My Dad had an interesting story about what happened to him this past weekend.  He made an electronic payment of $49.99 USD for his Sprint cellphone bill.  When he checked the status of his checking account, he owed the bank $23,000 USD for covering a $49,990 USD overdraft by Sprint.  He jawboned Sprint to death as he normally does when something goes wrong, and the money was returned to his account.  Now he's arguing with the bank over a $30 USD overdraft charge for the regular phone bill that came in while his account was in the red.  Bad enough that Sprint misplaced a decimal point, but why did the bank accept such an outrageous amount in the first place?

29 February 2007 @ 7:30PM Update: Sprint still wants $49,990 USD from my Dad's checking account as they charged him for a second time.  After another jawboning phone call where he was put on hold for a short 47 minutes, he got his money back.  The bank was kind enough to let my Dad put a stop payment on the electronic payment without charging him for it.  No wonder The New York Times is reporting that Sprint posted a $29.5 billion lost for the quarter.  Senior citizens like my Dad won't let them keep the extra change.  The only reason why I don't have problems with my own Sprint account is that I still write paper checks for the utilities.

Comment (0)

I can appreciate the irony of the February 25th cover for The New Yorker.  In a series of nine panels, a writer writes a book in the Winter, the book is accepted for publication in the Spring, someone buys and read the book in the Summer, the book is put out in the recycling bin to be picked up by a homeless person in the Fall, and the homeless person tosses the book into a fire in the Winter.  Since I'm planning to write my first novel starting on April Fool's Day and ending on New Year's Eve, I'll find out next year if my book will get the same treatment.

I would love to have my novel to be accepted by a publisher next year.  However, I'm in this for the long haul.  I'm planning to write a novel per year for the next five years to have a one-in-five chance of getting published.  I might get all five published or novel number six might be the lottery winner.  Publishing is a very uncertain business these days.  The rejection slips I'm seeing more often these days for my short stories are from magazines that ceased publication.

Comment (0)

The newest trend in monster movies is where the video cam plays a larger role than the no-name stars or even the monsters.  Two recent movies in the past month illustrated this trend, Cloverfield and George A. Romero's Diary of The Dead.  Only one will be become an instant cult classic, and both will be imitated by home amateurs, college students at film schools, and professional filmmakers looking to ride the newest trend.  The horror comes not from the current movies, but from the new movies that will appear in the next several years.

Cloverfield is a retelling of the classic monster-trashing-the-big-city formula from the perspective of a single video cam that previously recorded a dating relationship getting hot from the month before that gets recorded over during a going away party where the dating relationship had gone cold.   If the sound system at the theater I went to was set to normal instead of extra loud, I might've slept through the soap opera that unfolded.  No one really cares about the poor smuck who got ditched and then decides to rescue the girl who ditched him.  When the monster and baby monsters are finally shown, we don't see them for long as the movie is about the horrors of lost love instead of the destruction of a city by a seemingly unstoppable monster.

The highlights includes the head of the Statue of Liberty rolling down the street like a bowling ball, and the harden citizens of New York City whipping out their cell phone to take pictures; a collapsed building that causes a 9/11-inspired wall of dust to funnel down the concrete canyons of the cityscape; and a subway station being shaken by the monster fighting the military on the streets above.  Since there was only one video cam that recorded everything, the ending lacks the context to tie the story into the real world and the viewers are left struggling to find meaning in what they saw.  If that wasn't bad enough, there's an excellent sound track played during the credits that should've been saved for another movie.

George A. Romero's Diary of The Dead will become a cult classic for flawlessly executing the making of an internet movie called The Death of Death that documents the zombie outbreak as recorded by a group of film making students with two video cams, and edited to include video from other video cams, wireless surveillance cameras, cell phone cameras, and stuff downloaded the from the internet to provide a larger context to tie the story into the real world (some of the video was stock footage taken during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans).

The highlights includes an actress questioning the conventional horror movie formula of a scream queen running in her high heels in the middle of nowhere to have the monster grab her nightgown to show off her breasts (which does happen to her later on with a zombie when the main cameraman forgets he's making a documentary instead of a horror movie); exploding eyeballs when a pair of defibrillator paddles are applied to a zombie's head in a hospital; and an old Amish man who commits suicide by ramming his scythe into his head and the head of the zombie behind him.  I think Romero expects this movie to be widely intimated since he's holding a contest for the best three-minute short video to win an appearance on the DVD release.

Speaking of zombies, I picked up the March 2008 issue of PC Gamer for the cover story on a flood of zombie games that are coming out in the next year. Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil 5 look like the best of the lot, and I might get both.  I'm also looking forward to Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Batman, and Soul Calibur 4 when they come out.  Since I'll be writing a novel based on my six years as a video game tester, I need all the research material I can get my hands on.

Website Update: Since the current versions of MyBlog and Jom Comment are now compatible with Joomla! 1.5, blogging and commenting are now enabled. I'm still tweaking things to get them the way I want them to be and figuring out the minor annoyances that pops up.   I may need to shut down the website for 15 or 30 minutes at a time to make some adjustments.  Comments will be available for recent articles and moderated for now to filter out the "wow ur fat" crowd from Slashdot.

Comment (0)

My Dad taught me that there's history in buildings and landmarks.  He was a construction worker who built many buildings in Silicon Valley and the City (San Francisco), and was intimately familiar with the history of the area that he called home for over 50 years.  I got used to him pointing out various buildings he worked on such as the distinctive red brick office building on the corner of Winchester Boulevard and Moorpark Avenue in San Jose, or the masonry block sound walls built along 280 that California paid a million dollar per mile to build.

His first construction job after moving my mother and brother out from Idaho in the early 1950's—I wasn't born until the late 1960's—was at the General Electric Motor Plant on Curtner Avenue and Monterey Road in San Jose.  When the company he worked for kept him standing around doing nothing, he quit his job after two weeks because he wanted to work.   (That didn't please my Mom since she wanted his paycheck whether he worked or not.)  General Electric eventually shut down the plant and a real estate developer turned it into a new shopping called The Plant. (The name isn't very original and reminds me of a Stephen King story.)  I went there this past Sunday to check out the new stores and to marvel at a piece of family history.

I got a ten dollar gift card from OfficeMax to use at their new store at The Plant.  Since I'm a writer with 17 short story manuscripts in circulation and 34 rejections so far, I was running low on envelopes.  Much of the shopping center is still under construction.  OfficeMax, Target, Toy R Us, Best Buy and Pet Smart were the only stores opened.  From the distinctive orange paint on one building, I think a Home Depot will be there.  I keep wondering how many Home Depots can one area support with the real estate market tanking from the subprime mess.   Or any of the other stores scattered all over the valley.  Or, if you want a real brain teaser, why does every shopping center have a nail saloon?

I guess people still got money to burn in Silicon Valley.   I don't.  I stayed out of Target as I usually spend a hundred bucks whenever I go in, I didn't need another DVD from Best Buy, and I'm sure I would've gotten something at Pet Smart for my tropical fishes if I went in.  The OfficeMax store was nice, clean and very well organized than their typical store.  I got a box of envelopes and a few other items that came to twenty bucks after I used the gift card.   I may come here in the future since all the stores I shop at are here and it's a short freeway jump from my home.

The older I get the more I find myself being like my Dad.  I saw history being made when the tomato fields that I walked through as a teenager became the 85/87 interchange in South San Jose, saw the old railroad ties of a San Jose/San Francisco trolley line being dug out of The Alameda that ran through Santa Clara University, and saw the foundation of a future light rail line that will never be built laid undeneath the landscaped walkway that used to be San Carlos that ran through San Jose State University.  I built some history with my Dad when we worked together in construction for a few years on the Bayview apartments in San Francisco and the River Oaks apartments in North San Jose.  I came across the paths of many of the big names who made history in Silicon Valley as I worked at some of the top Fortune 500 companies.  As a writer working on my first novel this year, history of time and place will be a big part of the narrative fabric.  I'm planning to go back to SJSU in 10 to 15 years to earn a bachelor degree in history with my focus being my own backyard.  And I absolutely hate standing around doing nothing when I'm supposed to be working.

Comment (0)

When I started my website, CReimer's FPS Design & Portfolio, ten years ago on Geocities, it was supposed to show off my crazy talents as a video game designer when I was working as a QA tester at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, two different owners, multiple identity crises) for six years.  Working in the video game industry sucked the life out of me that being a video game designer went nowhere.

When my ISP could display web content from my Unix account home directory in 1999, I moved the website over, started honing my skills in HTML and later CSS to build a better web pages, and started posting personal observations on a irregular basis.  I moved the website to its own domain when my ISP offered CPanel web hosting five years ago.  Created a new website design using a PHP template and scripts, added pictures, reviews and other content, and eventually renamed the website as Once Upon An Albatross... after a Wildcat! BBS I ran back in 1995 before the Internet became popular.  Now it's time to make another big change.

Although what I been doing with the website is called blogging, I never accepted the term or embraced the technology.  My website has always been about teaching myself web technology and maintaining an on going programming project while learning computer programming at San Jose City College.  Being able to express myself was a side benefit.  That was then and the focus has now changed.

Since writing is a second full time job when I'm not working as a help desk support specialist to fix broken users and consoling hurt computers, and my five year goal is to become a full time writer, I no longer have the time to maintain the website as an extended programming project.  The website now has to show off my crazy talents as a writer, which means accepting the term and embracing the technology of blogging.

I started looking into content management systems that I could use as a replacement for my website.  A lot of coworkers mentioned Joomla!, and, after playing around with it for a few days, I decided to use that.  Picked up "Joomla! A User's Guide: Building A Succesful Joomla! Powered Website" by Barrie M. North from the bookstore, and spent an afternoon creating a bare bone Joomla! site with a postings for the new year.

Converting ten years of content will take a while.  My plan is to make the subsections available one at a time, and then clean up all the broken links in the old postings.  I'm hoping to wrap that up in a month or two.  Meanwhile, I'll continue to blog away and make changes where necessary to improve the new website.  A commenting system for the postings will be available soon.  (This was a feature that I wanted to program into the old website but didn't have the time to do so.)  I'm very interested in getting feedback from the 80+ readers who view my website every month, and I'm hoping to see something more literate than "wow ur fat" from the Slashdot crowd.  Later this year I might create a custom template design to replace the modified template I'm using now—if I have the time.

Comment (0)