moxyberry.com - my cup of tea

After four years of trusty service, my 15″ G4 Powerbook was starting to show its age: the 75gb hard drive was pretty much full, the measly 512KB L2 cache and 64MB ATI video card was struggling to keep up with Leopard and iLife. Despite its outdated specs, the Powerbook was still a perfectly functional personal machine, which is one of the main reasons why I’ve put off buying a new machine for so long (if it ain’t broke, don’t replace it?) A recent bonus from work tilted the scales and so yesterday, I made a trip to the Apple store down in Union Square to bring home the new bacon.

I knew that the performance of any new machine was going to blow away the 2004 specs on my Powerbook, but I am super giddy with happiness with my new Macbook Pro.

Tired Powerbook	Wired Macbook Pro
1.5GHz PPC	2.4GHz Intel Core 2
80GB hard drive	200GB hard drive
512KB L2 Cache	3MB L2 Cache
ATI Radeon 9700, 64MB	GeForce 8600M, 256MB
1280×854 max res	1400×900 max res

Yes!

February 16, 2008

 

 

 

I recently ordered two items from Endless.com (Amazon.com’s foray into shoes and handbags) - a pair of flats and a pair of knee-high boots - and had them delivered to my apartment in San Francisco.  After walking in the door after work that evening, Sam pointed to an enormous box in the middle of the living room - “I think those are your shoes.” 

It was complete packaging overload.  In this over-sized box was several feet of thick, heavy brown paper (”paper pythons,” as I called them) and on the bottom lay two boxes with my shoes in them.  Having ordered shoes online before, I know that they have boxes for a regular-ish sized shoebox and a longer, flatter box for tall boots; I guess what they don’t have is a decently sized box that can hold both of types of shoes.  I feel bad for the UPS delivery man that had to lug that thing around (who is probably the same poor chap that had to deliver my sister’s Christmas present of the Harry Potter hardcover books 1-6, which Amazon lists at 13.9 lbs.) They threw in two boxes of Godiva chocolates (little thank you gifts close to Valentine’s Day?), which I nearly tossed out as they hid in the yards of paper in the cavernous box.

  

I listened to Godspeed You Black Emperor! the other day for the first time years. “Hung Over As the Oven In Maida” came up during shuffle on my iPod while I was dozing on the shuttle ride back home to SF from work. The song instantly transported me back to high school when I first discovered GYBE as an angsty teen ready to go to college. “Hungover…” is an epic song - over 18 minutes long - and is as dramatic, brooding, frightening and hypnotic as I remembered it. Even now, I still don’t know how I am supposed to feel when listening to it. There is a street sermon in the the middle of the song - in any other song, it would be trite Goth-lite tripe but it works so well here.

and so we have this
you have it in your secret windows
and you’re understanding to understand it and to bring it forth
it takes minute detail
it takes a holy lifeit takes emotions
it takes dedication
it takes dedication
it takes a death

My personal memory of GYBE is from 2000, when my then-boyfriend and I trekked in to Manhattan to see them live at The Knitting Factory in Tribeca. GYBE was performing as part of a benefit for the Anthology Film Archives. We got there extra early to get near the stage and as the small venue filled with artsy New Yorkers and cigarette smoke (the days when you used to smoke indoors!), the excitement grew quite palpable. Then came the films. Oh my god. Terrible, long, painfully obtuse and art-for-the-sake-of-art experimental films. One was a 10 minute loop shot of a woman waving a large piece of cellophane plastic, as the color went from black-and-white to violet to blue to green. I don’t think there was a single person in the crowd that cared for the films; people even started sitting - sitting! - on the nasty Knitting Factory floor out of sheer boredom. There was over an hour and a half of films before they finally FINALLY came on. Unfortunately, I had to leave only a song or two into the show so that I could make the train back to Long Island lest I incur the wrath of my parents - instead of leaving thrilled by their dynamic live show, I was mostly pissed at having to spend 90 minutes watching shitty art films. A writer at The Village Voice must have been at the same show I was, as evidenced by his blog post.

The New York Times “Weekend in New York” segment this week shines a spotlight on Koreatown in Manhattan (From Bim Bim Bop to a Huge Spa) Reading the article made me super nostalgic for K-town. I used to live several blocks away from 32nd and 5th Ave and miss the convenience of having superb Korean food and groceries only a few minutes away. Oh, to have a Kunjip ten minutes away by foot! Fresh Soon-du-boon at Seoul Garden! Korean fried chicken at Baden Baden (have you ever seen a Korean restaurant decorated as a German bierhaus?)!

Hm, now I’m hungry!

The Comments section of some archived posts are under siege by Greek spam-bots.  Andros, Michalis, Kostatinos, Leandros, Manolis, Timotheos and all of your other Hellenic bot friends - GET OUT OF MY FACE.

What a difference one Christmas makes!  Sam and I have gone from having zero game systems to two: a Wii AND an XBox 360.  This is quite an upgrade; the last video game console I owned was a Super Nintendo back in middle school. I felt like a kid this holiday, getting hardware and video games as gifts.  My mom asked me if I would even have any time to play video games… hmm, fair question.  The point is that they’re there for the playing when I do! 

 

Jared Diamond recently had an op-ed piece in the New York Times that struck a chord with me:

TO mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences  

….

If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates). Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people…

What’s your Consumption Factor? (New York Times, January 2 2008)

I live in Northern California where environmental sustainability is a big in-your-face issue and work at a company that has a Green Energy czar so I am no stranger to green lifestyle advocacy. However, reading Diamond’s op-ed reminded me that “oh my god, I consume 32 times more than my fellow human being on the other side of the planet.” I am embarrassed to be consuming so much more and producing so much more waste.  Being green and living an environmentally-conscious life is all the rage these days. Past the carbon offsetting and Priuses though, is the idea of just living your life more thoughtfully, less excessively. Conspicuous consumption just screams “because I can!” and I hate that.

The truth may be that no matter how hard as I try, I may never be able to cut my consumption down to something that is not still a huge disparity with the rest of the world.  Still, I think it’s worth trying to live my life as responsibly as possible.  32 times is just too much.

The Times Square Alliance is having something random called Good Riddance Day on Friday the 28th: 

 

In keeping with that spirit, the co-organizers of New Year’s Eve in Times Square (Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment) are inviting the public to say goodbye, once and for all, to those bad memories of 2007. “GOOD RIDDANCE DAY” is a chance to, literally, throw out your bad memories.We’re inviting New Yorkers and visitors from around the world to join us in mashing a year’s worth of bad hairstyles, loathed music, fashion disasters and ill-fated romances into an unrecognizable pulp of bad karma and negative vibes – which will then be carted off, never to be seen again.

So is this an invitation for NYCers to bring old stuff with them to Times Square to have the TSA happily haul it away for free? A plot by the TSA to get free labor in helping to make confetti for New Year’s Eve on Monday? Hm…

You can always agree to that.

Ok, no, I don’t hate the NFL - in fact, I really love watching football - but the only feeling I can muster when I see a game distribution map like this is ARGHHHH.  Everyone in the country gets a 4:15pm EST football game on CBS  except for the Bay Area??  The vast majority will get to see the Steelers and Patriots play, the poor NY metro area gets the Jets-Browns but in San Francisco?  Nothing.  I can see it now: Pittsburghs pulls off a crazy upset tomorrow and beat New England… and I don’t get to see a minute of the game.   

Yes, it’s true, I could go to a sports bar that has DirecTV Sunday Ticket and watch the game, but that just means that I would be surrounded by the smug Boston/New-England frat boys that tend to congregate on Sunday afternoons… 

The Bay Area is terrible for watching football. 

 It’s all your fault, NFL. 

• the darned heat in the apt is always blasting. old-school radiator with no way to tell how to turn it off… ugh. #
• T/F? The health of Silicon Valley can be measured by the state of traffic on Highway 101 from San Francisco to San Jose. #

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