The Grand Social Experiment

About three weeks ago I had lunch with a coworker. Ruth is a coworker of mine like Stephen Davis was a classmate of mine. We inhabit the same space, pass each other weekly about our daily business, and exchange smiles of anonymous benevolence that are shared among familiar strangers. But this digression is not precisely relevant to my story. I upped the relationship and asked Ruth out to lunch which resulted in her loaning me a copy of a book she enjoyed, The Game, by Neil Strauss. This book has set off more than one interesting conversation among friends and the Grand Experiment.

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My Nieces Are Cooler Than Yours

This past week I hosted my two nieces (Jessie and Maria) with my sister, Molly, for a whirlwind tour of the bay area. They came out around 3:00 on Tuesday and I left them dazed and confused at Union Square around 1:00 on Wednesday. In that time, we saw the wharf, the Haight (for an east-African dinner at Masawa), Chinatown, the top of Coit tower, and the redwoods of Muir woods. I’ve posted the few pictures that met my stringent quality requirements on the image section in this folder.

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Blitzporn

Man, there’s a lot of porn on the internet. And it’s not just the meat-and-potatoes, slap-ass, money-shot-in-your-face kind of porn we all grew up with. It is some sick shit! Well, I know that “sick” is all a matter of degrees, but I’m just saying that it appears that most porn ads that bombard this blog (about 30 a day) are of the more extreme sort than I’m accustomed to.

If you have already been offended by the language in this post, don’t go any further. It’s going to get a little worse.

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The Shame of Intel

I just arrived back in San Jose after a long Memorial Day weekend near Nashville with my family. One planned event for the trip home was the replacement of my parents’ PC purchased from Dell in 1998. That Pentium II was hopelessly out-of-date and a severe bottleneck even for web browsing. My Dad wanted my “expert help” in selecting a replacement, so we decided to shop retail on Thursday. The results of that research saddened me.

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Express Cameras Bait-and-Switch

A couple of weeks ago I got my press credentials renewed for the 2006 series of Miller Lite Fight Night at the tank. I wanted to buy a flash for the event that was recommended to me by friends and seemed like the right price. I typed in ‘buy 550ex’ (the model number) in Google and ended up in a scam a second time. I guess I didn’t learn the first lesson completely…

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