LIVES IN MOTION.  That’s the tagline for Martin + Osa, American Eagle Outfitter’s higher-end clothing line.  I only just found out about it this past weekend when I was shopping at Valley Fair out in BFE.  In fact, I didn’t know it was related to American Eagle Outfitters which means they’ve done a good job distinguishing the line from their other teen clothing lines.  And I also just found out that they are closing the whole line by the end of Q2 2010 (press release).

I’ve gotten kind of bored with mall shopping lately.  It’s always the same stores, J.Crew, Banana Republic, Zara, H&M, Club Monaco, etc.  I’m not baller enough to shop at the stores I want to like Barney’s or Bloomingdales and I don’t always have the patience to go boutique shopping.  I like Anthropologie but it’s a struggle to drop so much money for clothes when they’ll be on sale in a month or when the wait for a dressing room is unreasonable.  Why does it always seem like I like the off sale clothes so much more?  And Anthro has some catalog geniuses working for them because I swear their clothes look ten times better in the catalog than in real life.  Urban Outfitters has been giving me headaches more than it has been giving me clothes.  So I’m walking around, checking out the sales at the usual stores at Valley Fair and I walk past Martin + Osa.  I’ve never heard of the brand which usually means one of two things: 1] it’s an Asian-owned independent store who has been inspired by Forever 21 success and wants to sell cheap quality clothes made in China to rich unsuspecting girls in America (Aritzia I’m looking at you!  And almost all of the stores on Melrose in Los Angeles!) OR 2] it’s a super high end store that I can’t afford.

The front of the store doesn’t allow you to see much into the store (which I think is part of the reason why it didn’t take off) but it’s beautiful.  They use a lot of wood paneling throughout the store (which if you follow me on Google Reader, you know I’m a complete sucker for) and their dressing rooms (pictured above) have got to be one of my all time favorites.  I’d decorate my house like that if I could.  I love that they are floor to high ceiling and again they use the wood, subtle metal, and a contrasting bright blue light.  They also had this beautiful cylinder red-orange lantern in each dressing room.  I didn’t have my camera with me and I really regret not taking at least a iPhone photo of it.

Anyway, the clothes were all on sale with additional 30% off sale items  (makes sense now given the scheduled shut down) and I liked a lot of it.  Some of it was boring and plain, but they had nice sweaters and their tissue tee v-neck fit really well.  I guess those are boring too.  But I dress sort of boring so it fits me well I guess.  It’s really too bad they are shutting down.  I wish I had found out about them earlier.

On another note, I’ve been buying shoes off of Zappos and it’s really great.  Their no hassle free shipping and free return shipping makes online shopping a lot easier.  I don’t know why I always sound like a infomercial for products/things I like.

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On an unrelated note, right when I moved here and started taking public transportation, I promised myself I wouldn’t be a snobby commuter.  I’ve done okay in not converting.  Although I do walk up escalators on the left side instead of standing on the right even though I’m not in a hurry, I don’t get fussy when tourists or the eldery unknowingly stand on the left and clog things up.  Man when that happens, people go bananas looking at who’s the hold up.  People crane their whole bodies out to the side of the person in front of them to try to see the person that’s standing, and the person behind them will also crane out the other way and soon it looks like a scene out of the Sound of Music where the Von Trapp family is performing a family number (I don’t think that actually happened).  I also try not to get impatient when people feed a BART ticket into the machine that doesn’t have enough fare.  But one thing I cannot stand, is when people ignore the queues to get onto the BART.  On the weekend it’s anything goes but during the weekday, there are very obvious queues waiting to board the BART.  It’s really obvious.  I mean, it’s a long queue of 7-8 people per train door, standing single file (sometimes in the evenings it’s two lines per train door because it’s really crowded at Montgomery or Powell), no one’s even talking to each other, it’s all individuals, reading a newspaper, their phone, etc.  And a train will pull up and people will just cut the line (that’s been standing there for at least 5 minutes, sometimes more!) and jam into the train.  Did they really not see the line?  Did they think we were lining up just for fun?  Sigh, okay I’m really not that annoyed, but I think because I see it everyday, it builds up little by little and I just needed to vent about it.

Alright I’m beat.  Not even going to proof this one.

Better luck tomorrow.

I did want to say that all of my coworkers were complaining today about the warmer (70s) weather and humidity. I was wearing a sweater. I haven’t completely adjusted yet.

I just have to make a heartbreaking disclaimer that almost 4 GB of photos are missing.  Well, I usually delete half of what I take (maybe more) so it’s not like I really lost a full 4 GB but what happened was that I thought I had downloaded the photos to my computer and I went ahead and formatted all of my memory cards before our quick trip out to Rocky Mountain National Park.  (I love run-on sentences; they feel so much more conversational.)  It still makes me a little sick to my stomach to think about it.  Ugh.  And it’s worse seeing all of these mediocre photos of Rocky Mountain National Park knowing that I could have breathtaking photos of Machu Picchu instead.  I did try photo recovery software and even talked to a few specialists (thanks Carlos for helping me research) but most people said the chances of recovering photos after you format and then write over until the card is full again is slim to zilch and even if you could, “a recovery like that would cost several hundred dollars.”

So, I took a deep breath and decided to stop being such a baby with my pathetic mini-tragedies that don’t even register a blip on the world radar of real life tragedies.  I’m actually embarrassed to admit that I was upset as I was.  My eyes were uncontrollably tearing up.  It was really weird.  I never thought I had any possessions that I would cry over but now I know I do.  My photos.  (I really need to get a Time Capsule!)

So anyway, the husband gently (I use this term loosely) reminded me that we were lucky to have even gone and we were lucky that we were both there to take in the sights with our own eyes and that alone should be rewarding enough.  So I’m moving on.  All this to say, Machu Picchu is even prettier and more outrageously breathtaking than my photos convey.  Okay sorry, I’ll stop rambling like Governor Sanford.  (Wait one more thing, can I just say that I’m pretty sure that adultery is a bigger threat to the sanctity of marriage and the family unit than gay marriage will ever be?  Get it together, folks.  Okay I’ll stop.)

Here we go:

Bus ride from airport to our hotel in Cusco

Courtyard at El Balcon Inn

The streets of Cusco

Cusco, a city full of interesting doors

Fantastic Five

Convenience Store, buying water and bonbons

24 Hour Free Coca Tea at our Hotel

Minimarket

Macaws (at the zoo for animals rescued from the black market)

Condor with its crazy wingspan (there were pumas too! but we weren’t allowed in their cage, for obvious reasons)

Sandra makes a new avian friend

Giant corn served with quark

Tony is forced to try on a hat made from baby alpaca (llama) wool

Peruvian kolaches (with a side of roasted cuy aka guinea pig)

Happy shoppers at the famous Sunday Pisac Market

Meat market

A little patch of wheat

Spotlight on the sacred valley

Terrace farming

Tight squeeze

On the Pisac Ruins (who took this one for us? viaTheAvocadoProject)

Patchwork Quilt

Foreshadowing

Jin being Jin

Overdone but still fun

Sacsayhuamán

Nice view of the city

Photo taken by the Japanese tourists who kept speaking Spanish to us (via The AvocadoProject)

Wide angle doing what it does best

Jin and the Giant Peach

Tony, human GPS, helping us navigate San Blas

Windows

Architecture

Granja Heidi, a must visit restaurant if you’re ever in Cusco (get the Nelson Mandela Cake!)

The Church of La Compañia

By the Urubama River, before our whitewater rafting trip

Wetsuits

Bankside (photo taken by TheAvocadoProject)

The start of the Inca Trail! (via TheAvocadoProject)

Jin and Tony

Pretty easy beginning to the hike

We encountered a lot of people & animals along the trail

Beautiful scenery to hike in

Snowcapped mountains in the background

Our sleeping arrangements

Our whole group (via TheAvocadoProject)

Warmiwanusca a.k.a. Dead Woman’s Pass a.k.a. The worst part of the entire Inca Trail a.k.a. One of the greatest physical accomplishments of my life (4,200 meters above sea level, a ridiculous gain of 900 meters in about 2-3 hours)

Here we are, happy that we made it to the top!

Reflections in the mountains

Lots of steps

And more steps

Here’s our group overlooking Machu Picchu!  Yes, my hair is slicked back with sweat.  (via TheAvocadoProject)

Another group shot in front of Machu Picchu (via TheAvocadoProject)

Machu Picchu!

Quiet morning at Machu Picchu

Condor Temple (as demonstrated by Jin)

The Incas modeled their architecture after the natural landscape

The Temple of Three Windows

Beautiful

Amphitheater

Running out of adjectives

Stairway to nowhere

Team Machu Picchu

Since I didn’t get any classic photos of Machu Picchu, this is probably my favorite photo from the trip

My first time in a VIP lounge! Bogota, Colombia

I am one of your most loyal users.  I use the word “google” in its lower-case verb form on a daily basis, I use Gmail exclusively for all of my email needs, I use Google Calendar to coordinate my family’s schedule and even my friends’ schedules, I use Google Documents to collaborate on trip planning as well as other brainstorming needs, I use Google Groups to organize the student organizations that I am in, I use Google Images almost as frequently as I use the web, I use Google Maps to find my way around the city and on vacation, I use YouTube to entertain myself, and I even used Blogger once upon a time before I decided to buy my own hosting space.

This past year, I have adopted the use of Google Reader into my online regimen and it has served me fairly well.  I have been able to share things with friends that would have normally just fallen to the back of my mind never to be revisited again.  It has also pushed me to keep up to date on interesting news and hobbies that I have and I feel it makes me efficient with my time on the web.  It has been such a pleasant experience that I have convinced many of my friends to start using Google Reader (even the husband has joined, and I’m sure you know how difficult that is since I’m sure you are familiar with his online click patterns!) and I sing the praises of Google everywhere I go.  I think of it kind of as a volunteer gig.  In fact, I’m considering listing “Freelance/Volunteer Google PR Rep” right underneath speaking at Career Day at the Houston Hispanic Forum.

There are two things I don’t use of yours and for good reasons.  I don’t use Picasa to share pictures because Flickr is light years ahead of Picasa as far as interface and community go and you really messed up big time when you let Yahoo! buy Flickr.  Because of that mistake, I have to maintain a Yahoo! account that I only use for the purposes of Flickr.  The other thing I don’t use of yours is the G1 because the G1 is bulky, ugly and doesn’t have a slick UI like the iPhone.

All this to say, I am a fan.  I support what you do.  So please take what I have to say in context.

There are a lot of things you need to fix:

• You didn’t buy Flickr and now it belongs to Yahoo (yes, this is worth mentioning again)
• Your load times are starting to suck.  When I first joined Gmail, I could click on a link to Gmail and my inbox would appear within seconds.  Now when I click on a link to Gmail, I see this:

Then after a few seconds, I see my inbox.  I don’t know why I put up with this, but I do.  Many times a day.

• There are too many “Gmail is having problems, please check later” incidents.  Thankfully you released an offline option to Gmail and some other Google Services but downtime for email is really just unacceptable.
• Google Labs.  While I do appreciate many of the functions offered through Google Labs, why not offer it through the settings so that you don’t have to manually turn on labs and then enable the services?  And why do you have people wasting their time to develop functions such as “Canned Responses”, “Old Snakey” or “Mail Goggles”?  I mean, really?  Is this your best use of resources?
• When are you taking Gmail out of Beta version?
• Why didn’t you think it was a good idea to buy Flickr?
• Why have you made it so unintuitive to add friends on Google Reader?  Here’s the official answer on Google Help:

“Reader’s friend list comes from the list of people you can chat with on Google Talk or Gmail chat. To invite friends to see your Reader shared items, simply invite them to chat. To remove them, delete them from your Gmail contacts, or from your Talk list. Some friends might have been added to your chat list automatically if you’ve emailed back and forth with them; if you don’t want any more contacts added this way, you can change this setting.“

Why didn’t you just create a quick and easy way to add a friend to your reader by putting their email address in a field?  Surely you could have gotten Dave C. to work on that instead of having him work on Old Snakey!

• You finally enabled comments on Google Reader!  Thank you.  Why did you forget to add a new comment count?  You have counts for newly shared feeds, why not for new comments?  How will we know when there are new comments?
• When we see comments on someone’s shared feed, why not give us the option to add them as a friend?  Are you still using the pre-Facebook definition of the word “friend” and the pre-Twitter definition of the word “contact”?
• How come when I see someone’s public page of shared feeds, I don’t have the ability to add them as a Google Reader contact?
• When are you going to improve Google Finance so that I don’t have to switch over to Yahoo! Finance?
• When are you going to add Google Cars so that I don’t have to rely on Yahoo! Cars?

I better stop, my cheeks are starting to get hot.

Look, I still want this to work out and I’m not making any ultimatums here.  I just want you to stop taking me for granted and get to work on fixing some things.  And I know you aren’t really the jealous type but while I was researching Nambu, I found out about FriendFeed which looks pretty great.  That’s all I want to say about that.

Yours truly,

It’s Complicated in Houston

Here’s what I’m talking about.

The picture below is the color that the photo should be.  It appears correctly in Safari.

The picture below is what I’ve been seeing in Firefox.

Apparently, this is all determined by how browsers manage colors.  You can read more here.

I’m really happy with Firefox and pretty attached to all of my different extensions and add-ons that I use.  I really didn’t want to switch to Safari.  I was about to switch and posted a comment on Twitter about it to further postpone it.  BTH asked me about it and in trying to find a good website to explain the problem, I discovered that Firefox 3 has a fix!

From the “Web Browser Color Management Tutorial“:

“Color management in FireFox3 is off by default. TO ENABLE COLOR MANAGEMENT: type about:config into the address bar. To turn it on, change the value of gfx.color_management.enabled to true and restart the Firefox browser.”

This worked like a charm.

Now I can see all the right colors and stay with Firefox!  If you use Firefox and surf through Flickr a lot, do yourself a favor and enable its color management!

Lately I’ve been avoiding political conversations.  Partly because I feel really uninformed and partly because I feel like the loudest people around me are also pretty uninformed.  I was doing this subconsciously until yesterday when I got a NYTimes News Alert in my inbox saying the following:

“U.S. Plans to Curb Executive Pay for Bailout Recipients

The Obama administration is expected to impose a cap of $500,000 on the compensation of executives at companies that receive large new infusions of federal bailout money.”

Good news, right?

Strangely, instead of being happy that some sort of accountability was starting to take place in the financial sector, I caught myself cringing at the thought of what was going to be slung all over Twitter and Facebook and all the snide and sarcastic comments that I would have to hear about the crappy economy and the crappy bailouts that day, regardless of any progress.  Sometimes I feel like no matter what the news of the day is, someone always has something negative to say about it.

I think I have a general understanding as to the reasons why people feel compelled to do this:

• boredom
• humor
• small talk
• overconfidence in their own assessment
• passion

I think it would bother me less if people were truly passionate about the topics.  I don’t know, I’ll admit I’m often more passionate than I should be on some topics that are way over my head.  It gets the best of all of us sometimes.  But lately I think I find myself simply wanting to help people see that they could be wrong.  I don’t want people to admit they’re wrong, I just want people to admit that there’s a possibility.  Even the people I agree with!

Especially on issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Gaza strip.  I think it’s REALLY difficult to read a news story or blog post and make an assessment.  I think it’s helpful when we have dialogue and meaningful conversations about different tidbits we’ve learned here and there — in an effort to learn together and hopefully come to a more informed opinion.  But even after I formed that opinion I would still want to or try to leave room for doubt.

With our floundering economy, it really bothers me to hear pure capitalists talk.  I don’t think politicians are all stupid.  I don’t think their economists and advisers are all incompetent.  I think there are a lot of political factors that interfere with them always making the best decision.  It’s unfortunate.  But on top of that I also think there is some mercy (and perhaps a bit of pride) involved in actions like the financial bailouts — not just flawed economics or politics.  The diehard capitalists who want to see the whole system flushed out need to stop rooting for that.  Yes, if you were playing TheSims and you wanted to fix the economy, you might want to reset the economy by starting over.  But when there are human mouths to feed and human bodies to clothe, going through another Great Depression is just not something people should ever root for.  Especially not people who have the slightest empathy for those who would be hit the hardest.  Now on the flip side, those who think the government should just keep pumping out money to save people who bought $800,000 homes on $70,000/year salaries — you have some serious thinking to do, too!  Just because the bank was willing to loan people the money, doesn’t mean they had to take it!  I know there was a lot of shady dealings with aggressive realtors and whatnot, but we have to admit as a country that we haven’t really excelled at common sense in the last few decades.  I don’t think you can completely slam the bailout and I don’t think you can root for more bailouts either — I don’t understand how people can be so comfortable doing both!

It is just really frustrating to me when people make blanket statements or post inflammatory links or quotes.  Even people who are crusading for worthwhile causes — like ending wars and violent conflicts.  It gets so frivolous when people chant sayings like, “give peace a chance,” because honestly I don’t think you can advocate for peace without addressing somber things like fear, poverty, pain, history, power and oppression that cause people to disrupt the peace in the first place.  It’s a gross oversimplification.

Sheesh, I haven’t ranted like that in awhile.

I guess this is what I get for being a Christian and a social worker.  Surrounded by polar opposites and crazy loudmouths.  (I say loudmouth as a term of endearment.  IMHO, what’s worse than a loudmouth is someone who has no opinions on anything and doesn’t care to have an opinion.)  I’m not as upset as I probably sound, this has just been building up over the past few months.  I’ll try to blog more frequently so that things like this don’t happen as often.  Please take no offense to the post, it’s just something to think about.

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On a side note, am I the last person to find out about this?

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Warehouse Deals Inc. is an Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary. We offer open-box, refurbished, and slightly damaged merchandise at reduced prices with the benefits of Amazon.com fulfillment and customer service. You can find the same great deals on Amazon.com, but we have collected them for you on this web site. If a refurbished item goes out of stock, we will show you the current offer for the new version of the item on Amazon.com, so you still have an opportunity to make a purchase.

Warehouse Deals has been in operation since 2004 with a five star customer rating. If you are unsatisfied with the product for any reason, you can return it in its original condition within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. We’ll also pay the return shipping cost if the return is a result of our error.

We also feature a Bargain Books section where you can find in one convenient spot most of the popular books on Amazon.com that have a deep discount (up to 60%) off the list price.

Thoroughly enjoyed Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist.  It was hilarious, sweet, and just plain old fun to watch.  We watched a late showing on Thursday night with a really fun crowd that laughed as hard as we did.  I downloaded the soundtrack Friday morning and have been listening to it ever since.  The iTunes reviews were pretty annoying to read.  There are a lot of the snobby indie music listeners who are disturbed that the general masses are discovering their precious little bands.  They call the movie soundtrack a big sellout from the bands.  I think these people are more concerned about being an indie music guru than they are about the success of the band or enjoyment of the music.  I don’t keep up with the indie music scene (anymore?) and I welcome a soundtrack like this to show me the highlights — regardless of how old they are!

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The Cat Power concert was good last night.  Warehouse Live is a really cool venue.  People weren’t kidding about how clean they keep the place.  I was unsure whether they were going to let me bring in my D200 but after consulting the Yelp forums I decided it was worth a try.  As we approached the door I saw a girl with a dSLR camera slung over her shoulder.  The door guy let her in without a hitch so I breathed a sigh a relief.  When the door guy saw my camera bag, he asked to see what was inside and called over another guy to ask if my camera was okay.  The head security guy said that I had to put it back into my car and that I could take pictures with my cellphone if I wanted to.  So we walked back to the car.  I’ll admit that I was a little upset that the other girl got away with it.  Fortunately, as we were walking back to the door guys, we saw that the head security guy was escorting the girl with the camera out and telling her that she had to put her camera in her car.  Not that I wish misfortune on others — I just appreciate consistency in rules.  I’m not sure if that’s Warehouse Live’s policy or Cat Power’s policy.  She had her own camera guys taking photos of her during the show so I’m guessing it’s a Cat Power policy.

I had the same gripes last night that I always have about concerts.  Body odor, lack of personal space, obnoxious drunk girls (or just plain obnoxious underage girls as was the case last night), and all of the waiting!

I know everyone keeps talking about how our generation is all about instant gratification and people don’t know the value of waiting anymore.  I think the concert-going subculture is one of the remaining groups of patient people in the world.  With really long attention spans!  We waited in the studio for thirty minutes before they opened up the doors to let us into the ballroom.  (I’d really like to see someone in the studio in the future, the place is so intimate and cozy.)  Then we waited standing up near the stage for quite some time until the first act came on stage.  The opener was Appaloosa who played music from her Macbook (which was covered in stickers) and sang along to it.  Truth be told, it was actually pretty good music — but there was nothing to look at.  She did not have the star power or stage presence to really draw in the crowd.  She wore a strapless glittery red dress over blue jeans and cowboy boots which I guess was interesting.  Besides doing an awkward dance now and then and her constant readjusting of her dress so that her boobs wouldn’t fall out — there was nothing to see.  Then there was a LONG wait between the opener and Cat Power.  Stagehands came onstage to check the mics and the cords, tape setlists on the floor, place water bottles and towels around the stage, place a huge fan, etc… is this on purpose?  To create so much suspense and buildup that by the time the band comes on stage you’re delirious with happiness that it’s finally starting and you cheer so loud — slightly unsure if you’re cheering for the band or if you’re cheering that it’s finally starting.

Haha, I know I sound like I didn’t like the concert but I really did.  Chan Marshall is incredibly talented.  Her songs and her voice are both so emotional.  She was really in the zone for some of the songs.  I didn’t feel like she connected very well with the audience even though she did turn the fan towards us to cool us off, hand a girl in the audience her onstage cocktail, throw flowers out to the audience at the end of the concert.  Why is it that when musicians smile, it makes everyone watching want to smile back?  Musicians are mesmerizing.  I did feel that she was in her own world for a lot of the concert and she didn’t really say anything to us.  I have a suspicion that she was instructed not to talk during the concert to avoid a repeat of this.

Anyway.  This is a really disjointed post but it’s Saturday morning and I’m not used to being up on Saturday mornings.

Go horns!

So many misrepresentations, so many embarrassments.

As a Christian, I was appalled to watch this video and accept the fact that this man preaches each week to a congregation.  This is really just tasteless:

It starts slow but it picks up quite a bit.  Link from Metafilter.

I could never run for President.  Besides the fact that I was born in Brazil, I wouldn’t be able to stand hearing things like this about my family.

Something strange that I have observed about men and women (this is, of course, an overgeneralization) is that women love to shop for their unmentionables and men hate to shop for their unmentionables.  I’m not sure if it’s some sort of male challenge to see how long their underwear and undershirts will last but I pretty much am always the one that suggests that the husband needs new underwear.

I have a bone to pick with the person who is in charge of ordering underwear at all Wal*Marts and Targets.  There is ALWAYS a ton of XXL, XXXL, M and S sized underwear and usually a drastic lack of L sized underwear.  This is an inventory control issue.  Why haven’t they figured it out yet?

Also, I have noticed that there is an alarming lack of briefs.  There’s always a lot of boxers, boxer briefs, trunks, and even bikini briefs (yikes), but very few packages of briefs.  I have no theory about why this is.  But the husband is extremely loyal to briefs and I’ve cautioned him to maybe start transitioning to something else because it seems like they are phasing briefs out.

I have also observed that the husband generates three times as much laundry as I do.  He wears business casual clothes to work (dry cleaning), gym-clothes during lunch, sometimes gym-clothes at night, and something comfortable to walk around the house in.  That’s a lot of laundry.

Thus concludes this trivial post.

I think I’ve mentioned this before but in intermediate school I took an architectural graphics course as one of my electives.  We learned the basics about how to build a house.  I was surprised to learn that not only were there standard sizes for everything (doors, windows, etc), there are also standard space requirements.  For example, there needs to be a certain amount of clearance around a door to in order for there to be good design.  There also needs to be a certain amount of space between a toilet and the door and the sink.  Our teacher would criticize us for trying to squeeze things too closely together because he said someone actually living in the house we were designing would find it uncomfortable.  (Sidenote: I had the great idea to design a medieval castle for my final project so I didn’t have to follow any of the architectural standards for it.)

I know a lot of homes break these standards.  Especially in dense metropolitan cities like NY, condos and apartments completely ignore these standards.  I’m okay with that because I know real estate is expensive.

What really irks me is when I visit a large public restroom in a restaurant and whoever measured the stall space didn’t follow the standards.  I really hate it when the stall doors open inwards and I have to risk pressing my knee pits against the rim of the bowl in order to close the door.  Gross.  And yeah, maybe smaller bathroom stalls are cheaper but it sure is a lousy way to skimp.