Costco-Sized Post: DC, PC Mag, and Much, Much More!

This just might be my most ambitious blog post yet. So much ground to cover, and coming into the thing with an empty stomach and tired eyes, as well. Like Jordan fighting flu-like symptoms. A fool's errand? Maybe. But I didn't choose this task. It chose me. So here it goes, in possibly the worst formatting I could have ever chosen (but I'm neck-deep in it now, and there's no turning back. Plus, now I'm curious to see if my text can reach the bottom of my photos). C'est la guerre! Text sequence will correspond to photo sequence, but on the juxtaposition thereof I place no guarantee. Suggested bathroom breaks will be marked in yellow.
Warshington, D.C.
Rachel, Jamie, Erika and I took a trip down to Obama Town over Memorial Day weekend. First off, the two-bit, no-good, snake-in-the-grass Megabus pulled the wool over my eyes. I polled my coworkers for travel suggestions, and everybody seemed to land on Megabus and Bolt Bus, but warned against the economical but wholly unreliable Chinatown bus lines. Bolt was booked solid (we decided to go to DC just the night before), and Mega was going fast, so I snagged some Saturday morning tickets just in the nick of time. Done. That night, as we were arranging our itinerary, we looked up our departure location, and noticed that it was actually just half a block away from Chinatown. "Don't worry, it's not a Chinatown bus. It's Megabus' affiliate, Eastern Travel, we're fine." "Then why does it leave out of Chinatown?" "It's not a Chinatown bus." Despite my stubborn insistence, Eastern Travel was indeed a Chinatown bus, masquerading as a reputable people-mover under the Megabus name. Scallawags! I was pretty nervous trekking down to Canal Street that morning, fearing a 13-hour journey in a three-wheeled jalopy full of chickens, stolen purses, and ornate parade dragons. Fortunately, our trip was mostly without incident, apart from the 90 minutes it took us to actually leave Manhattan because we went to Penn Station to pick up more passengers even though Penn Station is a heckuvalotcloser than Chinatown to our house but it didn't give us that option on the Megabus Web site, now did it?
Anyway, we got to Obama-Rama all in one piece (quick aside: back when we first started hearing about him, I always forgot whether his name was Barack Obama or Obama Barack, and don't try and tell me I'm the only one. Anyhow, when people mention "the Obamas" it still kind of carries over and it sounds like they're saying "the Georges" or "the Martys" and it sounds funny). Let me just say that Saturday evening was absolutely my favorite part of the trip. It was cool and crisp, the crowds were minimal, and we seemed to have the gloaming draped monuments to ourselves (relatively). It was really marvelous, and the new WWII memorial was enough to send shivers up my spine. People talk about the people and politics in DC being such a mess, and they are, but a visit to our nation's capitol really is inspiring. All the memorials of men and women that weathered wars, living existences so starkly different from mine that they might as well have lived on different planets in a different universe, well, they have a way of sucking the selfishness right out of your soul. The Jefferson Memorial is still my favorite, I have to say. It was interesting that, since my last visit (which was sometime between the ages of 8 and 12), the buildings had not swelled in size in my memory, as youngish memories are wont to do. Quite the opposite--I had forgotten how immense everything really is in DC. And how about that Washington subway system? If I were a political pundit, I would make a tired crack about how the fancy, expensive DC subway system is actually very inefficient, and thus a typical use of our tax dollars. Seriously though, compared to the NY system, the DC system is infinitely cleaner, with high-ceiling-ed stations, fancy-schmancy turnstiles, track-side warning lights for approaching trains, and LED displays to tell you how far away your train is. The problem? It's expensive, slow, and only occasionally gets you from point A to point B. It's more like point A to point 2, and you have to walk back over to the alphabet to get to B. The NY system is greasy, grimy, cheap, and fast, and you really can get anywhere. It's like comparing Denny's on its slow nights (almost always) to a Waffle House.

(bathroom break)

Yikes, I burned right through those first photos. So Sunday was full of great visits, but they were made in a considerably less peaceful fashion. It was about a million degrees, and a googleplex-percent humidity. I'm a Georgia peach, but this was bad. We went to the DC Zoo, which was awesome, except that the entire country showed up without consulting us first, which made the sweaty factor almost unbearable (your forearms slide past so many other sweaty forearms that you end up grossly basted in salt and runny sunscreen, even if you started the day without any). During our visit to the reptile house (which was, and I didn't think it was possible, even more humid inside), I completely stopped caring for whatever flora and fauna lied beyond the condensation-coated windows. They could have had a unicorn/manticore cage match in there and I wouldn't have noticed or cared, I just wanted out. But the zoo had its highlights, the ornery, growling tiger being my favorite. Then we went to the Holocaust Museum, which was educational, horrifying, inspiring and unbearably depressing all at once. Walking through the concentration camp traincar was especially chilling, and once again made me feel like a complete waste for worrying about my own troubles and woes. We arrived fairly pitifully at the Museum of Natural History, hungry and depressed, and couldn't quite buoy our spirits back up until we went to the museum cafe, where a Coke and a giant blue-whale cookie finally infused some life back into me (which I mention not entirely as an irreverent segue, but to say that the discouraging evil felt in that Holocaust history was palpable and actually physically taxing).

Monday morning we made our way to Virginia to meet Verlan, aka Verlan the Generous and/or Ellen DeGeneres, who took us to Arlington National Cemetery. When we arrived, Pres. Obama was just leaving, and we stood on the roadside watching his motorcade pass by. I pretty much saw him. I mean, I saw a few black limousines and several black SUVs zoom past, and I looked in the windows and saw shapes of people, one of whom had to be Mr. Baracktober, so my eyeballs in all likelihood registered his image. In a few years' time, this story will transform into me hoopin' it up with Obama and his pals at the White House. When that day comes, you never heard otherwise, ya hear? We watched a bit of a memorial service at the Tomb of the Unkown Solider (where I found out that there are actually three real soldiers buried there) and that was definitely my most meaningful (if not the only meaningful) Memorial Day of my life. I spent half the time thinking of Admiral Greer's (James Earl Jones) funeral from "Clear and Present Danger," which, being the only military funeral I have in my memory bank, still gave me plenty of patriotic pause. Odd and slightly stupid, but there you go. Monday's excursion on the Beijing Bullet was 10% tardy and 90% hilarious. We got to the hole-in-the-wall Eastern Travel station and were told that, even though we had arrived 20 minutes early, and even though our ticket says arrive 15 minutes early, and even though we had a printed reservation for the 5 p.m. bus, our 5 p.m. bus was inexplicably full. The Chinese fellow that delivered this news was straight out of an anime cartoon. He was short, bald, and extremely agitated, but not in a furious way. More like a "Three Stooges" desperation. His English was very limited, and the more excited he got, the less English he spoke, which was difficult because passenger after passenger came in, just like us, saying "Hey, wait a minute," and the scheduling conflict was obviously not this man's fault, but was his to deal with nonetheless. After a few minutes of trying to explain that we would have to take the 5:30 bus, he randomly started shouting "Fi Turty!" at every passerby, probably even at locals just passing through. That afternoon probably took a few years off his well-meaning, tightly-wound soul.

(bathroom break)

The PC Magazine Laboratory
It will be less wordy from here on out, I promise. My growling stomach and strobing eyeballs promise, too. Editor's note: I am seconds away from biting my mouse cable in half and punching the daylights out of this computer screen--Blogger can't decide where it wants to put my words in relation to these photos, so it's just spilling them willy-nilly all over the place and occasionally deleting the photos with no explanation. So I'll just label my paragraphs, 1-10, to correspond with these remaining 10 photos. Whew.

(1) So I work at the coolest place ever. Even though I'm on the editorial staff, not the reviews team, my work station is in the PCMag Labs, where they do all their testing. I keep a tidy area, and take flak for my post-lunch toothbrush and toothpaste on the top shelf, but so what? I recently found out that the phone to the left of my monitor is mine, so I made a goal to make a call sometime soon. I think when I do, it will be appropriate to speak in code, given my setting.

(2) This is Dan Evans' delightful domain. He reviews videogames, and occasionally, being the eager, helpful intern that I am, I volunteer to assist him in his duties, be it Guitar Hero, Punch-Out!, or Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. Not that I'm really into gloating (because I'm not), but I suppose I do find a smidge of pleasure in swapping war stories with the other BYU interns.

(3) The guy in the orange is PJ "I have every letter of the alphabet in my name" Jacobowitz, the camera analyst, and the guy in the blue is Cisco Cheng, the laptop guru. Both brilliant and entertaining. PJ's the one whose camera video reviews have really gotten my acting career off the ground (shoot! I should have referred Will Sadler to PJ's reviews so he could discover me my talent!).

(4) Cutting-edge computers as far as the eye can see (assuming your eye can see about 30 feet). They're beauties. I just wish I had the tech chops to play with them.

(5) That's me waving my ID card (hidden inside my mini duct-tape billfold) in front of the sensor that majestically opens the glass doors to the labs. I was absolutely in love with these doors for the first few days (actually, I didn't have an ID card for my first few days, and you need one to get in and out, so PJ had to let me out to go to the bathroom, then stand vigil until I returned). Not so much anymore, although I'd be lying if I still didn't feel like a big shot every time I came and went. My main gripe is that the doors sometimes malfunction, randomly opening and closing (noisily, and right behind me) for no reason, up to 10 times in a row.

(6) I sure wish this paragraph were next to its matching photo, but Blogger can't seem to manage that. Anyway, we're down to that first screen shot now. As I've said before, braggadocio doth offend my humble soul, not to mention it undermines my stalwart professionalism. But if I were prone to boasting (once again, which I'm not), I would do it like this: My How-To story struck gold! It takes a good deal of luck, but once a story gains a little momentum on blog aggregators and feeds, it can really explode. I figured my day in the sun would be brief and relatively shady, but my story somehow got picked up by Googlenews, StumbleUpon, and digg, somehow gathering over 75,000 views. That overshoots my SSB story by quite a margin.

(7) & (8) Screenshots of digg and StumbleUpon. Apparently my story was at the top of the digg homepage, but I never saw it. Looking at it now, though, it has 663 diggs and 1344 Stumbles.

(9) The very next day, I was lucky enough to write a story on a particularly hot topic (the Palm Pre) and got to be on the homepage again. "From the Palm Pilot to the Palm Pre" wasn't a lightning rod like the How-To, but it had a brief stint on the digg homepage and got enough hits to give me something that I guarantee won't happen again anytime soon: In photo (10) you'll see that I had two of the most popular stories on PCMag.com on the same day! Hooray! Part of me wants to erase all this because I feel really lame going on about it, but heck, I'm excited about it, and with journalism in the toilet these days, these moments may grow fewer and farther in between.

The End! Chipotle time.