Chilled Out Bearded Man

Anyone see anything suspicious about these logos?
http://www.vagisil.com/
http://www.valvoline.com/

Is Vagisil’s secret ingredient engine oil?

Yahoo is raising the price of their domain renewals (and maybe registrations) from $13 to $35 per year starting in July 2008. Guess they are trying to get rid of their domain registry market.

For my trip to Brazil, I need a tuxedo for a formal wedding I will be attending. Since I have a few weddings coming up, I figured that if I could find an affordable tux it would be morth worthwhile to buy a tux, than to rent on.   I searched around for the best deals on Tuxedos.

Century 21: Not a big selection. They basically had Hugo Boss for $500 and Calvin Klein for $250.  I was hoping to spend under $300 and I didn’t like how the Calvin Klein Tuxedo fit me.

Macy’s: Decent selection, but the pricing here was an issue.  They had a really nice Jones New York Tuxedo for $300 and a few Calvin Klein suits, but most of their products were over $500+.  They were pretty knowledgeable about the brands, but didn’t seem to know anything about styles.

Men’s Wearhouse: I was shocked to find that they only had a tiny selection of Tuxedos scattered throughout their enormous suit selection.  They had a Calvin Klein, which fit me better than the Century 21 Calvin Klein, but was about $500. The guy who helped me was like a car salesman. He was gonna make a sale, whether I liked what he was offering or not. It made me uncomfortable, so I just told him that it was out of my price range.

Syms: This was the best option. They had a large selection of tuxedos for around $300 and under.  Their tailoring is also quite affordable. It was $10 to finish the pant legs and adjust one sleeve length.  Be careful what you choose at Syms, because they have some really quality tuxes mixed in with some lower quality ones.  Don’t be afraid to ask for assistance in choosing a nice suit. They were very helpful and knowledgeable and it didn’t feel like they were trying to close a deal.

I ended up purchasing a Joseph Abboud Tuxedo for $300 at Syms.  They had every size from 36 and up.

So how did I learn about tuxedos if I never owned one before?

Simple. The Black Tie Guide. This is a very thorough guide explaining what to look for when purchasing a Tuxedo and its accouterments (accessories).

Now that I have a tux, I hope I get invited on the next Tuxedo Travels…

The next step after buying tickets is getting a tourist Visa. Brazil requires all US citizens to have a tourist visa.
Simply put a tourist visa is a stamp in your passport allowing you to frolic freely (within limitations) throughout a country. In other words, you need a passport before you can get a visa.

To get a Brazilian visa, you must have at least 6 months left on your passport starting from the date you arrive in Brazil. This is the same day that your visa becomes activated. The Brazilian tourist visa lasts for 5 years, so its really ideal if you have 5 years left on your passport in case you decide to visit again.
Of course, I went through the whole process of filling out the Brazilian tourist visa form, only to discover that I barely had 6 months left on my passport and it was still 2 months till I was leaving for Brazil.

Now, the process of getting my passport renewed began. Its actually pretty simple if you just follow the instructions. The main thing you need to know is that it takes 4-6 weeks to apply for a passport renewal for $75, but you must add $60 if you wish to expedite the process to 2-3 weeks.

I actually received my passport in about a week and a half for $135 dollars.

You can get more information about renewing your passport at your local post office and by visiting the US Department of State website.

Once I had the passport in hand, I was finally able to visit the Brazilian consulate. There are a few of them throughout the country. I went to the one in NYC. The instructions on the website are very exact and if you follow them you should have no problems.

A few tips:
1) The hours are very specific for when you can drop off your application. Make sure to get there at the beginning of the time period as its first come first serve each day. They are pretty efficient, but apparently, Americans love visiting Brazil. I got there about 10 minutes into the time and I waited 45 minutes in the waiting area. As I was walking out there was an incredibly long line to get into the waiting area, which had not been there when I entered.

2) Keep a folder with a checklist while you are preparing the application. This will make it easy to just hand them all the parts. They will be grateful and you will be stress-free.

3) Don’t lose the receipt. When you give them the application, they will hand you a receipt which you need to bring back the next day to pick up the visa. I have no idea what they would do if you did lose it, but its probably better to not find out.
4) They will keep your passport for the day, so as a precaution, you may want to make a photocopy of it in case anything goes wrong.

5) They only accept Money Orders, which are quite easy to purchase at your local US post office. There is currently a charge of $130 for the standard US citizen adult tourist visa. The money order costs something like a couple of dollars.
You can find all of the information regarding the Brazilian tourist visa for US citizens at the Brazilian Consulate website.

You can find more information about traveling to Brazil with an American passport by visiting the US Department of State country specific page for Brazil. That page also has information about health and safety when traveling in Brazil.

Next time, I will write about planning the trip itinerary.

Its a movie about a man-boy who gets sent to boarding school to prove the point that boarding school should not be outside the law of the land. He proves that some lessons learned in boarding school are great for saving the world…

If you’re idealistic and believe that the world can be fixed, and you wake up everyday hoping that today will be better, and Ayn Rand wrote about your idealistic humans, then see this movie.

- ChillyB

This movie isn’t green…

Its drama. Its scifi. Its Korean. Its a mystery. Its a horror. Watch this movie. Its good. Its clever. Its innovative. Its creative.

Check out the Imdb review here.

I’m not yet in a position to raise a family, but I do hope to someday have a big happy family. A thought occurred to me today about parents and the way that children change their lives.

Looking at my parents, I see two people who decided to devote their lives to making a good life for their children. They spent the best years of their lives, running around and trying to support their children. They spent every waking hour actively doing what they could to improve the family’s lifestyle. They worked hard. They saved money. They cut corners in their own wants and needs to spoil us. Spoiling is relative, of course, but they did what they could to try to make a better life for us kids than they had.

The core of this was the idea that they had devoted their lives to their children. And this is what I disagree with. I agree to devoting a part of your life to your children. I agree to doing everything possible to make a good life for the children. But, there must be a limit, or we end up in a hopeless wasteful circle.

Life is a good thing. Unfortunately, if each generation spends their whole life improving the lives of the next generation and never allowing time for themselves, then who is the recipient of the hard work. Each generation must be able to balance their enjoyment with the preparation for the future generation.

The key is that we must not devote our lives to improving our children’s lives. We must constantly work on improving ourselves. This has an unexpected effect. By improving our own lives, we get to enjoy our lives, and at the same time, be examples for our children to follow. We need to give our children a template for making their own good lives. Each generation must play its part in the big picture, but it must do so by living its own life rather than suffering for the future lives.

Perhaps people already know this, and this is the cause of all of the “green” activism occurring now. Each generation sees a snapshot of itself and lives its own life within that snapshot. The global ecological concerns today are such prominent issues, because we feel that we could perhaps see our own destruction within this generation. Sure we don’t want to see the future generations destroyed, but its very hard for us to have forwardthinking 20-20 vision. We are very nearsighted when looking forward, especially when the past shines no light on the subject matter.

There are those who would say that its too late for us to live, we can only plan for the future. That is self destructive thinking. If each generation thought that way, we would end up with perpetually unhappy generations.

Yes, we must plan for the future, but the best way for us to do that is to better the lives of everyone in our own generation.

A great short film from director John Knautz for those of us who think our minds can handle no sleep.

Don’t no-sleep and drive. This is what might happen…

Still Life by John Knautz

Pretty ridiculous names, right?

I think its about as ridiculous as the merger itself. Can someone please explain how this helps either MS or Yahoo? You have two companies that have majorly different focuses. They both happen to be competing with the same company. Yahoo is a direct competitor. Microsoft is afraid that if they don’t get onto the playing field, they’re in trouble in the future world of computer software. Yahoo was originally based on Google’s search technology. Not sure if anyone has tried running the same searches on both Yahoo and Google, but from my experience Google’s results are generally dramatically better. And lets not even talk about Microsoft’s searches. Windows Live and MSN aren’t even in the same ballpark.

But search isn’t where the really money is anyway. Search attracts users to Google’s main site, but Google makes most of its money from advertising. Yahoo also does advertising. Advertising money, as you may have heard, is based on cookies. The more users an advertising company can get in their database of cookie-ified users, the more reach they have. And Google has the most reach. Microsoft has some reach and yahoo has a decent amount of reach, but combining the two just doesn’t a Google make.

And lets talk about quality for a moment. Google is known for their hiring techniques. Microsoft was too, but then it just became gigantor corp and its impossible to monitor all hiring at that size, though you do manage to attract some people due to your offerings if your competitor doesn’t get them first. Yahoo has some good people too due to their attractiveness. Google has always taken their hiring very seriously. Each person they hired since the beginning had to be a gem. So not only did they hire the best for themselves, they also took hiring potential away from companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo. Google’s people are just quality. Its that simple. They work hard, efficient, and smart. The company is focused from the top of the pyramid down to the lowest of the low (though they have a very flat and hence less bureaucractic and more efficient system).

Hopefully this is just a marketing tactic by Microsoft to get people to their own search sites or to start feeding the anti-google fire. Either way big bad Microsoft needs to leave our innocent Yahoo alone. Yahoo ain’t no Google, but it definitely ain’t no Microsoft neither.

Perhaps Microsoft has some other intention that they are not telling us. Like they really want Yahoo’s wonderful financial website, finance.yahoo.com. Or they just want to use their software experience to access the deleted Yahoo servers of yore to find the old Google search algorithms.

If this unfortunate merger does in fact take place, I would at least hope that Microsoft allows Yahoo to keep their name. This isn’t sanity world, this is corporate america people, so it may actually happen. And as my friend over at Landscapestartup.com would say Yahoo is headless and Microsoft is Jabba the Hut

Headless people (Corporations are people, too.) often tend to be spineless as well. Be strong Yahoo. Please be strong.

And in other news… Bill Gates is giving away all his money. Dear Bill, Please send a large check to the Beard Trimming Foundation for Bearded Men who Need New Trimmers.

Step 1 is accomplished. The tickets are purchased. I’m flying from NYC to Rio, Salvador, Panama City, and Costa Rica. Luckily I was purchasing the tickets far enough in advance that there were plenty of seats available. Still, everything seemed to be more complicated than it should have been due to financial limitations, flight restrictions, and various website glitches on the sites I attempted to purchase from.

Here are the sites I ended up using:

1) www.abstravel.com

This is actually a pretty simple site to use. Everything is straightforward and clear. The prices were especially good on trips to Brazil - under $700 to fly NYC->Rio->Salvador->NYC. Adding on Costa Rica and Panama City made the flight exorbitantly expensive and it didn’t really allow me to choose times. Unfortunately, I discovered in my searches that transportation from Brazil to Costa Rica is pretty limited and hence quite expensive.

I ended up purchasing the first two legs of my trip on this site for under $450(plus booking fee). NYC->Rio->Salvador.

Warnings on abstravel.com:
- They have a $100 booking fee (after taxes, etc), which is not made clear at any point in the searching process.
- They do not answer their phone (even if you can manage to find their number on the site).
- They do not respond to emails.
- They do not respond to voice messages.
- The site breaks down when you try to search for too many legs.

So if you can’t find what you are looking for on abstravel.com on your first couple tries, just push them out of your mind and move on.

2) www.cheapoair.com

Even though this site has a pretty sketchy name, it does actually have some pretty good prices. I purchased the last 3 legs of my trip with a bunch of personal travel restrictions for $950(plus booking fees). Salvador->Panama City->San Jose, Costa Rica->NYC

One really nice thing about cheapoair.com is that it gives a ton of options based on your itinerary. Took me a long time to search through all the options, but I ended up finding exactly what I wanted. Other sites, tend to show you what they think are the best options for you, or they just limit the options because they don’t want to give you what you want for too cheap.

Warnings about cheapoair.com:
- They have a booking fee, which isn’t clearly explained how its calculated.
- I had trouble entering my credit card information for a valid card that I use on a daily basis. They didn’t recognize it as valid for some reason.
- After I had completed what seemed like the final step, the site gave me a new notice saying that they need to charge me an additional charge of $12. Even though I had chosen all e-tickets, they claim that some of these smaller airlines do not offer e-tickets and they need to ship the tickets to me. And $12 was the cheapest price they could offer me for a Fedex delivery - no USPS even though there is two months till the flights. I guess this guarantees that I receive the tickets - wouldn’t want them getting “lost in the mail”.

3) travel.yahoo.com

I tried this. They claim to search many travel sites. The prices didn’t seem to be anything special, but I think its definitely worth a look due to the ease of use.

A quick note of advice on searching these travel sites…

Always try searching for your itinerary with “anytime” for every flight time. It may give you what you want and the prices are usually less expensive the less specific your requests are. If that doesn’t work, you can always try it with more specific times, but the price will probably go up significantly due to the pricing algorithms, etc.