Posts from October 2008

3 guys, one car, 5 years, 70,000 miles (we got it at 30,000). If my
math is even sort of right, it's about 4500 miles per person, per year.

We did take it on some far road trips too but mostly it just between
@terry's work and home.,

I am thinking about being Freddy Mercury from queen.



So last night was Bad Boy Bill at Madmoiselles Gentlemen's Club that I wrote about in @paul #45944 The atmosphere was so weird. The club is one big dance hall with a dual cat walk and stripper poles. The women were actually pretty okay to good looking. Not what I expected. Although, honestly I was surprised that only 2 women out of all of them did no have cellulite despite being skinny (with curves). Is it a genetic thing or an age thing? Do all women have it and I just never saw that many of them so clothesless?

The women can't get really naked. Not only do they where outfits but hey have these weird nipple shapped bandaids on their nipples. Its not like in Canada where I saw the male strippers. I imagine the female ones are crazier in Canada too.

The fact that most people were there for dancing and not for the strippers made it all such a strange atmosphere. At first I felt weird dancing because the strippers are dancing but as the music got better most of the crowd started to dance. The problem is it was dancing on carpet. I hate dancing on a carpeted dancefloor. No pun intended.

Broke my glasses on a stripper
So @enknot gave me a dollar to give to a stripper and I tried. First, he and @terry went then I went to give her a dollar and when she moved her breast hit my glasses and broke them. She was like, "I think I am breaking you glasses." I am such a dork. I later noticed you are supposed to take them off. I guess you live and learn although I don't know the next time I will go anywhere, where the drinks cost so much and are so weak.

Notice the missing pads.

This is so ridiculous. My parents have Time Warner cable. My mother
works at channel 4. The two companies still don't have an agreement,
so to watch the news channel 4, this is the solution.

I know buffalo is notorious fir rusty cars but I never saw one like
this. I probably should not text and drive on this corner seeing as
it is the only place I ever got into an accident. I am stopped at a
red light at least.

Last night I worked till like 11PM to finish up all the projects that had to be converted to the new flash upload. Some of them still have to be launched into production because I can't do that without signoff. At least they are ready to go. I can't believe what a pain in the ass it has been because of this one decision Adobe made. I wonder if they realized so many people were using their system the way it worked in flash player 9. Then I worked on a new AD based security system which seems to work out well.

I also had this serious issue where IE6 was blanking out on cached javascript files. I kept thinking it was some problem witht he scripts themselves but it turned out to be that it really just can't handle javascript gzipped. I set my .htaccess file to stop gzipping the content for IE6 and everything was fine. Honestly, that browser has cost my thousands of hours of wasted time over the years.

By the time I got home I was just ready for bed. So despite having guests over I passed out.

Today, there are like ten million other programming tasks I want to accomplish like adding native querySelectorAll support to the surebert toolkit but I am going to try and take a day off. The native querySelectorAll is pretty neat and it is extremely fast. The browser makers are finally starting to realize that programmer want js dom node selection through css selectors and it could be much more efficient if the browser just did it instead of having to use a js library. Safari 3.1 already has support, so does firefox 3.1 beta and the new IE 8 is going to have it at well. I can't believe something new will have cross browser support.

If only Roswell could move past IE6 which is sadly still our official browser.

Someone sent me this link the other day where you could see the actual paid salaries of all New York State workers for 2007

Its hard not to be jealous, especially when you are talking about the top paid people at Roswell.



I thought Dr. Hohn retired, maybe that was his severance package. According to this , he is administering "the newly-formed Empire State Stem Cell Board." From what I hear everyone loved him and he really turned Roswell around.

Seriously though, can you imagine making that much money in Buffalo. It amounts to about $30,000 a week. Let me repeat the - in Buffalo part. Are there even properties worthy of that salary in this city. He could buy the best properties in the city on one years salary.

In comparison, here is the top paid at Suny Buffalo. How is it that Dr. Linda Brodsky makes so much more than the other execs at Suny Buffalo. Check out that $799,000 salary! I guess being a doctor and an executive is really the way to go, its the same with all the top paid Roswell employees.



I decided to just go ahead and look up the top salaries for all New York state employees regardless of organization and guess what Dr. Hohn is still #1 followed by closely by Linda Brodsky and all the top execs at Roswell Park Cancer Institute.



What's even crazier is when you think of all the money they make on their side companies and discoveries. I am so curious how that all works. It seems to me when I make anything at Roswell they own it, but all the top people have side companies. I really need to work on the side company thing in my 40s.

Back to my Dept
In my department the difference between the different jobs is not too extreme. Not like in the medical depts. It goes from $35k to about $100k. This year I didn't make as much as I could have if I was overtime elligable. Next year I will make more because I moved up a couple pay grades this year. In the end I am satisfied although I sometimes want to kick myself for not going to medical school.

In the short term, I would rather have an office than more money. Two of the guys I work with just moved from cubicles to offices and I was visiting today thinking how nice it would be to have a meeting space/demonstration table built into your work space. I actually live in the shafted cube thats cut back to make room for an isle and don't even have a chair for people to sit at like other the other guys do. Its kind of redic seeing as I have constant meetings with people on how to do stuff as part of my new job and they just stand behind my chair or sit on a chair just outside my cube.

A security firm came to speak at our blockclub meeting and gave us
these safety pamphlets. Are these really commonly held misconceptions?

work
After a nice long weekend, I had a crazy day of programming, demonstrating, writing letters, meetings and quick hacks. Hopefully, tomorrow will be better. I am feeling frustrated with how slow everything moves at my work and how every conversation requires 75 minutes of small talk before the matter at hand can be addressed. I am so bad at small talk when something time dependent is waiting. Maybe I am just a boring person.

Home Life
The anniversary was nice. We spent the day just hanging out together and fixing things. We fixed a drain and installed a new lamp in our bedroom closet. Then @matthew and I took a bath while @terry studied and at the end of the day we went to Mother's for dinner where I had an 18oz ribeye steak that was so delcious.

So were these little neck clams


Along the way we went shopping at some antique stores and I saw this tray. I always wanted one of these. I also bought a lamb roast to match. Friday, they will meet each other and then my stomach.



They also had these crazy lights in there basement. What were they for. Medical use, disco lights?


Robbers
About 10 people/cars/houses on our block have been robbed including our neighbors the other day. We saw a dude enter their house through the door and we just assumed it was a worker because when I checked the door it was locked. The dude then stole all of their electonics and shipped them over the back fence. I wish I had realized what was going on.

Then last night on the way home from dinner some very capable look, young black guy begged us for money - that annoys me more than anything. I am fine with the cripples and crazzies and old people but when young people who are clearly in better physical shape than me ask for money - I find it hard to believe they can't do something to for work. On the way out the woman who sat next to us found her window smashed. He was still there bothering people for money. He either did it or saw who did it.

I think they may have caught the house robber and it was the same guy that robbed out house two years ago ;(

Other forms of robbery include food costs. I just can't ebeliev how much food costs keep skyrocketing. Look at the cost of these freaking cookies.



Here is a pic of @terry looking cute just before his haircut.

So after the Scion show (Communist Party) @terry and I came home and tried to go to Ohm but it was shut down so we decided to sprint on down to underground and see if anyone we knew was out.

When we were there we hung out with our friend Christoph and some older guy in jeans and leather v-neck open furry chest teeshirt came over to talk to us. He said and I quote:

We better vote for McCain beacuse if we don't its gonna be the beginning of the Niggers and Spics ruling the streets.

I am not even sure what his reasoning was or if it was just that Obama is black, and what do the "spics" have to do with it? I wish I had paid more attention so I could have gotten some better quotes but I was too drunk and didn't want to get into a fight.

I mean think about it. There we were in the gayest of all gay bars, where you would expect people to be the most liberal. It just goes to show you that no group of people consists of just one type of person.

Everyone kows how I feel about marketing. Especially, in your face marketing but what i saw a the Communist Party at Sound Lab - took the prize for most digusting in your face advertising I have ever witnessed. It got so bad that @terry and I left as we couldn't even enjoy the music anymore. I know that events are sponsored and sponsored events have advertising but this took it is a new more sinister direction which intergrated every aspct of the event with the advertiser and every surface with advertisment.

When we first got there I was really enjoying the music. The DJ was and she was totally amazing. I think my favorite party was her playing a childrens light up electric sword during her live set. None of my criticism for the event has anything to do with her. Her blog is also pretty entertaining I wish she blogged here.

Back to the event...

If you haven't been to soundlab the setup is pretty cool. They have a bar on the right and booths in a corner to left. The stage is in the middle. When we first got there, we went over to the bar to get some beers and I noticed that on the side wall there was a scion video advertisement playing. I thought it was weird but then i thought, maybe it was just a TV channel. Then it kept playing and playing. I just ignored it.

Then the place was so packed that we headed over to the booths for a bit to sit. In the booths were hundreds of scion keychains. I thought, I started to take pics.



Well someone must have noticed because with like everytime we moved from the booth and came back, the table was re-decked with more merchandise. After the keychains came Scion music CDs. Well actually the CD's were from iheartcomix.com but it also seems to be a scion marketing front.



Then the last time we visited the booth there were even Scion winter knitted caps which people started wearing truning even the patrons heads into fucking advertisments.



We move away from the booths and decided to just watch the music and dance. But then while we were dancing, someone went and put up a giant 6 ft across scion banner across the stage. At first it seems like a joke. I mean the event was called the communist party and @terry thought maybe it was a challenge to see if we would react to such extreme advertising.

So we move back to the bar to talk about it and low and behold there was a table with more scion keychain, scion metal boxes, and scion headphones, as well as, other scion merchandise and marketing material.





I was out of my mind irritated at this point. Every surface every direction except for the artist herself was 100% scion.

Its so weird the way that they slowly built it up to this nauseating advertising crescendo. And then the final straw. I say to @terry specifically, well at least scion is not in the art itself. I mean that would be the most ridiculous thing even. Within a minute the artists video screen from her dj set turned into these high tech graphic scion collages and advertisments as her set was ending. I thought I was going to throw up. There was no direction without it anymore. I know I am particularly sensitive to advertising but this was something I just never imagined and I could hear other people talking about how unpleasant it was.

In the end @terry went around and just threw the merchanidse off the tables and onto the floor. Then he started chanting scion, scion, scion and some of the dudes around us jokingly joined in, making it totally insane - we had to exit.

Apparently, for some scionistas it wasn't even enough

After that we went out on the town, invited people to our halloween party and maybe made a new friend. We tried to stop at Ohm at like 1am but it was already closed. Thats sad for that place. Tabu is also closed now. We got home at around 4:30am.