American Cars, like American Cheese, Suck

I got the Humpy DigiFunPak on its way. Just a few more tweaks and it should be ready.

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We rented a minivan for last month's trip to Montucky. It's much cheaper than flying, and it has a lot more payload than Glenda's Jetta and I doubt if my Subaru could make that long of a trip. The van we ended up with was a 2005 Chevy Astro. Very spartan in the way of amenities, but that's quite alright. I don't really need a dashboard TV set or an automatic peanut bowl or anything like that. But the thing that became quite obvious while spending time in this van was the fact that American cars are abject pieces of shit. "American" cars is kind of an iffy term, since most makes of cars are at least partially assembled here; I'm talking about GM cars. Sure, the van drove smooth and all that, but that's because it was pretty much brand new. You don't have to be in a GM car too long to notice that the interior components are remarkably chintzy and flimsy. To the point where you have to kinda wonder if it isnt' planned obsolescence, conditioning habitual GM buyers into buying a new ride every three years or so, assuming that all cars fall apart within that time span.

And if you follow the business news lately, you've no doubt heard how GM is taking a big crap these days. That's no surprise to me, but what is really surprising is that it's evidently so surprising to GM! Their big beef is that labor and health care is horking all their profit margin, when the real reason is totally obvious to an average dink like me: their cars fucking suck! The only surprise to me is that GM managed to milk it for this long, because their cars have sucked for a long time now.

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I used to work at Quark in Denver. If you didn't know, Quark makes the software that, until fairly recently, was used to lay out pretty much every newspaper and magazine in the world. I used the shit out of it when I was a layout monkey at the Montana Kaimin and was pretty into it. Enough so that when I moved to Denver, I managed to finagle myself a job at their HQ. I remember when I started there, I got a tour of their distribution center in Cheyenne, and they were saying they sold something like 300-400 copies of their flagship product QuarkXPress a day. That's pretty awesome for a piece of software that costs something on the order of $900 per user per year.

Right around the time I signed on there (summer of 2000), Adobe was starting to make headway with InDesign, the so-called "Quark Killer" because it was intended to be superior in ease of use to QuarkXPress, as well as integrate nicely with Photoshop. They picked an excellent time for it, because Quark was quickly solidifying its reputation of having really shitty customer support and being generally arrogant and unpleasant to deal with.

So within six months of my hiring on at Quark, things started to go downhill very quickly. The Adobe thing wasn't the only factor; the economy &emdash;particularly the technology sector&emdash; was starting to find its equilibrium after having spent a couple years being extremely overvalued. Quark started to lay people off in droves, meanwhile moving almost all of their software engineering to India (at one point forcing the Denver engineers to go over to India and train their replacements before being let go!) And I wasn't a software engineer at the time, but I and about 250 other folks got the pink slip two weeks before the 9/11 apocalypse.

Ever since then I've been keeping an eye on the news to see if Quark eventually just folded. To my surprise, it stayed afloat and now apparently operates much more efficiently, as evidenced by the fact that they've had two major releases since '01 (it used to take them 5+ years to do even one release). Then I open the bidness section of the Denver Compost a couple weeks back and read that, by golly, Quark CEO Fred Ebrahimi is sinking $500 million into a planned community in India, built around the Quark corporate HQ there. I'm not entirely sure what to think about this whole thing, other than that it's just plain weird.

I have never really understood what the deal was with Fred Ebrahimi. I never met the man, but he's always intrigued me. Everyone at Quark was pretty much afraid of him, and he was infamous for making kneejerk business decisions on a whim, or according to his mood or what he had eaten for lunch that day. He routinely shouts insults at people in press conferences around the world. He lives in this fucking castle near the Denver Country Club (and it is a castle in the literal sense) that has all these junked cars in front of it. He's a multi-billionaire who purportedly immigrated from Iran with no money, and reportedly has an obsession with collecting old scrolls from the Middle East. I once saw him at the airport carrying this tattered leather briefcase that had to be forty years old. Weird.

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Nerdlinger's Nook

Google recently released an API for the Google Maps site, which I'm halfway embarrassed to say has me terribly excited. It's almost all JavaScript and looks to be not that hard to use. Within hours of its release people were already doing rad stuff with it, and I don't have the links handy, but there were city-specific real estate maps, sex offender maps, geo-tagging photos, etc. I really dig this pedometer application too.

So it's pretty exciting to see what other kinds of stuff people will use it for. I'm not entirely sure what I would do with it other than map Chipotle locations and so forth. And you can't really do anything other than street-level mapping with it (no thematic mapping, for example), and that's what rings my boner chimes.

I guess if that camera ever comes back, I can do up a map of its incredible journey.

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Espied on the back window of a pick'em up truck last week:

Eat'n Chevy's, Shit'n Rams

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