Last night I watched Eraserhead, directed by David Lynch. 
This film easily surpasses his others as the weirdest movie I've ever
seen.  I like his films because they are so surreal and they
really make you think... especially thoughts like "what the hell is
going on?"  However, Eraserhead manages to take this to an extreme
beyond even my eccentric tastes.  If you're curious about watching
one of Lynch's films, I'd suggest Lost Highway or Mulholland Dr.  But don't say I didn't warn you!

Well, I was going to write a post about what I did this weekend (going to the Apple store opening at 2 in the morning with Jon and Dave,
eating at the street fair on 9th ave, playing basketball with several coworkers
and some ghetto kids near my apt, going undefeated in beer pong with
Dave), accompanied
by pictures from my new Razr V3c.  Unfortunately, Verizon
Wireless' evil policies
have made this impossible for the time being, so I'll
just talk about how lame Verizon is instead.

It all stems from the fact that Verizon willfully disables perfectly
good features on their phones so that they can leech more money out of
their customers' bank accounts.  I was aware of this when I
ordered my phone... I knew that the Verizon firmware disables Bluetooth
OBEX (a way of transferring data) on the Motorola-made V3c while
simultaneously replacing Motorola's UI with an inferior,
battery-draining interface.  Verizon even forces Motorola to
cripple its own phone software tool (Mobile PhoneTools) by disabling
all data transfers between your phone and your computer... just when
your phone is provided by Verizon. 

Why would Verizon do a crazy thing like crippling their own phones, you
ask?  They realized that they could extract a lot more money from
their customers by making it impossible for you to get pictures and
videos off of their phones unless you send them via MMS for 25 cents a
pop.  You also can't transfer wallpapers and ringtones to their
phones without paying even higher fees.

What makes these offenses even more egregious is that in the original
version of Verizon's V3c firmware, Bluetooth worked just fine. 
Verizon went out of its way to take away this feature... it's pretty
sad when a company's software "upgrade" turns out to be a considerable
downgrade.

Now you may wonder why I would get this phone knowing of Verizon's evil
schemes.  I could have gotten the previous version of the Razr
from Cingular or T-mobile and have a phone that actually works right
off the bat.  However, I wanted the new one for its better camera
and expanded memory.  The V3c camera has 1.3 megapixels compared
to the original's 0.3.  I don't want to carry a bag around with me
everywhere, I can't fit a camera into my already
wallet/ipod/phone-filled pockets, and 1.3 mp is good enough for my
needs, so there ya go.

Fortunately, because other providers (namely Alltel) carry the V3c,
it's possible to change the firmware on it (aka "flashing" your phone)
to their version and restore your phone to it's original glory, from a
time before Verizon got their dirty hands on it.  However, this
isn't very easy and involves downloading about 8 different programs to
get everything working again, and some things may end up not even
working at all.  The other option is to simply download the
original, bluetooth-enabled version of Verizon's firmware and flash
your phone to that... you still get stuck with Verizon's UI
though.  Anyway, rereading the first paragraph of this post should
imply which option I decided to try first.

Had great fun moving servers around yesterday!   I got to the
office at 5:45 AM to start out the day, which would involve travelling
to multiple secret "high security" locations, and ended up leaving at
around 9 PM.  Moving servers on and off of a truck is made all the
more exciting by the fact that they wobble around and there is the
potential for getting crushed underneath thousands of pounds of
computer hardware.  Fortunately, we survived the day without any
major incidents.  The things we do for the Xanga community...

Tensions ran high at one point, and a cage match
broke out in our now-abandoned previous facility.  In Joel's
account he first claims that he defeated me, then that the match never
even happened (despite photographic evidence to the contrary). 
The reason behind the brawl has also been lost to history... some
believed it was an argument over who would get to ride shotgun over to
Newark, but that theory has since been disproven.  The real truth
may never be known.

It's 4:20 on 4/20... do you know where your kids are? ;o

edit: Thanks for the eprop bombardment Chris, I feel so loved   And thanks to everyone for leaving such insightful pearls of wisdom... keep em coming!

The stuff I've been working on got pushed out to beta today!  Now
you can publish your photos to a photoblog, which lives at http://photo.xanga.com/patrick (replace patrick with your username).  Click on the small version of a picture in your photomanager
and then check the box next to "include this photo in your photoblog." 
You can tag photos too, and there's a bunch of features related to
that.  For example, you can view a tag cloud of the tag's you've
used at http://photo.xanga.com/patrick/tags/ (replace patrick as above).  Check it out!

edit: I added a decent number of pics to my own photoblog today, some
of which even include me smiling! :p  Also featured are my trip to
Cali this summer and my lovely girlfriend Deborah.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. General and Supreme Commander of the Allied
forces in Europe in World War II, President from 1953 to 1961, said in
his farewell address:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties
or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an
alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the
huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful
methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

... too bad we didn't listen

Everyone was out of the office today for a wedding and I was allllll
aloooone... forcing me to get my Counter-Strike fix on a public
server.  I'd thought I kicked my CS habit a long time ago, but
Source has brought it back strong.  Also, my fellow Xangagineers
are enablers! ;/

The new Xanga profiles are now on-line, upgrade your profile and friend me!