Now for today.
I thought i would get off my ass and finally do some shit that i was planning on doing for a LONG TIME. This involves rebuilding most of my desk arrangement. The plan starts with removing all the vertical wood pieces of the desk and replacing them with metal legs. This way i'll have more room to route cables, and i'll be able to take some of the extra wood pieces and make them into table tops etc. So.. where does that lead me? Thats right kiddies... IKEA!
Now i should have seen the signs. I used to live with Brian, and on a few occasions i remember assisting in the construction of home furnishings. On these occasions, Brian was so pissed that he would give up on the assembly and just turn to drinking. I THOUGHT that this anger was a result of the assembly itself. I found out today that the overwhelming anger that Brian showed was rooted in the trip to IKEA itself.
I had never been to IKEA before in my life.
I drove to Burbank today and parked about a block away from the Media City Center. Ok, its just a fuckin mall, but they have to give it this bigass name. I thought that IKEA was on the side of the mall that i was on. Nope, so after walking about a mile, i realize that if i do finally find the IKEA, i'll have to haul my treasure of table legs back this fuckin mile to my car. So, i find the IKEA, and promptly walk back to my car, and PARK CLOSER.
Walk inside and follow the lemmings. Upstairs, "showroom", that sounds right. Ok, slow people in my way, cut through a little side hallway, now in HELL. I am in the upstairs showroom with wall to wall children's furniture. I start walking on the little paths and i realize that the flow of traffic is following little blue arrows on the floor, and I'M GOING THE WRONG WAY. Also, everybody else has their official looking IKEA pencils and notepads and order forms and tape measures. FUCK, i should not have taken that shortcut. Now i'm so fuckin confused. Then it hits me. There are no boxes here. They don't actually have ANY product on the shelves here. So i'm really fucked. I wander for awhile just in a daze. I don't know exactly where i'm going and when i do finally find what i'm looking for, i doubt myself. I stand there in from of a table leg display. All the legs are connected to one table top that is suspended high above my head. Each leg has a tag on it and so many numbers that it even makes my head spin. About this time i hear a nice little voice in the distance. A female voice explaining procedures. My eyes light up, and i start to move towards the voice. What i find is a TV/VCR combo in a shelf unit nearby with a video loop. Its narrated by a woman who is explaining all the mysteries of the IKEA. I stand and watch in awe for about 5 minutes as the loop completes. As the tape ends i become aware of my surroundings again and realize that i am standing (almost drooling) with about 6 other people transfixed on the TV. I felt like for a moment i was in John Carpenter's THEY LIVE.
BUT NOW I AM EQUIPPED WITH THE KNOWLEDGE TO CONQUER THE IKEA!
I know now, that i can run back to the table legs and get a little number where they are located in the other part of the store. Then i can go grab them and make a break for it. YES!!! I am on my way. I head back the way i came now following the blue arrows. I've become a conformist! I feel happy with my conformity! I... I... where the fuck it the staircase!? I just want to go downstairs. SHIT, i gotta go back through kiddy land to get downstairs. So i endure the kiddy land, and for a brief moment i glimpse the little circular cabinets that wendy and brian have in their bathroom. I press on. Finally the staircase, I know i'm close. I get downstairs and HOLY SHIT. I feel betrayed. The video loop didn't tell me that the downstairs was 5 times larger than the upstairs. And now i need to make my way through a maze of... oh, hold on, i need one of those. Oh, that might look good in my.... SHIT, they got me! I end up picking up a few impulse buys before i even leave the retail part of the IKEA. I continue to follow the signs for the self serve department, and continue to turn corner after corner seeing nothing more than retail shelves. So now my shopping cart actually has shit in it. AND I STILL HAVE NOT GOTTEN WHAT I CAME FOR. (i am a lemming) And then it happens... the walls fall away and i enter a 3 story warehouse with steel shelves to the ceiling. I see aisle numbers and sections just like the fairy god mother... no the VIDEO LOOP LADY had said there would be. Now, i finally get the legs that i need for my desk. I contemplate buying an extra set, just on the off chance that i would need more. That way i might not have to endure all that i have. I didn't know that i was not done.
checkout was nice because a nice little girl with a wireless unit grabbed me out of line. I had been standing for about 5 minutes before this, but suddenly she just decides to get me out the door quickly. I didn't realize that they make you pack your own shit, so she gave me a nasty look when i asked her for a bag.
So i get outside and now find that the shopping cart that i have is not allowed more than 5 feet from the exit door. I'm parked across the street. I pick up my legs and just laugh to myself. There is no way i am carrying the much shit across the street. So the loading zone is the only option. NOW, here's the reason Brian never went to IKEA alone. You need a loading zone buddy. Someone to watch the shit while you get the car. Now i didn't know about the loading zone buddy until i realized that i was the only one standing there without one. I asked the guy collecting carts what the hell i do. With a sort of oracle-like tone about him, he says very pleasantly that i should proceed inside to the home delivery counter, and check my belongings with them while i get my car. I get to the home delivery counter and enter a crowd of confused people. at this point i think i am getting the hang of things, so i decided to look confident, instead of perplexed. It works in about 3 seconds. The guy standing there takes my shit and gives me a number. The crowd of people all rush towards him as i walk out to get my car.
So now i'm home and one IKEA item is assembled. I've lost all desire to do any further work with my purchases. I find that the wisdom of Brian is now the only true wisdom to follow. I will start drinking.
Here's my response.
Section 1 - You are all pretentious twats
The human race has always been filled with pretentious twats, even before the invention of the internet and
Moveable Type.
Section 2 - You make up irritating jargon for the sake of it
The human race has made irritating jargon since the creation of language. We didn't need the internet or
Moveable Type to achieve this goal
Section 3 - All of your blogs talk about the same crap
Well DUH. There are only a certain number of things that people really enjoy to talk about. Go figure if you give
a couple people a platform to talk, they'll end up talking about a small number of subjects. Again, didn't need
the internet or MT.
Section 4 - Movable Type is badly designed
This is a basic principle of evolution. Something poorly designed, will either be improved, or will fail and fall into
extinction. MT is being improved, but again, the principle of evolution was around before the internet and
MT.
Section 5 - Movable Type's bad design makes it easier to DoS you
(see number 4) and also see the updates for MT. Also realize the concept of DOS was around before the internet
or MT. People have flooded the White House with mail on a few occasions in history. People recently have taken
the idea to the postal service again and have ordered countless numbers of catalogs and magazines to a person's
address. So... sorry, didn't need the internet or MT to contribute to the DOS.
Section 6 - You are fucking stupid.
Yes, i know, but i didn't need the internet or MT to be this way.
Section 7 - You are all sheep
(see section 6)
Section 8 - Your blog is fucking up Google.
NOW WE HAVE SOMETHING!!! This is the only piece of relevant discussion in this entire article. The mass of
blogs has had a major effect on the capability of search engines to find what people are really looking for.
The article fails to offer any kind of solution. But then what did we really expect.
END RESPONSE
We need to adapt both search engines and blogs to work together. I have on a few occasions actually gotten responses from people thanking me for information that i included in my blog. So there IS a reason you would want to be able to search blogs. At the same time there is a point at which all the blogs of the world get in the way of finding what you're really looking for.
I think the solution is a simple combination of meta tags and headers. Bloggers need to adopt a set of identification tags that will tell the search engines very quickly that they are indexing a blog. The tags might also include geographic location or other relative information about the blog. Then the search engines can offer blog-free searches as well as blog-specific searches.
But I'm sure as hell not the first person with this idea. The real trick is to implement the solution and get people to adopt it.
and all the shots were taken with my tiny 007 camera.
I really have to say that working is much much much better than sitting on my ass at home. Don't call me crazy. After doing NOTHING for so long, ANYTHING is better. I can't say that the job is that interesting as far as assignments go. Video compression, flash ad banners, screensaver work, a little html and javascript. Everybody knows that all i really want to do is build games, but those jobs are few and far between. I had a talk yesterday with Andy here about the irritating fact that Flash will not really let you protect any of your code. I've been reluctant in the past to build games using flash just for the simple reason that anybody with half a brain can crack into ALL you code and see all the inner workings of a game engine you might build.
So i guess i really need to focus on the basics that will keep money flowing. I'll continue to do all the grunt jobs to pay the bills, and i'm going to seek out all the little game jobs that might come my way.
BTW there might be a few readers interested in the Ryan Secrest Live Performance today at hollywood and highland. Tune in to KISSFM for details. You know who you are.
Here are the pictures.
AND THE HIGH POINT OF THE TRIP!!! As i was going back across the street to work, i got a PERFECT shot of Dennis Woodruf's Van.
I gave Brian's top 10 a try on the way into work today on the train, and i have to say the trip went VERY quickly. I'll just stick to underworld on the trip home. back to work.
So last night Jen and I cooked Lemon Chicken for dinner. We've got the recipe memorized, but jen still insists on measuring out every ingredient and double checking everything against the now beat up piece of paper. So we take the first bite, and my response is, "well it needed a little more salt or something". Take another bite and we both laugh and realize that we forgot to add ANY of the lemon juice. So our lemon chicken really wasn't lemon chicken. Still good, but didn't have quite the flavor that we were expecting.
Jen is complaining now that she's hungry, so i gotta run. More soon.
Update this piece of shit website. Its an embarrassment to the school, and its an embarrassment to me. You should be able to find a couple dumbass students just like me that would gladly give you a brand new web site for free.
After shopping i came home and took apart all my speakers and amp system connected to my computer. I've gotta build a new housing for my amp setup. It just looks really lame white tape holding the entire thing together. Don't get me wrong, the thing is LOUD, it just looks like a piece of shit. Well off to dinner.
