November 2006

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! This is when everyone starts asking me, “So what do you want for Christmas?” Every year my answer is the same. “I don’t really want anything. I need cash. If you have a burning desire to buy me a gift, check out my Amazon wishlist.” To make it easier on you, I’ve embedded the little Amazon widget right here.

Here’s something you probably can’t get me, but I’d really like. Someone somewhere should give me a link I can click to automatically add all the college bowl games to my Outlook calendar. That would be oh-so handy. Why hasn’t anyone done that yet? Is it even possible to have a single object that imports multiple calendar items? Why isn’t ESPN working on this?

Let me say one thing: I was fully prepared to be disappointed by Casino Royale. I haven’t seriously enjoyed a 007 movie since the Roger Moore days. I thought Pierce Brosnan was going to be the perfect Bond; he’s a terrific actor and I’ve loved him in everything else he’s done. I think he was a great choice, but the writing in Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough just didn’t do it for me, and I never even bothered to see Die Another Day. That should tell you something.

I’m a huge James Bond fan. When I was a kid my dad and I would frequently have 007 marathons and watch four or five movies at a time. We used to make compilation VHS tapes (with a TRS-80 connected to the VCR) and put our own graphics and songs on them. I used to spend hours analyzing the bad guys and writing my own spin-offs. I’ve probably seen Octopussy a hundred times. I wanted to be James Bond.

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And so another childhood belief is disproved. I had always liked the oft-told tale of the surviving members of the ‘72 Dolphins sending a case of champagne to the team that beats the last unbeaten NFL team each season. Apparently it’s simply another urban legend. I followed a link from Pop Culture Junk Mail to Snopes, where there’s a long and detailed debunkment of this myth. It looks like I didn’t even have the myth correct, either. Snopes says that the story is supposed to be about the surviving members drinking champagne together (or simultaneously). Oh well …

I have hundreds of photos of other people golfing, but I’m always the one with the camera. That means I don’t usually get too many shots of myself. My dad took this one and I think it’s pretty good. If you view the full size version by clicking the photo you can just make out the ball going straight as an arrow down the fairway. Trust me: This is a rare event when I’m at the tee. This shot’s from the Stadium Course at the TPC in Scottsdale, AZ.

Tonight I’m in Phoenix, AZ at the Scottsdale Marriott at McDowell Mountains. My dad is here for a business convention and I am quite happy to be his golf partner for the weekend. (Apparently the UCLA Bruins football team is staying at this hotel as well, which is odd because we’re not very close to ASU.)

I would never really have considered myself a frequent flyer until about 2000. I was born in Rhode Island and went to elementary school and high school in Daytona Beach, Florida. In the summer I would usually fly — with my little sister — to see my dad in New England. Then I went to the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. Aside from one major adventure to London (and Dublin) during my junior year, and frequent travel in the Southeast for crew (rowing) competitions, I wasn’t much of a traveler. I’d been to New Orleans and Colorado. I had been just about everywhere in the state of Florida, and once I got to college I started driving to New England instead of flying, so I got to see most of the East coast of the U.S. But then in late 2000 I moved to Los Angeles …

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I have just about 9,000 songs (35GB) in my iTunes library, and I listen to music the entire time I’m in the office every day. I live and die by my smart playlists. I’ve seen more than a few tutorials lately about how to utilize this iTunes feature, so I thought I’d toss my hat in the ring with a few tips on how to make Apple’s killer app work better. Here are five tips to keeping your daily listening enjoyable.

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A few weeks ago I was browsing the latest Gator news at Topix and I stumbled upon Orange and Blue Hue. What a great site! I am seriously impressed by the quality of the writing at this blog. There are several different contributors and each has a unique style. It seems like every day — often multiple times each day — there is a new editorial or post about the current state of GatorNation.

The design of the site is also quite superb and they’re doing some really cool stuff with the font titles. If you’re a Gator fan, you should check ‘em out.

What happens when you take a bunch of nude female mannequins and attach them to skateboards? You get a strangely fascinating video. The subititle is perfect: “Mannequins on skateboards. With predictable results. Somehow captivating.” Oh, the humanity. (But not the huge manatee.)
link via me-fi

Dear IHOP,
At the end of September I visited your brand new Marina Del Rey location with several of my co-workers. Everyone in my office had been excited for months while we waited for you to open. When you decided last year to demolish the friendly, inexpensive, personal, small-town bagel shop that we all knew and loved, we were very sad. But we were glad when we learned that an IHOP — a friendly, inexpensive, personal, small-town restaurant — was taking its place.

I ordered a big breakfast even though it was my lunch break. We all did. Terrific eggs, two pancakes smothered in strawberries, bacon, ham, hash browns. So good. I thought that $11.94 was a lot to pay for breakfast and coffee and an orange juice, but I understand that you have to charge $3.00 for a glass of orange juice because oranges are so hard to get here in southern California. I left a $3.06 tip because I like nice round numbers and the service was pretty good.

Imagine my surprise when I connected to my bank to synchronize Microsoft Money that night and realized I was charged $25.00 instead! Sure, I suppose it could have been a typo, but I’m guessing that Hector the waiter pocketed that extra ten-spot with glee. My penmanship isn’t brilliant, but I’m fairly certain that anyone can tell the difference between my 1s and my 2s. I was a little bit bothered, but not irate.

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Where do I go to complain about grocery store shenanigans? I’m at the end of my rope with Ralph’s, the local supermarket here in Los Angeles. There are two things they are doing to blatantly defraud customers and it’s driving me crazy.

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On Sunday my girlfriend and I attended The 2006 Children’s Choice Awards event Bogart Backstage, sponsored by The TJ Martell Foundation. It was held at The Hollywood Palladium and featured a presentation by Bonnie Hunt in addition to appearances by Bowling for Soup, Hilary Duff, and Aly & AJ.

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I receive an incredible amount of spam. I have a dozen or so email accounts and I manage about two dozen websites. Plus I run the IT department at my office. I get about 500 spam comments and 1500 spam pingbacks and / or trackbacks on blogs each day, and that’s with Akismet and a captcha installed. If I had to guess I’d say I get somewhere around 1500 spam emails each day. I have both Outlook’s internal spam-catcher and SpamBayes running, but some still slip into my Inbox. I’ve gotten quite good at scanning and realizing instantly if something is for me or for the trash.

This morning a piece of spam managed to make it into my Inbox and it momentarily shocked me. I hardly ever look at the subject line of email these days. The part that I noticed said, “This is not meant to be an insult or anything but people are talking at work about your weight.” Whoa! I mean, I’m not carrying around a spare tire or anything, but I’ve been knocking back M&Ms and Almond Joys like a madman since Halloween so when I saw that I freaked. Sure it was only for just that millisecond before my brain realized it was spam, but still. Talk about a way to catch someone’s attention!

I really don’t understand how this particular message is supposed to fool anyone. I don’t have anyone at my office named “Mark” and even if I did there’s no way he’d mail me at the completely obscure alias of a domain nobody at work even knows I own. This guy must be sending millions of these if he expects to get any sort of response.

I have been planning to add an “About” page to this site for about four years. Everybody who’s anybody has an “About” page. People who visit and know not what a blog is must wonder what this site is “About”. I just never seem to get around to it. I have no idea what this site is “About”. And every time I take a crack at it I can never seem to be as pithy as all the other great “About” pages I’ve seen on blogs over the years.

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On January 18 of this year I got a speeding ticket for doing 53 mph in a 35 mph zone on a barren stretch of Sawtelle Avenue at about 7 a.m.

This morning I drove behind two CHP patrol cars — one was license plate #1204664 — doing between 54 and 57 mph for at least two miles on the exact same stretch of Sawtelle. They obviously weren’t in the act of pursuit or anything. They stopped to get gas.

There really should be a place to report law enforcement personnel who abuse their power like that. Cops in LA are notoriously bad. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat behind an LAPD officer who flipped on lights and sirens just to get through a red light.