I love the recent, sarcastic description of Vista that I heard from an acquaintance with a new ThinkPad:

i fucking hate vista. every time i do anything, it becomes a security issue. it’s like being an arab at the airport.

photo by dogwelder

There are a tremendous number of things in this world which irritate and annoy me. At one time, I wanted to create a blog dedicated to this list of pet peeves, which I was going to call itssofuckingannoying.com. I never ended up doing that because when I tried to think of all these things in one sitting, I realized none came to mind. So, now I am going to try to do this life’s mission of mine one ISFA or Pet Peeve at a time. Since this one happened to me the other night, it gets the honor of being #1:

I’m calling it Due at midnight. You see, many professors make assignments and say something like, “it’s due on Monday at midnight.” In class on Monday, I asked what I think is a sensible question (I’ve had to ask this many times before with other instructors) which was, “So, you mean 11:59pm on Monday, right?”

The professor seemed somewhat confused. He got agitated (for no good reason, imho) and said something like “No, I mean it’s due before midnight on Monday!” Still… ambiguous… I pressed further and ultimately seemed to get from him that he meant it’s due before Monday, i.e. at the instant when Sunday becomes Monday. I would call this 11:59pm on Sunday to avoid confusion. So, I left the class thinking it was due one day earlier than I had previously thought. You see, to me, midnight suggests late at night… which to me means when the day ends… i.e., when someone says “Monday at midnight” I assume they mean at the end of Monday, or 11:59pm essentially.

Anyway, I learn several minutes later from a classmate that he did actually mean that but to avoid further confusion he had changed the due date and time to Monday at 11:00pm. So my question which actually served all the members of the class by clarifying this confusion ultimately led to him punishing us by docking us an hour. What’s so fucking hard about 11:59pm? It’s so fucking annoying!

Check out the Hip Hop Prototype that Eric Niu put on at the IIT Institute of Design last Friday.

It was good fun.

First, you see Kayo and Edwin tagging. Next comes the dancing competition with Eric and Jun. Finally, the “freestyling.”

I (as The Notorious G.A.B.) attempted to emcee along with my partners in rhymes MC Yeti, La Barba, and MC Latte. Jump ahead to 6:18 to see my bit.

I saw this magazine cover while waiting in line at CVS the other day and was kind of shocked by the giant “Va-jay-jay” in magenta, oblique letters. When did this term become so widely and publicly used in print and media? Someone informed me that Oprah has, in fact, been credited with promulgating the usage of this euphemism for the lovely lady parts.

Well, I for one feel that it’s unfair that Oprah gets to have all the fun with coining and popularizing new language. So, I’m making my official plea to you, the masses, to help me spread my new term for lovely man parts in the popular parlance:

Pe-ni-ni.

… it’s not a grilled, buttery sandwich anymore.

Why is it that Obama repeatedly mispronounces Massachusetts? I heard it a couple times in last night’s debate and in the previous debate too. Just seems odd…

silly hillary
bashing tactics not working
you are losing me

oh, darth nader
you love crashing the party
get out… sick of you!

barack is plan b
i suppose i can believe
hope there’s substance there

I think there are interesting discussions out there about who would be a stronger Democratic candidate against McCain (or whoever gets the Republican nomination), and I must admit that I think Hillary would have a much uglier and harder battle than Barack would. However, a person of supreme intellect who I admire but who wished to remain anonymous wrote me an email with a solid argument on the issue of experience and GTD (getting things done). Here are some excerpts:

You all should vote in your respective primaries… and you should vote for Hillary.

Barack is a good speaker and is “popular” (in the high school sense of the word), but being “inspirational” to young people who have never cared about politics is not what qualifies anyone to be President. He is attractive and carries himself well. But, the President does not need to be campaigning once he is elected. By his own admission, he is not good with paperwork, deadlines, details, administrative or managerial work. And his message that he is an outsider and opposed to special interests and lobbyists is b.s. He has already spent 85 million dollars, more than Hillary, the last time I checked the campaign financing disclosures. He has tons of special interest lobbyist groups contributing (nuclear plants, pharmaceuticals).

Although he says it is not important, he has little experience in any job he has ever had. He talks about how he was a community organizer for many years. If you actually look at his CV, this was stuff he did as a college student, on summer vacations (like get out the vote campaigns). He was elected to be president of the Harvard Law Review, but never published on it (in fact, checking his CV, I have more publications in constitutional law than he does… and I have just one). He used that position to get a job in a law firm which he kept for three years. He is a “lecturer” at University of Chicago, in Con Law… not a professor (as he sometimes says)… and that is a guest position that requires no research or scholarly publications apparently, because he has none. He ran for the Illinois Senate, but only did that long enough to network so he could run for US Senate, and then as soon as he became US Senator, used that to run for President. If he were a piece of paper, that would be called “check-kiting.” He has never stayed at anything long enough to have a record. Half the time he was an Illinois senator he voted present rather than voting for or against legislation.

I find it interesting that the media and public either ignore or discount Hillary’s experience. I think they do this because she is a woman. She was working before Bill was. She worked as a children’s public interest lawyer for years before moving to Arkansas, she was twice voted one of the top 100 lawyers in America, she opened legal aid clinics, she was encharged with turning around the educational system in Arkansas (which was ranked the worst in the South, and she turned it around during Bill’s time as governor, to the top), she was a staff lawyer investigating the Nixon impeachment, President Carter appointed her as president/chair of the non-profit Corporation for Legal Aid (I think that’s the name), and she also worked as counsel for the Children’s Defense Fund. But, since it has to do with poor women and children, maybe people don’t care about that experience? The news always limits discussion of her experience to her time as first lady, which is bullshit because she was working for 25 years before that. But, that is the problem with being married to men who are so dominant: as one of my friends once put it, if your husband is a huge oak, there is no room for another tree to grow in his shadow.

I think Obama is very naive about the world and has an inflated sense of ego. He thinks that he can sit down even with proclaimed enemies of the United States and work things out, which probably explains why Oprah endorses him. Maybe Obama can invite the terrorists in Iraq who strapped bombs onto two mentally retarded women and sent them on a suicide mission, and have a talk about the error of their ways. There are simply some “people” that are not people to sit down and talk to, and there is nothing wrong in recognizing that.

But, Obama likes to be popular, and that entails winning over as many friends as possible and kissing ass as much as possible. Maybe in Iowa we have seen him more, since we have been exposed to the candidates for twice as long as the rest of the country. He lives on fame and public adoration, and that is not a good quality.

I think it is ironic that someone who is so abstract would want to be President in the first place. Bush was abstract in his own way (he was ideological but not cerebral). We see where that got us. Obama is good on the “vision” and the abstract ideas, but he fails at the level of policy-making and covering all of the nitty-gritty. And, he does not have strong interests in solving many problems, such as finding alternative sources of energy and becoming more green, that I think are important. To me, he is just a smart guy who is among the best public speakers. But there are many people in the world who are brainy when it comes to academics and abstractions, yet have no idea how to change a light bulb.

So, there you have it. Honestly, I still haven’t really decided between the two.  But I’m not registered to vote for the primary, so I guess I leave it up to everyone else.

People, go vote… early and often.

Well, my karma must be good, because after the bad seat on the airplane (see my previous blog entry) I’ve been repaid quite kindly with the tickets for the Bulls-Suns game tomorrow. Much thanks to Val for getting me the seats. Here’s the view from the United Center website’s interactive seat finder. John and I will be chatting it up with the Phoenix bench from Row 1. Yeah!

So, I just arrived in Seattle. I think I had the worst seat I’ve ever had on an airplane. It was a “window” seat except it was windowless!  It had a wall behind it for one of the food prep areas. Then to make matters worse, the little kid in the seat in front decided he wanted his window shade pulled down. Oh, well. I guess there isn’t much to see at 36,000 feet anyway.

So, today I saw Jack Cafferty, Lou Dobbs, and Wolf Blitzer all boasting to one another on CNN about their blogs. How could I not want to compete with that?!

Thus, I find myself here.  Writing into the ether.  Pressing my words.  Woohoo!