word for the day

I just learned a new work that makes me giggle:
pergraniteel

pergraniteel :: your crappy overpriced loft
as
carbon fiber :: your crappy squid bike

I'm About to Loose My Mind.

Today, Paul tells me this:
"If the only thing wrong with your job is that your boss doesn't understand evolution, you really should consider what the vast majority of humanity has to put up with on a daily basis."


Really?
Really?
I just can't imagine there are many more people like this.
Look, I'm very tolerant of religions. Sometimes I feel like I'm overly defensive even of Christianity.

But I can't tolerate this crap. Evolution is not an equal option to creationism. I don't have to give your religion equal time in science class, as though it were an equally valid part of a scientific debate. It's not science, and there is no debate.

I'm tired of people being proud of stupidity.
I'm tired of people misspelling things over an over until the misspelling becomes just fine.
It's not fine to misspell "lose" as "loose." IT'S NOT FINE.
And I keep seeing it. And I think you are an idiot, but I haven't told you yet. Maybe I ought to, lest "loose" becomes an accepted alternative to "lose."
But there's no debate. "loose" is not an equally valid way to say "lose." There is no debate. There's just you, looking like an idiot.

I'm tired of people thinking they will get rich from the lottery or Vegas. Every time someone tells you they went to Vegas and made X amount of money, ask them how much they lost. They NEVER factor that in. You only "go to Vegas and make money" if you come out AHEAD of your investment. Duh!

I'm tired of people thinking they can flip houses and make $200K for doing nothing. It's real satisfying watching people panic and end up underwater right now. Did you think you were entitled to a few hundred thousand just because? Oh, you didn't understand your ARM would adjust? It's got "ADJUST" right there at the beginning of the name, dumbass! This reminds me of my dot-com bubble friends who were making 6 digits for a few years in their 20's. Lucky them! But a year later when it blew up, there they all were getting evicted and starving. What, no savings? Nothing to show from the good old days? Tsk, tsk!

I'm tired of people telling me they're mad about gas prices and they demand that there be some half-assed, idiot-planned boycott a certain station on a certain day or whatever. Why do I keep getting these chain letters? It's NOT GOING TO WORK, and furthermore, it shouldn't. Shifting your gas purchase by a day or two doesn't do a goddamn thing to the oil company's profits, it just reinforces the idea that you are an idiot unable or unwilling to make actual change in your life in order to make things different. It shouldn't work, because you don't "deserve" low gas prices. Oil is finite. (sorry, it's true, "intelligent designers." Dinosaurs did roam the earth, a long time before us, and they are GONE) People suffer because Americans feel entitled to lower gas prices for WHAT?

Wanna stick it to the man? Thumb your nose at gas prices? Walk, ride your bicycle, take transit, at the very least get a more reasonable vehicle, CONSUME LESS. Of everything.
Walk outside and meet your neighbors and notice the buildings, sit at home and read a little, learn about actual investing, practice your spelling, something!

And get the hell off my lawn.

tweet tweet

As of last Thursday, some asshole in my building (or possibly the next door building facing the courtyard) has gotten a BIRD.

I will never understand people who keep birds for pets. They aren't particularly affectionate or compelling, and they are FUCKING NOISY. Birds are social animals; that is why they sing and twitter. So how cruel is it to not only cage a FLYING animal, but then to keep it alone?

It makes no sense to me.

And, to have one in a crowded downtown apartment building? Well, if I knew who it was, I'd go poop on their door.

The singing is somewhat charming in the afternoon, at least, it was the first time I heard it. BUT. The bird wakes up at 6am every morning.

Paul did not believe me. He keeps telling me it is a starling or something, taking up residence in the courtyard. I have lived in that apartment for eleven years. There are NO starlings in my neighborhood. No tweet-tweet, pippity-pip birds. Just a lot of pigeons (which I don't mind, toxic shit or no). Pigeon noises are sort of creepy and occasionally dirty-sounding, but ultimately low and unobtrusive.

Someone needs to die. And it's not the bird, it's the jackass keeping the damn thing in a downtown San Francisco studio apartment.

netflix

I was thinking of signing up for netflix. I'm trying to learn Mandarin and like watching movies in Mandarin so I can get excited when I pick out every fifteenth word. Paul de-activated my queue on his account because I guess he got tired of the crappy Chinese movies I was having sent over.

So. Today I saw some ad for netflix as low as $5.99, wanted to see what was up. Typed in netflix.com and it said "plans starting at 5.99" on the front page. Then I signed in to see what was in my queue. Since it wouldn't let me see pricing while I was signed in, I signed out again and returned to the front page. Now it said "plans starting at $9.99." WTF?

Cleared out my cookies. Barred netflix from setting cookies. Now it wouldn't even let me see the front page or any other info, just some bullshit about how I needed to allow netflix to set cookies so I could rent movies and have a queue. OH, did they fail to mention they also wanted to set cookies so they could have different price options for different people?

After clearing cookies and allowing them again, I now got "plans starting at $4.99" So now I've seen three different numbers.

Looked another time, and got "plans starting at $7.99." Different plan AGAIN.

Oddly, they actually show different plans to different people:


This is after I signed out, and have a cookie on my computer that tells them I've already been sucked in, and have a queue. So they'll try to get $9.99:

This is with no netflix cookies on my computer, so they'll try to lure me in with low pricing $4.99 ought to do it?:


This is somewhere in between, at $7.99. I didn't capture the $5.99, but whatever:

They're each different plans offered to people based on what cookies are set on your computer. Hey, fuck you very much netflix. Why not just show all the plans together, instead of lying about what they lowest priced-plan is? Honesty goes a long way.

I am looking at the Greencine thing. Anyone tried them? They have some movies netflix didn't have too.

Fun stuff about the city I love

why not just use the bubble as a floatation device instead?

real estate hilarity

weekend

Friday: realized I know someone who doesn't believe in evolution.
Saturday: had pizza delivered to SFMC again, at James' party to raise money for his Isle of Man racing efforts.
Sunday EARLY: Mt. Tam. We were there, where the hell were you?
Sunday 2: Considered the irony of nearly getting killed by some dipshit with an "Abortion: One Dead, One Wounded" bumper sticker. Actually, had we not seen him swerving across two lanes of traffic then grabbing his brakes, it would have been two dead. But I don't count on these dumbasses to have solid math skills.


Sunday gets two parts because we woke up at 3am to do the Easter Morning Ride. Wherein motorcyclists of all ilk gather to ride to the top of Mt. Tam to watch the sunrise every Easter. This year was rain and THICK fog, and so the usual 2-300 bikes was cut down to about 50 or so. Pussies!
Then we went to Berkeley and napped, woke up for Sunday 2, and rode to San JOse to have dinner with my family. It was great.


Rich folks who lecture about being christian and doing the sunday bible study routine and then tell me about how great their rich buddy's tax-shelter abuse scam is, fuck off. What WOULD Jesus do? Um, not that, I'm thinking.

Wet crotch is the new black. At least, that's what the folks at Aerostich seem to think. Feh.

livejournal

makes you PAY to show photos! really? nevermind, then.

enough!

ugh. so my sewing machine doesn't really work. I had been trying to just deal with it and work around it, but it is shit, and doesn't really come out right, and is very frustrating.

I need to get it fixed.

Yes, I know I have 4 sewing machines. But I want to use *this* one.

the coolest person I know

I went and saw Mames last night. He showed me his ID card for the Isle of Man TT Mountain Course, which, officially, makes James the COOLEST person I know.

Isle of Man racing is expensive, give him some support!

Coincidentally, Paul and I will be at Isle of Man. I get to go see James race at arguably the most beloved motorcycle race in the world! On a tiny island with people who talk funny. woot!

I am thinking of moving this "blog" thingy. I like some of the functions of LiveJournal; namely, being able to keep some posts public, other posts just for friends to see. There are a lot of things I just can't journal about publicly. (like, uh, my job, specifically) So, any thoughts about Livejournal vs. Blogger? I'm not so much "blogging" as I am "journaling" anyway, right?
But I hate to keep moving around, and most folks aren't livejournal users, so they wouldn't have access to my friends-only postings without ANOTHER goddam thing to sign up on this stupid interweb thingy. ugh. stupid internet!

Also, I suspect the hillclimb will be cancelled this weekend, rain and all. feh.
And, no, I'm not going to the fight party. I will be getting money to listen to 80's music.

Subzero

and really what I need is to figure out what the path is.
what steps to take to change careers or put this one on track. I can't afford to live in the Bay Area, which is where I want to be. I see places I want to park my bike and furniture, but I don't see how on earth I could get them.

it all seems very frozen right now. Patience comes and goes, ebb and...
today I want it all, tomorrow I'm willing to let it all go for just a little something, anything. The next day I am inflexible again. Then it seems possible, but upon another look, not at all. It's all water on the horizon of a vast desert. Or a mirage, or maybe just little piece of broken glass left from a different time.
Now it's just for investors and flippers, people who were given a little more, people who made better choices earlier, people who don't have bikes to wrench on. I'm at once above you and beneath you; spiteful, self-righteous, and deeply envious.

And it's all I want.
In this job that, just one generation ago, would have been a fine job to build a life on. A job that now means I'll always be poor, never able to put down roots in the place I belong.

Fuck you very much luxury people. I hope your 24 hour concierge sneaks in in the middle of the night and steals your precious granite countertop. Maybe one day I'll be ducking through an alley and find you clutching your stainless steel faucet, all that's left from the recessed-lighting-induced fire that burnt your condo-hive to the ground.

We'll always have our stainless steel.

Jenner

My family converged on Jenner for a family weekend Friday night. What this boiled down to was a lot of chocolate and a lot of drinking.

This year, we decided there wasn't anything my parents wanted or needed for Christmas. Except, the one thing they really want-- family time. With my brother and his wife in Seattle, they wish mostly for family time, so that's what we got them. Ben and Megan flew in Friday, picked us up in their rental car, and drove us out (the long way, since roads were flooded and we didn't trust the crappy American boat car to take it) to meet my parents and sister who were already at the rental house in Jenner. And then we had port, chocolate, wine, more chocolate, and I think a little beer too. It was grand. We even got to go to the beach Saturday when the sun was more or less out. When was the last time you got to walk down the beach with your folks, picking up shiny rocks and climbing on old rusted tractors?

It rained most of the rest of the weekend, so we cooked and played games and ate and talked a lot of shit.

Sunday I napped (drinking in the morning will do that to you) and then Paul and I hiked around Berkeley in the rain. In the evening, a noisy possum visited the porch a few times. He kept knocking of the recycling bottles outside, so we finally had to take the port bottle in, which solved the problem. Possums love port!

Today's Not-Really-Guilty Pleasure

omigod, so funny:
America's Overvalued Real Estate

...except I happen to LIKE houses that are dwarfed by their garages. Other than that, right on.