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Worst blogs ever

Have you ever noticed that there is one kind of blog post that we can all universally hate? It’s the dreaded “sorry I haven’t posted in awhile” update. Every blog has them at some point, actually most livejournal pages are comprised solely of “sorry I haven’t posted in awhile” blog entries.

The most horrible thing about the “haven’t updated in awhile” post is that it can become part of a vicious cycle. People think they have to write everything down…or nothing. So after a while they say “oh no, I haven’t posted, well, I’m still alive. I’ll catch up later.” So now people are more behind but they feel content with this minor update. They go on for more than a week without writing any actually new content. But now they’re one more week behind! So what do they do?

If they’re like me they probably brood over it for another week before making a desperate attempt at an entry that they delete before publishing and substitute it for another pathetic “whoops, I’m still alive. I’ve been so busy that I haven’t been able to catch up!”

Please, we all know that unless you make time for something you’ll always be too busy for it. I’m unemployed taking 1 class and I can bee too busy for anything unless I commit to doing it.

Anyway, I hate those kinds of entries…

Worst blogs ever
Posted Saturday, July 7, 2007
2

A Minor Bug Report

to [email protected]
date Jul 2, 2007 6:35 PM
subject iMovie crashes
mailed-by gmail.com

I didn’t know exactly which channel to go through so here is my bug report.

iMovie crashes after you’ve been working for 5 and a half hours saving every 15 minutes and then overwrites your saved project with some garbled mess that looks like it might be from 3 1/2 hours earlier but inserts random pieces from later on in the project. It does this 30 minutes before you’re suppose to show it to a large group of people who were waiting to see the finished project.

Oh yeah, and after it crashes(because the project is over a gig maybe?) it makes you feel super-depressed.

Let me know if there is a fix that doesn’t invovle razor blades and my wrists.

Thanks a lot

-Dan

A Minor Bug Report
Posted Monday, July 2, 2007
3

Rapping

My page-rank three brings all the girls to the yard
they’re like, you’re better than her
damn right, I’m better than her
I could teach you, but I’d have to charge

On that note I’ll say that job hunting is going well. I got a few things on the table. (notebook, glass of water and mouse included)

Rapping
Posted Tuesday, June 26, 2007
5

New theme!

So I’ve been a lot of talk about my new theme latley, the one I’ve been working on secretly in my spare time, under my bed with the doors locked, windows firmly shut and blankets tightly surrounding my location.

Secrecy has been of the up most important as I’ve worked.

I’m very near completion but I’ve hit some snags along the way. Number one my server is @#$@’n messed up I’ve been wrestling with permissions for like 4 days now, It’s driving me insane. I can’t even say how many hours I’ve wasted with that. The second problem is that I finally got a mock-up of the new design together on a working wordpress blog and it looked like…way too awesome soo awesome that I’ll need to re-export all the images and rewrite a bunch of my stylesheet for it to be viewable by mere mortals.

I’d show you a screen shot but my permissions are still so messed up I can’t even upload images! My server is so secure that not even I can do a damn thing on it.

New theme!
Posted Sunday, June 24, 2007
2

The End of New Band Day

Well, I’ve decided to kill new band day. Not because I didn’t have more to write about but for some other reasons.

  • I kind of let it die anyway
  • shepizzle.com has asked me to do music reviews there.
  • That sounds really impressive I know. Jon, thanks for asking me to join your cool indie music club and making me look impressive. At some point I’ll come to you and say

    “Hey, you see that chick there? She digs me because I’m an indie music reviewer on shepizzle. Thanks bro.” I can imagine it now, you’ll say

    “wow, find a less shallow girl.” Finally, I’ll respond

    “No thanks, she’s hot.”

    Until then, check out my latest, and so far only, additions.

  • José Gonzáles
  • Brand New
  • The End of New Band Day
    Posted Thursday, June 21, 2007

    Rock Awesome Graffiti @ the Ruins

    Seeing as the ruins have been ruins for the last 50+ years it seemed like a good place to practice tagging art. I don’t remember who all did which ones and I don’t remember their tag names so in no particular order with credit to paintjunkie, gthing, America and friends we proudly present graffitis for your viewing pleasure.

    Guy-in-suit Star Fire-reaper fire Ender-shroom Ballon-boy Dirty-west-grill gthing-strength

    Gthing made the discovery of a lot of VHS crew tags and we were pondering the meaning of that when he discovered their anti-crew, the BETAMAX crew. Betamax totally pwn’d VHS by tagging over their stuff and even posting anti-drug graffitis.

    Betamax Betamax-infamous

    Somewhere in the valley these two crews must be battling for “respekt”, saying things like “you got served!” and “yo.” Watch out for these colloquial urbanites; they could be dangerous.

    If the artists would like to claim their work, leave a comment on the linked flickr page with your tagging name.
    Rock Awesome Graffiti @ the Ruins
    Posted Wednesday, June 20, 2007
    2

    Culture vs Counterculture

    Someone told me that a beard makes me look like a wise guru. So it is with this awesome beard picture that I preface my tirade.

    My big beard

    BTW, I hate this entry, read on if you want but I want to delete it…if only I didn’t spend all that time writing it.

    Culture vs Counterculture
    Posted Tuesday, June 19, 2007
    5

    Europe Day 23 – Get us out of here

    Don’t let my title be misleading. Europe has been awesome. It’s been such a wonderful trip despite our snags and problems. But now, I just want to get home. I was to change the dressing on my knee, I want to lay in a bed that doesn’t belong to someone else. I want my mommy.

    We’re getting there

    Ryanair took us to within an hour of Barcelona and we had to then buy a 14 euro bus ticket to get actually get into town. We met a nice girl on the plane that had also been booted from the same flight as us because she went to the bathroom or something equally ridiculous.

    We were going to get a kebab together and then I yelled at Gary for some dumb argument. He was actually right but I animated and I think it scared the girl away. Whoops. We found the central train station in Barcelona and had to buy 1st class overnight train tickets to get us to Madrid in time for our flight home. That was like 30 euros. I actually chalk all these costs up to Ryanair screwing us.

    The train ride was agreeable and when we got to Madrid we had like 6 hours before check-in but I was in no condition to do anything and we sure as hell weren’t going to miss our flight. We were beaten, out of money and sick of moving so we camped out in the airport.

    Robynn came through for us and showed up at the airport bearing pastries and that spanish milk drink that they’re so crazy about. She hung out with us for a while before she had to go to class. Thanks Robynn, you’re a life saver

    When we checked in with Continental they immediately had a wheelchair brought in for me and treated me so well. It was in such contrast to the bad customer service that Ryanair had given us.

    Everyone was so polite and they arranged good seats for me so that I would be able to stretch out and lay down on a bench. I love them.

    After a layover and flight delay in NY we finally arrived in Denver and went home. It felt so good to be able to shower and get a few days of stink off me…well…mostly off of me.

    Now enjoy pictures of my battle wounds

    Hole in knee bad ankle
    Europe Day 23 – Get us out of here
    Posted Monday, June 11, 2007
    4

    Don’t Ever Fly Ryanair

    For those of your who don’t know Ryanair is an airline that operates out of Ireland and hates everyone. Just look at their website. It looks like a Spam site. When I went to order tickets there I accidentally navigated away from the page like 3 times because I thought I must have mistyped the url.

    My reason for disliking Ryanair is much more personal.

    When tried to goto the airport in Rome we had directions from the internet. We were going to follow them when a person in the subway told us that we needed to take a train from the train station. So we ran up there and got told that we couldn’t take a train there. After wasting more time, we finally got back on the subway and followed the directions that we found on the Internet. They took us to the exact opposite side of Rome than we needed to be at.

    Ryanair’s policy is that you must be checked in 40 minutes before your flight. We found ourselves on the wrong side of rome with only 35 minutes to get to our check in. Taking a subway was out of the question. We had to get a taxi.

    Let me draw a picture for you. Imagine me:

    Don't pass out

    Imagine me, bloody, arm in a sling, running on very little sleep, limping and in an considerable amount of pain running around trying to get someone to tell us how to get to the airport.

    We tried to hail a taxi unsuccessfully for 10 minutes. Finally we got one and he took us to the airport. It cost 60 euros and we ran into the airport and to our checkin station. There was no one there and we were 5 minutes late.

    We tried to talk to another rep from Ryanair who told us that she wouldn’t help us and that we had to go rebook a flight. Nevermind that the flight was late, nevermind that I was bleeding everywhere. It didn’t matter.

    We went to the information station that she told us to go there and there was a line with no one working the counter.

    We went to security and showed them our flight confirmation but they wouldn’t let us through without a boarding pass. Not really their fault. We went back to the Ryanair and waited. There was a girl there but she told everyone that her shift was over and that she wouldn’t help anyone.

    Now we were 10 minutes late for check-in and the plane was still late. Boarding was no where near to starting and it would have been easy to get us on the plane, but no. Ryanair doesn’t care about it’s customers.

    Finally someone showed up to help customers after another 10 minutes. The other customers in line saw our predicament and sent us ahead of them. We started trying to explain our situation to the Ryanair reps and they shh’d us.

    Dejected we waited. We tried asking questions but the Ryanair employees seemed not to speak english. In utter exasperation I told Gary that I hated Italy. You have to give me a break, we’d been robbed twice (Gary got pickpocketed that morning), we’d been attacked by Italian footballers, we’d been threatened by a mobster rental place and people gave us bad directions to the airport. Oh, and we’d been ripped off just about everywhere we went.

    The ryanair employee thought that this was worth commenting on and finally snapped at me in perfect english. She told me that hating Italy didn’t even make sense because she wasn’t Italian and Ryanair wasn’t an Italian company. I told her that it had nothing to do with her (not true) and that it was just the system. I was trying to be nice and take any personal offense away from my statement but she just got mad and offended anyway.

    She told us we had to buy all new tickets, even though the plane hadn’t started boarding. She didn’t care that I’d been in an accident.

    We finally got a flight to Barcelona, which meant we’d need to take an all night train ride to get to Madrid in time for our flight. Our tickets were 80 euros each and we didnt’ get a refund for the tickets we’d already bought.

    Getting on the flight was a joke, everyone rusehed to find seats, pushing and shoving their way past me. No one thought I might need special consideration givin that I was limping horribly, arm in sling, bleeding. It was horrible.

    Ryanair, from everything that I can gather does not care about their customers, they don’t care about your needs, they don’t care about you. Don’t fly ryanair.

    Don’t Ever Fly Ryanair
    Posted Friday, June 8, 2007
    22

    Europe Day 22 – A Morning in Rome

    When we tell people about our trip, how we’re doing it, sending just hours in some cities they think we’re crazy. They’re probably right. Rome is, in my mind the most extreme example of what I like to call “Extreme X-Treme Traveling.”

    Because of my accident we had to stay in Sicily an extra night. This meant that we would only have a few hours in Rome before we needed to catch our flight. Our train got into Rome around 5 AM and we went straight to the Colosseum.

    Colosseum Rome

    The metros in Rome don’t seem to be super common. More like intercity trains, like the Cercanais in Spain or the RER in France. We just walked from there to St Peters (Thats the Vatican) stopping to take pictures of some random ruins.

    Random Ruins

    Once arrived at the Vatican I sat down by the fence while Lewis and Gary talked with the nuns that were waiting to get into the Vatican. I was really tired because of how hard it was to sleep on the train. Something about most of my joints feeling like they were melting. I must have looked like a bum because people gave me money.

    Nah, I’m just playing, but that would have been awesome.

    Since it was a Wednesday the Pope was going to come talk to everyone. We just wanted to get to the Museums. We asked all the Nuns, in three different languages if we were in the right line to go to the Museum. We asked the guards. We asked native Romans that happened to be going into the Vatican that day. They all told us that we were in the right line to get to the museums.

    We went through the gates and the guards wanted to search us. We told them that we weren’t going to see the Pope, we just wanted to go to the museums. The guards let us right through without searching because we weren’t going to see the pope.

    We started walking around the edge of St Peter’s.

    St Peters Square

    A guard ran up to us and told us that we needed to leave and go around to the other side of the Vatican because we couldn’t get to the Museums that way. Thanks for helping all 30 people that we asked hours earlier! We went around to find a line that was about a mile long…nah, more like a kilometer.

    So we went to the Parthenon.

    Parthenon Bleeding at the Parthenon

    To me the Parthenon was the most impressive thing that I saw in Rome. It’s amazing. The dome is so massive and so old that the logistics are nigh unfathomable.

    The coolest part is that up in the very middle of the dome is a giant hole that lets light into the church. The circle is open, there is no glass, there is no shade. When it rains, it rains it he Parthenon. It’s incredible.

    Europe Day 22 – A Morning in Rome
    Posted Tuesday, June 5, 2007