August 2002 Archives

Cool.

Fred Thompson has always been one of the few politicians I've enjoyed, maybe because he always actually seems like he's doing what he feels is right, not what he felt would get him re-elected (case in point, he's NOT running for re-election because "he doesn't have the heart for six more years"). He once pined that he longed for the "realism and sincerity of Hollywood" (as it compared to his D.C. career).

He will be replacing Dianne Wiest as the D.A. on the long-running show, which is good, because I never really liked her in that role. Maybe I just LIKED "crotchety old Schiff" (Steven Hill), and she never really seemed right for filling that spot. I have no doubt Fred's character will make me proud. :)

You da man, Fred.

So I installed the latest rev of Mac OS X, codenamed Jaguar, today. I have almost nothing negative to say about it -- graphics are smoother, the system seems to run faster than before, the new features in Mail.app are nice (although there are still a couple things I miss -- accounts that don't have inboxes associated with them cuz they're just aliases, and a "refresh all folders" feature -- but overall, the entire product is quite impressive. The only real downsides is that I expected iCal and iSync to be in the box, not "available in September", the install process takes forfreakinever, the "logging in" screen seems to stick around longer than before, and I never used to have to type my username in at the login prompt (it always remembered it from the last login). But I can live with all of those.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday said a secret court had limited the ability of investigators to coordinate surveillance against terrorism suspects and announced plans to appeal the ruling.

Is it just me or is everyone so happy that the Justice Department had limitations put on it that nobody is remembering that the entire decision took place in a "secret court"... I remember being taught in Politics & Government, in high school, that secret courts were "bad", and only fascist regimes made use of them.

Oh yeah, I forgot, that's what we live in now.

I do. I was accused, in my days at Yahoo, of "single-handedly keeping e-commerce alive". I was the king of next-day-air packages, and the receiving department would ask me if everything was ok if they were doing their rounds of delivery and didn't have anything for me. Suffice it to say that I have experienced the gamut of customer-service.

During the dotcom boom, by and large, customer service was awesome. Companies seemed to actually care about their customer, were polite, delivered on the goods or services they claimed to offer, and life was all-in-all good.

Contrast that with today. My posting of a couple days ago about DVD.com seems to be the tip of the iceburg. I just went round and round with the halfwitted customer service rep at Barnes&Noble.com, wherein he tried to explain to me (falsely) that "FedEx Overnight delivery is 1 to 2 business day committment". I explained to him that, NO, FedEx Overnight Delivery, as a product, is an overnight committment, or your money back, or the shipping fee is completely refunded, per standard FedEx policy. So when my package is late, YOU can get your shipping funds refunded, thus I want my shipping funds refunded.

I've been studiously avoiding Amazon for years (they lost me at the One-Click fiasco), but I've yet to really hear complaints about Amazon, although I have been hearing more and more rumblings about bad customer service from the folks at B&N.

Pretty soon I'll actually have to visit retailers, pay for parking, etc., and that'd really annoy me. :(

You might have thought that Mel Brooks was just being patently satirical in Spaceballs, when the President (played by Brooks, natch), opens up a can of "PerriAir" to inhale the sweet smell of pure air on his polluted and dying planet.

Seems like some folks in India owe Mel a beer.

I remember when they were "DVDExpress.com", they had great customer service. Then they tried to branch out to other revenue streams as well, and simply became "express.com", and things were still ok, but not as good.

Now, they're www.dvd.com, and I won't bother linking to them because I really and truly explicitly do not want you to go there. I wish I'd done some research on "the latest name change" before I placed an order with them. I figured it'd just been a matter of "wow, someone let dvd.com go, we should grab that domain because it's a nice market position"... instead it was "a last dying gasp by a company desperate for cash, and not averse to charging for product never shipped" (at least, that's what the discussion in alt.video.dvd seems to yield... they'll SAY they shipped it, but until you get the Attorney General or a lawyer involved, it never actually seems to reach you... go figure.. tracking numbers? Nooo, sorry, they ship - when they do ship - cheapest possible method.

So I ordered chinese food this evening, from the local chinese place whose wonton soup is just awesome (you can tell they drop the wonton's in the soup like RIGHT before they burst out the door because even on delivery, they're still "firm").

But, calling in an order is like pulling teeth. I wanted Chicken With Garlic Sauce, Extra Chicken (I end up just tossing the vegetables, I just like the garlic sauce). After going round and round over what "extra chicken" meant... what do I get?

Fried Chicken Wings (with garlic sauce).

I could ALMOST stomach that (they weren't bad, although the fried thing whacks the taste of the garlic sauce) but the real kicker was that the wings are an appetizer so... no rice. Nice hot spicy sauce, and no rice. (I didn't order rice special, because I knew the entree comes with it).

So I ended up with a useless meal. You can't have "hot-ass garlic sauce" with no rice to try and soak up the spices from your mouth.

The problem, of course, is that the best chinese-food places are the ones where the owners are "fresh off the boat" so to speak, bringing the native taste over and haven't yet "americanized" the taste. So you have to choose between "ease of ordering" and "high quality chinese food"....

Thank god the wonton was good. ;-)

... Continue reading For A Credit Card Flaunting Their Web Presence....

Via Plastic,

What the heck is this independent business man supposed to? Lodge his thumb up his ass and not work for the entire month of August because he "might get called up for jury duty"?

I'm a firm believer that the jury system needs complete reform. Here's how.

Twelve jurors are selected randomly (plus alternates). You MUST show up. If you are a W2 employee, your employer MUST pay you full wages for the duration of your jury duty. The court must provide child-care facilities for children of jurors. If you are an 1099 or contract employee, provide documentation of your average hourly rate for the last calendar year, and the cour must pay the average rate for any business day they expect you to be on call and available for jury duty. Lawyers get NO ability to weed out jurors. A jury of your client's peers is going to have biases and personal opinions. They're going to have preconceived notions. Nothing in the Constitution says you get to have a collection of idiot savants for jurors.

Too often, our jurors are poor, uneducated, folks who simply have nothing better to do than to show up for jury duty. Everyone who is smart or wealthy has gotten themself excused via a trumped-up "economic hardship", or is smart enough to sound biased against a defendant (without sounding like they're obviously faking it), etc.

We need to get back to "twelve random folks", and make sure that those twelve random folks don't pay the price for some frivolous lawsuit. The court's time is reimbursed in the way of realistic (often outrageous) fees, so why aren't the jurors guaranteed to not take a loss on it as well?

So I'm watching Sex And The City (from Sunday night, TiVo is your friend). In the scope of 2 minutes I saw blatant product placements for AOL, Amazon.Com, Weight Watchers and Krispy Kreme.

It was hard to determine if the products were there to service the plot, or if the plot was there to serve as a means of delivering contracted product placement. If there's a doubt, then it's bad. And that's my not-so-humble opinion.

Call me a sports geek, but some of my favorite movies are baseball movies... I'm watching Bull Durham, which is definitely a classic, but I'm equally willing to watch For Love Of The Game, Major League (only the first one!), Field Of Dreams, Eight Men Out, 61^*, and a slew of others.

I'm a baseball geek. I may not be able to remember every statistic and who won what playoff game, but I know my baseball movies.

... I have to believe that the dot-coms are going to see some Enron style investigation of their accounting practices during the boom, given the tone of this article.

Show of hands, who thinks dotcoms were not playing accounting voodoo-black-magic in order to keep their stock price up and attractive for investors, and useful for acquisition-currency?

I want this job, I tell ya. Sounds like a fun time. Five years though (yuk!)

My Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring DVD showed up today, and let me just say that on my 27" 4:3 screen it looks like utter crap. (It doesn't help that the TV is starting to approach 8 years old or so, and the tube is starting to get dark).

I need a new TV... must be widescreen, I don't even know if I really need it to be "huge", but I do know that I want to be able to enjoy my movie collection on it. Now I just have to figure out where the money would come to pay for it. Anyone got a spare HDTV they want to send me on an indefinite loan?

... baseball commentators saying "There's nowhere to put him!" when the bases are loaded. There must be some Federal Law requiring them to say it because it doesn't matter who is in the booth, they always always always say it.

Yes, we watch baseball, we know the rules. We know how a base-on-balls works, and how the team on defense screws itself if it walks a batter with the bases loaded. Can we please move on now?

Thank you.

Nuff said.

So my copy of West Wing Season 1 on DVD finally arrived. There's a number of things I find interesting, not the least of which is that you can't get it in the States. It appears to only be available in Region 2 (UK and Japan). (luckily, my DVD player is not hampered by those silly region-encodings you may encounter on your typical US-purchased unit). Another weird thing is that I've gotten used to NOT having "real closing credits". In the US (for those foreign-based visitors), the end credits are actually squeezed into like the right-hand 10% of the screen and the rest of the screen is used for advertising the next show, etc. On the DVD, there's actually "real" closing credits, with a closing theme and everything.

I'm not sure if there's any content changes, because while I'm a West Wing fan, I'm not anal-retentive enough to know every word uttered in the US broadcast, so I can't really compare.

All I know is that I'm glad I can finally ditch my VHS tapes, complete with commercials and crappy NBC logo overlays.

Last night I saw the new Mel Gibson movie Signs. It was exactly as you would expect it to be: creepy in parts, hokey in parts, with a dash of dark humor here and there when you least expected it. The plot was credible. I won't say believeable, because there's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that goes on with any sci-fi movie, it's not like you're expected to believe that the aliens have been secretly impersonating humans all this time, or anything like that.

It's not a movie, though, that will "last" well. Lots of movies I can watch over and over again, and I just don't see this movie having that kind of staying power. Once you watch it, it's like "OK, I've seen it, I know the answer to the mystery", and that's it. But it does make for a nice 2 hour excursion.

3 out of 5 stars.

At Jeremy Zawodny's blog, Jeremy links to a CNET article detailing how HP is now wielding the DMCA stick against a group of security researchers for publicizing a vulnerability in HP's Tru64 operating system.

It doesn't require a degree in quantum mechanics to realize that for all the HP guy's posturing before Bruce's "non-event", the real reason for HP's swatting down of Bruce had nothing to do with "making sure it didn't hurt HP Linux development" and everything to do with "making sure there's no way folks can point to HP employees as being openly defiant of the law we're about to use as a very large stick against some small underfunded security group within the next week".

I've yet to see a peep out of Bruce on this latest development, specifically I wonder if he feels like he got completely hosed by his employer who torched his demonstration on false pretenses.