Andy Gapin

It’s not a new revelation that most large American businesses just don’t get it, but over the course of the past few weeks, this has driven me almost to a breaking point. As friends and frequent readers of this site know, my fiancée and I are moving from our large, but only-slightly-better-than-college-quality apartment in wonderful Highland Park, NJ to a townhouse in Somerset, just a few miles away. The big move is happening this weekend, I’ll be picking up the keys tomorrow morning and, on Saturday, we’re renting a truck to move everything that I won’t be able to fit in a few car loads over the course of the day tomorrow.

With everything there is to do when moving, I figured that it would be a smart move to get a jump on setting up utilities and changing our address at the various institutions that (may) send snail mail or need our address for one reason or another. I thought getting a head start would mean that we could move in this weekend and not have to worry about anything beyond unpacking. Unfortunately, while I’ve ultimately been successful, this has turned out to be a rather torturous affair.

It might be a somewhat obvious statement to say that moving can be a pain in the ass, but the biggest pains have been solely (read: solely) caused by major American companies either not caring about their customers or not really thinking about their needs or sanity. Maybe this is a passive thing. Maybe these companies are just too large for customer complaints to make it anywhere that would actually cause a meaningful change to their practices. Maybe these companies know that it doesn’t matter because we have no choice but to deal with it because there either is no competition or the competition is just as bad. Maybe these companies know that Americans are generally extremely complacent when getting screwed by large companies and we do little more than complain on the internet about it (see: what you’re reading right now). Or maybe, these large companies really just don’t get it and don’t understand their customers at all. I don’t really know, but I’d venture to say that elements of each of these play a part. In most cases, greed probably plays a large part as to why these companies don’t put forth a serious effort to make their customers actually like them, but much of what I’ve encountered through this can’t even be explained by the standard corporate greed.

Now, I’d like to take some time to actually describe just a bit of the pain I’ve gone though.

The first issue was Comcast. I’ve been a Cablevision customer for the last five years so I had to open a brand new account with Comcast. After finding out that after six months we’d be paying more than we are now for the same service, I was already not very happy, but there wasn’t much choice in the matter, FiOS isn’t available and there’s no way I’m doing satellite/DSL. I finally accepted this and tried to actually set up the account and schedule the installation. The fiancée is taking online classes currently so it’s a somewhat high priority for us that we have as short of a gap in internet access as possible. Plus, I’m a nerd, I pretty much require it.

I initially tried setting things up online, but the site was not being very helpful so I attempted a call (it takes a lot for me to actually use a phone for the purpose of calling). No luck, their customer service is only open during regular business hours. That works great for those of us that work 8:30-5:30 during the week. It’s not easy to step away from my desk for long periods of time just to make a phone call to the cable company. I eventually found some time to call on a day when I had to shift my hours back to provide some extra developer coverage post-release. Thinking that I’d be able to get everything scheduled and set up, I again picked up my phone and called. Nope, couldn’t be set up yet. The previous tenants hadn’t ended their service yet and it didn’t matter that I had a friggin’ signed lease for the place starting on the first of November. Comcast wouldn’t do ANYTHING until the previous tenants ended their service. They wouldn’t even at least create the account and allow me to tentatively schedule installation. It was a waste of my time to even call, apparently.

So I waited a little while and then tried again last week. This time I actually made it further on their website, but when trying to finalize, I was taken to a chat session with a representative. I have no idea why, but it happened. I spent a while chatting with this person giving them my information and working everything out with them. It seemed like I’d actually be able to make some progress and the previous people had told Comcast they were closing their account. Excellent. But if only it were that simple. After a while, the representative I spoke with told me that he wasn’t in the sales department so he had to transfer me to a new person…in the chat, mind you. So a new person hops on and I had to reconfirm everything I already provided. Annoying. Then, Comcast had the balls to actually have this person ask me for my social security number. Really?!? Really? I’m going to just provide that in a chat window to someone? Nope. I said that I didn’t feel comfortable so I was asked to provide my driver’s license number instead. Not as bad.

Eventually, I got everything sorted out and actually got a decent installation time. But this took multiple tries and hours of my time to accomplish. Not cool, Comcast. I’ll leave this one here and not even get into the ridiculous things that Comcast charges for.

Okay, next issue, American Water. According to them, our address doesn’t even exist. Awesome. Comcast and PSE&G think that it exists and I can say with a fair amount of certainty (you know, because I’ve actually been INSIDE of it) that it’s there, right where I’m trying to tell them it is. This issue is still unresolved. I tried first on their site and then had to call. While the woman on the phone was extremely friendly when I called, it was a little difficult to get off the phone with her after she said about a dozen times that she shouldn’t find it. But how can they not find it? Did no one ever pay for the water there before?

When setting up our account with PSE&G, I filled out their form online and received and email confirmation saying that I would receive another email within 5 days. Yup, never got that. So I gave them a call today and found out that everything was in order on their end. Yeah, thanks, that email I was supposed to get would have saved me the call during my lunch break.

The rest centers mostly around just trying to change my address with various companies. I decided that this would also be a perfect time to update my passwords with newer, more secure ones. Not that my old passwords were terrible, but I’ve been meaning to use more secure ones that are unique for every site. So far the password changing process hasn’t been too bad, except at financial institutions. I’ve learned over the past few days that American financial institutions have the worst password policies on the internet. Almost none of them let me choose the password I wanted. They either don’t allow special characters at all or only allow the use of characters from a small list of three or four of them. Let’s just think about that for a second, the sites that you probably need the most secure passwords for do not allow passwords that are considered secure at all by today’s standards. What the what? Really? Every other site I’ve updated so far has allowed me to enter a nice and secure password. But not Citibank, Capital One, PNC, ING, AMEX, Fidelity, or Chase. Nope. I guess they hate security. Somehow, they don’t realize that asking customers to answer the security questions is a joke. Most of these questions could be answered by close friend or even through a few Google searches about the person.

Citibank, whom I’m still paying back a student loan to, wouldn’t even let me change my address via the website. I mean, the form was there, but it didn’t work. For some reason, the form required that I put something on the second address line. I had nothing, I really had no idea what they hell the wanted from me so I just put a period. When I hit submit, I got an error that I had filled in my social security number wrong. WHAT?! Social security number wasn’t even a field on that form! I couldn’t have entered it even if I wanted to. So I was stuck. I filled out the contact form with the issue, but of course that form was a mess too. The form wouldn’t allow me to enter any apostrophes or quotations marks (I tried to actually quote the error I received in an attempt to help their developers) in the message. Yup, no proper contractions! Proper grammar be damned!

And lastly, for this rant at least, Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield. They don’t want you to change your address…ever. This just can’t be done via their website–and by the way, their website only works with Internet Explorer and even then, it’s not even usable, they should be embarrassed. They don’t tell you that you can’t change your address either. Instead, you need to hunt around their site like a savage. You can change all kinds of info, including your doctor, but not your address. I tried clicking all over and didn’t see anything. Eventually, I clicked to send new ID cards thinking that maybe there would be a form there. I was presented with my current address and asked if this was current. AH-HA! I found it! Nope, just kidding! I clicked to modify it and was provided with a message stating that I would have to call to do that. So, I called. That was a joke too. No where in their voice menus were any options that alluded to allowing me to update my information with them. Eventually, I just got myself to a representative and had them change my address, but that apparently requires me to be on hold for ten minutes while they process it. That doesn’t make much sense. How does changing my address take ten minutes?

I wish that I could say this got long because I included everything ridiculous that I’ve dealt with in the past couple of weeks, but it doesn’t. These are just the highlights. And they all simply come down to companies not giving a shit. If these companies cared, I wouldn’t have had to talk to a single person, which mind you requires me to step away from my desk at work since evening hours almost never exist. I should have been able to accomplish all of this quickly online. The websites should be usable and provide the ability for people to do what they need, easily and securely. I should be able to use a long password with upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. I should be able to change my address without much hassle. It doesn’t take much of a thought process to understand that if someone is changing their address, it’s likely that they’re doing so because they are moving and therefore, not only have dozens of other places to change their address, but lots of other crap that needs to get done for the move. Make this easier for me, not harder!

It’s almost 2011, there is zero excuse to not have a very well laid out website that works and allows users to do almost anything a customer service rep can do for them over the phone. It’s not hard. I would know, I make this stuff for a living. Hire developers that can think like users when designing the layout and functionality. At the very least, allow me to do basic things.

Companies don’t do this because they don’t care…and they don’t even want to pretend like they care.

Now there’s no need to comment asking if I’m surprised or anything like that. I’m not. I expected a fair amount of this, but this has been a lot to deal with in a very short period of time and I’ve just about reached my breaking point for it.

It’s just a couple photos, but here’s my fiancée having a little fun bringing me my drill so I could take down the curtain rods in the bedroom. Moving is such a pain in the ass, but the new place should be worth it. I’m really hoping at least. I’ll probably post a couple times about that when it’s all done, but for the moment, I’m keeping it to just these two shots.

If you read this blog or know me personally, you know that I don’t talk about sports much. Well, professional sports anyway. I do talk about running, snowboarding, and occasionally mountain biking. The reason I don’t talk about professional sports is because I rarely care about them. I used be a huge football, hockey, and baseball fan when I was a kid, but that kind of went away around age 16. Since then, I haven’t cared too much. I don’t really follow anything, but if and when it does come up, I’m still a Philly fan. That will probably never change.

All that being said, every now and again, I get sucked in around the end of the season. I did for the Eagles a few years ago and now I am for the Phillies this year. Yeah yeah, I know, I’m just following for the playoffs and not the regular season or through the bad times. Whatever, call me a fair-weather fan if you want, but I’m not getting sucked in just because they’re doing well. The Phillies have been great for a few years now, but this is the first that I got sucked in with them in a much longer period of time. I don’t know what does it, but every now and again, it just happens.

Now, what I want to bitch about is Cablevision and Fox/News Corp. News Corp wants more money from Cablevision and Cablevision doesn’t want to pay it. So what happens? They pull Fox from Cablevision. Awesome. They also pull their Hulu channels for Cablevision customers. Thanks, dudes.

What does this have to do with baseball and the Phillies? Well, Fox is the channel broadcasting the games. So, I can’t watch them. I watched game one of the NLCS at my fiancée’s parents’ house since we were there anyway and, last night, I had to follow mlb.com’s play-by-play online. Their play-by-play Flash application on their site is pretty decent, but you’re not actually watching the game which sucks. I tried listening online to the radio coverage from Philly, but they didn’t broadcast the game on their stream. And mlb.com charges to watch/listen online. Awesome.

Figures, one of the rare times that I actually care about sports and I can’t even watch. It’s not even that big of a deal, I’ll survive. What is ridiculous though is that News Corp and Cablevision have no problem screwing their customers. We are the ones that pay Cablevision directly, without us, they don’t make any money. Letting this happen is a slap in the face. News Corp makes most of their money from advertising, but without people watching, no one is going to pay to advertise. Now, Cablevision’s 3 million or whatever subscribers barely makes a dent for Fox so they’re advertising revenues will be 100% unaffected, but that’s not the point, it’s another slap in our faces.

While Fox and Cablevision are duking it out, it’s the rest of us that get screwed. In the end, they’ll reach some agreement and that’ll be that, they’ll both be fine, but those of us that just want to watch the TV we’re paying for are the ones losing out and there isn’t really anything we can do about it. It’s just greed.

So thanks, guys. You both suck and you’re both at fault. Quit blaming each other and quit screwing the innocent customers.

I just want to watch some baseball for the next two weeks while I still actually care about it.

This is actually the second version of this post, I scrapped the first and started over. I had kind of gone off more about the reasons why my fiancée and I moving and how much I’m not looking forward to the process, but that’s not really want to I want talk about today–expect one of those posts in about a month. What I want to talk about is the fact that I’m leaving Highland Park and that I’m going to miss it. This is kind of an appreciation post for a great New Jersey town.

Highland Park is awesome. It’s a quiet, (very) little town with pretty much no crime, but it’s also pretty much the most convenient place I could possibly be living these days. My apartment is very close to multiple major transportation arteries in NJ. I live about a quarter mile from the road that takes us halfway to either my parents’ house or my fiancée’s parents’ house, depending on which direction we go. That same road also takes us halfway to Philly or up to 287 and towards NYC. There’s a movie theater less than a mile away which is where we see most of our movies. There’s a Wegman’s close enough to make it worth going to, but if we don’t want to go that far, there’s a ShopRite much closer and Stop and Shop even closer than that. On top of that, there’s a Rita’s just out of walking distance and the cheapest gas station in the area is just a few blocks away.

It’s a great town for walking, it really is. This is probably why the town has such an incredibly large Orthodox Jew population, it really works out for them. Within walking distance from our apartment there is a diner, a Dunkin Donuts, White Rose (if you don’t know about this, find out), a Quick Check, a great pizza place, multiple liquor stores (one of which has a great selection of beer), a Stop and Shop, our bank (it’s a small regional bank), a Rite Aid, an ice cream place, a decent sushi place, a ton of Chinese places, an amazing Greek restaurant, a so-so Thai restaurant, and multiple apartments inhabited by my friends. We also can walk to New Brunswick if we want. It’s a solid walk to get to our friends’ places or meet up anywhere in the city, but we’re big fans of walking and on a nice day, it’s great. Sometimes, we’ll just walk to New Brunswick and back for fun.

Highland Park also works out great if you’re a runner. You can do laps around the triangle or you can head on down to Donaldson Park. Either way, you can make your run as long or short as you like by going up and down streets or doing multiple laps. Being laid out like a grid means there aren’t really any dead ends so you can just go wherever. I’ve even run down to Johnson Park in Piscataway for a little change of scenery.

I’m really going to miss all of that walkability. Highland Park, as a town and a place to live, has been great to me for the last five years and I’m really going to miss it, but unfortunately, it doesn’t offer what we were looking for as far as apartments go so it’s time to say goodbye. We’re not moving far, just a few miles, but it’s enough to completely change all of that convenience.

We’ve got a little more than a month left and I plan on taking advantage of that.

It’s a position I never thought that I’d find myself it, but with The Playlist coming to an end after next week’s show, I’ve realized that I don’t know how to keep up with new music on my own anymore. It’s actually kind of interesting when I think about it.

For the last seven years, I’ve hosted a radio show dedicated entirely to new music, so you’d think that I’d know all about digging up new music. Unfortunately for me, that’s not true at all. Being at a college radio station gives such amazing access to new music that you really don’t even have to try at all, it’s just there for you. Seven years ago, I took over the position of Head Music Director at 90.3 The Core and it was awesome. Even though I had been a DJ there for two years already, I had no idea just how much music the station received on a weekly basis. We’re talking 60-100 new albums a week. That’s a lot. Even with ten other people working under me in the department, I still had to be reviewing at least 30-35 of those albums each week myself just for the department to be able to keep up. I had no choice, all this new music was shoved in my face. I would complain every once in a while about not having the time to listen to the music I wanted to anymore, but in hindsight, that was probably one of the best problems anyone could ever have.

After a while, I had gotten so used to this that I didn’t look for new music on my own anymore. I would find out about a few bands here and there from friends or the indie music message board that I spent way too much time on, but I never had to actively look for new music. When I stepped down from the position as Head Music Director after two years–I wasn’t a student anymore and didn’t think it’d be right to keep the position–I still had access to all of the music. Since then, I’ve shown up a few hours early to every show just hang out and check out new music. Again, no effort. And one of the best things about this was that I had access to the full albums for free.

That’s all over now.

In the couple years before all of that, most of the music I found out about was from friends, going to shows, and from running a small venue for a while. None of this really took any effort either, there was still a ton of music just being pushed in my direction.

The last time I had to actually put effort into finding out about new music was before people did this via the Internet. It was the late 90s when most people still didn’t go online regularly. I would actually have to go to the CD store and take a risk buying something I knew only by name. I would check out the bands listed in the thank you section of the liner notes for albums. I would check out bands that I saw on show flyers for shows I didn’t even go to. I would actually ask people what they were listening to and go through the CDs they had in their backpacks. This was real work! Even once Napster hit the scene, you still needed to have an idea of what you were trying to listen to.

Over the course of the last ten years, everything changed. People don’t need to do that kind of work anymore. The Internet took over and made it super easy to find out about tons of new music and download it for free to at least check it out (totally not suggesting that people shouldn’t make sure the artists get some money in their pockets). I missed out on a lot of that. I don’t even know what sites to read and where to download music anymore. I really don’t. I didn’t need it, so I didn’t pay attention to much of it. Now I need it and I don’t know where to go.

Even though I’m a pretty big tech geek that spends a lot of time keeping up with technology, I feel like some clueless old dude who was just told he needs to use online banking for everything now, but has never actually used a computer before. What the hell do I do?!?

What are the credible sites to read for finding new music? Where do people download stuff these days? Beyond subscribing to the RSS feeds for Punknews and Absolute Punk and looking at what people are listening to on Last.fm, I’ve got nothing. I don’t have time to read any new sites or message boards. I don’t know how the hell I’m going to do this when I actually have to work for it and it’s not just all right there for me.

I guess I knew this day would come at some point, but that doesn’t make this any easier.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!

Now that Labor Day has passed and Summer is officially over according to societal standards, I guess it would be in order for me to evaluate how my Summer projects went. That’s actually easy to do, they were all pretty much failures! HAH! I was so busy with so much other stuff that I rarely found the time to work on anything. It was good though, I can’t complain.

My photo organization project was halted about halfway though the Summer. It wasn’t intentional, I just stopped having time for a little while. I got a sizable chunk of photos organized and I’m still going to try to chip away as much as possible at it until it’s done, but who knows how long that will take. While I took a ton of photos over the summer (a few thousand, I think), I didn’t take my camera out every day and therefore certainly didn’t produce a “usable” photo every day. Oh well. It would have been nice, but it just didn’t happen. I still ended up with a lot of good photos though. Heck, I definitely produced more than one good photo for each day between Memorial Day and Labor Day, but they weren’t taken that way (i.e. each and every day). Maybe in 2011, I’ll try to do a photo 365 thing. Maybe. But no matter what, I’m still happy with the overall number of great shots I took this Summer. My fiancée has told me no less than three times in the last week how much my photography has gotten better over the last few months, so that’s a great thing and really one the main goals of taking photos every day.

Of the two nerdy projects I had, developing an iPhone app and getting a lot of work done on the software I develop for the radio station, neither made it very far. The software for the station, ELCRo, got a little attention early on, but for some personal reasons, I decided to end work on that project indefinitely. I pushed out a couple minor updates and got about halfway through a major new feature before calling it a quits, but none of this measures up to the plans and hopes I had. I’m not too broken up about it, my feelings on the project as a whole just changed…completely.

As for the iPhone app, well, that never even got started. I never found the time to start learning Objective-C so that’s really about it for that. I’m not too upset about this either, I still don’t really have a good idea yet for anything that hasn’t been done before. I mean, I could make another fart app to go along with the 1,000 other ones in the App Store, but what’s the point?

However, what I did do this Summer was create a wedding site for my fiancée and I and completely redo my website. I’m happy about these things and I’m happy that time was spent on them instead of the other projects I had.

Now for the Fall, I’ve got a few things to work on too. I’ve got some serious half marathon training to do, I have to redo my fiancée’s food blog which was supposed to be done before my site (whoops!), we’ve been looking for a new apartment and will hopefully find something soon, I’ll be exploring some new photographic territory, and finally my fiancée and I will be getting back on the wedding planning train. Oh, and in addition to all that, I hope to start doing more posts about music again. I’ve actually got one that I should be doing tomorrow about how the hell I’m going to find new music now that I won’t be spending any time at the radio station. That will probably be an entire project itself. Stay tuned for that.

So there’s a lot to keep me busy for the next few months, not to mention that I’ll still be chipping away at my back-catalog of photos and counting down the days until Winter comes and snowboarding season starts up again.

Oh boy!

When I first got my DSLR, I didn’t really know what kind of photography I wanted to do. I hadn’t thought about it at all really. I just knew that I liked taking pictures all the time and always wanted a nicer camera to do so with. A lot of my photos were nothing more than a barrage of shots from various trips I’ve taken and candid shots from parties and such. Nothing really that spectacular, but with the latter, I liked the idea of catching a moment. I was intrigued by this. And for the former, I just liked to document what I was seeing. For the most part though, there was no “art” with any of it. I’m not a super artsy person. I “get it,” but that’s really about where it ends.

Now that I’ve been taking photos with a DSLR, getting very into it, and constantly reading everything I can find about it, I’m starting to change a little. But up until today, I still didn’t know what I was really intrigued by. Mostly, I’ve taken photos of what’s been available to me. I try to keep my camera with me as much as I can and try to find things to take pictures of, but mostly, I wait for it to come to me. With just a couple of exceptions, I haven’t been seeking the photos out and trying to create the situations myself.

If I want to get better, I need to change that, but in order to change it, I need to have that intriguing idea that I can run with. I’ve yet to find that. I have things I want to take photos of and I look at other people’s photos and I think to myself that I would love to take those kinds of shots, but I never really come up with my own ideas or think about it much after that. I don’t find anything to add to these already existing ideas. So for eight months, I’ve just been putting along taking as many pictures as I can trying to find that one subject that really sticks with me and inspires me.

I feel like I may have found it yesterday while exploring Wolf189′s Tumblr page. As far as I can tell neither his Tumblr nor any of his other websites actually have his name, but he’s a film photographer who takes a lot of erotic shots. Erotic photography wasn’t particularly what I was looking for, I was just exploring Tumblr since I made a page there recently. I clicked on the photography section in the directory and his page was one of the recommended ones. Over the course of the day, I clicked through all 50 pages of photos he has posted there and looked at some of the stuff on his other sites. He posts a lot of pictures multiple times, but there’s a lot of stuff all with a similar theme.

Of all the photography I’ve ever looked at, this is some of the most interesting. It really sucked me in. I found it stimulating and intriguing. Not because of the nudity and sexuality, but the style and what he does with the subject. I really liked it. I found myself studying some of the images really closely and putting thought into the composition and the color choices and everything.

I was seriously sucked into it. As I looked at some of the photos, I thought about how I would recreate them and do them differently. I found them extremely inspiring. I started a list of all of the shots that I wanted to do. Ideas started coming freely to me. The positioning, the props, how the subject would be dressed, different variations to try out, the composition and angles. It all just started flowing to me. None of it was really sexual. I mean, there was sexuality in these ideas I had and the photos I was looking at, but it wasn’t pornographic at all.

Right now, I have a long list of things to try out. I’m sort of short a model though. My fiancée doesn’t really like being in front of the camera, but has learned to deal with it pretty well. However, she doesn’t feel comfortable actually modeling or anything of the sort. As many couples have done, we’ve taken a few pictures and I’ve got a few of them that I like a lot, but she doesn’t really want to be the subject much. I don’t really know how to go about finding a model. I posted on Craigslist earlier today, but I don’t really expect much. I’m not a professional, I don’t aim to be. Photography is a hobby to me and this would be a new thing for me to try out. I don’t think my first few batches will have many keepers and I can’t afford to pay someone for this. So I need to find a model that doesn’t mind being the subject of erotic photos (not necessarily nude at first, but I would like to try that as well) and doing it for free. I don’t want to come off as a creep that is just trying to take naked pictures of girls for…personal needs. I don’t know how not to though.

That’s one issue, but my bigger issue with it is that I like to be able to post my photos on this site and Flickr and what have you. I don’t want to just take photos and not do anything with them. I don’t think I would ever call myself a photographer and my skills are down right beginner still, but I like putting my stuff out there and getting some feedback. I think it gives a little bit of meaning to it. And it’s that not being a photographer part that’s the problem. I’m a software developer by career and I like that. I enjoy my work a lot.

My fear is that if I start posting these types of photos it will come back to bite me in the ass later. While I am not looking for a new job now, I will be at some point in the future, many times, I’m sure. And with most employers looking people up online before hiring them these days, these photos will be found. My name is far too unique–there is just one other with it–for anything I put online to not be found. This is something I always consider before posting anything anywhere on the internet. Once it’s online, it’s there forever.

If I were a photographer, erotic photography wouldn’t really be an issue, it would just be work and it would actually be what was bringing in the paychecks. But I am not a photographer and it is likely that future employers will find my website instantly and view these photos as being pornography. Now, I don’t have any desire to make porn, but as is the point of this post, I am very intrigued by eroticism in photography as art. I’m not an artsy person and will never be an artist in any sense of the word, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t wish to create something as art and can’t enjoy it.

So what do I do? While I can easily admit that this is something that has just come up in the last day, I am very intrigued by it. I may try it and find that, like just about everything else I try to photograph, I suck at it. But I may also find that I like it a lot. The ideas are flowing in my head already. Do I not post these photos on my website and Flickr? Do I create another site that is not attached to my name for them? Post them under a different Flickr account? I would prefer not to do that, but I guess it’s an option. If I post a photo, it generally means that I’m happy with it and proud of it. Sure, I may not like it later on, but at the time, I find it to be an accomplishment for myself and where I’m at with my skill level. So, because of that, I want to put that photo out there as myself and I want my name attached to it.

I’m going to find a way to try this and I don’t want to keep the photos to myself. Like I said, I don’t think there’s much of a point if you’re not going to share what you’re doing. Signs are pointing towards me liking this subject a lot. Tonight, my fiancée was cooking dinner in just her underwear and tanktop, it wasn’t erotic, but it wasn’t safe for work either. I found a way to take a hundred quick photos of her doing it. All of the angles and composition came naturally. I knew each shot I wanted to take and what I wanted from it. I didn’t even think about it, it just flowed. The results were incredible. They were easily among the best shots I’ve ever taken and I didn’t have to try. The exposures and lighting were nearly perfect. It was fun. It was a lot of fun. I want to do it more.

I won’t post these pictures of my fiancée because I think it’d be a little weird to post such pictures of the woman I’m going to marry, but I think I’ve got a lot of good shots here. The photos I take of her are much more personal than anything else for obvious reasons, but the same kind of creativity flows behind them.

At this point, I don’t really need to decide anything and I’m making a huge deal of pretty much nothing, but it brings up the question that is often asked, what’s the difference between art and pornography? If I find that I’m actually into this, do I post the photos and have them speak for themselves without worry of others being offended? Could I find a happy medium and just post them and galleries in the photography section of this site and not as part of the main blog? Is these even something to be concerned about? Would a future employer not hire me because of it? What will family members think of it?

I’m curious as to what people’s thoughts are on this. Personally, I’ll actually worry about it for real if this is something that sticks. For now, I’m just going to give it a shot and see how it turns out.

I hate you. You are a terrible bank. My fiance and I use you for our joint account, but we are leaving you. This weekend, we will be opening a new account at a new bank and once we get everything switched over, we’re closing our account with you and we will never look back.

I wish that I could say that a slow and clumsy website–it took us days just to get both of us set up with logins that actually worked–and transfers that seem to take forever were the only reasons why I hate you, but I can’t. What put me over the edge is the fact that you call me constantly with marketing calls. Your tenacity is almost impressive, actually. This has been going on for over six months now. At least twice a week.

What really gets me about these calls is that they come from numbers all over the country. Luckily, I used my Google Voice number instead of my cell number so it is easy to block numbers, but the myriad of numbers from different area codes around the country that you use is astounding. And now the most recent area codes that you’ve moved on to are local to me. The interesting thing here is that when I block one of your phone numbers, you get a message saying that my number is not in service, but you are not deterred, you see right through this and, instead of removing the my number from your listed under the impression that the number is no longer valid, you just change the number that you call from. Very clever, Bank of America. Very clever.

When I don’t answer your calls, which is almost always the case as I don’t answer numbers I don’t know, you don’t even leave a real message. Many times, it’s just a blank two-second message. Other times, there’s the tail end of a recording. If I try to call this number back, it either beeps a few times and then hangs up on me, does not answer at all, or takes me to a voice menu that hangs up on me no matter which option I select. I don’t even get what you’re going for here. If you’re trying to market something to me, don’t you want me to be able to get back to you? This must be some trick you’ve devised that is just too complex for me to understand.

At this point, you might be wondering how I actually know that it’s you calling me since you don’t leave me messages and I don’t usually answer. Well, I have answered a few times. Each time, I am first taken to a recording and then I eventually get connected to a kind representative from your company that asks to speak with me. Once I tell her that she is speaking with the person she’s looking for, me, she starts an extremely long speech about whatever it is that you’re trying sell me. Seriously, I don’t even know. She kept going for so long that I couldn’t pay attention anymore. She wouldn’t stop either. It was a waste of time for all parties involved. And each time, at the end of the speech, I kindly said that I was not interested and would like to be removed from the calling list. I also stated that the number being called is a cell phone. This is only kind of a lie, as my Google Voice number only forwards to my cell. Every time, the representative tells me that she will have my number removed, but that it could take 30 days. First of all, I know that it doesn’t really take 30 days to remove a number from a calling list. It takes a couple clicks in a computer that’s that. Second of all, I was never removed from any list. This has been going on for well over six months and I still get calls.

What will it take, Bank of America?! Honestly, leave me alone. It is these calls that are driving me away from your bank. I will never do business with you again and I will also share this story with anyone that will listen. I wish that I had listened to the others that have hated on you for all kinds of other reasons.

Screw you.

I think this is something that has always bothered me, but I can’t stand when people dismiss country music as being automatically bad. When I hear people say things like “I listen to everything except for country,” I have to hold back smacking them across the face. No one should take this personally and I’ll be fair and say that I know most people don’t realize what they’re saying and don’t mean anything by it, but take a moment and think about this.

You don’t listen to “everything” except for country. I guarantee that there are tons of other genres and sub-genres that you aren’t into. Should I be able to assume that you like grindcore or Afro-Cuban music or traditional music from India? I’m going to go with no. What you mean is that you listen to most radio friendly rock and pop music. Maybe a little bit of the hip-hop, R&B, and dance stuff that gets played in the bars and clubs that are frequented by the 20-somethings of this country.

That’s not really the point of this though, I want to talk specifically about country music being singled out as the one genre that people feel they must openly and explicitly exclude. Maybe I just have a soft spot in my heart for country music because I spent a lot my childhood with my grandparents and they exclusively listened to country music causing me to develop a bit of a taste for it. Or maybe I just naturally like a little twang in my tunes. Either way, hating on country music doesn’t make you seem hip or cool. All I hear is that you are predisposed to hating things that you don’t know much about or that you haven’t taken the time to realize just how much country music has done for you. Yes, the mainstream country scene, as a whole, blows. There are very few good artists–I do enjoy me some Dixie Chicks–in the mainstream, I’m not ever going to deny that. However, there is an amazing amount of great stuff out there if you look beyond the mainstream. Not all country music is about pickup trucks and sung by hillbillies and ignorant southerners with annoying accents. It’s not just Billy Ray Cyrus, Garth Brooks, and Dolly Parton.

There are lot of indie and not-so-indie bands that are basically country, country-rock,  southern rock, or at least heavily country influenced. Even a lot of respected indie-rock, singer/songwriter, and folk music is very close to being nothing more than country music. Much of it is only not categorized as country because it originated from the indie-underground and not Nashville. There are good punk bands that combine elements of country and southern rock into their music. And let’s not leave out all of the overlap that can exist between country and folk, a genre which is rarely crapped on.

Hell, The Beatles, yes, the band that was extremely important either directly or indirectly to pretty much all rock based music to come since their existence, were into country music and very influenced by it. And they in turn went on to be very important to the country-rock scene. I’m not saying that because a great band liked something you should too, but I am going to say that if a band very few people are going to openly hate on had such strong country ties, maybe it’s time to ease up on the country hating and give it a fair shot.

I’m not asking anyone to embrace twang and throaty vocals in their music. All I’m asking is that people ease up on the hate and realize what they’re saying. Country music has been very influential to many, many bands and other types of music. I can guarantee that without country music, your own music collection would be vastly different. This is an extremely small list that I just pulled off the top of my head without even thinking about it, but here are just a few bands that are either country or one of its sub-genres, southern-rock, full of country elements and influence, or that straight up wouldn’t even exist without country music. They may not all sound like what you think of when you hear the term country music, but trust me, country music is pretty important to all of them

I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but that’s a pretty impressive list, don’t you think? Sure I sneaked a few bands on there that you probably haven’t heard of, but you should check them out! I may not like every artist on that list, but I can say that I love at least half of them and like at least half of what’s left after that. And the ones I don’t like are pretty big names and probably well liked by many of the same people that “listen to everything except country.”

Again, all I’m saying is ease up on the hate and realize what you’re saying. Country music has done a lot for you and you don’t need to listen to the mainstream stuff if that’s not your thing. You don’t even have to listen to or like any of it. You don’t have to say you like it. Just quit singling it out like it’s the plague.

My iPhone seems to be a little confused this morning about which way to be turning. Or maybe it’s trying to play a lame April Fool’s Day joke on me. As you can see from the conversation that’s happening via text, I was already a little confused otherwise I would have jumped all over the classic Mallrats reference. For anyone that may be wondering, the topmost message in the left screenshot is indeed a reply to a random Flight Of The Conchords reference I sent.

But speaking of April Fool’s Day, I hate it. This tends to come as a shock to my friends when I tell them, but I just find it annoying. I feel like I spend the entire day being blamed for pranks pulled by other people. I come off as the kind of guy that would be all about pulling pranks and playing jokes on others and, to a degree, I am. So this makes me the first person that people blame for pranks…every day of the year. And sometimes, it is me. But it’s so cliché and expected today. Why would I bother? My pranks usually fall into one of the following groups: making someone believe something ridiculous about myself or that I did/didn’t say/do something, sending horrible links to people disguised using TinyURL that are not Rickrolls, or bigger ones that tend to require a lot more effort and planning. The first two I’ll do any day of the year if the opportunity arises and for the third one, if I’m putting a lot of effort, I want to go for maximum shock and do it on a random day instead of April Fool’s.

So everyone should go and have fun today, but I’ll sit this one out. I won’t be installing the blue screen of death screensaver, freezing anyone’s office supplies into giant blocks of ice, filling someone’s office cube with packaging peanuts, installing software that randomly inserts keystrokes here and there, or partaking in any other office or non-office related pranks.

And while I’ve already been accused of using this as a way to boost a prank later in the day, it is not. I promise.