Sunday, July 30, 2006

take that!

i was finally able to submit my sample vlog to 5 takes yesterday. i had to go to a net cafe to do it 'cause we're on dialup-- kinda reminded me of the time i had to walk to a friend's house to watch an MTV special on alanis because we had no cable.
i digress.
we had a rather hard time getting the vid to the right size. a colleague "compressed" the inital 22MB file into a whopping 100MB. how she managed to do that, i don't know. we, not "we," more like "they" (i know nothing about compressing videos, if you want to talk about .txt, .rtf, .cwk, or .doc, i'll be able to relate and say something intelligent like, "oh, it's safer to send word processing files in .txt format just to make sure that it opens regardless of platform" ... once again i digress, ye gods and little fishes!)... as i was saying "they" got it down to 5.6MB, but the screen size was a step down from what the folks at discovery required. ah, well. if they take that against me, there's nothing i can do.

making that vlog released my inner ham.
trinka, jason, and stephie: supersam thanks you for your help, really.

if i don't get into 5 takes, i figure i can just make more videos (er, trinka?) and saturate youtube with my presence.

you think this will work?

dear google,

how could you let yahoo! get a toehold in the philippines before you did? they've partnered with a telco firm here, and you? you're nowhere to be found--except on all of our PCs.

come to the philippines, use our country as a hamster for your mobile apps. better yet, just come here.

if you need someone to sell the google brand, i volunteer. if you want to train a mascot, i volunteer my services as well. i may know little (ok, more like nothing) about programming, but i do know how google has made search, e-mail, and all the other stuff easier for us programming-ignorant people. everytime you come up with a new service, i tell anyone who will listen about it and why it's so great--my colleagues have called me a "google god" several times. i believe in your brand and your philosophy (don't be evil) and i get all excited when i come across an article on google.

love for a product makes for effective and compelling marketing. use me.

worst pick-up lines, ever.

"are you married?" (do i LOOK like i'm married?)
"are you a girl?" (not the approach i'd use)
"are you naughty?" (my parents think i am)
"what's your sign?" (oh my god, people actually use that line?)
"make me a good writeup, baby" (baby? who are you calling baby?)

speaking of writeups (all those lines above came from a guy i had to interview for a supplement. he reminded me of a bald and bearded johnny bravo). i made seven pieces around 450 words each and due to lack of space they had to be whittled down to a quote each.

analogies:
1. "i'm sorry, but all we could find of sam's corpse was a fingernail."
2. "could you condense beowulf into a haiku, we're kinda short on paper."

it was frustrating because they had stories to tell. but as my editor said, "let go."

so i'm letting go... this serves as a eulogy for my 3,000 plus words.
rest well, say hi to all my killed intros for me.

Sunday, July 02, 2006

dirty talk.

my truck is so dirty that someone took the liberty of inscribing this message on his windows (yes, my truck is a boy... named sue):

"completely
we belong
i never told you
the one i have
i love you"

several weeks have gone by, the words are still there.
contrary to what others think, it's lack of time-- rather than the wish to preserve the vandal's sentiments-- that keeps the inscription there.

so, i was in a cab, right? and...

[02VII06]

roads are beautiful when they're empty;
you can see the promise of somewhere
written on those lonely stretches of asphalt.
llmarcelo [at] gmail [dot] com