Running (literally) in the office

Just a short post.  Running inside an office building, from office to office or cube to cube, is not needed.  Seriously.  Yeah I know, you think this doesn’t happen.  Whatever.  I thought the same until it happened where I work.  I was sitting at my desk and I hear (and feel) someone run by.  Not like a little jog or fast walk….a full on run.  Really?  What the fuck?  There is no reason, unless you are police, SWAT, or military, to run inside the office.  You look like a complete jackass.  What the fuck are you running for?  Can a call not wait 20 seconds?  What about a conversation?  If you run inside the workplace you are a fucking idiot.  Relax jackass and take a fucking chill pill.  You don’t need to run.  You are NOT that important.

Stuff

It’s almost comical to see how people just seem to want to get more “stuff”.  Everyone seems like they are in the constant pursuit of things.  Worthless things.  Things that they think may give them pleasure, status, mostly a bunch of stuff they don’t need.

It just makes me think of the movie Fight Club where Tyler Durden says these two things:

-“We’re consumers. We are bi-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear.”-

-“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”-

You can’t really say it much better than that.  We all need to wake up and quit with the bullshit that we just keep doing everyday.  Now I know there are some genuine people out there that don’t have extra to spend on stuff, so I’m not referring to them.  I do find it funny that sometimes I see someone living in a 1950′s home with 1300 square feet and they have a 50″ TV in the living room and a $40,000 vehicle in the drive way.  What the hell?

Hey whatever……I guess.  Rock on with your bad self. [:confused smile:]

Lucy

One week ago today I had to take one of my cats to be put down.  I hated it.  I miss her so much.  I never thought I could love a little furry animal so much.  I mean, my gut still hurts.  I lost a friend; a friend I had for 10 years.  Her name was Lucy.  She was a simple looking grey cat.  I never thought grey would be so beautiful.  She had little polka dots on her belly and her belly was a light grey/white.  You could look into her eyes and see that she was an old soul.  She was wise.  It was like looking into the eyes of a cat and realizing that you were looking at a soul that was two hundred years old.  She never bit any of us.  She was very protective of us, and she was never mean at all.  I learned a lot from Lucy.  She was patient, and all she ever did was love.  She gave so much love that it was infectious.  Everyday I remember something else that she used to do and I miss her more.  It is hard for me and I am almost in tears as I type this.  I love her so much.  I have a wife and a child and I love them both like nothing else on this earth.  With that said, I am still surprised how much I love Lucy and how much I miss her.  We have other cats, they just are not Lucy.  They are wonderful, but none of them is anything like Lucy.  They just don’t have the depth that Lucy did.

Lucy picked us sometime in the summer of 2002.  She kept coming to our back door and we decided after seeing her drinking from a lake and looking hungry that we would give her a home.  She is the best pet and friend that I’ve ever had, not counting my wife or child.  I dearly hope that I get to cross paths with her again in the future.  I hope we meet and can hang out for a long time.  I miss my friend.  I love you Lucy.  I always will.

People are missing it

People are missing it.  I don’t think they have any idea that they are missing it either.  Increasingly, I see people riding in the passenger seat of cars and they are looking down.  They have that look; you know, that look that people only get when they are looking at their damn phone.  It looks rediculous   You look like a moron when you’re looking down at your phone.  Even when I look down at my phone I look like a moron.  Smart phones have made people dumb.  Instead of people enjoying the outside world when they are actually outside, in a car or otherwise, they are looking at their damn phone. What a complete waste.

I understand the convenience of having a smart phone and being able to use it, especially when you’re not the driver of a car.  The thing is, it is only a convenience.  I highly doubt that anyone is ever doing anything where they are texting or typing something that is an emergency.  Seriously.  When stuff is an emergency people use their phone as a phone and hold it up to their face and talk.

I can remember when you didn’t have a choice of what to do.  The only thing to do was look out the window.  If you didn’t want to look out the window you had to bring a magazine or a crossword puzzle or something.  I just don’t get what is so important that people need to see what is on Facebook  or Twitter or otherwise.  I don’t understand why they have to be available all the time or why they have to text all the time or update Facebook with their location or other dumb stuff.  Now, I do use Facebook and Twitter and I like both sites very much.  I however view them as something fun to do in my spare time; not something that I always have to be doing.

I just think that people need to go outside and “be outside”.  They need to be in it.  There is so much beauty that is lost because people refuse to take it in.  Instead, they spend time playing with their devices.

I should state that I do own an iPhone 5 and that I have had a smart phone for the last two years.  I simply choose to not let the phone rule my life and everything that I do.

Lose the phone.  Spend your time outside, truly outside.

Radio Commercials – do they work?

So, something I’ve been wondering as of late; do radio advertisements even work?  I don’t think they do. I often drive 45 minutes each way to and from work and I alternate between 2 or 3 stations.  If I’m listening to a talk radio show like “The Alan Cox Show” and he goes to a commercial break, I switch back to NPR.  If I’m listening to NPR and they go to break, I switch over to Alan Cox.  If they are both on a commercial break  at the same time (this rarely happens) I switch over to an alternate radio station. Sometimes I may listen to a song or two on the “third” station before I go back to NPR or Alan Cox.  So, I never hear these commercials.  I cannot believe that I would be the only person to do this.  I can guarantee that tons of other people do this.  Who the heck actually hears the commercials?  

I would bet if there was a way to do an accurate study the advertisement/marketing folks would be blown away by how many of their ads are NEVER heard.  This makes me laugh to an extent because when I do actually hear a commercial (rare) it sucks.  I mean it sucks so bad that I think a 14 year old kid could have come up with a better commercial.

I’d be curious to see what other folks think about ads/commercials on the radio and if they really work.

Idiot BMW driver on Turnpike

This morning on the way to work I saw a guy driving a BMW 330i. He looked like what I call the typical BMW driver. Self centered, drives like a jackass, thinks he’s the most important person on the road at the time.

We were on the turnpike and we were in and out of construction zones the entire time which was about 30 minutes. The guy was originally behind me when we went through the toll booth. For the entire time we were on the on-ramp he was within about 2 feet of my rear bumper. Asshole. So when we finally get on to the turnpike, we’re in a construction zone. All trucks are supposed to use the left lane because the right lane is the shoulder. This jackass goes flying around me and cuts in front of a big rig and then has to hit the brakes because there is another rig in front of him. What a fucking idiot. He then weaves back into the right lane and is only 3 cars ahead of me. At different times during our turnpike trip, he would weave in and out of cars to get ahead. It was funny when I would slowly come back up on him and then pass him. This is with me using cruise control most of the time on the turnpike. We both got off at the same exit. He was 3 cars ahead of me when we went through the toll booths again. He also sped up to the toll booths at about 50 and then came to a sudden stop to allow it to read his EasyPass. When I finally got up to the booth I could smell brakes; the smell of when you overheat your brake pads.

So I was relaxed and drove safely for the entire trip on the turnpike. This guy seemed frustrated and expended a lot of effort to get ahead. In the end he was only a few cars in front of me. I can’t believe idiots like this guy don’t realize it’s not worth it. He endangered the lives of other people along with his own (and the two people in the car with him) for a couple hundred feet of pavement. What a total fucking moron.

Windows Phone sucks

Let me start off by saying that I have been an iPhone user for the last 2 years. I love the iPhone. I have tried a couple phones with the Google Android OS as well. I thought that they were pretty cool. I would say on a scale of 1-10 that the iPhone would be an 8 and Droid phones would be a 7 (maybe a 6 for certain phones). Well on that same scale I would give the Windows Phones a 4.

I have used an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and currently use an iPhone 4S. I have loved them all. I also think that with each iOS update the phones get better. I was given the opportunity to try out a Samsun Focus S with Windows Phone 7.5 loaded on it. I was able to try the phone for 30 days. I made it 24 hours and no longer wanted the Windows Phone. I moved my SIM card and my phone number to the Windows Phone and had turned off my iPhone and put it in a drawer. I now have my iPhone 4S back and am back using it again. Thank God. Below I list the reasons that the Windows Phone sucked. If Microsoft doesn’t make major changes to Windows Phone 8 it will fail just as bad as Windows Phone 7.5.

The reason for this phone sucking are partially due to Samsung and partially due to the Windows Phone OS.

✖ No visual voicemail. You have to call in and listen to your voicemail. This was on AT&T. Maybe it’s different with another provider.

✖ No good apps. No United Airlines app which I need for work. No good receipt scanning app. No “Words with Friends”. All the Navigation apps sucked. The included AT&T Navigator sucks. Bing maps suck.

✖ The way the camera is setup is garbage. The button is on the lower right side of the phone. You hit the damn thing on accident all the time. It will not macro focus. You cannot tap to focus. You tap and it takes a picture. In addition you can turn off the camera button so that it doesn’t work (when the phone is locked). That also doesn’t work. Seriously. I enabled that setting, and then locked the phone. After holding down the camera button it comes right up and I can take pictures. It’s easy to see that they didn’t put much thought into how the camera works at all.

✖ The way that the games are tied to XBOX live seems childish. I don’t own an XBOX. I don’t need avatars or online game scores or whatever else populating onto my phone in the “games” section. I would rather each game be a separate app like on the iPhone or Droid.

✖ The Windows Phone native Facebook and Twitter “tie-ins” suck. I had to disable them and download full apps. They didn’t look anything like Facebook or Twitter. Just a boring white page with jumbled large and small text trying to look trendy. It just looks horrible like that.

✖ The time shows up in the upper right hand corner of the phone. If you want to see the battery icon, your connection status, and/or WiFi status you have to tap the top of the screen to get all of those other icons to “slide down” out of no-where and you can see them. After a minute they are gone again, only leaving you the time. I realize that when you have no service, or a low battery the icons do show up. That’s too late in my opinion. At least give us the option to have all the icons on all the time.

✖ Microsoft tries to tell you that with this new Windows Phone you don’t have to scroll through pages and pages of apps like you would with your iPhone. With the Windows Phone you have to scroll up and down instead of side to side. No difference. They fit less on a page because they use huge square tiles instead of nice compact icons that have descriptive logos or colors like the iPhone and Droid phones use. Some people may like this. Not me.

As a side note, the way them rename their products ever year or two needs to stop. You have people who have a @hotmail account or an @live account and it’s no longer called Windows Live. They actually did start using the “Hotmail” name again. That’s a move in the right direction. Every now and then I get people asking me what the heck is a “Live” account. Heck they have renamed it from Hotmail to MSN to Live Mail and now back to Hotmail. Someone at Microsoft sure likes to change names a lot.

It is hard for me to imagine how a product like this can leave the building without someone going “uh guys…..yeah we can’t leave this phone like this”. How does nobody see the problems they are allowing it to ship with? Was it rushed to market? I guess I shouldn’t wonder since Microsoft has a history of releasing incomplete stuff to market and calling it “finished” or “final”. They did it with Windows Me, and Windows Vista. I hope they don’t do it with Windows 8.

For those interested, linked below is a much better write up on why the Windows Phone sucks.
http://www.wpsauce.com/2012/05/windows-phones-suck.html

I did edit this post to take much of the swearing out and some of the really harsh language. I did so because I felt it made the article a bit more crisp and drove the point home better.

For the record I didn’t hate everything about it. I really like how well Microsoft Exchange mail works on the phone and I do like the overall layout of Email on the phone. It would be nice to be able to have an “All Mail” folder that would change my view and aggregate all of my accounts into one folder. It’s easier to quickly move or delete mail like that. The touchscreen was very responsive and the on-screen keyboard was perfect. No complaints. The lock screen was informative and much nicer than the lock screen on an iPhone. The phone was thinner and lighter than the iPhone and I did prefer the lightness and the feel of the Samsung Focus S to that of my iPhone 4S.