It’s been too long, my friends…
You’re Pitiful
yin and yang
They say that when times are the toughest, that’s when you find out who your true friends are.
Then again, you don’t ever expect to make new friends altogether during such times, but either way, it’s interesting to see how the characters of those around you truly shows when the proverbial shit hits the fan.
I won’t tell the story here because it isn’t really mine to tell, but all I can say is yes – there was a hardcore collision between said poop and its related fan; and also, I saw someone in a different light this evening that completely changed my perspective for the better. I’m pretty sure that Sara’s glad, too. All in all, certainly not how I’d have liked to spend my Sunday night by far, but we dealt with it, it’ll be over after tomorrow, and then we can all move on.
Life does that to you sometimes – I recommend learning how to deal with the ups and downs without driving yourself insane earlier than later. Easier said than done, I know, but life’s too short to let the ignorance and disrespect of others ruin your days. Better to take a deep breathe, move on, and let God / Allah / Buddha / karma handle the follow-up.
But enough small talk – I’m going to go have some cheese toast, make up a big bowl of ice cream for my girl, and try to unwind enough so that we can both get a little sleep. Good night.
good night
Today was a good day. You know, one of those lay around most of the afternoon doing pretty much nothing, then go out in the evening and kick it old-school style sort of days? Yep – that’s exactly what we did today, or at least something like that…
The original plan was to finish painting, haul a load of stuff up from Sara’s apartment, then maybe catch a movie or something. Mind you, when none of that had happened by about 5pm or so, we opted to just skip right to the dinner and a movie part, leaving the rest to pick-up tomorrow. Talk about your perfect example of simply rolling with the punches – we headed out for dinner at Stumps down at Channelside, then to watch the new Superman flick on IMAX, but the wait ended up being so long at Stumps that we opted to just have something quick at Hooters instead. A quick meander around after our meal taught us that we’d not only missed out on the 9pm showing, but also that even the super-late showing was already sold out, so from there we decided to do the only thing that we could do living in Florida – go to the beach instead.
We’re still looking for someplace to go on the 4th for fireworks, so we thought it would be good practice to just drive around and find something. This ended us up at Madeira Beach over on the gulf coast and even just the sea breeze alone proved to be just what the both of us needed after an otherwise topsy-turvy kind of week. We first stopped off for a cheezy round of mini-golf (after 18 holes, I beat Sara by one stroke, for those of you keeping track at home), then grabbed some ice cream from a barely open gas station and walked over to the beach for a leisurely stroll down the shoreline. It was great – the water was warm as bath water, you could actually see the stars twinkling in the sky because we were far enough away from the city lights, and there were only a few other people in the area at the time, so it was nice and quiet to boot. It would’ve been sooooo easy to fall asleep out there, with the ocean waves lapping up against the beach – truly a great way to wrap up a day otherwise spent doing absolutely nothing!
…of course, my opinion stands that sometimes you just need to take days like that every now and again to preserve your own sanity. Next time, though, we vowed to go sometime during the day when we might actually get a little sun and be able to spend some time in the water, but this was still a good start! Now if you’ll excuse me, clearly I’ve had a busy day and could use some rest…
Where does the time go?
I’ve been putting off posting this for a while, or rather I suppose I should say that I’ve been postponing writing for a while – I’ll be damned if this isn’t just going to be an extraordinarily busy summer!
I know that there’s only so much time in the day, but it kinda sucks right now because after sleep and work and trying to find time to spend with Sara, any time left over to write or exercise or (gasp) work on the Just Laugh rebuild is pretty much nil at best. And it’s rough because I know she feels bad a lot because she thinks that she’s cutting into my time to do other stuff and I really don’t want her to feel that way because I love any and every minute that I can get with her, but sometimes she does get more brunt than she deserves simply because I can trim time away from her a lot easier than I could, say, from work…
And just between you and me, I think that’s a lot of my problem right now – I’m at a very dull point in my job right now where for some reason it’s just horrendously mundane for me to even make it through the day. I’ve lax’ed things up a bit to try to get out closer to my scheduled time without putting in so much overtime lately, but the bottom line is that simply put: I’m bored. I’m not being challenged, so my duties are purely routine at this point; the same workload problems continue to slack on by, so I’ve pretty much just come to look at them with tinted glasses because nothing seems to change; and ultimately, I don’t see any end in sight, so basically I’m forced to live with a nine-hour block of my day just void of anything other than time on the clock.
(…and I know, I know – there are certainly worse things that I could be doing for a living, but that’s another topic for another day…)
It’s kind of funny because it’s times like these when I start to fantasize back to the days of Just Laugh and wonder if we could ever bring it back again, or more. When the site was at its peak back in 2001 / 2002, I fondly remember having dreams nightly about the site getting just absolutely huge and becoming a household name – truly “Your Source for Humor on the Internet.” I invisioned skyrocketing talented writers and artists into new careers, donating huge sums of money to charities and somehow bringing HBO’s Comic Relief program back to life, and basically just living the high life doing what I could truly love doing – making people laugh and helping other people make people laugh. Comedy tours, celebrities, realizing true fame by finding a plush version of our ever-popular Just Laugh Pepper Monkey on a store shelf – so many possibilities for success…
Of course, I always wondered how those days could’ve been different if I’d had one or two other people on board with me that were just as passionate about the project as I was – staying up all night staring at code to get a feature online by deadline or brainstorming for our next interview. Trouble is, that kind of dedication, just short of a miracle anyways, takes money to support because like it or not, nobody else has that kind of time on their hands either. But if one didn’t actually have to punch a clock and spend 40+ hours a week earning rent money, you just might have a chance…
So that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately…a lot. It seems that whenever my job really gets me down, I start to get off on these drives about how I’d like to get my creative efforts to the point where I could focus on them full-time and count on them to pay the bills. I still honestly believe that there are some good concepts behind Just Laugh and the right people could make some money off of it – it’s just a matter of my being able to put the necessary time in to get it to that point…all the while keeping my job and my girlfriend in tact, too. Talk about a tough balancing act!
But still, they say that dreams are worth following for a reason, so if I really believe that there’s something to this one, I owe it to myself to continue persuing it. I don’t know where the time itself is supposed to come from, but I can attest myself that some of the most entertaining creative minds do their best work after they’ve already spent a full day’s work hammering out widgets to make ends meet while they follow their dreams. Nobody ever said it was easy, but then again, how many really good success stories ever began with the hero having it easy right off the bat, anyways?
First, though, I should probably get some sleep… 😛
Bye-bye, Textamerica…
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/20/textamerica_goes_fee.html
So I heard a rumor earlier this week that the original moblogging site, Textamerica, was planning on deleting all of its free users and switching to a paid subscription model. For a while I was actually contemplating just accepting the charges because it’s always been a pretty cool site to me and I enjoy looking like a complete dork on those instances when I’m actually being an active moblogger. Then I saw the new rate structure today – $99 a year – and said, “Poo poo!!!” to that!
All I can guess is that they’re about to go under, so they’re panicking because otherwise, that rate doesn’t even make sense and they’re going to scare off 90% or more of their user base the moment they start implementing it. Sure, it’s a premium service and I’m all about their trying to recover costs, but a hundred bucks a year is just way too much for the ability to simply post pictures from your cell phone. At least, it’s too much when there are still other services out there that will let you do it for free. I think I pay something like $15 / year for LiveJournal and I use their site a lot more than I ever do TA’s. Also, all of my blog posts from the last three years aren’t simply going to disappear if I don’t make my payment on time. Meh…
While I was thinking about looking into hosting a moblog server of my own for a replacement, I see that Flickr also seems to offer the same thing so I might just go over to them instead. Does anybody have any experience with Flickr or have any better suggestions for this new MoBlogger soon to be without an online home?
new comic!
Just got around to finishing Friday’s strip this evening – belated, but I think it’s one of our better strips to date. Enjoy…
A Lease is a Lease
http://www.l7comix.com/comic.php?id=64
Chase can go eat a dick…
(…and my advance apologies to Sara’s mother, who’s been known to read this from time to time, or anyone else for that matter who happens to stumble upon my blog for the first time and is greeted by this lovely rant of customer service inadequacy, but this time they’ve just gone too far…)
So Chase declined my credit card while we were grocery shopping at Wal-Mart this evening. We’d been out shopping all day and used the card several other times without incident, but with a shopping cart full of food and other necessities on the line, they decided to reject the purchase back without a reason code and then furthermore wouldn’t answer the phone when the cashier called to verify the charge manually! I tried calling in myself to find out what the problem was, and after first getting disconnected “on accident” by their brilliant IVR system, I finally got through to Marcus who informed me that their systems were down…period. Nothing he could do, and didn’t seem to give two damns about the fact that I was sitting there with a cart full of perishables wondering how they were going to get paid for now that the credit line that had been so graciously thrust upon me…at 23% interest, but that’s another rant altogether…was suddenly not available to me because they were having “system problems.” He claimed that the bank systems were fine and that wasn’t why my card was being rejected, but the customer service systems were updating and that’s why he couldn’t tell me what the problem was. “Just call back in two hours – we’ll be happy to help you then…” Thanks, asshole, but I’m not sitting around Wal-Mart for two hours waiting for your systems to play catch-up…
Sara and I had an interesting talk about disaster recovery and just corporate liability in general the other day and as far as I’m concerned, when you’re one of the largest freaking banks in the world, something’s not right when a simple software update can bring your system to its knees. Just like companies in the Bay area here have to have sufficient disaster recovery plans in place to support their businesses in the event of the unthinkable, the same applies elsewhere and for some reason, I’ve got my doubts that Chase’s $50,000+ credit line holders weren’t getting turned down for their purchases an hour ago.
I’m done with this bank. It sucks because they’re currently the oldest credit card in my wallet – almost 8 years – and I know that something like that can have a positive effect on your credit report, but regardless, I’m tired of being dicked around. The interest rate that they’ve got me paying now in no way indicates that they have any respect for me as a “valued long-term cardholder,” I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with their customer service reps when I have had to call in, and I’m just tired of it. In the past, I’ve always been stuck with the account because it had such a high balance and I didn’t have anywhere else to go, but times have changed and I do have options now. Tomorrow they’re getting a call and regardless if I have a place to transfer the balance to, the account’s getting closed. I don’t even care that they’ll look at it as just one drop in the bucket because I don’t hold a corporate account with them – the bullshit stops here.
Movie Talk – Cars
I know a good chunk of my writing has sort of been absent from the Internet for quite some time now and while I’m not quite ready to bring things back just yet (…still waiting on the new site…), I do have a couple of favorites here and there that I’m going to be posting over the next several days in an effort to get myself motivated enough to finish the rebuild for comedic-genius.com. In the meantime, I hope this will suffice… 🙂
A word or two before I begin – I truly mean it when I say that I can’t say enough good things about this movie. Sara and I went to see it only two nights ago and we probably would’ve turned right around and watched it again, if it hadn’t been for that having to go to work the next morning thing. The soundtrack was acquired merely hours later and we’ve both been listening to it pretty much religiously to and from work each day ever since – it’s just a really, really good film. Seriously – if you’re only going to go see one film this summer, or even if you’re really cheap and don’t like to spend the extra money to go out to the movies, this one is by far worth the ten or fifteen bucks that it’s going to cost you for a couple hours of movie magic. If you wait ’til you see it on DVD, you’re gonna wish that you’d sprung to see it in the theater, so just go already!
Walt Disney’s Letter to the World of 2006
This is pretty cool, in my not-so-humble opinion. Fifty years ago, Walt Disney was asked to submit a letter predicting the future of entertainment to a time capsule that would be opened in 2006.
It’s quite the insightful letter, not only speculating about the progres of human interest and the need to be entertained, but also hoping for a world that has outlawed war and created the ideal world for man to co-exist with himself and everything around him. Truly a visionary of his time, even if we’ve probably actually grown farther away from such a concept since he first wrote it.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s still a thing or two we can learn from the man and his mouse…
http://craphound.com.nyud.net:8080/walts1956letter.pdf