February 29, 2004

Pizza The Hut

Sunday, March 7th, 2004 marks the end of an era for me. I began working for The Hut with an open mind, but after a year (damn… a full year) of bad gas mileage, annoying customers, washing dishes, being ripped off by children, almost crashing into co-workers, not being able to speak Spanish, never once getting off at the time it says on the schedule, eating greasy pizza four days a week, having my car smell like pepperoni and ASS, never having the weekend off, missing out on meals when Liz comes to town, JENNIFER, a seven cent raise (good job!), and just one person too many tipping me entirely in nickels, I am more than ready to call it quits and move on to my new position at Staples. There will for sure be some things I miss, and I’m sure time will be kind to my remembrance of The Hut, but in the end, I hope this entry jogs my memory.

February 26, 2004

chu-chink

After gym class, I have a four hour and forty five minute gap until my next class, so I often find myself reading material for one of my classes. Today was no exception as I came into the library, found one of the obscenely comfortable chairs next to the window and started reading the chapter on printing in my black and white photography book and somewhere between the filters and the baseboard I just tilted my head back, put my book on my lap, and checked out.

In the middle of my tenure as a millionaire photographer sought world around by photographers for my printing skill (?He makes it look soo easy,? they?d say) and by gay men for my startlingly good looks and fine taste in clothing (?Really, you?re NOT???,? they?d say) I suddenly felt my head go flying off with the swift CHU-CHINK of the guillotine. Upon awaking fully I turned around to find myself looking into a HUGE lens attached to a camera held by an elderly woman whom, as I would discover momentarily, was named Marilyn.

With a voice just below a whisper, Marilyn told me her name and explained, ?It was a really good shot.?

I just hope my mouth wasn?t open.

genius

There’s a lot of the following going on in my Photo 1 class:

Professor: “While on the left picture the background is IN focus because he used a smaller aperture, on the right picture the background is blurry as a result of a much larger aperture.”

Guy in the back: “Soooooooooooo, how did he make the background so blurry in the second picture? Is he moving the camera or something?”

If this doesn’t stop soon I’m going to start bringing a rolled up newspaper to class.

EDIT(3:44pm): I just remembered another one:

Professor: “This photographer is famous for his printing technique which makes his pictures look as if they were paintings.”

Guy in the back: “Woooooowww. Those pictures look almost like paintings.”

February 25, 2004

blahs

The weather around here is pretty great. Mid 50’s, lots of clouds, and plenty of rain. It’s good for wearing jackets (which I look good in), good for hot cocoa (tastes great, less filling), and does wonders for tips as a pizza man, but… Bad for my car. Getting in and out of my car with wet shoes over 7 hour shifts at pizza hut, followed by closing the windows for extended periods of time has left the inside of my car smelling of a wet, long dead, dog. Fortunately when I’ve actually been driving to school it hasn’t been raining and driving around with both windows down has been enough to get rid of the stench on a temporary basis.

The aforementioned strain on my car could finally be seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve got a job interview at Staples this Friday, and so we’ll see what happens with that. Katie (Lauren’s sister) refers to it as the WORST STAPLES EVER for exactly the same reasons I want to work there: It’s only open till 6pm on weekdays, 5pm on Saturdays, and is closed on Sundays. But like I said, we’ll see. I’m still hopeful that the library will end it’s hiring freeze any moment and I’ll be bombarded with offers from the 8 locations I applied at. I’m getting to believe that’s wishful thinking at this point, however.

I’m absolutely infatuated with my photo classes. Scary statistic: 56% of the people enrolled in the SMC photo program are people who already have a B.A. and just hate their jobs. The last part of that statistic is implied, but a quick hand raising exercise in my Black & White Photography class confirmed it pretty handily (haha, I made pun on accident). Hopefully getting an early injection of photography will somehow vaccinate me against hating my chosen profession.

Lastly, my sister mentioned that she enjoyed being mentioned in my blog, so:

KELSEY.

February 22, 2004

snl

“Georgia has ruled that state schools will continue to be able to use the word ‘evolution’ in the classroom. However, as a compromise, Dinosaurs will now be referred to as Jesus Horses.”
-Jimmy Fallon, weekend update

February 21, 2004

bring it on

Since all of the recent hullabaloo over same sex marriages, I’ve heard an ocean of opinion on a subject that to me always seemed pretty clear cut. Growing up in a rather liberal San Jose during my childhood, I’ve always believed (probably somewhat naively) that people were past this particular issue and whatever part of the country hadn’t come around would do so soon enough. Even my most staunchly conservative friends would roll their eyes as Jerry Falwell screeched that homosexuality was causing the decay of western society. However, since attending San Luis Obispo, an area which has much more conservative values than my native San Jose or my current Los Angeles home, I’ve come to realize that there is still a pretty large group of people out there who think of homosexuality as either a mental disease or the result of too much exposure to radiation. The worst part is it’s not one of those values that tends to change much with time, I expect neither camp will change their feelings about the issue during their lifetime, so it’s up to the next generation to look at the the world around them and decide whether or not gay men and women have a place in it.

The following is a letter I read on Joshua Marshall’s blog.

Josh,

I’m 62 years old and grew up in Missouri. When I married my first wife, who as Japanese American, we had to do so in another state. At that time it was against Missouri state law for interracial marriages to take place. Times change.

40 years later the pain of that state-sanctioned inequality, which made some couples second-class citizens, still stirs an old, deep-felt resentment. While I’m not gay, I certainly have sympathy for the state-sanctioned unfairness that gay couples endure and believe that in another 40 years (probably much sooner) gay marriages will be a simple, accepted fact of life.

John

Everyone has their own opinion, but as for me, I just hope when I’m sixty years old my child will have learned about this as just another sad chapter of American history, lumped in with Slavery and Manzanar.

February 19, 2004

is it diamondique?

Money equals love poster.It’s funny how when you learn something new, it seems to open a floodgate for similar information that you’ve never noticed before. Since I wrote about my feelings about diamonds a while ago I’ve since discovered this article, which talks about some amazing advances in diamond fabrication(Note, not fake diamonds, but man made real diamonds.), saw Eugene write about it and then noticed the Simpsons mocking the diamond franchise in the most recent new episode. (picture on the left.)

Good times.

now for photo 2

In contrast with my Photo 1 teachers stiffness, my Photo 2 teacher is outright amazing. I think he can speak for himself (All capitals indicates raised voice):

“Are there ANY males in this class.”
-Professor Jones, First thing he said to the entire class

“If an assignment is worth 100 points and you turn it in late…. You get ZERO. If you don’t turn it in at all, you get MINUS ONE HUNDRED. I’m serious.”
-Professor Jones, Explaining his late policy.

“My only rule is there’s no porn… If you don’t know what POR-NOG is, come to my office and for TWENTY BUCKS I’ll show you my video.”
-Professor Jones, Explaining what we can and cannot shoot for our final project.

“First off, I’m head of the department, so complaining about me won’t do no good. Secondly, I have Tenure, which, if you don’t know, means you CAN’T make me work, and YOU CAN’T get me fired.”
-Professor Jones, on his many years at the College

February 18, 2004

d’oh!

Interesting Revelation:

In Season 3, disc 2, of the Simpsons, there is an episode called “I married Marge.” In this episode there is a flashback to the time when Bart is conceived inside of a miniature golf Castle. The interesting part is that this flashback is dated, 1980.

This means that Bart was most likely born in 1981, making him a full two years older than me. I wonder if the writers had known how long the series was going to last if they would have left that out.

February 17, 2004

first class

My Photo 1 class ended 26 minutes ago and I thought I’d put my thoughts down while they’re still fresh.

The building that this class is being held in is off the main campus and completely new to me, and so far I’m more than impressed. Ample free parking, air conditioning, and plenty of study room are only the first three things I can think of that the main campus lacks and this building has. I’m only annoyed I haven’t had a class in this building before now.

The teacher is an interesting character. Caucasion Female in her late thirties, her sense of fashion chronically stuck in the early to mid eighties and personality borrowed from a saltine, she nonetheless quite obviously knows her stuff, and is very good at being able to show what she’s trying to teach.

The class I have already mentally divided into three groups: Those serious about photography, those interested in the concept, and those who view it as a romanticized world of travelling the world and taking pictures of babies, bands, dandelions, and aging houses with the paint peeling off. The first two groups I have no problem with, but the last group doesn’t really care about anything this class has to offer. They want to take pictures, and hearing about the chemistry of film, metering, aperature, shutter speed, and focal length almost killed them as their heads hit their desks like prisoners striking anvils in unison.

February 16, 2004

tamping rod

“I’m going to order desert, just so you know,” Lauren said as if I planned to put up a fight about it. She makes this statement with confidence and without making eye contact, so that my response won’t affect her resolve. As my employer had decided to detain me on February the 14th, we agreed to go out to dinner the day before, California Pizza Kitchen being our destination.

My dad’s father worked at a heavy machinery dealership while my mother’s father worked as the manager for the produce department in a grocery store, so neither of them really went out for dinner all to often and desert, well… desert was not in the cards. So it’s understandable that my parents view getting desert as an extravagance on par with personally embroidered toilet paper. On the other hand Lauren’s family has taken to looking at me as being a little bit “funny” when saying strange things such as “I’m full” when the desert menu comes around.

“Just so you know, I AM going to order desert,” she says, again without eye contact, preferring to keep her eyes on the prize, reading and re-reading the descriptions of the Apple Crisp and the Chocolate Souffle on the menu hung on the window as we wait to be seated. We were already hungry when we left the apartment and the drive over in addition to the half hour wait at the restaurant had us half way between ravenous and cannibalism.

We agree on tortilla soup as an appetizer as waiting for food was not an option; I’m sure that we are entering stage 3 of starvation, our fat reserves completely gone and our bodies beginning to digest our muscles as the only remaining source of energy. Consumed by hunger we down the soup, the complimentary Pita bread, and several refills of Strawberry Lemonade and Arnold Palmer tee, respectively. Our cravings are only sharpened by this tease of a meal, and upon their arrival I begin to barbarically inhale my Shitake Mushroom Pizza with a honey wheat crust while Lauren lay siege on her Fettuccine with shrimp and garlic sauce. About three quarters through our respective meals our will begins to falter. We try to force each other to finish what was too small to take home in a box, “Here, you need to try some of this, it’s amazing.” Gradually, painfully, sloooowly we finish each others meals in an exercise that becomes more and more akin to packing gunpowder into a musket.

Content, I lean back in my chair and enjoy the afterglow of a good meal as Lauren sits hunched over the menu again, her eyes lacking the confidence they once carried. She reads aloud the descriptions of the deserts, after each one asking “Doesn’t that sound gooood,” her eyes pleading, begging me magically remove the last three fork fulls of pasta from her stomach and make room for what she could no longer back down from. “It’s not that big…” she tried to convince herself, referring to the size of the chocolate souffle a la mode, her preference in portion size having reversed in the past hour.

She orders the Chocolate Souffle and makes me eat half.

On the ride home, I just made sure my chair was leaned back. I am uncomfortably full to the point that I can’t get to sleep till two in the morning.

only in dreams

“The last couple weeks I’ve been waking up in the 7-8am timeframe every day; tomorrow I have to do the same. It almost feels normal… I haven’t really done this since high school.”
Havoc Pennington, head of User Interface Design at Red Hat Inc.

Man, a programming job where it’s abnormal to have to wake up early in the morning. Yet another reason to be involved with open source software.

February 14, 2004

watchred.com

It’s been such a long break that I’m actually looking forward to school starting again. I’d like to think this is because my classes are just brain candy, but deep down, I know it will be nice to have some short term goals forced upon me and it will be refreshing to have that little bit of stress that will make me put off my school work while doing everything else that much more effectively. It’s called productive procrastination, and it’s my lifestyle of choice.

If you’ll remember in a previous entry an individual who regretted he hadn’t registered onelast.com himself contacted me to communicate his story of woe and I posted that if anyone could think of a better domain name then I’d gladly sell him my domain name for what I paid. Well he posted a list of very decent domain names in the comments of that entry, my favorites being pointabout.com, pastfive.com, and endpost.com, but in the end I decided they weren’t really for me. However, he also pointed me to nameboy.com, a website that gives you suggestions for domain names based on two words you feed it. Now, unlike some sites, it doesn’t just combine these two words together (though it does that too), but also looks for any words that might be vaguely related to what you entered. For example if you enter “failure” and “giant” you’ll get all the obvious domains, but you’ll also get failuretocomply.com, failurenow.com, phailure.com, or backslidingbrute.com. Through nameboy.com, I discovered the domain name watchred.com by searching for “red” and “technology” and immediately felt I’d found my domain name. The whole time I was looking for a domain name I was looking for that one combination of words that would leave me with that “Eureka!!!” feeling that would generate the confidence of knowing I made the right choice. Watchred.com is that domain.

I’m going to contact Haydur today, and if he still wants the onelast.com domain name, I’m going to transfer it to him probably near the end of the month and watchred.com will be the new domain for this site. I’ve already registered it as of this writing, I’m just waiting for it to propogate through all the DNS servers, which should take somewhere between 12 and 36 hours.

I’ve got more to write about, but as I don’t have the time right now I’ll just wish everyone a happy v-day. It’s a very corporate holiday, but celebrating love, plutonic or otherwise, can’t be a bad thing. You just better hope you had reservations about three months ago or that you celebrated a day early like some people.

February 11, 2004

not even one paddle

I just bought a canoe off of ebay. You can check it out here. It didn’t come with paddles or anything, but it did come with a case and a tripod, so I figure that makes up for it.

I’m probably just going to resell it on ebay for more than I bought it, so if anyone is interested in a canoe with no paddles, just let me know.

February 9, 2004

finally, a beer for the fatherland

“there’s only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.”
– David Sedaris, from Naked

I was in line to enter what any passing tourist would assume are sacred doors at the DMV this morning and though I attempted to suppress it, I was actually laughing out loud in line at 7:45am. Now, they say misery loves company, but what’s left unsaid is it really hates people enjoying themselves in it’s presence. In the words of Piebald, “If looks could kill, I would’ve never had a chance.”

I’d forgotten how well earned the DMV’s reputation is. Arriving a full thirty minutes before the doors open at 8:00am, the line already wrapped half way around the building. It was 8:38am when I hit the information desk and was given a number, 9:55am when my number was called, and 10:07am when I started my car in the parking lot. I started my book on page 128 that morning and left on page 234. At that point I was almost annoyed they couldn’t let me finish my book before calling my number.

February 7, 2004

retraction

This week, Lauren has gone to practice from 10pm-12am every evening as well as attended a practice on friday, all just to be ready for the Grammy’s. That’s 16 hours of her time, all for a cause which they were not even paying her for.

Then, at the climax of the eight hour long practice on friday, Lauren was informed that the woodwinds had been cut from the gig. There will be no performance with Outkast, the ultimate prize for her time and effort simply pulled out from under her.

I hope Mr. Andre “Ice Cold” 3000 cries himself to sleep.

February 5, 2004

new domain name?

When Eugene removed the domain names he was thinking about using from his blog to make sure people didn’t steal his ideas, I thought maybe something in his car had fermented to the point he was suffering delusions from the fumes. But as it turns out he might have been on to something. I got the following email earlier today:

Hi there,

It doesn’t make much sense to email you about this, but I just had too. I blog over at haydur.com, and back in December I had a thought of changing my blog title to something other than my first name, and you know what I choose? onelast.com.

I even made plain title graphics and everything… but today I realized how lazy and I’d been about registering the domain so when for a casual whois check at betterwhois.com. You registered it! Damn. I’m feeling so stupid right now I can’t tell.

Anyway, no harm done and good luck with your blog. :)

Haydur.

I would honestly give this guy my domain for what it cost me if I could just think of a better one. If anybody thinks of something they think would be perfect for me, check if it’s available through register.com and let me know.

February 4, 2004

too bad polaroids suck

I’m not a big name dropper, but, well, let’s be honest here, I’ve never really had any names to drop. But now I sorta do and well, I’m gonna. Let’s just get right to the meat of this post:

Lauren will be performing “Hey Ya” on stage with Outkast at the Grammys this Sunday.

Well, she’ll be with forty other people from the marching band wearing funky green outfits out of focus in the back. But she’ll be there, and that’s all that matters. If you don’t recognize her by her funky brown hair or her towering height, just remember she’ll be one of the two girls with a clarinet.

When Lauren emailed her teacher, Trixy Sweetvittles (I swear on all the people who died of the plague that I am not making that name up) to ask if there’s someway she could miss class for a rehearsal, she got the following response:

OH MY GOD!
You definitely get excused for a rehearsal with
Outkast! That’s awesome! I’ll leave the
assignment hand-out and materials with Greg. You
can pick them up later.
I hope you get some polaroids!
Trixy

Everyone just rolls out the red carpet when you know the right people.

small world

I was looking at photo.net when I saw a picture I very much admired. The crazy thing is, I’m looking at a picture on a website that people post to from all over the world, and this particular photo was taken at Quimby Middle School in San Jose, California. Somewhere I’ve been before.

Just kinda random.

February 2, 2004

pay attention now

Me and mah graham crackersSo how many low fat cinammon graham crackers am I holding up? Yes, only in the visible hand. No, I’m not hiding any from you. Yes, the graham crackers in the picture are of the low fat cinammon variety.

Though you and I may only see two Keebler low fat cinnamon crisps, according to the good people at Keebler, I’m actually holding eight. They tell you on the box that there are only 110 calories per serving and there are eight crackers in a serving. I thought this was rather impressive until I did some simple math and discovered that they’d been misleading me. What convention told me (one object, therefore one cracker) was twisted into a reality that the Keebler company prefers (indentations denote the beginning of an entirely separate entity, therefore one object can be four crackers.). This in itself it isn’t too disturbing, but if they really care enough to trick us into thinking a graham cracker is 13.8 calories, what else aren’t they telling us? It’s not like anyone would really want to eat 8 graham crackers at one sitting just to get the full serving in.

Blah. Endings aren’t my specialty.

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