Newsflash: vMTV is freaking U-G-L-Y

Okay, not exactly a newsflash.

My bf is out of town so maybe that is why I spent some time today visiting both There and Virtual MTV (Laguna Beach? I don't know what it's called any more) today.

I started in There, where I thought I might check out the non-cement water (yes, that's how behind the times I am, I've never seen the "water" in There). I ended up checking out my clubhouse, which I'm sort of surprised I even still own, and noticing how I have NO furnishings for it any more. I think I sold them all. I have this vague memory of maybe selling everything off thinking it would force me to make something new.

Not a bad idea, but I have to get my other computer working properly with the drawing tablet and all first. At least I found the driver cd for my wireless Internet card. I ordered a computer with no wireless network card thinking I'd save like, ten bucks or something and cannibalize my old computer that was having problems. That hasn't worked out so well. I tried getting this USB wireless network dongle thingy, thinking again that I was soooo clever...and when that arrived it didn't come with a driver cd...it just said to download the drivers from the Internet. Ah...AHEM...who's brilliant idea was it to have people download drivers from the Internet that are supposed to be used to connect you to the Internet? It's like when you call Comcast because your Internet connection isn't working and you get that recording that says "did you know you can get help right away by going online?" Um, screw you Comcast hold voice lady...if I could go online I wouldn't be calling you this time or any of the other times, either!!!

Yeah so...what was I saying? Ah yes, so I went in There to see the water and I ended up checking out the amusement park instead. That was very cool. Last time I saw that ferris wheel, it wasn't even animated! It was kind of spooky because the area was totally deserted...I decided that wasn't too surprising after a while because really, once you've tried each ride and then maybe tried each ride with a friend or five, why would you go back again? It's like Great America, you're not going to go there every day all summer long. Well...actually that sounds kind of fun.

After the amusement park ghost town, I decided to check out vMTV, where I hadn't been since I signed up for it over a year ago. First I had to FIND it again. In fact, that was sort of the theme of my entire time with vMTV today (well, that and "welcome to uglytown".) I had to find the site, then find the download, then find the Galleria, find the developer site, find the developer downloads, find some documentation for the developer downloads, find a decent hair color. Erm, well, I never found a decent hair color.

My god that place is a mess. First of all, it looks like someone took There and hit it with the SecondLife ugly stick, including the UGLIEST BOUQUET OF FLOWERS EVAR, which apparently is actually a beverage and you can drink it. Uh-huh. I heard there is a really ugly teddy bear, too, but I don't know how you find that. I assume it is also a 250 sip beverage. Also note in the pics that my face color doesn't match my skin color.

The website is a total mess, with a lot of links that don't work and missing navigation elements (like, good luck getting back from the forums) and I found it was really hard to do anything in vMTV. And of course, I have never seen Laguna Beach or The Hills so I totally don't get any of the references to anything. In fact, MTV isn't even one of the cable channels I get. I did see Pimp My Ride once, and I must say the pimped out cars in vMTV look pretty cool. I bought myself a black cadillac, but maybe later I'll get one of those pimped cars. I have to go back now, because I submitted a few things once I finally figured out how.

Oh, besides Pimp My Ride, I also liked the streaming music feature. I just wish I could have figured out how to change it or skip songs or whatever and it seems like if I find a song I like I should be able to...I dunno...bookmark it or buy it or something? vMTV is such a weird place. They totally don't seem to want to follow the There way of letting member developers create most of the cool content, so they end up with mostly a bunch of REALLY LAME content. Someone should give each MTV person who works on Virtual Laguna Beach a copy of "The Long Tail". In fact, it's available as an audio book, so they could listen to it on their commute to work or while working out or...whenever...they should just listen to it. Maybe they're afraid that if they encourage members to make new content, they will make stuff that is just sooo much better than what their advertisers have that the advertisers will be upset?????

iPod Touch

I'm probably the last to know, but I just found out about the iPod Touch, a hybrid of the iPod and an iPhone. My first thought was I WANT ONE, since after using my iPhone I find the screen on my video iPod to be totally puny.

Then, I realized this thing is only 16GB. That's twice the storage space of the iPhone, but 1/10th that of the latest iPods. When you have an iPod that holds basically your entire audio library including dozens of audio books and a bunch of movies, who wants to move backwards and get something so much smaller? Plus it seems like they COULD HAVE made it hold more if they'd really wanted to. Thanks but I think I'll wait for 60GB or more. If I didn't have an iPhone already, I might feel differently.

My third thought was, "this would make soooo much better of an Ultimate Prize for the IMVU Street Team than an iPhone". I mean, c'mon...you don't need to pay a $100 a month cell phone bill to use it, and it's available/usable WORLDWIDE. Somebody should go rethinking what "Ultimate" really is. Of course if they're going to do that, I'd still like to cast my vote for the Wii being the ultimate prize.

I am not like my mother!

Next month my bf and I are taking a ten day trip. We haven't quite finalized plans for it, but the most important part logistically is that my semi-retired mother is coming out here to cat-sit for me while we are gone.

So, last night I was talking to my bf about buying my mom her ticket. I can't just...you know...buy her a ticket, because it has to be on the right airline so she can get her frequent flier miles and I have to buy it during the right time period so she can get double ff miles, or so she has informed me, and she wants to make sure that the miles will get credited to HER and not, say, to ME.

I jokingly sent my mom an email asking if she'd like me to have her routed through Memphis so she can get even MORE miles, and she emailed me back quite seriously that yes, that would be good if the times were convenient. So, I was laughing about it to my bf. Like, imagine if I'd been planning to buy her ticket using FF miles? She probably wouldn't come catsit, because then she wouldn't get any miles. Like, maybe she's coming out here for ten days just for her Northwest Worldperks. Heck, if it were me, *I* would pay MORE money to get a more convenient nonstop flight and screw the miles.

So then, since I like to rant about things, I start ranting about AT&T (you're suddenly quite jealous of my bf being stuck in the car with me for several hours, aren't you?) and about how people on the west coast get kind of screwed with free "evening" minutes because they don't start until 9pm, but you can't call anyone on the east coast using your free minutes because for them it's midnight. Meanwhile, people on the east coast can call people on the west coast at 9pm and people on the west coast are getting that call at 6pm, and it's like, soooo unfair. Then, after ranting for a while about how much AT&T sucks and how unfair it all is, I suggest that maybe HE should get AT&T, because then he'd be "in my network" and all our calls to each other would be free.

I realize this is a somewhat ridiculous suggestion, since he makes phonecalls all day long and probably 95% (or more) of his calls are to people on some other network or maybe on a landline phone or someone in another country, and all I ever have to say about AT&T is that they suck, but still...my phone always makes a point of telling me exactly how much time/money I used up and have left at the end of each call and it drives me crazy and never is ANYONE I EVER talk to in the same network I am.

It was about this time he went from just sort of smirking to OPENLY LAUGHING AT ME. "Yeah, your mom and her frequent flier miles", he says, "at least I know where you get it from."

What???? I am NOT like my mother! Argh.



p.s. to my mom: Sorry Mom, I don't know how to get the owl hoot ringtone on your phone. No idea.

The Truth Behind the Numbers

My two current obsessions are condo cruise ships and gambling (my mom will be so proud).

About a year or so ago, I learned about a cruise ship called Residensea's "The World". This ship travels the world taking about four years to circumnavigate the world, stopping for two or three days in this or that exotic or not so exotic port and then eventually visiting them all again. What makes it different is that people don't just go cruise on this ship for a week or two, they LIVE on it in large luxury condos.

I've been thinking about it again lately because I just saw a one hour special about it on the Travel Channel. Hey, for around two million dollars, you could have a residence on Residensea. Considering Bay Area housing prices, that isn't too bad...except then you have to figure in about another ten thousand per month in fees for the running of the ship and dock fees and all the other expenses that the residents share, although I think you get a couple thousand of that back as shipboard credit in places like the restaurants and the deli, maybe the spa?

They say you need to have a net worth of about ten million to be able to afford to live there. The cool thing is, the tv special showed this real estate couple in their 50s who still work, they just do it from their shipboard condo. They each have a desk with a computer and anything else they need, with a fabulous ocean view of course, and they just keep working. Woohoo. I would LOVE to do something like that in my 50s.

I kind of lost some interest in Residensea after learning last year that they don't accept pets. What? That blows. But this week I learned there is a new ship being constructed, due to be completed in 2010, called the Magellan, which IS going to take pets, if they are under 15 pounds (no jokes about Rodney please, he's not an ounce over 14 pounds!) on three of their decks. Now I really really really want a net worth of ten million!

Haha...I don't know...it could happen.

And that brings me to the gambling obsession...

Nonono...it's not what you think. I'm not running around being a gambling fool. I've just spent time studying gambling and reading statistical books that explain the odds of different games and how you can actually win. They basically all make me NOT want to gamble. At least not with any actual expectation of winning.

Here is a statistic I got from "The Lottery Book: The Truth Behind The Numbers": If you played the lottery twice a week (because generally that is how often they draw the numbers) and you played $100 each time, on AVERAGE it would take you 11,589 years to win the lottery. (so even if you lived 11,589 years and actually spend $200 a week on the lottery, chances are only 50% you'd actually win by then.) Hey, I want to live eleven thousand years!

Now it's been tenthousand years
man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew - now man's reign is through.
But through eternal night the twinkling of starlight
So very far away - maybe it's only yesterday.

Heheh...I love me some Zagar and Evans. According to them, we won't be around to see that 50% chance of a payout anyway.

So, something with a little better odds...we went back to the racetrack Friday. I need to study horse racing a little more, because although we didn't do as bad as in the past, I think we could do better. And, by do better I mean not lose quite as much money. The problem is, if a horse/jockey is favored to win, you can't make much money on the bet, like twenty cents on the dollar. What fun is that? It's way more fun to play a long shot. I guess maybe I shouldn't complain, since we aren't actually betting MY money.

China countdown: 11

According to my google calendar, as of today my cat China only has 11 chemo treatments left. I think my bf is actually sad about this since we have been having lunch together every time she has a treatment ever since we met. I guess he has a point...I'm not sure we'd ever go to Paradiso in San Leandro for lunch OR dinner if we weren't waiting for China to have her treatment, and Paradiso is a nice East Bay treat.

Besides, there is something about getting away in the middle of a weekday that always feels so decadent.

I was going through China's paperwork yesterday. I was planning to add up all of her treatment costs to find out exactly how much it really was. Argh, there are so many, though. At least they are getting cheaper. Her first trip to BAVS was about $2200...something I totally freaked out about at the time. AND she was going once a week for a while, AND I had to hire a car and driver during that time. Now it's more like $220 or 1/10th the price of the original visit each time and she goes only once every four weeks AND we have a nice lunch. Oh, plus she seems to have finally gotten used to it and hardly freaks out at all. She didn't even hide in the closet when she got home today.

I realized how lucky we are today when I was talking to a woman in the waiting room at BAVS who said she has been taking her pet in THREE TIMES A WEEK for radiation treatments. Whoa. Radiation is expensive and time consuming. It also has weird side effects. China's radiation treatments seem to have somehow robbed her of her ability to purr, and they think that it may have been the radiation that turned her into a crazy sneezing snot-blowing machine as well, although I think that might be from the exploratory surgery she had at the local vet where they also removed most of the lymphoma mass from her nasal cavity before she ever started at BAVS. She now sprays snot all over my monitors, bedding, windows...nothing in the path of her constantly running nose is safe, and I'm afraid she may continue doing this indefinitely.

Hopefully China will actually be looking forward to her chemo trips by next July, because we are thinking of still bringing her there after her treatments are over, just drop her off and go to lunch...it makes such a nice tradition.

That's the ultimate prize???

Yes, I like to complain about stuff. Looking around me, I don't think I'm alone in that.

Today's rant is about IMVU's latest Street Team "woo woo" invite all your friends thing. Refer 30 friends to sign up for IMVU in one month, and you're entered in a drawing to win a 4gb iPhone. They call it the "Ultimate Prize".

I've seen IMVU give away gameboys and whatever the latest little gadget is before, and I guess that's cool but I just wonder why the four gig iPhone is the "Ultimate Prize". First of all, couldn't they have spent an extra hundred bucks for the 8gig? That would be so much better of a prize, IMO. I have the eight gig and I already have more than four gigs of stuff on it. 4gigs just isn't that much space. Also, if you get the iPhone you are talking about a VERY EXPENSIVE phone bill.

I mean, I have people emailing me every day asking how they can get cheap credits or free credits because they have no money, have no credit card, they are only 14 years old and their parents won't buy them any credits, etc. etc. Now you want to give them a prize that is 1.) The wimpier iPhone that doesn't hold that much data and 2.) comes with a phone bill of about $100 a month? I think most of the people that might potentially scramble around for a month trying to get thirty people to join are probably people who either don't want to or can't afford to pay one hundred dollars a month for a cellular phone which only works on the Cingular/ATT network.

I suppose if you win this phone, you can always sell it on eBay or Craigslist or something. And, if you are in a country where the iPhone is not available you could always sell sexytime with it, but wouldn't it make more sense to just give away a Wii or something?

Actually, if it were a Wii they were giving away...I might be tempted to try and rustle up 30 friends myself!

Giant Chocolate Buttercream Cake

Well, that sucked.

Yesterday morning I woke up completely unprepared to try being a locavore for a month.

I realized I couldn't have any coffee...it doesn't grow in California or anywhere else in the U.S. mainland. Argh. No chocolate, either...check out the entry on Wikipedia under "cacao" and you'll see. As far as I can tell, no tea is grown here, either...although I can't find any reason why it wouldn't be possible.

Soon, I have a roaring headache. I figure I should go to the Redwood City Farmer's Market for the first time this year. They should have some good local stuff there. So I grab a big bag to fill with purchases and hurry out the door. They are only open until noon, and they get busier and busier until that time, plus there may be things (like quarts of freshly squeezed pomegranate juice, although it's probably early in the season for that) that will be sold out by now, but at least I won't miss it entirely. I don't totally know what is in season. I ordered a local foods wheel, but I don't expect it to arrive until Tuesday at the earliest.

I stop at the bank and since I am not prepared for this trip, I'm completely unprepared for being a locavore, I have to take money out of PayPal using my debit card, which costs me an extra $3. Sometimes the Farmer's Market just seems sooooo expensive. I think part of it is because spending cash just makes everything seem more expensive than using plastic. If they took credit/debit cards at the Farmer's Market I think I'd spend soooo much more...it would probably be worth it to them to pay the fees to the credit card company if you crunch the numbers...but it's kind of cool to think nobody is paying those fees at this market today. Well, *I* just paid $2 to my bank and $1 to PayPal for the privilege of using cash but um...the people with the stalls aren't paying those fees today.

Before even getting to the Farmer's Market, I pass Boulanger. I get...weird at the farmer's market with the crush of people, the chaos and my indecision and sometimes I won't buy anything at all, or maybe just a few portabello mushrooms and some baby spinach, but then I will almost always get a cappuccino at Boulanger, and then come home and maybe sip it on my balcony with a croissant or a bagel. I can't do that today...the coffee is not grown locally and neither is the milk probably or the sugar...or the flour in any of the pastries. No Boulanger for me today. Or tomorrow. Or next week.

The first food I encounter at the Farmer's Market is two different bread stalls. They each have rather different selections and both look very tasty. I think of asking them where they get their flour, but both stalls are rather busy and I decide not to. I make a big circle around the market. There are two flower stalls and I wonder if the flowers are grown locally. They COULD be...I should ask, but I don't. Maybe next week.

I'm looking for the stall that sells the wonderful walnuts, dried apricots and apricot preserves, but I don't find it anywhere. I do find the stall that sells all the different types of mushrooms. I buy two types of potatoes and some corn. I am thinking about how the butter I have at home is from New Zealand and I can't use it. Last night I was trying to send my bf home with a bunch of the non-local food I have, but I forgot at the last minute, so I have butter and cheese from New Zealand, a GIANT CHOCOLATE BUTTERCREAM birthday cake, and a bunch of other stuff I shouldn't eat, like vegetarian corn dogs and frozen Trader Joe's taquitos.

I buy some pluots or something. Like I said, I have a headache and I'm really not paying that much attention. The sun is beating down, and a few vendors say to me "it's hot out today, isn't it?" Which, since they live in the San Something-or-Other valley, where it is about 110 out every day this time of year, and it's only about 80 right now in RWC, I think they are just asking me because *I* am looking rather hot and wilted.

I am determined to buy plenty of stuff whether I feel like it or not because otherwise who knows what I will eat in the upcoming days...although my bf has promised to take me to the Palo Alto Whole Foods on Sunday. They sell locally grown raw cheese and milk that I want to try...I don't think the Whole Foods in Redwood City sells this same brand. But today, I am at the Farmer's Market, and there is no dairy and no eggs in sight, sadly, so I buy some weird looking beans I have no idea how to cook, and some weird looking cucumbers I hope aren't just for pickling or something, a bag of mixed salad greens, a few onions, some peapod type things, some eucalyptus honey I hope doesn't actually taste like eucalyptus but at least it's sweet and locally grown, some heirloom tomatoes so I can be just like every restaurant in town right now, except now I need some locally grown balsamic herb vinagarette and buffalo mozzarella to turn the tomatoes into a salad. Finally my bag is full and actually quite heavy and I've spent most of the cash I took out, so I take it all home and collapse.

Once home, I eat the raspberries I bought and drink some water. Blech, water...where is my coffee??? Or tea? The raspberries are really flavorful...wow...even better than the giant chocolate cake in the fridge, but the chocolate cake might actually have some caffeine and the raspberries certainly do not. I have some pistachios that were locally grown, so I eat some of those. After a while I realize they are SALTED, and I don't think the salt was locally grown. By now my bf has sent me a text message telling me I should probably just *try* to eat locally as much as possible but make some exceptions like for coffee or for when it just isn't convenient, which makes me feel rather stubborn and like "no, I really want to do this", but realizing I'm eating non-local salt I am really wavering and realizing what I got myself into. Because of my headache, I decide to take a nap.

Waking up, I still feel like crap. Last year I didn't have caffeine for four months and I did feel a bit bad at first but today I just really...well, I just really have a GIANT CHOCOLATE BUTTERCREAM CAKE in my refrigerator. Argh. Maybe I should make an exception for stuff that is already in my apartment. I mean, it's probably worse to waste the food than to eat something non-local, right? Right? I realize I'm really trying to rationalize eating a piece of that cake right now. I'm thinking I have some local cheese and eggs and I could make an omelette and even throw some mushrooms in it. Oh wait...the olive oil I have is from Italy and the butter is from New Zealand and the cooking spray, who the heck knows what's in it and where it's from. Oh hell...

....

....I eat a big piece of cake. Or really, I mostly eat the buttercream icing. Who cares about the cake part? Actually, who cares about this damn locavore thing? Yes, I want to be more aware of my food choices, and I'm happy to spend the month of September becoming more familiar with locally grown foods, but this has the potential to cause problems for...

The movie we are supposed to see Sunday

The restaurant, Paradiso, we always eat at when China goes to the vet (Wednesday)

Going to the horse races (Friday)

Going on that tour of the Healdsburg vineyards via horse and carriage with a picnic provided later this month

Trip to the Giants game next week

Just about everything else

So, I ate the cake, and I ate some more pistachios, and then for good measure I ate some bread with flour of unknown origin with New Zealand butter on it, and I had a few cups of very strong tea. Today I'm out of coffee but I'm having some more tea and then I think I am making hashbrowns...in New Zealand butter.

Let's just call it "local food AWARENESS month". I'm still going to The Cheese Board in Berkeley later this month to check out the local cheeses and I'm sure this will be a great month to eat at some "slow food" restaurants that use MOSTLY local ingredients. I can also cook more at home using my local food wheel and a seasonal cookbook I have kicking around somewhere. I may also try a few different Farmer's Markets around the area and maybe seek out some farm stands, too.

I just wish I'd gotten a cappuccino at Boulanger yesterday. The day would have been so much better.