I’m not big on new years celebration anymore.
my friends & I used to go up to Twin Peaks in San Francisco every year, years and years ago.. and watch the fireworks.

’til this one year, we all got sick
because it’s super windy & cold up there on New Year’s Eve
and that was the last time
of course, everyone also went their own separate ways
because we all deeply hated each other
deep inside…

No, not really… it makes a good backstory for some sort of a revenge epic involving former best friends who acquires super powers and then proceeds to destroy like… downtown Tokyo or something in their fights.

Oh, the things my friends put up with. Or something like that… (trying to figure out a clever thing to say to close this post….)

…

Tinu: You can be a writer!

Me: I am, according to my own blog.

Tinu: Haha.

The perils of the public bathroom is often absent in the recess of our minds, which I suspect is a form of primitive self preservation technique. Denial is obviously the most effective tool for curbing one’s natural instinct to avoid dangerous situations. Despite my brain’s better effort to mask the dangers, thus disallowing any confrontations of the public bathroom, I will put my own life on risk to address this series of life-threatening issues today.

Bathroom Design – The Division

I don’t know who was the brilliant engineer that came up with “the division” between bathroom stalls. The proponent of the division would say, “What, would you rather have no wall at all?” My issue with the division isn’t the fact that it exists, but the fact that it doesn’t exist enough.

Let’s say, if you were building a house, would you ever consider putting in walls with six-inches hollowed on the bottom, or having two-inch space between the walls? Other than a certain type of “converted-loft-into-living space” lifestyle, where the open space is meant to focus and project any strange noise you make into a sonic boom that can be released by cracking your windows just an eighth of an inch (thus allowing all of your neighbors to know exactly what you were doing last Saturday night), it’s hard to imagine anyone would build houses with floating walls on purpose.

So why, in the name of whatever holy entity one might be subscribed to at the moment, would anyone think floating wall in the most holy sanctuary of men is enough? How much longer will I have to watch as shoes pacing by the front of my stall door and pray silently to myself, “Please don’t look, please don’t look please don’t look..” There is no dignity with floating walls, let’s just all pass a bill that makes it mandatory for every public bathroom to have walls that touches the ground, and doors that closes without leaving peeping cracks, okay?

Bathroom Design Part II – The Urinal

Make no doubt, men take pride in their urinals. It’s one of the few (very, very, very few) places where men can claim almost absolute superiority over women. “See, I can go pee in less than the time it takes you to drop your pants and sit down!” However, the urinal itself is filled with an impossible flaw:

Splash.

Back.

I’ve seen all types of urinals throughout my years. Small ones that required precise aiming, gigantic urinals that one can sit inside if so choosed, ones that stretches from top of the ceiling to the floor, and elongated urinals that makes you wonder, “Where do I stand?!” Regardless the size or shape of the urinals, there is one common inevitability. No matter where you “go”, it will splash, you will eventually get some on you in some very visible and embarassing place. You can aim high, you can aim low, you can aim at the little hole on the very bottom or the “cakes” that never seem to really absorb anything (a little tip, the cake usually causes the most amount of unpredictable splashback). It does NOT matter.

This is what leads me to believe, that the designers behind urinals are really all women. It’s a dark, hidden conspiracy. It was created, supposedly, to prove the superiority and the efficiency of the male gender by demonstrating just how fast we can zip in and out of the bathroom, impatiently waiting in front of the women’s bathroom while tapping our toes. In reality, we’ll be staring blankly at the bathroom mirror wondering to ourselves, “How did that get there?” Meanwhile mortified at the slight chance that our dates might even peek (and they will peek!) at the general region.

Gentlemen! Speed & efficiency is NOT the most important issue at hand here. Slow down, aim carefully, and use a toilet if you have to (preferrably one with full length wall enclosures)!!!

How the Fuck Did That Get There?!

Despite my previous recommendation to use the toilet at all cost. There is one exception to the rule: If you can’t aim… don’t use the toilet!!

Even with all its flaws, the urinal provides a much larger (usually) surface area and shorter (usually) distance of travel will make up for one’s lack of aim. Splashback is the price that one has to pay, but you don’t expect for human invention to make up for all of your personal problems, do you?

Men, by default, tend to overestimate their own ability to control anything around them, may it be environmental, circumstantial, or limbs & organs that are actually attached to their body (which by definition, they *should* have control over and yet remain hopelessly without). Men who overestimate their ability to aim, commits the worst of sins that can be associated with the bathroom.

We’ve all had this experience, when you walk into the bathroom toilet stall and think to yourself, “How the FUCK did that even get there?~!!” At times you would think that the person that was using this particular toilet before you, might have their internal organs arrangement inverted from the normal physical anatomy that we’ve studied in school. There are several variations of this reaction:

How the fuck did that get…

• on the toilet seat
• on the floor
• on the door
• in the next stall
• on/in all of the above

combined with…

• a manly growl
• a girlish scream
• utter look of disgust
• utter blank stare of shock

Worst of all, men being men, we are not programmed to innately understand the operation of cleaning apparatus of any kind. Even at the expense of exposing oneself as “the guy who just did that” by simply walking away from the stall with a person waiting directly outside the door, men would still choose to leave things as is, and assume the evidence will magically disappear in between sessions.

Is This Even Made From Paper?

Many people make fun of fast food chains for purchasing meat of such low quality, that they would never actually make it onto supermarket shelves. The same can be said of toilet paper for use in public bathrooms. I have no idea how to source and acquire these toilet papers, but it is not rare for one to consider that large print newspaper might be a better choice.

The types of public bathroom toilet rolls I’ve experienced:

• Thin to the point that any bit of moisture will rip through multiple layers. This will probably remind you of the mistake that you made when you purchased that condom from that gas station vending machine one time.
• Despite being thin enough to melt in the air humidity of say, Florida, the toilet paper still manages to be sharp enough to virtually erase your finger prints.
• Multiple layers that never lines up correctly, which isn’t a big issue, but tends to make me very confused and attempt to “fix” it. Somehow tacking on another 20 minutes to the time I spent in the bathroom when it’s all said and done.
• Perforations that never seem to tear away correctly. One tug, you get half a tear and another 3 sheets, and this will continue as long as you insist that the perforations are there to help you.

Worst of all, is when they use the one ultimate toilet roll that seems to combine all the attributes of above: Thin, rough, multiple layers that seems to be falling apart at rapid pace, and most of all… no perforations at all. I don’t know how much money is saved each year by the mere absence of perforations on toilet rolls, but they make these long, continuous rolls that leaves the tearing and separation of individual sheets to your own device.

How am I supposed to know how many square sheets of toilet roll I need, if there are NO square sheets at all? One simply cannot expect the average, normal people to have the mental acuity to be able to determine an arbitrary value of toilet paper length needed! Can’t they at least print some sort of measurement units on the toilet paper itself (although I doubt that will be cheaper than if they just added perforation).

Even more frightening still, is such toilet rolls are always without a doubt, combined with a toilet roll dispenser equipped with a safe, plastic cutting blade. PLASTIC! It seems to take strength and reflex of Olympic proportion to make sure you get just the right amount (relatively speaking) of toilet paper separated with these dull, plastic blades.

I undersand the plastic blades were invented to protect one from cutting themselves, and thus avoiding potentially embarassing lawsuit. However, I think that anyone who files a lawsuit because they cut themselves while dispensing toilet paper, should probably be quarantined away from the rest of the gene pool.

What Is That Smell?

I’m not talking about “the smell”, we all know what that smell is. I’m talking about the urinal cakes, the air fresheners (both the spray and plugin kind), the blue liquid stuff that comes out when you flush, and whatever fashionable contraception there is to keep the bathroom sanitized and “fresh”.

For some odd reason, none of these devices ever seem to work as advertised. It’s almost as if the aim of such devices is to create a mixture of smell with human excrements that can only smell worse by a factor of ten or more.

Personally, I think all these devices were created to speed up the process and flow of people in and out of public bathrooms. If anyone made a device that can actually completely neutralize the bathroom smell, it would only cause people to stay even longer in the holy sanctuary that is the bathroom. Think about the typical amount of time spent on the toilet reading while you’re at home, versus the time you spent on the public toilet. The time-spent-ratio favors home bathrooms by an enormous amount.

This is no accident my friend, very much like the headache-inducing music or nausea-incuding smell at popular clothing retail outlets, these are all subtle hints that pushes you to get in, get it done, and get out instead of lingering around.

In Conclusion…

The situation is dire, and I’m not sure what I said here will be enough, or in time to save anyone from the perils of public bathrooms. I can only hope that someone out there will read this message, and think twice before they enter a public bathroom. Even if you HAVE to go, please go as safely, as possible.

Once you understand the stereotype, establishing relationships within the different cultures within the office is pretty easy. Of course, there will always be someone on the fringe, where personality and ideals clash in such catastrophic way that you’ll never truly get along, even on just a professional level. After all, it’s impossible to love the human race in its entirety. So we learn to get along, or at least learn to ignore those cases of absolute incompatibility.

For the most part, I get along with people just fine. However, if there was one personality that I simply can’t stand in an office environment, it has to be the self-righteous IT admin.

These IT admins usually share the following characteristics:

• They’re usually not the admin for your external servers, such as the customer database, or web server, the internet store… or any outward facing assets.
• Instead, they’re usually the internal admin that manages your desktop, network, storage & email.
• Often times, they’re contracted via a third party consulting/management company. This probably has more to do with very few smaller companies want a full-time IT staff. After all, when nothing is wrong with your corporate network, they just sit there and do nothing.
• They’re usually some very biased zealot championing some company or another. For example, a Microsoft-certified IT admin will endless push MS products & praise Microsoft, after all, their livelihood depends on the continued dominance of Microsoft.
• In contrast, they could also be a super dedicated Linux/Unix geek, where they would transition every system you have to open source as much as possible. They might also insist that every website you build must also be viewable in Lynx.

All those characteristics can probably be interpreted as “charming” or “eccentric” in the same vein as Jon Arbuckle. However, this one last characteristic is what really, really drives me nuts:

• Often times, they’re just complete assholes to anyone who they don’t think have any computer knowledge.

The odds, from the view of most IT admins, are against me, given the fact that I’m a Mac user. Often they will refuse to support me, and then laugh at me for my lack of Windows prowness. The assumption is that since I’m a Mac user, I know nothing about how a computer “really” work and will never understand the greatness and the knowledge that’s being held inside their brain as opposed to mine. Of course, they would have no idea that I once upon time, had a SLI-enabled rig with water pipes directing the flow of heat throughout my self-built system. A computer where every single part and spec, down to the cycling speed of the RAM was carefully researched & picked out by yours truly. I’ve simply grown tired of Windows, and tired of spending thousands of extra money just to get 5 more frames-per-second out of some first-person shooting game that I will get tired of before I’m half-way through the game anyway.

To them, being a “Mac user” pretty much equivocate to being completely computer illiterate. That, in turn, gives them the right to sneer and talk to me in that, “I know you won’t understand this, so let me explain this to you as what I would with a five year-old…” tone.

I don’t find it surprising that they would communicate to me in such a tone. What I do find extremely surprising, is that IT admins are seemingly the only people in the company that can also carry that tone of indignity while talking to VP level staff, CEO’s, and sometimes, even the vaunted Board of Directors! These IT admins, are the only people that can simply tell the VP of (insert any non-technical department here, obviously if you talk to the VP of IT that way, you wouldn’t have a job for much longer) that they don’t know what they’re doing, what they’re talking about, at times infer that they’re extremely dumb for having done something. As for resolutions, they will fix whatever mistake you just made, but not before scolding you and making you feel guilty. Of course, they’ll never fully explain to you what happened, either because they don’t really know, or they think it’s a waste of time to educate that little brain of yours with limited capacity for understanding their technical ingenuity.

The reality is this: IT admins are the new generation mechanics. Simply that, glorified mechanics.

Even VP and CEO’s whimper at the feet of IT admins, because they either do not want to deal with the complexity of computers, or do not have the time to deal with it. If you think about it, a CEO can have ran several multi-million dollar, successful corporations, and still resort to sending the car down to the shop for an oil change. In fact, they would be more likely to simply send everything to the shop than dealing with it themselves. Does the car mechanic talk down to the CEO? Of course not, because they understand that they’re in a service industry, and bad service eventually leads to not having any business down the road.

IT admins don’t see themselves as being a part of the service industry, but rather in a strange way, feels as if they’re in control of something much greater. If the CEO doesn’t get email today, then the whole company is screwed, therefore the wellness of the company relies strictly upon the shoulder of the IT admin, right?

Just as these proud IT admins are talking down to people as if they were five year-olds, the five year-olds are commoditizing what the IT industry does best. We’re approaching an age where a huge majority of our kids growing up knowing how to use a computer. They’re building their own websites, writing codes as a part of school assignments. Just how much longer will the current generation of IT admins be able to snicker at those people who don’t know how to use a computer? As the number of computer illiteracy dwindles, so does the job security of IT administration.

So, word of advice: Stop acting like assholes. There will come a day that they’ll just fire you and hire the sixteen year old from next door to do your job.

Why do we have asian/chinese “chicken” salad? Our cuisine covered an entire spectrum of all sorts of dead animals, why “chicken”? Is there a perception that Asian people only eat chicken, or somehow the only ingredient that you can mash into a salad from the entire range of Asian cuisine is chicken? Why isn’t there Asian barbecue pork salad? Asian fish salad? Well, if you really need to stay within the realm of poultry, how about Asian duck salad?

Of course, the mere fact that we have a certain salad created to cater to our culture is funny. I mean, growing up in Taiwan and all, Chinese people don’t eat salad, ever. Salad is clearly not a part of our traditional palette. So first we have our named tagged onto a type of food we don’t make, then have it limited to only one type of meat.

There is one possibility I have yet to consider though, maybe all Asian chicken salad strictly forbid the use of any other type of chicken excepted the ones imported from Asia…

Wow, that’s a whole ‘nother mess of complications.

Another miscellaneous test for a WordPress plugin, with a cute picture!

And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I’m sorry it’s the case, and I’ll work hard to try to elevate it.

“This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all.

You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war President. No President wants to be a war President, but I am one.

You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror

The Complete Bushism – By Jacob Weisberg

However, for every created need, there are a dozen of “WTF were you thinking?” I think this qualifies as one of them:

iCarta: Stereo Dock for iPod® with Bath Tissue Holder

I realize the product is a bit on the old side. I ran across a picture while browsing TUAW, and couldn’t resist posting it here. Since the product has been released for almost a year now, I’d like to see how many of these they’ve actually sold.

Via my favorite gadget blog.. Engadget:

Smart sole, adjustment shoe.. etc…

Yet here, they are the common vehicles of the wealthy young or old alike. What’s most ironic though, is finding a middle-aged man with silver mane, proudly and triumphantly driving down the freeway in his exotic sports car traveling at 55mph. Perhaps they are just past their athletic prime and no longer possess the reaction time required for pushing their vehicles to the limit. Or maybe they’re just very aware of how much it would cost if a dent was ever placed on their precious gem.

Either way, there’s nothing funnier than following a Porsche at 55mph in the slow lane (I was heading for the exit, mind you), then watching the driver slam on the brake lights as if going any faster would tear their $100k vehicle apart (he, on the other hand, was not exiting).