-=kenneth's rants and other things=-

I'm a bit disappointed

My dad mentioned something to me when I was in SA and completely forgot about it until now.

He said that SA Express News readers voted the Olive Garden as the best Italian restaurant in San Antonio. Are you f$*%ing kidding me?

I thought he was joking, or hoped rather. But nope, here's the reader's survey

There are so many things wrong with the selections. Uggh. I'm a bit disappointed.

Reunion Fun

Well, I'm back from the AHHS Reunion trip. I had a really good time (better than I thought I would). Most of the events were a blur, but here are some random thoughts and recollections (and advice?):

1) I had a camera with me and I thought I took hundreds of pics all weekend. That wasn't the case- I barely used it. I think I wound up putting about 20 pics in an album on Facebook.

2) I thought I did a damn good job mingling at the bar on Friday night and at the event on Saturday night. Well, now that I've seen some of my friends's pics- I seemed to have missed a lot of people. That's kind of a drag, I wanted to give at the least a hello to a lot of them.

3) The girls looked better than ever (but of course you knew I'd say that)

4) The smartest thing I probably did was to schedule outside events- I met Ross for breakfast on Friday so we could catch up. I also got to hang out with the Lauras and catch up as well.

If/when you're going to a reunion, do that same thing if you have time-- schedule lunches/breakfasts/coffee whatever with your classmates. Or, bring them along to your parents' regular burger night post-reunion if they're still in town like Kevin, Laura and Tenny were. Like I noted before, I thought I had mingled well, but didn't so I was lucky to have scheduled things where I did have time to talk.

5) I also got to spend some quality time with some non-reunion folk- most notably my parents, my replacement™, Megan, Sarah, Chuck & Sam, and got to do a quick catch-up with Golly who I didn't know lived in SF for a bit before moving back to SA (she has a kick-ass store where those of you in SA should go shop).

6) I forget I'm in a bubble out here and was surprised that a lot of people weren't online- ie at least facebook. But from the past week's worth of activity, they almost all are now. Not everyone I know sits in front of a computer all day like me and I forget that.

7) No, I don't have any crazy "guess who I made out with in the women's restroom" stories, so stop asking me that.

8) No, the hostess of a popular tv entertainment "news" show wasn't there- so sorry, didn't get any star gossip.

9) Re: #6 above, I also rarely have business cards on me. I remembered them on Saturday, but only had one on Friday night.

I did have the foresight to order some cards from moo cards but they didn't arrive until today (or after I had left). Take cards with you if you go to an event-- I used to think it was cheesy until more than one person asked me for one. btw- here's what my cards look like. I had linked moo to my flickr account and picked random photos tagged with "food, travel or wine" and did some rearranging. They came out quite well.

10) I thought I had more to add, but I forgot some points. I'll add them to the comments later if I think of anything.

Going To TX

I'm going to San Antonio tomorrow. I'll be there for a few days to attend my (wait for it. . . . . wait for it . . . ) High School reunion. Holy crap!

I'll have some 20 year old mullet pics for you soon!

No TPC trip this time though:

How To Taste a Lot of Wine with Your Friends

Are you in a rut with your wine selection? Want to branch out and try new stuff, but you're not sure what to try? Well, here's an easy way to taste a lot of wines with your friends that's also fun.

Have a station set up near the door where your guests can put their bottles in a bag and write down some key information on some index cards. In our case, we hand our bagged wines and cards to the "cardmaster" who will assign random numbers to our wines.

Here's a vid from Saturday night where I'm bagging my wines while Patrick, the co-host, plays with the camera:

Once everyone's wine is bagged- organize the bottles on a table, give everyone a glass, and have a place to dump out extra wine. Hand out some index cards and pens and serve some food! Then let everyone taste the wines and keep notes (they can take the notes home with them).

Make the one sober person tabulate the scores and then do a "reveal".

Here's Patrick who somehow got stuck being the tabulator . . .

Oh, by the way- I brought two wines. One of them got last place. Yeah, I rock. . .

Enjoy. . .

Reegs going over his notes, Pak picks a fave:
?

Kenny expounding on Grenache

I'm in a Bubble

You know, I realized something when I was driving around San Antonio and Austin this past weekend.

I realized I had never seen a McCain yard sign in SF. Okay, "window sign" since people here don't have front yards . . . . I have seen a few bumperstickers though

But when I was hanging out with Megan she told me she had seen a *Palin* sign in someone's yard. Correction- she had seen a few Palin signs in people's yards. I thought she was pulling my leg, so I made her show me and we drove to the location. Here's a video of it.

Note- in the vid we say it looks like a printout but we realized it was a vinyl sign when we got close. It's pink too- very Barbie. . . .

I doubt I'll see one in SF. . .

More Flip Vids

Here are some more videos from the goofy Flip Video Ultra

Angie, Mike and I pt 1- doing intense road-trip snack research

Part 2

Social Social!!

I have been playing with some alpha and beta software the past few months. Well, actually, I do that all the time, that's not news. But I like to tinker with Media Server software when I can. And now that I have a newer computer that can actually display stuff, it's been more fun.

In the past you've heard me talk about how badly I've wanted to build a "myth box". It's basically a home-theater+dvr server. (Patrick has written much more about it, check out his site).

There is other software out that's a bit easier to use if you're less inclined to tinker though and have a spare machine around. And if you have a Mac there's Plex and Boxee (and Sapphire, a plug-in for Front Row).

But I was thinking about the Mac software a lot recently. And this morning on the bus there was a guy on his cell phone talking about Web Two Point Ohhhh (I should point out that he wasn't that loud, but the rest of the bus was quiet). But listening to that guy talk about Social Sites (and someone in the office talking about Facebook) reminded me that just because a site has a "social" aspect it doesn't make it any better than other software. In some cases it can be worse. Bear with me, I'll circle back to this . . .

And to calm me down ...

How about this after that last rant?

Garbage Rant

I was reminded of something when reading one of Jen's posts.

She wrote:

I was driving behind a man this morning who felt that it was appropriate to throw his empty Starbucks cup out of the window, onto the roadside. Now, my opinion about Starbucks aside (HATE IT. Venti? Come ON...it's LARGE), I live in the Bay Area where being environmentally conscious is almost a religion.

The weird thing is that I've always thought the same thing but yet I've always been shocked (although the feeling's faded) about how much people litter out here in CA (SF in particular, but Jen's story was shocking to me because it's the "clean south bay").

My parents and I have this running joke about places being "first world"- I can't remember exactly how the joke got started but I think we started it after my first visit to Switzerland (I was hunting Nazi descendents and tracing Jewish funds that had been "repatriated" to Swiss banks... but that's another story).

I think I had said something about how spotless the place was and my dad said, "now that's first world"-- and I said, "no, it's .5-- it's cleaner than first world". We don't just use the joke about garbage though.

But when I moved to SF I had this image in my head- "Silicon Valley inventors, no garbage, wired busses that don't make noise, e-poppin/rave-attending coders, Wired magazine readers, sci-fi writers, hippies, restaurants, wine and bad football teams". You know- real "first world".

But the thing is, San Francisco is by FAR the dirtiest fucking placed I've ever lived in. And the rolling blackouts wiped out any hope for "first world" status in my eyes.

I still like it (most of the time), but good lord people, clean up after yourselves.

I dunno, maybe there's no equivalent out here to growing up in Texas where the motto "Don't Mess With Texas" isn't just the most successful anti-littering campaign ever but a creed to live by.

Maybe it's because we'd kick each others' asses (or at least report them to the Rangers) if we saw litterers and people out here don't do that.

I partly wouldn't blame people if they did throw trash because of some Berkeley tree-sitter saying "omg omg don't litter" all the time.

Of course if a SF cop did this, some PBR-drinkin' fixie rider would start crying

In my hood there is a ton of pink plastic bag trash- especially on Clement. The times I've yelled at people to not litter, they suddenly feigned a lack of understanding of English. (I bet I get bad comments about that line). And it's not just my neighborhood (which is cleaner on Lake). There are problems downtown too and all over--

Recently I was wandering over to Angie & Mike's in the Castro and saw this one dude trying to sneak behind the library- he had already dumped out some bags of trash in the yard of the yellow house on the end of the street and was getting ready to take a dump. (yes, pulling his pants down to defecate -dump, yes in theird 'yard')

I was about to yell at the guy and the homeowners came out and said "ummm excuuuuuuuuse me, that's our yard sir, you need to get out of there soon."

Soon? WTF? How about:"GTFO our property and take your bags of trash with you, and you have 25 seconds to do it."?

Johnny D & the Rocket 88s

I'm not sure I have a solution to the problem . . . but I think some tough love and billyclubs are in order. How about we arm Jen and let her rove around giving out citations? That'd be a start.

CA DMV Phone Queue

It's sad that due to my work duties of running the Support ACD (phone queues) I'm paying more attention than usual to the DMV's phone setup.

I'm on hold to speak to someone about late-arriving registration tag stickers. And as I was cruising through the phone menu I caught myself thinking, "hrm, that's an interesting way to set things up . . ." and "hrm, that's a good feature I should think about implementing in our hold queues in Q2 if I have time . . . ".

The agent/CSR has since picked up and is having a hard time understanding me and the phrase "I have not received my registration renewal yet" so my mood has since passed from curious/inquisitive to normal DMV-hatred. Thanks!

edit: and she just hung up on me . . .