Sometimes, I Really Am Different

It struck me hard, although not unexpected, today that maybe I am, after all, slightly different than most other people. And I mean in a mental sense. We'll leave the drastically-skinny-yet-gifted-with-an-enormous-head to some other time.

I'm assuming normal peoples' thought process goes something like this (while waking up in the morning):

*sees self in mirror* 'Oh man, my hair is so messed up... and I'm getting scruffy. Guess it's time to shave. Maybe I'll get a haircut later. Egh for now I'll just shower [or, if they're a night time shower-er, they'll just rinse their hair and wash their face] and put something in it... good enough for now'

OR, it might go something like this:

*sees self in mirror, pauses for a few moments* 'fuck it.'

And then they would go about their normal life, whatever that may be. Mine, however, is somewhat different:

*sees self in mirror* 'Oh man, my hair is so messed up... and I'm getting scruffy. *beat* Damn, this kind of gives me that "I don't care, I'm a badass," look. I look good with this jacket on. I should always look like this. My girl would love this. Girls like scruffy, right? It gives me a "rough" look that I'm sure J would want to tame. *beat* Yeah, girls like that. Matthey McConaughey is like that. He's pretty cool. I wonder if he ever found his shirt. I wish I would've brought more shirts home with me. I brought a lot of jackets and sweaters, but not enough shirts. Damn I look good in this jacket."

And the cycle continues. Stream of consciousness, here I come!

Let's Try Something Different

Before anything: facebook now officially scares me. If it weren't for me having such boring times at work, I would probably never update again.

Also, I hate it when one of my coworkers farts while in the testing lab. Honestly, this isn't just an excuse to be immature and type out the word "fart." It wouldn't be too bad except for the fact that there is no circulation of air going through there, so everything lingers. Eugh. But back to real matters.

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California (or some part of it, probably the CHP) has recently released anti-drunk driving PSAs which warn drivers that police officers are CRACKING DOWN on drunk driving. If you're above the limit, they WILL find you. It's remarkably similar to the seat-belt violation PSAs that circulated earlier. I'm all for stopping drunk driving, but there's one thing that I noticed after seeing it a few times: all of the drivers are male.

I'm no statistic expert, so I decided that instead of fabricating the facts, I should look them up. I found it hard to believe that all drunk drivers are male. Apparently, of the fatal car crashes that occur, men are above the limit ~35% of the time, and women are above the limit ~21% of the time (I wasn't able to find stats on non-fatal crashes, but thank you MADD for the stats I could find). Although men seem to drink and drive more, I wouldn't exactly say it was a sweeping majority. So why the exclusively male-themed PSA?

I would evoke the cry of sexism, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm just wondering why a lot of PSAs are like this. I've noticed that the abstinence/rape ones are very much anti-male, too. While, statistically speaking, most rape is man raping woman, let's not forget that the other way around does happen. I tried searching for the numbers on male rape percentage, but every single statistic had such a huge range of values that they were almost useless. Every single website stated that although they presented these numbers, experts believed that such statistics "vastly under-represent the actual number of men who are raped each year (source)." I personally know more men who have been raped by women than women who have been raped by men, and none of the men have reported the incident to the police. You could argue that the female friends I know have just not told me and I shouldn't be so bias, but thanks to the macho-image society places on males, under-reporting of rape is much higher than that of women (see same source as above).

So what's the deal with all the anti-men PSAs? It's not exactly helping the stereotypical image that men you randomly meet are untrustworthy and dangerous.

Any opinions?

The Man Behind the Nerd

I've always been a big fan Dilbert. I find it hilarious, especially now that I have/do work in a cubicle, pretend to do work, and feel the looming dread of any sort of superior passing by my opening. I call it an opening because a door would imply that I had the option of closing it if I wanted privacy. Not that it matters, as most of my bosses can see over the walls anyway. But save the cubicle rant for another day! Huzzah!

As I've said, I've always enjoyed Dilbert, but I've never expressed any interest in the man behind it. Maybe it's because I was raised on Calvin and Hobbes and Bill Watterson is as much of a recluse as you can get--I just assumed all other comics were likewise.

That's when I discovered Scott Adams' Blog. I suddenly have even more of an appreciation for the strip because now I feel I know the man behind it a bit more. And better yet, I fully appreciate his kind of humour. It makes me want to go out and read the books that he's written, not only his comic strips.

This is also the first time I've ever posted twice in one day. INSANE! If only I had more readers.

Tales from the Break Room, ep 1

When I first came in this morning, I saw a donut box on the table of the break room. This isn't that strange of an occurrence--many times do employees leave boxes of such treats in the break room for their coworkers, leading to much office lovin' that'll be felt more frequently than other offices. Usually I don't indulge in such items, as I'm only a temp worker, and since I'll be gone in less than two weeks, I figure I should let the locals be chummy with the fellow locals. There was, however, something different about this box.

My curiosity got the better of me. I grabbed a water bottle from the drink fridges and used it to open the lid, making sure not to leave any compromising fingerprints in the sugary glaze that coated the symbolic pink box that usually always indicated "donuts." It was then that I saw it. It was an oasis of a morning treat surrounded by the sands of sugar. It stood tall, proud, above the lower products of the bakery. Once I saw it I knew it was meant to be: just me and my blueberry muffin.

My eyes darted around quickly. My back hunched over the box as if to hide it from view. It was mine. The coworker that had been standing in the break room earlier was gone. Time to make a move! In one quick sweep of the hand I grabbed two napkins and the muffin, and quickly snapped the lid of the box down. Moving just as quickly I maneuvered into my cubicle and oh so tenderly placed my treasure down upon my desk.

I froze. I was missing something. My eyes scanned my desk until they came to a stop on an empty ceramic mug sitting comfortably on a stack of post-its that serve as its make-shift mat. I was missing coffee! I glanced towards my office door. No! It was too late! If I leave now, I risk someone else coming and stealing my precious. I would have to make due with the water I picked up earlier.

I broke off the first piece and put it in my mouth...

... and promptly spat it out. It was the worst goddamn muffin I had ever tasted. In my rage I threw it into the trash and went into the kitchen to grab some fruit. It comes in on the Monday of each week. At least they hadn’t eaten all the goddamn grapes.

Exactly Like a Dream

It's strange, losing full control. And I mean complete control. You can't do anything to go faster, to stop, to change direction. At the whim of whatever forces are tearing at you. You don't get scared, you don't freak out, but you try so hard to desperately regain even a shred of what you had but a few seconds ago. All your struggling is to no avail.

And then, a few seconds later, it's over. You have control over what's left--though it isn't much. The gravity of the situation doesn't settle in until your adrenaline (if you could call it that) wears off. It's only then that you're glad you got out in one piece.

Now for the aftermath.

Popularity Over the Internet

What? You can have a website call your phone and make others believe you're popular? Holy shit! If you ever need your phone to ring, for whatever reason, go here. this is awesome.

The Popularity Dialer

Be Yourself, Just Not All of Yourself

The saddest part of this article is not the idea behind the article (because anything Will Smith does is automatically mainstream and cool) but rather the idea that the reporter actually went on-site and followed these guys around, documenting their triumphs or, in this case, failures. Poor bastards.

All this fuss over the foiled terrorist plot in the UK has made me realize that the system we have in place for our "threat levels" is fundamentally flawed: we only ever raise them after an attack has occurred. Whether I agree with the whole ordeal is another matter altogether, but nevertheless, the indicators are only ever indicating that "a terrorist threat is imminent" (red! Get out the crayola box!) when a terrorist threat has just been attempted.

I'm getting a Wii. That and maybe a new bike. And a laundry rack. I've never bought a console system before, but I'd gladly make an exception for this one.

Spam, Wonderful Spam

I just don't think spammers care anymore. There used to be an art to spam, a sort of tempting title to an email that you recognized instantly as junk and yet you were still strangely intrigued. You wanted to click, but you were worried that some bastard might have hooked up an auto-download feature up to the email and you would end up destroying not only your computer, but every computer on your network. There used to be a time where the spammer was hated and despised, where your inbox was an Indiana Jones adventure in disguise. But now...

I just deleted an email with the title "Tuainae Muirssa a were mason." Who, in their right mind, would ever open an email with such a title? I get a few of these a day. I stare at them, becoming more and more frustrated as I scan the subject again and again, just trying to make sense of what may be lurking underneath that asinine and feeble attempt at capturing my attention. It seems as though quantity has become the new quality, and that grammar has been replaced by a computerized dictionary spewing randomly generated letters.

I miss the days when my long lost third cousin twice-removed in Africa had died suddenly and that I, the closest known living relative, had inherited his multi-million dollar fortune as long as I paid a measly couple of thousand for some processing fees. I yearn for time where my finances had been pre-approved, where free viagra and cialis rained from the skies, and my next vacation could be all expenses paid.

There was once an age, but no! There was once a golden era where "hot lesbian sluts" used to crave my "steaming cock," where I would have to spend time to individually weed out the temptations and tend to my email account. But now my mouse simply moves directly for the Delete All, without a second glance, without ever looking back.

Oddities Abound

I had an appointment at Kaiser Permanente this morning and as I took a seat in the waiting room I noticed something odd.

A few steps in front of the front desk there was a sign that appeared to be a small notice board so that people could read it before they approached the front desk. However the entire notice board was covered with one sheet of paper that read, simply:

Please, do not lean on the sign.

Nothing more.

EDIT: I was commenting on the irony of having a moveable sign that said only "do not lean on the sign."

Go Ninja, Go Ninja, GO!

In case you've been living under a rock (because everything on here is just SUPER trendy) for the last few days, you might not know this very, very important event that will happen on about March 30, 2007:

Welcome, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV... aka TMNT.

It'll be darker than the other movies, and done completely in CGI, which is a huge relief for me, because, for some reason, I didn't initially take to the idea of people running around in turtle suits for the other movies. It just didn't seem right, growing up with the cartoon and all. Like I said, it'll be darker, like the comics (I claim one less nerd point: I never read them) and the humour will come from verbal play between the characters and not gags like in the other movies.

I have a severe distaste for gag comedy that goes over the top.

Although there won't be any traveling through time like all 4th TMNT things should be, I'm still geekin' out over it.

Almost Creepy

This is nuts.

It's a nightime shot of the sydney harbor... a 720 megapixel shot. You can zoom in so far that you can see individual people in the windows. He combined 169 photos to be able to do it.

Enter, Stage Left

Here starts the beginning of a new blog.

I'm at work right now--I've just moved cubicles so I'm hiding and telling no one of my switch yet, hoping to escape from actually doing any work for a while. It's not like I hate the people I work for, I just hate what the bulk of my job entails.

I work at Advanced Analogic Technologies Inc. in Sunnyvale (smack in the middle of silicon valley for you SoCal people) and my job description is "intern of test engineering." That means I have two main responsibilities: I test parts and I deliver things. Only problem is I hate testing parts and no one has asked me to deliver anything for the entire time I've been here. And I just got a new car, too.