Would you like to earn $10 by filing your taxes online? Impossible? Not quite…
Use this link to file your taxes and you’ll get a $10 check in the mail. Cool! If it asks you for my client ID, please enter 9B101658-2851-430F-A114-9D3EAE865F62.
Full Disclosure: I think I also get $10 along with you when you use this link. Also, you must be a new H&R Block user to qualify.
So, the site has a new name along with a new design. I hope you like them both. Oh, it has a real domain name too. The new address for the site is www.cobjectively.com.
The name C-Objectively is a play on words. Objective-C is the programming language most commonly used when making a program for a Mac. Of course I don’t need to spell out to the bright minds who read this site that the site’s name reverses this to actually sound like “See Objectively”. Hahaha. You think I’m so lame but I like the name. It also took me ages to come up with a name that was clever and not corny. Maybe that means I’m not creative enough? Eh? Maybe you’re not.
Come back soon, I’ll be posting links to interesting sites and articles, reviewing different gadgets I own or have played with, posting thoughts on my last semester as an undergrad (no, I have no immediate plans for grad school), and who knows what else will show up.
Thanks,
Armen 
So check this out. Its WordPress. What’s that you say? Its me hosting my own blog. Its free. Its open source. Its way more powerful than Blogger will ever be. I love it.
My blog is back up and running on this new system. Not only that I imported the old Blogger posts in here too. I don’t know if that was the best idea but its too late to turn back now!
When I get more time I will be changing how things look and feel. Until then, be excited that I’m back! Oh yeah, wish me luck on my interview with Cisco tomorrow…
Wow. Americans really love buzzwords. They eat that shit up like crazy. Only problem is it really bothers people who know whats up and hate when words are plugged in just to sound snazzy and cutting edge.
Take for example this page [autospies.com]. Its an article from what I call the best auto news site on my links page. Nevertheless, these guys have submitted to buzzword whoring just like the rest of them. If you look at that article, you’ll notice they refer you to the “blog” section found further down the page. But you know as well as I do that that is not a blog. That is what has been known for the past umpteenth years as USER COMMENTS or FEEDBACK or whatever. For a short defitinion of blog we turn to dictionary.com.
Is it just me who gets annoyed by stupidity like this? And the propagation of it thereof?
Lastly, I just heard one of the craziest names ever, Jed Bloodworth. Yes, its a real person. Yes, he’s from Texas.
So I’m sitting in the “commuter” terminal for United here at SFO writing this post. I missed my 9:25am flight to Burbank this morning. I don’t know why they call this airport the San Francisco Int’l. Airport. It’s hardly anywhere near San Francisco; it took almost an hour to get here on the BART. It is however a very big, clean, and generally nice looking airport. With the exception of the “commuter” terminal that I’m waiting in. This thing makes Burbank Airport look like LAX. I think they’re making us fly prop planes into Burbank. I’m really starting to miss my reliable Southwest flights out of Oakland right now.
So recently I’ve been lauding the public transportation I take to work every day as great. But I think that’s mostly been a form of optimism for myself. A recent spate of super-smelly people, including one dude who thought it would be cool to bring several bags of rotting TRASH onto the bus with him, have changed my view on public transport rather quickly. Sitting in traffic may suck but at least I don’t have to hold my breath while doing it.
Speaking of public transport, I saw a funny (weird?) thing the other day on the Muni train to work in SF. One of the seats near mine was wet. These seats are bowl shaped to accommodate our wonderfully bowl-shaped rear ends and in this particular bowl-seat there was a small pool of water. At the next stop, a portly fellow who must have been about 40 boarded the train and placed his rear end right on the seat that had a pool of water in it. I watched this happen, but I only caught the last split-second of him sitting; It was too late to warn him. So the train continued on its way and this guy didn’t move. He didn’t even make a funny face. Now, I KNOW he was sitting in a nice pool of water but the guy didn’t budge. I wonder if he even knew…he must have.
Well, the flight to B-town left at 11 and only one standby got on. Since I am still typing this you can figure out who did not get on the flight. Next one’s at 12:50pm and I think I’ll watch a Euro 2004 soccer match I’ve got until then.
So, where to begin? I’m living in Berkeley for the summer in the apartment Ara and I will be sharing in the coming year. For now however, my apartment-mate for the summer is Mario. Mario just got his M.S. in Structural Engineering from Berkeley. He needed a place to chill while he looked for jobs and that?s how he ended up here. He’s a nice guy and it’s working out really well. So well in fact that we sometimes end up in really long conversations bashing, in no particular order, President Bush, the education system in the U.S., and of course the wonderful “two-party democratic” political system in the U.S. Suffice to say that we’re both itching to see Fahrenheit 9/11. If you don’t know what that is, please go check out the trailer.
Meanwhile, Berkeley is a huge bore. Nobody is here, plus I don’t have my car. And please don’t ask me if I’m meeting my In N Out consumption quotas because I’ll be too ashamed to answer. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a million things that I’d like to do, they just can’t involve too many people since, there are none remember?
I’ve started reading a book to learn Objective C. I looked around at reviews on a lot of books on developing for Mac OS X and between those and my sensibilities, I decided that it would be better for me to learn the programming language and the API’s for the OS separately. Otherwise it might be too many new things to digest simultaneously and I don’t want to confuse things in my head. If you know me you know that I love to have a solid and thorough understanding of anything before I can be comfortable with it. So anyway, the book I decided to read is “Programming in Objective-C”.
I just had the funniest thing happen to me. Know when you’re about to say something and then forget what you were going to say? Of course you do. Well what’s the digital equivalent of that? I wanted to send an e-mail; by the time I opened the new e-mail window I had completely forgotten the person I wanted to send something to and what it was about. I sat there chuckling for a couple minutes at this new digital version of a classic brain-fart, then I remembered what I was going to write and I got crackin’. Lots more to come soon, stay tuned.
Okay I promise I’m gonna finally post by this weekend a huge post all about my new job and the ins and outs of full-time work in SF. Until then…
I think this is really the ideal T-shirt to wear in Berkeley. Anybody have ideas for a better one? I doubt it.
I wrote the following post on May 25th but was so busy in the few days I had in Burbank that I didn’t get a chance to even post it to this page…
So I just saw the movie Secondhand Lions and it was a pretty good one. If you haven’t seen it I really recommend it. There are very few movies that I can honestly say that I like and this is one of them. It didn’t hurt that the movie gave me something to do while I formatted my mom’s computer and reinstalled everything on there. Then again its my fault I had to even do that since I left her computer wide open without any firewall protection from the 7 gajillion worms and viruses for Windows that have been out in the past few months.
…
Its so hard to keep in touch with people. There are a lot of people I’d like to keep in touch with. To begin with, I have a whole gamut of relatives who I barely see anymore because I’m barely ever in town. These people have grown old and some of them had children and they’ve grown old. It makes me sad that I can’t see all the people more often.
There are also of course some friends that I don’t stay in touch with or talk to as often as I’d like. But we all know how it is, everybody is busy with school and work. People’s schedules don’t really match the other’s for downtime. In all the stress and hubub of the day-to-day stuff we sometimes forget a lot of people. I do it and I’m sure a lot of you do too. I don’t know how to avoid it but it makes me sad. I only hope that the others understand and that the few chances that we do have to spend time with one another or talk to each other, that we make it count. We should not be bitter over why this person has not contacted me for so long but instead be interested in what has kept them so busy. That’s all of course if you know the person to be a true person. For those fake people who will say hi and ask questions they’re not interested in hearing the answers to, just let them be along their fake uninterested ways.
To anybody who reads this, if you don’t already, stay in touch. And if I’ve done a bad job of it, let me know what a loser I’ve been and I’ll do the same. Friends and family, people you care about and who care about you, are the most important things in our lives. Well, in my life anyway.
You know, I think about posting every day but I just never get around to it. I do have a lot to say though. Some day soon…
