For some reason or another, I see a lot of writing. That is, I have the privilege/frustration of reading a collective of blog entries, essays, rants, articles, and whatever the English language decides to throw my way the past few years. And since I see so many, I figure it might be a good exercise to categorize them for my writing pleasure and possibly your reading pain.
Lately, I’ve been considering getting one of those fancy XBox 360 machines; I figure the pretty graphics will keep me happy during the day and the rambunctious purring of its cooling fans will lull me to sleep at night.
In the process of finding potential games to buy for the system, I figured sports is one area where more powerful hardware makes a difference and is better played on a TV over a computer screen, so I went around looking at those. Specifically, I checked out two games – NBA Live 2007 and NBA 2k7 – and I was trying to decide which I’d get.
As is par with most purchases nowadays, I went online and searched around, looking for videos, screenshots, impressions, reviews, rumor, etc. (the game was about to be released when I started this) Of course all the previews had good things to say (e.g., hype), but impressions and ultimately reviews varied widely, and impressions were good, ranging from good to bad to the worst game ever made to the greatest billion lines of code to grace the eyes of god. Who to trust when so many people claim to know what they’re talking about?
I was trying to come up with alternate titles to “Craigslist sucks”; that was the best I could come up with.
Craigslist, as you have probably heard of, is a thriving online forum-based community which happens to include a huge classifieds as well as dating section, and supports itself by charging for job listings at a discount – something that only works because of its enormous size and readership. If you’ve ever used Craigslist, though, you were probably looking at or posting at the classifieds.
I’ve found the Craigslist listings to be, well, a bit lacking. It’s like Craigslist took the worst elements of the Internet and traditional classifieds and mushed them together – terrible pre-1997 layout and design, free and unlimited postings inviting spam, limited 10-day run with no opportunity to reorder postings, no system whatsoever to validate the user’s identity, etc.
So, I was taking my sweet time going home to Sacramento this weekend, having just lost track of the number of times I was stuck in traffic slowdown trying to get out of the Bay. It’s perhaps sometime in the mindless inching march of the metallic mobile orchestra that I pieced together a mundane realization – transportation in California sucks.
It’s a given that public transportation in California is pretty bare, especially when compared to the developed and mature infrastructure on the American east coast and elsewhere in the world. That’s not supposed to be a problem, though, since California is big and vast, and people here would rather drive instead; so why are our roads so poorly designed?
Ok, so that was probably a bit unfair – there are roads which are well designed, cities that are laid out pretty well and in a straight-forward manner, and I’m sure there are all sorts of challenges to be had with building public roads on the hill that is under San Francisco. Most of our roads and major highways/bridges are also over 30 years old, so chances are Caltrans didn’t think about scaling its road system to accomodate quite this many cars.
Just spent the past two hours going back through the entire journal and categorizing every post that was previously unfiled; tedious and repetitive work at best, but something I’ve been meaning to do for a while to keep things nicely backwards capable. I should remind the uncaring reader (e.g., my girlfriend) that the “categories” section on the left as well as the “thoughts uploaded under” section under every post link to posts of that category, so you can hop on to something else more interesting if the topic at hand is not your cup of tea.As I was going through my collection of writings, I began feeling a bit nostalgic for some of my older posts and related to my older self until I got sick of reading my own crap. As far as I can tell, the stages of my writing:
It can only get better from here, right?
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It’s ironic that, for all the supposed technological superiority America holds over other nations, our American telecommunications industry seems to be made up of 80-year-olds who sit around muttering about the good old days of business. I usually wouldn’t care less about their archaic ways until I’m forced to switch cell phone carriers.
As it turns out, the cheapest way was through Chinese ninjitsu, otherwise known as using shady corporate policy loopholes to one’s advantage. My parents had a plan via Verizon Wireless, and one reseller had the means to sign me up for a new plan (with complimentary new phone), then switch me over to a family plan with my parents in a month. Since I don’t even use that many minutes on a given day, this made perfect sense and saves me $20-$25/month. (1)