Wyszdom

Congratulations to my sister Sara, who recently won the award for Outstanding Senior Collection at the 2008 Silver Needle Fashion Show by Marist College.

My mom pointed out Sara’s designs in the Poughkeepsie Journal’s photo gallery of the event. Here are some direct links to her photos: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

To give you an idea of what it was like to live with a fashion designer, here’s a typical morning for us in high school:

I’ve just come downstairs and head towards the garage, where I see Sara. We need to leave in about two minutes. Sara looks at me, and is obviously not impressed.
Me: Is there something wrong with what I’m wearing?
Sara: Well, it’s too late now…

Or imagine that I’ve just gotten dressed before some family comes over for Christmas dinner:

Sara: Where did you get those pants?
Me: My closet.
Sara: Those are Dad’s pants. They can’t be yours.
Me: Well, they still fit.
Sara: Mom! He’s wearing pleats!

And more recently:

Aunt/Friend/Etc: That’s a cool bag, where did you get it?
Sara: I made it.

Update: Video.

I often have trouble talking to numbers people. Numbers people need stats on everything, no matter how unimportant the numbers are. I tend to only make qualitative observations.

Part of this may be due to the fact that I’m not that interested in measuring things I cannot control. I almost never check the weather forecast. In most cases, weather won’t change my plans. Now that I’m in Silicon Valley, where there is no weather, I don’t even understand why there’s a forecast in the first place. The only forecast I’d really be interested in would be for earthquakes, but the current precision on those doesn’t help me very much.

To illustrate my problem, here’s what a typical conversation with one of the engineers I know sounds like. Keep in mind that I am generally struggling to insert numbers wherever possible so I don’t sound like an idiot:

#: So, California, huh? What’s the average temperature where you live this time of year?
Me: I’m usually indoors. They keep it at room temperature.
#: 72?
Me: Sure.
#: Do you drive to work?
Me: Yeah.
#: How long does it take you?
Me: I don’t know. Depends on when I leave.
#: When do you usually leave?
Me: Typically between 7 and 11, but it really varies based on when I wake up.
#: Well, how many miles is your commute?
Me: Oh, I looked this up once. It was three. No, that was my old apartment. I think five. Maybe.
#: Gas prices must be crazy out there.
Me: Yeah.
#: What’s the average price there now?
Me: Expensive.
#: How many miles per gallon do you get?
Me: I usually fill up when I’m down to 1/4 tank.
#: Got it. So, how are you liking the local sports teams?
Me: I’m really only qualified to talk about the Internet.

I just completed a two-week period of only wearing glasses, and not contacts. I’m glad I did it, because after wearing glasses for an extended period of time, I’m no longer bothered by all of the distortion they cause, and will be more likely to wear them at night instead of leaving my contacts in longer than I should. But that’s not blogworthy.

What is blogworthy is the fact that this two-week training on my eyes has given me a bigger laptop monitor. You see with glasses, everything appeared smaller than I saw it without glasses (even with contacts.) I don’t know if that’s how it works for everyone, but that’s how I saw things. But after two weeks, I was used to the “small” world I was living in. Today, just after I had put my contacts back in, I picked up my laptop and noticed that everything looked huge! At first I thought my resolution or browser font size settings had been changed. As I looked around, I realized that wasn’t the case; the monitor itself appeared larger. I looked beyond my monitor, and saw that my TV had grown too! I think I’m going to go and look around for more “upgrades.”

Oh, and speaking of upgrades, if you use WordPress, it’s time for 2.5.1 (includes security fixes). You’ll want to subscribe to their blog to hear about future updates (thanks for the tip, Matt), so I don’t have to tell you here.

I know I picked on NBC in my previous post, but the truth is, I don’t think anyone has come up with a complete solution for online video. Not even Apple. I recently wanted to check out Juno, since I was told that I’d like it. It is available in iTunes, but for some reason not when I search on my Apple TV. I could download to iTunes, then sync to my Apple TV, but that’s just silly, and it wouldn’t be in HD anyway. Ok, I just checked as I was writing this… it’s available to buy in iTunes, but not to rent. Ugh. Why?

Maybe TiVo has some good stuff going, but I haven’t used one since living at home, because I don’t have cable now and I don’t think a TiVo would be worth it for the amount of TV I watch. I’m not interested in getting cable, since their HD is compressed to the point where it would annoy me too much. I’ve been impressed by the quality from FiOS, but my building isn’t wired for it. And I know Amazon has their Unbox thing, but I looked into it when it first came out and there was no Mac support.

So while I’m sure Apple and other services would point fingers at the studios, and the studios would have a short-sighted comment about piracy, I really don’t care whose fault it is. I just want to watch a movie.

I considered putting this in my “Idiot Marketing” category, but in this case I think they truly are just clueless.

I was busy tonight and didn’t catch The Office while it was on TV. A year ago, this wouldn’t have been a big deal. I could just download it on iTunes the next day. In fact, it would be even better now since I could sync it to my Apple TV and watch it on the same screen I would have normally. Unfortunately, NBC has stopped selling their content on iTunes, so that is not an option. The next best thing I can do is get it on my computer, and hook that up to my TV, although that requires getting off of the couch. NBC does offer the ability to watch the episodes right on their website, but even if I went through the trouble of hooking up my computer, the image still wouldn’t be full screen. This is what “full screen” mode looks like on NBC.com:

See the unnecessary border? Annoying. And why do they have to promote the name of the show in the upper left corner? Obviously I am aware of the show; wouldn’t their marketing people want to put the NBC logo or something else there instead? I could put it in that mode and then make creative use of a the “zoom” accessibility feature ins OS X, but it’s hard to get it aligned just right.

I thought for a brief moment that I might be able to get a better, fuller-screen option of the show when I noticed that NBC now has a download option. But before I even clicked, I remembered NBC.com’s historically poor treatment of Mac users, and guessed that they don’t offer Mac support. I was right. According to their site, “Support for Apple and Linux systems will be coming in early 2008.” That’s a somewhat positive sign, but I personally would only consider Q1 to be “early,” and we’re now approaching the end of April. I’m sadly used to it, but this lack of Mac support is ridiculous, especially today when Apple’s consumer market share may be at 21% in the U.S. Its market share of consumers who have computers that actually work and like to do things with them like watch TV shows may be even higher.

I’d gladly pay for an HD download of The Office, but nobody is selling. Oh, and did you notice that the screenshot isn’t from tonight’s episode? That’s because it’s not available their website yet. It’s times like this that I consider going to the dark side and finding a nice high-quality HD download on the Internet. The same thing happens when I try to watch a DVD and get frustrated by the piracy warnings that they disable the skip buttons for. You know, the piracy warnings that only people who purchased the DVD get to see.

I wish an executive from every network would just sit down and listen to someone like Alex Lindsay for 5 minutes and trust that he knows what people want. But that probably won’t happen until it’s too late.