BS

Inadequate American Pizza

Monday, April 28th, 2008 | Life | No Comments

So one day Vicki was telling me at how she had been to America and how worthless our pizza is there and how we have absolutely no creativity at all. Now I was slightly taken back because I am a huge pizza fan. I mean it’s hard to screw up a pizza, and I personally buy white pizza with chicken from the grocery store and in Wisconsin I would often enjoy some taco pizza.

Well sure enough, she was right. Now I have not had a chance to have their homemade pizza pie (yes, it’s pie too… remember, everything is pie) yet, but just by going to the Domino’s Pizza up the street you can see that there is a huge difference, and it seems that there are no truly standard toppings at places either.

The Domino’s I had directly before hopping on a plane to go here was a small pepperoni and sausage pizza with regular pan crust. I had gone into the store near my friends and had looked at the option and seen that as the best choice. Here I went in and decided on a Meatosaurus with a Cheese Burst crust (hadn’t noticed the triple cheese crust yet). I am however eager to try the Fire Eater and Mr. Wedge pizza, and possibly a Funky Chicken or a 7 Meat Pizza. See for yourself at the Domino’s Website for New Zealand.

Yes folks, this is just the selection at a pizza chain and I am informed that Domino’s doesn’t have that great of a selection either and that I really need to try a roasted lamb, garlic and potato pizza.

There is a varied selection of pizzas like these at the grocery store too which I know would make people back at home happy who are sick of ONLY having a choice of Pepperoni or Cheese in the grocery store.

Everything is Pie

Sunday, April 27th, 2008 | Life | No Comments

New Zealand Day 2 until whenever… Ya know, I had this nice notepad listing the things I did each day so that I could expand on them in blog posts. HOWEVER as good of an idea as that was, the computer managed to restart without me saving it. Good planning ahead right?

So I have a good memory and could rebuild the outline if I so choose, but that would take effort that I didn’t feel like making so instead I have just not written anything. Well putting some deep thought into the process I realized that not everyday is all that interesting anyways. So now I will just write of subjects that I have found while being here that are interesting.

Starting with pie. Yes, pie. We all know and love a good fruit pie on a special occasion. Well Kiwi’s love pie on all occasions. So much that they have pretty much have fresh pies available to eat in most strip malls and cafes.

Shopping List (crossed out things I haven’t seen here):
Hot Pockets - Mince/Cheese Pie and Chicken/Vegetable Pie
Pasties - Potato Pie and Steak/Cheese Pie

Sausage/Egg Burrito - Sausage/Egg Pie (or Roll..to make it easier 2 eat.. still flaky pie crust)

День одно до 3

Sunday, April 20th, 2008 | Life | No Comments

Day 1
——–
So my plane got in, and I was happy to be in New Zealand. I was 200% exhausted from not only the stress of Bob and the long flights, but also from my long road trip to see my friends and family. It was really easy to get through customs and they didn’t make me pay any extra for my expensive projector, despite having a thing that says you need to pay extra money on things that are worth more than $700 and were not purchased from a “Duty Free Shop”.

Found my way to an ATM and was happy to see that it spit out New Zealand dollars on my US account without extra fees, just as I had been told It would (hey, being told something and seeing it actually work that way are two different things).

Got a Shuttle Bus to take me directly to the house I am to be living at. The cabbie was a nice guy who took on the duties of a tour guide to show me around the areas of the city that we were passing since I seemed to be full of questions.

Nocked on the door of my new house and said hello to my new housemates’s. Met Shane first, who showed me to my room. The room has some very pink curtains, which I got a laugh out of. He said he was going to give that room to Jo, but it had a big desk in it which he thought I could use.

Anyway I am living in a house with 4 other people all about my same age. I figured that would be fun / interesting and if it wasn’t I am not stuck here at all since I pay rent weekly and can leave whenever I want.

Kept mentioning to people that I needed to get to take a shower and go to sleep, but I kept not doing it. Ended up in a long conversation with Jo (one of my housemates) and eventually went to bed.

Airline Hell

Thursday, April 17th, 2008 | Life | No Comments

Hi, my name is Bob (Bastard Operated Bot). I am a robot built to be a non-understanding asshole. If you give me input trying to tell me you have an electronic visa, i will discard the information and inform you that you are wrong and that you will have to buy a brand new round trip ticket because I will not let you fly with your 1 way ticket.

Fucking Bob.

Ok here’s the skinny on this… I had an “eVisa” granting me a 1 year visa into New Zealand. It allows me to come and go as I please during that time. The eVisa simply says that I need to show it to the customs person in New Zealand and that I will be granted entry to the country (well assuming they don’t find all the Mexican Smack I have in the hidden compartment of my luggage).

So I showed up to the airport with my passport, but it did not have a “stamped visa” in it saying I can go to New Zealand. Well of course I don’t silly Bob, I won’t get the stamp until I arrive in New Zealand!!! Well that just did not jive with Bob and I did not have a piece of paper that would satisfy him so he gave me 3 choices:

1) Leave now and find a way to get a Visa (since he did not believe in the existence of the Electronic Visa, even when I pulled it up on my phone).
2) Buy a return ticket home (since he said that NOBODY will fly me to New Zealand unless I have a stamped visa in advance). 3) Take my first connecting flight to Los Angelas and fight with the people there like I was with him.

I choose option 3. However choosing that Bob had to make sure that he fucked me over in an uncomfortable way (like in the back of a Volkswagen). So he changed my ticket to a 1 way flight to LAX, so that I would have to get my luggage and haul it across LAX, and then go through the checkin process again in a short period of time, all the while hoping that the next airline didn’t have “a Bob” working for them.

Option 3 of this choiceless choose your own adventure story:

I fly to California and then make a crazy fast run out of the plane to find my luggage. Of course it took it’s sweet time showing up, but eventually I had luggage. So I then needed to go and check my bags back in… To do that I asked some people and they told me I could take the “A Bus” to get to Air Pacific… However that bus just left so it would take awhile, and I would be better off just walking. At this point I was cool with that since my luggage had wheels, so I took off in the direction I was pointed being informed that it was only a 10 minute walk.

Well the lady had told me that it was just a horseshoe shape and to just walk to the end. Well I did that, and my arms built for typing were about to fall off when I noticed that the airport seemed to go on forever, but nothing looked like the place i needed to be. So after way way longer than 10 minutes I hopped on the “A Bus” and it proceeded to drive me another 20 feet backwards from the way I came, before stopping again and announcing the airline I was looking for was at that stop. So I laughed and got off only to then still only see an arrivals section and luggage pickup.

Talked to some more random strangers and was informed that I needed to take the stairs up to the to the top because the bottom was just for arrivals and departures were up top. Now I looked around for an elevator but on not finding one I just said screw it, and huffed it up the stairs.

Unfortunately the wheels on the luggage were not skilled enough to make it up these big stairs so I had to lift each bag and set it on the next stair up. I got to the top and was so bloody tired, but then I went and asked the person at the top how far it was to the airline checkin that I needed to go and they said… waaaaaaaaaaaay down towards the end, then hook a right and keep walking until u see it on the right. :sigh:

So I got to Air Pacific and I showed them my eVisa and they said that they couldn’t find it in the computer, BUT they believed me, so they booked me another visa right there, as well as boarding passes for there and for Fiji so I didn’t have to argue with them when I got there.

So I got to my gate just as it was boarding and then flew for 11 hours to Fiji. Now I was expecting to say that an 11 hour flight was the worst thing in the world, however on a 747 it isn’t that bad. After we all sat down in our assigned seats we waited till the plane was boarded and then everybody just moved seats. I took a seat behind the one I had so that I could take the one I was in and tilt it way forward and then I could tilt the one behind me way back because the person behind me had moved over one spot.

Ok, it still sucked sitting on the plane that long, but they give you free blankets you can keep / free face masks that block out the light / headphones with your own tv / free alcohol (yes, on international flights you don’t have to be first class to get that free) etc…

We got into Fiji (which was very beautiful BTW), and I instantly jumped into a long line to check back in for my connecting flight. Getting past that and the metal detectors (hey, I didn’t have to remove my shoes, woohoo) and I was then chilling out waiting 3+ hours for the next flight and I decided to buy some juice. I grabbed a small thing of pineapple juice and another beverage called “just juice”. I went up and was informed it was $6 FJD. I didn’t have that, so she informed me it was also 6 Euros, and then I said it was american currency and I could just go exchange it for FJD, but she said that they accept USD and that it was $6. Now I know for a fact that they were screwing people over on that. I was able to rationalize the $6 on the juice, however I may not have known the value of a Fiji dollar, but I do know the value of a Euro and if it was 6 euros it would have been just over $9.50 in USD. So I guess I was glad I wasn’t paying with Euros. I have since done the conversion and 6 FJD is $4 USD.

Another 3 hours on a plane and I was in Auckland. This plane wasn’t a 747, but I had the original seat I booked which was directly behind business class and had a massive amount of leg room!!!!!!!!!!!! The breakfast they provided on that flight was actually pretty good as well. So my last 2 flights were Air Pacific and I would recommend them to everybody. However if you are going to fly on United I would warn you that if “electronic tickets are not available” for the flight and you have to get paper tickets and check in with somebody at a counter, that you should look for another airline and save yourself the stress.

I mean I get it. If Bob had booked my flight all the way to NZ and then I got there and they sent me home, United airlines would have had to pay for my return trip home and then it would have been his fault. However knowing this didn’t mean shit to me because I had an approved visa and knew I was just getting dicked over, and was worried that I would get dicked over in LAX as well.

Ok so I arrived. Will write about that in another post.

So Some Shit Be Down

Friday, April 4th, 2008 | Site Updates | No Comments

I just moved my site to a dedicated server. My old host was fantastic, and had let me have free service for the past several years, but they have sold the company… Alas, all good things must come to an end.

I decided that at the same time I moved servers I would switch to PHP5 | MySQL5 and Apache 2, instead of 4|4 & 1. What does this mean to you? It means that for the moment you cannot use the chat box and you will have to fall back to old fashion communication.

-Did you use the contact form? It was broken from midnight until 10:30am CST. So emails from that time bounced.

-Hmm, all my wordpress plugins seem to be broken. Well whatever, so long as the page displays I can fix that.

-The “Fridge” was broken. I have fixed it…. sort of. I changed it from how it was because it wasn’t staying within the fridge borders. So I eliminated the actual fridge outlines and gave it 100% width. This will mean if your screen is not as wide as somebody elses screen then you might miss seeing some words. Also the “magnets” now “slide down the fridge” about a centimeter. This is really odd, but I am not going to try to figure it out right now.

-The Movies. Ok this wasn’t a direct connection to the server swap. Rather 99% of all the AVI movies on this site came from FlyUpload.com and they have gotten sick of the huge amount of extra traffic streaming videos from download links that aren’t supposed to be public.

All this means is that they made it more difficult for me to parse their site and they have added a cookie that seems to be necessary etc… I have figured out 2 out of the 3 things I need to get them working, but I haven’t cracked the third yet. So I will keep working on it, and don’t worry: Can’t guarantee them to work today but I WILL get more high quality streaming movies on the site soon.

Hmm, this APPEARS to be it. However if you see something that’s not working please leave a comment or send me an email so that I can fix it.

Hope to get chat and movies fixed today, but no guarantees.

Patience is a virtue~

James / TSA / THE Smartass / BS / Whatever else I feel like calling myself