nuinca

Phrases and gap analysises

A few words and phrases that makes me uncomfortable. Will add more as I think of them. Feel free to add your own:

- Gap analysis

- Stiff competition

- Sticky

- Pipe wrench

Forgive the dust

After a several month hiatus, I have nuinca.com back on a stable server (one that isn’t costing me $15/moth) and I’m going to spend some time updating the stylesheets for this nifty theme.

The dark gray background wont’ be the final look – I hate it, but the normal, all-white background was burning my eyeballs.

More soon!

The one not about me

Joellen died today. And that’s really it.

This is a great powerful moment  in which words fall apart and the well oiled mechanisms of life in it’s mid-20’s rust together. There will be something again and it will be here soon, no worry about that. But for now, stupefied in the dark is what we have.

Jesus. Goodbye Joellen, I love you.

The part about narcissism

Diana made me go to church on Sunday. Gasp, I know, church isn’t Jonathan’s idea of a great time, but when I’m absolutely forced to go, at least we make it to a local Presbyterian outfit whose minister has had some impressive things to say in past sermons.

Except for this time.

At some point the minister started comparing today’s narcissistic society and the good ole days – and used our “selfless” and “prideless” victories in World War II as an example. Culture in the 30s and 40s, our minister said, was not personally prideful and people carried on with the larger benefit of mankind as their reward.

I wasn’t sure who was more upset at his oversimplified and obviously contradictory statements – me or Jesus. From what the history books have told me, the early/mid part of this century hosted McCarthyism, women’s suffrage, segregation and gross war-time cultural stereotypes. How did any of those benefit mankind?

Of course, I can’t argue against how personally narcissistic society has become, but I do have an idea of why it’s happened. If I was a 26-year-old man in 1940’s America, know what I would have been proud of? Being a white man in 1940’s America. I could be proud of my gender and race – cuz hey, at least I’m not black or a woman.

Today, however, being proud of one’s race/gender/greed (I’m purposefully excluding religion, because that’s one place people are still total assholes) is mostly unacceptable, and mankind’s need to be proud of something has forced us into being proud of ourselves. Not a totally bad thing, I says, since maybe we’ll all soon be too busy with ourselves to worry about how much we hate the other guy.

If any of this sounds too FOX-esque, forgive me. My recent 4-day trip to Augusta, GA left plenty of tv watching time, and I spent hours on FOX news. God, I hate Glenn Beck

The impossible

Slideshows suck. Wedding slideshows suck even more. Mine doesn’t. Watch it!

The best birthday that wasn’t

I have had some great birthdays in my life. On my 21st, the group I was with got way more drunk than me, which doesn’t make much sense but did end with someone leaving a puddle of fish-n-chips-n-whisky in the middle of Main Street, Greenville.

Before that, I remember my pops getting me a cream-on-white Fender Stratocaster (a la Clapton) on my 16th birthday. Problem was, he wanted to surprise me and asked me to get his cigarettes out of the car. I did, and somehow managed to miss the large, guitar shaped box next to them. When I came back in with the smokes but without a guitar, dad had to improvise.

There are plenty of other memories, but the point I’m getting to is this – recently, my birthday has been the worst day of the year.Last year I had a root canal.

This year, I went to ER.

Diana and Luis planned an incredible surprise party for me at some meat and swords place out at the beach. Everything started well enough, including me being genuinely surprised at a room full of people dedicated to telling me Happy Birthday. It was awesome – for the first 15 minutes.

Pretty soon, I was in the bathroom throwing up so hard my lungs were having a hard time refilling after each yack. Lucky for me, the bathroom in this busy restaurant was movie-scene deserted, and I had plenty of time to wretch in peace. After an hour of praying for death, Luis got me out of there, and around 2:00am I felt like I was going to die and went to the emergency room (after stopping by the paper to retrieve the insurance card in my desk, natch)

The lovely ER nurse with the personality of a moldy sponge pumped me full of relaxing meds and sent me home with a diagnoses of food poisoning around 4:30am.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that I missed a night full of sword meat, booze and friendship, Luis and Diana had a custom-made robot cake for me at the party. Luis brought it over the next day and I spent the next two days picking apart the remains, eventually cutting the head off and keeping it in the freezer.

The moral to this story? Always cut the head off a robot.

Auto-tuned love

Have I posted this music video before? I can’t remember. Doesn’t matter – watch it!

Regardless, I say this is the best music video I’ve ever seen, even though it’s definitely not one of Kanye’s best songs. After watching it a hundred times last night and today, I realize why it works so perfectly with Kanye’s auto-tuned voice – it’s a rough digital proximity of the original.

Medvedev

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has a video blog. They seem to be very scripted, and certainly not short (the one above is 5.5 minutes long), but it’s an interesting look at a world leader and country who’s fairly notorious for controlling information. If Medvedev can do it, why can’t our editor?

Palm Pre x3

This post has 3 purposes.
1) Talk about my new Palm Pre
2) Increase site hits by talking about the new Palm Pre.
3) Actually accomplish something at work since I have to open today. Palm Pre.

So yeah, I bought a Pre. After being on a few waiting lists around town (and having Best Buy suggest that I put down $50 to get on a VIP waiting list), I picked one one up the Sprint store in St. Johns Town Centre. I called Friday afternoon, they had one for me Saturday.

Despite my constant bragging on how much better the Pre is than an iPhone (and it IS), I have had a few gripes with it.

Gripe #1 Stupid dragging up to unlock. I know that Palm had to be different from Apple, but dragging up to unlock the phone is annoying. It doesn’t affect usability at all, but it does affect one-handed-ability-ness, which isn’t a word but should be.

Gripe #2 When I leave the Pre in the keyboard-out position, and the screen turns off, the only way to turn the screen back on is to hit the power button or keyboard button. WTF Palm. Why can’t I just touch the screen or shiny button at the bottom?

Grip #3 Re-positioning the cursor when I’m texting/emailing. So if I have written an email, but misspelled a letter a few words ago, I have to try and touch on the screen where to place my cursor. Again, not a huge deal, but it’s the most frustrating of the issues I have.

Other than those three, everything about the Pre is fantastic. The shape is perfect, the camera is bright and contrasty, the touch is flawless and the keyboard is great (for someone with skinny fingers, anyway.)

*update. Ok, my Pre just crashed for the first time. I don’t know what was happening, but the phone stopped responding for about 10 seconds and then restarted itself. God, let’s not make a habit of this.

Since I’m here…

I always hated the flashcard study aids game as a kid. The one where you write one stupid thing per card, mix them up and randomly pull one? Yeah, that.

In memory of that hated time, I am going to pull a flashcard game on you RIGHT NOW. All you have to do is look at these 4 random images and tell me how they relate. Not only is Nuinca.com fun, it’s educationrific!

Sike – they don’t relate! I mean, I guess besides the fact that everyone is human or a convincing robot clone. Farrah, Billy and Michael all died this week. I bought a Palm Pre.

Now, I am not saying that their three deaths were funny or meaningless or anything, I just need to point out that it’s weird that 3 super stars (shut up, Billy Mays was a super star in my book) all died in one week, and I really wanted to bury the lead until this sentence.

Done and done.