PHIL NGUYEN

The Apple verses Microsoft advertising war delights me. All those “I’m a PC” commercials are just downright bizarre. They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I cannot say I disagree. It’s kind of like that kid in high school that leaves for summer break as a nerd and returns in the fall as a punk. Something just isn’t quite right. Of course, Apple responded directly to that strange set of events with two sets of advertisements that ask why Microsoft is spending so much on an advertising budget and less on the development of the software itself - a pretty fair point. Windows Vista is a poo poo platter if I ever saw one.

I am pleased with Apple’s new line of Macbooks, Macbook Pros, and 24″ cinema displays. Though, I’m not purchasing any of them, it is definitely a step in the right direction and it seems that their market share will continue to increase.

This is definitive proof that people are, indeed, very stupid. I don’t think the book is all that great to be honest - I think pretty much everyone is categorized as a douchebag. It’s more geared towards bad comedy than its blog counterpart (you can google that, since I’m lazy). The blog is fairly academic and makes some valid points about the evolution of men, but the book moves away from that ideology which is upsetting.

Malcolm Gladwell is fantastic, and his ruminations about different kinds of geniuses is worth the read if you have some spare time. It’s kind of academic at points, so skimming through part of it isn’t a big deal - but definitely check it out. It’s not too late for me to realize my own self genius! I especially enjoyed the bits about how Mark Twain and how he wrote Huck Finn.

I made a trade in fantasy football. I gave up the touchdown machine Jonathon Stewart in order to acquire the injured Joseph Addai. I already rostered Addai’s backup Dominic Rhodes, so that makes the trade a little less risky. Since the Indianapolis coaching is staff is notoriously coy about their injury reports, there is a fair possibility that Addai’s injury is more serious than currently being let on. But anytime you get a chance to add a featured top 10 running back on a pretty strong offense, you jump on it. My current roster is pretty robust for a 12 team league:

QB: Romo, Delhomme
RB: Westbrook, Addai, Rhodes, Buckhalter, Charles
WR: Marshall, R. White, M. Jones, A. Bryant, Avery
TE: Clark
K: K. Brown
DEF: NY Giants

If I can get some of these guys healthy, I am very excited about the prospects of this season. I have an excellent receiving corp. Marshall is a top 3 fantasy receiver, and White would probably be redrafted in the 7-10 range. My depth there is not bad either, as the other three are definitely serviceable. I like my set of running backs too. I crushed this week thanks to strong performances by Avery and Westbrook, so now I stand at 5-3, but with the second most points in my league.

I want to buy a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Here is a baby boy pictured below. This breed is playful and easy to maintain. Perfect for me.

I probably have to wait on that for a little while. I’m concerned about house training a dog in the winter and that whole transition of becoming a pet owner, so this will probably have to wait until the spring, but gosh, I am excited.

Google’s new browser Chrome is absolutely fantastic and makes browsing the web on Windows a joy. Its simplistic interface is so sleek and aesthetic. Everything is where you would expect it to be and each icon is both inline and universal (programmers: pay attention!). Visually, it’s leaps and bounds ahead of Firefox and (gasp) Internet Explorer. Whenever I was forced to use dreadful Windows, I had preferred Firefox 2 to both Windows Safari or IE. I had been playing with Firefox 3 for a while, but it’s feels so cramped. There are too many frivolous buttons. I consider myself to be a tech geek, and I have no idea what half the buttons on the toolbar do. Unless you are colorblind, FF3’s GUI is unbelievably jarring. No application (much less a browser) should use every color in the rainbow. Thank god Google is here to maintain my sanity and save the world.

I’ve also been pleasantly surprised with how snappy Chrome is. There is a noticeable speed bump, especially in regards to some Java-based web apps. So far, Chrome has been stable for me. No freezes or crashes yet (knock on wood!) and most of the hiccups are do my inconsistent Internet connection, not the software. It will be a travesty if more people don’t pick up on this great piece of software. A good Google developing group is good for all of us.

I’ve been an absentee blog owner recently. There hasn’t been any legitimate reason for my brief hiatus, but I have been busy with real work (poker), fake work (bar scouting reports), and fun (too much). A rundown of things I’ve done this past week:

Monday: A friend of mine does PR work for restaurants. Part of the job description is going to various restaurants, sampling some of their best, and reviewing it. I was invited for a dessert tasting, and well, you know, I can’t turn down a free meal. This instance, we went to Olana. I ordered a chicken milanese sandwich as a small entry (can’t eat on an empty stomatch!), which was subpar, but we were there for the desserts so I can excuse that lapse in culinary judgement.

The first one we got was peaches and blueberries on polenta waffles with a side of blueberry ice cream. It was pretty good. There was a mixture of textures, from the smooth ice cream, to the dense, crumbliness of the polenta. The next dessert was a rhubarb strudel and that was absolutely fantastic. The pastry was wonderfully flaky, and the taste was just delicious. We got a fried ice cream ’smore, but that was easily the worst one. It was too heavy and there was a singular flavor that was too overpowering. We also got a cheese plate, which was standard as far as cheeses go.

Tuesday: I saw Jaguar Love (ex Blood Brothers and Pretty Girls Make Graves) at the Southpaw. Decent music doesn’t often come to this side of the slope, but the Southpaw houses some gems every once in a while.

You would think that I’d become exposed to new, rad music now that I live in the hipster capital of the world; well actually, a hop, skip, and jump away from said purgatory. But my once brazen ears have been musically sheltered. I am an endangered species. And soon, I will grow old and bald and be relegated to playing the Foo Fighters on repeat.

But ANYWAY, they were absolutely fantastic. I can see how their sound would be very hit or miss to some people - the singer’s voice is shrill and potent. But they are much more muted than their Blood Brother’s days, and they definitely put on a very fun live show. The two opening acts were really good, and I wish I remembered who they were.

EDIT: Stether’s remembers! They were called Kings of Left and the other was Beluga.

Wednesday: My knowledge of wine is pretty much zero. I don’t even know enough about it to be a novice or an amateur. But alas, I made my way to a Inoteca. I don’t think I made a fool out of myself, though I do feel like a girl ordering fruity, sweeter wines (read: blushes). But I must say that they tasted great, and I could get used to adding wine to my drinking repertoire. For various reasons, I feel somewhat important and older when I’m at a wine bar. It’s a stark contrast to drinking boxed Carlo Rossi and passing out in a bathroom during college.

I want to take this course at the French Culinary Institute. The price tag is kind of hefty ($995), and I’m not sure if I’m going to want to go to class at 8pm on a Wednesday night in December. The cold scares me. Why do I even live in the northeast? But still, I’m considering it. I’d learn a lot, and if I have plans to open a bar, I at least have to know the basics.

Thursday: Vegetarians united and we went to Vegetarian Palate for dinner. It wasn’t as good as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still a place I would return too. I ordered a mango chicken which was pretty good. And the table split vegetarian peking ribs (very good) and fried chicken bananas (not good, but then again, I don’t like ‘nanners).

Speaking of vegetarianism - I briefly experimented with it about a month ago. In total, I was a vegetarian for 13 days, which of course is a small sample. But I want to dispel this myth: a lot of people say that becoming a vegetarian makes you feel healthier. It’s kind of like an intangible thing that not many people can properly explain. They don’t say you gain more energy, or that you lose weight, it’s just some feeling. Well, I didn’t feel better. I felt much, much worse. Perhaps it was a lack of protein. Or maybe I just missed a medium rare steak. But I felt less responsive, and I had terrible, irregular stomach pains. That, more than the lack of meat, made me not want to be a vegetarian for any period of time.

BUT, I recently stumbled upon an advertisement for something that might have cured it - and something, I may get anyway: The Washlet. It’s not a toilet or a bidet, but a toilet seat attachment. And a hose-type device juts out, and washes your behind. Look at the demo. I think I’m crazy, but I think this might be the ultimate luxury.

Friday: I played poker for like six hours. I thought my brain was going to melt away into the long lost corridors of the sphinx.

One more thing: this is probably common knowledge to the internet-savvy crowd, but for the unaware, XKCD is seriously the best internet-comic ever. And this is coming from someone who loves dinosaurs and dinosaur comics. I want to post some of my favorite XKCD ones, but half the greatness lies in the alt tags, but you sort of have to be an computer geek to know what they are. Still, I may post them anyway.

The blog software that I use is pretty robust. It has nearly every option I could ever want and I only even use a fraction of the widgets they give me. The one thing that is sorely lacking though is the inclusion of a simple menu-driven blog roll. It would be nice to be able to link to you guys some of the (too many) blogs that I read on a daily basis. Also, I think it would help garner traffic for this dear piece of web space.

Side note: I thought only a handful of you read this blog, but I’ve now had 10000 hits a month since February, which I don’t think counts people who read off of an RSS reader. The number of unique visitors has steadily climbed as well. I don’t even think I know 200 people in real life, much less 800 that read this nonsense. I think those figures are fairly impressive considering the noise to content ratio is off the charts.

From what I gather, I have to fidget with some HTML to manually create a blog roll. I’m pretty good with that kind of stuff - web design used to fuel my spending habits before Party Poker was invented. Still though, I think it’s a pain in the ass, and this software should have a simple text field to allow to be do that kind of stuff.

ANYWAY, a good friend of mine just decided to join the ranks of blog community. He’s a rock star (sort of) so I look forward to reading some of his stuff. I figured I’d throw out a plug to him. So here, read all about the chronicles of The Brown Shaun.

Rumors are flying around that renowned author CR Hollenbeck has a blog too. But I hear that super top secret, and I haven’t been able to breach security yet, but soon, the stealth bomber in me will break those impenetrable walls.

One more thing - I’m going to open up a bar instead of a restaurant. It’s going to be a cocktail lounge that pays homage to the early 20th century speakeasy. I’m calling it Brandy Alexander. No really, I am. The ideas are flowing.

OK, I am thoroughly underwhelmed at yesterday’s WWDC. I’m not sure what more Apple could have done with the new iPhone, but it’s their job to push the envelope and be creative and whatnot, not mine. Certainly, I will be an opening day buyer, but it’s not something I’m craving at the moment, unlike the initial iPhone and the MacBook Air (or their recent operating system releases, for that matter).

What was more intriguing to me was their rebranded .Mac service, MobileMe. I’m most interested in online storage, the new pushing software, and how everything syncs from each machine, a problem I struggle with currently. Mainly, I hate charging my iPhone through the dock connector because I prefer using a normal wall socket. I also like how the email system works through MobileMe and how everything seems to just work from all locations. The interface seems pretty slick and it works with Windows too.

They didn’t make much notice of their new OS, Snow Leopard, but that’s too be expected. That development is still months away and I’m sure they didn’t want to give up any of their ideas this early on.