19 days remain

As our wedding day approaches, one of the things I've really gotten tired is the questions people ask us. It's the same questions over and over again. As the wedding nears, they come more and more frequent. Another I noticed was that work has really eased up.. I guess they know it's a stressful time. Anyway, here the list of questions we keep getting:

"How's the wedding planning coming along?"
"When is it again?"
"Wow, only __ more weeks. Are you excited?"
"Are you ready?"
"Where will you be living?"
"Your parents must be really excited?"
"Who am I sitting with?"

Rinse and repeat, these questions are coming at a rapid pace and I'm totally sick of it. It's almost like you know the question is coming when you run into pretty much anyone. And, after talking to some friends in other stages of life, the sad reality is that after the wedding, there will probably be a whole different set of questions..

Dear Google,

Are you ever more forgiving of one thing over another? For example, maybe you have one sibling who has an annoying habit that you complain about every time he/she does it, but then someone else in your family has the exact same annoying habit but you look the other way? Another one I can think of is how I am ever-forgiving of Nintendo for not coming out with any good games for the Wii, and continuously tell people that the Wii is awesome even though I haven't played the thing for about 7 months.

What I've been finding is that we're a little like that with Google Mail. When Gmail came out it was the coolest thing ever. It was fast. It had conversations. It had chat. It had POP access. It had 2 gb (and counting) of disk space. It had auto-complete for emails. It had a chat log. The search tool was fantastic. It had great spam protection. It used Ajax so it was quick and functional, no annoying page to page screen loadings. I told everyone I knew about Google Mail and encouraged them to join.

3 years have passed and all the great features are still there. The unfortunate thing is, everyone has caught up to them and surpassed them. That's what happens when you sit around and twiddle your thumbs. Yahoo Mail has every single feature except for the conversations feature. It has chat, it has POP, auto-complete, Ajax. The search is there, and spam protection. It's all there. And it's fast, which is something that can no longer be said about Gmail, which seemingly has slowed down to a crawl. I dunno about you guys but I'm tired of clicking on something in Gmail and seeing that "Loading.." thing popup, and you can't even cancel it, you have no choice but to sit there and wait for it to load. On any other application, if you want to cancel, you press Esc or STOP. With Google mail, you wait. And you wait. And you wait.

Why is it taking so long? Is it wrong to assume that opening an email should be faster than the Google search tool which datamines the entire internet and comes up with a result in less than a second?

Did I mention Yahoo Mail has *unlimited* space? And the spam protection has been upped to a notch where I no longer receive as much spam as I do on Gmail. Did I mention Yahoo Mail has a built-in RSS reader? 1-button to erase all my spam?

3 years is an awfully long time for an application to sit in Beta testing. If any other company put out something that sat in Beta for 3 years, they would have gone out of business by now.

I'm ready for an upgrade, Google. I think we deserve one. Years of us telling people how great GMail is, but now I look back at Yahoo! Mail and see a far superior web-based email application. We need something to back us up on our claims that Gmail truly is the next best thing. I don't want to be called a liar.

Help me be honest.

Yours truly,
ebrian

Topics

Is there a way to refine the topics? Seems like I create a new topic name every time I create a post, so that in the end, I have about 2 post for all 80 topics because I come up with a new word to describe it each time. There's got to be a way to refine it, rename 3 to 1 and have it automatically switch for me..

Undeserving sequels

This might totally gross some of you out, but I thought of this great analogy for movies that should never have had a sequels. Mind you I'm not talking about bad sequels. Sometimes you had a good movie that had a really bad sequel to it, like Speed 2, or Ocean's 12, Dumb and Dumberer, etc.

But what I'm talking about are sequels to movies that were so unbelievably bad that there was absolutely no reason to make a sequel to it. I'm talking about movies like "Fast and the Furious" which was so bad and yet they made 2, yes TWO sequels to it. "Pirates of the Caribbean" which was just gawd-awful and they again made 2 of them. How about "Weekend at Bernie's", can you believe they had two of those? How dead can the guy be? Wouldn't the body start to rot after awhile? Unbelievable.

Or another example is the most recent 3 Star Wars movies.

One thing I always thought that maybe George Lucas could have done, was say after he made the first one, upon seeing what a disaster it turned out to be, could have just cut ties with the other two and just plead insanity on the first. Like he could have just come to the media and just "Hey you know what, this guy had a nuclear missile pointed at the country and said he'd blow us all up if I didn't make this movie. So I did but then I managed to disable the missile so I'm not making any more of them. Yea I know I said I'd make 3 but I don't really want to subject you to that again, besides I was under duress at the time because I love America and I couldn't let him do that to us." Something like that might make those Star Wars movies slightly more bearable. Then you'd kind of be like "Man, that was the worst movie I've ever seen.. but did you hear that he saved millions of lives by making that movie? Man that George Lucas, what a noble guy, dragging his reputation through a pile of crap just for us. You know, he's my hero."

Anyway back to my gross analogy. When I was little, sometimes I'd take this huge dump and you know it's like the dump is one long strand and it's so unbelievable because it's so long. Some of them would be wound right around several times like a really long snake of poo. Anyway, I'd tell my parents or my brother to come see this unbelievably long piece of crap.

But then the next time someone had a super long crap, they'd invite us to see it but then we'd be like "Umm.. that's okay. I think I'll pass this time." And they'd say "No but this one is really big, and it's got some corns stuck in it.. YOU GOTTA SEE IT, ITS BETTER!", and you'd still maintain your position of "That's okay man, I've seen a long piece of crap before. Even with the extra stuff in it, it's still a long piece of crap and I really don't feel like looking at that right now."

That's exactly like some of these terrible movies that are getting sequels made for them. Can you believe they're making an "Alien vs Predator 2"? And a second "Fantastic Four"? Someone was saying that they think the second installment of Fantastic Four might actually be better than the first. Well I'm thinking that it wouldn't take a whole lot..

Who are you talking to?

This thought occurred to me yesterday as I was walking back to work after lunch with Ina. We had street-meat. And that is why Ina is the *best*.

Anyway, there was this guy talking to himself and I thought he was one of those people on the street who have conversations with themselves. I remember when I was little, sitting at the bus station in Buffalo and there was this African American woman talking to herself. She wasn't overly animated but just sitting two seats away from me, I sat there and listened to her entire spiel, and it was actually quite interesting. In her mind she was speaking to a judge, presenting her case and I remember it being very coherent, almost like she had rehearsed this a trillion times (which probably why she was in her state in the first place). I suspected she was probably very intelligent and just completely lost it after some legal trouble.

These are real people, who just happened to lose a few marbles here and there. But I just remember that time in Buffalo (or was it DC?) when I sat there for 10 minutes waiting for my mom or dad to get us some bus tickets. And when my parent came back they felt protective and pulled me away to keep me from this dangerous person who could lash out at me on any moment's notice.

I guess it's kind of sad the way people are treated just because they are having a conversation with no one around them. Nowadays you see people doing the exact same thing everywhere, only it's completely justified because they have this little piece of plastic stuck in their ear with a blinking blue light on it.

Jericho cancelled

Damn you all to hell, CBS. You canceled the only show I watch on your network, the only good show remaining out of a seriously pathetic lineup of crap shows. I mean come on, The Unit gets renewed? It's nothing more than militarized version of Alias with President David Palmer instead of Jennifer Garner! Isn't smoking pot illegal in the US? And how about these other crap shows like the Ghost Whisperer, Close To Home, The Class??? No one watches that shat! The New Adventures of Old Christine? I mean what the hell kind of name is that?!

If it weren't for NFL football I would block your channel altogether. Damn you, you stupid, stupid bastards! I spit on you.

This is for people who talk during movies