So my wife and I (yes, my wife.  Try to keep up.) recently purchased a Hyundai from a local dealership.  We’re quite enamored with  the car, a 2010 Tucson I’ve nicknamed “Tusker” because it totally looks like Halo’s Warthog. The service has been pretty standard - our salesman was likeable and had about four billion rip-off “add-ons” he wanted to sell us in addition to the car.  We can’t hold company policy against him, so we bought the car.

However, when we were done the sale, he showed us the Hyundai customer satisfaction survey we’re going to get in the mail soon.  We had to rate him in a number of categories from 1 to 10, and he told us that Hyundai’s policy was assign a fail grade to anything but a 10.  Each field might as well be “did you love your associate, or should we fire him?”

Now there are two possibilities here.  One is that our salesman was as unscrupulous as a car salesman’s reputation would lead one to believe, and he’s lying to get perfect scores.  Or even that his dealership encourages the lie to look better on paper.  It’s possible.

But the other possibility is that Hyundai is really shooting itself in the foot.  What’s the point in a survey that’s so clearly skewed?  You don’t get any actual feedback - you just encourage employees to circumvent the system.  It’s one thing to strive for perfection, but it’s another thing to ignore the road to getting there.  Part of that road is honest feedback.

It’s been a while, and my loyal readers are clamoring for news of what I’ve been up to.  Yes, both of them.

Generally, life has been keeping me busy.  I’m working on writing, directing, and producing a series of animated tech videos for Reebok’s in-store displays, as well as teaching two classes at YCCC.  On top of that, I’m trying to get a portfolio ready to apply to go for my MFA, and someday, I’ll finish that screenplay.  And yes, there’s continued volunteering at my church, and spending the little time I have left with my lovely lady.

I thought getting laid off meant that you had more free time.  Let me just say now that is a dirty, dirty lie.

Christian Brown Design’s site went live a little while ago.  I put quite a few hours into this high-resolution site for a the furniture design studio in Vermont.  As the Flash designer/developer for the project, I wish I could say that I’m responsible for how great the site looks, but I must say - his stuff makes me look good.

Of special note are the furniture and building galleries, which I coded as entirely XML driven galleries.

For a while now, I’ve been volunteering to head a team of talented guys in re-making our church’s web site.  Today, the site went live.  You can check it out here.

Thanks to everyone on our efficient, good-hearted, and entirely-Dorito fueled team.

Recently, I received a letter from Dell giving me the option to renew the warranty on my Dell XPS Desktop System. “We know that your Dell XPS System is valuable to you,” the letter reminded me. Of course, in my eyes is akin to reminding someone of how much they like the tie you gave them for Christmas last year: if they really like the tie, they don’t need a friendly note reinforcing that they like it. Regardless, my Dell XPS is valuable to me. Just not for the reasons that Dell suspects.

My XPS isn’t valuable for nostalgic reasons. After all, it took me 3 months of irate calls to India to get the free upgrade to Vista that came with the system. And after I installed said upgrade, I have months of USB issues and other computer demons that are sure to haunt me for a long time.

And it’s not for the software it can run. I upgraded to the XPS to be compatible with Vista’s Direct X 10 and the impending revolution in graphics it would bring. However, so far as I am aware Direct X 9 has served me well all the while; I’m not aware of a single game that won’t run with Direct X 9. The upgrade was wholly unnecessary. (And it’s a good thing, as the graphics card in my Vista-compatible XPS turned out not to be Direct X 10 compatible.)

And it’s certainly doesn’t have monetary value, as I just sold that piece of crap for under $200. Fun economic fact: PCs are the only thing that depreciate faster than Bear Stearns stock.

No, what I really value about my Dell XPS is that it finally convinced me to switch to a Mac. Me - the PC loving, power-gaming, never-surrender Mac hater that I was turned and bought an iMac.

…And I love it.

Yes, my XPS inadvertently drove me to a computer that actually works, is intelligently built, and comes with great customer service. For that, I’m eternally grateful. Not grateful enough to pay three hundred bucks to re-Warranty a machine that never worked properly in the first place thanks to it’s debilitating stupid OS, mind you. No, not that grateful. Just grateful enough to blog about how much you suck.

You suck, Dell. You and Vista suck so much.

Most days, I use an old electric razor to shave. It’s not the greatest of razors - my trusty Nerelco tends to painfully tug my facial hair as soon as it gets beyond the length of “stubble.” That may not be so bad if it didn’t take approximately forty-seven passes over the same 3 inches to successfully get all of the whiskers.

Due to the problems with my razor, I don’t shave every day. One of the few advantages of being more blond and pale than an albino Norwegian is that people can seldom notice my facial hair from a distance.

One of the problems with this habit was made all the more apparent the other day when I found myself unshaven at work before a big date. Unfortunately, the object of a date is usually to not stay at a distance from the lady, so my rampant stubble was going to be an issue. Unable to get home before I was due to meet Becky, I rushed out, purchased a single razor and a can of shaving cream, and attacked my nearly-invisible beard in the company washroom.

I must admit, I thoroughly enjoyed that shave. One pass from a normal blade cuts a lot more than several from an electric razor, and so I was quickly admiring myself in the mirror like one of those smug dudes from the Gillette commercials. “Oh yeah,” I thought. “That’s smooth.”

And I wondered: why don’t I shave like this all the time?

As if on cue, my face started spurting blood like a bad horror movie. Apparently, I have a second aorta in my chin, because it would not stop bleeding for two hours. Even after I though the gore had subsided, I ended up bleeding on my date when I gave her a hug. (Sorry Becky!)

Oh. Yeah. That’s why.

“Zack is reading a book!”

My sister Erin announced this with the same tone of deep betrayal that one would use to say I was selling valuable information to Russia, or had suddenly moved to China, or had rooted for the Yankees. In fact all I had done was bring Bill Bryson’s excellent In A Sunburned Country on our boat ride. My father was driving my immediate family, as well as my sister’s in-laws, around the coast of Maine from our base at Popham Beach, our annual vacation spot. (It’s no small coincidence that my sister’s in-laws were there; it was the close proximity of their cottage to our rental many years ago that introduced our families and set in motion the long string of events that would eventually lead to Jake and Erin’s wedding.)

Erin was disgruntled that I had opted for bringing a book rather than “enjoying” the boat ride. The fact of the matter is that I enjoy a boat ride in the same way that I enjoy a bus ride: by bringing a good read and occasionally smiling at the passing scenery. I don’t want to seem like I don’t appreciate the fact that I get to be on the water; I’m very blessed to spend some time on the quiet coast of Maine relaxing with my family each year. I just don’t find any one form of transit much more exciting than any other.

And lest I sound anti-social, let me regale you with a choice quip from our outing: At one point, my father pointed to the deep blue fog on the horizon, indicating a smudge of slightly darker blue in its midst. “See that blue area there?” he asked. “There?”

“There?” confirmed Mark, my sister’s father in law.

“Yes. That’s Monhegan.”

“Interesting,” said Mark.

I beg to differ.

This was before we sighted a whale, stopped the boat for ten minutes in case it surfaced again, and then realized that it was, in fact, a seabird.

Before you write us off as complete idiots, please note that it was a Gannet, a large diving bird, and we mistook the splash of a dive for a whale plume. Nonetheless, you get my point: much of the things one might miss on a boat ride are tiny specks on the horizon or odd splashes, or the ensuing discussion that a speck or splash might spark. That’s assuming there is anything to miss: much of boat riding is spent in silence as everyone on-board squints into the sun and surf and hangs on as the boat jumps over wave after wave. When something of interest does arrive, such as the pod of dolphins that we encountered, it’s easy to close the book, watch the spectacle and remark upon it, and then resume reading.

Yes, bringing a book was a great idea. It was hard to keep the pages open in the wind, certainly, and I wouldn’t bring a book if I was particularly concerned for its safety or dryness (the copy of Sunburned Country I brought cost fifty cents at a flea market and, better still, belongs to Erin.) But despite these slight quibbles, it turned an activity that I normally find quite dull into a remarkably enjoyable experience. From now on, I think I’ll be bringing books on all of my boat rides. Perhaps something more nautical. Like a guide to distinguishing seabirds from whales.

When you fall down, some adage probably says, there is nothing to do but get back up again. Should you drop the ball, it’s time to pull up one’s bootstraps, turn one’s chin up, buck up, get some moxie, put on a happy face, do the locomotion, teach you the electric slide, and a host of other inane idioms to the effect of: it is probably best to move on after a disappointing failure.

Last week, I dropped the ball in such spectacular fashion that I half expected to see Dick Clark standing nearby, propped up on Carson Daly and happily garbling a countdown. It started innocently enough; instead of my normal power bar or vegan chilli for lunch, I decided to splurge a little and have a whoopie pie.

Whoopie pies, for those of you who are not from New England or Pennsylvania, are a wonder of physics. Developed by Amish mad scientists in the early 1800’s in a bid to exterminate the US population by way of diabetic shock, the whoopie pie is a baked good so sweet that it defies the laws of nature. Recent experiments have confirmed that every ounce of whoopie pie filling contains two pounds of sugar. In 1982, the surgeon general was reportedly set to draft a policy requiring that whoopie pies come with warning labels, but he tragically passed away after developing kidney failure from prolonged proximity to the whoopie pies he was studying. In short, whoopie pies are disgustingly sweet confectionery monstrosities that are about as healthy as picnics in Chernobyl.

I am horribly addicted to them.

One little whoopie pie, I assured myself, isn’t a big deal. My insulin levels would probably recover within an hour or so, I said. And to my credit, I was probably right - if I had limited myself to the single whoopie pie, I likely would have experienced no negative effects beyond the sugar shock on Friday afternoon.

But you never have just one snort of cocaine, or just one shot of heroin, or just one hour of World of Warcraft. No, you don’t sample your follies; you fall into them. Hard. The next morning, I breakfasted on a whoopie pie. And then, it being Saturday, I recalled that I had to attend the wedding of my friends Nick and Sara with my pal Kristin. And so I drove to Maine, where I stopped and had lunch. It took all of my willpower not to make this lunch a whoopie pie.

Nick and Sara have been together since before I’ve lived in New Hampshire. Since just after I started college, actually. Their ceremony (which literally lasted less than two minutes) was up front in admitting that this wedding wasn’t joining two people; it was acknowledging that two people had already been joined for quite some time. So from the start, you knew this wasn’t going to be a traditional affair.

There was swimming instead of dancing, casual dress rather than formal, alternative rock rather than classical music; in every way that they could, Nick and Sara took the customary wedding tradition and reconstituted it into something that suited their personal tastes. And for the most part, it was wonderful. One notable exception, however, was their take on wedding cake.

They had whoopie pies instead.

Standard chocolate whoopie pies. Bright pink strawberry whoopie pies. The decadent double-chocolate whoopie. The underwhelming banana whoopie. Mint. Chocolate chip. Vanilla. A five-pounder, containing more sucrose than a Dominican plantation, for the ceremonial cake cutting. And most deadly of all, the kryptonite of my soul, the peanut-butter whoopie pie - two pads of moist chocolate cake surrounding a core of whipped peanut butter frosting.

I don’t even remember half the night.

When the haze had cleared and I was driving home, I recall swearing, swearing, that I was done with whoopies. Done. This had to stop. It had already stopped. I was clean from here on. Until the next morning, when I had one for breakfast. Things looked grim, and I didn’t know what to do. Then I stepped on the scale.

There is something inherently jarring about a sudden spike in weight. My scale might as well have reached out and slapped me across the face. It pulled up my bootstraps, turned my chin up, bucked me up, gave me some moxie, taught me the electric slide, and a whole host of other idioms just by showing me three digits that were not, and could never be, to my liking. I haven’t had a whoopie since. I think it will be a long time before I do again.

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are, unfortunately, another matter…

As technology continues to advance along the crazy logarithmic curve of history, it’s beginning to act more and more human.  For example, Wii Fit gave me a hard time about my recent workout schedule in front of a group of friends last night, digital Benedict Arnold that it is.  Much more disturbing is the fact that Facebook is starting to suspect that I may be gay.

Let’s just clarify for my own edification: I’m not.  I can be horribly shy around women, and  I can count my relationships on one hand.  But all of those relationships, and the countless more that I would have liked to be in, were with women.

Facebook, like many online social applications, collects data about me and uses it to filter ads that will address my specific demographic.  It knows that I’m Protestant, that I live in NH, and that I’m 28.  It also knows that I’m single, and that I like women, and so it’s been flinging ads for ‘Sexy Singles’ and ‘Lonely 30-somethings.’   These ads usually feature buxom women clad in tight t-shirts and lounging around pouting, because we all know that buxom women with loose morals and pouty lips are rejected by society and often have to turn to internet dating.  Beyond their clearly fraudulent nature, these ads are mildly annoying.  I ignore them.

It appears, however, that Facebook has noticed my disinterest and, in a colossal but eerily human miscalculation, has decided to see if I’m secretly hoping for some male companionship instead.  This morning, after showing me three or four mopy bimbos in bikinis, Facebook slipped in an ad for a man-to-man dating site, fearturing a muscular guy pouting on a bed (naturally.)

When I got over my indignation and navigated away from the page with the ad, Facebook immediately returned to its pattern of lascivious young women lounging petulantly.  I could almost see the server holding up its hands in appeasement, saying “Sorry! Sorry. Just checking, man. Just checking. You never know.”

Well now you do know, Facebook, and I’d really rather not see any more ads for that sort of thing.  Truth be told, I’d rather not see any ads for dating sites.  If you truly want my precious click-throughs, advertise Star Wars figures or other nerdy toys.  They’re far more interesting to me than the imaginary pouting women searching for online dates.  Sad, but true.

Take note, Hollywood movie producers. Yesterday, in an action packed journey that would shock and amaze summer moviegoers, we may have saved a life. And the fact that it was a bird’s life only makes it slightly less riveting. I’m willing to sell the rights for a modest sum. Here’s the pitch:

OPENING SCENE: ERIN, JACOB, and ZACK (played by George Clooney) are driving down Route 108 in Dover. In the middle of the road sits a small gray bird, mouth agape, breathing heavily as it watches traffic fly by. Heroically concerned, and also prompted by the hysterical wailing of Erin in the back seat, Jacob stops the car. Erin rushes out and grabs the bird. Biceps bulging and sweat dripping from his manly frame, Zack (played by Brad Pitt) assists her with a towel. There’s also probably an explosion somewhere. There could be.

Cut to the three inhabitants in the car. Jacob, still foolishly thinking that the trio might make it to the beach that day, tries to call the SPCA, who informs him that they do not take injured birds unless the cats are especially hungry. Erin, who has the bird in her lap, argues with Zack (played by Matt Damon) about the best way to hold the bird. Zack contends that the bird should be in a box, while Erin is holding him in her lap. Erin doesn’t want to disturb the bird by moving it to a box because his mouth is open, clearly indicating that he is ready to strike at her exposed wrist. (Doubtlessly, the bird knows that slashing her wrists will cause her to bleed to death in the back seat.)

However, there’s some debate over why the bird’s mouth is mysteriously open. Zack (played by Johnny Depp) contends that it’s not a warning sign that the bird will attack at all, but instead a reflex because this is clearly a hungry baby mockingbird. Perhaps a cowbird. Jake agrees for the most part, but maintains that it’s actually a hungry baby thrush. Erin doesn’t particularly care what species it is, so long as it leaves her wrists intact.

Zack (played by Will Smith) uses his lightning reflexes calls the number that the SPCA gave him, and gets the York Center For Wildlife, a rehabilitation center for birds, mammals, and turtles (this is true) that agrees to take the bird. At the moment he gets off the phone, the deadly cow thrush launches itself from Erin’s lap to the front seat, landing first on Zack, and then on the dashboard of Jacob’s BMW, where it unleashes the full fury of its bowels. When the beast is recaptured by a daring Jacob, who grabs the bird with one hand and steers the car (perhaps through an explosion) with the other, Erin confines it to a canvas bag. Zack (played by James Dean) suavely sponges off the dashboard with his beach towel.

After making the long and perilous trek to York, which includes crossing at least two bridges, one wrong turn, and stopping for gas and snacks once, the heroes arrive at the York Center for Wildlife, which is not in York at all, but Cape Neddick (think coastal Maine town meets Deliverance). The heroes deliver the bird to the center, which is staffed entirely by attractive women (actually, this is true as well).

The center is an odd place set up in a modular house - imagine a lovely home with birds flying around the living room and a tray of dead mice labeled “for the raptors” by the kitchen sink. There, the three bird-rescuers take a tour of the facility (only offered on Saturdays), and meet several raptors, including the peregrine falcon Frejya, and Leo, an owl who looks like a character from a Dr. Seuss book. They do not meet Galileo, a great horned owl who is kept locked away like Hannibal Lecter because of his “aggression.” Through the slats of the horned owl enclosure, we can see him peeking at our heroes hungrily and clacking his beak. This is very much like Jurassic Park, which, coincidentally, made ridiculous amounts of money in theaters. I’m just putting that out there.

FINAL SCENE: Our heroes make a small donation the the center, which is run entirely on donations and grants. Then, they learn that their bird was neither a baby cowbird nor a baby thrush, but an adult catbird that had most likely been hit by a car, and his mouth was agape not in hunger or threat, but because he had just been hit by a car. Rather than aggressive, he was in a slack-jawed stupor. This is a shocking twist; the same kind of shocking twist that made “The 6th Sense” such a box-office smash. After their shocking and potentially lucrative surprise, our heroes are ready to head home. Zack (played by George Clooney again) climbs into the soiled BMW before it pulls out of the driveway, much to the disappointment of the attractive young staffers of the Center for Wildlife.

Our avian patient is under surveilance, and will hopefully be out and about soon. But even if he doesn’t make it, I think that doesn’t change the important fact that this epic tale could make me and a brilliant and enterprising Hollywood producer rich. Call me. We’ll do lunch.