roy

Gott on a good hair day

2008-04-26T14:34:00.001-07:00

Triple fister

2008-02-20T17:59:00.000-08:00

2008-02-20T17:44:00.000-08:00

Regina at Garfield park, feb. '08

2008-02-20T17:03:00.000-08:00

Regina at Garfield park, Saturday

2008-02-16T16:15:00.000-08:00

Carl & the Sub

2008-01-10T12:47:00.001-08:00

Carl gets excited about the suburban's bass boat paint job by earl
scheib of San Diego.

Muni is retarded

2007-11-03T12:52:00.001-07:00

Um, why can't the SF transit authorites get their shit together? Why
don't bart tickets work on muni? Why do you have to pay in quarters to
get thru muni turnstiles in bart stations? Why doesn't bart actually
CONNECT to the Oakland airport? Want people out of cars? Make the
system convenient!

itunes for iphone sucks

2007-11-01T12:09:00.001-07:00

Why does Apple make it impossible to search for DRM-free music from the iphone's implementation of the itunes store? I will not buy music with BS strings attached, so the itunes store is next-to-useless for me. Come on Apple, fix it and I'll buy stuff from you!

Meanwhile, the iphone still has egregious feature lackings, such as (hello!) multiple SMS recipients, etc. Still the greatest phone in the world, but seriously Apple, get the priorities straight.

-Roy

Flat tax now!

2007-04-12T11:43:00.001-07:00

The US tax code is SIXTY THOUSAND PAGES. Anyone who itemizes taxes spends an AVERAGE of 28 hours figuring this all out. That's 3 days worth of work that's not used to contribute to the nation's economy. Isn't it incredibly obvious that we need a flat tax?

The argument by "progressive" tax advocates is completely ludicrous. If you make more money, YOU PAY MORE under a flat tax! Let's do an example:

Bob makes $100,000 a year. The tax rate is 20% flat. He pays $20,000 in tax.

Sally makes $500,000 a year. The tax rate is 20% flat. She is very smart and has worked harder than Bob all her life. She pays $100,000 in tax. That's as much as Bob makes total. That sure seems to me like it punishes Sally plenty for making more. But that's not good enough for "progressive" tax people. They say Sally should pay 35% or more. 35% of Sally's $500k is $175,000! That's insane! We should not punish people for being successful any more than we are.

Time to KILL THE IRS and institute a flat tax. Our current system is the very definition of insanity.

Samsung Blackjack has Lame Issues

2007-02-10T14:54:00.000-08:00

Have had the blackjack for a month or so now, and it's pretty ok in
general, but the battery life sucks. Lasts about a day and a half,
then quickly enters the spiral of death -- complains bitterly about
being low on juice, then SHUTS OFF THE PHONE without telling you it's
off, so you get no calls and can't place them. Then it
unceremoniously shuts down completely. No wonder they give you two
battery packs... but who wants to lug them around? And the "holder"
for the spare battery is a hilarious hack of an afterthought -- a
plastic box that the (lame, incompatible with anything else) plug
goes in. The box could hold 2 batteries, but charge only one. Lame.

Million-dollar ride

2006-10-25T12:28:00.000-07:00

So this sunday I'll be piloting the brand-new Moots Vamoots SL 6/4 ti from San Fran to SD, over the course of 7 days. 640 miles, 90+ miles/day average. Should be fun. Ass, you will be sore.

My main fear about this ride is that there won't be enough Budweisers, which are the key to effective training and recovery. Of course, official/serious corporate types try to enforce a gatorade regimen on you, so we'll see what kind of friction develops.

In other news, it's 80+ degrees in SF right now, not a cloud in the sky. Clearly the world is about to end.

MacbookPro Quality Problems Vex Me

2006-08-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

So I love Apple more than anyone (except the freakish nerds who keep
their apple <I>boxes</I> as collector's items... wow), but my new
MacbookPro already broke and is seriously pissing me off. My older
powerbook G4 may have a [ key that's so sensitive a light breeze will
activate it, but that's not debilitating. The p[roblems:

- the battery is slowly exploding. Yes, it's protruding about 1/8",
making the computer fail to sit flat and scratch tables. And the
charge? it lasts for AT LEAST 30 seconds. Fricking great Apple.
- the mouse button is crap, and is stuck closed 50% of[ the time. I
can't tell you how aggravating it is to have the computer selecting
and dragging and sending things at random because the mouse button
won't release it's grip on click[ness.

This computer was damn expensive and is generally radical, but a
bogus battery after 3 months? a clicker that doesn't work? COME ON
APPLE. I am a shareholder, and you better fix this shit.

Tonsilectomies are brutal

2006-07-07T23:20:00.000-07:00

Damn, just got both the tonsils and uvula removed last week, and let
me tell you, it sucks. The operation itself is a breeze, since
you're out cold, but the subsequent week is hell. Very difficult to
swallow at all - can't eat anything, barely able to drink even water,
and very challenging to get the vicodin down. Which, of course,
you're supposed to take with food... not possible. After 8 days of
opiate haze, I had the worst headache and nauseous stomach I can
remember and just prayed I'd fall asleep so it'd go away. Woke up
feeling the same. Started taking vicodins two at a time, just to be
able to drink water. Nasty, nasty taste in the back of the mouth at
all times, a combination of pussy, bloody drip, drymouth, and
remnants of whatever cottage cheese-type goop you've managed to sort
of get down. Very happy today, day 10, to finally be able to eat a
semi-normal breakfast and sweet jesus, drink some coffee. Also
finally got the voice back today, which was weak and sorry for the
last week and a half. Yet people keep trying to talk to you, you
know? Even though they know you can't talk, they just have to ask
inane questions. Pleasantries and frippery are hard to resist I guess.

Go veg!

2006-07-06T22:15:00.000-07:00

Leo Tolstoy wrote a great article on reasons to be a vegetarian.
Check it out: <A HREF="http://www.ivu.org/history/tolstoy/
step.html">http://www.ivu.org/history/tolstoy/step.html</A>

Suffice to say, I completely agree with him. It's incumbent upon the
top species on earth to be the custodian for the others, and not to
hide behind religion and societal convention as copouts for
continuing to eat meat. There is NO persuasive rationale for it.
It's bad for health, the environment, geopolitics, and of course the
animals themselves. Would you eat your cat? Then why a pig, which
is smarter than a dog? Get your head out of the sand.

LaCie drive, part II

2006-05-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

So at the suggestion of the helpful LaCie tech support dude, I tried
another USB cable I had lying around and shit, that fixed it.
Surprising to get a bad cable these days, but I did. They should
really check their supplier -- sucks to make people think your
hardware is bogus when it's just a cheapo dead cable. So the massive
mac-dad 500gb drive works fine, condemnation retracted.

New macbook pro vid conferencing kicks ass!

2006-05-10T16:18:00.000-07:00

Dude, you can have up to 4 people vid conf'ing simultaneously at no
charge over a decent connection in full-motion/sound vid. Sweet!

Active.com's interface sucks

2006-05-09T10:49:00.000-07:00

The Active.com service is great, thank god someone made it possible
to register online for all the millions of low-budget, web-challenged
events that go on all the time. But their website is seriously
weak. Half the time I use it I can't get past the first page because
of 1000 "check here if you're over 13" and "check here if you're over
18" and "initial here if you want a rabbi to bless your hot dog".
Can we hire a UI designer people? And while you're at it, how about
employing some web technologies newer than 1999? Say like
remembering who I am... they have cookies nowadays, use them chumps.
Try out Google calendar for inspiration on a great UI.

LaCie external drives are crap

2006-05-08T18:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I bought a 500gb USB 2.0 "big disk" from LaCie. It doesn't
work. I knew I'd have to reformat it because it comes with NTFS
(windows) standard, but the Mac disk utility doesn't even see the
drive. I tried 3 different computers, no dice. The instructions say
nothing about such a possibility. I therefore have to assume it's
defective. Told my friend about it, and he said he also had trouble
with LaCie external drives. So that settles that: don't buy their
stuff, unless you like returning to Best Buy frequently. Very
disappointing.

"Price Gouging" by Big Oil

2006-05-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

Nothing could irk me more (well, other than apostrophe misuse) than
the bulls*$&t bandying about of "price gouging" by "Big Oil". This
is nothing more than a cheap election year red herring by mostly (but
not only) democratic politicians calculated to curry votes from the
uninformed. Wise up, people. No oil company controls the market, it
is supply and demand that set prices. You know as well as I that the
problems are these:

MTBE being illegal, with not enough ethanol to replace it (granted,
MTBE is nasty stuff that SHOULD be illegal)
Refinery capacity (due to an onerous permitting process and
reluctance of refiners to spend billion$ when the market could
collapse at any time)
Unwillingness to allow drilling in the US, despite low risk and high reserves
Supply! we are fighting China for a finite amount of oil,
obviously the price is going to go up. this is a good thing! now
how about some decent BICYCLE PATHS? get people out of their damn SUVs.

If you really think ExxonMobil is ripping you off, BUY THEIR STOCK, DUMMY. The pay a decent dividend and you'll never go wrong with that
equity. If you want to ride the ethanol train, buy Archer-Daniels-
Midland stock - they are going big in both ethanol and biodiesel.
Love how big agricultural-products companies are competing with Big Oil now, very cool.

If you have some sort of "moral" objection to that (makes no sense), then here are simple ways you can beat high gas prices:

RIDE A BICYCLE - lose your spare tire while you're at it
Buy a VW Golf TDI (or Jetta/Passat/Touareg) - 50 mpg and does
burnouts (hybrids are for suckers, they get 35mpg or so)
Put biodiesel in your Golf TDI - it supports American farmers, it
pollutes less, and it even smells good
Better yet, run straight vegetable oil in your old Mercedes diesel
-- your friendly neighborhood Sikh is happy to give it to you after he
cooks up some delicious Indian food and your car will both run great
and smell great from it. It's FREE!
And by all means get rid of your stupid f$*%ing Hummer! GOD!
(like napoleon D. would say)

10 most rocking records ever

2006-04-30T11:02:00.000-07:00

1. Black Sabbath - Paranoid
2. Black Sabbath - Master of Reality
3. Kyuss - And the Circus Leaves Town
4. Tool - Aenima
5. Nomeansno - Small Parts, Isolated and Destroyed
6. Metallica - Master of Puppets
7. Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
8. Metallica - Ride the Lightning
9. Soundgarden - Superunknown
10. Orange Goblin - The Big Black / Thieving from the House of God

Sweak.com

2006-04-12T16:46:00.000-07:00

One of the longest-lived and least updated sites in the world is
sweak.com. Jason Senn "maintains" this repository of
random sweak things ("so"+"weak"="sweak"). Check it out.

American Airlines uses ANCIENT planes

2006-04-11T17:02:00.000-07:00

So I recently flew AA to Savannah to get out of the 40 days and 40
nights of SF rain. Would have used a good airline, but the free trip
aspect won out, even though they sucked 50k aadvantage miles due to
late booking (standard for them). Anyway, anytime I'm getting on an
MD-80 it makes me a little anxious -- after all, an Alaska MD-80 lost
its horizontal stabilizer a couple years ago shortly after takeoff
and crashed into the Pacific off LAX, killing all on board... so I
looked at the manufacturing info on the plate inside the door this
time, and guess what? The plane is NINETEEN years old, build in
1987. I was a junior in highschool then, and McDonnell Douglas was
an independent corporation, building planes in Long Beach, CA. This
plane had been boarded so many times it had dents in the doorway from
high heels. Dudes, it's time to retire planes this old -- send them
to Bolivian Air or wherever these things are put out to pasture.
Southwest is honestly not much better about this -- some of their
737s look like they were painted in 1974, like a lot of camaros -- so
let's all fly JetBlue, eh? Sure they use Airbuses, but at least they
are only 2 years old.

Evil Beaver

2006-03-31T15:07:00.000-08:00

YES! I found the greatest commercial ever made: the Evil
Beaver. This is a Miller Lite spot that ran during the '98 super bowl, which was fricking amazing because it's SO wack. What's more genius, the soundtrack? the beaver-on-motocross-bike? the chewing up of the peg-leg? or the premise itself? Incredible work by
Traktor

China Camp

2006-03-26T22:58:00.000-08:00

Dusted off the Giant NRS today and headed over the golden gate to the
China Camp trails. Muddy as Paris-Roubaix and pretty dicey. Seeing
as how I suck on uphill "technical" (silly term) trails, suffered the
indignity of many dismounts and thus the frenzied
start-from-standstill-uphill quest for forward momentum while
struggling to clip in with mud-covered cleats and pointy rocks
everywhere. View from the top was staggering, a 360 of SF, the bay,
Sausalito, and so forth. Descent was really friggin' cool. Ended up
completely saturated with mud and 40% visibility out the shades. An
ice-cold Bud on the way home capped off a pertineer perfect day.

Page Creator is pretty rad...

2006-03-24T21:55:00.000-08:00

Sure I'm partial to Google, but who isn't? The new Page Creator
dealy is so easy to use my dog Rover created a page for himself. Ok, so
I helped him, but it's pretty slick anyway. He had less luck with
Google Finance -- which he mistook for something that might be
delicious -- and his licking did not bring up any ticker symbols or
research, despite the interactive graphs and charts.