|
Today's Fortune: |
   
|
Friday, March 15, 2002
John got married today; or at least he should have. I hear everyone is at Dusty's as I type celebrating. There was some kind of mixup dealing with the invitiations, otherwise I'd might have been able to make it. Congrats, anywho.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 3/15/2002
Ice Age rocks. Best movie in the theater so far this year.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 3/15/2002
I take that back, there's no dilemma. I'd be having fried-bald-eagle that night if I could find it and kill it.
.: posted by Jeremy 3/15/2002
Talk about a dilemma.
.: posted by Jeremy 3/15/2002
The company I work for seems strange to me. We have had a "burn rate" for the past 11 or so months. Previous to this little recession, we made such an insane amount of money, though, that we've been able to operate for about the past year on a little less than half the total revenue we were making 2 years ago. And since this is a private company, with no intentions of going public, that "burn rate" comes out of our president's checking account(oversimplification, yes, but not completely inaccurate). So even though it's been crappy that we've had to go through the cutting of bonuses and two layoffs, the fact is that a good portion of our paychecks are coming directly out of our president's pocket. This all seems strange to me because unlike many former web companies where people's paychecks came from upper management's refusal to accept responsibility(the fact that I would be hired to check links for 10 bucks an hour proves this, I think), our paychecks are being delivered out of a single person's acceptance of responsibility for his company.
.: posted by Jeremy 3/15/2002
Wednesday, March 13, 2002
Whitey is getting a taste of his own medicine. But really I don't see the big deal in names like the baseball team "Indians". I do see a problem with a name like the "Redskins" though. I could imagine a team like the Houston African Americans, but not the Houston Darkies.
Anyway, it's not like there aren't teams called the Fighting Irish, or the Canucks. But whatever.
.: posted by Jeremy 3/13/2002
Monday, March 11, 2002
Were American Indians big into land management? More and more archaeologists and anthropologists say, "yes." But not in any sort of unified way. This is a good article which points out that the Americas before large-scale European colonization were not at all "pristine." Hopefully that will be a kick in the groin to all the Progressives and Tree-huggers who have a noble-savage vision of the American Indian living in harmony with his/her environment. It should also be an even bigger kick in the groin to the conservatives who treat the revelation that the Indians massively cultivated the Americas as an excuse to bulldoze and pave. While American Indians may have massively transformed the face of our continents, and were most definitely not uniformly Earth Mother worshippers, they also weren't massive destroyers. And even if they had been, that wouldn't justify wide-scale abuse of the environment.
Not that I'm a big environmentalist. It's usually hard for me to care about the environment. The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, and I doubt that we'll do much permanent damage in our brief stint here. But I certainly would rather see mountains and trees and plains than stripmalls and parking lots.
.: posted by andy 3/11/2002
Sunday, March 10, 2002
I've had this girl in my head for a few days now. I hadn't thought of her in months, and she just kind of popped into my head on Tuesday. I met her once around February of last year. I was working insane hours at Marketecho, and I remember I hadn't left work except for sleep all week when Sara invited me to go out with some political types from the capital.
I left work at about 7, went to Sara's (she was still at the capital), showered and changed clothes. I met everyone at Sullivan's. It was a Friday or something, coz there was like an hour wait for our table of 12 or so. Sara saw some politician and went to shmooze, and I started talking to Paul Domjan. Paul had come with this girl, a grad student that was working for some tech company in North Austin. Paul wandered off, and I started talking to her. She was some sort of researcher, and had a degree in a natural science. Of course I ask her what she does, and she gives the little 'tech blurb', something that everyone in the any technical field quickly learns.
Most technical jobs are considered very boring to the rest of the world, so you come up with a one or two sentence blurb that sums up what you do and at the same time indicates to the asker that they really don't want to know the details. Mine was something like "I do database programming stuff for a startup." Hers was something like "I test the strength of various silicon adhesives by sticking samples in a machine that rips them apart." This was, of course, extremely facinating to me. Women that work in applied sciences are HOT! Wow. So I pester her about every aspect of her job, impress her with my martini ordering skills (I believe her words were 'Your martini doesn't taste horrid.') That's gin, perfect, with a splash of bitters, thank you. She lived less than a mile from the apartments that I had just moved out of two months before.
She gave me her phone number. Not directly. We were sitting at the dinner table, and she had the girl sitting next to me, whom she knew, and who was with some guy who also worked at the capital, give her a piece of paper and pen. That I saw. Apparently, she then got the same girl to put said piece of paper in the pocket of my coat, which was hanging on my chair. This was very slick, I thought. The bizarre thing about this was the paper which she wrote her number on. It was the back of a letter from a guy to a girl, who incidentally couldn't spell and had sloppy handwriting. It was a letter begging the girl back. The guy and the girl had just come to Austin, probably to work at the capital for session, and it was putting strain on their relationship. Flipping this over, you would find in very elegant handwriting a name and a phone number.
By this time, Sara had come back from shmoozing, and was thoroughly drunk. Sara normally wasn't very public in her affection, but she might have sensed something going on, or was just so far gone, but she was literally hanging on me. She ordered pea soup. That was probably the only thing on the menu under $20. She never did that when it was just the two of us, incidentally. Every one of my cocktails was twice the price of her entree. Not to mention the two bottles of wine and rounds of appetizers I bought for the table. In hindsight, Paul and I were probably putting great stress on the other males at the table, because to refuse or not chip in would have made them lose face, and they're all making 20K or less working at the capital, Paul does consulting at $50 an hour between classes for a political analysis group in London, and I make $1700 a week plus options and bonuses, and I work so much I barely have time to spend it.
By the end of the night, the girl was acting very snobbish. I don't know if it was because Sara came back, or because Paul came back.
I found her number in my pocket the next day, and thought about calling her. I could never decide, and had so little free time and was still unsure if she'd been offput by Sara, or not. I read the letter her number was written on innumerous times, trying to understand it, and perhaps hoping that it would give some insite or prophesy, but to no avail. When Marketecho closed, I finally threw it away.
Her face blurs together with the faces of two other women I've known in my life. When I try to picture any of them, I just get this generic confluence. It's probably better that way. I just wish I could forget her completely again.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 3/10/2002
Andy's sister summed up Time Machine pretty well. First he went into the future a little, then a little more, then he hit his head and went unconscious and woke up a half a million years later. It's conceptually similar to the book, but the plot diverged greatly.
Queen of the Damned is terrible. It could have been okay if it hadn't been directed so poorly. They go too far with the goth theme and acting. The Vampire Lestat was much better, and had a better story to boot. And The Matrix really has ruined action movies. The fight scenes are between vampires, so they're supposed to do everything faster and better, but too many wires and a silly blur effect.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 3/10/2002
My little sister's summarization of the movie Time Machine (her current user name is Stupid Author Project):
Stupid Author Project says:
this guy that is a proffesor wants to change his past and so he makes a time machine to go back and change things and he does, but it still doesn't work out how he wanted
Stupid Author Project says:
then he goes to the future
Stupid Author Project says:
and then he goes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay into the future
Stupid Author Project says:
like 603037 or something like that
Stupid Author Project says:
i can't remember the exact date
Stupid Author Project says:
and he fixes stuff
Stupid Author Project says:
and learns a lesson
Stupid Author Project says:
but i won't tell you the end
.: posted by andy 3/10/2002
Google
DrinkBoy
Modern Drunkard
DMOZ.org
The Agonist
Metafilter.com
Fark.com
RobotWisdom.com
Memepool.com
Plastic.com
news.google.com