« March 2006 | Main | May 2006 »
| New job that complements your skill set and has a shorter commute | $ |
| New job with WAY better benefits than old job | $$ |
| New job with higher salary | $$$ |
| New job with boss that isn't a raving lunatic and who lets you out early on a 70 degree, sunny Friday afternoon | PRICELESS |
Go LSU & George Mason!!
--------
I've been meaning to mention... I'm an aunt!
but I like this photo the best because it looks like she is plotting something. Girl has good genes!
--------
Just when I was rejoicing at the return of my friends, Don and Jerry, to my life and thinking how like home it feels to be watching them again it was... The Philadelphia commercial from 2 years ago makes a return? Say it isn't so! Just don't let the Foxwoods leprechan ad be back. PLEASE. And that Jimmy Fallon and Parker Posey have epileptic fits piece? Once was enough.
No idea what I'm talking about? Then you don't watch enough Red Sox baseball on NESN. It's opening day for me as I don't start paying attention to baseball until after the tournament ends. Speaking of which:
Congrats to Billy Donavan and the Florida Gators!! It's not their fault my brackets got busted.. no, that is UConn and Gonzaga's fault. ssssssss....
In July 2001, I went to NYC and stayed in the Millenium Hotel where I took this photo:
Last week I was back at the Millenium hotel for the first time since. The view, however, is drastically different:
Sometimes I still can't believe it.
--------
--------
You know when you quit something that you are very attached to/addicted to (i.e. smoking, chocolate, caffeine or for me, Diet Coke)? You feel good that you've done it...proud of yourself. But 1 slip, 1 cigarette, 1 can and you're back on the juice. Back where you started from, down the slippery slope to complete and utter weakness...
Well, it's one week into baseball season, and the Red Sox have the night off. I found myself thinking: no baseball. God Damn It! Now what am I supossed to do?!? I barely have time to blog anymore, but time must be made for my boys.
--------
--------
--------
--------
--------
Yup, all you non-Massachusetts residents are jelous of our celebration of the "shot heard round the world". The poor Patriot's get overshadowed each year because it's also the dreadful combination of Marathon Monday AND a Red Sox game at 11:05 am*. I think I write about this every year because it's so insane. This is what happens to me:
First I commute to work with people going to Fenway. Drinking may or may not have already commenced.
The Red Sox start at 11:05 at Fenway, at noon, 26.2 miles away the runners begin their trek. This means that just as Mark Loretta was hitting his walk off homerun to put the mighty Red Sox over the top, the first runners are making their way down Beacon St., a mere 2 blocks from Fenway. The Fenway crowd then pours out onto the streets and into the bars, where they drink and drink and drink with the other marathon spectators.
Hours later, I wait patiently for the train. The train arrives, full of people in their metallic post-marathon jackets and Red Sox gear. The doors open, and a smell of a dive bar the morning after smacks me in the face. Bleecchh. All the way home I endure 2 drunk guys coming from the game talking to a marathoner, asking such astute questions as "how long is the marathon? 6 miles?", "26 miles? No Way!", "Is the NY marathon that long?", punctuated with screams of "Who likes the Red Sox?" (seriously?). Finally, a girl yelled back: "you do". Hee.
This was going to be funnier, but I forgot was I was going to say.
* this year vs. Seattle. Is anyone watching in Seattle at 8:05am??
--------
Can you count the number of ads for a certain cell phone provider on this page.. how to even count the the completely egregious background image?
The answer is 5 (4 of which are EXACTLY the same), plus the background image. Further below, there is an additional one in the middle column.
Seriously, Boston.com, what are you thinking?
This week in the Economist (subcription req.), there is the most amazing blurb..
LONG gone are the days when Chinese parents often chose such names as Hongbing (Red Soldier), Aihua (Love China) or even Kangmei (Anti America) for their children. They are still limited by the custom of using no more than two Chinese characters for given names. But growing numbers now prefer to choose highly obscure ones to avoid the common phenomenon, given a paucity of surnames, of bestowing a name already used by countless others. The police, however, have plans to stop this.The problem is that commonly used software for inputting Chinese characters, including that used by police departments responsible for issuing identity cards (which every Chinese must carry), cannot handle very rare characters. In China, the usual way of writing a character on a computer is to enter its pronunciation using Roman letters, then choose from a list of possible options (most characters have many homonyms). A rare character might not show up on the list.
The tens of millions of Chinese with rare characters in their names have long suffered the consequences, experiencing problems with everything from buying airline tickets to opening bank accounts. A Chinese graduate student says none of her examination certificates has ever recorded her full name, Chen Minqian. The rare min character, a poetical term for autumn, has been represented by zeros or asterisks. Many computers once had problems generating the name of Zhu Rongji, China's former prime minister, thanks to his rong character, which is an unusual variant of a character meaning smelt.
For the police all this has become a particular problem with the introduction in 2004 of new identity cards with embedded microchips. Rather than getting better software, a senior police official has announced that the answer is to ban problematic characters.
Typical. It's only their names, I'm sure they won't mind.
--------
--------
--------
--------
--------
--------
you spend minimal time keeping up with your blog reading for 5 weeks? Well, according to the RSS reader:
Yeah, I subscribe to way too many blogs, most of them political/news related.
--------
And like a gift from above, we have A-Rod Humping...
--------
Weird.
--------
For those of you not dorky enough to be Tivo-ing C-Span on Saturdays, as I did, last night was the White House Correspondents dinner, one of the more amusing evenings of the year. The President usually playfully mocks himself to show that he has a sense of humor, and Bush did. And the Stephen Colbert appeared and said what 68% of American's would love to say to Bush (Watch at You Tube), though he was no where near as mean as last week when he ripped Bill Kristol. Some, I'm sure, will emphasize the lack of laughter from the crowd, but that just proves Colbert's point on the media and frankly, the administration isn't funny, they're just scary.