Story Archive - June 2007

Anime Expo: Day 2 - Photo Op (06/30/2007)

Being sober on a bus is, like, totally different than being drunk on a bus. - Ozzy Osbourne

AX is the same basically each year. We spend out days waiting in many hours of lines for equal hours of content. At night we go back to the room to watch newly purchased shows, play lots of Super Smash Brothers and drink alcohol. In proud AX tradition, there is some point where I fall into a very deep sleep and people stuff bottles of liquor around me take photos of it.

Boys... Jordan's Drunken Dream

Anime Expo: Day 1 - iDay (06/29/2007)

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. - Steve Jobs

The primary activity of Anime Expo is to stand in line. Generally, around 50% of our photos are standing in line, 40% are drinking in the room and 10% are actually doing some other cool activity.

When Apple announced that iDay was going to be first day of Anime Expo, I was upset. I wanted to stand in line at the Palo Alto Apple store, right near my home, with Scoble and the Digg guys and the other celebrities that were there. Instead, I found myself at an ATT store near the Long Beach convention center.

I arrived at about 2:30pm in line and was around person number twenty. There were two kids, around age sixteen, standing behind me in line. We got to talk about computers and they talked about how advanced things have gotten. They reminisced about how when they were young, people still used three and a quarter inch floppy drives and 56k dial-up modems! WOW! That might be one of the first times I really started to feel old with technology. At about 5pm, the father of ones of the kids came up to line, handed them each a $20 bill and they left.

At 6pm the door opened and the manager made an announcement that they would let in ten people. Each time two people left, they would let in two more. At this point I was around number thirty in line since it had expanded a lot. It took around thirty minutes for the first person to come out. He said they only had about ten phones and it was ridiculous. We asked the manager and he refused to tell anyone the inventory.

Around every fifteen minutes someone would leave the store and someone else would get to go in. When the sixth person left he told the line he had bought the very last 8gb model. They only have 4gb left. We asked the manager to confirm and the manager refused to say anything. Person number twenty walked out and said she had bought the very last one. The man behind me in line, who had paid the two kids to wait for him, called the Apple Store in LA to see if they had stock. When the store said "yes," he left line to drive there. He probably got a phone that night.

The Line at ATT iHello! So It Begins

I stayed in line until I went in to place the order. The person behind the counter said it would ship on Monday and would arrive on Tuesday. Instead, it ended up shipping on Tuesday and arrived on Thursday (because Wednesday was a federal holiday). Happy iDay! For thoughts and reviews of the iPhone, please consult the rest of the internets.

Anime Expo: Day 0 (06/28/2007)

Tequila, Jager, Johnny Walker and Kahlua Super Smash Brothers Drunken Wesley

Persian Wedding (06/23/2007)

If I'm the best man, why is she marrying him? I've been downgraded to the mediocre man. - Kevin (Mediocre Man)

It's a Saturday in Sacramento, and it's hot. I've been in town the entire week dealing with a family emergency and I'm drained. While work has been beyond stressful for the last three months, this switch to family issues didn't remove any stress from my life. It's shifted. At least I'm feeling stressed and drained over something that is actually important over something that isn't it. There are different stress muscles being flexed inside my soul and for just a little bit in my life emotional stress feels like a break, even if it's not.

Today is a break from the stress of work and the stress of family; I have a cousin getting married and we've all been told the party is going to set some records. I don't have a date. I thought about inviting someone, and I have quite a few friends who would have had a blast, but it just seems a little weird to me to invite someone I'm not very involved with to a giant family wedding. Maybe I'm just strange. My step-mother tried to score me a date at the last moment so that my younger brother wouldn't feel embarrassed to bring a date of his own. It all fell through and he and I roll up to the house stag.

The wedding is at a friend of the bride's house, just a little ways from the home I grew up at. The place is gorgeous. I mean it. My childhood home was one block outside the lush neighborhood of this house. There are white columns everywhere in the home and a beautiful indoor balcony. I look for a moment at the beautiful stone spiral staircase and I can already envision the bride walking down it, her dress trailing back up behind her before it's bustled.

Groom and Bride

The groom is handsome, white and nerdy, while the bride is a gorgeous Persian from Iran who has only been in the United States for a decade. It's a fantastic mixing of culture throughout the entire party. There are two tables of hors d'oeuvres; one is covered with fruit and the other is covered with bread and piles of gunk in various colors to be spread on bread. I grab a pile of Persian food and sit down at the table. One of the other members of my family asks what I have put on plate and all I can do is shrug, "it's very tasty glop."

The ceremony starts and it is a mix between the Persian half and the west. After the bride finishes her descent down the stairs I go running up to watch the ceremony from the balcony. There is a table covered with all sorts of traditional Persian items and while the pastor is reading from the scripture the mother of the bride is rubbing two candles together over the heads of the candles. "Today we celebrate another day when the blue eyes mix with the brown." In Iranian tradition, the husband takes on the origin of the bride. So my cousin from the midwest is now from Shiraz, Iran, and has become a Shiite Muslim.

Brown Eyes and Blue Eyes

The dancing begins and I sit hesitantly to the side. I'm not one who typically shies from the dance floor, but the music is Persian disco (with Madonna thrown in from time to time). None of my female cousins has the courage to hit the dance floor with me and I can't muster the courage to dance with one of the random friend's of the bride. Eventually, as I'm bopping to the music on the side, one of the girls grabs me, "You want to learn how to dance like a Persian?" Absolutely. She grabs and orange napkin from the table and dances with it like a scarf.

The party lasts until midnight and then the house is shutdown. The DJ changes from the fast dance music to slow, unable to even slow dance, put you to sleep music. The kids, and I am somehow still one of them, know it's still a party. We head off to the bride's parent's house for the after wedding party. We went another four hours doing disco dancing.

Do Not Want (06/22/2007)

What do you absolutely refuse to eat? - Vox QotD

I'm a very unpicky eater. That's a combination of good and bad. Food is food; it keeps me from dying by I'd be happier if I didn't have to waste time eating it. On the good side, I can be happy eating at nearly any location. I figure if I'm at a restaurant and nothing in the menu looks appealing to me, it's more likely a problem with me than with the menu. I'm sure there could be some restaurants that are an exception to that, but it's held true so far.

Growing up I was a little picker. I remember that I hated pasta. My brother would want to go to Strings, an Italian restaurant, and I could stand the place. It was always a battle about going there and I would usually give in, but nothing there tasted good to me. Now I'm very happy with the place.

I've eaten tripe. I've nibbled on chicken feet. There are a couple other exotics dishes that have landed in front of me. I accidentally snacked a tad on crickets in Mexico (they were just on the bar like peanuts! Who knew?).

I can't stand Cheese and Macaroni. I find it disgusting. I tried it once as a child and didn't like it; then I avoided it for the next ten or so years of my life. In college I was on a retreat where we had groups make food, and one of the groups made Cheese and Macaroni with cut up hot dogs. I at the bits of hot dog, but I found the pasta absolutely disgusting.

I can't stand beans, especially refried. I'd like to. I like burritos and other places of Mexican food, but when it comes with rice and beans I cannot bring myself to eat the beans. I can nibble on them, but I just can't eat it.

I prefer if my meat looks like meat and not like the animal it came from. So things like crab, shrimp (especially with eyes!) and whole fish have a bad mental affect on me. I've struggled through eating them, but it's not an easy think to wrap my brain around.

The bad part of being an unpicky is that dinner dates are a pain in the ass. When every place I go has the same affect (keeps me from dying) it's hard to pick one place over another. I would be just as happy eating every meal at Taco Bell as I would eating every meal at Left Bank. They are both going to keep me alive.

I had a dinner date a couple weeks ago where we went to a tapas bar (her choice) and the food was tasty. Lots of different treats, much melted cheese and other goodies, but it's hard for me to say a place if I liked it more or less than any other place. I've seen people spend hours just running through their favorite meals and all the little intricacies that make it so, but I've never been one to do it.

Roll Call (06/21/2007)

Who are the last five people you called on your cell phone? - Vox QotD

My phone has not been playing nice recently and hasn't been tracking the call list very well. I've lost a few people's numbers because I assume it has captured them, but when I go to the call list ten minutes later I find it is empty. For example, right now I went to the call list and it's blank. So I'm going to do my best from memory. It will be tricky. I don't call people. I hate the phone.

Older Brother: We're currently engaged in a family tactical manuever. Almost the entire group of siblings of my generation and my father's generation are in town and we are moving the earth. I called my older brother to get a situation report on the tactical operation he was at running.

Cousin: There is a wedding in the family this weekend that I was suppose to buy a gift for. I held off until the last week and was intending to buy it, but I called back to Sacto on the family mission and left the invitiation behind. So I had to call the best man to learn where they were registered.

Medical Records Office: As part of the covert ops going on, I needed to retreive a copy of a medical records so I called one of the office and worked my way through sweet-talking a copy of one of the records. My day-to-day job involves a lot of consulting kung fu and customer jedi mind tricks, so it is nice to flex it for personal reasons from time to time.

Here it gets very blurry. I really hate my phone and rarely make phone calls on it. So without my phone record list actually working I cannot remember the last people that I've called. I genernally just use e-mail and IM, and with my BlackBerry this has even worked on the go. So I'll just make up two other people I often call.

SG: I call this college friend a lot; we are exchanging a lot of dating-life advice and every few weekends take a night off to have a drunken night in Santana Row and then crash at her place watching a DVD of "Sex in the City" or "Law and Order."

Adam: Okay, I made this one up, but it's not uncommon. I often call on the way home so that he can tell me if I need to buy food for dinner or pickup ingredients for the latest TikiBar drink.

Change the Channel (06/20/2007)

Who's the most annoying person on TV? - Vox QotD

When there is someone on TV that annoys me, I quickly change the channel.

I don't watch very much TV these days. I was watching more a year ago where there was a lot of "what's on?" I think I would attribute a lot of the change to a combination of the Apple TV and Netflix.

It's easiest to just get my TV shows through Netflix and put them onto the Apple TV to watch when i have free time. So now when I have a spare moment, instead of channel flipping, I pull up the video podcasts or an episodes of one of the shows. I don't have to deal with watching what I don't want to watch.

The problem with the switch is similar to the problem with switch from a printed dictionary to an online one. You lose the joy of stumbling upon something you weren't expecting to find. Honestly though, when is the last time you stumbled upon a good television show?

Also Known As (06/19/2007)

What other names did your parents consider for you? - Vox QotD

My original name, as on my birth certificate, was Donovan. My father's name is Donald, so the idea was that it was slightly naming me after him.

I've heard some differing stories on how it made it's migration to my current name. The basic consensus is that since I am the second boy in the family it was inappropriate to name me after my father. That's a right of the first child. So, they picked another neutral name from their list of possibilities.

Personally, I think it's a good choice. I've been quite happy with me name.

Alarm Times (06/18/2007)

What time is your alarm clock set for? Do you use the snooze button? - Vox QotD

I've been busy. Very busy. To reduce my need to think, I've got this plan to start stealing the Vox question of the day. Sound good? Good.

I hate waking up in the morning. I despise it. I love staying up at night. This has always been a very painful combination for me.

I wake up at the drop of a pin, but I also hit snooze at the drop of a pin as well. My newest method is to use my phone for an alarm because I set it across the room. This way, when it starts beeping I'm forced to get out of bed and walk across the room to try and turn it off. Sometimes I still flop back into bed, but normally I do not.

My alarm is set for 7:30am daily throughout the week. I wake up successfully for it. On the weekend I don't set an alarm (unless I need to) and wake up at 8am cursing that I am awake.

What Do You Do? (06/10/2007)

Tell everyone what you want to do and someone will want to help you do it. - W. Clement Stone

"Besides work, what do you do?" An interesting question posed to me on Friday night by my hot date. I thought about that a lot on my two hour commute to a surprise party. I posed that question to all of my friends that I was visiting, "what exactly do I do?"

I wonder how many people can answer that question in any kind of decisive way. I'm a jack-of-all-trades, as such, I can spew a list of things that I can do, but none that I do with any type of consistency. That's not bad, right? It's not bad to not have any single consuming hobby. It can't be.

The only consistent hobby is that I throw crazy parties at our home every weekend. Seriously. EVERY weekend. This weekend, all of us were out of town for the surprise party, and all of ours friends were upset by it, "Guys! What I am going to do this weekend if you're away at a surprise party?" It's a problem. I can see that.

So what do I do? I hang out with my friends. I think that's what defines my hobby more than anything else. Sure, I go the Maker's Faire with my friends. I go skiing with my friends. I go geo-caching with my friends. I go to dinner with my friends. I see movies with my friends. How do I plan my weekends? Typically? I asked my friends if there is anything they want to do; if there is, I plan it. I make it happen.

Sometimes that involves through BBQes at other people's homes, dragging people out to go clubbing in the city, a whole mess of different things.

The party on Saturday was crazily hot. I forget that the valley isn't pleasant all year round like the bay area. There were a ton of children playing in the pool. I'm sad I forgot my swimsuit, but it didn't stop me much. I dumped all my electronics into the kitchen, grabbed on of the super soakers and attacked the kids. I got drenched. They were in swimsuits. It wasn't particularly fair, but it was fun.

I demonstrated juggling as well. One of the geeky boys was very impressed and I did my best to teach him. Yet, at the same time, all the little girls kept grabbing the juggling balls and running off with them. The geeky boy decided to teach me a magic trick. It was one of those, "pick a number, now do all this match to it, now I bet the result is three!" He was very proud the first time. He tried it on my again, but I had a few drinks in me, and I picked a non-real number and applied it in a non-linear ideal. At the end he said, "it's seven!" "No, I got 27.5 i." "How did you get that?!?" His cousin had to interject, "because he's being a jerk." Yes. I was. Sorry.

We swung by a Long John Silver's in Vacaville on the way home. I don't know why I love the disgustingness of that place, but I do. There aren't enough of them left in the world to find.