This is my front page. All comments here are screened; if you don't have my email address, you can drop me a line here. If I know your email address, I'll reply by email -- if not, I'll reply to your comment, and then rescreen both your comment and my reply.
It's also got every tag I have -- this is because my current LJ style doesn't include a tag index. (At least half of my participation on LJ is on my Treo. I chose this style because it loads quickly and it's still readable on a small screen.)
I'd tell you more about myself, but that's what my profile -- and the rest of my journal -- are for.
The Wet Spots have been my favorite musical group that talks frankly about sex for a few years now. Granted, they're the only group in that category that I know of, but hey, they can still be my favorite! Here's a song featuring lewd uses of fruit, and here's a song about not making, as the singer calls it, "bad anal choices."
Sesame Street has long made puppets named after real-world celebrities. It kinda saddens me that Bill-O apparently now counts as such, but it's still fun to see puppets take the piss out of him. He even manages to fake a sense of humor for it!
Once upon a time, most of you used the same kind of connection for wired earpieces: a three-conductor plug, 2.5 mm in diameter. Granted, Nokia just haaaad to be different for a while and use a four-conductor plug, but even they eventually adopted the three-conductor TRS standard.
Then, Bluetooth came along, and you shitheads figured that standards are for wussie wusses. First, Motorola. When you assholes made the RAZR, you decided to use the mini-USB jack not only to charge your phone, but as a receptacle for the earpiece -- an earpiece only you carried. Then, the other companies followed your lead, and now, half of the phones in my shop have proprietary earpiece connections.
Sure, they do Bluetooth, which is admittedly a common standard now. Not everyone likes Bluetooth. Every day, I get customers who are afraid that using Bluetooth earpieces will give them earpiece-shaped brain tumors. Personally, I don't believe it, but what I believe is irrelevant -- enough people do believe it, and no number of studies showing otherwise will convince them that Bluetooth is safe. People still want their wired earpieces, and they don't want to have to order them.
You had an already-existing standard that was conventient for everyone, and then you took it out behind the barn and shot it in the head. "Ha ha, if you want a wired earpiece, you'll have to come to us for it, because we're the only ones who have it, and we can charge as much as we want for it!"
So, at work, we have this disc that we play on loop that's supposed to show off just how bloody amazing blu-ray DVDs are. I'll admit that the disc does the job, but the movies it uses are annoying the crap out of me.
First of all, Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story. Try to imagine Bill Murray, but painfully unfunny, and without the charm and smoldering good looks. Then cast him in a role halfway between the Beatles and Elvis, with all the fame and women -- especially women -- that implies.
(John C Reily is a lot like Norm MacDonald and Will Farrell. All three of them together are funnier than cancer only by the narrowest of margins, and yet movie producers keep hiring them. WHY???!!!???)
Next: Good Luck Chuck. Dane Cook is twice as funny as John C Reily, I'll give him that. This movie's comedic highlights include "ow, my nuts," "ow, my nuts," "lookit the fat girl eating hur hur," and just in case you missed it, "ow my nuts."
Saw IV: I almost liked this movie when I saw it in the theater. In all fairness, I was drunk at the time. (When I get home, I'll link to that from here.)
Across the Universe: Looks pretty but appears to made no damned sense.
I dunno about you guys, but this just makes me want to RUSH out and plunk down $400 for a blu-ray DVD player!
Today is the last day that you can drive and talk on the phone without an earpiece or speakerphone in California. Tomorrow, if you get caught doing that, you'll be ticketed. And speaking as a pedestrian who frequently has to avoid getting run over by idiots with their cellphones who aren't paying attention to the road ahead of them, this new law couldn't have come soon enough.
At my workplace, we've been telling customers about this law, and suggesting that they beat the rush, for a few months now. Of course, people being what they are, most waited until the last minute, so today was somewhere between "very busy" and "absolute zoo." I made at least twice as much money as I do on an average day, just on commissions from Bluetooth sales. (Not that I didn't sell phones or USB modems -- on the contrary, I did. I just sold a shitload of Bluetooth stuff.)
My manager will have enough energy to tuck his kids into bed, and if he's lucky, he'll even manage getting to his own bed before collapsing. Me, I loved it, and I'm so riled up that I probably won't be able to go to bed for another few hours (it's 10:30 PM as I type this). He thinks I'm crazy, but hey, hyperactivity should come in handy for something, right?
At my job, we're getting more and more pink gadgets. We now carry three cellphones in pink, including a smartphone. Two of our MP3 players are pink. A couple of our digital cameras are pink. We have two thumbdrives that are pink. We even have headphones that are pink. Awful shades of pink, too: hot pink, conjunctivitis pink, radioactive pink, denture pink. I'm beginning to feel like I'm in an Aerosmith video, except without the bizarre video editing.
"As pink as the sheets that we lay on Pink is my favorite crayon Pink it was love at first sight Pink when I turn out the light..."
I can't help wondering what made the manufacturers of all these gadgets go with pink. My guess is that they figure that women don't buy electronics, so giving them a new paintjob will make them more popular.
(Speaks in a high voice, with frequent little squeaks.) "I don't know anything about high-tech thingies, but I'll buy this one, because it's pink, and it's so kyooot! Tee hee!"
But then, I tend to assume the worst of marketing. It could be that pink really is popular. Just looking over my f-list, I see three people who probably wouldn't mind having pink electronics much. Granted, three isn't very many, but "friends of flamingchords" isn't exactly a good representative sampling.
I'm told that people actually buy these things in pink, but I haven't seen it yet with my own eyes. As far as I can tell, our female customers are afraid of being mistaken for eleven-year-olds, and our male customers (even our gay ones) are afraid of being thought swishy. In this culture, pink seems to be a color for making a very strong statement that practically no one cares to make. At least not with their electronics.
But we have plenty of customers I never see. For all I know, when I'm at home, the pink crap is flying off the shelves. Those people in marketing may well know something I don't.
Okay. Recovered from the caffeine crash and burn I suffered last night. And I'm in a slightly pissy mood, so it's rant time.
In the past couple of months, we got new televisions at work. Big HD-ready ones with LCD screens. I hate to say it, considering my love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with television, but they are gorgeous. Having said this... unless you are using it for DVDs and you're using an HDMI- or DVI-capable DVD player, do not bother buying one yet.
One: price. The things are godsdamned expensive. As with any technology, you pay for what you get, but as with any newest, kewlest technology, you pay three times as much for it if you want it the year it comes out.
Two: non-HD programming. Most regular television content has all kinds of little imperfections that you'll never see when watching it on a regular television. These little imperfections become painfully obvious in HD.
Three: HD programming. There just isn't enough of it yet. Every channel I've seen that is HD-capable seems to be on a loop. For example, here are a few programs I've seen:
A documentary of sorts that takes place in India, with two tribes of monkeys: the temple monkeys and the market monkeys. One market monkey, dubbed Romeo, falls in love with a temple monkey, dubbed Juliet. Chaos ensues. For the record, I saw this documentary and was dead of squee... the first few times it was on.
A documentary on the Bismarck, a WWII German Battleship. This one I've only watched a couple of times, but my coworkers have caught me humming music from it. (It has a kick-ass soundtrack, including Mars, the Bringer of War from The Planets, by Holst.)
Fat Fiancees, a documentary on a wedding and the preparation for it in Uganda. This one pisses me off enough that it'll get its own entry. If you're a feminist, it will piss you off, too. Have your blood-pressure medication ready. You'll need it.
Jeff Corwin, a low-rent Steve Irwin. Sorry, I'm being mean, here. His show is just as interesting and probably more educational than Steve Irwin's show, since Steve Irwin probably wouldn't bother with such things as leafcutter ants. Still, part of the fun of watching Steve Irwin is that he's completely nuts -- "how will this lunatic manage to get himself injured this time?"
I'm not saying that these shows are bad, by any means. Even Fat Fiancees is an excellent documentary, even if its chosen subject makes me want to throw things. What I am saying is that the variety of programming is definitely lacking. It's not worth spending over a grand on a television for it, unless you have a top-end DVD player and you take your movies very seriously.
Edited to add: And Steve Irwin is reportedly dead, less than twenty-four hours after I wrote this. Not that I'm saying it's related or anything, but it's still creepy. I just learned this from lurking at tigerwolf's LJ. (Seriously, dude, cheering because he's dead? Did he shit in your cornflakes at an impressionable age or something?)
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bored