How my gun saved my life

Posted on April 21, 2008 by Matt Jacob

The scene is yesterday at about 6:30 p.m. The sun is setting and it’s getting dark out, but it’s not quite nighttime yet. I’m coming home from an afternoon of apartment shopping, and I stop at my credit union on the way home because I’ve got some checks to deposit. I’m standing at one of the two ATM’s, waiting for the machine to finish sucking in my deposit envelope so that I can get my receipt and go home. Since it was a fairly warm day yesterday, I decided to carry openly, with my pistol in plain view on my waist. When summer rolls around in Tucson, concealed carry more or less goes out the window.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a white pickup truck with two Mexican guys pull into the parking lot. They look kind of sketchy, but I don’t think about it too much because there are a lot of people in Tucson who look just like them. One of the guys gets out of the truck and starts heading straight towards me, even though there’s a vacant ATM right next to me. I half-turn to get a better look, and now my gun is fully exposed in this guy’s line of sight. He stops, takes one look at my waist, and turns around to head back to the truck at a quicker pace than he originally came. The truck peels out of the parking lot, I grab my receipt, and that’s the end of that.

I don’t really want to think about what could have happened had I not been carrying yesterday, but I might have had a pretty unfavorable situation on my hands. It’s not like the guy pulled a weapon on me and demanded my wallet, but the whole thing was extremely suspicious at the very least. Why come to the bank if you’re not going to use the ATM? Why walk towards me when there’s an open ATM on the other side? Why turn around and change your mind after seeing that I wasn’t going to be an easy mark? Exactly.

Stay safe out there. Your personal safety is nobody’s responsibility but your own.

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Don’t take it personally

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Matt Jacob

I think I mentioned this a few months ago, but I’m currently working on redesigning this site. The default WordPress (the software that powers this blog) theme is nice and everything, but it’s the default. It’s ordinary. It’s commonplace. It’s prosaic. Truth is, though, I’ve been redesigning this site for more than four years. Part of that is due to a shift in purpose and focus. Four years ago, I fully intended to use this site as a promotional tool to showcase my freelance work to prospective clients. Since I’ve pretty much given up on freelance gigs these days, the current purpose of this site is to showcase my thoughts and photographs to friends, family, and (hopefully) the world.

Having said that, I’m aiming for absolute simplicity and minimalism with the new design so that my content comes through clearly. Enough about the new design, though; it’ll be here when it gets here. What I really wanted to talk about was taking things personally. It’s obvious that redesigning this site has become a labor of love for me. In fact, personal projects—I’m mostly referring to software and web-related projects, but this actually applies to pretty much everything I do—always manage to pull me in much more than work-related projects. That doesn’t mean that I do a sloppy job at work, either. I can do eight hours of high-quality client work and be perfectly happy with it, but doing the same thing for myself might take three or four times as long.

It’s true that I’m my own toughest critic, but at some point, you’ve got to say that enough is enough. You can tweak a lot of things for a long time, but eventually you need to capitulate and agree to keep chipping away on feature X during the next iteration. So that’s kind of where I’m at right now. I realize that I’m a perfectionist (recovering), but I’ve almost reached the point of “good enough” with my redesign. Give me a couple more weeks to put the final touches on and kick the tires a bit, and then I’ll flip the switch and invite public comments and criticism. I’ll try not to take it personally.

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Newest addition to my family

Posted on April 16, 2008 by Matt Jacob

Weighing 6 pounds, 12 ounces, and measuring 38.5 inches…

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Allergic to life in general

Posted on April 7, 2008 by Matt Jacob

I don’t even know what ragweed is, but I don’t like it. Nor tree pollen, for that matter. Nor anything else that’s dumping tons and tons of allergens into the air.

I’m sneezing.

My eyes are itchy and watery. (Don’t worry, I’ve already checked for rocks).

The mere thought of spending time outdoors is causing an allergic reaction. It’s time to find me some antihistamines.

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An uphill battle: Rainbow sandals and me

Posted on April 1, 2008 by Matt Jacob

I’ve tried to like Rainbow sandals, I really have. Despite numerous problems with my first pair, I still wanted to try the hemp version instead of the standard leather version because it seems like they’d be more durable and comfortable. The leather ones crack easily and don’t hold up to moisture very well, which is unfortunate considering how much sweat my feet are capable of producing. I strolled over to Landmark Clothing on University today in search of the mythical hemp sandals, only to be severely disappointed.

Someone about my age greeted me when I walked in, and when he asked if there was anything he could help with, I told him I was looking for Rainbow sandals. He pointed over to a wall where approximately 15 pairs of various sandals (all Rainbow brand) were hanging. After looking over the selection and not finding what I wanted—it didn’t take long; there were only 15 pairs, after all—I asked if this was it or if other varieties were off hiding somewhere else.

About that time, an older man—clearly the owner or at least a manager of some kind—emerged from the back of the store and took charge of the situation. He informed me that they could order anything I wanted that wasn’t in stock.

“Great”, I said. “How long will that take?”

“Two weeks at minimum, but probably more like two and a half.”

“But I can order them online and they’d get here quicker and cost less”, I protested.

“Go ahead and order them online, then.”

“Thanks, I think I will. Have a nice day.”

And then I left. And just like that, Landmark Clothing lost a sale and a customer, because there’s no way I’m ever going back into that store again.

This is just one of many customer service stories I could tell—and do tell from time to time right here on this site. When did it become fashionable to treat customers (and potential customers) like crap? When did businesses become too good to accept my hard-earned cash that I willingly want to throw at them? When will small companies wake up and realize that they’re not just competing against other local shops, but against every vendor with a website?

Today, for the first time in my life, I was actually somewhat proud of my decision to go to business school. That feeling has since worn off (and it didn’t take very long, either), but the point remains: common-sense business practices might not be common sense to a lot of people trying to run a business. And if that’s the case, then things that aren’t common sense (e.g. marketing, accounting, operations management) must be way out in the ether somewhere.

Oh, and by the way, I did end up ordering the hemp Rainbows I was looking for. They should be here in about four days.

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On having clear vision (part II)

Posted on March 25, 2008 by Matt Jacob

O, Mexico, how I love thee. Thy joyous people, thy sugar-laden sodas, and thy rocks that break off into small pieces and impregnate thineselves into my left eye.

For the record, the mighty Mexican rocks were simply no match for my pickaxe-wielding fervor. The magnitude of my work was simply too much for Mexico to handle, and thus, the rocks had no choice but to crumble under my strength. Yeah, but seriously, a rock fragment broke off and became lodged in my eye, and that really explains the irritation I was describing in the previous post. The upside is that I saw an ophthalmologist yesterday who removed the foreign object and gave me some antibiotic eye drops, and now things are starting to feel better.

The day before (Sunday—Easter Sunday, actually), I went to urgent care to get some treatment, but the guy there couldn’t find anything wrong with me. During the ordeal, I discovered that I still have 20/20 vision, though. After all these years of staring at computer monitors, who would’ve thought? I also learned that I once wanted a pirate eye patch when I was younger. According to my mom, who’s a reliable source for my entire life history, I had an allergic reaction in one eye, and I begged for an eye patch because I thought it would make me cool.

I thought the eye patch story was ironic in a way, because I was suffering from something that was completely curable, yet I wanted to block out half my vision just for the fun of it. I think we can get like that in life and in our relationships sometimes. We’re perfectly fine and capable of seeing things accurately, yet we choose to block our sense of the situation and only see what we want to perceive. Let’s take the pirate patch off today and ask God to show us things how he sees them. After all, let he who has ears to hear, hear; and let he who has eyes to see, see. Let’s never take our physical or spiritual vision for granted.

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How important is clear vision?

Posted on March 24, 2008 by Matt Jacob

There are many things in life that I don’t think I appreciate fully until they’re gone. Vision is one of those things. Think about it, though: every morning, I wake up, I open my eyes, light passes through the cornea, lens, and retina of each eye, and I can see. And thankfully, I’ve always had pretty good vision (20/20 or better without corrective lenses). For the past three days, however, my left eye has been extremely irritated. It’s all red and bloodshot, it hurts to touch (I know, I know—”then don’t touch it, stupid!”), and it’s sensitive to light.

I’m going to see an ophthalmologist tomorrow, but in the meantime, eye drops have been helping for a few minutes at a time. Out of all the senses I have (all five of them, that is), sight is not the one I’d pick to be impaired permanently. And although not being able to smell or taste are enough to get a handicapped license plate and front-row parking in the grand state of Arizona, I don’t think I’d want to lose those, either.

Basically, I guess I’m trying to say that this situation reminds me of 1 Corinthians 13:12:

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

More on this thought later, but now I’ve got to go and rest my eyes.

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Smuggling a truckload of Coke across the border

Posted on March 22, 2008 by Matt Jacob

At about this time last year, I had my first taste of Dr. Pepper made with real cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. I enjoyed it so much that I wrote about it. It’s hard to describe in scientific terms, but cane sugar tastes more like sugar than corn syrup—it’s more sugary, if you will.Well, having been in Mexico for the past week, I knew I couldn’t possibly come home empty-handed. That is, I couldn’t leave unless I was bringing some of the One True Soda back with me. Now, I couldn’t find any Dr. Pepper, but as a general rule, Mexico and Coca-Cola are closely intertwined, and rumor has it that one was founded by the other.

On our last day in Nogales, right before we left, we found a Coke distributor who was willing to sell us cases of the good stuff. And cases are exactly what we bought. I picked up 24 bottles (500-mL each, which is about 17 oz) for roughly $24, which seems like a pretty good deal in retrospect. Vince bought his own assorted case with half Coke and half Fanta, Manzana Lift, Squirt, and Sprite.

At the time, the joy that only cane sugar can provide was clouding our thinking, and we failed to remember that the trunk was already packed with sleeping bags and everyone’s stuff. No worries, though. After 30 minutes of unpacking and shuffling bags around, we finally decided to remove the bottles from their crates and cram them into every spare crevice the trunk had to offer. With all 48 bottles tucked in and nestled snugly, we took off for the border.

Other than a 2-hour wait, we didn’t encounter any problems while crossing back into the States. To my surprise, smuggling a load of Coke into the U.S. from Mexico was much easier than I had previously imagined.

coke.jpg

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Stand behind our troops (or not)

Posted on March 4, 2008 by Matt Jacob

I found some humor in this bumper sticker I saw the other day (on a Prius, of course, but you probably would have been able to deduct that on your own):

“If you can’t stand behind our troops, stand in front of them.”

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The beautiful game

Posted on March 3, 2008 by Matt Jacob

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about the beautiful game (soccer, or more commonly, football) here before, but I’d definitely like to start writing more about it. I’ve been involved with the sport for a long time (10+ years), and it’s something that’s both important to me and a big part of my life. Right now, I just want to touch on something that’s been in the news a lot during the past couple weeks.

It’s true that soccer is a physical sport, and many people don’t understand that, including: a) anti-soccer people who feel that soccer isn’t “manly” enough for them, and b) parents who explode every time their kid gets brushed on the arm. Well, as with any sport, soccer has its own share of “the good, the bad, and the ugly”, and the incident I’m about to describe is definitely ugly. A couple weeks ago, Birmingham City defender defender Martin Taylor made an over-the-top challenge against Arsenal’s Eduardo da Silva in an English Premier League match. The tackle literally broke da Silva’s leg (pictures here, obviously not for the faint of heart) and dislocated his ankle.

As I understand it, this happened very early in the match (about the 3rd minute or so), so it wasn’t in retaliation for anything that had happened previously. Still, it sounds like the referee handled the situation properly with an immediate send off (red card) to Taylor. This incident is a great reminder as to why USSF stresses that serious foul play (SFP, a sending-off offense) must be dealt with quickly and appropriately. We simply cannot allow players in any league to come in with over-the-top tackles, tackles from behind, or any other kind of tackle that endangers the safety of an opponent.

This has been the first of what I hope will be many football-related posts.

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