Sunday, May 31, 2009

Drunk Tank

The drunk tank (aka any Metro ride from DC back to the 'burbs from like 12am - 3am) is by far the highlight of any night out in DC.

Last night, there were people racing down an escalator going the opposite way, a guy telling another to "meet me.. fucking wherever", and a group of guys who I'm pretty sure caused a girl to get off earlier than her actual stop.

Obviously, it's also luck of the draw depending on which car you're in. Sometimes there will just be a bunch of passed out people, but if you're lucky you'll get at least a few rowdy people who make the trip quite entertaining.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

New Car

I bought a 2009 Infiniti G37x yesterday.

It's slightly used with about 7k miles, but looks completely new.

It's a very slick car, and is leaps and bounds above the Civic in terms of performance, comfort, pretty much everything.

It's crazy quiet, even at 60mph, and the sound system is ridiculous.

My favorite feature is the push-button ignition. Instead of using a key to start the car, you just push a button. I need an AV cable to connect my ipod to the stereo system and then I'll be set.

There's also a feature that tells you how many miles are left before you run out of gas.

I'm pretty sure I can be a lot more lenient with it (take curves a lot sharper, brake with a lot less room), but so far I'm being careful. Otherwise it's only a couple of weeks before I'd get a ticket/get into an accident ;)

I can see why some people fall in love with their cars.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

new favorite website

TFLN

They finally have an RSS feed (went live today), but surprisingly you can't text your text to them - you have to either email it to them or fill out a form on their website. Isn't that ironic?

Does anyone else think it's weird that you can say 'text your text' and not even blink? Using the same word as a verb and noun in the same sentence!

I can't even imagine trying to maintain a site where they get such a massive amount of input and uploading them in a timely fashion. From what I can tell, they don't have any ads or any other source of revenue, yet getting them up on the site is a full-time job. Not sure how they're able to do it.

At least on TFLN and FML, they don't have to come up with witty headlines like the overheard sites.

Monday, May 04, 2009

FML, fo real

So after the awesome beginning to the weekend with my hard drive crash on Friday, I went to volunteer on Sunday at the National Science Bowl. Why? Because I'm just that cool.

I was the scorekeeper and basically marked the score on this massive flipchart. The training session in the morning was pretty intimidating and it seemed pretty hard since there's a bunch of rules and different ways each question can be scored, but it wasn't that bad once you got the hang of it. I also figured out that coaches from both teams are also keeping track and there's an official "rules judge" who also keeps score, so you're not alone - and if you fuck up, people will let you know immediately. Out of 9 rounds, I only messed up twice, which isn't bad at all.

I'm not sure how the teams are created, but it seemed like every team had 1 or 2 good people, and the rest were just sort of there for the free trip. There was probably 1 person on every team who didn't answer a single question.

My favorite part of the rounds was definitely the bonus questions cause you heard them actually discussing the question. It was great when everyone on the team was just as clueless about the question as the audience ;)

My favorite team was The Meadows School from Las Vegas. Shoutout! I don't think they won any games, but they had the most personality, and they had 2 cute, but kinda dumb, Indian girls.

So the tournament was pretty fun and interesting for the first 7 rounds. After that, I was done. They only gave us food in the morning, so I had a massive headache and was really tired by Round 8. On the way home, I got into a car accident. I was getting on the highway when I hit a slick spot and my car turned 90 degrees and half of it ended up on the pavement. I was about to back out again onto the highway when an oncoming car hit me. Fun times. I'm fine though, and so is the other guy. But my car's done, and it's officially time to get a new one.

We're getting an estimate for the damage tomorrow, but there's really no rational reason to get it fixed since it's old and its time has passed.

It's been a great weekend. Hope yours was just as eventful!

Saturday, May 02, 2009

MacBook HD failure!

So I thought Macs were supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Well, even sliced bread can have its flaws apparently. On Friday night, when I was just using my computer normally, my Mac just froze. This was the first time that had happened since I got it 1.5 years ago, so I thought it was pretty strange.

I restarted it, and even more bizarre behavior continued - a flashing folder with a question mark appeared, instead of the normal apple. Yeah, so after surfing the web on my iPhone, I found out that it was most likely a hard drive failure. Luckily, I didn't have much important data on there, except for songs and photos, so I wasn't too worried.

I have to admit that the people at the Apple store are pretty good at their jobs. I was sort of expecting the people at the Genius Bar to be condescending and rude (just look at the name!), but they were actually pretty nice and helpful. They were able to replace the hard drive (for free!) in about 20 minutes.

Apparantly, there was a "known issue" with the hard drives in my model of the MacBook, so they didn't charge me. I dunno how they do it at Apple, but at my company, we put known issues in our release notes so that we can't be blamed for it later. It would have been nice to have known about the known issue so I could have backed up my non-essential data before it just disappeared.