How Stupid Am I?
Obviously there can be many, many answers to that question, but it seems that the nice folks at Ford have already decided that I'm pretty dumb. I have realized this due to two "ammenities" that were in the Focus I rented recently.
The first was the automatic doorlocks. I'll be damned if I could figure out a way to have the car not lock me in once I started driving. It's like they're feeding this fear that anywhere, maybe even right now as you drive through the rice fields of the Central Valley, you could be carjacked. Only something like 1 per 10,000 people get carjacked in a year which is about 28,000 people total in the United States. Sure, that's a decent amount, but come on, I think that if I'm cruising through Hunter's Point or West Oakland, I can figure out that maybe I should lock my doors and be packin'. What they really need is a buzzer that goes off whenever you come in to the car with Krispy Kremes because you're just ever so slightly more likely to have a heart attack than be carjacked.
The other thing that is perturbing is when you're cruising along and you've got the stereo rocking out. You come to a stop, turn off the car, get out, maybe get get some Krispy Kremes and hop back in. When you turn the car back on, the stereo will start up, but at a much lower volume. I suppose this is a "safe" volume so that you don't hurt your ears. Bitches, if I wanted my tunes at that volume I would have put them at that volume. Why are you deciding this stuff for me. Is it that you just want me to wear out the volume knob having to turn the stereo back up all the time. Because if so, let me tell you that if I have to replace one of these OEM decks, it ain't gonne be with another Ford one. It'll be with something that rocks tha house, ya hear?
Otherwise, decent drive. Pretty good gas mileage overall and a rather suprising car to be made by an American manufacturer. If you try to drag race from a stoplight be prepared for a good degree of torque steering though, but that seems to be pretty common in most front wheel drive cars.
31 01 2006 0 comments
Um, Spelling? Anyone, Anyone?
It is really frightening me how much we're losing the ability to write in the English language. It is obvious that illiteracy has been around a long time and will unfortunately be around for some time to come, but I'm seeing people unable to spell in all walks of life these days. I'm talking about college graduates who write "root" when they mean "route" or jewelry professionals who write what they do as "jewlry". These aren't typos either (as you might see from time to time on my site :0). These mistakes are repeated again and again.
These are the folks at the top of what should be an easy language for them to converse in. I can only think of how defunct the language is going to get with all the kids growing up with marketing acronyms and text messages. "C U @ DNR, L8R"
We seem to be drifting further away from our written language and back to something iconographic. Will the trend continue? Probably. It is the nature of English to be flexible after all. I guess that's the reason we use Latin to name new bugs that are found. But still, "jewlry"? At least use a spellcheck every so often.
27 01 2006 0 comments
Quotes as of Late
For those who may have been wondering, the little "nuggets" that appear to the left on each page are things I've seen at various states of sobriety. They however do not hold a candle to two gems I recently heard when out and about in SF.
I was riding the 27 Line up from 9th and Bryant. A jaunty EQ3 outing had afforded me with a new center table. While the 27 kinda sucks because it takes a long time to get anywhere and goes straight through the Loin, it's also pretty convenient to me. So, as we're going through the Loinier part of things this woman gets on. She looked hard and what I mean by that, I think she could have rolled me if she wanted. There was a street-craze to her that made her stink of danger. Naturally, she sits behind me. She starts talking to herself. It was nonsense at first, but coherent sentences started rolling out eventually, the best one being, "Mother fucker's say I got psychological problems? I ain't got no psychological problems!" Never in the history of its misuse has a double negative been more appropriate.
Later in the day, I'm walking up Taylor to Bush and these very, well... gay guys were walking down wearing very brightly striped clothing that only they could possibly even dream of attempting to make work. One says to the other with all earnesty, "I mean, you know, it's just so hard to be fabulous all the time, you know?" I feel this way everyday when I figure out which sweats are clean enough to wear.
That's San Francisco. You gotta stay on your toes to hear the good things.
26 01 2006 0 comments
Goodbye Red Chair People
I never really knew you and if I saw you on the street, I'd never recognize you and you would probably not recognize me... maybe. I only know you through your bright red Ikea chair in your living room. You see, your apartment window was directly across the street from mine and I would walk in to my living room to see you sitting in yours. Maybe you had the same reaction, but I'll never know. Don't worry, you can't actually see anything at this distance, except for something like a red chair. Maybe you could see more in to my apartment? Maybe I should close my blinds further than they are? I suppose I shall never know now.
I speak in eulogizing tones because one day I walked in to my living room and saw that your red chair was not in yours. In fact, there was nothing there and it was dark and bare in your apartment. I can only assume that you moved. It's probably for the better. Had we ever met, I would have never known what to say really. "Hi, nice chair." Sounds a tad up front. "Hey there, I think you live in my neighborhood." That's pretty lame and sounds like I'm going to sell something. Anything to say is made even worse by the fact that you might recognize me and that my trying to be coy would just seem creepy.
Well, to wherever you are folks, I salute you and your chair. Best of luck in life.
25 01 2006 0 comments
What Are We Doing?
It was with great disdain and furious anger that my toaster oven suddenly died on me. Basically what happened was that a well-meaning relative bought me what seemed to be a very nice GE toaster over from Walmart of all places. I had had it for about a year and then, one day the top heating elements stopped working. This of course make it not able to toast things very well and thusly not able to really work at all. It was all a large frustration as I've become addicted to dark chocolate melted on toast with a light drizzle of olive oil and kosher salt. Sounds weird, but damn is it good. It's also not too easy to do without a toaster oven.
So, with those elements going out, I figured that this appliance would be like most good appliances in that you can replace critical components of it, like a heating element. Seeing a need to use my screwdrivers, I dug in to it with great fervor. That's when I discovered this. What the hell is this? It was made in China, but put together in Mexico or something? What is happening here? Why have we lost the technology to make a toaster oven? There's nothing digital in this thing. It's quite simple really with four highly resistive elements that heat up to toast things.
In the end, it turned out that like most junk built these days, you can't replace the elements. They're wired in series, so if one goes, they both go and to replace either of them is not possible due to the construction. I suppose they figure that because it's $50, that you'll just get a new one when it goes. Obviously I have to get a new one to get my chocolate toast thing happening again, but it looks like I'll have to spend more money to get something that will last.
As a last testament to my hatred of waste, I spent two hours breaking the piece of junk down to its base components so that I could put it in to the recycling bins and only be forced to toss out the smallest amount of waste. I figure it's the least I can do and am now off to find a new toaster oven. Maybe one that is Hecho en Los Estados de Unidos.
24 01 2006 0 comments
Internet Explorer is soooo Whacked
I've stopped using Explorer on Windows. It crashed too much and was seriously underwhelming to me. Firefox has been good to me. To be honest, the latest versions of Opera have been pretty good as well and I use them on occasion.
But the complete craptitude wasn't completely evident to me until just recently at an ongoing web dev job I do where I had to re-render a large chunk of the front of the company site as an image because Verdana at the particular size they wanted to use looked like hell. It did not look this way in Firefox or Opera, just Explorer on Windows. I don't know what they did the text rendering engine in Explorer, but it appears to be hosed. I tried everything I could think of to fix it, but in the end, we ended up with images where there should really be text. I suppose it's for the better as the marketing group wanted to use Neutra there (it's their main logo font) and there's no way to get that to pop up on browsers. Yeah, I know, there's that bit where you can get it download with Style Sheets, but that is far too unreliable for everyday use.
So, here we are, having to cheat basic fonts in Explorer. On a positive note, apparently, we can move beyond the basic five web fonts of: Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, Courier, and possibly Trebuchet MS if you're not worried about pre Mac OSX support. That's right, Comic Sans can now be duplicated with Chalkboard on the Mac. So rock and roll.
23 01 2006 0 comments
SEO is a Sham
Search Engine Optimization. If you're in the web industry and you haven't heard this term, then you're really not in the web industry. For those of us who are, it's tossed around about as much as AJAX these days. For those who are out of the loop, this is a fancy acronym for work done to a website to make it friendlier to the search engines. It can be something as simple as reworking a few bits of the site, to a complete overhaul, to paying for the search results to be artificially altered in that site's favor.
There is some legitimacy to this practice, but in reality, the hype is over the top. I go so far as to call it a sham because there are so many shysters running around saying that they can do it and maybe they can. Really though, it's not that hard and this abbreviation is as misleading as SUV. It's all a clever marketing ploy that people have latched on to and overuse.
Really, no site should ever need SEO work done to it. A site should be designed properly from the start and maintained properly after that point. Obviously the actual practice of this can fall apart due to committee decisions, time constraints, staff attrition, and a great many other things. But, a site should be like an informational pamphlet; to pull in a 20th century print reference in to it. It should be easy to read and if someone can't stand back and see that it isn't, then the people working on it need to be talked to or even replaced. Calling in an SEO expert is really a waste of money. I suppose that some firms can really use this due to extreme neglect to their sites over the years, but that's the kind of neglect that a business should have learned not to do years ago when the dot-com first took of.
I'm on a rant about this because essentially I do SEO work without really doing SEO work. I don't call myself a Search Engine Optimizer because I don't need to. I do the job I set out to do and I feel that I do it well. Take this site for example. It is XHTML compliant, has a Google PageRank of 3 (not shabby for a personal site I do nothing to promote) and it is the number one search result out of 29,000 when you search for 'hudin'. Okay, so it's been around for a few years and that plays in to ranking to some degree. But, this site has somewhere around 1,000 pages now. It isn't web friendly at that size without doing a few things. What are these things? Planning, paying attention, and doing my job. Another site that is a good example of doing my job is www.belden-place.com. This domain didn't even exist four months ago. Since purchasing it and building the site, it is now at number 8 or so in results when searching for 'belden place' on Yahoo and that is out of 645,000 results. This was done without spending a cent to promote it or fix rankings and even if I had, most of the places rigging search results take about 1-2 months to move a site.
It all comes down to building a site the right way and making it work. I feel this line of thinking neutralizes and makes SEO an obsolete a term. So, what do we call proper site development? How about WBS (pronounced 'webs') which quite simply stands for Well Built Sites. It's a simple concept I know, but really, so is making a site that works.
20 01 2006 1 comment
I Love USPS
Ah, the United States Posted Service. Is there any group I can't love more. And no, it's not because they lose things (always send certified) or open things (send important things via someone else.) It's because of their rates and the way that stamps work is just super duper.
We had a recent two cent hike in the price for a first class stamp. This is crappy because it invalidates any stamp that was made previous to it for first class duty. Yes, there is a two cent stamp you can buy and will have to buy, but the beauty is that they always seem to be out of it every time I go to get them. Somehow, somewhere I will have to find a two cent stamp because I am getting a backlog of letters to send out which the 30 stamps I recently bought can no longer send.
Whoo Hoo Postal Service. You rock my world!
19 01 2006 0 comments
So, I Got Bored
I don't know why I did it, but I saw that prsut.com was available, so I registered it. As if that wasn't enough, I set up the goofy site that you see there. Maybe someday I'll make something more informative or what have you. For now, it's just kind of this weird thing that floats out there. It is amazing how many hits it gets for being totally unknown.
18 01 2006 0 comments
Talking About My Generation
In the Chronicle, there was this article recently about a book that's coming out which goes in to detail about how my age group (18-34) has been strapped with too many bills and can't get out from under the financial burend they've been lured in to. This is true to some degree and a lot of people I know are in deep trouble. Many more though, are not. I am one of them.
I'm typical of my generation in how my spending habits used to be. I went to a four year university and graduated, although I only spent two years there due to being a transfer student. I graduated from college with about $12,000 in debt. During this time, a little before, and a little after, I managed to piled up $10,000 in credit card debt. I also live in the SF Bay Area, so my rent is crazy. But here's the thing. I currently have no debt and while my savings are not amazing, I have enough that if I'm out of work for a month, I'm not prowling the streets for half-eaten food. I also manage to travel internationally once a year or so. On top of all that, I'm a tech geek, so if anyone is going to spend money on garbage it is, in theory me.
This book is just another offshoot of the Whine Generation, which is my generation. Trying to offload our debt as being society's fault is so indicative of people who never want to take responsibility and are in some ways unable to do it because of how we were raised. But once again, I'm not trying to blame someone else. Even though people are chased around to get in to debt at an early age (somehow I got my first charge card at 16) it doesn't excuse us from the burdens of life.
There were a few simple things I did to manage my life in a fashion that appears to be better than most my age.
1.) Turn off your TV. At this point, there is nothing on TV that is worth watching. It wastes time. It costs $60 or more in a cable bill. And most importantly, it keeps trying to get you to buy things you don't need. I've been TV-free for about two years and it's been great. It hurts to watch it again when I sometimes catch it. The transistion is hard at first, but with the internet, it's gotten much easier these days.
2.) Don't get a credit card. If you do, because they're practical after all, leave it at home. Bringing it with you will only make you think you can spend money you don't have. If you have to pay cash in hand, you actually realize what you're doing. At least some of the times anwyays.
3.) Try to avoid having a car. This is really hard in many parts of America, but if you can do it, don't have one. They lose money the moment you buy them and all they do is suck it down the longer you have them. If you do need one, get something economical. Remember that SUV stands for Stupid Useless Vehicle.
4.) Don't eat out. I'm guilty of breaking this one myself, but at the very least if we avoid fast food restaurants, we avoid a group that is preying on our generation by offering terrible wages and terrible food.
5.) Be smart about buying a home. If you think you can afford one, try paying your rent twice in one month. If that's a pinch stay away. Also, at the age of my generation, we should not buy a home to live in for the rest of our lives. It is an investment. Do not think of it otherwise, or it will pull you down.
There are countless other things to do, but these are some pretty basic ones. They've served me well and will hopefully continue to serve me well. On one last note, whenever you get a call for a field poll, answer it and answer it truthfully. Those have more power than voting these days. And, despite what I just said, vote dammit. Our generation gets forgotten about because we don't go to the polls. It's takes a couple of minutes every few years and it decides our fate and lives. Even if you don't vote on national issues, vote on the things for your county and city. You will see the effect of those directly.
Remember that we are owed nothing in this life. What you get you have to earn. If you get whiny about that, I'll come slap you myself because it's about time we pulled our act together.
