Digital Parsimony

So I picked up my first real suit today, for my friend Alex’s wedding. Check me out yo!

Yeah, I know, it’s pretty slick. It took a few stores and some crazy sales guys to get this thing picked out. Not only that, but this encouraged me to go out and buy a set of much-needed dress shoes. Well, above is a picture of the whole-shot. If you’re really interested, it’s a Joseph Abboud modern, fitted suit, complete with no-pleat pants and Johnston & Murphy Faulkner Moc Toe shoes.

Alright, so the shirt and tie combo is rather questionable, but I walked into Express and had to buy this shirt. Every time I have walked into the store, I’ve seen this shirt just staring at me, and every time I couldn’t justify buying it. Thanks to Olga, Olya, and Rodion, I used my birthday gift-card to buy a belt and uber-expensive shirt.

Anyway, so that’s me in a monkey suit, I know Popa wanted to see it. What do you think?

People talk about wearing a sport coat, a suit jacket, or a blazer…who actually knows the difference? I figured I would do a simple google search and be amazed with all sorts of results, finding my answer almost immediately. To my surprise, most answers weren’t credible and long-winded, oftentimes in paragraphs upon paragraphs of contradicting information. So, here’s a simple guide to explain the difference.

Blazer
Traditionally, this is your typical blazer, characterized by patch pockets, metal shank buttons, typically double breasted, and not paired with matching pants. . Where the blazer is part of the dress of a school, college, sports club, or armed service veterans’ association, it is normal for a badge to be sewn to the breast pocket.

They often form part of the uniform dress of bodies such as airlines, schools, yacht or rowing clubs, and private security organizations. As sporting dress has become more adapted to the activity, the blazer has become more restricted to clubs’ social meetings.

Commonly, blazers are navy blue, but almost every color and combination of colors has been used, particularly by schools and sporting organizations. That’s enough on blazers though…

Suit jacket
Suit jackets are basically sports coats that have matching pants. Your suit jacket is basically any kind of coat that has a set of pants made of the same material, using the same pattern and look. Your typical suit jacket is either gray, blue, or black. Any of these colors can come with pinstripes. If it has pinstripes, most of the time it’s a suit jacket, because you just can’t wear pinstripes with khaki’s or jeans. It’s as simple as that.

Sport(s) coat
Finally, your sport coat. This could really have any design and is usually worn more casually. Sport coat’s don’t have a matching pair of pants and are made to go with khaki’s or jeans. This is actually quite simple. If pants don’t come with it, than it’s a sports coat. A lot of the time, when you have a jacket that uses a color that’s out of the ordinary, like a bright color, it’s going to be a sport coat.

So, now you know the difference between the three. Feel free to be a smart a** and tell people they’re wrong when using the incorrect term. Surprisingly, a lot of labeling and in-store tags are incorrect. You tell ‘em though, make sure to say Vlad told you so…

Spotted a cool picture of police having nothing better to do than write a man a ticket for just sitting down. But from the aspect of photography, this guy definitely got himself in the right place at the right time.

Randomly surfing the internet a few days ago, I stumbled upon a t-shirt that really describes my personality. If you haven’t figured out what it is, it’s simply a pug licking a mixer. I think I would get along well with whoever thought to frame a picture like this. I justified ordering it just the other day, and am utterly excited to receive it in the mail.

I’m rather excited I ran into this shirt really. Yeah, I’m sure you’re going to say it’s something I could have lived without, but what’s the fun in that? This makes me start on another rant, can you think of anything that you would hate to have missed up in your life? No, this doesn’t mean a pug t-shirt, but maybe someone you now adore or couldn’t live with out. A best friend, a mortal enemy, the job you have, that lottery ticket you found on the asphalt last Sunday, have any of these things changed your life?

I guess where I’m going with is that I’m excited about the way things have worked out. With college, friends, family, work, and love; life is treating me good my friends, so much that I almost feel guilty for having it all to myself.

A pug licking a mixer is really the best way I can summarize my life in its current state.

There’s really nothing like an action-packed weekend, you know? Something to get excited about throughout the whole week. I sit here typing on my tainted keyboard (the letters of home row are starting to fade), looking into my “rear-view-mirror” attached to my big Apple Cinema display, hoping for something exciting to cross behind me. Yeah, a typical Tuesday. Too much work to think about, and not enough time to do it, and I don’t have the motivation to get started. Plus, I’ve got a blog to write!

The cafe is pumping the fumes of freshly grilled pink salmon into our enclosed cube-farm, now I’m almost convinced they’re doing it on purpose. It smells like heaven and my stomache is sure to let me know, that if in the next 10 minutes I don’t feed it, it’ll send up a rupturing gargle, further intensifying the all-so-human instinct to consume.

Anyway, back to the point, this weekend was an absolute blast. Here’s a quick review:

Friday:
1. Brandon turns quarter-century (25).
2. Get to restaurant, drink beer.
3. Popa passes out after 1/2 a beer and a proper bit of fish & chips.
4. Drink more beer.
5. Pay bill, finish Popa’s beer.
6. Wake up Popa, drive to liquor store.
7. Look for pipe, can’t find pipe, buy Vodka, chips, salsa, zig-zags.
8. Load car, forgot beer, go back, buy more beer.
9. Get to house, turn on Rockstar and crank the volume.
10. Open fresh beer.
11. Popa’s asleep again, there’s drool…must have been a rough day.
12. Play Rockstar with friends ’till 3:00AM.
13. Popa wakes up, ready to party.
14. Party leaves, Vitaliy drives us home.
15. Cuddle up to Popa, back to sleep.

Saturday:
1. Wake up, head hurts, drink water.
2. Brush teeth, kiss up on Popa.
3. Eat fresh aladiki (mini-pancakes).
4. Recover from Friday.
5. Get dressed for concert.
6. Pick up friends, wearing the same exact thing as me.
7. Look like tools.
8. Buy panties (don’t ask).
9. Eat Thai, face is now a running mess.
10. Get to concert & park (phew…)
11. Watch Coheed and Cambria destroy what would have been a good song.
12. Linkin Park comes on.
13. Enjoy the best show ever! They came back on stage twice after leaving.
14. Ahem…leave concert, go to bar, drink beer.
15. Get home, cuddle up to Popa, sleep.

Sunday consisted of more fun, dinner with friends and family, watching Popa school girlies in hockey, and playing Call of Duty 4 all night.

Ahhh…great weekend.

Il Posto is one of those places you visit once or twice and then try to keep in memory. A meal on Valentine’s day will cost you $70 plus tax and tip. Let me tell you, the chef definitely knows a thing or two about “the munchies”. Why is it that the taste of food could be so different at a place like Il Posto in comparison to something like Olive Garden? They’re both Italian and use the same ingredients in their food. I don’t know the answer really, because if I did I would own a restaurant myself. The difference in a place like Olive Garden and Il Posto is directly correlated with your taste buds.

Here are some fun facts about taste:
- We have almost 10,000 taste buds inside our mouths; even on the roofs of our mouths.
- Insects have the most highly developed sense of taste. They have taste organs on their feet, antennae, and mouthparts.
- Fish can taste with their fins and tail as well as their mouth.
- In general, girls have more tastebuds than boys.
- Taste is the weakest of the five senses.

I also found out that as a child, you have taste buds on your lips, roof of your mouth, and sides of your mouth, making your whole face essentially a flavor-catcher. I also tried to contemplate having taste buds in my hands and feet, and realizing that it would be a horrible way of living. This keyboard I’m typing on surely has to taste like sh*t, and I would have to put up with it for 8 hours a day!

Lastly, I wanted to bring up my jealousy towards these pricks they call supertasters. A supertaster is a person who experiences taste with far greater intensity than average. Women are more likely to be supertasters, as are Asians and Africans. Among individuals of European descent, it is estimated that about 25% of the population are supertasters. The cause of this heightened response is currently unknown, although it is thought to be, at least in part, due to an increased number of fungiform papillae. Here is a demonstration of the fungiform papillae on the tongues of different tasters:

How do you recognize one of these lucky freaks?
Documented examples for either lessened preference or consumption include:

* alcoholic beverages
* Brassica oleracea cultivars
o Brussels sprouts
o cabbage
o kale
* coffee
* grapefruit juice
* green tea
* spinach
* soy products

Other foods may also show altered patterns of preference and consumption, but only indirect evidence exists:

* chili peppers – capsaicin burn is more intense in supertasters
* tonic water – quinine is more bitter to supertasters
* olives – for a given concentration, salt is more intense in supertasters

Summary: I’m jealous, hungry, happy, grumpy, and love good food. Rinse and repeat.

Another rendition, but this time the little fella’ hires a creepy clown. This is what advertising is all about!

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Something about a baby taunting you after purchasing stock and throwing up like a genuine baby makes me laugh every time.

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This would be the first entry of hopefully many, but like we all know a lot of the times trends like starting blogs get quickly abandoned. It’s Wednesday and I’m procrastinating the work I should be doing.

Things I should be doing:
- Replying to work emails
- Designing a layout for my BIT516 class
- Writing a security policy for work
- Reading slides for InfoSec class
- Going to the clinic to pick up test results
- Showering
- …the list can really go on forever, but here we face a bigger issue, prioritizing and utilization of time. Imagine, if we used every breathing moment to do things we should be doing, we would turn into an Indian call center. As they await their next sorry soul to call-in and try and decipher their elvish tongues as they list through keyword-based searches in an attempt to find a pre-written script to tell you what’s wrong with your life. The point I’m trying to make is creativity, it doesn’t exist much of anywhere but here any more. Kids these days have the fashion sense of Gucci and Ralph Lauren and can draw the Mona Lisa blindfolded. Places we export labor to demonstrate their people to be no more than humanized robots, and if we had the biological understanding to develop technology that produced robots with the ability to conduct the same searches those fools do, we would have done it already and left several third-world countries third-world. With that being said, I’m sure we would also understand their robot accents a bit better to.

Well, first post, cheers!