Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer
At Bice, an upscale Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan, the kind of place where men in suits can order $90 truffle pasta platters to impress other men in suits during their business lunches, in the men’s room, above the urinal:
WE AIM TO PLEASE
YOUR AIM WILL HELP
And apparently it’s hip now, too. How fucked up is your social life when you have to smoke crack to be “cool?”
I’m considering auto-deleting emails from certain country codes as a simple way to avoid spam.
No offense to the nations mentioned, but more than half the junk mail I receive is from Brazil and Denmark thanks to lax security by foreign sysadmins. I don’t know anyone in either country; why not filter them out? Seems far more straightforward than installing some half-brained spam software that may junk my real correspondence.
Which begs another question: do the spammers really think I’m going to “llame, por favor!” when the x-sender is .dk?
…for a few more hours, at least. My employer’s London office is fun. Great camaraderie amongst my coworkers, and lots of welcoming introductions the last few days.
Today I try the never-before-attempted feat of working the morning in London, flying to New York, and spending the evening (overnight GMT) moving out of my old apartment. Wish me luck.
My brother got me thinking about the cost-per-annum expense of the furniture and appliances I’m selling as I move out of my old place.
I lived uptown for five years, and my furniture at the most was that old (some pieces far less). Factoring in what I get back for the items, even as I sell things cheap, I make out OK:
Item Retail Resale Yrs CPA Bed . . . . . . . . . . . . $600 $150 5 $90 Dining table and chairs . . 250 50 5 50 Wall unit . . . . . . . . . 350 150 5 40 Dresser . . . . . . . . . . 120 10 5 22 Microwave stand . . . . . . 100 25 5 15 Bedroom lamps . . . . . . . 110 45 5 13 Coffee table . . . . . . . 50 10 4 10 Vacuum . . . . . . . . . . 60 20 5 8 Foyer table . . . . . . . . 40 10 4 8
Even the expensive stuff, like the bed, comes out under $10/month. Not bad.
That $150 wall unit is a steal, by the way. And wait’ll someone buys my $950 sofabed for less than three hundred bucks.
Eighty-eight comments (many of them useful) on Jason Kottke’s off to New York thread. Oh, and Jason: Island Burgers. Must go to Island Burgers.
On Madison Avenue, at lunchtime, on the east side of the street, between 56th and 54th Streets: my friends’ friend’s ex-fiance, Peter, who unsurprisingly did not recognize me; a fair-skinned, red-haired woman adorned with a bindi; and Carlos Santana. It was an entertaining walk.
Where do homeless people with cardboard signs get their magic markers?
The lady and I have pretty much decided we’ll be taking our honeymoon in Hawaii next year. It’s reliably beautiful, fun, and safe. Heck, it’s Hawaii—what’s not to like?
Next spring I’ll be learning to scuba dive, so I can join Amy in the deep water, and she’ll be learning to play golf, so she can join me in the deep rough.
As preparation, we’ll be sleeping in the Lake George Tiki Resort next Friday.
In a ten-minute span at work today I witnessed:
1. A coworker practicing his chip shots with full, shoulder-high swings of a pitching wedge.
2. Another coworker doing her hair—with a hair dryer—at her desk.
We sit in an open-plan office. Both of these activities occurred within six feet of my seat while I tried to meet a Friday deadline for a client.
And one wonders why I pine for a door.
Ideapad © 1998–2025 David Wertheimer. All rights reserved.