I found this while poking through my old pictures directory. I wonder if this sort of thing can get you in to trouble?

(Another friend referred this to me, so again I have to credit an assist:)

Evidently, Ultima Sports Ltd has set a new 0-100-0 record with their supercar, the "Ultima GTR". Apparently this feat is so impressive that it's actually blinking on their website. Wow, right? It's pretty nice looking, actually. And it gets better! Wondering how much this bad boy will set you back? $300,000? $500,000? NO! This car is just $27,000!. Here it is:

But there's a catch: When you order your Ultima GTR from the UK, here is what you get:

Notably missing from this picture are (a) an engine, (b) an extra assembly garage, (c) a painting facility, and (d) 1 year of your life. (I like to imagine that the parts come affixed to this giant plastic grid, so you have to punch out the wheels, chassis, steering wheel, etc.)

But I had you going, didn't I?

Another amusing sig I just found (this one's from my new boss... what does that mean?)

Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

The Pyramid of Speed amused me a great deal.

Admittedly, the person who sent this to me is the only person who reads my blog who would actually find it funny, so this is sort of a pathetic post. But it is keeping me right at my nearly spree-like one-post-per-day average, so that's something.

Quantity over Quality. Wins every time.

I think that when a person begins to exhibit a pattern of self-destructive behavior, they would recognize that the first step on the road to breaking out of that pattern is to admit that they have a problem. In my case I am making way too much food.

Take the banana incident, for example. If I had thought for a moment about what I was doing, I would have realized that just because you have 9 black bananas doesn't mean that you must bake them into 7 pounds of banana bread (I doubled the recipe, serves 28!). Why did I have 9 black bananas? I honestly don't know. It's all a blur. But now I have all of this banana bread, and I'm going to start trying to, what, eat it for breakfasts for the next 300 days? Pawn it off onto unwilling friends? People like FRESH banana bread, not "oh, I've been looking to get rid of this for some time now, here you go" banana bread. It's just irrational.

And now this: the cheese thing. I have some cheese. (The cheese was left over from another excessive cooking project. Another story.) And so I think to myself, "I'll make macaroni and cheese." I end up at the grocery store, things kind of go dark, and 2 hours later I have 6 quarts of macaroni and cheese ready to bake in my oven. What am I going to do with 6 quarts of macaroni and cheese?!?

Maybe I need some kind of intervention. Or, maybe you should just come over to my house and eat something.

I'd like to think that the corporate tag line for these people is something like CleanFilms.com: We put the "fun" in "fundamentalism".

The little picture of the horrified girl is pretty priceless, although even better is trying to imagine what an "Edited-for-Family" version of "Caddyshack" might look like.

Please prioritize
Some bug must be the last one
You can't have it all

• Her: "Yeah, when I flew home to Vietnam over Christmas, i connected through Singapore and the plane was completely jammed with Indians"
• Me: nervously laughs; "Heh heh... well, I guess, um..."

• Her: "Yes, and also I had this Indian neighbor once that parked his ugly car in front of my house all the time. I had to move away!"
• Me: "Oh, yes well I suppose every nation has its jerks..."
• Her: "And I had this friend who is a landlord, and she said that once an Indian family has lived in a place, you have to replace the whole kitchen because of their smelly food!"
• Me: "Good heavens, well that's really a shame... *squirms in chair*"

People complain a lot about AT&T wireless. I know because I'm one of them. I think their service was probably worse than everyone's except for Sprint. But you know what? Back before Cingular took them over, at least I didn't have to look at this bitch:

Their online service is down EVERY HOUR OF EVERY DAY. I've tried in the morning. I've tried at night. I've tried weekends. WHEN IS THEIR SITE EVER UP?!? I think I saw it up once on a Tuesday afternoon, but like an idiot I didn't pay my bill then because I didn't have the bill in front of me.

Little did I know that I had happened to catch the system on its one hour per week of actual uptime.

Ironically, the only reason I did check on Tuesday was because my laptop had entered its Norton Anti-Virus Corporate Edition Extra Unnecessary Uncancellable Unending Scan Of Every File Seven Times For No Reason, thanks to our IT department's genius scheduling ("Who would want to use their computer on at noon on a Tuesday?!? That would be CRAZY.") So the only thing my computer had enough leftover cycles to do was run a web browser (barely.)

As you can see, I have given in and actually bothered to learn how to restyle movable type. This has been pretty much completely guilt-motivated; as part of my new "I'm a graphic designer... no, really" charade at work, I feel like I should have a site that doesn't completely look like ass.

So if you think my new site is pretentious and horrible, just remember that I'm trying to fit in to the design community. :)

It looks like Jennifer Garner's new movie Elektra has received what I'm pretty sure is a record low score of 03% on Rotten Tomatoes. Who knew when she was just a lowly porn star in Alias the heights to which she would soar.

Impressive.

I drink a lot of water. And as a result, I have had a lot of time to ponder this icon:

If you work with me, and you're a boy, you'll know why I've been staring at this icon so much:

I love this icon because it is a picture of a hand, pressing a button. On a button. So to recap, what this icon conveys is:

• This object is a button


• You can push the button with your hand.

This gives me an idea: I propose that to simplify user interfaces everywhere, we all agree to standardize on one button which just indicates (through an icon) that the button is a button, which you can click. With your mouse. It might look something like this:

I found an article on a SQL Server tech forum written by some random guy from Anderson. This was his sig:

-- graz
Creating tommorrow's legacy systems, today.

Right now, as I am sitting here typing this, the guy in the cube next to me is buying a $700,000 house over the phone, sight unseen.

Today's word that I have stared at so much that it's starting to look wrong to me is:

MODULE

M-O-D-U-L-E. Like "MOD"-"YOOL". Or "MODE"-"OOLAY". It's worse in lower case, see: "module". All I can see is the "dule". "mow"-"dool". Or "mow"-"dooley", like a truck with 4 rear tires. "mowdooley".

Programming is ruining my brain.

I finally drove at Laguna Seca! So, my car has finally earned its forth and final sticker:

And I only went off into the dirt THREE TIMES, filled my exhaust system with rocks, got passed by tons of people, and generally sucked. Here's a picture of me passing one of the few cars that was actually slower than me:

And since I went into the dirt, I hereby present myself with the coveted First One Off Award, which recognizes my ability to have fucked up first and worse than any of my friends to date. Yay.

On my flight home they had to re-route me through Atlanta instead of Chicago, and I got booked in First Class for my flight back to San Jose. And as far as I can tell, all First Class gets you is the privilege of sitting next to snotty bitches who are willing to pay for treatment that they feel they deserve.

When I sat down she was talking in a loud voice about wine on her cell phone. She continued talking until after the second time the flight attendant asked her to hang up.

Once in flight, she drank 4 vodka tonics and fell asleep, put her shoes on my backpack (which contained my headphones, laptop, etc), and then knocked her drink into my lap. Then she snored for a couple of hours, woke up, rang the call button, and ordered another vodka tonic.

Upon landing, she immediately dialed her cell phone and then spent the duration of the deplaning process commiserating about how First Class just isn't what it used to be, and how unacceptable it was that she had to use the call button to request another drink. She then jotted down the flight number so that she could file a complaint with the airline later.

In contrast, coach really isn't so bad.