Year: 2006

I said I would write about the Jersey smoking ban, so here it is. Yeah, I know I say I’ll write about a lot of things, but I actually meant it this time.

HOORAY!

Really, that’s all that’s necessary. There’s nothing more to be said. It’s a GOOD thing. And there’s absolutely nothing you can say that can change my mind. Go ahead, try all of the arguments:

• Businesses will lose money – Oh really? So New York restaurants and bars are shutting down? New Yorkers suddenly thought it was hip to go into New Jersey when their ban was imposed? I really want some stats that show me that people suddenly stopped going out because they couldn’t smoke anymore. Hell, just find me one person. On the other hand, I count myself and Lisa among many who have gone out less and less due to the prevalence of smoke. Are there some losses? Of course, but there are also some gains.
• Smoking is a personal right – Sure, so go exercise your right at home, where it doesn’t infringe on my personal right to breath. Seriously, since when are your personal rights more important than mine? Smoking affects EVERYONE AROUND YOU. This isn’t some corny PSA, this is an unavoidable fact. When you smoke, that smoke goes into the air that all the people around you are breathing. And that’s the stuff so bad even you want a filter on it.
• Bars and restaurants are private businesses and should be allowed to make the decision themselves – This one almost makes sense. ALMOST. But once again, the right of the private business does not extend beyond that of the individual. Or should we do away with fire codes? Afterall, if a business owner and his clients are willing to pack 200 people in a 10′ x 10′ room, why shouldn’t they? What about health codes in general? Why should employees have to wear hairnets? You don’t want to eat bad meat or deal with a potentially dangerous occupancy, then go somewhere else. It’s as simple as that.
• Smoking doesn’t really cause cancer, you’ve just been brainwashed – I seriously saw this one on a forum. I cannot believe someone that ignorant could figure out how to use a computer.

I know everybody loves to whip out analogies for these types of arguments and point out how banning smoking is like banning alcohol or something like that, but it’s not. All of you analogies suck. How do I know? Because they do. Seriously, I’ve read them all, and they all suck. Smoking is not like alcohol or fatty foods or any other substances you would like to claim can slowly kill you but are considered “okay” in public. Last week when I downed 4 or 5 Guinness and a couple Maker’s Mark, not a single drop harmed anybody around me. Maybe my liver suffered a bit, but I did not risk injury or disease towards anyone but myself. The smokers in that same bar, however, did damage to my own lungs along with their own. There was no way to avoid it. Even my friend who made sure to blow her smoke away from us hurt me. Maybe my clothes didn’t smell as much because she was considerate, but eventually that smoke did make it’s way up my nose and into my lungs. I can assure you, however, that every drop of the Maker’s Mark went through my own liver.

Listen, I’m all for personal freedoms. You want to go kill yourself? Fine, be my guest. We all have our poisons and we all make our personal choices as to how to handle them. But that’s only hunky-dory as long as those choices don’t affect others around you. As long as you keep blowing smoke out at other people, it is no longer strictly a “personal freedom.”

The one thing I’ve mentioned over and over again that I truly miss about Hoboken is the ability to just walk out the door, walk into a bar, and have people I know to hang out with. Growing up in the ‘burbs, I actually got accustomed to biking (and later driving) over to friends’ houses just to say hi and see if they were up for doing something. But, then again, we were all living in neighboring… neighborhoods. No big deal. And there’s also parking in Pennsylvania – something they haven’t discovered over here in New Jersey, yet.

So Friday was a fun little throwback, as I drove into Hoboken to drop Lisa off for a visit into The City. It turned out to be a rather wet and miserable day outside, so I seriously debated just heading home until she called as I had limited photo ops available. But on my way to Tunes before leaving town, I poked my head into good ol’ L&J’s to see if anyone was around. Turns out a couple members the OpenMic crowd were there (Yvonne and John Beret), and we proceeded to imbibe, talk, and just generally laugh it up. What started as just a random hello ended with me two sheets to the wind and ready to unfurl the third. In fact, Lisa had to drive me home at the end of the night (after I insisted that we stop for fries at Mickey D’s).

I doubt I could ever go back to my nightly barhopping days, but I sure do miss the times when nights out weren’t exactly a scarce occurance. To be fair, I’ve actually had a decent share lately – the previous week I got to hang with co-workers at the local Irish Pub to say goodbye (or goodnight, I forget which is the good one) to a (now former) co-worker, who decided to abandom us for life up north with her boyfriend. On top of that, the festivities continued on Saturday when we headed over her friend’s house for yet another stop on the farewell tour. Somewhat ironically, on that first night of the NJ smoking ban (yeehaw! more on that later), I ended up with burning eyes and smokey hair thanks to the fire they had outside.

The party was a blast – I mean, it had everything. . There was a no-so-blazing fire, awesome food (the hostess was one of those amazing cooking types that think nothing of whipping together cocktail weenies from scratch for a get together), just enough alcohol to listen lips, derogatory stories about the South, bizarre photos, a spanking, and someone saying “Boobie was totally an asshole.” And no, I’m not going to explain any of that.

Now I just need to get back to working on re-hydrating my body, as nights like these certainly don’t help

During lunch I ran over to CompUSA. Figured I should pick up some tax software – I’m going to try out TaxCut, because it’s cheaper than TurboTax. I’ll have to sit down tonight and bang out the returns for both Lisa and I, because we really want to get them done early this year. Yup, definitely want to file early this year…

Wouldn’t it be terribly clever if you all thought this was a post about self-love, but in reality I was talking about re-modeling our bathroom? Yeah, well, it’s not. Over the weekend I was contemplating cutting my hair in preparation for the coming warm months. Since the sky decided to drop snow and sleet on our area on Saturday, that idea quickly lost it’s appeal. But I still wanted to take pictures of my full beard and long hair to document this scruffiest time in my life.

I ended up having a lot of fun playing around with self-portraits, and enough of them came out with real “amateur cool appeal” that I began to wonder if long hair was really the way to go. It might just become a seasonal thing as the heat really gets to me. But for all of you who haven’t seen me in months, I figure I’ll share some of the best from my little photoshoot (alright, that’s a total lie – I totally dig the photos and wanted to share them because I thought I looked awesome!)

Since I still haven’t bothered to “go pro” on Flickr (hey, if they won’t get out of beta, why should I go pro? 😛 ), I can’t create another set. So just check them out under the self-portrait tag. Lisa also took a bunch while I was out, but I better run them by her before I post any. We finished up with some together shots, but they may be too disgustingly cute to post.

Prompted by a discussion (hopefully my last comment will appear soon enough) I had on another website regarding web design (specifically, one I did not care for), I began to think about screen resolution. I remember months ago when some bloggers started talking about dropping support for smaller screen sizes because they just weren’t showing up in the logs enough. And while I can appreciate here in the mid-aughts that 640 pixels is a ridiculously small width for anything short of specialized usage (e.g. PDAs, cell phones, or visually impaired users), it seemed strange to me that 800 pixel-wide designs were also under threat of dismissal simply because 1024×768 had become the most dominant screen size.

I’m sitting here at my desk at work with my laptop screen set at 1400×1050 and my secondary one running 1680×1050, so what’s my problem? Well, my problem is that I’m also running the Google Desktop Sidebar, Outlook, Winamp, a couple Active Directory utilities, and multiple explorer windows. In other words, I don’t run my browsers full screen – I actually multitask. Sure, I could easily just bump the size of my windows a little bit as I have in the past, but why would I want to? I can’t think of many sites that actually benefit from going all the way up to a width 1024px. When I look at the new designs at the New York Times and CNN, I can’t help but notice that there’s a lot of crap that pushes them out that wide. Keeping my browser 50-75 pixels narrower loses almost no content. So why not just shrink that silly video player or drop one of the excessive “other news”-type columns to get the page back down to a more practical 800-900 pixels wide?

Of course the response would probably be, because they don’t see a need anymore than I see a need to increase my width. But I will once again submit that the content doesn’t need the extra width and even tends to be hurt by it. Those pages tear my eyes in different directions and make it difficult to focus on what’s important. Granted, a newspaper is not nearly as focused as a blog is and doesn’t have the luxury of using the narrow one column design Michael at Binary Bonsai finally settled on (for now). But there is a balance that can be struck – one in which 3 or 4 well-sized columns are used to place content appropriately, and bells and whistles are axed if they don’t truly add to site.

It’s not like I have any definitive answers – heck, I didn’t even do this design – but that doesn’t mean I can’t question these decisions. Afterall, I am the user. Personally I think the fluid-to-a-point method works best (once IE7 is out with real support), but that obviously won’t fit every situation and will be impractical for others. But, in the meantime, please try to remember that some of us with high resolution monitors don’t feel like reading paragraphs stretched across 1200 pixels – my eyes are bad enough as it stands.

Every so often on Mondays I forget to browse through the TV listings and accidentally end up watching CSI: Miami. Having caught a few episodes I can say, without any doubt, that it is the absolute worst show ever. Seriously, how the hell has this horrid piece of crap made it four seasons – especially with that pathetic excuse for an actor David Caruso at the helm. The man would have difficulty scoring a lead role in a high school production yet continues to get paying gigs. Does he know how to display any emotion except squinty?

Last week – or maybe the week before, I can’t keep track – I caught this one scene in which the human sunglare was told that they couldn’t get a hold of someone or something and that person might be in some sort of danger – you can tell it really had me captivated. But the point is he paused for affect, put his sunglasses on, and dramatically walked into the elevator. And all of it was done without an ounce of irony. This was actually his attempt at creating tension – a feeble display of acting at best, MTV poserdom at worst.

Tonight this horror of horrors was on while Lisa was doing some work. I walked into the room and asked if he had donned his “special” sunglasses with which to fight crime. Much to my chagrin – or possibly David’s – he then proceeded to put them back on as if they would help him… I dunno… see his lines better or something. Terrible. And the big finale was like the most poorly edited music video I’ve ever seen. It made that “Fishheads” one look like modern art. And sadly they were destroying a song by The Sounds in the process.

We thankfully had an episode of House to watch to purge as much of the experience as possible. To be honest, a 12 hour marathon of Joey and The Tyra Banks Show would have been a welcome followup to wash out that bad taste.

Things I want to write about when I get home tonight:

• Seeing She Wants Revenge at Irving Plaza with Jeff and Sara
• Seeing Franz Ferdinand and Death Cab for Cutie at the Tweeter Center with Jeff, Sara, Chris, and Mark
• I really should mention how great the Billy Joel Concert a few weeks ago – is that enough?
• Progress on the house and the lovely flowers its previous owner planted for us – photographic evidence!
• The length of my hair – more photographic evidence!
• Booking our honeymoon to Hawaii – well, that’s really all there is to say so far
• My ever-shrinking storage space thanks to DIME
• IE7 – it’s actually pretty cool so far
• Fun and impromptu photo sessions at home and how they’ve inspired me

If I actually get to write about any of that I’ll be amazed. So just in case, I leave you with this enjoyable meme:

Go to Wikipedia and look up your birthday (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births, and one death in your journal, including the year.

Three neat facts:
5509 BC – The world was created, according to the Byzantine Empire. (I almost left off that last bit as this one was just WAY cool!)
1752 – The Liberty Bell arrives in Philadelphia.
1875 – A murder conviction effectively forces the violent Irish anti-owner coal miners, the “Molly Maguires”, to disband.

Two Births:
1854 – Engelbert Humperdinck, German composer (d. 1921)
1974 – Jhonen Vasquez, comic book artist

One Death:
1999 – W. Richard Stevens, Author of Unix Network Programming and several books and IETF RFC documents (b. 1951) – I was actually sad to find this out. I had no idea he died in ’99 at such a young age. Every CS major would at least recognize his books even if they don’t own them.

It’s so interesting to see how the birthday information changes, because I pretty much only ever remember recognizing Lily Tomlin (and perhaps Conway Twitty) as sharing mine when I would look it up as a kid. Now I recognize names like Rocky Marciano and even the GREAT Billy Blanks being in the midst. Plus there are the newer additions to fame like Fallout Boy’s guitarist (born on the day I turned 8!) and a number of athletes.

Oh yeah, and one terrorist.

A few weeks ago I managed to pick up some Pearl Jam tickets directly from TicketBastard, since I missed out on the fan club pre-sale for the second show. The experience isn’t alltogether painful as their servers have the common courtesy to not lose cookies or randomly crash in the middle of large rushes for tickets. Instead, you just have to wait the actual 5-10 minutes that the progress bar displays for your order to pop up. Unfortunately, my order popped up with a copy of their new CD (which I fully intend to pre-order directly from them) in the cart at the ridiculous price of $16.99. Despite their claims that I would be able to remove the CD, I was stuck with it if I wanted the tickets.

Much to my surprise, this weekend I received an e-mail from their customer service describing the bug that had prevented customers from removing the CD from the bin and included instructions for cancelling that portion of the order. “Wow,” I thought, “Those jerks actually did something right – they actually fixed their mistake.” So it occurred to me that I should write a post describing what a wonderful thing TicketBastard had done in order to right this wrong. Songs should be sung about them and tales told long into the night as we feast over wild boar and flowing stouts. Perhaps a statue in their honor shall be erected.

Then I began to wonder why I should praise a company that charges me an extra $8-$10 just for the right to buy a ticket for fixing their mistake. Do they really deserve any publicity for simply not being completely devoid of ethics?

No, no they don’t. So I guess I won’t write about this afterall…

Talk about a one-blog-mind – the first three posts from my regular feeds today were all the same. This has definitely peaked my curiosity. It is now a very real possibility that I would consider buying a Mac somewhere down the line. I’ve said plenty of times that I was interested in OS X, but would never fork over all the money just for an extra machine that couldn’t run all of my Windows software. Now the transition might actually make sense.

UPDATE: There are, of course, more talking on the subject – Deiter talks about the possible negative ramifications. But since I moved him over to the photo section, it takes me longer to catch up 🙂 .

Alrighty, listen up, I’m not about to freak out because it‘s snowing snowed in April. I’ve seen weird and wacky weather enough the past few years to get over that. But the manner in which the precipitation transpired this morning was just WAY over the top.

When I first got up, I rushed to take the garbage down to the street. I didn’t even need a jacket. It was beautiful and sunny out. Yeehaw! As I hopped into the shower I noticed it was getting a little grey outside – darn, looks like we’ll get that rain afterall. By the time I got out of the shower (TADA!) it was snowing. That sucks, but not too much. So I (not so) quickly gather everything for work and get ready to leave. WHERE THE HELL DID THE HAMSTER-SIZED SNOWFLAKES COME FROM?!?! Seriously, my car was coated with a not-so thin layer in about 2 minutes flat. Suddenly we’re checking the weather channel to figure out if it’s even safe for me to leave.

WHERE DID MY BEAUTIFUL SUNSHINE GO?!?!

Finally I decide I can’t just sit around and leave even later in hopes that the blizzard subsides. There’s probable a quarter inch on the ground, and I want to get out before the roads get bad. The drive isn’t that bad. After about 15 minutes, it’s barely snowing. Five minutes later, I don’t see any flakes. I pull into work, and my car is the only one with snow on it.

And I repeat: WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!?!