Urgently Needing Roots

For any Australian this sort of thing is both unfortunately and funny. In the Australian vernacular "root" has a meaning directly analogous to "screw" in the American vernacular. So the plumbing section of the yellow pages takes on a whole new dimension if you know your way around Aussie slang. Gems such as Mr. Rooter, Super Rooter and the above depicted Urgent Rooter just leap of the page and swim around inside the reader's imagination. Rooter Bong on the other hand just defies explanation.

Bruce Beresford's 1981 film, Puberty Blues, does a great job of putting the word in context. Scoot forward to 1:30 and take in the root reference, particularly relative to the mention of the panel van (and that's a whole different discussion).



And while we're at it, any Aussie can't look past this...


To help those a bit in the dark understand the humour, "coit" is an Australian slang term for one's anus.

Self Righteousness On the Back of the Car

I love a good dose of self-righteousness plastered across the back of a vehicle for all to enjoy. It must feel great to soundlessly roll around the hilly streets of San Francisco while the electric-hybrid motor does all of the heavy lifting. You can glance out of your window, hold your nose high and think to yourself, damn, I'm awesome! I'm driving a hybrid. Sure, if I really gave a shit about the environment or the funnelling of funds to those evil terrorists I'd give up driving a gas powered vehicle altogether and switch to biodiesel or just ride a bike but no, that's too much effort and would eliminate too much of the god-given convenience rightfully mine as citizen of the United States of America.

Let it go.

For some odd reason it really irks me that people feel compelled to fly their "I'm better than you" flags in the most cowardly ways possible. While darting about city streets who's likely to apprehend the hybrid driver and attempt to engage her in a debate about the merits of her decision to still consume gas while hypocritically splitting hairs about which gas powered vehicles Osama Bin Laden purports to love or hate? I think that's what shits me most about bumper sticker propaganda; the purveyor of the propaganda is rarely there to defend his position. You slap your statement in place that only people whom you've passed or who are behind you can actually see. And even if they did care to call you on your crap you're too neatly sequestered away in your hermetic coccoon to be reached. It's the very definition of passive aggressive behavior. And even if someone did you actually penetrate the defensive barriers you'd probably be petrified of the results.

Lay Off the Botox, Please!

Ladies, gents, everyone... Think carefully before you start jabbing syringes full of Botox into those ruffled furls of flesh on your forehead. Case in point: Laura Tyson.

Laura's an accomplished woman; former Dean of the Haas School of Business, former Dean of the London School of Business, blah, blah, blah. The list goes on. She's also a not-so-secret Botox fiend. Watch the following video and compare the degree of expression emanating from Laura's face versus Rachel's.



Those eyebrows don't move! They don't shift, edge or budge one angstrom left, right, up or down. Meanwhile, Rachel's facial expressions are going every which way, as is her style. Hang on, at about 30 seconds into the clip Laura's high arch brows tick up a touch, revealing for the first time a crack in her frozen countenance. And those Saint Louis Arch type brows... Always a tell-tale sign of a grand or 12 forked over to a scalpel wielder somewhere in one of the snootiest burghs around. Perhaps I'm simply too young at this point to fully appreciate just how youth-oriented our culture has become, but why do it? Getting loads of plastic surgery doesn't make the recipient necessarily look younger, it just makes the recipient look like she or he has had loads of plastic surgery. Like Sylvester Stallone's mum. Urrrgh! Looking at her gives me the willies.

It kind of looks like her face is made of putty, doesn't it? I wonder how much Play-Doh has been injected into those cheeks?

Now let's give credit where credit is due; Rachel Maddow is probably 10 or 15 years Laura's junior, so The Beauty Myth probably hasn't quite caught up with her yet. Or maybe Rachel's self esteem is a little more robust. Who cares? Just let those eyebrows roam. Set them free. Allow those furry caterpillars to crawl up and down. It does a face good, even a professorial one.

A Doomed Strategy

John McCain screwed himself. At this point the games is pretty lost due in no small part to his poor positioning within the electorate.

If you're John McCain, you're facing a Republican base that's not particularly jazzed about your rather centrist track record. The base slaps you with the RINO moniker and claim they'd rather sit out an election than cast a vote for you. Curiously enough that centrist attitude puts you in good stead with independents; the same people who probably would have voted you into office had George W. Bush not pulled nasty, racist stunts in North Carolina back in 2000. But that's all water under the bridge now. Your solution: pick Sarah Palin. She's a dicey pick but she stands a good chance of winning over all those women, and you just might get a crack at making history with your presidency, trumping the half-breed in the process.

But it didn't turn out that way. Sarah Palin wound up revving up the base and only the base. Injecting an air of creepiness into the campaign, the woman you picked to excite the female vote has instead become a masturbation fantasy for die-hard Republican men. The women you sought to bring into your camp with the pick are just kind of grossed out. And you can't really blame them. Meanwhile you're forced to go along for the ride, feeding the racist sentiments of a base that represents and ever shrinking percentage of the American demographic. By the time you become aware of the monster you've created it's too late to back out.

On one side McCain is forced to distance himself from the naked hatred and racism boiling over from his ostensible base, while on the other side he's forced to push back against Obama in order to secure the independent vote. Caught in a vise, McCain is getting squeezed and the poll numbers reveal it.

We've got just over a week to go and much can change between now and then. Just wait for the White House to release a judiciously timed Bin Laden video. But this is not 2004 and the zeitgeist has mostly moved on. It's hard to see how McCain can release himself from the situation he's created.

It Burns Me Up

Politics is my baseball. I don't much care for most American sports aside from the perennial squabbles between the Democrats and the Republicans. My only wish is that a third party were more viable, thereby making the spats more interesting. Getting to the point, right now we're in the middle of the American political World Series. I'd say we're getting to around the seventh or eighth inning, the Republicans are down by about four or five runs and they're looking pretty tired.

Anyway, the last debate spat forth a particular remark that didn't get picked up in any of the many media channels; in most instances it slides right past those paid to care about such things. Perhaps they were too distracted by all the other memes and catch phrases that emanated forth from the mouths of the aspirational. But I caught this one and it really burns me up...

Why do some anti-abortion types refer to their opponents as being "pro-abortion"? I think John McCain mentioned it his previous nationally televised chin-wag with That One. I skew pretty left of center when it comes to my political beliefs and I know a lot of people who would prefer not hunker down and get greasy with the anti-abortion/pro-life faction. The thing is that not one of the friends I keep would consider his or herself "pro-abortion". I can't think of a single woman who's so pro-abortion that she deliberately gets knocked up just because it's fun to drop a fetus or two on the floor every once in a while. That's pro-abortion. She's most likely pro-choice, meaning that if a woman really feels the need to do something with her body then she's free to do it, even something as unpleasant as an abortion. That doesn't mean she's really into it. It just means free to choose for herself. Nowhere implicit in that concept is any notion of being pro-abortion. To use that term is to conflate the issue at hand. In fact most people waging war over abortion are really arguing about two very different concepts that just happen to intersect on some pretty dangerous ground.

All this abortion garbage is, as George Lakoff has gone over, just a surrogate for control over women and enforcing a strict social order. At the core of it is a desire to ensure that women stay in their gender roles and remain largely subservient to male masters. When a woman is free to choose she's free to choose in the absence of any male oversight, and I think that makes a lot of people really, really scared. The rationale goes something like, "Shit, if women start making decisions for themselves what might happen next? And why stop there? Women making decisions for themselves is about as crazy as a black man becoming president of the USA!"

The Microsoft Tech Support Rabbit's Warren: Down We Go

A couple of weeks ago, lost in my unemployment funk, I ran an experiment in customer service. Here's how it went...

Microsoft Vista includes with it a suite of shitty widgets, gadgets or whichever name MS chose that hadn't already been snagged by Apple. I'm pretty fond of the clock gadget since I've got friends and family members scattered across the globe. Courtesy of the clock gadgets I'm spared the task of having to remember time zones. I needn't explain more.

Ordinarily they should look something like this:

Its a clock. Pretty simple, huh? Big hand points to the minutes, little hand points to the hours.

Well, I booted my system on night to find that the clock instead looked like this:

Totally unreadable, but the clock gadget is hardly a necessary component of the operating system. Other gadgets, such as the Contacts gadget and the System Monitor gadget exhibited similar corruption.

I poked around on the web for a while, searching for any documented evidence—and more importantly fixes—relating to this kind of problem. There were a few, I tried them and none of them worked. Later that night the corruption miraculously disappeared after I did what amounted to nothing. The Microsoft fairies has swept through my machine and righted all wrongs. I could go to sleep a happy man.

The next morning I fired up my machine to find the corruption, like a nasty case of genital warts, was back in full bloom. My fixes had failed, even my attempts to roll back to a previously working image of my discs had met with poor fortune. Then I had an idea.

These components come native with the OS, I thought, so Microsoft should be able to solve the problem. I'd never contacted Microsoft's customer support line before; I've always had a natural aversion to dealing with Microsoft in that manner, but this time my logic went something like this:

1. It's not a critical component of the OS
2. Microsoft should be able to support their own software, even if I'm sure they can't
   
3. The problem is going to be a tricky one to resolve since it involves the corruption of a set of files—these sorts of problems always push tech support staff to their limits
4. I'm unemployed and I've got loads of time to waste on such a fruitless exploit

So I rang the hotline and got routed to the land of blue, multi-armed deities.

"If they can't fix the problem you won't be charged the $60," I was informed.

"Let's do it," I agreed. And down into the rabbit's warren I went.

The first tier tech to whom I spoke was a very personable woman. She patiently listened the problem I was encountering and asked me a few probing question. Had I restarted my system? Yes. Had I attempted to use the gadget restore feature? Yes. Had I checked for solutions online? Yes. Had I attempted to re-register my DLLs? Yes. We could both see where this one was going. "Would you mind if I took control of your system?" she asked. Of course I didn't mind. She then directed me to open IE and navigate to a particular page that would invoke an ActiveX control that would in turn let her view my system. That's when things went pear shaped.

"I'm telling it allow the ActiveX control but nothing's happening," I told her.

"What are the menu options you're seeing?" She then described a list of menu items that should have been visible but in fact weren't.

"The one you want me to select isn't there," I told her. "Shouldn't this be easy?"

She let that remark hang while she laboured further with me on trying to get the remote control app installed. This tête-à-tête continued for what was about another twenty minutes, neither of us getting any closer to solving the problem, we were too embroiled in trying to solve the problem of installing the tools that were supposed to help us solve the original problem.

"I think your tech support needs tech support." If she found the remark amusing she didn't let me know it.

A few minutes later I told her I'd solved the problem; not with the corrupted gadgets but with the installation of the remote control app.

"How did you do it?" she asked.

Heh, I thought, this is going to be great. "I used Firefox."

Yes, Firefox worked better with Microsoft's website than Microsoft. Oh the irony.

What then transpired was about two more hours of being repeatedly put on hold while the pleasant yet overwhelmed tech support agent ran my issue up the food chain in an effort to get to the root of the problem. Her final solution was to have me download third party clock gadgets that would in fact work, despite the fact that the native Microsoft gadgets remained corrupted.

"No, no, no," I told her, "that's not a solution, that's a workaround. I called to get a solution to the problem, not to be told about a workaround I already knew about. You're going to need to try harder."

"I'd like to transfer you to an escalation engineer."

"Okay, let see what else can be done. Thanks."

So there I was, two hours lost for nothing, and I'd been shunted to another part of the call center. The next person assigned to my problem was nice enough, but beneath the veneer of concern was a hint of resentment. After all it was 1:30am where he was and I'm sure he didn't care to be dealing with these problems at this time of night. In an effort to break the ice and get him to deal with me on a personal level—really build a stake in the issue—I told him that was soon to travel to India. I asked him about southern India, the place where I'll be going, while we ran a series of hard disc checks. He really didn't give a shit. Okay, I thought, we'll have it your way.

His way was ultimately just like the first tech's but longer. After a further three hours of aimless meandering the final solution was proposed: reinstall the operating system.

Think about that for a moment within the context of the "deal" proposed by ringing Microsoft's tech support in the first place: they either fix it or you don't get charged. What the OS reinstall represents is a bogus deus-ex-machina. No matter which problem you have with Windows, Microsoft can always, as a final resort, declare that your only remaining solution is to reinstall the OS. We'll take our sixty dollars now, please. No shit I can always reinstall the OS. The reason why I called was to fix the problem WITHOUT reinstalling the OS. The corrupted components shouldn't corrupt in the first place. And if they do, then Microsoft should be able to fix them without placing undue burden on the affected customer. Apparently that's not the case.

And neither was I surprised. For years the tales of Microsoft's tech support have swirled around technology companies. Most of us working in the tech industry are savvy enough to support our own equipment without having to resort to hotlines. On this occasions the reasons for my deep-rooted suspicions of Microsoft's tech support were confirmed. The company itself is as needlessly complicated as the software it produces, so much so that the software itself is in fact a replication of the complexity of the company played out at a different scale. It's all one big mess with a powerful marketing arm. If you get caught in the labyrinth, like I did, don't expect to find an easy way out.

The Cut

My employer finally got around to enacting some layoffs. They've been a long time coming.

Ever since the company's inception, layoffs have been eschewed at every turn. "It's not a part of our culture," or so went the mantra. The company weathered the catastrophic downturn of 2001 without retrenching a solitary employee and the corporation was probably better for it. It maintained the warm fuzzy reputation that had hovered above it's corporate head like a halo since the day it was founded.

Now that's changed. There's a new sheriff in town and he's got different ideas about these things. The shareholders demand value, and that means heads must roll. Mine was one of them.

I'd been lurking the hallways of the company for over 10 years. Plucked out of Australia after finishing my studies in electrical and electronic engineering, I arrived for my first day of work sight unseen. My first role at the company was as a lowly hotline engineer. Sometimes cranky users of the company's products would phone in to rant about whatever was on their minds at the time. Like the bedridden elderly, most of them simply wanted someone to listen to their tirades. Treat the person first and the technical issue second. Most of the time I never got to step two.

Wind forward ten years and I'm a Senior Manager of the company's web site, an aspect of the business that it hardly considers central and with the new broom sweeping through considers largely expendable. I'd liken to situation to a dysfunctional romance, one that kept itself going based on the memory of glory days long in the past. The company hadn't broken up with me yet and I lacked the stones to break up with the company. Finally someone took action.

The writing was on the wall long before we were dragged into the executioner's chamber. The Director to whom I reported was being conspicuously dropped from any discussions of the future state of the company and its web site; the Senior Director to whom he reported had espoused her views of a smaller, leaner web group at the company. To be honest I tended to agree with her approach. So when the hammer fell on over 60% of my team it came as no surprise. Most surprising was the people the powers in charge sought to remove. Two of the developers on my team prop the site up in ways that senior management will only truly understand once they're gone.

But as I've repeated to myself over and over under my breath in an effort to reprogram my mind, it's not my problem.

My problem now is how to fill my days until business school starts at Berkeley in August.

Corporate Life - The Exodus

The department for which I work underwent a sort of reorg a couple of weeks ago. Marketing absorbed a huge chunk of sales and support. My career started out in support, staffing the hotline and troubleshooting the bullshit problems of pissed off engineers. Always fix the person first, then fix the technical problem. It's always easier that way.

So now we're a honkin' big organisation, full of over-inflated egos that demand perpetual assuaging and reassurance. Those of us in the rank and file, namely me, spend our time scratching our heads in an effort to work out why the hell the move was executed in the first place. Better alignment? Maybe. A parting gift from the outgoing CEO to his man with marketing plan? Now you're getting warmer. Redundancies? Ah, we're starting to hit the mark.

Even still, when I strolled into a meeting this morning I was kind of surprised to overhear that the VP who came over to Marketing as part of the shift was splitsville. Yeah, not more than a month after the move was made official she bailed. There are a couple of rumour sources in the company that I like to check on this sort of stuff, and in this instance he knew nothing concrete. Bear in mind that he reports into this woman's organisation, so the cone of silence around the exit wasn't exactly shocking. Two hours later it was confirmed.

This kind of thing is going on all over the place now. Nobody should be reclining back in his or her Aeron chair, picturing the long, safe career at the company that stretches out ahead. It's time to put the spit shine on the resume, kiddies, nothing is certain anymore.

Corporate Life - The Exodus

The department for which I work underwent a sort of reorg a couple of weeks ago. Marketing absorbed a huge chunk of sales and support. My career started out in support, staffing the hotline and troubleshooting the bullshit problems of pissed off engineers. Always fix the person first, then fix the technical problem. It's always easier that way.

So now we're a honkin' big organisation, full of over-inflated egos that demand perpetual assuaging and reassurance. Those of us in the rank and file, namely me, spend our time scratching our heads in an effort to work out why the hell the move was executed in the first place. Better alignment? Maybe. A parting gift from the outgoing CEO to his man with marketing plan? Now you're getting warmer. Redundancies? Ah, we're starting to hit the mark.

Even still, when I strolled into a meeting this morning I was kind of surprised to overhear that the VP who came over to Marketing as part of the shift was splitsville. Yeah, not more than a month after the move was made official she bailed. There are a couple of rumour sources in teh company that I like to check on this sort of stuff, and in this instance he knew nothing concrete. Bear in mind that he reports into this woman's organisation, so the cone of silence around the exit wasn't exactly shocking. Two hours later it was confirmed.

This kind of thing is going on all over the place now. Nobody should be reclining back in his or her Aeron chair, picturing the long, safe career at the company that stretches out ahead. It's time to put the spit shine on the resume, kiddies, nothing is certain anymore.

New Tunes - No Wait, These Are Old

I've been spending on music again, such is my wont. For reasons I can't adequately explain, This Mortal Coil leaped into my head about a week or so ago. I'm not sure why. Their main hit was a version of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren", which The Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser warbles forth with her usual hyper-produced gloss. The first time I heard it was probably back around 1990 or so; my brother and I were getting into all of that stuff at the time. We taped most of Triple J's Hot 100 for that year, which was an attempt to collate the listeners' favourite songs ever. The list was peppered with plenty of alt-rock gems from the eighties, most of which rounded out the top ten. Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" took the top spot, but the video tape spooled out its final millimetre three songs before it aired. We never got to catch it.

Seventeen years later (ah crap, it's been that long) I'm drawn back to it. Unsurprisingly it holds up. TMC were ahead of their time, just as were the bands from which the members were drawn.
Right now track 9, Barramundi, is concluding. Lisa Gerrard is belting the notes out of her considerable pipes and my ears are loving it.

I've missed you, This Mortal Coil. Let's slip on our gothiest outfits, blot out the sun and talk about spiders in a dark corner. It's good to have you back.

Back to the Corporate World

I took three weeks off from work over the Christmas/New Year break. The company I work for was closed from 21 December until 2 January, but I took both the preceding week and the subsequent three days off. My parents were in town. I kind of had to do it. Everyone at the company was compelled to take three vacation days on 25, 27 and 28 December. We're in cost-cutting mode right now and we've been in that mode for a really long time. A really long time.

Budgets are getting slashed across the board. This quarter my department's budget is down 4% over last quarter, which in turn was reduced about 4% over the quarter before. It's a cycle that's been going on for some time. Each quarter we tell ourselves that the next quarter will be rosier, better but sure as we all need to shit, the next cut comes around. We're left little else to slash now. There are no more training dollars, no more money left for entertainment or travel. The only things left are essential services and heads.

Which leads me to the rumour I heard today: layoffs. You won't have to scrutinise the coffee grounds too deeply to come to that conclusion. When you've cut just about everything else but people and your CEO is calling for a significant ongoing reduction in costs then what else can you cut?

But it's not going to happen on the current CEO's watch. He's too avuncular for that.

Which brings me to my next event at work today: I met the new CEO. He's an affable enough guy. My first meeting with him left me impressed. He talked about the need to boost sales, which is true and I told him we're all looking forward to some new leadership, which is also true.

I reduced my inbox from about 400 unread emails to about 200. Our intranet was given a new lick of paint and it's not particularly good. I ate a salad for lunch.

Bizarre Behaviour at the Gym Part 3

Don't wear tight little shorts made of spandex. Especially if you're male. Especially if you're male and over forty. Especially if you while away your hours under the glow of a melanoma-forming solarium lamp. Especially if you feel compelled to let the spandex ride high enough up groin to split your nut sack in two, revealing the full form of your meat and two veg. Just don't do it.

I Can Has Balls?

Emasculated, androgynous wuss-pop? I love it. I put mustard on it and eat the shit. See how I love it.

Good news, mopesters, the navel-gazing quartet from Brooklyn, Dirty on Purpose, have dropped the bioavailability of their SSRIs to the point that has allowed them to spit forth a new slit-your-wrists worthy ditty. And they'll take absolutely none of your cash money for the pleasure.

Check it: http://www.rcrdlbl.com/artists/Dirty_On_Purpose/download/Leaving

Yep, hop on over to the oh-so-hip www.rcrdlbl.com (dropping vowels = tres hip) for your helping of corner-cringing slow-pop.

Early impressions: The crushed-scrotum vocals complement the morose melody like a stout cabernet sauvignon complements a slab of rare porterhouse. Deeelicious.

Bizarre Behaviour At the Gym - Part 2

I don't ever want to see an erect penis at the gym. Ever.

But of course I did, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this now.

The other day I was busy washing the stench off my body after a particularly sweaty workout. Having offended more than enough noses with the rancid odour of my sweat-soaked t-shirts, I've since learned to give my drenched workout garments a solid rinsing with Dial soap in the showers once I'm done. The anti-bacterial sales pitch of Dial ain't just a sales pitch, boys and girls.

So I was getting my scrubbing done when I caught a glimpse of the person in the shower stall opposite mine. As he pivoted to access a touch-to-reach part of his body I swear I saw a boner making itself known to the world at large. Nobody wants to be the guy in the locker room showers staring at another man's potentially erect cock, so I quickly turned away.

He pivoted again, somewhat self-consciously, making a half-hearted attempt to disguise what, in a second flash, was revealed to be an honest-to-goodness stiffy. Worse yet, he was looking back at me!

Look away and pay him no mind, I thought to myself. Dry yourself off and leave. Empty your mind. Empty your mind.

And I did.

The odd thing here is that the gym is located in San Jose, not San Francisco. You'd expect that kind of thing in the San Francisco gyms, but not in San Jose. I've never seen such a thing in the SF gym I go to, but then again, I never shower at the gym in SF. Perhaps there's a reason.

Bizarre Behaviour At the Gym - Part 1

I pulled my bike up next to the bike rack situated in front of the entrance to the 24 Hour Fitness gym (otherwise known as the McDonald's of gyms) at the Potrero Center in San Francisco. After securing the bike with two locks—I lost a previous bike to thieves at the same spot about three years ago—I started to make my way past the disabled parking spaces. Like most disabled spots, they're marked with the typical blue wheelchair logo right next to the door to the gym.

A minivan edged into one of the two disabled spaces. The blue wheelchair placard dangled from the stem of the rear vision mirror. Out bounded a spry, middle-aged woman of squat dimensions. She grabbed her gym bag from the rear of the van, slammed the tailgate with a loud bang and made her way inside.

Weird, I thought, that a "disabled" woman should be firstly, acting with such vim and vigour, and secondly, going into a gym. Sure, there's probably much, much more to her story than I can glean from a few seconds of observation in a dimly lit underground parking structure, but it struck me as kind of ironic that a person so in need of the conveniently located disabled space should be using it to go to the gym. Sure, disabled people can workout too; that's why there's this thing called the Paralympics, but this woman didn't even seem mildly hobbled. There wasn't even the slightest hint of a limp, gammy hip or twisted elbow. She just slung that bag over her shoulder and waddled her plump, but not obese—lest she be branded genuinely disabled—frame inside for a brisk workout.

Fifteen minutes later I saw her working up a decent sheen of lady-sweat astride the stationary bikes as she made her way through a circuit workout.

Pet Peeves - Fixie Bikes Part 2

I've ranted about fixie bikes before—those no-brakes fashion accessory bicycles that Mission hipsters love to park in front of Ritual Coffee Roasters on a Saturday afternoon. I'm a self-confessed curmudgeon about them... But I'm not the only one.

A couple of days ago I was parking my double caliper braked hunk of junk down at the Best Buy on Harrison Street. Peering down at the rack I copped an eyeful of the following:

Okay, so the photos taken by my mobile phone are blurry pieces of crap—definitely not up to Brit standards—but you get the idea. What I love about it is that it combines two of my favourite things: nerdy lolspeak and a heathly disdain for riders of fixies.

In the lower right-hand corner of the sticker an email address is listed. I contacted the person on the other end of the intertubes asking for a clearer image of the text listed below the main headline. Here's what I got. Behold, in all its glory!

You can click on the image for a larger version, or you can exercise your constitutionally enshrined right to be a lazy bastard and just read my retyping of the fine print.

fixed gear bikes are for people who live in plains states. welcome to san francisco, or wherever you are. fashion and peer pressure can make you do anything, even something as misguided as eschew gears in a hilly town. "obey your thirst." different, better advice: get over your bad self. don't forget to use lube. power down. stay healthy. if you keep it up, something inside you's likely to explode. BLAM! then where will you be? huh? well, right where you are now, but with an exploded body part. and nobody wants that. get there in the end, & our cardiovascular systems can still beat marketing execs' in a fair fight. above all, ride predictably. don't run red lights. participate in 4-way stops. PLEASE. it is frustrating when car drivers ignore us, but ignoring them is not the solution. and ignoring them and the traffic laws will get us killed. get home safe. look around at us. have empathy. believe me, some-bloody-body needs to.

Yeah, fight the power! I'm with her/him all the way except for that meandering middle part about brushing your teeth and exploding body parts. That was way too cosmic for my tastes. But the rest of it? Right on the money. I'm so glad somebody is out there changing the world, one pointless sticker at a time. I'm especially glad when said sticker fuels my crankiness, and with a lolcat twist to boot!

He Shames Men Everywhere

I just got off the phone with The Brit. That man needs to be retrained. He's making the rest of us look like unsympathetic, lazy, self-absorbed fools. Now he's a good mate of mine, and he's even been kind enough to bestow upon me the honour of joining his wedding party, but his perpetual over-achievement is making the rest of his gender look ugly.

Exhibit A for the prosecution: The Wedding Proposal. Read the thing, the whole thing. It's worth it. Discover the lengths a man will go to in order to demonstrate to the rest of his brethren that his notion of romance is 6.79×10⁶ times more epic and significant than anything that the rest of us can concoct. I mean, he flew the woman to Hawaii. Think about it. He orchestrated a chain of ultra-charming, spare-no-expense-because-you're-worth-so-much-to me, heart flutter-inducing events in the hopes—who thinks the outcome was ever in doubt?—of securing the life-long partnership of his favourite Cubana Gringa. It's just like the genre-killing 1991 release of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album. With the release of one record the whole shoegazer music movement collapsed now that its pinnacle had been realised. The same goes with The Brit. Now none of us can ever propose to our respective significant others without receiving some remark about the lengths that stinkin' Brit went when the time came for him to pop the question.

And it gets worse. Between jetting around the globe for work, he lends himself to extensive charity work, preparing food for the local homeless shelters in San Francisco and constructing homes for Habitat for Humanity. And he maintains an active social life. Me? I think about doing these sorts of things and then kid myself that my life's already overloaded. But The Brit? Shit, that fucker slides straight off a plane, puts in a full day's work and then races into Costco to purchase the food for the homeless shelter's soup kitchen. Meanwhile I'm contemplating whether or not I should have a wank.

And oh yeah, he's marvellous photographer and an excellent chef. In fact the whole chef thing nearly backfired on him. A couple of years ago The Brit was desperately single and seeking ways to improve his chances with the ladies. Quite sensibly, he settled on two specific areas in which to improve and refine himself that might widen the scoring goal posts a little: cooking and dancing. While I haven't seen The Brit turn on his dance moves in a while, I have had the pleasure of eating a lot of his food. So had a number of ladies. He's good. Too good. He's so good that it was intimidating—both to me and to his female prospects at the time. Except of course for La Cubana Gringa. I'm not sure if anything or anyone intimidates her.

So men at large, get to work. We've got a lot of pastries to bake, tiramisus to construct and a pile of elaborate proposals to plan. Ah fuck it, I think I'll just kill myself now and avoid the hassle.

I've Seen a Few Before

I've been plugging away at my job in Silicon Valley for nearly ten years. By the time March of 2008 swings around the calendar will have clocked past the decade marker, and that's a long time. It's an especially long time to be working for the one employer. Sad but true, I've been slave to the will of the one corporation ever since I set food on American soil. I recently tried to change that state of affairs.

Right around Halloween, the household of The Brit, La Cubana Gringa and assorted other roommates threw a party. It was a rager, with my personal—and non-existent—costume prize going to the woman who dressed up as a box of Pocky. During the course or the evening I ran into the former Vice President of the department in which I once worked at my current employer. He departed the company under somewhat controversial circumstances, but that's a whole other tale for the telling. Anyway, he clued me into a Director of Engineering position at a startup that, unlike most startups people think of when they hear "startup", is making money hand-over-fist. They've got a staff of 25 and they're raking in annual revenues of around 17 million. What's the nature of their work? I'll answer the question shortly.

I was told by the former VP that they're carrying on like it's still 1999, and the job might well cast a lure strong enough to draw me away from a decade's worth of indentured servitude in Silicon Valley. The new job is in San Francisco, the pay very much on the high side and they're throwing all the usual and ridiculous perks once lavished upon the startups of old: massages, snacks galore, comped lunches, you name it. Colour me intrigued, I said, and then promptly forgot about it.

A couple of days later an email arrived for me. It was from the contract recruiter hired by the startup to stock the company with talent. After a brief exchange of emails we agreed to meet. The odd thing was that we agreed to meet on a Saturday afternoon at Puerto Alegre—a restaurant located near the intersection of 16th and Valencia that's well known for its margaritas. And one last thing, the company is in the porn business.

The porn business? I wasn't quite ready for that, but the more I thought about it the more I liked it. After ten years in the semiconductor trade, the thought of jumping ship for the land of boobs and balls seemed quite enticing. Instead of watching eyes glaze over as I tell people who ask that I manage a group of web developers for a Silicon Valley-based semiconductor, I'd suddenly become a source of insider information into the salacious world of shaved pubes and DVDA. Yeah, that sounds great. Now, whenever I go to Australia and hang out with my wine maker brother, I might actually stand a chance of sustaining more than a half second of anyone's attention after we're each asked what we do for a living. A Silicon Valley semiconductor manager doesn't stand a chance against a wine maker. Nobody gives a shit about electronic components, but just about everyone's got a stake in the wine business somewhere, and I'd wager nearly as many—whether they advertise it or not—have dabbled in porn.

So I met the recruiter at Puerto Alegre. He's a regular at the place and holds down the same spot every Saturday afternoon. He was calling the staff by name as he did his best to ensure that my margarita arrived promptly. It did. He then divulged the extra details about the company and not without a lot of spin. Yes, they're in the porn business but they're not a producer. They're more like a straight-up web company that just happens to have wound up a purveyor of smut. And he's got a point. The company, now revealed to be [REDACTED], has cooked up perhaps the most ingenious way of delivering video over the web. The greasy-haired producers in the San Fernando Valley supply their DVDs to VideoBox who encode the discs using a proprietary codec and then deliver the content to their fee-paying customers via a very slick Flash-based interface. The key there is the "fee-paying" part. Cast your mind back to the dim, dark, nascent days of the intertubes; it was the porn industry that first worked out how to extract a buck from the web. The porno peoples have been making money off the web for over ten years, while the major "legit" studios are still thrashing around, spewing forth failed, DRM-laden white elephants that chew through resources and yield nothing but a huge loss.

With the help of about three margaritas I managed to leave an impression. The interview was set up for the following week—the next Friday to be precise.

Clad in my ten year old suit that miraculously still fits me, I presented myself at the offices located near 2nd and Mission in SoMa. True to the words of the recruiter, the place was rockin' like was still 1999; snacks were in ready supply and the Dance Dance Revolution arcade machine languished monolithically in the center of the office, daring anyone to use it.

I met the guy running the show. He was bearded and overweight, but the beard was neatly trimmed, as if to say, I know I'm a fat slob but I still give at least a little bit of a shit about how I appear. The look of smug self-satisfaction hung on his face about as attractively as his fleshy jowls. I didn't really like the guy and I wondered whether or not I could handle working for him. He'd be my boss if I got the job.

But things brightened up as rest of the engineering team made their way into the office to meet with me. They were all smart, tech savvy and genuinely into the technology. The whole porn aspect of what they were doing was simply incidental as far as they were concerned. They were convinced that they were working a cutting-edge web startup. And I agreed. The high point of the interview sessions came when, feeling especially confident, I declared to the developer with whom I was meeting, "I've seen plenty of dicks going into pussies before. It's the technology that really excites me!"

Never again will I utter those words in an interview. It struck me only as I walked away from the building, mentally replaying the moments of the afternoon, that I'd just had a once in a lifetime moment. I suffer from social tourette's at the best of times, letting loose with all manner of inappropriate remarks under the cover of a funky accent. But in this instance the filter came off altogether and it was a strange relief.

Last night the recruiter called me. He said I didn't get the job. He said that while I was a cultural fit, my ten years of working in staid, large, corporate environment had left me ill prepared for the stress of a small startup. I agreed. During the interview it became clear that I would prefer to operate at a more abstracted level while the company wanted someone better able to stick his fingers into the code and make a mess. That's not me.

The recruiter put my name in his Rolodex and promised to call me when the next opportunity swings around.

They're NOT PEOPLE!

I've got two cats. Well, that's not quite true. I have a cat, a tuxedo-furred lump of fluff named General Zod, and The Great Organiser has a cat, Piet, and since The Great Organiser and I live together I therefore get to live with two cats. You get the idea. You're not stupid. It's also worth remembering that I do not live with any dogs, not even a small one that might conceivably fit into my tiny, shit-box sized, sub-700 square feet apartment. No dogs. Not one.

So Friday swings around and I dutifully go to check the mail. I get a stack of window envelopes and an armload of apparently important bank-related mail for what seems like about four of the dozen or so people who have at one stage in the past decade called my current address home. All the hunting catalogues that lodge in the mailbox for a certain Mr. Henning Schultz indicate to me that he must have enjoyed slaughtering a critter or two with high velocity projectiles. With a name like Henning Schultz that strikes me as being kind of appropriate. It just screams Schützenfest.

Nestled amongst the stack of crap was a magazine. Oversized and glossy, the publication was the premier issue of Wag Magazine: the rag churned out by the same business geniuses whose minds gave birth to the retarded baby that is Wag Hotels. The tone of the magazine and the mindset of the people behind it is made abundantly clear right there on the cover.

It would be impossible to produce a cover that reeks of any more nervous social status desperation and bizarre anthropomorphism. You're into wine because it's what all the well-heeled people at Mummy's and Mummy's new boyfriend's country club are into. Daddy doesn't do wine since Mummy divorced him after she found out that he had been fucking that "cheap whore" in Marketing who's half his age. He just does hard liquor now. But you're into wine and now you're going to project your wants and desires on that pet of yours. That dog really couldn't give a flying fuck about wine, Napa, or anything you're into except the food, but you think a black lab amongst the grape vines looks so cute that you're just going to have to take a photo and plaster it on the cover of your new magazine.

And then send it to a person who has two cats.

Each page is a window into a world of massive conspicuous consumption—the sort more often found in LA than in San Francisco. But scrutinise the biographies of the editor and contributors and you're left with the suspicion that those involved in this love letter from bored dilettantes are from the Marina: an outpost of excessive yuppiedom bunkered away on the northwestern side of San Francisco. They're all thirty-something women whose attempts at snagging that doctor or dentist have dragged on for about a decade too long. With the hopes of meeting their parents expectations of success in tatters, they've turned to the only creatures who won't dump them for a younger bit of fluff after the third shag: their dogs. Left with nothing else productive to do in their lives (there's always in vitro fertilisation, ladies) and no way to demonstrate to a world that once expected so much of them that they've actually accomplished something, they've assembled a document that illustrates everything that's wrong with the crass distractions of the obscenely wealthy, or at least those people who aspire to be obscenely wealthy.

Here are a few examples of how everything this magazine represents is wrong. People are being slaughtered in the Sudan but if you want to add a touch of period charm to your apartment situated just off Lombard and you're feeling particularly generous to your pooch today, why not buy her a doggy four poster bed? Fuck it, while you're at it, close that feature article on forced child labour in India, jump into your Benz and head down to Beverly Hills for a spot of doggy yoga and acupuncture. And since you're obviously so flush with dough, plonk down that six spare grand you were going to donate to the hospital for some gaudy white gold dog charm jewellery. And then spend a few hours trying to work out on which crappy, mass-market work of "art" by George Rodrigue you're going to blow a wad of cash.

It fucks with my head to think that there are people in this city, and indeed in this world, who are so self-absorbed that they think their dogs need as much high-maintenance pampering as their sheltered existences are used to. They're fucking dogs. They eat their own vomit and sometimes their own shit. They couldn't give a rat's arse about some San Diego chef who bakes gourmet doggy treats; they'll eat a slab of rancid bacon if you presented it to them. Save yourselves the money. And if you really want to do something useful with that cash that will actually do something that might bring some benefit into this world, donate it to a good charity. There are plenty of them: The Sierra Club, Doctors Without Borders, The Red Fucking Cross. Take your pick! Just stop making up for the spiritual and emotional bankruptcy of your life by trying to turn your dog into a carbon copy of yourself.

And don't send your shithouse magazine to me again. I don't own a fucking dog!

Long Time No Type

Yeah, I've been out for a while. There are a few stories to be told and they'll trickle out like a runny nose over the course of the next few weeks. The short excuse is that I was busy studying and feeling sorry for myself. A month and a half is enough time off, I think, and now I'm feeling the urge to throw myself back into the fray. I'll get back to covering a few of my favorite topics...

• Custom licence plates
• The Great Organiser
• Cat Wars
• Me

I found this rolling cliche in the parking lot outside my therapist's office (yes, I'm in therapy, that's got a whole lot to do with my extended absence).
I think the owner of the Mini is a pedophile. What else could KIDWRK mean?