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What is it with mustaches? Different mustaches conjure different thoughts and judgments about the man who wears it. Since I’ve grown mine I’ve been told I look like a child molester and a cop. I’ve been told I look mean. My female roommate loathes it but some girls fancy it. There was even a study that proves girls like some sort of growth on a man’s face.

I grew it as joke, but it began to grow on me. Now I’m curious to see how it’s going to take shape. I learned you need to wax it if you want to tame it, so I ordered some Oregon Wild Hair Mustache Wax. The ends are just now long enough to attain a faint twirl.

Since I’ve grown my mustache, I’ve heard two anecdotes about mustaches from guys my age. One was a warning. He said, “Be careful. My dad grew a mustache in the 70’s and he’s had it ever since. My mom’s never seen him without it.” The other was a hypothesis. The guy who I was talking with hypothesized with his friends that not having a mustache is a form if contraception (since his dad and his friends’ dads have mustaches). In other words, if you have a mustache, you’re more likely to become a dad. Not too sure believe that one.

While waiting for the Yeah yeah yeahs to take the stage at the Fillmore last night, Verizon wireless had a screen projected on the side of the auditorium displaying text messages sent by people in the venue to a special address. “I love this band!!!!!!,” “I love their sound :),” “Hi mom!” and other inane, boring texts scrolled up the screen.

Rather pissed off by the blatant marketing scheme and curious to see if they did their QA, I decided to send the text, “Fuck Verizon,” to the number and see if it would make its way to the screen. The band came on, I forgot about the text, and never noticed if it showed or not.

This morning I got a text:

Congrats! You won for texting to the screen at the Fillmore, courtesy of Verizon Wireless. Contact Chris at 415-555-5555 to claim your prize!

I called Chris and he told me I won two tickets to any show of my choice at the Filmore. “You’re eating your words now,” he told me. But I wasn’t; I still have the same opinion of Verizon, despite the free tickets. Curious to see if he had the same opinion, I asked, “Did I win randomly or because of what I wrote?” It was random.

So I’m going to see Bebel Gilberto on September 9th courtesy of Verizon Wireless.

Craigslist finally got over its minimalistic and idealistic design strategy and added some minor graphical UI elements to the famously no-frills site. Upon viewing listings in the San Francisco Bay Area, the user will notice that the sub-regions, once separated by pipes or “|” are now represented by tabs. This comes after, a week or so ago, a change where the layout for the flag links was shifted from horizontal to vertical.

I think the changes are an improvement but more so, they are significant simply because the craigslist interface changes only on rare occasions. There’s more room for improvement in other areas of the interface and I wonder if this marks a trend towards a better UI. Perhaps colors other than blue, purple, and grey?

I’ve always liked the homepage of craigslist and appreciated its quirky brand. It’s an example of a site where content is king and design takes a back seat.

Are you getting paid the market rate for your job? Find out at SalaryScout.com where you can search voluntarily and anonymously submitted profiles of employees’ skills, job requirements and compensation.

The site’s great idea but very basic (as it should be for a first release). It only allows you to search profiles by job title and view an employee’s location, experience, degree, company info and, of course, salary and benefits. The site is as anonymous as it can be and when asking for company info it asks for non-distinguishing features like company size, age, and annual income. But there’s nothing to stop the user from making a distinguishable username or submitting identification information on one of the various inputs.

My suggestion for the site would be to add better sorting and data analysis. Viewing each profile piecemeal is a relevant, but the information would be more powerful and compelling, from a statistical standpoint, if it were consolidated. This, however, is not an easy task and one with which HR departments struggle. Just the mere classification of jobs seems like a useless exercise, especially in a quickly changing world. SalaryScout offers the kind of qualitative salary information that you would get from asking a friend.

The founder’s goal was to prevent “corporate politics, experience, and age [from being] important factors in determining compensation,” which I think is noble. Compensation should be 100% skill based, but I doubt much will change. And even if those factors are made to be not important, negotiating will still be a large determiner of what you get paid. And since an employee’s value is ruled by supply and demand, which can fluctuate, SalaryScout is an invaluable resource to check from time to time, when you want to find out what your market value is.

Chipotle does a pretty good job at seeming not corporate.

The most surprising aspect of their dining experience is the music; they’ve got some good tunes. I recall hearing Manu Chao in there once and just yesterday I heard a Cowboy Junkies-sounding cover of Townes Van Zandt’s Sitting Around Waitin’ to Die. I’m impressed.

I’ve known that supermarket club cards are used for tracking users’ buying habits but it just dawned on me today that they are essentially the same as cookies, used by websites for tracking browsing habits online.

The interesting part of this type of statistical tracking is that it’s faceless. I lost my old card and just received a new today. The cashier gave me a form which I could fill out and send in, but what’s the point? I still get my discount. They’re not trying to link you with your groceries; they’re trying to average you with other consumers so they figure out different consumer stereotypes and ultimately make more money. The questions they can answer with these data are “someone who buys product A also buys product B” or “someone who buys product C shops twice a week while someone who buys product D shops every other day.”

These data are demographical and don’t really have anything to do with the card-carrying consumer. Cookies track the same sort of data: “users who visited site A also visit site B,” “users come to this page C more frequently than page D,” and “users stay on this site for X amount of minutes.”

The facelessness of club cards and cookies protects consumers’ individual privacy but they are still a little mischievous because the tracking is, for the most part, unseen. Club cards are disguised to be a money-saving privilege (afforded indiscriminately) rather than tracking tags similar to those tacked on to wild animals for studies. And cookies are all but invisible to non-technical Internet surfers.

Due to its physicality, the future of club cards has the potential to be more ominous when considering the possibility of adding RFID tags to them. RFIDs are already being added to many products in the store; why not go one step further and put them on the shoppers? This way the stores can figure out how long it takes to decide whether to buy Aquafina or Dasani or your exact path through the store upon entrance and exit of the automatic sliding doors.

I wrote this story to be included in a compilation for a friend’s birthday, thought I’d blog about it.

Disclaimer: This is more a story about me than it is about Lina, but it happened the first time that I met her.

Twas Fiesta in Santa Barbara in the year 2004. Los Bobby, Mike Franz, Bridget O’Brien, others and I (a.k.a “the Block”) invaded Galeria’s place for the weekend fiestivities.

All I remember from that weekend (aside from Fiesta) was playing quarters, lots of quarters.

I got up to go to the bathroom, and in my absence somebody bounced a quarter in to the community cup, which was full of beer. (Was it Lina? Was it Jesse?) “Somebody should probably take that out,” muttered somebody to clear his or her conscience; but nobody did.

The two rotating mugs were right next to each other, one after the other. The first one got to me and I can’t seem to bounce my quarter in it. The person on my left beats me and passes it to Bridget on my right. She’d been bouncing doubles all night and had it out for me—I knew she was going to pass it back to the person on my left and I was about to be double-screwed.

I had to guzzle the community cup and make my quarter so that I wouldn’t get skipped again. I grab the beer cup, opened the hatch and started sucking beer out of it. On its way down, I felt an object glide through my throat. By the time I realized what had happened, the quarter was already in my stomach. Everyone was laughing guiltily and I was dumbfounded. When they caught their breath, the players told me what had happened while I was in the bathroom.

I contemplated whether or not I was going to die, whether or not I would pass it or the quarter would be with me forever. It didn’t feel right, but I think it was mainly a placebo. I probably never would have known that a quarter was inside me if I wasn’t aware when I swallowed it.

For you curious folk, I eventually passed the quarter. But that’s another story.

I’ve always had a distrust of real estate agents and mortgage brokers. They’re used car salesmen selling houses and loans instead of lemons. They’re always so slick and do the best job of pretending to give a shit about their suckers when they’ll do just about anything to get them to sign on the dotted line. You see their plastic faces pasted on bus stops, door hangers and various other forms of litter. What the hell does your ugly mug have to do with buying a house? I smile inside anytime I see that someone has mustached their blown-up image. (more…)

I knew when I started this blog the high possibility that it gets old and rots before it ever even gets off the ground. It’s been more than a month since my last post and I’ve been meaning to update it for quite some time. I still haven’t managed to develop a cohesive theme to unify all my posts other than “random things I’m interested in.” There are lots of things I could have written about and even thought about writing about, but I never got around to. I think the trick is to keep them short and sweet.

One reason I prefer shopping online to shopping in person is because it’s so much easier to find the goddamned product you’re looking for. All you have to do is type in the desired thing and the search engine will pull it right up for you.

At grocery stores, it’s not that easy. They try to categorize their goods which works for the most part, but not for those hard-to-find or hard-to-categorize commodities. Being a man, I never like to ask where something is until I’ve searched the whole store.

Here’s my question: why can’t they add search engines to supermarkets and in turn save the employees from having to memorize the whole store and the customers from the embarrassment of not being able to find their item without help.

The technology we already have, computers are cheaper than people, and the store’s products are already in a database. Why not have a monitor at the end of every other aisle that let’s you search for your product? It could even pull up a map of the store and give you directions alá Google Maps. This isn’t too far-fetched; in fact, it seems like something that should have been done before the superfluous self-check kiosks.