I’ve been trying to register a variation of my name for some time now, only to be frustrated year after year by people who aren’t named Zi, or Mei, or any permutation of those letters and initials. Today, I looked up zimei.org and zimei.net and found out they belong to one Dr. Janet Zand. The first thing I noticed wasn’t her super-shady looking skin products or her fake-ass sounding credentials, but the awful kanji. For someone who has supposedly spent years studying throughout Asia, she sure has a shitty command of Chinese. The “mei” she uses means beauty, except the word looks all mangled, like it was designed by some gwai-lo. It should look like how it’s written in the speech bubble.

Some of the Before & After photos are positively terrifying! I’m no doctor, but here’s this Zi’s secret to looking young: soft studio lighting, gobs of makeup, and an airbrush. And don’t forget the facelift!
So… my namesake belongs to some quacky looking plastic-surgeried up lady with very a poor understanding of Chinese who’s out to cash in on the growing Asian fad.

This is rather amusing! While checking my server logs, I discovered some random sites in Germany and Holland hotlinking to my bad wabbit. How did they find me?! This just goes to show that once you create something, your work can take on a life of its own.

If you have any rabbit spottings, lemme know.

A little while after I came back from Japan, my college buddy Jason Gonzales told me about the SEEK Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I wasn’t doing too much at the time, so he asked if I wanted to tutor. I was a teacher in Japan for 3 years, so I felt right at home.

Aside from the tutoring, I somehow got roped into being the unofficial tech support and webdesign guy in the department, helping the staff with Powerpoint presentations, pamphlets, workshops, and designing covers for manuals and other printouts.

Here’s a lousy shot of it with my camera phone.

click here for PDF version

The colors look horrible in the PDF too, in real life, it’s glossy and shiny (printed from a professional color laser at Kinko’s)! “Think Outside the Box” wasn’t my first choice for a tagline, but I had to work with what I was given.
The CUNY graphics department guy didn’t respond to repeated requests from us for the official logo, so I had to recreate it by hand in Illustrator.

Looking back through my Zip disks and CD-R’s lying around the house, I created a surprisingly large volume of work in the short time I was employed at Jupiter Media Metrix. I joined them around January and by about June, the company was going through their second round of layoffs. That’s when I got the axe.

These are some files I saved from there.

Misc artwork

Made back in 1999. This was for a wine review website a co-worker wanted to make, but never got off the ground.

another early drawing in Illustrator, when I was first learning how to use the program.

This was a complete build from scratch, to replace the all-Flash version they previously had. (I believe you should NEVER use Flash to build a complete website). The new version is PHP driven, using a few custom scripts I wrote, turning a 200+ page site into only about a dozen files to have to edit.

It would’ve been a giant headache to manage without dynamic programming and my gerry-rigged CMS (nicknamed “GhettoCMS” because I had to do everything from scratch with very limited resources). I definitely wouldn’t have been able to turn it around in the timeframe they needed (1 month)
The graphic design was done in-house. The Flash segments on the site were designed and built by me.

click image to go to MWW Group’s website

Windows has a very annoying habit of not releasing file permissions properly, making renaming, moving, or deleting the file impossible. This happens quite often when I want to delete Divx movies. I figured out a few tricks to get Windows to unlock the file, including:

• camouflaging the file along with some useless or dummy files. Select a group of files and move or delete them together. This works some of the time.
• rebooting. This sometimes solves the problem, but who wants to go through all that?
• using a nifty little utility called Unlocker! I wish I had discovered this years ago.
• There are times when even Unlocker won’t work. A reboot and combination of the above steps usually solves the problem.

This was one of my more unusual requests. A friend called one evening and asked me how to recover Yahoo! Messenger chat logs. His coworker was trying to find her chat history and sent over some log files. I guess she had been chatting with some guy that wasn’t totally being honest and she wanted some written evidence, but it wasn’t my concern. Here’s what I found, for you budding computer forensics nerds out there:

http://www.ikitek.com/products/Yahoo-Message-Archive-Decoder.html

She was so happy, she offered to pay me. But for 15 minutes of work, it really isn’t worth the hassle. Sadly, Google Answers isn’t taking any new applicants for information specialists.

I suppose you can also use this technique to snoop on your suspected cheating spouse’s IM conversations also…

“Please do not smoke in front of the entrance doors.” Who makes a sign like this? It’s like: “Please watch out for the automobile cars.”

I guess the building manager wanted to distinguish the entrance doors and all the other kind of door that the building would have, like an exit door, or an exhaust door… or to differentiate all the things around the entrance: the entrance door, the entrance wall, the entrance window, the entrance carpet, the entrance plaque.. it’s ok to smoke in front of every one of those.. just not the entrance door.

Every few days, I am reminded of exactly why it is I hate riding the subway. The trains are full of scumbags and sometimes I feel like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, waiting for a rain to come and wash away the scum, the dogs, the c*nts..

Today, I was annoyed by two loud trash-mouthed girls. They got on at Ninth Avenue in Brooklyn and dressed really trashily. One girl had on jeans that clearly were not meant to be on her. Her fat was bulging out over the side. She had a Playboy cellphone holder clipped to her pants. They looked to be college age or younger and demonstrated a complete lack of refinement and disregard for others that shocks even me. I am not known for being modest with my words, but these two girls took it to another level of vulgarity that would probably have Dennis Leary feeling embarrassed. The entire 30 minutes that they were on the train, they talked loudly about bullshit like getting drunk. Every other word seemed to be a variation of the word fuck or fucking. I tried to tune them out by meditating, but it didn’t help. They were like school in summertime — no class!

I kept thinking to myself this is the exact reason I wear headphones to work. I won’t forget them tomorrow.

Look on the side of the can next time you have a V8. You’ll see that one 8 ounce serving of the juice contains as much as 590 mg of sodium! That’s 25% to 50% of your RDI (depending on how you calculate it– the RDI is an iffy range between 920-2300 mg)!

For something that’s advertised as being good for you, it sure is packed with a lot of unnecessary sodium, like most processed foods. Salt acts as a preservative to extend shelf life, but too much of it can shorten yours.

Drink 2 V8’s and you’re done with your salt allowance for the day. If you’re on a salt restricted diet, you’ll have to be especially careful with what you each during the rest of the day.
I confess to loving the taste of V8 (cold), but I avoid it because of all the sodium. A few months ago, I tried out a low sodium (and really ghetto) alternative. I had some extra cans of tomato sauce lying around and decided to drink them instead. I live in an Italian neighborhood, so whenever I go shopping, tomato sauce is always on sale.

Here’s how to make your own healtheir low-sodium V8 alternative (or in this case, V2) at any time, with just a blender. Dump a can of tomato sauce into a blender, add some salt, a stalk or two of celery, and water to dilute to a desired consistency. I like my juice really thin and usually add 3 or 4 parts water for every part of sauce. Add some ice cubes and a few drops of McIllhenny’s tabasco sauce and you’ll have a refreshing drink that’s much healthier and cheaper than V8.

I don’t recommend blending up too many vegetables, because the juice will start to get thick. But, if you have a juicer, you can juice to your heart’s content. with your favorite vegetables.