Author: bryan

I’ve been back in California now for a couple of days after a short but sweet trip out to Texas to visit friends and families. We left last Tuesday (23rd) and flew to Dallas. We spent a couple of days there, relaxing and eating and such. On Christmas eve we had an awesome dinner of roasted duck that Les’s mom whipped up. As always, her food is perfect and comes into being seemingly without effort.

Another interesting thing we did on the trip was get Les’s dad set up with his new computer: a 14″ G4 iBook. Since I didn’t have the money lying around this calendar year to buy a mac for myself, I gave him my personal discount from Apple. He’s got all the trimmings: Airport Extreme, extra RAM, a bigger hard drive. The thing is quite sprightly. We outfitted him with all the important accessories, too, like a wireless network for their house and a shiny new digital camera. They seem to be enjoying their new toys. There are a few pictures from the events on gallery, but I also set up a little picture website for them to have. You should check it out: http://marcandsusan.overt.org.

Other highlights of Dallas include driving around to look at the elaborate displays of lights on the houses and getting a sweet duffel bag (monogrammed) and a very nice pen and set of engraved note cards from Leslie’s parents. Cameron also got me an awesome book of collected Tori singles arranged for solo piano. Not a bad haul.

We left on Christmas day to go to Austin. The afternoon was spent with my parents, opening presents and eating candy and nuts from the stockings. I scored a very nice light for the front of my bike, a questionable dancing turkey, and Metroid Prime, a video game for GameCube (which is good, since I just beat FFX-2 yesterday. Got to have a constant supply of distraction). We had an excellent turkey dinner with the stuffing that my parents make that I love so much. The turkey was also even better than usual, a fact my parents attributed to it free-rangeness (amongst a rash of inane jokes about catching the turkey).

The rest of the time in Austin was spent catching up with friends that were in town. It was awesome. There’s no doubt what I miss the most here in CA are my friends from home. And I’m not making the same kind of friends here, partially because of my geographic isolation from other people my age, and partially because I ended up working with people who are mostly 5-20 years older than me and are married/have kids/otherwise don’t want to hang with me. In any case, I’m going to do my best to hold on to my good friends until I can systematically lure them all out to the west coast.

So, now we’re back in CA. Yesterday, Clare arrived (yay more friends!) and we spent the afternoon in the city, walking down Haight and around in Golden Gate park. Today is getting off to a lazy start after a perfunctory celebration of new year’s last night (damnit, we did at least have champagne!). We’ve taken some pictures that I imagine we’ll post eventually. Stay tuned.

As many of you may know, I have a special place in my heart for WalMart. I’ve hated the place since before I read _Nickle_and_Dimed_, and since then I haven’t even let someone mention it without going off on some sort of tirade. I was recently reading slashdot when I came across a comment (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=89856&threshold=5&commentsort=0&tid=141&mode=thread&cid=7761374) that really summed up why I think the place is so awful:

Top 5 Reasons Not To Shop At Wal-Mart

        1. American Wal-Mart Employees Are Exploited.

        2. Wal-Mart’s Low Prices Are The Result Of Human Misery.

        3. Wal-Mart Forces Its Unethical Practices On Its 65,000 Suppliers.

        4. Wal-Mart Destroys Local Communities.

        5. Wal-Mart Is Not Accountable.

1. AMERICAN WAL-MART EMPLOYEES ARE EXPLOITED:

        * “Full-Time” (actually 28 hours/week) employees only gross $11,000 a year,

              on average.

        * Health benefits are available only after two years, but premiums are so

              high only 38% of employees can afford it.

        * Even discussing working conditions or unionization will result in

              retaliation and firing.

        * There is “a harsh, anti-woman culture in which complaints go unanswered

              and the women who make them are targeted for retaliation.” (Quote taken

              from a national class-action suit against Wal-Mart.)

2. WAL-MART’S LOW PRICES ARE THE RESULT OF HUMAN MISERY:

        * 13-16 hour days molding, assembling, and painting toys, 7 days a week; 20

              hour days in the peak season.

        * Workers are paid 13 cents/hour wages in China: the minimum wage is

              31 cents.

        * There is no health or safety enforcement: constant headaches and nausea

              from chemical fumes, indoor temperatures above 100 degrees F, rampant

              repetitive stress disorder, no protective clothing available.

        * Most employees are young women or teenage girls.

3. WAL-MART FORCES ITS UNETHICAL PRACTICES ON ITS 65,000 SUPPLIERS:

        * Suppliers have to open their accounting books to Wal-Mart executives so

              they can cut “unnecessary expenses” like unionized workers, health

              benefits, and American-made products.

        * Suppliers are forced to move facilities to China and other low production

              cost nations to meet Wal-Mart’s demands.

        * Competitors are also forced to abandon customer service while slashing

              employee wages and moving production to foreign sweat shops to remain

              competitive.

4. WAL-MART DESTROYS LOCAL COMMUNITIES:

        * Wal-Mart stores average 200,000 feet in size: more than 4 football fields

              and destroying any sense of community or character where they are located.

        * By pricing items below cost they crush local retailers. Once they hold a

              monopoly in the market they raise prices.

        * Three good jobs are destroyed for every two Wal-Mart jobs created.

        * Instead of business profits being reinvested in the community they are

              shipped to Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.

5. WAL-MART IS NOT ACCOUNTABLE:

        * The media won’t report negatively about Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart would

              pull its huge advertising budget.

        * The 535 members of Congress have no power compared to Wal-Mart’s

              global reach: Wal-Mart does not have to answer to American voters, just

              it’s stockholders who are seeking unethical profit.

        * Wal-Mart is radically remaking our labor standards and local economies

              by stifling debate, suppressing knowledge, and not asking our consent.

It’s a bit incestous, but I can’t resist. My brother passed this my way: overt, jived.

I think I mentioned earlier that Apple, as a reward for all the hard work of its employees this year, has given us all the week off. Now, granted, I’m not responsible for this hard work, but I’m still taking the week off.

Yesterday I went out to Castle Rock with my brother to do some bouldering. It was great. The rock there is sandstone, much nicer on your hands than granite (Hueco Tanks, Enchanted Rock), but not quite as nice as limestone (Reimers). Still, with the cool weather and the sandpaper texture, you seem to stick spiderman-style to everything, which is a great ego boost. Of course, I forgot my camera. We’re thinking about dragging Doug and George out there for some nature this weekend.

The rest of the day was soaked up finding and buying a (free-range) turkey, ditching our digital cable box like a bad habit ($15 a month so that the channels will change more slowly?), and playing X-2.
You know you’re a hardcore fan of a series when you shell out $50 bucks to watch a former high-summoner run around in a strange japanese idea of a short skirt dancing and singing and changing clothes. Yet the game is strangely excellent, just like all the FF series that seem at first bizarre or tedious (can you say FF tactics?).

More reports to follow as Thanksgiving activities heat up.

Once upon a time a boy named Bryan was born. He grew up strong and in time had a wrist worthy of bearing a watch. Not a big watch, though, for he was a small boy at first. So, he took to wearing women’s watches since the huge chunkiness of men’s watches made it look like he’d strapped a roma tomato to his arm.

This worked for many years until Bryan’s wrist grew too large for women’s watches. He now had to face the cold, harsh world of timepieces built for real men. He found a reasonable watch that had a neat little feature: it would light up when you pressed a button. In time, Bryan lost this watch as he loses most things, even those that are strapped to his body. He bought another watch, and this one showed the date. “What a neat little feature,” he thought. Then he lost this watch.

The process continued through the years, watches being bought and lost, and bought and broken, and slowly Bryan was seduced by the all the neat features he’d seen. He proclaimed, “I shall once and for all have a watch that has all the features I want, consequences be damned!” And to the horror of his friends he bought this:

Weighing in at 17.2 kilograms, the watch had everything Bryan could have ever wanted. It glowed when you pressed a button. It had the date. It had a timer. It had an alarm. It had a big face, and then THREE LITTLE FACES WITH HANDS INSIDE THAT FACE! Imagine the power!

In time, though, Bryan came to realize that he hated the watch. It was huge. It was ugly. And it was heavy. He started taking it off to type, to play piano. Then he started to not even bother putting it on.

A new idea came into his mind. “What I really need a watch to do,” he thought, “is tell me what time it is. And a watch I’m not wearing doesn’t do such a hot job of that.” So he decided to make a drastic change. A vague memory of a better kind of watch echoed in his mind. Something small. Something thin. Something light. Something swiss. A swatch!

This watch, my friends, does not even have a second hand. This watch is 3.9mm thick. This watch is so serious about being light that it is missing most of the material out of it’s links! THINK ABOUT IT! THIS IS THE ANSWER! At last Bryan has found a watch which will satisfy him for the rest of eternity. Will Bryan and the watch live happlily ever after? No one will know until that fateful day comes when the mailman delivers it.

I’m hoping for tomorrow or Monday. The end.

When I started fresh with a new look for overt this summer, I pledged to update everything more frequently. And I’m certainly doing better than I have in the past (i.e., two posts a year). Still, things have been dropping off a bit, and I think I know why.

When I started updating frequently, every week or day had me in a new state or on a new trip or with a new lease or new fundamental plan for my life. Now, I’ve got a plan that’s slightly longer-term. I keep waiting for something worth posting to happen, but it doesn’t because things have settled down.

So I realized what I have to do to keep momentum: start posting boring details about my life. This way, random strangers have access to a more complete picture of who I am.

So on with it! Tonight is Friday night, which as you all know means expensive meat and Japanese beer here at the Greatest Apartment in the World (TM). Today I went with ribeye steak because it cost more than the other meats (this is my level of sophistication when it comes to buying good food). Plus, I have fond memories attached to it and I haven’t had it in years.

Now, I’m waiting for Leslie to come home from her self-imposed torture of grading papers on Friday afternoon. I personally had a great day at work, but, quite frustratingly, I can’t really say why except that I got to see some cool stuff (sense any similarities to working at a three-letter govt agency?). Well, that’s why I took the job, I guess: to play with cool new stuff. I just have to wait for some time to pass before I can point to it and say, “I worked on that.”

I’ve got some other things to blather about, but I’m going to put them in separate posts, mostly just because I’m curious to see how my system handles multiple posts in one day (a pitch of updating frenzy I’ve not previously dared to approach).