January 31, 2003
Guess what? If you're dumb
Guess what? If you're dumb enough to put a mailto on your site, like I did briefly, you get lots of spam. :) Bye-bye, mailto . . .
January 27, 2003
Valuable Lesson: 13.1 miles or
Valuable Lesson: 13.1 miles or 26.2, it all HURTS. Ran the SF half-marathon yesterday in GGPark, finished in 3 hours, 4 minutes and around 30 seconds. My body says OWWWWW today.
What did I discover with my second "real" run? Well, I am truly pathetically slow. My new resolution is to start working on my speed. A 13.30 minute mile is way, way too slow. I also discovered that all the prep I did for the Maui marathon in September does not necessarily magically stay with me. Oh well. Time to jump on ye old treadmill.
January 24, 2003
Rumors are that it's COLD
Rumors are that it's COLD in NYC right now. As I make my rounds around SF in a bikini, I'll be thinking about y'all, sending you warm vibes. Ok, no bikini, but I have to finally admit that after almost four years, I have finally acclimated to SF weather. For instance, it's January, and I have yet to wear my long underwear yet, whereas in 1998 when I first arrived from Hawaii I lived in it. Damn though, I miss my cold intolerance and eternal tanlines, even though I'm sure moving away from the tropics saved me from early death to skin cancer. And now I'm making plans for a snowboarding vacation. Insanity!
This weekend, though, I'll be wearing shorts as I run in the SF half marathon on Sunday. "Run" is probably an optimistic term, considering how LAZY I felt last weekend on my six mile training run, which was heavily punctuated with walk breaks. I'm shooting to cross the finish line on Sunday before noon. Heh. We'll see if I make it.
January 22, 2003
January 18, 2003
January 15, 2003
I never did wish y'all
I never did wish y'all a happy 2003! Here's some new year's madness from Boston.
January 14, 2003
Scary and strange fact of
Scary and strange fact of the day -- the car involved in this shooting incident is my old Infiniti that I sold to this poor kid Alex, who luckily wasn't hurt (his friend wasn't so lucky). Credit to Mr. Contois for his astuteness in recognizing my old car!
January 13, 2003
Finally, we get to see
Finally, we get to see the results of Leanne's new camera! Pics from the Yahoo! year end holiday bash, where your hostess here enjoyed six Yahoo-tinis. Can you tell?
January 12, 2003
It's Sunday night. I'm at
It's Sunday night. I'm at work. Why? Because I need to make sure the world is safe for video greetings on Personals. Sigh. I'm tired.
Funny -- I went to work out in the Y! gym before coming in the office. As I was doing some sit-ups one of the local networks ran a story on our new video greetings, the same thing I'm sitting here launching right now. Kinda funny, since they'd violated our embargo -- no news stories on this product are supposed to run until tomorrow. Sunday is a way, way, way slow news night.
Anyway, off to bug the engineers again. Yawn!
January 09, 2003
I'm not sure whether to
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry regarding Arianna Huffington's anti-SUV ad spots. Sure, she's getting energy politics out in the forefront, and encouraging people to ask hard questions about how they can justify driving cars that get 11 miles per gallon. And I'd like to believe that oil is supporting terrorism, at least indirectly, but there are so many places at which you can cast stones at our country's ignorant energy policies that demonizing Arabs is not the best way to do so. Kudos though for demonizing SUVs though. I just wrote a capsule for Bookmarks on High and Mighty, a new investigative book about SUVs that paints them as Satan on wheels. Since we live in a land where we are encouraged to express ourselves politically through what we choose to consume, presumably a great many SUV drivers are going to hell after this book.
Note: Watch the ads, I'd love to see them on national TV. Ha.
January 07, 2003
From the “It’s a Small
From the “It’s a Small World Department:”
Last night smoke slowly began filling my apartment. Concerned, I nosed around until I figured out it was coming from downstairs, where my neighbor, John, was attempting to light a fire in his new outdoor fireplace. We chatted for a few; I told him I’d just come back from New Year’s in Boston. He casually mentioned that his friend Ayesha was from Boston. I paused. Deneb’s brother Rigel, while I was in Boston, raved about his friend Ayesha who also lives in SF.
“Does your friend happen to work at Kaiser by any chance?”, I asked.
“Yeah! Do you know her? She’s one of my best friends! I’m having dinner with her on Thursday.”
“No, but my boyfriend’s younger brother is friends with her! He hung out with her while I was in Boston but I didn’t meet her. He said she’s super cool.”
“Omigod! What’s your boyfriend’s brother’s name?”
“Rigel.”
“Yeah, she’s totally talked about him!”
And on it went. I love social network theory in action.
Caught! Apparently people do visit
Caught! Apparently people do visit Yahoo! Personals, my employer. This weekend I submitted a fake ad for testing purposes but forgot to hide it. Thus, an ad with my photos entitled "Jen King is God" was viewable to the public, and a friend of mine who I haven't seen in about two years actually found it. Hee hee hee. Even funnier -- because I'm lazy when I create fake ads, I usually find some amusing article and copy/paste the text into the written part of the ad. This time I used a story about an all-women naked protest scheduled to occur in San Fran in opposition to the upcoming war. I've gotten several amusing responses to people who assumed not only that I wrote the account, but that I was going to be marching. Classic.
January 04, 2003
Please, please make sure we
Please, please make sure we don't have the lamest, ugliest quarter in the entire US! Vote here!!!!!!
January 03, 2003
Like many subscribers to The
Like many subscribers to The Sun, I have a love-dismay relationship with the magazine (note: the article on Dr. Bronner of the Magic Soap fame is the best story I've ever read in The Sun. Read it!). It's often so brutally honest, and hence depressing, that I come away from an issue with an acute sense of discomfort and sadness. Why are people so screwed up? Why is the world such a cruel place?
But then I read an article like this one from the November 2002 issue and I realize how important reader supported, noncommercial journalism is in this world. This story articulated perfectly exactly what is wrong with our capitalist economic system and the fundamental shift in values that would be required to change it. And while at the same time it becomes clear just how enormous the task of changing society is, at the same time it illustrates how small, collaborative changes can make a difference. And on that note, check out Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point, which further illustrates how small, viral ideas can spread like wildfire in society and transform consciousness. Which leads me to ask, my friends, what social revolutions should we all try to engineer? If public relations firms can "greenwash" on behalf of their corporate clients and form innocuous sounding groups that disguise their true purposes of promoting corporate causes (I'll try to come up with some good examples later, dinner is calling me!), what can we tech-savvy, bad-ass, ambitious mofos come up with? If the kids in the East Village can get surburban mallrats to wear Hush Puppies (see the aforementioned book), what can we do that might actually improve the world in some measurable way?