Walk the Line

Here is the trailer for the new Johnny Cash movie, Walk the LIne. It opens November 18th.

Saving gas without switching cars

Here is a CNN article on how to get better gas mileage.

The Final Farewell

Exactly 6 months later and the good Dr. gets his last wish: (AP Article) Ashes of Hunter S. Thompson blown into sky



"One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die." -HST

Tonight I'm putting "Mr. Tambourine Man" on repeat and doing a shot of 10 year-old Wild Turkey with a beer back in memory. There will never be another person to fill his shoes. RIP

Composite Photo Listing

This is a composite listing of all the groups of photos that I've posted to the site so far. Stand alone photos will just be posted with that entry. As of now, there are 8 groups of photos. I will update this as there are more posted.

Updated 8.19.2005: I just updated this post with all the photos I took from my move to Montana.

Montana:
A View from My Balcony
The Drive to Montana and Missoula
Big Sky Country
The Berkley Pit in Butte, MT
Around Butte, MT
The Dumas Brothel - Butte, MT
The Lewis and Clark Caverns in MT

San Diego:
Downtown San Diego at Night [These are photos I took of the west side of downtown San Diego on July 9th.]
My 'Hood [Photos taken around my neighborhood on July 2nd, 2004]
San Diego Photos

Miscellaneous:
Pictures of Me
Family Photos
Missouri Photos
Miscellaneous Photos
G5
My 4Runner
San Diego Fires

Photo Post - A View From my Balcony

Big Business

What is the deal with big business lately? Why does it seem that the bigger a company gets, the worse the overall experience is of using them to get products?

Examples:
-Best Buy: Do a quick search on the web combining “Best Buy” and any negative word (sucks, blows, bites, licks balls) and you will find hundreds of websites that go in depth as to the poor customer service and rip-off service plans they offer. They are the Wal-Mart of the consumer electronics world.

-Wal-Mart: What can I say that hasn't been said by thousands of other disgruntled customers? There are so many things bad about Wal-Mart, it would be silly to even waste the time outlining them here. Customer service is shoddy at best. It's hit or miss. I've seen people go out of their way to help me and other people treat me like shit or blow me off. The thing I've always had a problem with at Wal-Mart are the cashiers. Just last week I had an absolutely terrible experience with a cashier who was in a pissy mood and “accidentally” charged me for alcohol she wouldn't sell to me because we mixed and matched some wine coolers, even though the whole shelf was in a state of utter confusion. Luckily I caught it right after she did it so I got the money refunded. I'm pretty positive from her demeanor and the way she was handling my groceries that she wasn't having the best of nights and she did it on purpose.

I think the overall problem with Wal-Mart is the bottom-of-the-barrel experience that it offers. In California, the Wal-Marts are train wrecks. Mexicans are walking around everywhere with their 8 kids trailing around making noise and Spanish is coming in over the loudspeakers. The shelves are in shambles and everything is a mess. Wal-Marts elsewhere aren't that bad, but they certainly aren't that great. The products they offer are usually of low quality, the aisles are usually messy and dirty, and the customer base are bottom-feeders for the most part. F- on experience all the way.

I'll take Costco or Target anyday. I have yet to have a bad experience at Costco, EVER. The workforce is much more friendly and knowledgeable, and the products are high-quality. If not, you can take them back anytime, even without a receipt. Target's workers are friendly and generally knowledgeable and I can only remember one time when someone there pissed me off.

The good thing about Wal-Mart, and quite possibly the only good thing, is the low prices. The food we now buy at Wal-Mart is considerably cheaper than any grocery store I've ever been to. I mean, it is CHEAP.

-Ticketmaster: Let's see, can you say “outrageous fees?” Ticketmaster is the king of bullshit extra fees. They make you pay more for a “convenience charge” even when they email you the electronic ticket? What the fuck is that about? It should be cheaper! Other than that, they aren't that bad. They have a stranglehold on tickets, so there isn't much that people can do...most people would do whatever it takes to go to some concerts, so TM knows they can swindle everyone that comes along. That's why it's nice that some artists support a variety of ticket purchasing companies, not just TM.

-eBay: This crappy service was once a great idea. The thought that you could take all the worthless shit in your house and sell it, but expanding your customer base from your local area to, oh I don't know, nationwide/worldwide, is a great idea. eBay is certainly a dot-com success story that is worthy of some praise. For a few years, they were the talk of the media day in-day out. But, they suffer from two major problems: outrageous fees and if someone rips you off, there is a good chance that they won't/can't do shit about it. After a lot of coaxing by me, Morgan signed up to eBay and got ripped off pretty hard by some douche nozzle in Michigan and eBay wouldn't do shit about it, so we don't even bother with eBay anymore. I refuse to use eBay based on that and the fact that I've heard numerous stories from people I know about getting ripped off. The thing people don't realize is that eBay is nothing more than a website that makes thousands of dollars a day doing almost ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Their customer service is poor beyond description and they don't have any real-world capital. It's all just a website. Sure, there are people all across the country that use eBay as a reliable business model. But for the occasional average-Joe, the chances that some Internet scam artist is going to get something they once cherished is unthinkable. If you get burned by eBay, you'll feel the same way. I'm sure thousands of people have had the same problem. Then there is the evil twin: PayPal. Again, more outrageous fees, even worse than eBay in my opinion. Again, PayPal is nothing more than a website that makes thousands of dollars a day.

-Microsoft: This would take way too long to explain. Suffice it to say that most people don't even consider an alternative to their evil ways. Despite the fact that M$ runs most of the worlds computers, it is a horrible experience. I downloaded Acrobat Reader the other day and it reminded me so much of my Windows days: dialog boxes popping up asking me bullshit questions that don't make any sense. it takes a thousand years to load up in a web browser, and uninstalling it was just a pain in the ass. Just like Windows. I don't miss the days of things popping up on the screen and bugging the shit out of me about things I don't understand. Yeah, I don't miss that. The whole point of computers is to NOT KNOW ALL THE BULLSHIT BEHIND THE SCENES. The point is for it to work for you whenever you need it without being annoying or bothersome. Enter Apple. If the world only knew how much better Macintosh computers are...

-McDonalds - Worst. Restaurant. Ever. Anyone who knows anything about the way McDonalds runs their business knows that it is quite possibly the worst restaurant in the history of mankind.

So the moral is, be wary of big business. The bigger a company gets, usually the worse the experience is. It's the underdogs or the people who were slightly late to the game that usually offer better alternatives.

Really Lucky Guy

Mike Matas, the guy I wrote about who got a kickass job at Apple, just got a new car, an Audi TT. Yeah, I guess life is kinda like the movies. I'd probably do the same thing.

Hopefully he won't do the same thing the guy did in the movie In Good Company after buying his new car.

Google News RSS Feeds

Google News has finally added RSS feeds to their site. This makes it much easier to keep up with up-to-the-minute news off the RSS wire using Safari RSS instead of having to go to the site.

Officially Out of the Navy

After almost 8 years, finally. I've been out a week and I'm loving it.

Time to clear the air of all those little things that have been on my mind since day one. Much fuss has been made about blogging about your employer, so I chose to wait mine out. No dirty little secrets here (those will go with me to the grave), but just a few insights on the time I spent in the US Navy.

There isn't much to say other than I'll miss the job security, the pay, and the relatively simple way of getting by it offered. By simple I mean that as long as you show up on time in the right uniform and do what you're told, you encountered few problems and you got paid every two weeks on time, no questions asked. I traveled often while I was on the ship and I met a lot of interesting, cool people from all corners of the globe that I would never have met otherwise. I learned to get by with whatever I could throw on my back and take with me, at least on the ship. It taught me self-reliance and how to deal with being closed off from society for varying periods of time. I learned that plans changed often and being flexible was key.

On the other hand, the downsides eventually began to outweigh the upsides. The bad thing about being a government employee meant that your ass was theirs. Once you chose a duty station, the chances of relocating or changing jobs in your favor was virtually impossible until that tour of duty was over. Rarely did anyone get relocated anywhere at a duty station involuntarily that worked in that person's best interests. Relocating usually meant that you were either a bad seed or you weren't pulling your weight. Or you appeared that way. As with all large bureaucratic organizations, there were inherent flaws in the system. Some people who would bust their ass, but not kiss anyone else's would usually get little to no recognition. Other people who got by on appearances and being the golden child were sometimes rewarded unjustly. Those who got rewarded usually deserved it, but a lot of times they didn't and vice versa. So it goes.

By far, the worst problem plaguing the Navy is the middle to upper management. Generally speaking, my closest bosses weren't bad people. It was usually the people above them (or above them) that were the problem.

That's the first rule of politics, isn't it? The man who orders the execution never drops the blade. -from Quills

You always seemed to be one or two steps removed from the ones making the uninformed decisions. They never worked with you directly and they usually had a distorted view of what was going on. There was a saying we had: so-and-so forgot what it was like to be a Blue Shirt (Enlisted; the low guy on the totem pole). In all fairness, sometimes that was a good thing. Sometimes it took an intelligent outside perspective to set things straight. But usually they just fucked it up.

And with that comes the rampant stupidity of the utterly clueless upper management.

Some of the problem with that stems from the fact that when Officers go to their schooling before entering the real Navy, they are bred in an environment that feeds the notion that they are superior to the Enlisted. After school, they join the rest of the day-to-day Navy with this idealistic view of how the military is supposed to be and how the underlings are supposed to kowtow to their every whim. They don't ease themselves into their new surroundings, they are there to change the world and then some. It doesn't last long. 6 months of living on a ship and they've learned more than a lifetime of schooling could ever teach them. To be starkly honest, I didn't like most Officers, mostly because they rarely treated Enlisted people as human beings. It was usually all business and no personality. There was always this feeling behind every interaction that there was a vast difference between you and them, and you were the inferior one. I especially had a hard time taking seriously any Officer younger than me that had been in the Navy half as long as I had who showed up at our doorstep without the first clue as to what was going on.

In the Army and the Marines (and the air crew of the Navy, from what I've seen), the division between Officer and Enlisted is a lot less defined, as the Officers know they have to rely on EVERYBODY in their unit to save their ass in a tight situation. Petty personal differences and any feelings of superiority take a back seat to self-preservation. People learn to get along to survive. The Navy is a lot more corporate. Back-stabbing and snobbish behavior is practically part of the job description.

Enough of that. We all understand the evil nature of upper management and corporate culture. It's more of a human problem than a Navy problem.

Aside from the things that were an everyday, accepted part of Navy life like going out to sea, being away from family and friends, wearing a uniform, etc, there isn't that much to complain about. But there were a few things.

Probably my biggest deciding factor on getting out of the military was the advancement. The tests that I took for advancement were 80% about things I never worked on and most likely would never work on even if I had spent 20 years in the Navy. This problem was job-specific, that only someone who did the same job I did had a problem with. Most people in the Navy took advancement tests that dealt directly with what they do on a daily basis. Mine dealt with many different things, most of which I didn't deal with on a daily basis. I had no desire to learn useless facts about other people's job. I was too concentrated on my job and my workcenter on the ship, and later in college when I was on shore duty. I couldn't give a shit less about what other people's jobs were.

The other big deciding factor for me getting out was that I sensed some very big changes afoot in the manning goals of the Navy. The new goal of the Navy (possibly the military as a whole) is 'optimal manning.' Optimal manning means that they have just enough people to accomplish the job safely. It means less people doing more work. It means less advancement. It means the military is downsizing, but still trying to accomplish all the same goals they had yesterday.

While I was on the ship, I couldn't help feeling that my life wasn't going anywhere. I couldn't go to college (ok, a REAL college). It was hard to keep up with anything going on in the news or read websites on a regular basis. I couldn't have a meaningful relationship unless the woman was really patient and willing to go for long periods of time without seeing me. I guess that comes with the job, too. But after a while the bullshit overwhelms you to the point of no return.

I could probably write a book about the good and bad points of the US Navy, but thankfully, I won't. Suffice it to say that the best and worst thing about the Navy was the same: the people. Some people were cool as hell, some were shitheads. The bad part, though, was living with the shitheads on a daily basis, at least while out to sea. That is something you won't encounter anywhere else. The Navy is the only organization in the world where you have to live and work in a semi-corporate environment in close-quarters for long periods of time with other people that you may or may not like. You have a problem with a co-worker and want to blow off some steam after work by having a couple of beers? Nope. You run a good chance that you'll be around them all day and night. Work time and free time overlap.

As my friend used to say, “It's been real and it's been fun. But it ain't been real fun.” I learned a lot of things about myself and about life and I'm glad I did it now that it's over with. But would I do it again if I had to? You already know the answer.

USS Kinkaid Burial Grounds

How I got on this topic last night, I forget. I think I was trying to find a forum for people who were on my ship and see who dropped in lately. I think I was looking for the Navy Knowledge Online forums, but I just typed in USS Kinkaid into Google. From there I found a remarkably detailed description of the ships life on Wikipedia, which is maintained by anyone in the known universe who wants to update it. At the end of it, there were the coordinates for where it was sunk (link to Google Maps) on July 14th, 2004, a little over a year ago.

PostSecret

PostSecret is:

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

You really have to see this to believe it. I was surprised at how creative (and dark) people can be with something like this.

Bottled Water Bad?

This is an excellent article by the NY Times on the evils of bottled water.

Bottled water is undeniably more fashionable and portable than tap water. The practice of carrying a small bottle, pioneered by supermodels, has become commonplace. But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment. It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is then kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles to go into landfills.

Of course, tap water is not so abundant in the developing world. And that is ultimately why I find the illogical enthusiasm for bottled water not simply peculiar, but distasteful. For those of us in the developed world, safe water is now so abundant that we can afford to shun the tap water under our noses, and drink bottled water instead: our choice of water has become a lifestyle option. For many people in the developing world, however, access to water remains a matter of life or death.

While I drink bottled water, I only buy it for the portability. Perhaps I'll be picking up one of those Nalgene water bottles that I've been eyeing for so long.