Blahgorrhea

Looks like great Jeffrey’s think alike: Blahg.

I’ll forgive him — I’ve done my fair share of stealing as well.

Apparently, the self-help phenomenon is an $8.5 billion a year business. Maybe I’ll write a book on how to write self-help books. We could use more of those.

With all the recent talk about “thin wallets” and “front-pocket wallets,” I decided to go ahead with my old plan to make a new wallet out of clear packing tape. I got inspired during a bike ride and came up with a sweet woven tape design:

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I noticed today (all of a sudden and four days after I resumed blogging) that my blog was broken — none of my content was showing up. I suspected it had something to do with one of the plugins, as I had had a similar issue when I was first setting up the blog. So I played around with the plugins and found that one was outputting this error message:

Warning: preg_replace_callback(): Unknown modifier ‘|’

Knowing very little about PHP and trusting the good net citizens out in the world (well, those on the web at least), I did a quick Google search for the error string and found some interesting results in Google’s cache. Expecting to quickly find that an upgrade to PHP caused an issue with the Markdown plugin in WordPress (which was the issue and had been fixed in a newer version of Markdown), I instead found that a lot of people were having the same problem I had, but no one wanted to discuss it.

I had my “holier-than-thou indie record store clerk” cherry popped this afternoon when I went to Rasputin to purchase the Wolf Parade album. I know what you’re thinking: “After that diatribe on how different Jeff is, how come he is just now getting around to buying the Wolf Parade album when all his indie friends already have it?” Well, fear not, Wolf Parade is still filed under “indie” at Rasputin, so as far as I’m concerned, I am still ahead of the curve.

So I went to the register with the album in hand, and upon seeing my selection the clerk said, “Finally someone is buying a good record.” I joked with him, “Who?” (which he didn’t really get). He told me he hadn’t been able to catch their shows when they were in town a few months ago, but his girlfriend saw both. Then he went on to tell me about the ol’ Canadian sound and how there is another Canadian band with a similar sound that apparently shared studio space with Wolf Parade. I promptly forgot the new band’s name as the clerk told me how they new band has what you’d consider a “Brooklyn sound” with Casio keyboards and a drum machine, even though they have a drummer too. More experimental.

If only I could remember the name, I’d be totally ahead of the curve this time around.

As I was peeling a pummelo yesterday, I thought to myself, “This fruit is a pain in the ass to peel.” It’s got a tough, almost impenetrable outer skin, underneath which there is a thick layer of bitter pith that is practically impossible to rip off. But once you get through those layers, you are awarded with sweet yummy fruit, well worth the effort it took. Just like me. If you were a fruit, what would you be?

I found out two nights ago that the smallest size at Starbucks is in fact not the tall, but that it is still the short. In an effort to pump more caffeine into Americans, they took the short off the menu, made the tall the smallest available menu size and added an enormous 20 ounce venti as the large. Considering how annoying the whole changing of sizes from small/medium/large (Domino’s is another terrible perpetrator of this pattern), I was very pleased to learn that I could still get a normal size cup of coffee. All this has happened since having become a huge Peet’s fan when there was a Peet’s store across from work. Now there is no Peet’s, and the local coffee shop has bad coffee, so I go to Starbucks. I had become used to the 10 ounce small that Peet’s has and was thrown off by the extra two ounces I receive in a Starbucks tall. Ordering a short gets me back into normal coffee drink size range, but it is only eight ounces. Now that is a 10-cent (and two ounce) dilemma.

Sitting humbling amongst the many philosophical platitudes in the 400+ pages of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” is the key to universal peace. On a page in one of the final chapters it is stated:

There never really can be [a contradiction] between the core terms of monistic philosophies. The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it’s not, you’ve got two.

How brilliant of an observation is that? Now all we need to do is get everyone in the world who believes in a “monistic philosophy” (just so happens that it is the monotheists waging war right now) to agree that even though the attributes of their individual “Ones” seem different, they really derive from the same “One” source. Once that happens, we’ve got world peace. Piece of cake.

Happy New Year to my three or four loyal readers. I hope all your resolutions hold up. I’ve recently been enlightened to the idea of a “new day resolution,” making a resolution each day that holds for that day only, thus not suffering the feeling of utter failure in case of not holding true to it. I like it. Resolution for today: post something on my blog. Looks like I’m not a failure yet.