Recently in Random Stuff Category

I'm in a big of a pickle. I have been a loyal American Airlines customer since around 2001 or so. Between flight miles, bonus miles, credit card miles, etc., etc., I've banked a metric fuckton of Frequent Flier Miles. Where I live there are only two convenient airports, Stewart/Newburgh (SWF) and Albany (ALB). Six months ago, American pulled out of Newburgh. In September, American is pulling out of Albany.

I simply can't see driving two hours, dealing with city traffic, etc., etc. to go to a NYC airport that has American Airlines, when there are two airports that are local, very convenient, mostly traffic-jam free, etc., etc.

So now I need to pick out a new "preferred" airline... Here are my options....

• AirTran (SWF)
• Delta (SWF, ALB)
• jetBlue (SWF)
• Northwest (SWF)
• US Airways (SWF, ALB)
• Air Canada (ALB)
• Cape Air (ALB)
• Continental (ALB)
• Southwest (ALB)
• United (ALB)

So let's get rid of some of them right off the bat:

Cape Air - goes to like two places. Seen that sitcom Wings? Yeah, it's like that.

AirTran - Leaving SWF the same day as American, I think.

Air Canada - Only connects through Toronto. I don't think I want *every* flight I go on to be an international one going through customs.

US Airways - If I fly out of SWF all my flights, and from ALB most of my flights, will fly through their Philadelphia hub, which according to consumerist.com has an absolutely horrendous lost-baggage rate, and a 60% on-time rate. Woot.

Northwest - Has anyone forgotten the way they treated their passengers in the 1999 Blizzard? Did they even apologize? :-)

jetBlue ... oh, jetBlue, how I want to love you. If only you flew to somewhere other than Florida from SWF. Fly me to a major city, and let me partake of your glorious service. Unfortunately, they don't, and my connecting options through jetBlue are limited to "fly to Florida, and then connect to somewhere else on the east coast, and then fly somewhere west." It's just plain silly, and won't work long-term.

So that shortens the list quite a bit....

• Delta (SWF, ALB)
• Continental (ALB)
• Southwest (ALB)
• United (ALB)

Southwest is usually cheap (which is sweet) but I really really really hate the cattle-call. It doesn't usually affect me that much, since (as D can attest) I am always early to my flights, but the fact is that when I connect through somewhere, I can't be any earlier than my flight drops me off. I've got long-ass legs and I want a guaranteed aisle seat so I can stretch them during the flight. So Southwest is really my "last ditch" airline, and certainly not where I want to start banking miles again.

I used to be a rabid United flier, but -- in all honesty I have no idea why -- I distinctly remember being SO pissed at them about something that I immediately "changed loyalties" to American. My memory is extremely hazy, but I remember that "United fucked me somehow, and American swooped in and saved the day with great customer service," and I was sold. But I'm not sure if I can hold against them something I can't remember.

Continental is, by most accounts, awesome to fly on, but you pay for that level of customer service, as I also seem to recall them being one of the more expensive airlines to fly.

Delta... I dunno. I've flown Delta recently (when I was flying back from LAX on AA a couple weeks ago, AA cancelled my LAX>ORD>ALB flight for weather (all flights through ORD actually) and AA only connects through ORD, so AA had to throw me on another airline, and hence I got to experience Delta. My Delta experience was ok (heck, they came through for me in a pinch), but my view is a bit jaded by the fact that my connection time was hellishly short (30 minutes), the first leg was late, and I ended up having to haul ass through Charlotte trying to get from my arrival gate to my departure gate.

Anyone got any good long-term experiences with any of these four? Recommendations for or against?

I shouldn't be blogging this from work, but someone forwarded it to me and I have to, before I forget...

I've always love Gordon's shows. He makes for entertaining television, and it's clear from watching him in various shows (other than Hell's Kitchen that is) that -- to a certain extent at least -- there is a bit of a softee behind the loud, abusive, exterior.

One quote I absolutely loved, from a recent tvguide.com interview, which made me realize how much I like him?

TV Guide: What's your favorite comfort food?
Ramsay: In-N-Out burgers [an L.A. chain] -- I absolutely love them.

Oh, HELL YEAH. My boy Gordon likes himself some In-N-Out? I wish the TVGuide reporter had asked him what his favorite Secret Menu item was.....

Courtesy of Tera:

As JR says, decimal points are a bitch.

I can't blame JR for not saying anything. For as badly as those guys have been gouging us for years, it's nice when you can turn the tables on them for a while....

I've been thinking a lot about the Virginia Tech thing the last few days. Partly because my brother-in-law is a VT alum, as is my father-in-law. Partly because I also work on a college campus. But I've been very reticent to talk about it. Why? Because to a certain extent, I agree with this blog entry about it not being an appropriate moment yet to discuss my real thoughts.

Because oh, do I have thoughts on the topic. But right now is a time to, as Jack Bogdanski says, shut the fuck up about such thoughts.

There will be plenty of time to talk about "where things went wrong" at a macro level, or any of the various blame-game type things. For now, it's time to let people grieve, to give them the time and support they need to get through the upcoming days. After the worst of that is past, then we can look back and start to try and prevent future occurrences.

I'm trying to figure this out.

1.) Paris Hilton abandons her property in a storage unit.
2.) Someone buys that stuff at auction.
3.) They put pictures, captures, MPEG encodings, etc., of their property (they bought it perfectly legitimately through the abandoned-property process) up on the web.

Where, exactly, is the "problem"? Certainly, I can understand that Ms. Hilton may be embarrassed by the content (admitting that you take it up the butt in exchange for some drugs, for instance, may be considered awkward if that gets out, an example I am told is in the collection). However, I'm hard-pressed to figure out what legal standing Paris has over the use of stuff that is no longer her property.

Maybe she can pitch a legitimate fit over the use of her name in the domain name, for example, but what other legal leg does she have to stand on, and why has a court, temporarily at least, sided with her?

I was reading a CNN story about a guy who ended up in Montana when he wanted to fly to Australia, and while my initial thought was the "hahahaha!" inner-monologue mocking, I remembered that I damned near booked myself airfare and hotels for Portland, Maine during the week of the O'Reilly Open Source Conference being held in Portland, Oregon. (I'd made the hotel reservations, and noticed when American Airlines, unlike the hotel web site, demanded clarification on my input of "Portland"... the hotel had simply fed me the first Portland hotel it could find, which also happened to be a convention center hotel, etc., etc.)

So instead I'll just say that this serves to underscore the power of a typographical error.

Recently, you received a memo which said, in closing:

If you see open windows in classrooms or dorms on campus when it is cold outside, please close them!

Let me be the first to tell you that if you do that to my window, I will break your fingers, slowly and painfully. OK, maybe I'd settle for just banishing you from my building or something, but work with me here. Pretend like this is an honest to goodness threat here, OK?

Unfortunately, Buildings and Grounds, along with the Sustainability Committee, has drilled it into peoples' heads that "opening windows in the winter is bad." And while I might agree that it can be bad, it is not always bad.

For instance, if you have a south-facing room, with large spacious windows, it's entirely possible that the heat of the sun beating down on your building all day long will heat your office up to the point where you don't want or need "campus heating" at all, but in fact would much rather they turned on the air-conditioning again.

My office has its own thermostat, controlling JUST my room. I have it set to 55-degrees. It's 84-degrees in my room. But remember, I'm evil for leaving my window open.

So, word to the wise -- don't touch my window, despite what ResLife is telling you to do.

Now, I'm not saying she did it, but c'mon, tell me that the picture to the right, which is an artist's sketch of the woman who slashed a woman to steal her newborn, doesn't look exactly like you'd expect an artist's sketch of Britney Spears to look.

I'm officially tired of clearing out the junk comments. Leaving a comment will require a TypeKey login to authenticate with. The upside, though, is that comments will go right up automatically if you've authenticated.

Damned comment-spammers.

After reading this, I feel a little (and I do mean little, not a lot at all) bad for confronting an Air Marshal in Baltimore/BWI yesterday, explaining to him that if he's going to try for "I'm just a business traveller talking on my crackberry, honest," that he should probably not be giving physical descriptions of passengers loud enough for passersby to be immediate winners of the "Spot The Fed" game.

I don't actually know that he was an Air Marshal, he might have been TSA, he might have been FBI, who knows. I do know that if he was trying to keep cover, he did a piss poor job, and I did (extremely politely and calmly, I might point out, not like some raving lunatic) point out to him that he might as well have been wearing a uniform for as "subtle" as he was being.

Hell to the yeah, Iron Maiden's back. Their new single, The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg is available via iTunes Music Store, and it kicks serious ass.

It evokes the power, both in terms of vocals and writing, of the Powerslave era, and that's saying a lot.

I can't wait til the new album, A Matter of Life And Death, is finally released in September.

My crappy week just got a little bit brighter...

Via Grrl Still Kickin':

Mario Brothers as a live action event.

ZD has an article which says that some investment group is seeking to have a resolution voted on which would essentially make the Class A stock and the Class B stock "equals" in terms of voting power. The theory being that the Class B stock, which is only held by three top Google executives, holds far more voting power than is accounted for in actual shares held.

Now, here's the kicker, the article points out, "By their ownership of 86,753,907 shares of Class B common stock, three of the company's executives (Eric E. Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin) controlled 66.2 percent of the total voting power of all the company's shares...even though they owned only 31.3 percent of the total shares outstanding," the proposal says, according to Google's filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

So, wait... they have 66.2% of the voting share? How the hell does this investment group expect this referendum to pass? "Yes, I'd like to give up my control of the company voluntarily"? Seriously, even if every single shareholder except the top-three voted for it, it would still only be 33.8% of the votes, a clear minority.

Weird the way people will waste their time on fruitless pursuits.

Someone in the UK want to order me a few of these and send them my way?

I got my copy of Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime II CD today. As I was reading the liner notes, I notice this funny thing:

Photcreds: Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come vToo come Too come Too come Too come Too come Too come

The "v" in there is actually in the credits. Although anyone who's used a word processor knows what happened:

• They blocked out where the photo credits would go in the liner notes
• They misspelled "to" in "to come"
• They copy/pasted it over and over again to use the right amount of room, accidentally not hitting CTRL on one of the pastes, leaving a "V" in there from the malformed CTRL-V
• They never followed up and put the photo-credits in.

Oops.

While picking up some random household supplies at Target today, I looked up at the TV screens in the music section and saw a music video for a Rob Zombie song I'd never heard before. Lo and behold, Rob has a new CD out, Educated Horses.

Is it Hellbilly Deluxe? Nope. Is it Sinister Urge? Again, nope.

Does it kick ass, though? Hell, yeah.

A couple weeks ago, I drove by this little church (old enough to have a historical marker, FYI). Out front they had a little sandwich board for their "Friday Film". It said "MONTY PYTHON: MEANING OF LIFE".

That's kinda cool, I thought, a church that's willing to take a step back and laugh at itself to a certain extent, and isn't so "lofty" as to insist that anything which might poke fun at Christian Mythology is inherently evil.

But, I'll be honest, I didn't give it much thought past that point. Until a couple days ago, when I drove by again, and this week's "Friday Film" was a little further out there: Dogma.

Now, this takes things to a whole new level. I mean, Meaning of Life may poke fun at Christianity a bit, but Dogma takes it completely to the next level. I mean, Dogma describes Jesus as, "The nigger who owes me twelve bucks", which of course is delivered by Chris Rock, playing the ostracized thirteenth apostle (written out because he's black, of course). It implies that God likes to take time off and hide out playing Skee-Ball on a New Jersey boardwalk, to the detriment of anything else that might require his (her?) attention. It's got the Buddy Christ even. George Carlin as a Catholic Cardinal?

Dogma is not the kind of movie I'd ever expect to see playing at a Church's "Friday Film Night". Heck, I'm an atheist, and I almost want to go over on Friday night just to congratulate the minister for having the balls to be open-minded about everything.

I'm glad to see it, though. Christianity can, at times, be really really full of itself.

When two people come to the door of the restroom, one going in, and one coming out, the right of way is always yielded to the person going in, because by and large, they're in a lot greater hurry than the person coming out.

Seen on Peter David's blog, taken from Bill Mumy's Site, Andreas Katsulas -- known to science-fiction fans as G'Kar of Babylon 5, known to Star Trek fans as the Romulan Commander Tomalak, and to non-sci-fi fans most as the one-armed man in the movie remake of The Fugitive -- has died of cancer at the age of 59.

He was a consummate character actor, and I've never read another actor say a bad thing about him in all of my readings. His portrayal of G'Kar over the five years of Babylon 5 is quite possibly one of the best performances in all of science fiction history.

The world is a lesser place now.

Apparently, Jeremy has tagged me and now I have to go do one of these meme things:

Four Jobs I've Had

• The Original Yahoo Troublemaker (I bequeathed that title to Jeremy)


• Convenience Store Clerk


• Video Arcade Coin Lackey


• Grocery Store Cashier

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over

• Free Enterprise


• Bull Durham


• Office Space


• Real Genius

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch

• Lost


• Battlestar Galactica


• Grey's Anatomy


• Boston Legal


• (The West Wing would have made the list, but I'm too sad over its cancellation at the end of this season)

Four places I've been on Vacation

• London


• Vegas, Baby!


• Timberlock in the Adirondacks


• Orlando, Florida

Four of my Favorite Dishes

• Chicken with Hot Garlic Sauce with Wonton Soup


• Pizza (homemade)


• Roast Beef


• Lasagna

Four websites I visit daily

• none... by and large it's either in my aggregator and I read content there, or I visit it randomly as needed

Four places I would rather be right now

• London


• Chicago


• Australia


• Wherever D is at the moment

Four bloggers who I am tagging as "it". (ugh, I hate doing this)

• Jay (so you'll have some content again)


• Russ (so you'll have some content again... sensing a pattern here? *grin*)


• Damion


• Jason

Man, did anyone else watch the ABC "New Years Rockin Eve" thing last night? D and I had joked that we had to watch it because Disney/ABC was going to wheel out the animatronic Dick Clark robot again, and that's always got to be a hoot to watch.

Except this year, the robot was defective. It can't move, it slurs its speech, and only about one in three words it says were able to be deciphered. Whoever had the idea of "Let's let Dick host the show again" seriously should have their employment reconsidered.

And Ryan Seacrest, throwing it back to Dick for the final countdown? Dude, are you high? What were you thinking?

I'll be the first to acknowledge that Dick Clark has a huge place in Hollywood history. He started out with a small local dance show and parlayed that into a television empire. But, that said, you have to know when your ego is going to cost you viewers, and having Dick on TV last night just seems like one of those "what were you thinking?" moments.

John Spencer died of a heart attack at age 58.

I've always loved him as an actor, since I first saw him on L.A. Law (although, as it turns out, I'd seen him years prior as a missile silo airman in WarGames, but didn't realize it until much later). He was a classic character actor, who was able to bring a certain charm to even some of the worst characters.

Not that this is at all important in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly does leave me wondering where the hell West Wing is going to be heading in the next six months. Given that he's supposed to be the VP Candidate (and, given that the last president's VP had to resign in disgrace, how believable is it that a second VP would get elected and then vanish), that's a pretty huge hole to fill.

I guess it depends on "what's in the can" already, and what may already be in the can that they want to scrap so as to make his plot-exit easier. Right now, it seems like the easiest solution would be for Vinnick to win the election. Then Leo can simply vanish into obscurity. But without the ability to write him out gracefully, I'm not sure what else they can do, especially after last week's "We want Leo to replace Josh as the campaign manager" plot twist (which, luckily for the writers, Leo did not accept or it'd just be harder to weasel out of).

But all that aside.... rest in peace, sir.

Season 4 of Red Vs. Blue is well under way, complete with its usual great quotes:

(on the hasty retreat they made in the last episode)
Tex: "This is a long range weapon. I need distance to use it effectively."
Tucker: "Where were you plan on shooting him from? The fucking moon? If you'd have backed up any further you'd have had to mail him the bullets."

So I received an e-mail earlier this morning, telling me I hadn't made any payment on my postseason tickets for any (potential! potential! mustn't anger the Baseball Gods) postseason play. But then they followed that message with another, explaining that it was sent in error:

Please disregard the following email. According to our records your 2005 Postseason Account is paid in full. Sorry for the incontinence.

Incontinence? I didn't realize they'd sent me anything like that via e-mail.

D: I need to put some more comfortable clothes on.
Me: Oh?
D: I had to get dressed up to go to work today at the edit.
Me: Isn't your editor's edit-shop in like his attic?
D: Yeah, but I had to get dressed up. I had to put on a bra... and underwear.
Me: *laughing hysterically* I miss working from home.

Bob Denver goes to that deserted island in the sky.

I apparently first encountered this concept, amusingly enough, in an episode of Red Dwarf:

Rimmer: They say that every society is only three meals away from revolution. Deprive a culture of food for three meals, and you'll have an anarchy.

I spent this morning trying to find the "real" source for that, but can't. It appears that it may have actually been a made-up quote. Regardless of it's pedigree, though, it has certainly proven to be true, given the events in New Orleans.

In the first 24 hours -- the first three meals -- society hadn't really "broken down" yet... people were waiting to be rescued, holing up wherever they were, dealing with crappy conditions and accepting them as temporary (or at least, anyway, that's the way it seemed here watching it all on TV).

After 24 hours, though -- when you'd gone past the third missed meal -- all hell seems to have truly broken loose. Rape and murder inside the alleged safe-haven Superdome, police themselves became looters (I saw a nice AP photo of this, with a cop walking out of a wal-mart his hands full of DVDs and it looked like stemware, but I can't find the picture now), you name it, it happened.

In fact, to anyone who's read Stephen King's "The Stand", this seemed like you were watching a real live televised interpretation of the first third of the book. If you were a Christian person, living in NOLA, you might seriously wonder if you were witnessing the "end times".

D and I were discussing last night, "What's going to happen to all these people who shot other people who were trying to come after their food, etc.?"

Louisiana state statute RS 14:20 says:

§20. Justifiable homicide

A homicide is justifiable:

(1) When committed in self-defense by one who reasonably believes that he is in imminent danger of losing his life or receiving great bodily harm and that the killing is necessary to save himself from that danger.

(2) When committed for the purpose of preventing a violent or forcible felony involving danger to life or of great bodily harm by one who reasonably believes that such an offense is about to be committed and that such action is necessary for its prevention. The circumstances must be sufficient to excite the fear of a reasonable person that there would be serious danger to his own life or person if he attempted to prevent the felony without the killing.

(3) When committed against a person whom one reasonably believes to be likely to use any unlawful force against a person present in a dwelling or a place of business, or when committed against a person whom one reasonably believes is attempting to use any unlawful force against a person present in a motor vehicle as defined in R.S. 32:1(40), while committing or attempting to commit a burglary or robbery of such dwelling, business, or motor vehicle. The homicide shall be justifiable even though the person does not retreat from the encounter.

(4)(a) When committed by a person lawfully inside a dwelling, a place of business, or a motor vehicle as defined in R.S. 32:1(40), against a person who is attempting to make an unlawful entry into the dwelling, place of business, or motor vehicle, or who has made an unlawful entry into the dwelling, place of business, or motor vehicle, and the person committing the homicide reasonably believes that the use of deadly force is necessary to prevent the entry or to compel the intruder to leave the premises or motor vehicle. The homicide shall be justifiable even though the person committing the homicide does not retreat from the encounter.

(there's a 4b, but it says basically "unless the person committing homicide is a drug-dealer").

So it would seem clear that if a person is in their own residence, business, or is, simply "there lawfully", that they could easily shoot-to-kill anyone who attempted to break in, without having to attempt retreat. So those people are protected.

More interesting, though, are the reports of people (including police officers and National Guard troops), who were simply telling people "If you come any closer, I will shoot and kill you." The fear of bodily injury was so great that even trained soldiers were ensuring that they kept the upper hand by making sure they didn't get into hand-to-hand range. So, given the circumstances, a reasonable person might be able to make the case that "that person I don't know simply coming near me is an imminent threat, especially if trained professionals also felt exactly the same way." That would give him a sub-paragraph (1) defense for the homicide.

Now, and here's the interesting part -- with a complete absence of evidence, how do you differentiate someone who shot a man because he was positively fearful of what would happen if the man kept coming closer, and someone who shot a man because he had some food that the killer wanted? Answer: You really can't.

And when you can't differentiate between "lawful homicide" and "unlawful homicide", that's pretty much when society ceases to exist. And the revolution has begun.

I just realized that on my flight back from OSCON next Saturday, I've got a fargin' four hour layover in O'Hare. Now that I look at it, I remember the whole "the next earliest flight would have had a two-minute connection time, and that's a bit rough," thoughts going through my head. It's not an "epic" layover by any stretch (I've had that once before, but I can't for the life of me remember which airport I got stuck in for a while), but it's still an ugly thing to look forward on the return trip.

But, I've got my copy of Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill (Acoustic) loading into my iPod right now, so I'll be all set. I could put that disc on repeat for a while and not get bored of it, I don't think... it's that good. Go buy it. Right now. Seriously. One-click that puppy. Trust me.

I was watching the latest episode of Iron Chef America, with Kerry Simon as the challenger, and Michael Yan was one of the judges.

I remember watching his show, "Yan Can Cook", as a kid. I've never been a huge asian food person, but I always found just watching him to be entertaining. When I first was exposed to him, it was the era of Julia Childs and such who -- while extremely talented -- were extremely boring to watch. Yan was way ahead of his time (years before anyone thought of a "Food Channel" cable network) in realizing that success was to be had by actually entertaining while teaching cooking (even if I was too young to be able to follow along really, and possessing little desire to try foods from that realm of cuisine).

It doesn't look like he's got any show on the air currently, and that's a shame. Maybe Food Network will wake up and realize Yan's got a place in their lineup.

D and I had tickets to last night's Def Leppard / Bryan Adams show. Their co-headlining tour this summer, the "Rock and Roll Doubleheader Tour," was only playing in Minor League ballparks. The local date was being held in Dutchess Stadium.

Having ascertained in advance that Def Leppard was the "closing" act last night, and not having any interest in Bryan Adams at all, we decided to head over a bit after the start of the show, and try to avoid as much of Adams' set as possible.

We get there to find that:

• Dutchess Stadium has 1 parking lot.
• It is full to capacity.
• There are no neighboring lots with overflow functionality of any sort.
• You cannot park on any of the roads on the vicinity of the stadium.
• The nearest "apparently safe" place to park was about a mile or so away.

Now, seriously, who the heck designs a stadium but doesn't give its parking lot enough capacity to handle the max capacity of the stadium? This wasn't like the lot was "barely full" and there were a couple cars parked outside, there were, on the side-street we found, which was the first place to park, about a mile of cars parked on the side of the road. This is way more than "slightly over-capacity".

In the end, we decided that Def Leppard was not worth walking a mile (just to the stadium entrance, let alone how far we might have to walk into the grounds itself to get to the show), and bailed on it completely. Instead we went to see War of the Worlds, which pretty much sucked.

So needless to say, not a great evening.

So I finally got scrutinize the eight hours of MTV/VH1 coverage from last night, as well as the ABC "recap" two-hour shot. First off, let me say how disappointed I was that ABC didn't grab the HD feed and use that. Instead, I DVRed the HD channel and got the SD feed because they were, apparently, lame.

I got to the only part of the Live 8 concert that I actually gave a wet slap about - the only part that actually had me and a couple friends pondering "Could we somehow manage to get tickets to the Hyde Park show?" and that was the Pink Floyd reunion.

I will give a small amount of props to MTV/VH1 for at least "not completely butchering their performance" the way they did for most artists (you get to hear about one song out of their entire performance, with the VJs rambling inane tripe over the start/finish of it, and then about another 30-45 seconds of a different song as they use it trail out to a commercial).

Instead, with Floyd, (starting at +06:02 for those who care), you got to hear almost the entire 25-minute Pink Floyd set without any sort of interruption. The set, at least what we saw of it on the Empty-V, was Breathe, Money, Wish You Were Here, and Comfortably Numb.

Of course, it wouldn't be Empty-V if they didn't fuck with it. In the middle of Numb they cut away to the VJs who are going to throw it to a commercial in the middle of the song. Then, they go back to the band-shots, and it seems like they're going to fade out. But they don't. So you think "Hey, maybe some producer somewhere got a clue and decided no-fucking-way do we cut on Floyd, period."

Then, just as Gilmour starts to fucking shred on the guitar solo that is the ending of the song, they cut away. Because, you know, fuck world poverty, fuck great music, if Dreamworks has to wait another 45 seconds for their 100th repetition of their War of the Worlds spot to run, there's gonna be hell to pay!

But, Empty-V annoyances aside, they were hellishly great together. There was a great point where Roger Waters dedicated Wish to "everyone who couldn't be there, especially Syd," which was quite cool. Also of note was a great shot while Roger was doing Wish vocals and, thank goodness for a lucky cameraman placed behind Nick Mason, Gilmour looks over at Roger, then back at Nick Mason (and the camera) and smiles this big-ass smile.

They all seemed truly happy to be together. Maybe, just maybe, they can decide "Hey, this is cool. Let's go out and do one last album/tour/something?"

Pleasepleaseplease.

I'm beta-testing a financial management application for the Mac. The instructions clearly said "You should continue to maintain data in the last production version, as well as in the beta version, as data files may not transfer from beta to beta." (or words to that effect).

Now, I'd been a beta-tester for this application before. Several times. In years of testing it, I never had a data-file that wouldn't migrate itself from gold->beta->beta->new_gold quite easily.

So I stopped actually keeping data up-to-date in the old "gold" version. Why bother, right?

Wrong.

Installed Beta3 today. It refuses to read the Beta2 file.

Looks like I've now got to recreate the last two months of transactions. Oh, and since I installed Beta2 on top of Beta3, I need to find a copy of Beta2 somewhere so I can read the data and recreate it accurately.

Can you say "Ugh"?

Pope John Paul, in his last will and testament, demanded that all of his personal papers be burned upon his death. The pope, according to Catholic doctrine, is the voice of god. What he says, god is saying, that's the deal.

So the voice of god said "burn these immediately upon the death of Pope John Paul."

... and his personal secretary thinks he knows better than the voice of god and has decided that not only must they not be burned, but that they must be made public.

Of course, it wouldn't be politically nimble for Benedict to excommunicate the old fucker for disobeying the dying wishes of the last guy-with-a-big-hat, but that's what he should be doing. After all, what kind of precedent does that set, if you only have to listen to the pontiff if you fucking-well-feel-like-it?

Last night, I trekked my ass down to Sayreville, NJ. There, at the Starland Ballroom, I paid witness to the return of the original lineup of thrash metal greats, Anthrax. (Ok, yes, to be pedantic, it wasn't the original lineup, it didn't have the singer who was only around for their first album and fired shortly thereafter, it had Joey Belladonna, who came after and lasted for nearly a decade or so).

Starland is a great little venue. I had arranged for pre-show soundcheck access. Because the soundcheck kept getting delayed later and later, the Starland folks agreed that when we all came back after soundcheck (because you get kicked out in between soundcheck and doors-open), we would use the VIP entrance, and come in 15 minutes before doors-open. This way, we all had first pick of the choice spots against the rail. And there I was, at stage right, for the entire evening. Right behind one of the camera-crew for the live DVD they will filming of the show.

It was a setlist filled with old classics that we haven't heard Belladonna sing live in years. I would have been intrigued to hear him try out some songs from the John Bush era (after all, Bush tackled Belladonna-era songs with the Greater of Two Evils CD). But, alas, it did not come to pass.

The show was great. Security was awesome (even gave me a bottle of water midway through the show, which I slugged from and then passed back to the masses like a good concert-goer). It was just an extremely pleasant experience all around.

I miss John Bush, though. It's still sorta up in the air what's going to happen with the "present-day" lead singer. In actuality, I don't think Joey has the right voice to sing Bush-era songs. So if Joey is back "permanently", those Bush-era songs are going to vanish into the ether more or less, which is shame, because some of those albums are just phenomenal, like Sound of White Noise or We've Come For You All.

Perhaps they could end up with the "two lead singers" thing. Joey singing Joey-era songs, John singing John-era songs, and then collaborating with some of each on new albums. That would be the best of both worlds, but who knows if something like that could come to pass.

Anthrax is going out on tour this summer with this lineup, you should definitely check them out when they come around.

CNN has a story that the runaway bride has been indicted by a grand jury. She was indicted - in Gwinnett County, Georgia, of "making false statements" and one count of "making a false report of a crime".

Except, of course, she did neither of these things in Gwinnett County, Georgia. The locality where those crimes were committed, Albequerque, New Mexico, has publicly stated that they will not press charges.

How in the hell does a District Attorney in Georgia have the balls to go after someone for something done elsewhere?

How in the hell does a Grand Jury have enough collective stupidity to actually indict someone for something that wasn't even done in their jurisdiction?

A Palm Beach Post story talks about Boynton Beach's high school yearbook. Apparently, the yearbook staff decided to have some fun with the usually completely lame "senior superlatives", and had categories like "Most Whipped" or "Most Likely to Be on Jerry Springer".

In other words, the students -- willing participants -- were poking fun at themselves. Apparently, though Robert Richards' mom (Jacqueline Nobles) is all upset now that her son had his picture taken in a leash held by his (now-ex-)girlfriend.

"I don't want this to be the memory any student has of my son," [his mother] said. "Just like these books went into circulation, they can come back out."

Seriously, is this woman a retard? I hate to break it to her but except for in the 24 hours right before a reunion, nobody except the perenially lame goes poring over their yearbook reminiscing. If she had kept her mouth shut, that picture wouldn't have been anyone's memory. Now, though, what he will be remembered as is "that kid whose mom had to butt her nose into everyone else's business and got the yearbooks held up and/or recalled."

And... recalled? Come on, ... nobody's gonna give those yearbooks up now if they've already gotten them, are you kidding me?

That genie is out of the bottle, and it's fine that way, all except for in the eyes of one uptight mother who seriously needs to get laid more.

So the runaway bride is agreeing that she will try to make amends for the city of Duluth's expenses (nearly $60,000) in trying to find her. The city of Duluth is quoted in this article as being of the position that she should pay some of the expenses incurred by the city.

I'm sorry, maybe I'm confused. Why exactly is it that she should pay some of those expenses?

I'll certainly agree that she was should have told her groom she was flaking and going for a ride, but the reality is that she's under no legal obligation to do so. People have the right to just up and take a trip on their own without checking in first. People have the right to simply vanish and not tell their friends and family where they're going. It's a shitty thing to do, but it's not something they need to pay the government money for when it's all over, simply because everyone assumed the worst.

Now, yes, the chick did lie to the police who found her, but the expenses had already been incurred at that point. It's not as though "her lying" led to the government's loss of cash. That loss of cash had already long since happened.

I think it'd be spiffy if she did repay some of the loss, but I certainly don't see it as a "should" situation.

Live from SJC, it's Derek the Air Traveler....

TSA: Sir, I'm going to ask you to take off your shoes, or you'll be subject to secondary screening.
Me: That's cool. You can screen me.
TSA: You'd rather be screened?
Me: Yes.
TSA: Than just take off your shoes?
Me: Yes.
[ insert me going through the metal detector ]
TSA: Please step over here, blah blah blah.
[ the following takes place while being wanded, patted down, pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed and numbered. ]
TSA: This will take five to ten minutes.
Me: OK.
TSA: Have you ever been through a secondary screening before?
Me: All the time.
TSA: Really?
Me: Yeah. I don't like taking my shoes off.
TSA: Why not?
Me: Because it's a waste of time.
TSA: How do you figure?
Me: The terrorists have already tried that. They know we're "onto them" when it comes to that, and they'll just figure out some other way.
TSA: So why do you subject yourself to five or ten minutes of hassle?
Me: Because I'm not in a rush this morning, and while you're dealing with me, you're not wasting someone's time who is in a hurry.

Bonus points to anyone who can, without using Google, spot-the-reference. :-)

Yesterday afternoon I left work a couple hours early, on the premise that I would go to the doctor, and do "a couple hours" of work this evening.

I had to re-import several thousand images into our CVS repository (they got initially added as text, not binary, files). There were about 40 directories of images that needed processing. I wrote a program that would crawl a directory, performing the tedious "move out of the way, tell cvs to delete it, commit the deletion, move the file back, re-add it as a binary file, commit the re-add" over each and every file. I figured there was "a couple hours" worth of work there. telling it to process directories.

I chose to do the files one at a time for safety. If something takes a shit, it takes a shit on one file, not an entire directory, etc. This seemed to me to be the best way to proceed (especially when it's a process where committing to CVS automatically pushes the results live into production).

I started that process around nine PM last night. I finished it this morning... a few minutes ago. At the end, I said "fuck it" and started processing files en masse (mostly because I was dealing with less important files that I knew I could very easily recover from a backup because they're color chips and never change).

Wow am I tired. I haven't pulled an all-nighter in a long, long time. I told work not to expect me in today. I think a nine-hour overnight is enough work.

This past sunday ... it's freezing. Cold. Rainy. Ugly. Like "I want to wear three layers, gloves, thermal underwear and I'll still be cold" ugly.

Today ... got the windows open at quarter to midnight, probably leave them open all night. It's gorgeous out.

What the hell?

Brian pointed me to a post on the Chicagoist blog indicating that it appears that the venerable Aragon Ballroom may in fact be in the process of being gutted by fire as we speak.

Please let that not be so. The Aragon is one of those great small-hall places where many a metal act has brought the music to the masses.

Here's hoping it's like, the building next door that CFD is responding to, and not the Aragon. :-(

So I got my first invite to Yahoo 360 today. I suppose if I was a newbie to the computer world, this would be a really cool service. It has all sorts of blog capabilities, photo sharing, etc.

But, seriously, why would I use this?

... I have already got a blog.
... I already share my photos.

If I want to link to "my friends" I can easily do that from the sidebar of my blog. If I want to maintain "lists", ... well, crap, I don't even know why anyone would do that. If I want to review local attractions, I'll just write a blog entry about it, like I do all the time anyway.

In other words, there's really not a lot of "value-add" for someone unless they're a complete newbie, in which case they won't mind being completely locked into Yahoo's system (and, to be fair, this is the same argument I made against Blogger, and the same argument I made against Flickr, even before Yahoo borg'ed them up). All this buys you is not having to "maintain" something that really requires very little maintenance in the first place, once set up.

Maybe I'm missing the attraction. Certainly, I've got enough Yahoo readers that they'll tell me what I'm missing, one would hope.

I'm really starting to get annoyed at the tipping culture these days. My local chinese food restaurant -- which is nothing more than a walk-up counter -- has a tip jar on the counter. The Dunkin' Donuts in Goshen where I sometimes get my morning dose of sugar has a pre-printed-by-Dunkin-Donuts tip-mug "for excellent service".

Excuse me? Since when did either of these types of establishments get tips? What possible level of "excellent service" could someone ringing me up for two donuts give me that would be worthy of a tip? Are they going to carry it out to my car for me in the rain and prevent me from getting wet?

What's next? Will the McDonald's put a tip-jar on the counter, so that you can reward them for their "excellent service" of getting your order right? At what point do we as a society say "this is the job I'm paying you for, and that's why you get money, if you want a tip, take it off what I'm paying you?"

I'm not a stingy bastard when it comes to tipping - at all. I'm frequently the guy who tips way too well. But it annoys me to see people who have no business even getting tips trying to do their best into guilt-tripping people into giving them tips.

So now they've started releasing some images of Terri Schiavo, before she turned into a useless meat-sack, and I must say, she was pretty darned hot.

Too bad she went from looking that, to looking like Corky's red-headed stepsister.

.... come home from dinner-and-a-movie extremely tired around 11
.... login to World of Warcraft "just to check to see if that item you were selling finally sold."
.... see someone online that you hadn't talked to in a while
.... realize that it's quarter-to-five in the morning and you're still not in bed

Ah well, I'll sleep really late, and be really awake for poker tonight.

From a conversation with Lady Marmalade (I don't make this up, she asked to be called that!):

DB: American Idol so penalizes TiVo owners. If you don't happen to vote in that narrow window, you're screwed.
LM: So true. This is also the case with, say, Presidential Elections. You sleep through the day, your vote is not counted.

kinda hard to counter that logic.

As I've often pointed out, I rant incessantly about bad customer service experiences, mostly because I like the idea that people will do Google searches for companies they're thinking of doing business with, and maybe think otherwise.

But then there are the counter-examples. The companies that I am so extremely and totally happy with that I feel like their examples must be told as well, so that if people Google for them they'll know how great the company is to work with. These are the companies I talk about how "I might even be paying more than I have to, but I know the service is so damned great that I just don't care."

For me, one of those companies is Hollywood Poster Frames. As someone who collects movie posters, I was always dissatisfied with the crappy frames you got everywhere else, and Sue at Hollywood surprised me with high quality stuff, and great customer service.

For example, I have been ordering frames from them for a number of years, and ordering them in the same style. I placed an order for a couple frames I'm getting for some posters in my office at work. She left me a voicemail message to indicate that the metal in the "Gunmetal" style I'd been ordering for years is now a little different (more of a true gunmetal color, the old color was a little more bronze-like). She immediately offered to cut some samples from the new gunmetal, the bronze, and another color that she can get but doesn't really advertise, and ship them to me to compare them against my existing frames to decide what metal I wanted to use. (Luckily, since these will be at work, and not right next to any exising posters, I was able to tell her just to use the new gun-metal, and include the samples so I can do comparisons against the other frames for future orders).

And there will be future orders, because they go the extra mile to make my experience a pleasant one. I know I'll get quality stuff, I know it'll look good, and I know they'll stand behind it.

If you need frames (of any size, really, they do custom-cutting) ... talk to Sue there, and tell her I sent ya. :-)

Is there any faithful reader in the UK who would like to help me out by offering me the use of your shipping address for something? Nothing illegal or huge or anything, I just want something shipped to you there (since the company won't ship to the US) and have you re-ship it to me here in the U.S.

Please and thank you.

I want MTV to make this so bad it hurts...

"This is the story .... of seven terrorists .... picked to live in a cave ... find out what happens ... when people stop being nice .... and start killing for real .... Real World: The Undisclosed Location"

Seriously, I've played the MP3-rips of my Rammstein: Live Aus Berlin CD over and over for the last month (which only convinces me more that I need to get the DVD of the show as well).

I don't pretend to understand much of anything they're singing, but herzeleid.com has some great lyric-sheets (along with English translations so you can see how fucked up some of the songs are).

I could seriously see myself having a kick-ass time when and if these guys finally come back to the States.

How come all those people who leave flowers and pictures and candles and crosses and crap on the side of the road don't get the same fine for littering as all the rest of us do.

Is it not littering if you place your junk reverently as opposed to just hurling it out the window?

George and I were talking today, and realized that it's time for a summer festival tour like the days of old.

Five bands, we figured.... the two headliners (alternating on some sort of schedule of their choosing who goes on last): Iron Maiden and Judas Priest ... both of whom have summer-tour availability at the moment.

Now, the "first two" bands on any festival tour like this are local to regional up-n-comers, so we didn't really try to figure out who they should be, because it's going to widely vary. So who sits in the middle, taking the "We're known, but we're not quite headlining festivals level yet" spot? Well, given that both the headliners were European acts, we figured it'd be another Euro group. George suggested Scorpions, but I vetoed them on the "what the fuck have they done lately?" logic and, besides, you want a middle-act that's different enough to bring in a different group of people, but similar enough not to get bo