Outlook print fail

I love stupid irony stuff.

Today is Earth day. It’s a day dedicated to explore a more sustainable way of living.

I’ve always inspired myself to live in an environmental friendly way so Earth day is just another day for me.

Imagine my surprise when this came out of the printer today at work:

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail

Got to make you smile


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Villa Amanzi

Villa Amanzi designed by Adrian McCarroll, Waiman Cheung and Jamie Jamieson located in Phuket, Thailand. This is not the Regular Joe usual hangout but it is nice to take a mental vacation now and then. Just look at it!!!

  

Time hitchhikers or “pull a Sara”

Imagine a situation; it is Thursday night and you went out to a cool place for some drinks and laughs with friends. After an hour passed by and you had few drinks and chatted up everyone you know around you, you get a phone call from another friend who is still at home and you start a shouting contest:

Friend: “WHERE ARE YOU???”

Joe: “AT THE NEW PLACE WE TALKED ABOUT WITH THE PRETTY BARTENDER I LIKE”

Pretty bartender: WHAT??!!!

Joe: CAN I HAVE MORE VODKA ON ICE LIKE I LIKE??!!

Friend: “HOW IS IT?”

Joe: “VERY COOL, LOTS OF PEOPLE”

Friend: “ARE YOU GONNA STAY THERE FOR A WHILE?”

Joe: “WHAT????”

Friend: “DO YOU THINK YOU GONNA STAY THERE FOR A WHILE???????!!!!”

Joe: “oh… we came about an hour ago… I guess we are going to stay for about 1-1.5 hours and then move along”

Friend: “WHAT????!!!!!! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!! GET AWAY FROM THE NOISE”

Joe: “WE ARE GOING TO STAY FOR ANOTHER HOUR OR SO!!!”

Friend: COOOOOOOLLLL!!!!!! I’M HITTING THE SHOWER AND COMING”

Quick math for you; shower + dressing + hair + change clothes + hair again + fixing a light snack + change clothes again + driving + find parking + getting in the club at this hour = 54 – 72 minutes.

So, now I sort of promised to be in the club for another hour if I like it or not and when my friend arrive it means I have to stay with him as if we just came in together.

Now… what should Joe do?

a. Stay until my friend arrive  and have a few drinks like it’s no big deal

b. Stay until he arrive only to say good night and leave him a warm beer

c. Wait until my friend is on the way and text him “dude we left but have a great time”

d. Just ignore my friend and leave or stay without worrying about it

A bigger man would say the right thing to do is definitely a. stay with your friend. I say good for him. If you ask me, the answer is somewhere between C and D. let him fry in his own lateness.

In my opinion it shows an utter disrespect to people’s time. If I’m going out on 11:00 pm I guess I’ll be home around 01:30 am. So I have 5-6 hours of sleep. But the social norm today is if someone new arrives around 00:30 then the clock starts all over again and you should stay with him for few hours at the least.

I believe I am obligated only to the ones I went out with in the beginning. All the rest are free agents. If I let someone know about my whereabouts it is only information and in no way it should be interpreted as a promise for companion.  Or as Parker Lewis used to say: “synchronize swatches”.

Maybe I'm exaggerating but as I mentioned again and again; my time is all I have. It is the most precious resource I have at my disposal and I am not about to give it away to “time hitchhikers”.  Like any commodity, if you put too much of your time out there it loses its value.

“Pull a Sara” is when someone calls you after you’ve been in an event for some time to ask if you are there and that he is now on his way. It can be a party, a BBQ, the beach and more.

It is named after a dear close friend of mine who is a beautiful person and one summer she used to call us after we’ve been at the beach for 5 hours to tell us she is on the way. That’s when my famous impatience kicked in and I started calling it “pulling a Sara”.  Yes, being my friend is peachy.

Sara was last seen trying to meet with friends and arriving 5 minutes too late.


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Web 2.0 terminology – do I “like” it?

I know it’s a boring title. I love writing and thinking of funny, interesting stuff that I know I would love to read 5 years later. For some reason every time I write a post title it sounds like MIT paper cover, but much less interesting.

That’s because I take every word I write very seriously. I am not pretending to be a serious guy or a great writer for that matter but when it comes to words I never take it lightly.

Words are everything basically. All the communication accessories we have developed until now are all meant to deliver words from place to place.

Even as a kid I strived to learn by heart all the lyrics of every song I like, repeat movie monologs over and over again until I got them perfect (I’ll tell you what “like a virgin” really means…) and basically just try to give words the treatment they deserve.

It got to the point I can’t read the paper anymore because I feel it makes my IQ drop. The words they use in headlines to deliver the news are just ridicules. Something like “Markets tsunami!!!” when the S&P 500 drops 0.5% or “Global meltdown” on every hot summer day. They use very strong words to describe everyday news so we always feel in a constant state of war or crisis. Everything just to keep us afraid and panicking enough so we have to buy the paper tomorrow. The news agencies tend to treat us like idiots. And they do it with the help of words. It is words that inspire people to fight, run, hide, buy, sell, come, leave, hate or love. And when the right words are used in the right way it can make extraordinary things happen.

So yeah, I love words. I love to think of where a word came from, making up new slang words, use them to motivate or be motivated by them.

For many years we, as readers, could express our feelings about content in many ways. We could read an article or a book and we could hate it or like it. We share our opinion with people over dinner or comment about it on the website. At the beginning, the internet didn’t change our ability to express an opinion. It only allowed us to better customize and increase our content consumption while we could still express very clearly if we like a piano playing cat or not.

When social networks were introduced and gained popularity it changed completely the way we find new content or explore the web. It kind of cut back on our options to find new stuff but now we get most of the content from friends, from people we know or we can customize it according to our interests. I won’t get into the whole “there is no more original stuff and all content is just recycled from one to another” argument (it’s a discussion for another post) but as our “playground” got boarders, so our ability to express emotions has shrunk and it changed our terminology accordingly.

The whole purpose of this blog is so I can share content and ideas I like. I love the times we live in that enables us to communicate everything. After a long time of consuming large amount of information on a regular basis I developed a kind of sensitivity for it and all the more so to what I share or pass along. 

Until recently, when one wanted to pass along to his Facebook friends an article or a movie or a post on the web, he could either “like” it or “share” it.  I realize these two makes for different functions but the split was basically I “like” a photoshoot of behind the scenes at the Victoria Secret show and I “share” news about an earthquake. I mean, how can I “like” anything about an earthquake?

Recently Facebook merged the “share” button into the “like” button. So now I face a problem. If I read an article about the tsunami at Japan and I feel I want to share it to my friends then I am actually forced to “like” it or “digg” it. I definitely don’t like or dig anything about it. I love Japan and its people and I feel like sharing it. No likey.

Another point is the whole “viral” stuff. How come viral became the best thing ever? Everybody wants to “go viral” and there are viral experts that I doubt ever went to medical school. As a child of the 90’s I know viral is bad. Very bad.

So where will it end? In a few years my kid will only like or ignore things. He would tweet me on what he digg and he and his friends would try to go viral till they die.

So pay attention to the words you are using. There is a reason there are so many of them.

Hope you liked it and even if you didn’t, you can share it.


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The Soprano - Draper Paradox

The regular Joe is a first born. That means I had to fight my parents for all the rights my younger brothers later took for granted.  Yeah I know, I’m a hero. It also means that my brother could get away with a lot of things I couldn’t. I remember it came as a bit of a shock back then. To think I’m trying as hard as I can to earn my gold stars so I can later leverage it to my own benefit.
And here you have this little brat who acts out, do whatever he wants and somehow gets the same privileges I’ve worked so hard for.  That’s when I first realized that action and result don’t always correlate and that the world is not fair (I was a bright kid).

That same feeling struck me one evening while watching TV with my special lady friend. Don Draper just called his beautiful wife (January Jones – we love her) to tell her he’ll be working late.  From our deep acquaintance with Don we know what that means. To put into simple words, he lied to his wife so he can go sleep with another woman he just met.  Of course somewhere in the back of my head I thought; “man, this Draper guy is cool. I want to be him”.
Imagine my surprise when my special lady friend expressed her affection to Mr. Draper out loud or in other words… “He is so hot”.