If anyone knows the name of this show, let me know. I think I want to play this game. Maybe we can have a Kabuti Kids version. I think a Filipino-American version will have to feature the “Bagoong Sandwich” that Kim keeps threatening to make.
Monthly Archive for May, 2007
Virginia DMV has the most retarded policy. In order to do anything online you need a PIN. This is all well and good, but they only distribute the PIN via First Class Mail. This means if I want to change my address online, I need to have them send me a PIN– to the wrong fucking house!! Their only explanation is that “email is not a secure form of communication.”
I think the security issue is a semantic argument. Why would anyone want to change my address with DMV, what would the motivation be there? Identity theft? Perhaps.. but don’t you think identity theft is more likely when you have DMV intentionally sending a security PIN to the WRONG MAILBOX!?!
I am sure you asking, “Justin, why are you changing your address with DMV now, didn’t your family move back in 2005?”
Well, yes that is true. It seems that once a year I am reminded by a police officer (and when I say reminded, I mean pulled over) that my tags are expired. I know that it is my responsibility to make sure I update my registration, but DMV has the wrong address on record and keeps sending my renewal notifications to my old house, so I never get them. Back in 2006 I went to Norfolk City Hall to pay an overdue personal property tax (overdue for the same reason, wrong address on file) and take care of this. The city updated my address (they also changed my name to Jason) and the “DMV Express” line in that building said they’d take care of DMV’s record too.
I never filled out a change of address form.
They never gave me one.
They said they’d change it.
So last night I get another friendly reminder from a VB police officer that doesn’t have anything better to do. I don’t think he would have noticed me if I wasn’t blasting Refused with the window down. I was alone, driving at the speed limit, and totally sober. I did nothing wrong, but he decided to follow me and look for a reason to pull me over. It’s that rock and roll music. This time in the friendly reminder was in the form of a ticket. I know this is my own fault, but, seriously, who thinks about renewing their registration? You get the thing in the mail, you fill it out, pay 30 bucks and you get a new sticker.
To, perhaps, overextend my foolishness, I also went online and realized that you can renew your registration without a PIN number. Since, I wasn’t sure DMV had the wrong address, I continued with the transaction, expecting some kind of confirmation screen that says “This is the address we will be sending your registration to.” I think most people expect this when performing online transactions. I never saw such a screen, and I can only assume my new stickers are being sent to the rednecks at my old house who are still using the curtains we left in my old room. I guess they can put the stickers on that broken down Caravan in the driveway. I feel very safe now.
Just out of curiosity, I went on Massachusetts’ DMV site and saw that the change of address form was super easy to fill out. You need all of your information: Driver’s License Number, VIN, title number. If someone has all of that then they stole your car, your license, and they intend to drive it legally. Not likely. This method seems convenient and as logically secure as could be expected. New York’s DMV does something similar. No PIN for an address change.
One thing I believe about internet solutions, is that if the system fails to work for the least savvy user, it doesn’t work at all. It’s not a solution. True, email is not a secure method of communication. Neither is the internet. The packets being sent from my router, to my service provider to the DMV website have a number of opportunities to be captured and unencrypted. It might be difficult, but it can be done. If someone really wanted to know my information, they could do it. I agree that managed to make some foolish oversights through this debacle, but I doubt I am the only one to do so and I doubt I am the only person to smack my computer with bananas and make monkey noises when using VA DMV’s stupid website.
So now I have printed out a Change of Address form, and I have a confirmation receipt that I renewed my registration– but I won’t get that because it’s going to be sent to the wrong address. If I get pulled over I’ll bet that his computer will tell him I am renewed, that might be fun.
Not a whole lot been happening on the ‘ol quality-low these days. I sometimes contemplate taking this site down. I definitely need to find a way to re-invent it. I am becoming a little bored with the blogging process.
Next week I start my last week at unnamed technical college. I cannot say that I am excited to be graduating because I don’t have anything lined up yet. I will be happy when I walk out of those doors and never return, though. It has been a mostly unhappy experience attending unnamed technical college, and anyone who has read this site knows that already so I won’t go into any more detail.
When I enrolled I had some lofty ambitions that now seem kind of impossible. I don’t know if I will ever afford moving out of Virginia, but at the moment I can only hope that I can manage to survive and pay my student loans. I have to figure out a way to pay them off that doesn’t involve me working myself to death. There has got to be a way, I can’t be the only one experiencing this. (Any Berklee grads out there with student loans that would like to share with me their methods of survival?)
I know I have said all of this before in one way or another but I trace back all of these mistakes I’ve made and they all lead to how ill-prepared I was in high school. School in any form, does not work for me. If I ever have kids I don’t know if I can honestly look them in the eye and say you have to go to college, you have to get a degree and you have to do this right after high school. I have seen little indication that my degrees or the degrees held by my friends and colleagues have done anything for them. My music degree is the reason I am severely in debt, and therefor the reason I am pursuing a career in the IT field, which is a distraction from what I really have wanted to be doing the whole time– which is music. I know of private instructors in this area that are doing exactly what I was doing and they are now making more profit because they don’t have these loans. You don’t need a degree in the music industry. Most of the best players around here have other gigs and I find it almost humorous that my full-time pursuit of the discipline has forced me to a lifestyle in which I barely touch my instrument. I would have been better off attending Berklee for a year or two, finding a teacher I really loved and studying with him and playing in bands while I worked a 9 to 5.
There is a student at the GSA who is attending Berklee next year and, through cumulative scholarship awards, he is getting three years for free. Three years! That’s unbelievable. This probably doesn’t cover room and board, but that is one chunk of change he doesn’t have to worry about. Now this kid has oodles of talent I didn’t have, but he also has a lot more guidance than I ever did. If there is one thing I needed at that age it was someone (with a music background) to tell me what I needed to be working on and how I needed to be going about accomplishing it. I didn’t have it. I think I still need it! My high school guidance counselor told me Berklee would be a mistake (ironic) and that I would never get in anyway. That’s the extend of the advice I received.
When I think about how the reason some of my good friends are more musically successful than I am is that their parents just happen to make more money than mine do and could afford to pay for their educations out of pocket, it kind of bums me out. God knows those guys deserve to be successful because they work hard for what they get and they could just as easily have done nothing after graduation, but, without that major obstacle they were able to jump right in the game and kinda do whatever was necessary to make their dreams happen. In two years I will be thirty and with no major accomplishments to show since I graduated college. Music moves further backseat every day, and it breaks my heart that it’s all because of this debilitating student loan debt.
Then again, maybe it’s a choice. I really want to start taking lessons again because I feel like I need some really hardcore Anthony Vitti / Whit Browne type to just kick my ass and make me work on the bass again. Whit always told me I think too much. He’s absolutely right. I think too much. This stupid website is a testament to that. Music should be about having a good time. It shouldn’t be work. I need to be playing.