Category: Uncategorized

Amy & I were clicking around this evening and came across Battlefield: Earth. We marveled over its badness, then checked out the Netflix page for it. Two great things occurred:

a) “Members who enjoyed this movie also enjoyed: Wild Wild West, Batman & Robin, Van Helsing, Planet of the Apes, and The Chronicles of Riddick”, and

b) This review: “I watched this movie for free one winter, working for a local cable company. Part of my job was to monitor the various cable channels to make sure there were no problems. And even though I was indirectly paid to watch, I still felt ripped off.”

The big year-end issue of my magazine is split between a directory of contract service providers (2nd half) and a series of profile pages of advertisers. Some of them by a profile/ad spread, others just buy a profile. My associate editor and I get the text and images in, lay them out, send low-res PDFs over to each client, and put in whatever revisions they request and send out more PDFs.

Since there are around 120 profile advertisers, you can imagine that there’s lot of project management involved. We also need a certain amount of perspective on which profiles are going to be smooth and which are going to “take some work.” Every morning, I open up a spreadsheet that contains the status of every “unapproved” company (their info gets moved to a worksheet called “Yay! Done!” when they’re approved). It reminds me which companies I need to harass and which ones I’ve yet to get started with because I know their profiles are going to be a major hassle.

When it’s a new advertiser, we have to engage in some handholding. When that new advertiser is overseas, this process can get a little more taxing. When the new overseas advertiser sends files from a program that you haven’t seen since 1998, it can make you throw your hands in the air. And when two of them send files from that same program. . .?

Today, I received e-mails from two separate accounts in India, and they both sent me files from Corel Draw. I looked at these attachments and their “.cdr” extensions and I thought, “Are they using Windows98? Did they send these e-mails over Prodigy? Are they just discovering Celine Dion and Titanic? Should I ask them to resend everything on a ZipDisk?”

It felt like the time I found my old collection of mix tapes up in the attic and realized that I don’t even own a machine that can play them.

Yesterday, my dad picked up a new iPod. He called me to ask what sort of video files it can play. I wasn’t sure — outside of the movies and videos you can buy at the iTune store — because I haven’t bought a new iPod since July 2004. It’s true: I don’t even have a color display on the thing. Just 9,000 songs or so.

Dad went on to complain about the lack of “stuff” that accompanied the purchase. “There’s no dock, no cables, nothing! It’s just some slim little box, instead of that big one that folded out and had all the other accessories!”

I said, “Dad, tell yourself this: ‘I just bought a 30gig player with a color display, full video, and a 13-hour battery, for $249.’ Then ask yourself what $249 would’ve gotten you a few years back.”

He conceded that it was a mighty impressive amount of stuff for a lot less cash.

Just to keep things in perspective, here’s a piece from an article about Toshiba’s 100gb drive for iPod-sized players:

Toshiba first developed a 1.8-inch drive in 2000. The device, which was at the time the highest capacity such drive available, could hold up to 2GB of data and cost around $740. Today the drives have not only risen in capacity but also fallen in price to the point where an Apple iPod, which includes an 80GB drive and color screen, costs $349.

The official VM wife has started her own blog! She’s at Minimally Invasive. Since it uses the same template as this blog (I’m cheap), you’ll only be able to tell us apart by the fact that Amy’s posts are far less jaded than mine. Also, she has better hair.

Down the line, we may put up duelling posts about some of our domestic wackiness. For the moment, we decided she should take the lead on the time I almost made her a botulism-tainted martini this week.

Never a dull moment!

I just had one of the best meals of my life. I can’t even begin to describe the peanut and tamarind black cod, the lamb-three-ways, the blue fin tuna, or any of the other bazillion dishes we had. All hail Michael & Guy Rubino!

The nice thing about recognizing that my impulses can only lead to extravagant impulse buys (like the $1,500 I nearly spent on a new laptop last week), is that I actually have cash on hand when something significant occurs, like yesterday’s $900 bill for work on my car (tires, 60,000-mile tuneup, various belts, differentials and filers).

The added bonus of putting $900 into the Element of Style is that it kills the big impulse buy of getting myself a new car.

Jane Galt has written about plenty of important topics these last few years, but none as important as Best Practices for Coffeemaking. It’s a subject near and dear to my heart, especially since I recently moved back to paper filters after two years using a gold filter. We recently bought a new coffeemaker, because Amy concluded that having coffee waiting for her when she wakes up is never a bad thing, and the old one wasn’t programmable.

Despite my issues with buying products from German companies, I went back to the Krups well on this one. They haven’t done me wrong yet, and this new model’s been working out okay. But the big change, as I mentioned, is tossing out the gold filter and going back to paper. This was supposed to be a temporary measure, but I’ve been pretty happy with the coffee in the morning, so I’m sticking with it. Also, contra Galt, this new machine has a built-in water filter. I may take up her suggestion and get a Brita pitcher.

Which brings me to my #1 suggestion for good coffeemaking: get good coffee. This means whole bean, and not the Starbucks beans at your supermarket. For me, the best affordable stuff ($7.99/lb.) is the Kenya AA “Out of Africa” beans I get at Chef Central. When I wanna splurge, I head into NYC for Porto Rico Importing Co. and buy Hawaiian Kona ($24.95/lb.).

In the afternoons, I have a second dose of the stuff. I make this with a French press mug from Bodum (which they don’t seem to make anymore, according to their site). My coworkers goof on the devotion I have to making this stuff (“You actually grind coffee in the morning and bring it to work?”), but I believe that life is too short for coffee that comes out of a prefilled bag from a “drinks station”.

(At a conference & trade show in Paris in October, some exhibitors had complimentary coffee for attendees. This was my first experience with pod-style coffee, and it’s a poor substitute; trust me.)

So get good beans, grind your own either the night before or in the morning, and maybe use filtered water. And you can go too crazy trying to get “the perfect cup”. As one of the commenters on Jane Galt’s site put it:

The problem with increasing one’s level of coffee snobbery too far, is the same as the problem with wines, home audio, or any other hobby that deals with diminishing returns: the increase in required investment (time, money, or frequently both) to go to the next level of enjoyment, begins to far exceed the marginal return from doing so.

(One major caveat I need to make: I take my coffee black. I’m pretty sure I adopted this style because it reduced the amount of variables that go into preparing the stuff. This way, I only have to deal with the quality of the beans, the water, and the coffeemaker. No worries about the milk being off, or having the wrong kind of sweetener available. Maybe I also drink it this way to avoid the chemicals and/or calories in the additives. Or I’m just all hardcore and shit.

The point is: my best practices for coffeemaking need to be balanced against this bizarre predilection I have. Similarly, never trust me with any issues involving alcohol.)

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been out of the office for the past week-plus (except for Monday). When I have a big block of time available like that, I tend to put together a big-ass list of stuff that needs doing. One of the items on the list was cleaning off the console table.

The table is at the top of the stairs and is the first place small things get dumped upon entry into the house. It was covered in receipts, ATM slips, office memos, warranties, baseball caps, maps, Post-Its, and small change.

I made a couple of passes through the paperwork, dumping most everything in the shredder. Soon I was left only with a significant quantity of change. I dumped it on my desk and thought, “Well, as long as I’m clearing that stuff out, I oughtta get the change that’s been piling up in my car for the last 3 years, too.”

That was a little tougher, insofar as pennies and nickels were consigned to the cup-holder area, which left some of the coins at the bottom a little sticky. In fact, there’s still a penny that I simply am unable to pry from the cup-holder, but I guess that’s tribute to Charon or something.

On the other hand, the actual change-holder, which I use for quarters and dimes, turned out to be cavernous. Amy joked that I’m going to get better mileage and handling now that I’m not hauling a ton of loose change in the car.

So I looked at this enormous pile of change lying on my desk, and I thought, “Surely the time it’ll take me to count all this is worth more than the value of the coins.”

But my ethnic stereotype was undeterred. It took even longer than I feared, and put me in mind of being a little kid with a piggy-bank. Final count?

• $5 in Sacajawea dollars
• 1 50-cent piece (I also carry a “lucky” one in my wallet)
• $1.71 in pennies ($1.72 if you include the one that’s permanently stuck to my car)
• $4.00 in nickels
• $18.70 in dimes
• $23.25 in quarters
• 25.60 Euros (about $33)
• 64 Danish Kroner (about $11)
• 400 Hungarian Forints (about 3 cents)

I don’t think there’s any sorta lesson I can impart from this, outside of “Don’t let your change pile up” or “Just use CoinStar, fer chrissakes.” My next challenge will be finding someone who can exchange the Euros and Kroner, since my local bank won’t touch foreign coins, only paper money.