It arrived. Twice.

I now have TWO softcover, ruled, pocket-sized Moleskine notebooks! My friend Erin delivered one she brought up from the BYU Bookstore in Provo on Sunday (thanks again!), and the one I ordered of Amazon finally showed up at work.

Lesson learned: if I'm going to order a notebook online, make sure I have plenty of space left in my previous notebook and order it early.

The horribly ironic thing is that I haven't even done so much as an inaugural scribble yet. It's weird. Getting a new Molie is a little intimidating. I'm not sure why, but I feel like I need to be very careful not to screw it up. So I'm excited to get them (0bviously), but once I do I feel like I have to have something worthy to write in them before I can do so.

I'm pretty sure none of this is healthy.

I once heard of a farmer who bought a brand new, beautiful truck. The first thing he did after he signed the papers was walk out and key the side of it. The salesman was obviously shocked and then the farmer explained how now he wouldn't worry about it getting dinged up while working on the farm. He could go out and use it for what it was intended and wouldn't think twice about it getting bumped, scratched, dented or dinged.

I need to key my Molie.

Maybe I furiously scribble on the first page until the pen starts leaking. Maybe I write some profound quote. Maybe I tear the first page out all together, sort of an overly dramatic Dead Poets Society gesture.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

A letter from the IRS

My wife and I got this letter from the IRS informing us that our economic stimulus check should be arriving by the 16th. Odd thing is, the letter is dated the 19th and we still don't have our money.

What does one do in a situation like this? Fortunately, there's a helpful subhead in the letter which reads, What You Need To Do. Allow me to quote directly from the letter:

"You do not need to do anything."

Let me make sure I understand: The IRS mailed us a letter telling us we should have our money when they knew we didn't. I'm certain they're aware that we don't have our money as they're the ones who are sending the money to us.

In addition, we aren't supposed to do anything.

Huh.

So...what's the point of the letter? And why didn't they just mail us the check?

Non-news news of the day: Twitter is down

"Something is technically wrong" is the understatement of the year. It's ridiculous. As Michael Arrington said, if Twitter could keep the site live for 24 consecutive hours that would be news.

It's interesting. I'm reading Getting Real, the e-book from 37Signals (the guys who made Ruby on Rails on which Twitter is built). In it they're quite adamant about launching your product/site quickly and with minimal features - worry about scalability later. The whole time I've been reading it I've had the thought, "Oh yeah? What about Twitter?" rolling around in the back of my head.

I'm the first to admit I know zero about building web apps (I consider myself a consumer geek, not a back-end geek). But I do know that from a user standpoint, if your product crashes this frequently with no explanation as to why or when it will be back up, something's gotta change.

I don't know if the problem lies with Rails' inability to scale or Twitter's. But Twitter needs to figure it out and it certainly seems like they've had enough time to do so.

The Notebook (not the movie)

Here's a history of the ordering process for the notebook I ordered a week ago:

I'm in Utah and ordered the notebook from some podunk bookstore in South Carolina via Amazon.

It shipped from Oregon.

It sat in Union City, California for four days.

It then flew from California (over Utah) to Denver, Colorado where it has been "processed".

I charted the information/physical trail and it looks something like this:

It appears to me that they're trying to avoid directly sending me the product I ordered.

A nitpicky error in the season finale of The Office

When Michael reluctantly gives Toby his watch during the exit interview, Toby says he'll set the watch for Costa Rica time. From what I can tell, Costa Rica is in the same timezone as Scranton.

*sigh* I'm a nerd.

UPDATE: check the comments for the subsequent drama that has unfolded since I posted this.

"But the ads made it look so cool!"

I'm doing a little research for a commercial we're shooting on Thursday that involves a bunch of sci-fi nerds standing in a line waiting for the premier of their new movie. (Although the commercial has nothing to do with sci-fi nor movies.)

As I tweaked the script, I remembered the red guards from the original Star Wars Trilogy (I think they were first seen in Empire Strikes Back). Wanting to learn a little more about them, I jumped on Wikipedia. From the 'pedia:

[Imperial Royal Guardsman] are the best and most loyal of the Imperial stormtroopers, solely responsible to Palpatine.... A mere 4% of all trainees would survive the rigors that awaited them to become Royal Guards; during a year-long training program, recruits sparred against each other continuously perfecting their combat skills. ...In their final test, each fought his training partner to the death...

Seriously impressive, right? And then there's this guy who's in charge of guarding the Palpatine's 10-speed:

The Emporer can be such a jerk sometimes.

Image courtesy of here.

Does ANYONE in Utah have this Moleskine?? - UPDATED X3

It's driving me nuts! I've called every bookstore I can think of and NOBODY has these notebooks in. I ordered one from an Amazon retailer on Sunday and, from what I can tell from the tracking info, it's been sitting in California since Tuesday.

I'm looking for the pocket sized, ruled, soft cover Moleskine notebook.

Do you have one? Do you know where I can get my hands on one ASAP? Drop me a line and if I can in fact get one, I'll buy you a snow cone.

UPDATE: Barnes & Noble said they had one at their Gateway location:


Except when I called, they don't really have it in stock. *sigh* And I went and got my hopes up.

UPDATE 2: BYU Bookstore has copies in. My good friend Laura is going to mail me one on Monday...unless someone else is going down sooner.

UPDATE 3: My good friend, faithful reader and distant relative, Erin, is coming to Salt Lake tonight from Provo and will be bringing me the long awaited notebook.
Photo courtesy of here.