Can't You Hear Me Knocking?

Like I mentioned before, Halloween is my second-least-favorite holiday. Yes there is free candy and costumes and if you live in Santa Barbra, ST D's and Blackouts. But still it is not in my top five. I should have been motivated earlier on in the week to finish my InDesign project for my magazine design class, but like usual procrastination got the best of me. As well as Guitar Hero III. (Link is to a flash site.)

I arrived home after class and realized that I could spend just two or three songs worth of time playing. I mean, I just wanted to face slash on expert mode, how hard could it be? So after three hours I put the game down and started working on the project I had started in class. While playing I got the pleasure of listening to room mates complain about stupid things and develop a headache, but work still had to get done.

I worked through the temptation to hop back on Guitar Hero and show them who really was a "rock legend," but I had to keep pushing through with the work, because soon the trick-or-treaters would be here. So I scarfed down dinner and then procrastination got the best of me. I went with my room mate to get more candy because we ran out.

We went to Safeway, where the candy was now on sale, and picked up a few bags. I was going to buy some Patron Silver to have for this weekend, but because of the 5.6 earthquake that rocked us in the South Bay, they had none to sell. So we went to the liquor store down the street from our place and picked one up. Best $50 investment I have made in a while. So anyway, got home, unwrapped it and then hid it away for the weekend.

Came back upstairs and churned out the rest of the project. This is my replication of Men's Health's table of contents. The photos are watermarked with other people's companies so they look funny, but oh well. Here it is.
Again, any comments or criticisms would be greatly appreciated.

Damn Orange Fret!

I just read this on Ctrl-Alt-Del, and it sums up all my troubles with Guitar Hero. The character on the left is Ethan and he is the creator of Zeke, the character on his right, who is a robot constructed out of xbox and xbox 360 parts. His faithful but not fully understanding companion.

Push It To The Limit

Everyone has experienced the pain of a crappy shopping cart. Many problems may be found with the carts: there are only three wheels, one of the wheels has not been oiled since oil was invented, an infant has pooped in or around the child seat area, someone has struck your cart with a vehicle in the parking lot, and anything else you could imagine being wrong with the carts. There seems to be no shopping cart that is even remotely enjoyable to push.

I believe that the crappy shopping cart adds to the frustration of shopping. Shoppers who settle for the hand baskets know what I am talking about. There is little frustration when it comes to finding and operating a little hand basket. Sure you can't put your forty pack of toilet paper in it, but at least you know that you won't be rupturing the ear drums of fellow shoppers with your squeaky cart, dubbed "Tin Man."

I understand that people who use the hand baskets are only shopping for a few things, but my post is not a way to help you fix your crappy cart, or tell you a way to fit your two weeks of shopping into a hand basket. Instead my post is to tell you that I had a completely, amazingly average cart today and it brightened up my day.

So there my room mates and I were, standing in front of the evil empire's fortress, #316. I don't know about you, but does anyone else always forget a kart until they are inside the store? (And I am going to spell cart, "kart", from now on because of my allegiance to Mario Bros.) I know... I am a nerd. Anyway, it took forever to find a kart.

When we re-entered we were instantly provoked by the candy section set up for Halloween. Halloween is my second least-favorite holiday, for your information. We each got a bag of candy to give out on Halloween to the children in our neighborhood. The only problem with that is, we might not have any candy left by the time trick-or-treaters ring our doorbell on Wednesday.

Sorry about the candy tangent. So my kart was just spectacularly average. I was thrilled. There was nothing obviously wrong with my kart. I glided from aisle to aisle with ease and comfort. Sure I didn't know what type of bacteria was on the hand grips, but I didn't care. I was happier than Tanya Harding with a steel pipe in her hands. I would like to tell you that I found something to rant about on this trip, but I was so overwhelmed by the outstanding, non-squeaking glory of my kart, that the negatives slipped my mind.

Next time you go shopping, donate to whatever cause they are promoting. I donated five dollars to breast cancer research today. I normally would, but I was more likely to give more, probably because my kart was just so exceptionally not disappointing.

How Much Is Too Much?

First and foremost, my girlfriend gave me the idea for this post. She was shopping at Safeway and noticed that Diet Coke fridge 12 packs had a buy two get three free sale. I thought to myself, "Now that is one silly ass 'sale' they are having." How much soda does one person need to buy? I understand if you live with a group of people or your family, but that is just a lot of soda. It took me a while to get the courage to bring my camera into Safeway, but tonight on a quick trip for chili powder, I took my camera along and snapped a few sales that had me think twice about how much I was saving.


The first sale was for coke products, which was at buy two get two free, instead of three free. Cheap bastards. Sales are created so they can create a shortage of what was last week's surplus product. Pepsi has a sale one week, guaren-damn-tee it that Coke will have one the following. I just could never buy that much soda. I am personally trying to kick the nasty addiction, but I couldn't see me picking up four or five cases of soda and putting them on the conveyor belt. Is this the line to get adult diabetes?

So the other few products I took snapshots of were, the Campbell's Soup at Hand sale as well as Bumble Bee Tuna and Contadina Tomato Sauce. And this brings me to the title of my post: How much is too much? Honestly? Do you need to buy 40 cans of tomato soup so that when it is not on sale, you can think you stuck it to the "man." Sales like I said before are ways for companies to reduce the amount the store has in stock, in a way creating artificial shortages. People think they are saving money but their savings is just a way for the store to move the product.

Buy one get one free, two for six dollars, ten for four dollars, it doesn't matter what the sale is, you would be happy with the normal price anyway. A sale is just a reason to buy nicer things and think you are saving money. So the next time ramen noodles go on sale, think to yourself, "How much is too much?"

I would suggest that you take double paper bags the next time you go shopping, but I was informed that most Safeway stores frown or say they have run out of paper bags when you ask for them. So until then, get triple plastic.

What I've Done

Today in class I finished my editor's page, which is for my newspaper/magazine design class that I am taking with professional magazine aficionado, Tim Mitchell. He is spearheading the class now that we have entered the magazine portion of the material.

For our first assignment he wanted us to re-produce an editor's page from a magazine we like to read. I had Wired, Motor Trend and Men's Health and the only one with a distinguishable editor's page was Men's Health. So I opened to page 28 to start diagnosing the project that I would have to undertake. The first words out of my mouth were, "Oh shit!" For such a tabloid magazine, I was surprised at the amount of design that went into their pages. My understanding of InDesign and Photoshop is limited and there were some things I was going to need help with. One of those things as you will see in my design were the top header bar and the bottom page and label bar. They took the longest amount of time to do.

Here is my re-production of the Men's Health editor's page. I don't know if the real one is online, but I forgot to scan the real one today so you could see what it looks like. Oh yeah, thanks to Andrew and Megan for helping me get InDesign figured out.
So once again, I ask you for your comments. I spent a total of six hours on this, trying to get it right. The images and text are purely of the placeholder variety. Literally, seriously.

Thanks for Nothing

I am about to write a blog about nothing. I didn't get to blog this last weekend because of studying, a bachelor party, and an NFL football game. So here it goes.

Thanks for nothing she said. I had this dream about a love eternal, but I couldn't breathe. I felt a little bit lonely, but I couldn't get the theme song for H Street out of my head. Simple pages were in my mind and it seemed to anger the bloody rage of the titans. I was told to be somebody, but I continued to ask, Hear You Me? I would say I told you so, but that would be a fire coming out of the monkey's head.

Weapons of mass distortion kept me awake, making sleeping a,here without you, moment. But I was A.S.A.O.K. with the thoughts of let you down memories. Uptight feelings lead to a downpour of emotion that could only have felt like tonight. New York, NY was where I wanted to go, but holding me back was the drugs for me.

I told myself she will be loved but I couldn't run from the singled out, kiwi, form of not being myself. Our time is now, and nothing but backwards could take that away. Bad stone is the reason the white boy is back and we just hope to dial nine-one-one to anyone. Good riddance to all the people that do not believe comin' back is an option. 10,000 days is too long, by the way there was a Stockholm syndrome case of frightening Sunday's best.

I have a secret I wish to share with you. Hyper music is the reason fidelity and helping the poor exist. Bliss makes me bad and only makes me feel starless. Someone should issue a missing person's notice for sun rays and Saturdays. Back to the good old days when we were broken, escape, six, and "I'm like a lawyer with the way I'm trying to get you off."

I believe I am getting tired of this growing stronger and into something like a song for the deaf. Stories like these make you want to look at what you've done and just add a --The End--

I needed to write something and so I did. So I wrote a story using my motivation, my girlfriend and the songs on my random iTunes list. I took a song name and then wrote a partial sentence, then added another song name. Song titles are in alternating bold and italics. I tried to change them slightly to make this grammatically correct. So if you read this far, you are probably thinking... Thanks for nothing.

Autobots ... Rollout!

I just bought Transformers: The Movie on DVD and I have to say, I couldn't be more excited. When the movie came out in theaters I ended up seeing it three times. Not because of anything related to not seeing the whole movie, but solely because I didn't mind seeing it again.

So I went to target and bought the movie yesterday and was slightly disappointed with what I bought. Not the movie, but when I opened the package and put the DVD in my player, it seems that you have to buy the special edition package in order to get the behind the scenes footage and anything else other than just the movie. In the package I bought for $25ish dollars, I got the DVD and a small comic book that prefaces the movie. On the DVD there was only the choice of playing the movie or selecting the scenes and languages. Yup, like I said before, nothing extra.

Back to the movie. I grew up watching the cartoons and even though it is not true to the form, the director Michael Bay made an honest attempt not to destroy our childhood memories. If anything my peeve with the movie, is that Shai LaBeouf is the lead roll. There is no reason that he should be lucky enough to get and drive around in the 2009 Chevrolet Camaro prototype. It just isn't fair. Everyone who knows me, knows that I am the rightful owner of the first production model to roll off the assembly line in Detroit. So here is a little clip from the movie.

Down On The Street

The title of this blog comes from a song on Rage Against the Machine's album Renegades which was produced in 2000. The song title works well with this post because I have been inspired by a conversation about illusions. I like to consider myself an "artsy" person, but just when I thought I was good at something, I saw something that made me consider going back to art school.

The discussion began with a website that tells you which side of your brain you use more. I would link it, but I don't remember the Web site. So after seeing the test, I thought about the types of illusions I used to enjoy when I was younger. The "young or old woman" example came to mind; I would put the image in, but I want to save space for the better examples.

So I was looking online for illusions and there was an image of a sidewalk painter who creates visual illusions, some of which I have to show you:

In these examples the artist has placed himself in the image, more specifically with the one on the right. I like also how he has created an edge on the concrete, making it look like this is going on below the pavement. For the "Batman and Robin" art, I love how he used the wall to be a part of his artwork, as a window sill outside of the burning building. In the above image he also impressed me by using the stairs as part of his waterfall. It just shows that a lot more went into this are than the idea and time.

Sidewalk art has always been an amazing sight to see in person, but never have I ever seen anything this extreme or well thought out. In these samples you can see that more has gone into the art than the thought. The placement and incorporation of the surroundings is awesome. So these images have made me a little more interested in picking up my sketch pad again. Seeing something like this on the street would just make me stare in awe for hours.

I really like this one with the sailboat. You can see the reflection of the surrounding buildings in the water. Absolutely amazing. Everything about this one is just great, I was mainly drawn in by the way he makes the ground look like it moves into a sinkhole where the water has gathered. I can't say enough about how much I like this type of art.

A Day In The Life

The song title for this post comes from The Beatles 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It makes sense for this post because I haven't posted since my sleep deprived night a couple days ago and also because I have been busy. One of the things that has been keeping me busy is my newspaper and magazine design class. We only meet once a week but all week i practice and work out the details for creating a decent page, in my case it was for my midterm I took on Thursday. It was the final portion of the newspaper design portion and we had two hours to pick the news stories, design the page and add promos if we wanted. This is what I came up with using inspiration from the slightly un-orthodox newspaper the Los Angeles Times.
So thats what I came up with. Not so bad for my second major project on InDesign. Let me know what you think. Sorry about the quality. It looked better in acrobat reader.

Insomnia: Now I Gotta Let You Know

"What's got me insane oh-oh
Cause I can't stand the rain eh-ey
It's hitting my window pane
A little too much
And now I gotta let you know..."

Yes I know that it's a lyric from a rap song. In fact it is called "The Rain" by Akon off the Konvicited album, and I am too tired but too awake to look up the year it was made in. So I am up at this glorious hour of the morning because I am having trouble sleeping. The rain has decided to fall and instead of it being an absolutely wonderful experience, I have found some flaws with the house I live in.

The gutters might be clogged and the wretched noise that they make when water is trying to drain off the roof it just awful. It sounds like someone is releasing diarrhea in the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom. Not to mention, not only is it coming from our house, but if I open my window to let in some of the cool air, I have to deal with the same noises coming from my neighbors house. Which one? All of them. This is proving to make me and insomniac.

I have bit my daily limit of fresh necks on the vampire application on Facebook and I have fought and defeated most of the chumps that I can for one day. They funny part is I will have nothing to do to kill time tomorrow between classes. This is just absurd. I have never had this much trouble falling asleep. In my trip to Arizona last weekend, I was sharing a bed with my girlfriend, and even though I hadn't done that in a long time, it was still easier to fall asleep. Even with the "where do i put my arm when we cuddle face to face?" predicament. So I am awake, and at this point, staying up all night sounds like a better idea than going to sleep for three or four hours.

This post obviously has nothing to do with working at Safeway and if you have read this far, you should have figured it out by now. But, I am getting tired of holding my keyboard on my lap in bed hoping to make myself tired. Ugh, but in the paraphrased words of Akon, sometimes I can't stand the rain... its got me insane. Night all you other insomniacs. I will try to go to sleep now.

"I Helped Hemmingway Write Like He Did"

My trip to Arizona last weekend was amazing. I got to finally have a weekend to enjoy. While there I went shopping for some alcoholic beverages and went to Safeway. Did you know there are drive-through liquor stores there? Anyway, I couldn't find the Jagermeister. I was disappointed, but ended up getting the Sky Vodka as a "safe" choice. I was astonished at the number of college aged folks who were in the liquor isle browsing with me. So I looked in the "cabinet" and I didn't see the jagermeister and it kinda pissed me off. Also that cabinet makes you look like an alcoholic, because they have to get someone to go over there and get the booze for you.

So, I have decided that unless it's a matter of price, I am going to go shopping for alcohol at stores other than Safeway. You look endlessly through the thousands of types of vodka and forget what color alcohols are supposed to be. Like in my last post, it's used to confuse you. Oh yeah, do not try to buy alcohol with anyone who isn't twenty one, because everyone in your "group" must be of age, otherwise you are "supplying for minors" even if it is your little sister with cereal and milk. This process singles you out as well and forces you to make several trips tot he store. I would go on an environmental rant but thats is saved for another post.

If you like wine and buy it from Safeway, there is a good method of wrapping the bottles (along with skinny, wine bottle like bottles of other alcohols made of glass) in order for them to be transported home safely. First take out a paper bag and prop it open. Grab another paper bag and rip it in half, from side to side (across the writing) and use the pieces of paper to wrap the bottles. Then place them in the open paper bag or plastic you have a lot and prefer handles. Safeway used to have carrying cases for six or fewer bottles, but their cheapness got in the way. So until next time, bag it yourself.

The title of this blog is a line from the song "Alcohol" by Brad Paisley on his 2005 album Time Well Wasted. I don't think it needs any more explanation than that.

Feel Like Rain

Yes, the title of this entry is "feel like rain." Not Feels like rain. Its the third track on Motion City Soundtrack's 2005 album Commit This To Memory. So today after my night class I headed to Safeway to get a new shampoo, shaving cream and soap, because I was running low. As I was looking down the isles to find what I was looking for I remember another thing about Safeway that bothers me.

I am getting ahead of myself. Let me set up the situation. First of all, it's raining and that makes me upset. Don't get me wrong, we need a little rain here because everything is dieing from the heat and I am starting to get annoyed with wearing shorts. So it is raining and that also means that I have to drive slower in order not to spin out around corners and spin the tires coming off of a green light. So when I was headed to Safeway I slowed down and tried to remember the things I needed to get. Now to the main event.

As I entered the store, I was instantly greeted by the extreme amount of Halloween candy. I guess I shouldn't care, but it has been out since September first, and that is a little crazy. It is still at the end of this month, which I can't even think about right now. So I passed up the diabetes isle and made my way to the personal hygiene isle. I found the soap and shampoo and stood in the isle feeling small compared to the gargantuan selection of bars of soap. Then I realized that I hate how being in Safeway makes you forget what you went there to get in the first place. As I searched for the bars of Dial soap I felt overwhelmed by the large variety of soaps. I looked top to bottom and couldn't find it. There is a soap for sensitive skin, dry skin, itchy skin and flaky skin, but there wasn't a damn bar of soap for normal skin.

Once I found the Dial I had to decide which sent I wanted... Is there a reason for more than "soap" scented soap. I mean do I have to smell like something other than soap? Scents are becoming ridiculous these day. I am waiting for Axe to come out with a scent called "Male stripper's g-string." That will be the day I start washing myself with soap bars I steal from hotels. So finding the shampoo was easy because it was right behind me. So I picked it up and headed to the check stand. So I pay for my goods, and head out the door.

I stepped one foot into my house and realized, I had went to Safeway and forgot the one things that I went there for in the first place... Shaving cream. I went into the bathroom and cursed the Safeway distraction gods for making shopping and working there such a living nightmare. Now I am packing for my trip to Arizona and I will have to pick some shaving cream up when I get there. That or rough it for a few days. Anyway, until next time, keep asking for double papered bags. Courtesy clerks love that!