1000 Flowers Bloom

My California DMV Woes

I had a very similar experience to Brad Feld this summer. I had swapped cars with my brother and gone to the DMV to fill out the paperwork and paid all the fees so everything was legal.

I got pulled over a year later and was told that my license plate didn't match the car it was registered to (similar situation to what you experienced). Luckily the officer understood that this was a DMV error and told me to clear it up with them.

The most frustrating part was then going to the DMV and having them accuse me of losing the paperwork and to "check with my wife" who was probably more responsible than I was. 2 days later the DMV sends me the paperwork that THEY had neglected to mail me earlier and wanted me to fill out.

$600 dollars worth of fines and 2 days of my life that I'll never get back but we finally got it resolved.

United breaks guitars

Wow this is awesome. United breaks this guy's guitar and then refuses to own up to it. Then, after 8 months he finally gets their attention by creating this video.

Kudo's to him for finally getting United's attention. If I had any musical talent I'd write the "United told me I could fly and then changed their mind" song. Ask me if you see me about it...

Dancing down the aisle

Ok this was hysterical - via Sara.

Denny's commercial - Resist the machine

Sorry - couldn't help but post this funny commercial:

Obama Townhall

Ok so this is kind of silly. Obama did his live webcast townhall this morning at 8:30 AM Pacific.

It's now 11:41 AM Pacific and I'm looking for the video to watch over lunch. I've checked the Whitehouse.gov site, youtube, google, the news sites and I get nothing.

Is it that hard to put the live videostream back up? Bizarre...

I hate it when that happens...

I've now had two other Chris Law's show up on Google Alerts for my name.

Luckily I still have the top rank for my search but I get the feeling that I better keep posting on my blog for that to happen.

A little less twittering for me...

Watchmen

I watched the Watchmen (hah) on Saturday and I walked away impressed.

The graphic novel was one that I had enjoyed years ago but never believed could be made into a movie. I thought at best that it could be a trainwreck. I was doubly nervous when I heard that the director Zack Synder was the same one who had directed 300, which I thought was a pretty awful movie.

I was wrong.

The movie certainly has it's flaws and at 3 hours it's a LONG movie but it gets some things totally right.

One of the best lines from a movie comes when one of the vigilante heroes is arrested and put in prison:

"You don't seem to understand. I'm not trapped here with you. You're trapped here with ME"

The opening credits are also brilliant:

Starwars a capella tribute to John Williams

Hah - couldn't resist re-posting this. Found from Sara. Revel in the geek awesomeness.

The Expert vs The Casual Traveler

On my way to the University of Missourri Thursday morning I noticed a change at the Oakland airport.

The security line was split into two,  one line for expert travelers and one for casual travelers. I'd heard of this change but never seen it myself.

In theory this is a great idea! Expert travelers who know what they need to do in order to get through the line aren't totally frustrated as they watch security spend 10 minutes explaining/arguing why someone can't bring their bottle of hairspray through. True story.

Social norms help enforce the rules. No one wants to pretend to be an expert traveler and hold up the line.

After doing a double take at seeing the signs, I immediately made a beeline towards the expert travel lane. Mistake!

I'm not sure if it's because when you fly at 6 am in the morning there aren't that many casual travelers or if people don't want to admit that they are casual travelers but that line was much shorter!

I'm super curious to know if these lanes:

A - truly speed up the time it takes expert travelers to get through security

B - do not reduce the time it takes to get through but do reduce the frustration level.

C - do neither because people either get in the wrong lane or because so many people are expert travelers that the expert line gets very slow.

Friendster hacked?

I got a couple of complaints from people saying that I had been sending them spam messages from Friendster.

Oddly enough I started to get spam from my brother as well:

I looked in my sent folder and it was empty. My brother's sent folder was empty as well.

I changed my password but it looks like this is widespread...