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miniwee
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Name: Wee
Country: United States
State: California
Metro: Bay Area
Birthday: 4/24/1980
Gender: Female
Interests: illustration, photography, fashion design, internet security, graphic design
Expertise: Being off-colour
Occupation: Engineering
Industry: Computers (Internet)
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
10/15/2005
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| I'm in Beverly Hills again for the third time and I think my Hertz gold membership finally kicked in. I had the most trouble picking up my rental car last time:
Hertz didn't have a car for me even though the
reservation was placed under my company's gold membership. They had to
choose a car on the spot. When I went to the parking stall to pick it
up my newly assigned vehicle, it wasn't there. I had to go back to the counter and they had to choose another
car. Unfortunately the second car was in a different lot so I had to wait for some
guy to walk there and drive it over. When I finally got the car, there was no GPS in it. Luckily, I printed Yahoo Maps to my hotel and MySpace prior to my departure. I think it took over an hour for me to get out of the car rental lot. The silver lining was that I ended up with a Mazda 3. It's a car I considered buying at one point and I've test driven it before but having it as a rental car really helped me to determine what it was like to have one. I like the adjustability of the seats, but it really drives like an American car. It feels like a Chevy Aveo and it's very different from my 1999 Toyota Corolla. I like my Corolla. I feel very close to the car. I feel like I'm in total control of it and that it is very responsive to my commands. The Mazda 3, on the other hand, feels like it has a mind of its own. I feel more in control when I use the Tiptronic, but something about it still bothers me.
This trip will be quite short, but I will be back in LA again next week. My rental car is a 2007 Silver Toyota Corolla this time and I like it. It feels more refined than my old Corolla and has very adjustable seats. I sit far enough from the steering wheel that I don't feel like I might get killed if the airbag deploys in a low speed collision. The minus is that I have a concern about the turning radius of the car. I was not able to pull a U-turn but that might have something to do with the narrow roads in Beverly Hills. In any case, I may consider getting myself a newer, safer car. My dad has already offered to give me his 2007 Honda Civic.
I'm really jealous of my coworkers who got to go to Facebook F8 tonight. I was supposed to be there but I got sent down to MySpace instead. Not that MySpace isn't fun, but there was free food, free beer, good techno and an open hack fest for developers. Peter showed me his Simply Hired hack for Facebook and it was amazing.
Amusing fun fact: Tom (*THE Tom) just caught me on Facebook looking at Peter's hack. Tom was not amused.
*Tom is the co-founder of MySpace. MySpace and Facebook are competitors.
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| - There are people working in the office 24 hours/day.
- Band posters and photos of concerts are on every wall.
- The average cubicle decoration will probably get you fired from a normal company.
- Overheard at myspace #2: "We're the #1 web 2.0 company in the world!"
(this is funny because they don't have a single line of AJAX in their
code... yet.)
- Overheard at myspace: "I wish we could smoke inside the building. I would be so much more productive."
- Nerf gun fights at 6:45 PM
- Someone hired a man in a monkey suit to sing happy birthday to a MySpace employee. Promptly after the singing telegram was delivered, the facilities department sent out an email to all MySpace employees to remind them that animals are not permitted inside the building.
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| I'm on my first business trip ever and it's been a long day. It started off with a delayed flight, and then my Gold status at Hertz didn't work because the sign board was broken. I couldn't just walk up to my car and drive off. Then I battled LA traffic on the 405 and then again on Santa Monica Blvd.
When I arrived at MySpace, I was disappointed to find that Tom wasn't really my friend. There was no warm welcome... in fact, we weren't even on the guest list. Security had to call our hosts to ask why we weren't on the visitors list.
My development environment was borked for most of the day, but right around 6:00 PM, a very smart and helpful person helped me get everything under control.
I only have 1 bar of juice on my cell phone and I'm still at MySpace. Another smart and helpful person suggested that I could ask the front desk of my hotel to see if they have any Nokia chargers (people often leave them behind in the hotel rooms.) I'm tempted to check in to see if they have any, and if not, I'll run out and buy one at the nearest Cingular store or something... but there's much to be done before I fly out tomorrow. Arghhhh! What to do, what to do?
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| I lost a little faith in the human race after reading Jason Scott's story on how he exacted revenge on myspacers who hot-linked to an image hosted on his web server by replacing the hot-linked image with a picture of something else.
The story itself is amusing (if you weren't a victim of his goatse bait-and-switch.) but the last 5 paragraphs contained a very poignant message:I was idly wondering today where to go with this, whether to simply refuse to allow myspace pages to hotlink to any images whatsoever, when I recieved this in my inbox: Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007 20:46:11 -0800
From: HotFreeLayouts COM <hotfreelayouts@gmail.com>
To: mailbox@textfiles.com
Subject: hardcore porn pic - take down asap please
hi, you really should take down ASAP
www.textfiles.com/artscene/mirrors/GRAPE-DEMO-ARCHIVE/graphism/rs/razorback/
razorback-the_grim_reaper.png
somebody is flodding our server with that / posting it on myspace etc.
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HotFreeLayouts.com Abuse Team And here we are, back full circle. "Hotfreelayouts" is one of the sites that offers up these design templates for downloads (along with ads, of course), and these fellows, the pilots of the current generation if you will, were utterly unable to do anything about my "flod". Or my flodding. Consider, then, what was going on here. Myspace, a site which is being used by people who don't know how to host or design, ends up with a gaping ass provided by a design firm which can't understand the nature of hotlinking (or of spelling), who have written to someone who can host, design and spell but are doing so with a demand that this person take action.
There will always be people who use things in unintended ways. The first example that comes to mind is the CD-ROM tray as a cup holder. However, when people make a living off of teaching others how to use a CD-ROM tray as a cup holder, then something is very broken. And this, my friends, is why I aspire to take on teaching after I retire from building the Internet. Computers touch every part of our lives, why isn't computer science a mandatory subject in school, just like math and science? | | |
| Google recently topped Fortune's list of "100 Best Companies to Work For" partly due to its huge set of employee perks. In response, Mike wrote a cleverly humorous article on Google perks compared to the stuff that prisoners are entitled to. The verdict? If you're really after perks, you should commit a major crime rather than work for Google. | | |
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