The Zereps

where are we going? we’re not tellin’! (but maybe we’ll see you there. ;))

ugh. I had the worst time getting home today from work, and where better to openly complain about it then on my own personal blog!?  Apparently there was some sort of ‘signal malfunction’ and so the subway trains were only coming about 1/3 as frequently as they normally do. What this means is that not only is service slower, but there are 3 times the number of people cram-packed into the subway cars! Now, during rush hour, the trains are usually packed enough, but add this to the mix and you have yourself a very hot, stinky, packed-in-like-a-sardine-doesn’t-even-begin-to-describe-it situation.  Add on top of that a homeless person (God bless her) who hadn’t had a bath in months by the smell of it and you’re really starting to have a good time. At this point, I, like most other people in that particular car exited promptly at the next stop. I’m not sure if this was a very good move though, because I had to wait another 20 minutes to catch the next train coming by–which was also packed to the brim with evening commuters like myself trying to get out of Manhattan and back into Queens. And on top of all that, my cell phone died; this was unfortunate on two levels–for one, I can’t call and tell Candice why I’m so late, and two, I wasn’t able to listen to the MP3s on it (which recently happened to be the BBC radio-show version of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’) But then I have to think to myself, if these are the worst things I have to complain about right now, then life isn’t so bad after all.

Thanksgiving. In March? Yup. Well, that’s what it felt like anyway after Candice cooked dinner. We had mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn, and Quorn ‘Turkey-style Roast.’ (.) What’s that, you may ask? It’s a ‘meat alternative’ that has a texture and taste almost exactly like turkey. As most of you know, I don’t eat meat. But for the first 20 or so years of my life, I did and I can hostestly say I can hardly tell the different between the Quorn roast and real Turkey. Suffice to say, it was a pretty good ‘thanksgiving’ meal.

What you all really wanted to hear about was taxes, right? Oh yeah. It’s that time again. Time to beat your head against the wall and navigate through hundreds of tiny boxes with indecipherable instructions (and that’s using tax preparation software!) Somehow in the ‘tax vortex’ Candice and I ended up withholding exactly the amount of tax that we owed, so our net federal return ended up being $0.04 (which the IRS kindly rounded down to $0.00.) Luckily, though, the State of New York was kind enough to give us back a couple hundred dollars we had ‘loaned’ them.

Here’s my latest installment… check it out here.

Well, we all know that computers don’t always do what we want or even expect them to do. Sometimes programs and even entire operating systems crash and burn right in the middle of doing something important. Here is my small tribute to software designers and the problems they cause (AND the ways they try to explain these problems to us, the lowly users.) Luckily in the past couple years things have gotten better and operating system stability has improved quite significantly (especially for Windows.) Most of these were taken during the 90s at some point, when Windows 98 was mainstream and could hardly stay running for more than an hour or two without crashing.
Click here to see the album: Computer Errors

(Also, see the video here of Windows crashing when Bill Gates was trying to show it off at a conference. Classic.)

…into the new (and only) Trader Joe’s in Manhattan, that is. It just opened last Friday, and although there wasn’t a line out the door this time, the check-out line was still pretty daunting. I was mainly interested to see what kind of stuff they had (i.e. was it similar to the standard California fare) and to check out the prices. I must say I was impressed on both fronts. The selection was really good and the prices were fantastic (especially for Manhattan!) At first I was a little disappointed to see that they didn’t have any vegetarian food in the ‘Mexican’ section, but then I realized that they had sold out competely! Nobody wanted the stinkin’ chicken burritos–there were tons of those left. I think I’m going to wait until the hoop-lah dies down a bit more before I go back again…  $2.69 for four veggie corndogs–you can’t find deals like that anywhere else in the city (that I know of anyway.)

For all of you who were keeping tabs on us using our RSS feed from ericperez.com, you may have noticed that that feed hasn’t been updated in several weeks even though we’ve been posting quite frequently since then. Please update your aggregators to use the feed at thezereps.com. This is because I moved to a new hosting company and since the blog isn’t just for me, I made thezereps.com the primary (hosted) domain name (ericperez.com and candiceperez.com both redirect here for the time being.)

[and I just don’t feel like redirecting the RSS feed. =P]

Click BfPs on the menu above to check it out.