This is the name I tried to use while making a facebook profile for my car. Turns out Facbook doesn’t think numbers and letters could be a real person’s name. Shwatever, facebook, shwatever (said with Swedish accent).
I’ve never named one of my vehicles. I think it’s weird. You name people, pets, and ships, but not so much cars and motorcycles. So for the sake of making a facebook profile for my car so we could be in an ‘open relationship’, at least temporarily for hilarity’s sake, I had to choose a name that had solely alphabetic characters. I chose “Princess Beemer VonBeemersen”. It’s German, it’s lovely. Ever since I saw Enchanted I pretty much wanted to marry Amy Adams and she was a princess. Then I saw Tangled and I wanted to marry Rapunzel, too.
There is a great misconception as to what is a princess. Allow me to clarify: normally when you hear a girl is a ‘princess’ that means they’ve had everything handed to them, have never worked a real day in their life, and expect perfection and happiness to effortlessly fall into their lap at all times. Nay, friend! That chick in Tangled could paint, play guitar, really cared about people, and was fearless. Similarly the princess in Enchanted was so resourceful that she made a dress out of curtains. Yeah. That’s my kind of girl. She also had no malice in her heart. Hard to find.
Anyway now that I feel like I’ve seen those Disney movies too many times . . . back to the car. This thing freakin rocks. No kidding. I shopped long and hard and for me it’s a perfect match right now. It’s got power, handing, bassy bass from 2 subs under the front seats, great brakes, heated seats (for the ladies), and sex appeal. Yup. Booyah. It’s black on black with aluminum trim. The car is sick. I love it.
So I went for a little joyride the other day and happened upon an icy parking lot. After doing some donuts I was wishing for someone to be around to film me. Then I thought: ‘hey! I can film myself! I’ll just put my camera on that snow bank over there!’ So that’s what I did. Then after watching the videos and clicking on a random artist on Spotify I realized that it would be funny to put some sensual R&B to my sliding car. And here’s the end result:
I hope this video has brought you some joy. 10 points for guessing the song at the beginning.
AHHHAHAHHAHAHH the days of beloved Jetta are coming to a close!!! As I type this the eBay auction has 2 hours left. This car has been an integral part of my life for these reasons:
# 1 It brought my Dad and I back from my mission. It was lovingly given to my by my 2nd cousin who lives in Valencia, CA. They drove it to Ventura where the mission home was and we drove it back to Kaysville, UT.
# 2 It was purchased by my great uncle in Cedar City, UT brand new in 1986 and has been owned by family members ever since.
# 3 This is the first car I’ve ever owned and also my first vanity plate: “PLAN IT”. I get a lot of laughs and compliments about that. I figure it’s motvation to succeed with ma business.
# 4 This is also the car I gave my first ride to Janie Thompson in. I can end a sentence with a preposition if I want to. Lotsa memories, lotsa memories.
# 5 The Jetta has prevented me from marrying a gold digger. I go to pick girls up and they have to love me for who I am
# 6 I took it on a 3,000 mile road trip in the summer of 2007 that completely rocked. It was Provo to Phoenix (sister) to LA to Santa Barbara and Santa Maria (mission) to Sacramento, CA (cousin) to Portland (grandparents) to Jerome, ID (mission buddy with many moo tows) to Kaysville, UT (parents). I found out on this trip that a) I’m kind of crazy in a car by myself as evidenced by the crazy videos I took b) the car can do 515 miles on one tank of diesel and c) I ain’t afraid of road trips and doing what I feel would be fun/good.
# 7 Some value other people’s possessions very highly as evidenced by the $2,225 price right now on eBay. It’s still got 1 hr 50 mins at this point. Kelly Blue book is $750.
Here’s the little you tube video I took to help sell it:
The world needs a new acronym. I give you FEGF. Friend’s Ex-GirlFriend. This last month I ran into and almost took on a date like 4 of these people! What? August has turned out to be an interesting month.
On an unrelated note Eric and I went and played some basketball tonight and after getting packed twice by this 6′ 5″ dude I scored on him with a fadeaway jumper. Take that tall dude.
On a car note I have decided what I will buy in the coming months. A BMW 328xi. Yes, folks the B’mer of balance. Fast, reliable, 4 doors, good in snow, bump in stereo, chick magnetism, FREAKING AWESOME. And not too outlandish. If you’ve never driven a late model BMW I assure you of their ability to alter your opinion on whether nice cars are worth it.
Wow, seems like Apple really blew it with Final Cut Pro X. The prior version of Final Cut Pro was $999 and many people bought it. It’s because it was professional-grade software on which real movies were edited. Examples: Enchanted, Napoleon Dynamite, The Simpsons Movie, Where the Wild Things Are, and The Social Network. It’s the real deal.
Enter Final Cut Pro verion ten (X). It comes with an impressively low $299 price tag and you download it from the “Mac App Store”. It’s more like iMovie (free movie editor) than any pro editor, though. People are calling it iMovie Pro. Lotsa fuss. You can’t even import a project from a prior version? Many features missing? Apple knows best I guess. Dear Omnicient Apple, I’m hungry, what should I have for dinner?
What a strange move by a software creator. You’d think they could gather a bunch of professional movie editors and ask them what they like and dislike about the software. Listen to customers maybe? I had a memorable experience with product development once while working a convention put on by Omniture. In 2009 I attended their ‘Summit’ event in Salt Lake City. They gathered all their most influential customers (many CMOs of fortune 500 companies) and asked them what they thought about Omniture’s products. It was an amazing moment. Their CTO, an intelligent and funny guy named Brett Error, lead the discussion and they gathered valuable feedback. On top of that they had a web page with a constantly changing board of features that customers wanted. Each different feature was voted up/down depending on customer demand. Now that’s cool. No wonder they grew rapidly and sold to Adobe for $1.8 billion.
I own a macbook and an iPhone but DO NOT consider Apple to be the greatest company ever with perfect execution on every product. Sometimes their decisions are downright ridiculous.
One of the most memorable experiences I have with design was at Arizona State when I saw Patrick Scofield give a talk. He kept repeating the words “positive, memorable experiences” in reference to designing products. Boom! Roasted, Apple. I think that’s what it’s all about. Creating positive, memorable experiences, not mass pandemonium by selling a sub-par product nobody asked for at a price no one was expecting through a medium no one uses.
Hey y’all! Of all the internet greatness that is now April Fool’s day, I really appreciate what a website did for internet target Rebecca Black.
Because of her video “Friday” that came out only 3 weeks ago she has been the victim of LOTS of internet foolery. People have parodied her song to no end and really said some nasty things.
A popular comedy website called Funny or Die decided to help her out. They made videos not a few of Rebecca doing funny stuff and portraying her in a positive light. I don’t think the world is entirely evil. Sometimes people do good things and this was one of them. You’ll have to put on your internet humor to get this whole situation.
Here’s another one of those classy home evening videos from the past. I figured you liked the last one so here’s another. We made this in the Spring of 2009.
It’s a parody of a dating class we held each Sunday at one of my BYU wards. A ward is a geographical area of Latter-day Saints that meets each week for church.
In the dating class we talked about how there are different love languages and personality types. Love this one I actually do like second hand lions in real life.
I got some new software that I’m mega pumped about. And it’s about time. I have a macbook which I really like that I used to run windows on. My hard drive was getting full so I had to get rid of the windows part, which also happened to have my design software on it.
Luckily microsoft just came out with office 2011 for mac so that part doesn’t have me at a total loss. I was, however, design software-less for a while and it took a toll on my sanity. I realized just how often I use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, etc. Good to have it back. I took this picture with my phone and used a nifty app called instagram to put a filter on it and blur everything except for the words on the box. It’s on my desk at the office. Normally this stuff costs $1800 but a friend of a friend got the hook up for $124 from an Adobe employee.
So today I realized that since I signed up for this credit card in early 2008 I haven’t used any reward points at all. Now there’s 25,000 to be redeemed for like $250 in cash. Booya! That helps business a little.
Eric and I just got back from the gym. As un-fun as exercise sounds sometimes (especially when it’s lazy time) it always feels great afterward. We go to 24-hr and like it.
So our ward is having a video contest for each home evening group. Our video is going to rock!
Here’s a video I made with my ward way back in Spring 2008 of the same origin:
This is insane. I just checked ebay on this day of Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:33 am and saw something that made me cringe a little. It’s an iPad 2 selling for 242% of its suggested retail price.
Holy cow guess I should have bought like 10 of these things and sold them on ebay.
The diabolical Sprint is at it again. Before today it is my estimate that in the last 4 years I have spent a total of 25 hours on the phone with them and I’ve received about $800 in credits and back-charges. That’s $32 per hour, not bad! This all stemmed from a tip I received from my friend who said that if you’re calm and you spend enough time on the phone with a cell phone company you can get whatever you want. I’m a believer.
Today (Jan 27) has been a battle of legendary proportions. Their defenses are supported by endless notes from prior credits. Their agents use the term “valid charges” like water falls from the mighty Niagara, they pretend to understand your situation for a moment only to slap you in the face with a spikey lead glove of repetitive excuses you’ve already heard. I lean back in my chair, tired, thirsty, nearly defeated. something inside me won’t give up. Can’t give up. I will not submit to their slimy pressure, I will not bend to their abyss of non-sequitur corporate drivel.
A beam of light, a ray of sun in my bone-vibrating dismay – - I am not alone.
A deep, fast, flowing river of disgruntled customers understands the hate that is Sprint. People have gone so far as to find the CEO’s phone number and email address and publicly post them on the internet. Not just him, but also 25 of their top executives. The people’s contact info is for the taking. I called a few just to see if they were real and turns out yes, they are. The American people won’t stand for an organization that serves so many people when they are so corrput and so big ($32 billion per year rev).
The end of the story? I won. I beat those punks. They most certainly did NOT get to charge me their last huzzah of BS and cram it down my throat like so many others. Screw those guys. Big time. I got the charges reversed and it’s bye bye bye. Worst customer service ever.
Along with this rant is my graphically altered logo protest of Sprint. Enjoy.
I hope you love this picture as much as I do. If it doesn’t make complete sense, then let me describe my perception of the satire at hand. This is Ariel from The Little Mermaid as a hipster. A hipster is usually someone trying to break from the norm because they possess (at least in their mind) superior social, economic, fashion, and everything awareness. This is usually manifest in their starving, desperate need to be different from as many things as possible. They listen to bands you’ve never heard of, eat food you’ve never tasted, hang out at other places only populated by hipsters, and don’t waste time talking to anyone that doesn’t wear thick-rimmed glasses; a mainstay and loudly-proudly waving flag of the hipster subculture.
Of course by now thick-rimmed glasses are now likely too mainstream and they’ve moved on to staring into an ipad and letting the rear-facing camera direct them where to go.
So the humor here is that things that make people happy are just not cool enough for those “really” in touch and they have to pursue things that are not popular just because they’re not popular in search of not happiness.
It’s no surprise that hipsters worldwide are loathing every microsecond of today as it might make other people happy.
It’s valentime’s day! Who’s excited? What a great excuse to ask a girl on a date or deepen a relationship. If you don’t have a romantic bone in your body at least you can follow a yahoo.com article’s advice and just write him/her a note. It said that 75% of women just want a hand-written note on V-day.
For all those jaded folks out there, just enjoy Valentines day. If no one showed up at your doorstep in the morning with flowers, chocolate, a teddy bear, a tree, a real bear, a puppy, a kitten, a baby rabbit painted pink playing guitar, a piano being played by a gorilla, and a diamond ring begging you to go out to breakfast with them—- then you go make someone’s day. Write a note or draw a picture and send it to someone you care about. Why not? Besides, complaining about valentine’s day is so mainstream.
Whats up yalls. Today was another worldwide leadership training by the LDS Church. It was pretty good. They talked about the new leadership manuals and how the changes made were more principle-based. It takes more spiritual maturity to apply a principle to a situation than to just follow the manual.
We had an intramural soccer game today that was way wicked fun. I loved it. I felt awesome, I’ve gotten into better shape pretty quick since I started going to the gym a few weeks ago. Yea I ran and was not weary. As always I slammed into people and scared them out of the ball rather than having real soccer finess, but that’s what you get when you take a defensive end and put shin guards on him. Sprinting at people is effective. We won 4-0.
BYU beat the U of U in basketball today, always a good day when the Utes go down. They put up a way better fight than last time, we only won by 13 whereas last game, a home game for the Utes, we won by like 35. Jimmermania still lives strong in Cougar hearts.
My ward had an etiquette dinner tonight that was pretty fun. They served ribs which I thought was hilarious. There are some way fun girls in my ward, our fancy evening degraded quickly into discreetly launching the tiny fake diamonds on our table at other tables. Yup.
Then it was game time at a friend’s place. A story about one homie at the gamestimes- I saw her at the gym the other day and we were running next to each other on the treadmill when the girl next to us seemed to be having trouble running. She tripped, and slipped, and slopped, and flopped madly like a sea-turtle on coke and finally ended up on the floor in a heap. Treadmill runners everywhere were in shock and wondered if she was seriously injured. The guy next to her shut off her machine and I hopped off of mine and went over there to see if she was ok. She was just fine but I felt like I wanted to offer some moral support so I tried to be reassuring as I could.
Well I hope most of you are asleep by now and your Sunday is filled with rest and good vibes.
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