I don’t think my beef fried rice has any beef

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I ordered some beef fried rice from a local Chinese food restaurant.

When I opened it up, I noticed that it didn’t really have beef in it, and it instead had this large chunks of white fleshy stuff.

If anything, I think this is more fish fried rice than it is beef fried rice.

Oh, the mysteries of Chinese food.

 

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How not to run an Internet company

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

My Internet service provider, ResTech services, has a customer service department that’s open until midnight.

At 12:04 AM, four minutes after midnight, my Internet started beginning to fail.

FOUR MINUTES after the customer service department closes.

My Internet is randomly disconnecting and reconnecting, and when it does eventually reconnect, it’s extremely slow.

The worst part is that I have an exam coming up in a little over 12 hours, and I need to do some final preparations, which involve downloading documents from my course website.

I’ve been spending the past eight minutes or so trying to download a 1 MB PDF document, and it’s still not finished.

So I decided to come on my blog to write about this tragic moment as I panic, and procrastinate trying to find a solution to this Internet crisis that I will most likely not end up finding, and going to sleep.

 

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I’m on spring break. I went to visit Ed’s fish.

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

What better things to do than visit Ed’s goldfish during spring break, right?

Of course, I also visited Ed while I was at his house, but his goldfish seemed mighty worthy of a photo­graph and a placement on my website. Now they are on their paths to becoming Internet superstar sensations.

 

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How not to be a guest lecturer

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Earlier today, I had a guest lecture for my legal studies field work course that is highest on the scale of “could have gone disastrous.”

Our guest lecturer works closely with matters regarding the death penalty. The topic itself is great – there have been so much research done on the death penalty, there are so many opinions that exist about the death penalty, and there are so many personal stories one could have regarding working with people on death row, that the lecture can’t go wrong just from the topic itself.

Where it does go wrong, however, is the length of the presentation.

My lecture period is 75 minutes long. Today, we started about five minutes late due to random prep­a­ra­tion issues and technical difficulties, and spent about ten minutes going over some announce­ments, other class materials, and introducing the guest speaker.

It was finally time for the guest lecturer to begin her presentation.

Ten minutes later it was over. She asked if we had any questions.

Yes, she left 50 minutes at the end to answer our questions.

Now, it’s great that she cares so much about our input that she leaves five times as much time for questions than her presentation. But if she was faced with a silent class (which, fortunately for her, she wasn’t), that would’ve been pretty disastrous.

 

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How not to use voicemail

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Voicemail is a pretty nice invention. It lets people deliver vocal messages to you without you having to be there.

The keyword with voicemail, however, is “message.” The point is that you leave your message so you can establish successful and as-complete-as-possible communication with the other person as soon as they listen to the voicemail.

A few days ago, someone I know (who will remain unnamed) left me a voicemail that was such a failure that I had to write about it.

The intent of this person was to remind me to do something (which I had already done). Instead of leaving a message along the lines of “don’t forget to do this,” they instead left the message, “call me back.”

Now, unfortunately for me, this person is important enough that it is in my best interest to call them back as soon as possible. The problem was that I did not have my phone with me. The only reason I was able to listen to the voicemail was because I get my voicemails sent to my email inbox, and I can listen to them anywhere I am.

So, the easy solution is that I just go get my phone and call them back, right?

Not quite that easy.

I happened to be almost a mile away from my apartment where my phone was, and it was raining out­side. So in order to call this person back, I had to walk almost a mile in the rain back to my room to get my phone.

Which I did.

I’m sure you can imagine how annoyed I was when I found out what their message was.

The worst part was that I had to proceed to return to my previous location by retracing my near-mile-long trail of steps back through the rain.

So here is a public service announcement. If you need to deliver a message to someone, SAY YOUR MESSAGE IN THE VOICEMAIL, INSTEAD OF JUST ASKING TO CALL YOU BACK.

Have a nice day

 

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