A Japanese Helmsman and a Russian Navigator

I am male, and therefore immune to the injustices made against women in the decades before I was born and the injustices happening to women all over the United States in contemporary times.

While technically, I suspect my belief system (or lack thereof) qualifies me as an atheist, I feel no religious persecution, for I feel I have none to be persecuted. I respect that religion is important to many people, however I grow increasingly frustrated by the few who twist the underlying tenants of many religions for personal gain.

I am white, and generally of privilege. My family would not have to had worry about its skin color during the emancipation or fear where to sit on a bus during the King civil rights movement. Yet, I'm saddened by the recent Supreme Court decision which has the de facto effect of rolling back many hard fought civil rights battles, and worry about losing the purity of the melting pot.  I hope that a future version of us can restore and extend the privilege of voting to all citizens.

By contrast, I am excited by another recent set of Supreme Court rulings. While I personally consider myself neither gay nor straight, I can't help but feel that regardless of where anyone's personal life has led them, we are all now recognized as more complete citizens of this nation.

We are all a multiplication of the individual parts that create us; no individual facet of our id defines us. It is my belief that this spirit is what the founding fathers wanted to immortalize in our constitution.

To that end, I will continue to fight my own prejudices, and work toward higher levels of empathy for all individuals. I will gladly discuss and will encourage others to look at the product, not the individual factors that make up a person. However if they choose not to, I will try to accept that aspect of their individuality.

I have been very fortunate to have lived in and traveled to many different corners of our great nation. More importantly, I have met many awesome people who come from all walks of life. Over the years, it has become very clear to me that I must continue to work hard to stay true to this country's foundational declaration "...that all men are created equal."

We all deserve it.

Course 314 mark 215. Speed: Warp 7

I like things that are technological in nature. I currently own 3 computers and enough parts in various drawers and boxes to make at least 2 more.

I make video games for a living. Not shitty video games that no one ever plays, but some of the best games in the industry. I'm not ruffling my former-GE-owned-NBC-now-owned-by-Comcast-corporate-we-fucked-over-Conan feathers, it's just the reality of the studio that I work for. We're a geeky, nerdy organization; It's pretty cool.

I stream movies and TV shows that I have ripped to my hard disks (from DVDs I own...maybe one or two 'borrowed' from Netflix), which are setup in a Raid 1 array and send the data off site every few months, thus protecting them from the earthquake that will eventually turn my condo into beach front property.

My cat has a chip in the scruff of her neck, which has all of my personal information, including name, address, toothpaste preference, favorite kama sutra position, and my last will and testament all embedded on it (By the way - Irvine Animal Shelter - did you really need anything past my name, address, and phone number?).

I have owned cell phones since they were "an emergency device only" and currently use Google Voice as my administrative assistant. I can use my cell phone to remotely control my home theatre.

I love Star Trek. I have more than one friend I can sit with and quote episodes and episode titles ad naseum. I can name nearly all of the actors of all of the series that weren't the piece of crap that was Enterprise.

I'm a nerd. I'm a geek. I'm ok with it. In legal terms - I'd be described as an expert geeko-nerd-witness

I'm also trying to be less judgemental in my life, more accepting of the general douchebaggery that you see walking down the street or in a coffee shop. Oh - you didn't signal before you turned left from the far right lane? No problem. I lived. Well now - you're in the grocery checkout line and you are paying with cash and coins? No worries! I can read about Angelina's most recent international adoption. Wait! You're driving the wrong way down a one way street? That's ok! I have the Geico Gecko on my dashboard.

Trying.

It's hard to be non-judgemental when you see someone at a conference, in the bathroom, or simply just hanging out reading the paper talking to NO-ONE wearing an earbud.

If your life is that exciting that you need to be on the phone at a moments notice, ergo requiring you to have an earbud hotglued to your cranium, you're doing it wrong. Also - you look ridiculous, not cool and certainly not nerdy or geeky.

Get an admin. Learn2email. Perhaps, maybe, perhaps you could just let a phone call go to voicemail. The earth rotates at nearly 1700 km/h (~1050 mph for my US friends) and orbits the sun around 100,000 km/h. That's fast. It makes any phone call you take while walking to Starbucks look like a snail high fiving a buddy snail recorded by a high speed camera.

What's that metaphor mean? You're slow. Not in a short bus way, although many people should probably be confined to that well engineered machine. It's just perspective. There's no need for you to be rushing to get to that next call or meeting, you're already moving fast enough as it is and wearing an earbud when it's just you only makes you look like a douche.

....


Unless you are Mr. Spock or Lt. Uhura. Then the earbud is freaking awesome and totally ok.

The Middle Seat Gets the Armrest

I am not a big fan of flying. I studied engineering principles in university and I'm still amazed that planes can stay in the air. Unfortunately for me, I live in beautiful, sunny, gorgeous California, while the rest of my immediate family lives back on the adjectiveless East Coast.

I always sit in the aisle seat when I fly. I enjoy sticking my feet out into the aisle to make the flight attendants trip and scold me. I also enjoy the easy access to the lavatories protected by the federally mandated and regulated smoke detectors. I get nervous when I'm sitting, 1970s era seat belt buckled, listening to music or a movie on my iPhone that is probably transmitting more RF noise than the entirety of the airplane cockpit (yes, even in "Airplane Mode"). I get nervous, because what happens if I spontaneously combust? There's no information in the pictogram safety card that tells me what the hell to do in that situation.

But not in the airplane lavatory. I know that if for some reason I were to burst into flames, the smoke detector would alert the mid-air fire department to come and extinguish me. I imagine it would be similar to that scene in Airforce one where Harrison Ford has to jump out of his plane on a zip-line and careen over to another plane. I wonder how the fireman would keep on their red hats with all of that wind?

One of the big challenges that I have always faced in airplane seating is to understand who gets the middle armrests. Some could argue that it's first come first served, and there are plane configurations where such a system is appropriate. For this discussion, lets assume we are in a standard 3x3 737 or 757 configuration. Let's look at the pros and cons of each part of the seats.

Aisle Seat

Pros:

• Lots of Leg room options when you leverage the aisle.
• Easy access to the in-flight porta-pottie
• Easy access to flag down flight attendants without being the dick who pushed the call button and woke everyone up.
• Easy access to the overhead storage bins, allowing you to shift items in flight, thus validating the flight attendent caution speech during the final taxing to the terminal.
  

Cons:

• There are two people that have to crawl over you to leave their seat
• You don't have a wall to lean against and nap
• It's hard to tell whether or not the plane is coming in parallel to or perpendicular to the runway because you can't see out the window.
  

Window Seat

Pros:

• You have the window! If shit is exploding outside or if the plane is upside down, you're first to know.
• There's a great wall to rest against.
• You're the first person in your row to get served a drink.

Cons:

• You have to crawl over two people to get out of your seat.
• If someone in your row smells, the air is gonna get all stuck by the wall and just recirculate.
• Kids like to look out the window, which means there's probably one behind you kicking your seat.

Middle Seat

Pros:

• You only have to climb over 1 person to leave your seat.

Cons:

• You have one of the the worst seats on the plane. No one wants to sit in the middle seat, especially if they are traveling alone.

It's pretty clear that the pros and cons of each seat section do not balance out. Some might say that the middle seat deserves nothing because they obviously didn't book their flight early enough to get one of the pimp aisle or slightly-less-pimp window seats. Have some compassion. They need something to look forward to, and it should be the right to use both armrests. It's a small token, but I'm willing to give it up, given how crappy their flight is going to be.

While we're on the topic, here are some ther Airplane laws I'm working on getting ratified:

• If you or part of your body uses part of my seat because you are too big to fit in the airplane, you will buy everyone in the row as many 5 dollar cocktails as they wish.
• If you are wearing perfume or cologne on the plane, you will be seated next to the lavatories.
• If you carry on more than two carry on items, both items will be checked and routed to different airports.
• If you try to carry on something that will clearly not fit in the overhead bin, all items in that baggage will be checked, and routed to different airports.
• If you leave your bluetooth earpiece in your ear after the cabin door has been closed, you will be shot, for being a douche.

Don't Talk to Me While I'm Peeing

My Sister forced me to write this. She didn't put clothespins on my eyelids and handcuff my wrists to a chair while holding a gun to my head to watch me type these words. No, she forced me through nothing simpler than sibling rivalry.

My sister is pretty awesome. She's got twins, a husband, is a professor (Dr. Kristen is what I should technically call her - I won't, at least not until I have a cooler title than Dr. Matthew. I'm working up to Lord Matthew. Patience.) and is the only person who can truly appreciate the fact that there are parenthesis in this ridiculously long sentence.

My sister is 5 years older than me. Somewhere after I was legally allowed to buy porn, the age gap narrowed between us, and we've become close friends and confidants. However, at age 13, she was an evil, conniving supervillian who tricked me into telling her about the purple phone I had seen wrapped mere hours earlier and then promptly tattled on me to our parents. Somehow, I came out as the bad guy and she was in tears because her birthday was ruined.

But that's not why I'm here today. If a mother of twins can work full time and still find time lament about not having time to write a blog post, and still write one, then I, a shiftless 28 year old gamer can certainly type some thoughts about a growing epidemic...

Peeing. Everyone does it. Some people do it quite well. Others, need help. Cats do it in a box, dogs on the kitchen floor. It's a natural phenomenon.

It is, however, not something I discuss with people.

As a male, I am trained by society to be highly competitive and aggressive toward other members of my gender. I by my nature, tend to be more of a pacifist, but if there is one thing that fires me up is being interrupted in the men's room.

Look, I know pissing is boring. I know it's slightly awkward standing next to a man who is holding his most prized possession mere inches away from where you're doing the same thing. If you're lucky, there's a divider wall giving you a bit of privacy (and if you're really lucky, no one is looking over the divider wall cheering you on). This is one of the few moments in life where a day to day activity shares alot in common with a funeral. There is no need to say anything. Don't talk to someone while they're peeing. "But, what about XYZ circumstance? Is that ok?"

Here's a simple test you can do to figure out if it is ok to talk to someone while they're peeing:

1. Are you peeing? Don't talk to anyone while you're peeing.
2. Is the person next to you peeing? Don't talk to someone while they're peeing.
3. Is anyone in the room peeing? Don't talk while someone is peeing.
4. Are you entering a room where you expect people to be peeing? Hedge your bets and don't violate rule number 3. Stop talking and don't talk to anyone who might pee.
5. You walk into a room and are talking to someone as you enter a room. Said room happens to have a urinal on the wall and one (or both) of you start to pee. Stop talking and don't talk to him while you're peeing.*

*Note: I'm specifically talking about men & urinals here. The same applies for stalls. Ladies - I don't think I've ever seen one of you go to the restroom alone. I have no idea what goes on in there, nor do I really care. If for whatever reason you happen to find yourself in a situation next to a man while he's peeing, please obey rule 2.


Other etiquette:

1. If you're one of the classy individuals who decides to not take the above test, please understand that if you start up a conversation with someone who is peeing, you will likely be ignored or at a minimum talked about behind your back as a "pee talker."
2. There is a very elaborate decision tree involved in choosing a urinal in the men's room. If you don't know the decision tree, you shouldn't be in the men's room. If you violate the decision tree AND strike up a conversation, don't be surprised if you end up in a hospital.
3. Wash your hands after you are done peeing. It's gross when you don't.

Above all else: Don't fucking talk to me while I'm peeing.

Competition

I was never much into playing sports. I participated as a child, largely because my parents have always had the upper hand in determining what’s ‘best’ for me (Granted, if I’m allowed to dictate what I do for myself, I seldom leave the house and avoid the terrors that await me at the Kwik-E-Mart and Bowl-a-rama, but that’s neither here nor there – coincidentally, neither is my albinism).

Swim team, soccer, track, basketball, gymnastics, even tee ball are all sports that I’ve participated in at some level throughout my life. Sadly, Nintendo’s track & field power pad does not count toward All American Athlete status, otherwise I’d be sitting pretty in a huge mansion and a hall of fame trophy would be on my mantel.

Don’t get me wrong - the whole team thing is great as is the rush you get when you win, but the modern sports that are so diligently covered on ESPN have been around for so long that I argue it’s time for something new (Except for Cricket, that shit never gets old). Once I make my billions of dollars by working incredibly hard and investing wisely (ha!) I plan to start my own alternative sports network. Take a look at some of my headline shows:

Competitive World’s Smallest Violin Playing
Competitive Steer Branding
Competitive Naked Snow Rolling
Competitive Tooth Brushing
Competitive Hope No One Just Saw You Nose Picking
Competitive SAT / Achievement Test Cheating
Competitive Celery Digesting
Competitive Laundry Folding
Competitive Couch Potatoing
Competitive Nails-On-Chalk-Board Scratching
Competitive Phone Dialing
Competitive Flat on Your Face Falling
Competitive Pickle Jar Opening
And finally…
Competitive Dog Sticking his Nose in a Stranger’s Crotch Apologizing

Not all of these would be for everyone to watch, nor would I personally want to see the Stanley Cup for the world’s best Celery Digester, but I think it would spice up the rather bland television and reality TV nonsense that plagues the airwaves today. At the very least, they would all be more interesting than golf.

Unhandled Exception

There, in a frame on the wall, is my diploma. Not a nasty, dirty, wet wall, but a white, clean, dry wall. It is my office wall, and that means there’s a computer nearby.

If you look carefully at my degree (thoughtfully paid for by my parents), you’ll notice a few things. My full name and the issuing school come to mind, but those are pretty common to all of the diplomas handed out on that sunny day in May of 2003. Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering. That’s what it says. It’s pretty long. So long in fact, that it barely fits on the same line. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a longer degree title issued from my school. But what do all of those words mean?

It means that not only do computers piss me off when they fail and get a “blue screen of death,” it also means that I am ultimately accountable for everything that has ever gone wrong with computers since the Greek Gods first graced humans with the abacus. Now, as any self-respecting American working in a corporate organization would do, I shift much of the blame onto my coworkers as possible to save my own ass. Joking aside (ahem), the truth is after having studied computers and software at length for the majority of my life, I have come to realize that now more than ever I wonder how the damn things work as frequently and reliably as they do.

Don’t believe me?

Count to 1 silently in your head. Did you make it? Good. How much did you get done in that one second? Consciously you only did one thing, you counted to 1. Unconsciously, you probably counted to 1 under your breath, ignoring my instructions, shoved some blood around your circulatory system, took a breath, blinked, took the image that was projected onto your retina and flipped it, divided some cells, swallowed, used countless muscles and nerves, and did a host of other bodily functions that I won’t even mention. Take a guess at how many things were going on in your body at one time in that one second that you didn’t even think about. What’s the number? Thousands? Tens-of-thousands? Millions? I don’t know, as I said I’m only a computer geek.

What I do know is that a modern desktop computer can do somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 5 BILLION instructions every second. Does it make mistakes? You betcha. All the time in fact – certainly more than you realize. There are actually all kinds of nifty methods that nerds way smarter than me have used to get that error rate down, or to recover so quickly from an exception that you don’t even notice it. In fact, computer scientists specifically design software to try to handle anything that an unpredictable human can come up with. That doesn’t stop most people from shouting obscenities at machines when something unexpected arises. Keep in mind, these are machines that are only doing what some imperfect human has told them to do. (Actually, now that I think about it, some of my best insults and profane phrases are directly related to Microsoft’s mother.) In any case, if the rare exception does occur, just dial the help desk and they’ll solve the problem, or in more dire consequences, give you a new computer that is far 'superior' to your old. At the very least you can bitch at them and feel better about your current predicament.

Therein lies the irony. Think back to all of the stuff you were doing when you were counting to 1. Did you ever stop to think about how often that perfect computer in your head makes mistakes? Ever open a web browser window to a search engine and forget why? How about pick up the phone and forget whom you were about to call? When’s the last time you made a grocery list and left it sitting on the table? Every time you set the alarm to PM instead of AM, have something on the ‘tip of your tongue,’ use the phrase ‘Now why didn’t I think of that?”, put your shoe on the wrong foot, lose your car keys, or have something ‘go down the wrong pipe' you’ve had an unhandled exception…in your brain. I make mistakes like this on an hourly basis. Probably more frequently.

Who do you call when that happens? There’s no brain-fart hotline in India to answer questions or to listen to you bitch about your own absentmindedness or stupidity (Note to self: possible lucrative business opportunity in opening a brain-fart helpdesk).

Here’s an interesting thought. For every 10 minutes of an hour that your computer did something wrong, it did 3 trillion seemingly correct tasks in the other 50 minutes. When was the last time you gave the impression that you did something right 3 trillion times in a row?

I've Got Leghairs in My Eyebrows

I wish I could take credit for being the first person to have put these words together in this particular order. Never before have six words created such a clear mental image in my mind. I wish I could draw for you what I see when I read that sentence aloud. You are probably fortunate that I am quite inept at art, because frankly, it’s pretty clear the type of image it creates, and it’s even more evident that it’s gross.

Grooming in general is such a tremendous pain in the ass. I’ll never understand how the makeup companies have convinced people of the need to rip out eyebrows and then draw them back on with a pencil. One of my personal beefs is shaving, largely because it just plain sucks. It’s no wonder really. Think about it at the most basic level. You are putting a sharp blade…on your skin. What group of Darwinist fools conjured up this scenario? If you screw up, your body has no problem telling you how much of a dumbass you are by rushing pints of blood to a cut smaller than a Tic-Tac. There’s a reason one of the weapons in Clue is a knife.

For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that having hair is part of being a mammal. Let’s also ignore the fact that humans are the only creatures vain enough to find it necessary to chop off stuff that purportedly exists keeps us warm. (When was the last time you saw a chimp, or whale for that matter, get a bikini wax?) We’ve got space heaters, blankets, and IcyHot to take care of that.

Let’s instead create another mental image – what if the Earth had to shave? Picture a gigantic forest. Not a scary Blair Witch style forest that can lower the IQ of attractive teenagers to a point where they end up dead at the hands of a barely adept serial killer. No, we’re going for a Bambiequse (pre-fire) style forest here. A place where skunks and rabbits are friends and butterflies can make a fawn stumble and fall simply by landing on its nose. Green, lush, tranquil. Picture that setting as the US’s beard. (Or leg/arm hair if you prefer. It doesn’t matter.)

Now, let’s take what we do to our legs or face every day, and explode it to the macro level. Try to imagine a measurement scale where one tree = one hair. When you get to that scale, think of how big of a razor you’d have to have to chop down Bambi’s home as quickly as we slice up our own tiny trees every day.

Without doing any kind of actual mathematics (I only hold a minor, so I don’t need to do real research), I would estimate that one blade of the razor would be 160 miles long and 10 miles wide. In today’s high tech society, you get mocked and judged if you use any less than three blades to ritualistically mutilate yourself after bathing, which means our forest felling Gillette is at least 4800 square miles. That’s about the size of Connecticut, for those who are keeping score.

So now, if we take the beard scenario, we are dragging a Constitution State sized blade across the country and along both coastlines from San Francisco, down around the goatee of Texas, to Washington D.C. skipping only Oklahoma and part of Arkansas (our imaginary US mouth would fall in this area). Every day. Can you imagine the havoc this would cause in our day-to-day lives? The collateral damage on the US highway system alone would be devastating, particularly since roads are already in a seemingly perpetual state of construction.

While a scenario like this might benefit evil corporations like Grandma’s Friendly Concrete, Paint Supplies, and Baked Goods, I really think that the global economy would be more than a little impacted by the constant rebuilding and subsequent destruction of the cities and roads across the United States. It seems naturally logical that we don’t destroy our country every day. Some might say it would spare us catcalls about affectations from France and New Zealand, but who cares about them anyway?

Let’s shrink back down a few levels again. Did you ever stop to think about the collateral damage you are doing to your skin every time you put your own little Constitution state against it? Neither had I, until today. I wonder how many microscopic empires I’ve crushed and tollbooths I’ve knocked over without a second thought.