• The Oil Spill
• The Economy
• Baseball in 2010
• Lebron James

I don’t like complaining about stuff unless I can offer a solution, so I’ll try and offer some lame solution to anything that merits one.

The Oil Spill

I feel like this has taken a backseat to a lot of stuff and it probably shouldn’t. Those people in New Orleans get crapped on more times than anyone I’ve ever seen. I bet after this is all cleaned up, people will still be clamoring for more drilling… really? What’s it going to take to stop? An oil spill covering Wall Street?

I bet if all the executives for Goldman-Sachs (who now occupy many of the spots in the US Treasury) lost their homes to flooding or they couldn’t work because a ball of crude oil exploded in their office they’d have a different attitude. God forbid they lose that million dollar pay check right? But it’s alright for a fisherman to lose his home. Pretty messed up way to run things.

Solution: To the top 1% – Stop being jerks, how much money do you really need? “Throw more money at it” is not a solution to anything.

The Economy

What a miserable time to be starting out in the workforce. I feel fortunate that I have a stable job and we didn’t have any layoffs when the economy (especially in California) seemed to be dictating it. I think that’s pretty rare in a company now-a-days. To my knowledge, we didn’t lose any benefits either.

The homeless population in Los Angeles has noticeably increased in the last 2 years I’ve been here. I can’t even walk 2 miles to the movie theater without passing 5-10 homeless people. The state is of no help, they’re laying people off in record numbers and raising taxes. We have the highest population of movie stars and musicians in the country here, so how about you tax guys like Will Farrell (no idea if he actually lives in LA) more and leave the little guy alone? The taxation structure in this country is so out of whack and protected by big-business, I’m not sure if it’ll ever get back to a stable point; especially not under the current structure.

Solution: I didn’t realize this until recently, but apparently in the 50s the tax rate on the wealthy was upwards of 90%. And that money was used to build roads, better schools, and better lives for a lot of people. Everyone was happy until corporate America took over and drastically reduced the tax rate on themselves to where it currently is (not sure what the number is). So the economy started into a gradual free-fall to where we are today: The rich have and want more money than they could ever need and the poor are poorer than they have ever been. The top 1% in this country have more money than the bottom 95% combined. The gap between the rich and poor will continue to grow until something big changes. Maybe raise that tax rate again? I dunno.

Baseball in 2010

I love it, the pitchers are back. I’m just hoping that everything is on the level and they’re not using some designer drug to gain an edge. The good hitters are still hitting and the good pitchers are insane. I’ve never really seen anything like it, I bet this is what it was like before they lowered the mound.

Also, I think Bud Selig should do something positive for the game or step down. Honestly, the guy is basically spineless.

Solution: Stop molding the playoff around the Fox TV schedule, if they want to televise the games they should adhere to the schedule, not the other way around.

Stop making the all-star game mean something, these players may only work March to October but they still deserve a few days off. How do we reward the best of the best? We make them work really hard over their vacation. I’d be pissed if I was reward for my work by having to come in on my day off and it wasn’t laid-back/relaxing.

Baseball needs a salary cap, screw the union, let them go on strike. Salaries are out of control. Make the cost of everyone go down. Heck, put a cap on the cost of a soda and a novelty bat. It’s ridiculous what’s happening out there… and once again: how much money do these people really need? I think a cap of $100MIL a year for a team is more than reasonable. And it’ll only effect 8 teams (including my Red Sox).

Lebron James

This is exactly what the country has turned in to. Everyone taking their person goals as #1 and reaching them at all costs. That being said, Cleveland is miserable so I can’t fault him for leaving, I would have done the same thing, no one wants to live in the same place their whole lives. I think Miami was a lame, cop-out choice, but whatever.

If I was Lebron, I think I would have went to Orlando, a good team but not a guaranteed championship, I mean… you have to complete a little, right? There has to be some challenge or you get bored really fast.

It’s unfortunate that Cleveland is a borderline slum at this point, and without Lebron they’ll probably dip to the levels of Detroit. But we learn at a very young age: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Security guard in the mornings

This guy is great, I see him maybe once a week. I come into work around 7am and every morning he’s working he looks at me and proclaims “Hey man! What’s up?”. And I respond with a “Nothing man, how’s it goin’?”. This the extent of my interactions with this gentleman, and it’s a great way to start the day.

Cleaning lady at work

I see the cleaning lady every morning and every morning she says “good morning” with a smile and a broken-English accent. This lady is very nice and seems pretty genuine in her “good mornings”. Every once in a while she’ll kick me out of my cube to vacuum. I haven’t used the trash can or recycle bin in my cube in 2 years because I don’t want her to have an extra trash to worry about; I just use the main one near the break station.

I may get her a Christmas present.

Guy with the long arms

There’s a guy I pass at work on my way from (never to) the bathroom. He has really long arms. I’m talking like he can put his hands on his knees without bending over. Anyway, this guy’s pretty great.

Crazy wheelchair lady

This is a homeless lady who lives on my street. It’s a sad story, don’t get me wrong and I wish her the best. The wheelchair isn’t because she can’t walk or anything, it’s acting more like a shopping cart as it just carries her things and she pushes it around. Every once in a while when I’m out around 6am I see her getting a morning workout in by boxing the air. It’s hard not to smile.

Van guy

The van guy has been living in a van outside of my work on and off for 2 years now. I think he brings character to the area. Most people don’t like him because he goes to the bathroom in a bucket and leaves it on the sidewalk (but really, where else can he put it?). I’m pretty sure he’d knife me if I tried to talk to him.

Initially I was slated to speak for about 60mins to 50 or so people and I had the presentation all laid out (for the most part), it was going to be a fairly casual thing and I was hoping to engage in more of a conversation with the audience as it’s more of a classroom setting. And I felt pretty good about that until they moved the talk into a larger room to accomodate the popularity.

First off, I think that’s awesome, and I’m totally pumped to try and educate more people about HTML 5 and the direction of the Web. But it caused me to trash my entire presentation and rebuild it for a larger audience. Which is fine, I don’t have a problem with that at all; it just adds to the intensity a little now that it’s 18 days away and I’m still building what I hope will be a great talk.

I always get nervous before speaking, so it’s nothing new to get butterflies – especially speaking to a good size crowd at a conference. But I think it’s pretty awesome talking to someone who is taking notes about what you’re saying. It can be a little intimidating, but I like it. I’m usually nervous until about 30 seconds into a speech/talk and then I’m fine. I actually kinda like public speaking and that intense nervous feeling when you crack the first awkward joke wondering if anyone’s going to laugh. Let me tell you, if you get that laugh early, the rest of the talk will be easy as pie. If you don’t… you’re in for a wild ride.

Alright, well… I just got 3 wisdom teeth removed. I apparently don’t have a 4th one, so that’s good.

I feel fine, not loopy, no pain (yet). Hoping to be back working tomorrow, but time will tell.

Let’s see… what else… the doctor was cool, funny guy. He said I wouldn’t remember the name of his friend at Virginia Tech, so if a Hokie named “Paul” is reading this, your boy thinks you’re a cool dude.

They made me take out my earring, I think it’s in my pocket, I’m kinda on the fence about putting it back in since I have no plans to be that 40 year old guy with an earring, I might just leave it out.

I guess this post isn’t as entertaining as I had hoped.

Oh, and I saved the teeth…

It makes it very difficult to eat, talk, and basically move my jaw much at all. Fortunately I know what the problem is, unfortunately I’m well aware that it’s my wisdom teeth.

I haven’t gotten them removed yet for a few reasons:

• Last time I was at the dentist, he said that they weren’t impacted so I didn’t really need to get them out unless they were bothering me. And to be fair, they really don’t bother me all that much, just for a week every 6 months or so
• I have since avoided the dentist as to not get a contradictory opinion on the matter
• There are very few things I hate more than missing work due to an illness. When I left my last job, I think I had around 180 hrs of unused sick time, and here at USC I’ve maxed out my sick days at 12. I just don’t like taking sick days, it’s not like I work construction, if I have a laptop and can sit up under my own power, there’s a good chance I can work through it.

Spending the last 3 or 4 days popping ibuprofen, barely talking, and icing the right side of my head (frozen water, not covering my head in cake frosting) has made me think that I might very well need to get, at least 1 or 2 of these teeth removed.

At least I’ll be a few ounces lighter afterwards.

If I do decide to get them out I plan to blog about it shortly after, depending on the medication they give me, I think it could be a pretty entertaining post. So look forward to that.

Also, I finally got a haircut yesterday, that’s the picture at the top.

posted at OkayTim

Here’s a short list of things that I think are worse than a punch in the face. In no particular order:

• Ice chips in milk because the fridge is too cold
• Lettuce on a day old sandwich
• Red light cameras
• Inaccurate DVR stopping during a fast forward
• People who stop in the middle of a busy sidewalk to look up
• Insurance of any kind

If someone told me I could get punched in the face and never have to deal with anything on the list again, I’d take it in a heartbeat.

I’m sure I’ll think of some more…

I have a lot of traveling in the coming months, lots of flying around and I just wanted to stop by and list out me stuff I’ll be doing so when I don’t reply to e-mail no one gets mad.

1. Nov. 26-Nov. 30 – Mrytle Beach, SC
2. Dec. 8 – Dec. 12 – New Orleans , LA
3. Dec. 24 – Dec. 30 – Myrtle Beach, SC
4. Dec. 30 – Jan. 4 – Boston, MA

I’ll leave you with a quote:

To me, it’s a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, Hey, can you give me a hand? You can say, Sorry, got these sacks. — Jack Handy

I was reading this article on Yahoo! today. I don’t know about everyone else but when I see an article title like “10 Most blah blah blah” I’m really just interested in seeing a list of 10 things, not a paragraph with the 10 things buried in there somewhere for me to search out. It seems to make sense to me…

It creates a much better using experience to be able to glance at an article and get the gist of it. Then having the ability to read further.

With all that said, Yahoo! failed on this one, so here’s the top 10 list of states in trouble:

1. California
2. Arizona
3. Rhode Island
4. Michigan
5. Nevada
6. Oregon
7. Florida
8. New Jersey
9. Illinois
10. Wisconsin

Easy to scan right? If you want to read more, you can check it out on Yahoo!.

6am – Wake up

6:30am – Watch Married with Children on TBS

6:45am – Leave for work

7:15am – Arrive at work

12:00pm – Lunch

4:15pm – Leave work

4:45pm – Arrive back my my apartment

5:00pm – Watch PTI recorded

[ The rest of the day is mixed with freelance work, writing, TV, eating or walking around ]

11:00pm – Bed

And this fella too:

Being in LA for a little over a year now I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of the area and the roads, not all the highways but I can usually get from point A to point B.

I’m generally pretty vocal about the traffic in this area and last weekend’s trip to Vegas put me right over the top. With no traffic it takes about 4.5hrs to drive from LA to Las Vegas (and vice versa). Tay and I left LA around 3:15pm on Friday to meet up with some friends from Raleigh. We left early to help with traffic because last time I went we left at 5:30pm and it took 6.5hrs.

How long did it take to drive to Vegas you ask? 6.5hrs… again. We hit brutal traffic at 3 spots in the trip. But that wasn’t even the worst part. The drive back took 10hrs.

Here’s what happened on the way back

We left Vegas at 2:15pm after lunch at the MGM. Traffic was immediately bumper to bumper so we stopped at the outlet stores in Primm (it’s the first town with casinos on the way to Vegas ) to see if it would lighten up. We walked around for a while, gambled a little more, and 2hrs later we left.

Traffic hadn’t lightened up at all… not a happy camper, but what are ya gonna do right? There’s really only 1 way to get from Vegas to LA. So we sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic until we hit Barstow (the halfway point) which is a little over 120 miles from Vegas.

There are very few exits on this road, there was no accident, no reason at all for there to be traffic; I couldn’t make sense of it… until we got to the source of the traffic. The California Agriculture Checkpoint (they check cars for dangerous Nevada carrots) – which looks like a giant toll booth and they never stop anyone at it. So essentially it’s there to create a 120 mile traffic jam every Sunday. I don’t think I’ve ever been more angry at California than I was when I realized that the stupid checkpoint was the reason I had been sitting in traffic for 8hrs.

We stopped once more in Victorville to get some caffeine and  pulled back into Santa Monica just past midnight, completely exhausted.

The Vegas trip was great, but traffic was the worst; we could have flown in from Boston faster.

So the official list of places I’m not driving to anymore stands at:

• Hollywood (an hour to go 10miles? Come on…)
• Las Vegas

The blacklist is of course voided if family is visiting. I think I might just fly to Vegas next time.

Posted on okaytim.com

A school bus in Japan

The outside

The inside

A school bus in India

• Blood Sport
• Kickboxer
• Lionheart
• Ghost Rider
• Snakes on a Plane
• Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift
• Crank: High Voltage
• Death Warrant

Obviously I’m not a fan of Jean Claude Van Damme, a brilliant terrible actor.

Posted on OkayTim.com

Anyway, when you get a Pre they fill out your $100 mail–in rebate form for you and you just have to mail it out. 2 months after that I get this e-mail from sprint

Dear TIMOTHY WRIGHT:

Thank you again for your purchase of a wireless device from Sprint.

Your rebate of $100.00 is in the final stages of processing and should be mailed to you within the next three weeks.

To check your rebate status, just click on [link omitted]

Thanks for choosing Sprint.

Sincerely,
Sprint

So it looks like I’ll be having to wait yet another month for my rebate.

My experience from sprint so far

1. Overcharging me by 23% for month #2 in my billing cycle and saying they can’t fix it until month #5 – and they can’t refund the overcharge.
2. Taking over 3 months to send a rebate check

If I was someone who swore more, this is where I’d do that, but I think this post speaks for itself.

Sincerely,
Tim

Posted on OkayTim.com