Tuesday I will be in Mountain View.  Tomorrow I will be in Frankfurt with good friends and many drunk loud Germans screaming at a big TV. Tonight beyond the witching hour I declined an adventure in Koeln, being the wise or stupid one.  Today I was rocking out with people from 10 to 79 and also teaching a tango dancer to waltz to a band playing surprisingly damn good cover songs.  Also today I unexpectedly toured Bonn for two hours with a beautiful new also-unexpected friend, played piano for an entire wedding in Sankt Augustin, and ate a breakfast of bread, sausage and cheese for the many-hundredth time.

I like paying for things with a credit card.  It’s typically pretty fast (especially with those merchants that don’t require a signature for <$25 purchases).  It's secure.  And I earn travel rewards for every dollar I spend.

So when it comes to the occasional purchase online that I can only buy via PayPal I cringe.  Why?  Because PayPal really really really doesn't want me to pay with a credit card, and they'll harrass me about this during every checkout, creating a user-hostile experience each and every time I use their dog-forsaken service.

A friend recently lamented that it took eight clicks for them to buy something on PayPal.  That sounds about right.  You see, PayPal defaults users to paying from their bank account… so we have to search for a tiny “more funding options” link and then select the credit card, then be subjected to a long whiny please “Are you absolutely positively sure that you don’t want to pay from your bank account?  It’s really a better option yadda yadda yadda...” followed by a charmingly shifting yes/no set of buttons.

Look, PayPal, I want to pay by credit card.  I’ve told you this more than a dozen times.  I’ve also read/skimmed/ignored your stupid please-don’t-pay-by-credit-card notice more than a dozen times.  And, by the way, I’m well aware that you already pass on extra associated charges to your merchants when buyers pay by credit card.

So SOD OFF!  Either let me set “pay by credit card” in my preferences somewhere, or leave me the frack alone.

In the meantime, I’m hoping you go out of business, to be replaced by a company that doesn’t repeatedly spit on its users.

ADDENDUM / DISCLAIMERS:
- I work for Google, which offers a somewhat-competing service called Google Checkout. I use and like that service, but am not part of the Checkout team.
- My anger towards PayPal may seem heavy given the seemingly light-transgression described above.  But it’s just the last straw.  PayPal has a history of thumbing its corporate nose at its users, and I’ve had the displeasure of using PayPal for many years as a buyer and seller on ebay.

Today’s entry is short and wonderful.  Behold, in the video below, Matt Harding… “dancing” around the world, one city at a time.  At the 54 second mark, watch the video really come alive when he delights countless locales who join in the dancing… and, i guarantee, charms all of you watching, too .

For more information, see www.wherethehellismatt.com.
Also, you really really must see his other videos (linked under his name).

Edited on June 23 to add: Thank you to Bee for pointing out my URL typo! Now fixed

Once again, I was off to Germany… home of good friends, heavy food, wacky long sentences, and Lufthansa, the airline whose plane I was unceremoniously squished into not like a sardine, but wurst.

I had the foot-munching-tray aisle to my right, and a stupendously larger-than-life and dumber-than-devil-fossils young fella to my left.  To his left sat an acquaintance of his, seemingly of equal gelatinousness and dimwittedness. For the purposes of this entry, we’ll call them Slad and Elad, respectively if not respectfully.

* * *

Slad had no sense.  No sense of etiquette, culture, space, or time.  No sense at all, really.  And he was happy to share this nonsense with me, loudly… cheerfully interrupting the safety instructions which were actually melodious and fascinating in comparison.

Slad: HEY!
Me: Hi.
Slad: THEY’RE TALKING GERMAN!
Me: Yeah.
Slad: WHY ARE THEY TALKING GERMAN?
Me: It’s Lufthansa, a German airline.
Slad: [A look even blanker than usual]
Me: ...And we’re going to Germany, so there are Germans on board.

Only the first part had sunk in.  And barely at that.

Slad: LUFTHANGLE?
Me: Lufthansa.
Slad: YEAH!?  BUT THEY’RE STILL TALKING GERMAN!
Me: [speechless]

About 30 minutes into the flight…

A friend of mine just let me know of a frustrating and seemingly unfair issue in his neck of the woods:  A popular and much-loved priest in South Dakota is apparently about to be deported due to what seems to be a pretty lame bureaucratic snafu (pemanent residency application accepted but later lost/misplaced).  An advocacy site is here: HelpFather.

Something you can count on

I managed to get up at 8am to go to the gym today.  This is impressive, because:
- Today is Saturday.
- I went to the gym yesterday.

But that’s not really the story here.  Rather, we had a substitute teacher for our gym class who giggled in an adorable, Japanese-school-girl’ish way, and apologized for not speaking much English.  Continuing on in mildly broken English, she pleaded for us to just follow her and everything would be okay.

Okay, then. But I soon realized that something wasn’t quite okay.

I’m not a crazy athlete, but I like working out at the gym and also dancing a few times a week.

Finding good dance shoes wasn’t so hard for me.  I got personal recommendations from some of my lindy hopping friends, and was also delighted that the friendly folks at dancestore.com were happy to offer personalized suggestions over the phone.  For the record (and now from personal experience), I recommend that all lindy hoppers get this dance sneaker; it makes turning and spinning a breeze.

But I’m having a much harder time finding good cross-training and running shoes.  I’ve had good luck with New Balance shoes in the past, but it’s hard to find a good selection of ‘em locally in my size, so I decided to go online.  Sure enough, via Amazon.com or Zappos and undoubtedly countless other sites, I have a choice of zillions of shoes.  And that would be okay if there was some help filtering… but there’s not! :o

Yesterday, I bought ”Wii Fit” (a balance board + training CD). I decided I was really committed to exercise more and eat right. Today, unfortunately, I missed breakfast due to a dentist appointment and came into work late.  I grabbed a pack of cashews… not too bad.

And that’s when it happened.  Charles walked by my desk.

In junior high, I was not thinking about love.
In high school, love was for everyone but me.
In undergrad, love was only for the Bad Boys.
In grad school, I was delighted to realize that good guys could find love, too.

And now, I am tempted to believe that love is surprisingly, frustratingly, completely random.

The Rational Me yearns to apply logic to love, typically less out of need than pure intellectual curiosity.  Do [x] and you will find love.  Be [y] and you will find love.  Or, most simplistically and IMHO reasonably, be a Good Person and you will be well-deserving of love and will be correspondingly likely to find it.

And yet, despite seemingly having many data points, I fail to find many firm correlations, much less prerequisites or guarantees.

Here are a few thoughts on music services I’m in love with online.  CAVEAT:  Many, if not all of these only work in a limited number of countries due to lame licensing complications… typically the United States, often coupled with Canada and/or the UK.  And it’d be wrong, oh so wrong to use proxies to get around this .

* * *

I just learned that on Last.fm you can not only play tons of (full length!) songs on demand now, but do so without even having an account.  This makes it a great service to share neat music finds with others!

Here’s an example:
The short, catchy, and wordless 47 Reasons, from the charming and often hilarious a cappella group, The Bobs.

Downside:  Individuals are technically only supposed to be able to stream a song full-length three times.

Other music services online that I love: