Category: Miscellaneous

Matt recently gave me some career advice. He said that impressionists are the lowest form of comedian. I think he was just afraid that I would do an impression of him online. So instead, I’ll bring you my impression of Brandon.

Brandon is pretty normal, and I’d say even shy around most people. However, for some people, he goes into what can only be described as “creepy mode” where he makes robotic signs of affection and speaks in a weird voice.

Check out my impression of him below, and stay tuned to the end, because I’ve included a special surprise that Brandon had probably long forgotten about until now.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, I also have impressions of Nelson and Mark.

I recently developed a new impression of a coworker. Mark has a very distinct way of starting a conversation. I’m not sure if I captured it that well in this video, since my original impression contains top-secret Google topics, but the gist is that he speaks almost as if he’s writing an essay in high school using the “funnel” method. He was most recently a teacher, so I guess that makes sense. He starts broad, and then narrows down to the point. It’s a very logical way to speak and easy to follow, but for some reason I’m making fun of it.

Today, just a day or two after I first debuted my impression to Nelson, Mark walked up to Nelson’s desk and unknowingly launched into a perfect impression of himself. I mean it was dead-on. A few words into it, Nelson and I simultaneously started laughing so hard that neither of us could talk. Nelson tried several times to compose himself as Mark attempted to proceed with the conversation, which of course only made it worse. I was at the point where tears were coming down my face, so I had to leave the cube for a few minutes and walked around with a goofy smile on my face.

After the conversation was over, I explained why we were laughing and performed my impression. After telling him that my impressions are limited to a select group of people (I think Nelson is the only other person on the list), he described it as being a member of the worst club you could possibly be in. I think he liked the impression.

By the way, I used YouTube’s “Quick Capture” feature to do this since Apple returned my repaired laptop without iLife (or even an operating system). Pretty cool that you can capture video in a regular web browser with Flash.

Eh, nothing exciting, so let’s just get this out of the way:

From SFO to PHL a United attendant used the phrase “as quickly as feasibly possible.” That’s redundantly repetitive.

US Airways no longer shows movies on domestic flights. Fortunately, this also means (at least in my experience) the end of the annoying inescapable commercials.

The tray table ad at my seat on a US Airways flight from PHL to SFO was upside-down. I wonder if that made it cheaper for the advertiser.

A page in US Airways Magazine dubbed a Las Vegas restaurant as “Chicago’s favorite Las Vegas Italian restaurant.” I’m sure that both the citizens of Las Vegas and the Italians are honored.

One of the flight attendants kept telling people to “boot down” their computers.

The flight attendants kept entering the cockpit on their own and breaking the snack cart barrier rule.

I left the airport in a taxi and gave the driver directions as I read from Google Maps on my iPhone. I don’t think that’s how it should work.

I don’t know if it’s my driving back from the airport persona or if it’s just a little bit of the East Coast wearing off, but every time I drive back to my apartment after a trip I am faster than usual.

Ok, that’s it. Happier blog posts to come starting tomorrow. I have an idea for a new series.

I’m just killing time here keeping myself awake until I leave for the airport. I didn’t want to risk sleeping in and missing my flight, so I’ve been up all night. Don’t worry, I haven’t done anything productive. I’m not even finished packing. Maybe this time I’ll take a photographic inventory of which clothes I leave at home, so I know what I do and don’t have to pack next time I fly back.

If things were the other way around and I was staying up on the East Coast right now, instead of writing this blog post I’d be out satisfying my craving for this:

Last year, I was able to catch the tail end of the fall leaves. On the way to Thanksgiving dinner, one of the roads was lined in yellow:

Well, I guess I should finish up this packing thing and get going. Have a great Thanksgiving.

On Thursday night, I will eat pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving for the first time in this millennium. As you may know, I’m a picky eater. My first memories of pumpkin pie are of me thinking that it looks mushy, and that’s not a texture that I like. I did give it a try one Thanksgiving night, and I know it was before 2000 because I remember we were in our old house. Just as I suspected, it was mushy, and I didn’t like it.

Last year, at Thanksgiving dinner in Pennsylvania, I as usual passed on the pumpkin pie. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I was on the long flight back to California. It’s a longer flying time than the eastbound flight, and it feels eternal. By the time they served dinner, I was bored and hungry. I was at that point where anything would taste good… I can’t believe the things I’ve eaten on planes out of desperation. I finished the main part of my meal, and as a special treat, they served a slice of pumpkin pie for dessert. I was still hungry, and went for a bite. Wow, it was good. And not just good because I was hungry; it was legitimately delicious. So delicious that I was really mad at myself. I was sitting there enjoying airline food after passing on the homemade version just a few nights before. I promised myself that at the next Thanksgiving dinner, I would eat pumpkin pie. I can’t wait.

The picture you see at the top of this post is from Thanksgiving 2004, just after someone had listed a grilled cheese sandwich on eBay, which, allegedly containing the image of the Virgin Mary, sold for $28,000. As you can see, our pie benefited from some saintly intervention as well, which is probably why, between mouthfuls, the pie-eating members of my family described it as “divine.”

I’m about to hop on a shuttle up to San Francisco, where I’ll be helping out with YouTube Live, the first live streaming event on YouTube.

I was lucky enough to visit the YouTube office yesterday, and it’s pretty cool. Nelson, Beah, and I were treated very well as we accompanied Henri, and YouTubers have a strange obsession with puggles. Seriously.

It’s a good thing I’m attending in person, because my AT&T DSL connection has been disconnecting like crazy for the past two days. It was a challenge to even get this blog post published; I had to go to work for the WiFi. Hopefully AT&T has good tech support on the weekends, because I’m calling them as soon as I get back tonight.

Let me know if you watch the show! K, shuttle’s here, I gotta bounce. Grind hard.

I hope I don’t get in trouble for this, because I think Nelson is a cool guy, and he doesn’t really like a lot of attention. But I’ve been told that I do a good impression of him, so I’d rather not let that go to waste. I’m willing to risk losing a friendship for a few extra pageviews.

If the quality is bothering you:
I was going to record it with a nicer camera but I couldn’t find my power cable, and I wanted to shoot it before The Office, so I just shot/edited using my laptop. I can’t find an equalizer on the new iMovie so sorry for the background noise.

Two heartwarming stories:

Earlier tonight, I went to Wendy’s because I was so hungry that I couldn’t wait to make my own meal, or even wait for In-N-Out. My total was $6.04. I handed the cashier $7. He looked at it, said, “It’s cool, bro,” and handed back one dollar. I was pretty exhausted and hungry at the time so those four cents made me feel good.

And just a few minutes ago, I checked out the latest XKCD:

Aww. I was even more excited at first, because I believed it to be a parody of Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, which I still have on VHS somewhere at home, taped off of TV at some point in the ’80s. It’s fun to watch stuff taped off of TV, because the first part of the special is always commercial-free, as my parents were savvy enough to pause the tape during the breaks, but then at some point they fall asleep or get distracted, and you get to see old commercials for OshKosh B’Gosh and old promos for that night’s upcoming edition of Action News.

After taking note of the title, however, a quick Google search let me know that it was the title of a short story. I assumed that the story had the basic plot I was familiar with from the Sesame Street special, but I wanted to be sure, as I fact-check all of my blog entries. But the short story is about a page and a half long, and what am I, a grad student? So I went to the Wikipedia article instead. Boom— plot in six sentences. Thank you, Internet. It’s 1:11.

900 feet up to 1300 feet…

As I mentioned on Sunday, I like to check out stats on the web. It’s really interesting to see how I fit in to the web, and to do this I check Google Analytics daily for referrals from search engines and other sites, and also take a look at link data in Webmaster Tools. But enough about the Google products… I get to talk about them at length every day. Let’s take a walk down the street to my neighbors in Sunnyvale… Flickr!

I recently enabled stats in my account, and they became available to me tonight. Since I share my photos pretty liberally with a Creative Commons license, I’ve searched for references to my photos before, using Google searches for phrases like [“Photo by Wysz”] or simply [“Michael Wyszomierski”].*

From this, I’ve found my photos in a few interesting places, which is quite fun. A few examples:
BART
PhotoPermit
LAist

I’ve even made it into the main design of websites:
Vibrant Software
Techtel Marketing

And at least once I’ve appeared in an unfortunate news story. An unfortunate story with an unfortunate lack of a “This is not a picture of the real guy!” caption. My first thought when I found this? “This explains a lot…”

And a little off-topic, since I heard about these via email, but I’ll brag about being offline as well. This photo was reportedly printed on about five thousand fliers for some anti-ticketing service in San Francisco. And this one almost made it onto a billboard in West Virginia, until the organization decided not to go with billboard advertising.

But where were we? Oh, yeah, Flickr stats. Usually, if you don’t completely control a page, you’re left somewhat in the dark when it comes to statistics. But Flickr has opened up and given some pretty good stats for photo pages that you own, including view counts and referring pages. Let’s take a look at the referring pages and see if I can find anything new and interesting. Here we go, I found a couple of note:

1. Denver Post
2. This picture was linked in a deleted segment of the Wikipedia article: “List of bow tie wearers,” which is up for deletion in its entirety.

Admittedly nothing terribly exciting at the moment, but my Flickr stream has been pretty stale for about a year as I’ve been playing around with Picasa Web Albums recently. Maybe I’ll try to get the two in sync someday so you can view the photos in your preferred interface. Yeah, right after I convert all of those old home videos to DVD and scan all of our old photo albums.

*At work, we put [queries] in brackets, so everyone is clear on exactly what the search was. So, [“phrase search”] represents a user who searched for those words using quotes to specify a phrase, and didn’t simply do a [keyword search].

When we don’t feel like taking a seven hour drive, my family will fly into Manchester to visit our New Hampshire-based relatives. The airport is over an hour away from their house, so the first order of business when getting out of the airport is to get fueled up with stuff from the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s. With Thanksgiving fast approaching I’ve been in super-nostalgia mode, and was checking out the location on Google’s Street View since my relatives’ house is not on it at this time. I thought it was a nice touch that they were able to include the Golden Arches in a flower bed:

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