congratulations lisa fernandes

congratulations not on being good enough to make it to puerto rico. congratulations not on making it into the final round of top chef and the chance of winning more money in one day than you would in 4 years as a chef. no. you get none of those.

to illustrate my point i will use a reference from a favorite african safari of mine. imagine you are in a jeep seeing a pack of zebras grazing in the marsh only to get spooked by a lion. the zebras all proceed to turn and run as the lion swiftly approached. they race away and quickly the hierarchy of the zebra is splayed for you to see. the fastest move with reckless abandon and escape without ever having felt the lions breath. at the back of the pack is antonia, she is the slowest of the zebras and will be the sacrifice. however, not anywhere close to the front of the pack but just barely ahead of antonia is lisa.  she is that second-to-last zebra.

she’s not a winner. she’s not even close. she’s merely a bit faster than the slowest zebra and has once again escaped impending death. congratulations on not being a the loser. you certainly didn’t win.

oh and blais and stephanie aren’t mean: you’re a fucking bitch who always has to go against the grain. you shall reap what you sow.

finding a job on a bell curve

finding a job sucks. honestly, root canal without any drugs or an amputation without being knocked out is easier to take. okay, maybe i took that too far. but it still sucks. to make matters worse is not just getting your foot in the door and getting the interview, but now you get to wait…..and wait…..and wait…..and wait for there to be any response. often times there’s no response at all. this can be frustrating to say the least and while i understand that the company often doesn’t make split-second decisions regarding personnel the job seeker is still left in a lurch.

i have, after many nights of not sleeping well, have come up with a theory about the probability of getting a job post-interview. here’s the scenario: let’s say that you interview on a thursday and you interview well, ask and answer questions well, and they tell you that you should hear from them in 3-5 business days. i propose we look at the idea of getting a call back on a bell curve.

we all know and hated the bell curve. it was that one geek that ’screwed the pooch’ for the entire class by getting a good score on the test. what i’m thinking is that on the two ends of the spectrum we can refer to as the length of time in days. the shorter and longer the ‘callback time’ the less likely you are to get one. however, that sweet spot is in the 2-4 day marks where the standard deviation says that the probability is best.  if they call you back in the 2-4 day area they are interested and not desperate (like calling after getting a potential date’s number).  there is a certain amount of restraint in waiting that period of time.  i say this because right now i’m sitting outside of the sweet spot and i want to tear out what little hair i have left.

now before any mathematicians or professors jump all over me for using a bell curve, it’s more of a visual aid, rather than any actual mathematical process. so there.

single men with cats scare me

today while on one of my frequent trips to the grocery store i was in line behind some guy with quite a stack of goods, mostly cat food and kitty litter.  he had no ring on his finger and i was a bit frightened.  it just seems unnatural to me for a single guy to have a cat.  now, it’s not that cats scare me, nor do single guys, but the combination of the two really really creeps me out in a jack-nicholson-in-the-shining sort of way.

this guy had like 25 tins of cat food a huge thing of kitty litter and was buying frozen dinners. yes, i made the assumption, whatever, you do it too.  don’t act like you don’t.  it just creeped me out.  a single woman with a cat: no issues here.  a single guy: just wrong.  so whatever, just something i had to share.  anyone else out there get creeped out by seemingly random things?  i hope it’s not just me.

the real reason motorola is going down the tubes

i grew up with motorola in my life. they were the first walkie-talkie i ever used, the first pager i ever had, we can’t forget about such treasures as the zach morris phone or the illustrious moto bag phone, and they were my first cell phone. that was a long time ago. since then i have had some sort of cell phone but generally it has never been a motorola, save for a few.

since last week it was officially announced that the cell phone division would be spun off (though largely for accounting reasons to make the new ceo look good and make the acquisition seem palatable to a potential buyer) and the company would actually be two companies sometime in 2009. this comes on the heels of some really poor sales and a slipping market share. but there’s more reason the company is just not good: failure to innovate.

i guess even whole foods makes mistakes….

is sprial some new culinary term i don’t know about? if so hit me up and tell me.

lean like a cholo - song or music for instructional video?

while driving in the car today i turned on the radio; you know that thing we all used to listen to before cds, mp3s, xm, sirius, and ipods; and while flipping through the stations i came upon a song that i had never heard before. it had the most awful chorus that just kept repeating: ‘elbows up, side to side. elbows up, side to side’ followed by a horrible voice that really sounded like a bad voice-over saying ‘i lean like a cholo’.

that was it. i had enough. to begin let’s define what makes a cholo. according to our friends over at urbandictionary.com:

cholo - A cholo is term implying a Hispanic male that typically dresses in chinos (khaki pants), a wifebeater sleeveless teeshirt or a flannel shirt with only the top buttoned, a hairnet, or with a bandana around the forehead, usually halfway down over the eyes. Cholos often have black ink tattoos, commonly involving Catholic imagery, or calligraphy messages or family names.

okay, really a dirogatory song is one thing if it’s good; one need not reference dr. dre’s the chronic and the gratuitous use of the ‘n’ word. however this is nothing more than a modern day version of gene simmons sweatin to the oldies. let’s look at the lyrics shall we:

All the homies they know what i mean
baby let me show u how i lean(Like a cholo)

lay back bounce in the club
when we do a dance ya we do it like what

seriously. what, did you wipe your ass and come up with that? can you not put a full 16 bars together of cohesive words and make a decent song? do you need to make fun of people to get a hit? this is not music. this is music for an instructional video at best. music doesn’t just do voice-overs and give you instructions. this is what’s wrong with the music industry: shitty one hit wonders. this dude will be back flipping burgers in no time once they are done with him.

i wont even link to his video on youtube because i don’t want him to get any more than his 15 minutes. oh and in case you were wondering, the author of this post is not a hater.

in search of the perfect coffee cup

i love my caffeine, i really do. long before my most recent addiction to red bull and monster (which i am convinced cause impotence, not a first hand account though) i was and still am addicted to coffee. most specifically dunkin donuts coffee. i am not alone in that i hate starbucks coffee, see here and here, but that’s not what this search is about.

update: how to delete my facebook account

wow. okay that was way more difficult than it needed to be. apparently the privacy at facebook dot com email address is the one you need to use to get through. after the initial email spelling out my intentions my inbox greeted me with the following message:

Hi trixareforkids,

If you deactivate your account, your profile and all information associated with it are immediately made inaccessible to other Facebook users. What this means is that you effectively disappear from the Facebook service. However, we do save your profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.), so if you want to reactivate at some point, your account will look just the way it did when you deactivated. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and expect their information to be there when they return to the service.

If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, let us know, and we will take care of this for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added.

what did you not get from my first email? did my title, permanent account deletion request, confuse you? how much more transparent can i make myself. i don’t give a shit what others users do and that they expect their information to be there when they return. seriously? people do that?

ah, wonderfully today i my inbox greeted me with a notification from the people at facebook telling me that my profile had been deleted and my email was removed from the login database. success. i am free. to mark fuckerberg: i will sleep better at night knowing that i contributed to undermining your $15b valuation.

*the author of this post is not one of those bullshit armchair quarterbacks who hates on the people who create technology because deep down inside they are pissed at themselves because they couldn’t come up with it on their own. i just don’t like how hard it was to do something that should be easy. and the use of capital letters is only from a cut and paste of the email. later bitches.

cutting the cord: how to delete my facebook account

subtitle: kiss my ass mark zuckerberg!!!

i’ve grown bored of facebook. i have. realistically let’s face it, social networking has a limited lifespan. after the thrill of catching up with some high school people you were acquaintances with (really, if you were friends you would still talk to them), sharing mild laughs with people you actually talk to, spying on a few exes, wasting a lot of time taking bullshit surveys or playing bullshit games like scrabulous there is really little left to do otherwise. i’m bored. at first i thought it would drive more traffic to my blog, but no luck, i guess people just don’t like me.

anywho, this is no easy task. while it’s my information and i technically own it, i really don’t own it (or at least that’s how facebook sees it). they are “kind enough” to keep things like your profile and wall entries on the site after you ‘attempt’ to delete your account in the hopes that one day you will come back. fuck you!! if i want out, i want out. i know i accepted these terms in the eula (end user license agreement) but i really don’t care. i’m done with you. so here’s a clue for those of you out there that want to do what i did and that’s get rid of your account completely - sack up because this takes some time if you have done a lot on the site:

open access for all

it’s round 17 of the spectrum auction by the FCC and yes the $4.6 billion mark has been reached for access to block ‘c’.  what does this mean to you and me?  well that means in the auction for the 700mhz spectrum (the one that can actually penetrate walls and office buildings), a portion of that will be forced to be open to any device on any platform.  this is a great day.  schweet!!!