As far as I'll go

woot.com humor that will fly by too quickly due to a woot-off

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:42:40 -0400

Oh, You’d Be All About This If They Were Two Chicks

iPods. Sansas. They’re okay. They have their place. But the Coby 2GB Media Player is a different sort of player. Can’t it have a place in the world too? Can’t it find… someone special?

“Hey, Trisha! There’s a concert in my pants and you’re invited!”

ugh

“No? Okay, well, Polly? Concert in my pants? You’re invited?

Grow up, Stewart

“What? I’m just trying to- Janet! Janet! Have you heard about the concert in my pants?”

“Whoa, whoa, Stewart! What’s going on!”

“Aw, Bobby, I’m trying to tell people all about the Coby 2GB Media Player. Look at this, it’s so tiny, but the speakers are built right in for better sound!”

“Hey, they swivel out! That is cool!”

“Yeah, and you can play music and movies and there’s a built-in FM radio and everything! I’ve got about eight hours of video on there right now, which is perfect, because now I’ve got-”

”-a concert in your pants. Got it, Stewart. But you know, women don’t always see things the same way us guys do. You can’t talk to them in crude and frank manner. Unless you’ve got muscles and a cool car. Which, let’s face it, you don’t.”

“What? That’s crazy! Then women are stupid! And I hate them!”

“I’m very glad you think so, Stewart. Because I’m really interested in that concert.”

“Really? You want to know more about the concert saved on my Coby 2GB Media Player?”

“No, Stewart. I’m talking about the one in your pants.”

“Bobby, I… I never noticed until right now how beautiful your eyes were…”

“Come on, Stewart. Let’s drive up to Vermont and destroy the institution of marriage… together.”

Black bean soup at the adobe cafe

Sat, 16 May 2009 22:20:04 -0400

Black bean soup at the adobe cafe

Why I'm keeping my PhillyCarShare membership

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:25:32 -0400

Some aspects have not been disputed from all I spoke with:

PCS has been agressivley mis-managed - including its finances, customer service, gas-card scandal, & last-minute stealthy membership change
PCS has strayed from its mission (perhaps unwittingly)
The loss of PCS leaves Philadelphia with a single carshare provider
Folks who rent once/month or less will pay more under the new pricing

So, those things leave me the following questions:

Might there be opportunities to get PCS restructured for transparency & competency?
Can PCS sustain a business model capable of funding its operations through times of lean grant & foundation funding?
How bad could it be in a zipcar-only city?
Does careshare represent a good value for me?

(my) Answers, in order

Yes - I believe there will be extremely vocal minorities among both the group that stays and the crowd that leaves (but might come back under the right circumstances). The thing the public has in its corner is PCS’s focus on one market - if they don’t serve it well enough they’ll be increasingly marginalized. A couple of brave board members can suitably shake things up with well-timed exposure. Finally, I believe Philadelphia hungers for a successful PCS, even given it’s righteous anger over the current debacle.
Absolutely. With unemployment so high, the future of american automakers uncertain, credit scarce, and all of the more ordinary reasons car ownership is only questionably worthwhile - there is certainly money to be made. Anything including a renegotiation or re-bidding of their current insurance contracts, on-vehicle advertising, aggressive marketing for fleet-replacement, etc - could tighten up the business model. I think profits from organizational fleet replacement contracts could subsidize accessible monthly rates for low-income residents in a limited fashion; fundraising development might restore full accessibility or grant programs in the futre.
Fuckin’ lousy. Their “philly wheels” plan has a built-in expiration date of PCS’s bankruptcy or acquisition. Further, Philadelphia is merely one of many markets that will be served in a profitable rather than blanket manner. I feel Zipcar has a place here - visitors should have a carshare option while in town, and frequent travelers shouldn’t have to buy two memberships. But as a working-class town with strong non-profit & DIY communities, we owe it to ourselves to maintain a homegrown non-profit solution. If PCS is allowed to fail, it’ll be extremely difficult for something else to rise anew if it has to face an established national competitor.
Sometimes. I don’t own a car anymore and don’t plan that changing soon. Bicycle, septa, carpooling with driving friends, and some walking are my M.O. I also like a taxi regularly enough, it’s perfectly spontaneous for one-way trips about town. AND, for the times I need a car rental it’s sometimes better to rent from a chain. All that said, the ladie & I have been using cars a little more often than once/month between the two of us. It’s a useful option when I need to make or combine short spontaneous trips. Further, PCS has a little-advertised option to pay $125 for a year of membership instead of $15/month. That comes out to a little over $10/month, a significant difference. It makes that one trip/month cost about $20, which is still cheaper that what it’d usually cost for the round-trip taxi.

I understand folks who don’t want to take the gamble on a year membership and/or are rightly angry at PCS for dropping the ball. I hope PCS gets strong enough to regain your business, and keep mine.

fuckyeahcilantro: SAT practice question—laying pipe :...

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 08:26:10 -0400

fuckyeahcilantro:

SAT practice question—
laying pipe : fleshlight :: enjoying cilantro : this

gideonsbible: everybodycares: “The modern conservative is...

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:30:40 -0400

gideonsbible:

everybodycares:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

- John Kenneth Galbraith

I agree with rollertrain’s below critique, but I think it...

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:31:29 -0400

I agree with rollertrain’s below critique, but I think it applies only to those who don’t need to have the fire lit under their ass by such a manifesto

rollertrain:

The Cult of Done Manifesto [via (and sorry) rileydog]

These Bre Pettis/Kio Stark commands have been spreading around the internet like warts on a frat dick. Every time someone sends me this link or reblogs this manifesto, thinking “YEA, dude! This is awesome and correct!” I want to draw a question mark on her face with my old red editing pen.

This interweb trend-of-the-month has some good points: Failure can be a good thing, and I like the line about the point of being done is to start a new project. And the destruction line is interesting. But the rest of this crap needs some editing.

If you don’t have an editing stage, your shit is going to suck unless you’ve been doing the same kind of thing for 20 years. Also, “the engine of more” makes me want to vomit and cancel Matt’s MAKE magazine subscription, then mouth-rape the cult of BoingBoing with my fist as an exclamation point.

And laughing at perfection? Why? And whose? Perfection doesn’t even exist. But it’s a pretty tough goal to aim for, so why would you encourage people to laugh at it? So they can make even more sloppy crap that the world totally needs right now?

The most irritating line is “BANISH PROCRASTINATION.” Really. I would love to meet someone who has succeeded in banishing procrastination, though I probably have a better chance of having sex with that ghost I dream about.

Everyone procrastinates, and lines like this just make them feel even worse. Procrastination is fear and apprehension. If you ignore it completely, it’ll figure out how to get out of your denial cage and bite your ass. Best to deal with it on realistic terms.

And commanding your Pettisheads to trash their ideas if they haven’t started working on them after a week of thinking them up is dumb, arrogant and cruel. A week is nothing. Even on your internet.

I don’t know this dude, but I don’t trust anyone who writes their own manifestos or encourages fangeeks to literally or figuratively throw away their hard work. Maybe MAKE’s next issue will include instructions on how to build a long-distance heat-seeking ball-gag missile.

how my soup happened, 2009 edition

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:50:39 -0400

look through recipe books since I never use them in lieu of internet
put them back on the shelf briefly after irritation since they’re better suited for planners, go-getters, and do-gooders.
go back to tried & true method of throwing a bunch of ingredients in the search bar & seeing which recipes get spat back out
open 8 or 9 tabs, read through each recipe, find slight dissatisfaction with each one but useful tidbits on relative quantities
time to bring the laptop into the kitchen to start cooking
fuck, even trying 3 different tactics to reduce tearing from onion gas, my eyes still hurt.
- As of this writing, with soup simmering, eyes still hurt. I’m glad I chopped up that spiteful onion.
in a groove, mirepoix is about to happen. Oh, I was planning on adding spinach or a leafy vegetable & these celery stalks come with leaves that I normally chop off. Not this time, Gadget. In the back of my head.. “I hope this doesn’t taste like ass”
laptop forgotten as just a fancy radio. I got it from here, Bruno
and there goes my hopes for mirepoix when the carrots are moldy in the bag. That crisper failed at its duties, it’s getting demoted to the rank of drawer, with a half-written addendum of “whom could’ve been simply a shelf”. In my last house, I stuffed the drawers in the basement and simply used the space as a shelf for the same reason. DON’T TEMPT me drawer. Shape the fuck up.
looking at other vegetables, I guess scallions & some more celery are gonna pull double duty tonight. A few mushrooms, jalepeno with seeds, a few cloves of garlic, & the rest of a wrinkled ginger round out the raiding of the drawer.

Steve’s soup of what he’s got left and hopes it tastes good:

3 onions
2 full stalks of celery
1 bunch of scallions
0 lbs of carrots because they’re fuckin’ moldy
3 cloves of garlic
1 jalepeno
½ pack of mushrooms, or a whole pack if you have it
about 1 man’s pointer finger to the first knuckle worth of ginger (skinned)
olive oil
soy sauce
1 lb tofu
1 qt of vegetable stock
some wheat noodles (I used ½ lb of buckwheat thin noodles)
salt & pepper

Chop yo’ shit. dice onions & celery, chop scallions, slice mushrooms, mince garlic, finely dice jalepenos without cleaning out seeds, carefully mince ginger.
Saute yo’ shit. Olive oil, in bottom of the stock pot.
Once the onions start to turn clear, add enough soy sauce to coat everything without it pooling much at the bottom. Let it continue to cook uncovered, mixing occasionally.
Dice tofu into 1cm squares (more or less), & pan-fry in olive oil until the sides are partially browned.
Add vegetable stock & tofu
Add about 1 qt of water, using the vegetable stock carton if your stock was store-bought.
Add some more soy sauce (I used something near 1 cup?)
Salt, pepper. yeah.
Add noodles. Reduce to simmer. Blog about it.
I just tasted it, it is edible.
8-)

54 really nifty digital paintings

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:19:33 -0500

54 really nifty digital paintings:

This is a retwit from @sbspalding (who writes an amazing blog). The images wouldn’t get justice on a cell phone, so I retwat here (hmm, does that verb work in the past tense?). The page is called 54 “mind blowing” digital paintings. I’m not sure they’re all mind blowing, but it is a damn good collection from a variety of artists. It’s better than the average few minutes spent at DeviantArt or the like.

Super Efficient Floating Wind Turbines

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:24:00 -0500

Super Efficient Floating Wind Turbines:

Make sure to visit the comments too, where I laid some smack down.

Few traditions are as annoying as the worship of bipartisanship, for it ignores the fact that sometimes one party gets things disastrously wrong.

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 10:49:16 -0500

Few traditions are as annoying as the worship of bipartisanship, for it ignores the fact that sometimes one party gets things disastrously wrong.

"It'll shoot your eyes out" chili

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:17:49 -0500

Well, it shot mine out since I didn’t properly handle the habaneros properly.

So I started with this chili recipe, modified about half of the ingredients/quantities & added a few ingredients - including veggie faux ground meat.

It’s a good looking meal but it looks more like the insides of a burrito with the works than a chili with that homogeneous reddish-brown color. It turned out to be about the tastiest chili I ever made - full of flavor, just enough spice, and plenty of accompanying (but not overwhelming) heat.

move

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:03:03 -0500

In line with my previous post, if you google with me (chat, email, calendar, reader, docs), please do so with my new address

steven.feldman at gmail.

Resolutions & Plans for 2009

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:40:00 -0500

Thanks to MD for the idea.

Resolutions. These are things I must do for the significant betterment of myself.

Start higher education.
- For fuck’s sake, I work a block from CCP at the moment.
- I don’t want to do IT for the rest of my life. I’ll stay computer & tech savvy, but I’d like tech to be tools in my work rather than work’s primary focus.
Drive towards having as good a relationship with my brother as the one I share with my sister.

Plans. These aren’t resolutions, merely things that can result in lifestyle improvements and satisfaction of pursuits.

Get the house feeling like home. It’s moving at a slow crawl.
Blog more regularly. My writing already suffers and I do have a lot to say.
- Blog about my fantastic trip before I forget it.
- Use Yelp.com like I mean it.
Move to a more robust and variable password variety system. Most of my identities have a unique and relatively strong password, but they could be stronger, tougher to extrapolate the others from, and still easy for me to categorize.
Fully migrate my google identity & primary email to Steven.Feldman@ (calendar, contacts, docs, chat, etc). Minimize use of my bootsector.org account with the intent to leave it entirely, and migrate chickencow@ to solely a mailing list/bulk/spam account.
- There are a lot of Steven Feldmans out there apparently. I’ve received some funny emails.
- Google Docs. ‘nuff said
BSG from beginning to end. I’ve hardly seen any and I owe it to the small but starving sci-fi fanboy in me. Thanks Sipes
Stay away from timesink video games. Fallout 3 is kicking my ass in awesomeness and squandered time.
Decide on and build a network at home functional for Anne & I. Desired results: RAID file/media server, media PC for downstiars, comfortable office PC, strong wireless access in basement, yard, and all rooms.
- I really liked the apple TV. Is there a linux equivalent, and is it as good? Will Apple TV work with non-apple file servers? DVR?
- No Windows OS in the house except for laptops.
Play Go a little more regularly
Get certifications while I’m still at NTR

Shit Shit where'd it go?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:44:18 -0500

My bike, all locked up
Police station two blocks south
Yet snatched by some bitch

Overnight, locked up in front of Anne’s in South Philly. Called police this morning to leave a report, but since we don’t have a non-emergency police hotline, I’m still waiting for a callback. If you see someone riding this bike, please push him/her into traffic. He/she might survive, since my helmet was also taken.

Description:

Univega FS750 mountain bike - 24 speed
Cobalt blue, oversized tube frame mountain bike
Asphalt tires - angled tread channels rather than the knobby tread found on normal mountain bike tires
Black crate mounted on rear via black aluminum luggage rack
Black men’s comfort seat with a slightly peeling surface
Two water bottle clamps, on top and bottom of lower main bar
Blue & black saddlebag mounted under seat - the crate is purposely cut in the front to enable access to the saddlebag
Hook for U-lock mounted on seat - locking bar of U-lock would rest perpendicular to the seat post
If the tires were to be removed, one hub should have a rubber track on the inside and the other should have a cloth track
Inside the saddle bag should be an old brass Presta valve converter, likely located in the mesh pocket

Other accessories (may or may not be present)

Thief
Bell helmet - blue/black/white with a tiny red triangle on back and black chinstraps
Handlebar-mounted light
3-LED rear light mounted on rope on back of crate
Green & white nylon rope - clothesline?
Black unsheathed bungee cord with 4 or 5 or 6 holes for hooks (I don’t remember)
Thick braided steel cable with loops on either end. Sheathed in clear plastic with orange caps over the loop knots.
I do not recall if I scraped my name anywhere on the bike. If I did it is probably on the bottom and may be in english or may be my first name in 4 Japanese Katakana characters

Image and description of bike specs (my bike is blue, pictured bike is black):

http://www.bikepedia.com/QuickBike/BikeSpecs.aspx?Year=1998&Brand=Univega&Model=FS-750&Type=bike

My twitter made it into this debate synopsis

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:26:12 -0400

My twitter made it into this debate synopsis:

see if you can figure out my twitter ID (if you aren’t already a follower)

Why I took my money & ran.

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:56:43 -0400

A couple of months ago, Wachovia bank posted a loss of $9bil. I didn’t follow the story enough to know whether it was a cash loss or a write-down of bad debt, but either way that’s a lot of money. The FDIC sounds like a suitable institution under normal circumstances, but I am somewhat skeptical of its effiacy should some of the larger banks buckle. Given our government’s propensity to borrow excessively to fund unnecessary shite that has very limited return on investment, such as bailouts of investment institutions or, say, war; I am uncertain the US can put cash in place to prop up investor money for large quantities of people*.

I moved my money to PFCU - a federal credit union. I’ve been long-dissatisfied with my money being part of a large pool that’s bandied about by wealthy folks indifferent to my needs. I’m now quite satisfied to have my money in an organization in which its board is elected by its depositors, and is by mandate designed to serve its depositors. I’m ~~not~~ suggesting you do the same.

With the following article, I’m glad I saw the writing on the wall.

http://consumerist.com/5055292/now-that-the-largest-bank-failure-in-us-history-is-over-is-wachovia-next

if you want something done right

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:37:20 -0400

you gotta do it yourself.

scallop scampi with shallots, saffron, parsley. over pasta & asparagus

An American economy based on opening containers from China and selling the contents at Wal-Mart, or trading houses back and forth, provides scant profitability.

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:22:09 -0400

That quote succinctly describes why I might yet bounce even with Obama 08 and why I’ll almost certainly bounce with McCain 08. I won’t tolerate my (eventual) lifetime of working for a living being eroded or made irrelevant by the machinations of an elite and indifferent class.

Original quote here, thanks klang

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JI16Dj08.html

because not just people in my google reader should see this.

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:44:24 -0400

because not just people in my google reader should see this.

My speed story from..

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 13:23:00 -0400

Anne’s Golden Shower short story event, on 09/11/08 (prewritten story to follow)

15 minutes given to write, with the following agreed-upon lines to be included:

opening: In the dim light, her nose closely resembled a meatball sandwich
middle: Sayonara, mother fuckers.
closing: It was as if none of this, excluding this moment, had ever happened.

In the dim light, her nose closely resembled a meatball sandwich. A toasted cheese, 3-week old sandwich, at that. That’s what face plants in concrete will do ya, Tony mused. That’s also what dissin’ my peeps will do to ya too, ~~he c~~ coming back with a satisfied grin. Tony then gazed ~~lovingly~~ lovingly at Maria’s scarred face, currently sleeping fitfully. “Why she gotta be dat way?”, he muttered out loud.

He thought back to their wedding, all roses and flowing wine and fried chicken. Longingly, he recalled the honeymoon – ~~spending a long~~ lounging all weekend at a divey hotel in North Wildwood. “God damn did Maria look hot in that bikini, and god damn was I smart to wear shades so I could scope the teenage tarts and their tight little illegal asses”, he thought to himself. His mind jolted to two years later – their anniversary at the same hotel in North Wildwood, with the same shades and the same (well, new) hot totties about. Some young blond jackass from New England started chatting with MY Maria. I got up like the living speedy dead, dragged his sorry ass to the waves, and hurled him in like a sack of potatoes. “Sayonara, Motherfucker,” with a satisfied grin. Fast forward to dinner the other night, and cousin Luke taking a third helping. Maria joked “you gonna walk that off, right?” Tony got all sorts of mad and slammed her head into the stove. From the living room.

At that moment, Maria stirred, and Tony lost his train of thought. They looked at each other, and went “I LOVE YA” at the same time. It was as if none of this, excluding this moment, had ever happened.