Recently in Rantings And Ravings Category

Yes, that's right, kids, if "how to type meaningless crap in under 140 characters" is something you're having trouble figuring out, O'Reilly is running a Twitter Boot Camp. For the low-low price of $399, you too can be "trained" on things that are essentially covered in the help pages of what has to be the simplest and yet most inane product ever devised on the web (and let's be honest, that's saying a LOT).

What's more, there's the option of UPGRADING to the boot camp plus a "talk twitter dinner" with Tim O'Reilly, for $1500. Now, meaning no disrespect to Tim, because he's a fine human being and he keeps robo-signing my quarterly royalty checks, but .... SERIOUSLY!?! $1100 extra to "talk about Twitter" with Tim over dinner? For fucks sake, that dinner better be cooked personally by Mario Batali at that price, and include full-GFE with someone cute, because that's just insane.

You can go to the O'Reilly Open Source conference (or, frankly, almost any conference O'Reilly runs) and sit down at the same table as Tim at lunch and eat a meal with him, and I'm sure he'd happily discuss Twitter, or Perl, or web 2.0, or whatever other topic you brought up, because that's the kind of guy he is. He loves to chat about tech issues. There's nobody so hard up to talk to Tim that they need to pay $1100 to do it, when Tim does it for free all the time. :-)

It truly is a world gone mad, I tell you.....

I'm a big fan of the BBC show Spooks. A&E aired? airs? it in the US as MI-5 but it was always a cut-down chopped-up version made to fit in US timeslots, so I've never really watched it that way.

For me, I wait until a given season is available on DVD in the UK, and then buy the DVD set, and import it into the US so I can watch it then. Historically, how this is worked is that I see on the BBC web site (here) that there's a new season in the works, and then I start looking at UK DVD retailers a few months later to see if there's a release date for the DVD set.

Having just received my Season 6 DVDs a few days ago, I decided to check in on Season 7. After all, by the time one season makes it to DVD, the next season is usually in production. That rule seems to apply the same both here and in the UK.

However, when I go to the BBC homepage for spooks, I'm instead redirected to http://www.bbc.co.uk/spooks/nonuk.shtml, which tells me:

THIS CONTENT IS ONLY AVAILABLE TO UK RESIDENTS

I feel like the Weekend Update folks from SNL. I just want to babble "SERIOUSLY?!!?" over and over at them. They have decided that I, as a non-UK citizen, aren't even allowed to know about the show. No, if I want information about Spooks, I've got to hope Wikipedia and the DVD retailers can keep me up to date.

It's not as though this is something based on them having sold the rights to a US broadcaster, because the Doctor Who website is alive and well for non-UK viewers.

It really does boggle the mind how much the BBC just "doesn't get it" when it comes to the web....

UPDATE: Dan Taylor from the BBC noted in the comments that they've fixed the problem. Well done and thanks!

CNN has a story about the proposed $700,000,000,000 bailout of the financial industry. There's a great quote in there:

Paulson said that the bailout plan is the only way to unfreeze financial markets, giving firms the confidence they need to start lending to one another once again.

Y'know what? I'm not sure I want them to be confident right now. They shouldn't be confident. They should have the same insecurities about decision-making that we all do right now, mostly because it was their bad decision-making that caused this mess in the first place. Sure, you can point to people who borrowed more on mortgages than they could reasonably pay back, but the counterpoint to that argument is that these lenders lent money they should have known couldn't be paid back, or they bought mortgages from lenders without investigating fully the thing it was they were buying.

At the end of the day, the corporations gambled on their ability to predict the future and came up short.

If corporations get a free do-over, at taxpayer expense, then I for one am fully in favor of Phil Hellmuth walking into the Treasury Department, saying, "I flopped a set of Queens, and some idiot who didn't know the odds held on until the river and cracked my set with a straight. I got busted out of the tournament and lost my $50,000 entrance fee. Can I have a check, please?"

Because that's EXACTLY the same goddamned thing. These corporations gambled and they gambled badly. If they don't suffer, they will not learn a damned thing other than "we're considered too important to ACTUALLY lose money, so we can gamble however we want to and the taxpayers will come in and cover our losses... but obviously, we don't share our wins with the taxpayer."

Yes, it will mean tough times if these companies are allowed to fail. We need tough times.

My grandparents' generation lived through a Depression. An honest to goodness "I'll work for food" depression. They learned the importance of savings. They learned to save up for what they wanted to buy before they bought it, and the only debt most of them carried was a mortgage.

We've grown soft since then -- and make no mistake I count myself in that "we". We've accumulated far more per-capita debt than ever. Our annual personal savings figure has declined to the point where, each year, we save negative money. Why shouldn't we live on deficit spending? The government's been doing it for years with no problems....

Let the economy fail. And my generation, and the generation to come will grow up with the hard lesson that apparently needs to be re-taught every so often, on how to handle their finances.

It's been hard to avoid hearing about the Fannie-Mae/Freddie-Mac debacle, and how our congresscritters are planning to bail them out. "It'll be the end of the world" they say, "too big to be allowed to fail," they say.

I say horseshit.

There was a wonderful quote on NPR this morning which talked about the inherent impropriety of corporations where you have "Privatized profits and socialized losses."

If we -- you and I the American taxpayers -- are going to be bailing out these two giants, who've been passing along corporate profits to shareholders for years instead of building up the capital reserves they needed then the shareholder interests are immediately forfeit.

But in reality. I'm all in favor of letting them fail. Yeah, it might have some repercussions. Yeah, the corporations in question will crap themselves hard and all that. But how many private entities are we -- the voting taxpayer -- going to allow to make really really phenomenally stupid business decisions, and then have us pick up the tab for them? We do it with the airlines, we've been doing it left and right with mortgage companies, and now we're talking about doing it to the tune of billions of dollars.

No. You made your bed, now lie in it. And maybe the next generation of investors will learn to research better when they invest their money in companies with unsound business practices.

CBS really needs to learn what every other broadcast network has learned:

• Live sporting events always run long
• The programming which follows live sporting events should be "flexible" in its timing... give that time to the affiliates for their local news, for example.
• If you're not going to make it flexible timing, then you certainly don't do your season premiere episodes soon enough after the overrun slot that you can't have stolen back the time from the commercial sponsors

As we sat down to watch our TiVo'ed copy of this season's premiere of Amazing Race, we realized that the first thirty minutes of the time slot was us watching some crappy 60 Minutes episode we didn't give a wet slap about. We were still in the 9pm-10pm time-slot when we noticed this, and nothing else had started recording, so we were able to quickly tell the TiVo to grab "whatever is on CBS from 9-10", and it grabbed everything starting at the beginning of the 30-minute live-window, from 9:07-9:37pm, but seriously, if we had decided to watch it like the next day, I'd have been pissed. (Heck, we already were a bit pissed, we missed seven minutes of footage of them traipsing about Ireland, and we'd been sort of curious to see if they went anywhere we did).

What adds insult to injury is that if CBS had "Clue One", they'd butcher their live 60 Minutes airing... it's fucking 60 Minutes... it's a whole series of 15-minute news pieces. Here's an idea, if the fucking NFL broadcast is running 30 minutes over -- chop two pieces out of the 60 Minutes episode and air them NEXT week. I mean seriously, we're not talking Quantum Mechanics here. You've got a program that you can slice up into manageable time-slices. Tell the on-air talent for the football broadcast "Get us to the nearest quarter hour", and then show however many segments from 60 Minutes are appropriate. If you insist that "60 Minutes" live up to its name, don't air it right after a live sporting event that you know will always run late!!!

Seriously, if I can sort this out, and I'm not in television professionally, you'd think that people who get paid to do it for a living would catch a ride on the Clue Bus.

If your "field test" can't tell the difference between methamphetamine and cat urine, then maybe it's time to scrap that field test. And maybe you shouldn't hold someone in jail for nearly two months while you sort out how brain-dead your field test is.

Via Reason: Hit & Run:

This is what happens when you try to videotape your neighbor's warrantless search and arrest in Portland:

The moral to the story? I'm not sure... but the complete and total abuse of force by the State (see previous post on Blackwater, see the "Don't Tase Me, Bro!" kid a week or two ago) are starting to get more and more common.

It's worth pointing out, at the very least, that these sorts of abuses of authority, attacks on civilians by the ruling powers-that-be, attempts to control foreign lands, etc., were pretty prevalent in the late eighteenth century. And it didn't turn out so well for the bastards, then, either.

I'm not, at all, advocating violent overthrow of the government (that, my friends, would be a crime). However, I'm not ashamed or afraid to predict it. Neither party has a great track record on this front (the Red Team has Iraq, the Patriot Act, and Guantanamo Concentration Camp X-Ray... the Blue Team had Waco, Ruby Ridge, and others), so don't look to "the 2008 Election Cycle" to solve all your problems. It's not going to.

It's going to come down to, eventually, the population getting seriously pissed off at its leaders in both parties, and voting the bastards out whenever they try that crap, or it's going to come to an American Revolution style showdown... and the verdict really isn't in, for me, as to which outcome is more likely.

(Title is a reference to the paint job on the Decepticon "police-car" named Barricade from the Transformers movie)

Take this situation from my old home town...

A sixth grade boy asks a fellow sixth-grade girl to go out. Girl's ex-boyfriend, and five other sixth-graders, hatch a plot to literally slash the boy's throat. They build little weapons out of the blades from pencil sharpeners and come up with a whole plan to isolate him from other people, surround him, and then slice his throat open to kill him.

The kids are suspended, put on trial, get probation essentially (WTF on the judicial system there), but then -- are sent right back to school with their fellow students the following fall (now).

The victim is positively scared to go to school. Go figure. He's going to private school now. Who's paying for it? His own parents, because the school district insists there's no danger. Other parents are scared for their kids' lives, and those kids are scared to go to school as well. No fucking shit, man, especially since they're too young to be allowed to carry concealed for self-defense. *grin*

What amazes me about all of this is how fucked up the priorities of school districts are.... You don't have to hunt hard to find stories of kids who were sent-home, suspended, or expelled, because their attire was "disruptive to the educational process" (read there, "it annoyed the old people"). Never mind that 99% of their fellow students probably wouldn't even have noticed or cared, it was disruptive, damn it.

But students having a real, legitimate, founded, fear for their lives from their psychotic fellow students? No, that's not disruptive! Those psycho-kids have, and I quote from the article:

[Superintendent] Rhau said the children involved in the plot deserve an education and a chance to move on with their lives.

How come that logic doesn't apply to those kids who occasionally have a piece of profanity on their shirt? Or wear some shirt that's got divisive political speech on it? Seriously, if the educational process is so important, so sacrosanct, that conspiracy-to-commit-murder can't be allowed to interfere with it, then someone needs to explain to me how a shirt that says "Meet me at 4:20", or "Impeach Bush", or even "Fuck The Police" is somehow fair game for denying the educational process to a kid.

If you ever needed concrete proof that the public school system is simply fucked up beyond repair and needs dissolution, this is it.

(Contact Info: Richard Rhau, Superintendent, 845-247-6500)

Via IMDB News, although I'm sure it's just a feed from somewhere:

The Snickers ad that ran during last month's Super Bowl in which two mechanics munching at each end of a candy bar end up mouth to mouth and then register their disgust, offended not only gays but also religious conservatives, it turns out. The Smoking Gun website on Monday posted numerous complaints filed with the FCC over the ad. One wrote of feeling "violated" by the ad, writing "God knows, I didn't turn on the superbowl [sic] expecting to be tricked into watching gay sex." Another wrote that the spot violated "our religious beliefs and exposes our children to obscene and disgusting material they are taught are wrong." Other letter writers complained about Prince's performance during halftime likening it to gay porn. In all, the FCC received about 150 complaints about the telecast -- a far cry from the tens of thousands of letters that rained down on the commission in the wake of the Janet Jackson "Nipplegate" scandal three years ago.

First, is this the best the homophobic right has to send to do battle for television decency? People who can't differentiate between "two clearly straight men who accidentally kiss" and "gay sex"?

I understand that it's been previously established as a matter of law that "oral sex is sex", but I'm not aware of anyone anywhere in the world that categorizes "kissing" as "oral sex". If the ultraconservative freakazoids who write the FCC do, well, seriously, I'm forced to wonder if their significant others are really all that satisfied.

And, what the hell, dude? A commercial spot "violated your religious beliefs"?!!? Christ, every Sunday morning I see hours upon hours of programming which "violates my religious beliefs". I think that talking about a guy nailed to two boards up on a hill is disgusting, and I don't think children should be exposed to that kind of graphic imagery on television every Sunday morning, but you don't see me writing the FCC about it. What I do is change the fucking channel.

But now I'm actually seriously considering surfing the web every Sunday morning, and pointing out every time I see the use of a crucifix with some guy nailed to it and say "Hey, man, that type of torture is R-rated level material! Get that shit into the late-night hours where kids can't see it!" You should too. Let's start a letter-writing campaign to get the graphic imagery, and the shows which "violate our religious views" out of Sunday morning television. Put that crap on cable where it belongs: CNJN - Conservative Nut Job Network

As I commented to D last night, "I love the Grammy awards. They're an excellent reminder to me each year of how much I loathe and despise the state of the music industry."

Of all the live performances, there were really only two that I liked: Gnarls Barkley's rendition of Crazy, and the opening song by the Satan-Is-Now-Ice-Skating-To-Work Reunion of The Police.

Now, what clinched it for me -- what burned into my heart an absolute hatred for all things Grammy -- is the fact that they were only given a one-song set. Carrie Underwood? Three songs for her -- hell there was about fifteen minutes there where it stopped being an award show and just became a Carrie Underwood/Rascal Flatts concert night. Mind you that there's no evidence Ms. Underwood will have any kind of long-term staying power, she could be flash-in-the-pan gone in two years. Who knows?

Justin Timberlake? Yeah, he was on for three songs. I understand that the Boy Band Refugee is all the hip rage these days, but c'mon. Did we really need three songs by him?

Oh, and the clincher? "Whoever that random chick off the fucking street was"? Yeah, she got TWO fucking songs. Yeah, that's right. Some no-talent assclown off the fucking street got to do more songs than a reunion of The Police. What the fuck is that about? Some chick who - literally - the only people who know her name are her family gets more airtime than a band who literally defined music for part of a decade?

I wanted to walk away and go do something - anything - on the computer for hours, but I sat through hours of tripe hoping beyond hope that, well, since they're bringing performers back later in the evening (Justin and Mary J. Blige both did "repeat performances" hours after their original stint), that maybe they would close with some Police tunes or something. But, nope, no love for the Police.

So, that's it. I'm done. Next year, I'll just let D watch them on her own. Fuck 'em.

tv.yahoo.com has been one of the few Yahoo services that they had left well-enough alone with. The front page UI had some basic information, a schedule-grid for most of the major-networks for the prime-time period, and was an excellent resource for just going there "quick to see what's on TV tonight."

But, like all things Yahoo that don't completely suck, they're not content if they're not ruining it, so some product designers got their hands on it, and now if you go there, you will get "Yahoo!TV Beta". Unlike with Yahoo!Mail and others, though, there's no way to say "Let me continue to use the non-suck-ass interface as long as possible please."

What are the specific complaints?

1. The front-page no longer has a really convenient schedule grid.

   It used to have a prime-time schedule grid, in static HTML, that was infinitely useful. Wanted to see what was on for the entire prime-time window on the major networks? You don't even have to sign in, it's just right there -- useful. Now, you get this ... abomination... that only shows you like 90 minutes worth of TV, and instead of prominent placement "above-the-fold" where it's useful, it's buried down on the second page of the site so you have to go looking for it. Very un-useful.

   
   

2. The Ajax interface to the "regular" listings page is retarded.

   Alright, so let's go look at the "big grid", customized to my needs...

   

   This is after I've slid the little pointer-thing to something that "looks close" to what I want. So it'll start at 9:00. However, 8-9pm is in prime-time. Can I slide that bar back just a smidge so it'll show me 8-11pm instead of 9-midnight? Short Answer: Nope. The granularity appears to be that the shortest move to the left that I can achieve will move the bar so that the window shows 6-9pm. In other words, because they want it all to just be nice clean "three hour window segments", they've completely gimped the interface so that it's impossible to see "prime-time". Also, you can't easily even see "what's coming on from now forward?" For example, right now it's 8:10 in the morning. What do I see on the screen?

   

   Yeah, because I care so much about what was on from 6-8 that it I would gladly give up the ability to see what's coming up in order to know what I already missed. And, again, like primetime, if I'd like to see "from 8am-11am", I'm shit outta luck.

   Wanna know what's going to be on when you get home at 4:30 this afternoon? Yeah, you're shit outta luck, too. Have fun hopping back and forth left and right in their interface.
   

Anyone got any suggestions for places a guy can go to answer the simple question "what's on TV tonight?" without having to leap through stupid hoops to get the useful data?

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer has an article which says:

"In the last two days, we have taken a dozen baked pies," he said.

Pie filling apparently is banned from carry-on luggage, too. But the pies didn't go to waste. They were taken to the airport's United Service Organizations lounge, where soldiers passing through can relax and eat.

Wow... where to begin?

First, if the pies are so dangerous, and might be a threat, why aren't they being destroyed in a secure facility?

Second, if you're going to feed them to anyone, why would it be the soldiers? I mean, after all, aren't they the ones you should be shielding from this extremely hazardous threat?

Personally, I think it looks a lot like the following, teeny-tiny minor little clause to the Constitution has been violated:

Amendment V - ... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation ...

Seems to me that by confiscating them -- and then using them as a food product for other people (e.g., consumption by others, as opposed to simple destruction) -- the private property has been taken for public use, and everyone who had a pie taken in Cleveland airport is due a check for the fair market value of the pies.

... so I could fire them if they didn't show up to work on Monday.

I just wish they'd stop calling it "A Day Without Immigrants", since they're trying to also sucker American "supporters" and students to join in.

Why are they doing that? Because the ones we'll really miss are the ones who are here legally, doing really productive work and making good on the American dream -- legally.

Nobody will notice if some shit-job doesn't get done for a day, and that "nobody noticing" doesn't make for good headlines.

As seen on JWZ's blog:

Seriously... maybe, just maybe, it's time to kick the entire public education system to the curb, when we have an excellent student, a straight-A student, a student who is pretty much what every teacher shows up in the fall hoping that they'll catch a glimpse of let alone teach... when such a student is thrown into suspension because her highlights are a little too red.

And seriously, look at that picture. Do you think those highlights are anything that could be considered "distracting"? The fuckwits in Marshall, Missouri think so:

An administrator at Bueker Middle School said the girl's red highlights were distracting to other students.

School officials said there is a rule at Bueker that hairstyles that are distracting to the educational process are not allowed.

So what has Kristen learned:

• She can be unique - just like everyone else.
• The ruling class are morons.
• The ruling class, as morons, will make idiotic rules.
• It doesn't matter how much you succeed, what matters most is that you conform.

If those highlights are "distracting" then I don't know how the hell I got through high school with that teacher who had the crazy-ass "half-brunette, half-grey" hair-do that every school has at least one of.

I was reading a CNN story about a guy who's going to jail -- essentially -- because he won't let the government into his finances to verify that some money he claims he "lost in international investments" was actually lost. You see, he was in the middle of a divorce, and his ex-wife claims he was hiding the assets.

But here's the trick, see. He tells the court "I lost it," but doesn't give them the authorization to go traipsing through the data themselves. In other words, he asserts his rights not to be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.

Since international money-laundering like the wife suggests happened would be a criminal act, the guy is -- quite rightly -- refusing to give the government the evidence it needs to convict him. Go. Fucking. Figure.

But, since he won't waive his fifth amendment rights, he sits in jail on contempt charges. His contemptuous act : not helping the government make a case against him.

Is there any constitutional provision still being enforced? No? Didn't think so, just checking.

Yesterday, a Federal Air Marshal shot and killed a passenger who was acting irrationally, refusing to follow the instructions of the law enforcement official pointing a gun at him, and - oh yes - had indicated that he had a bomb and intended to blow the airplane up.

There is now a hue and cry over the fact that the wife of this individual had been crying and screaming and pleading for the Air Marshal not to shoot him, saying he was "mentally ill" and "off his medication".

Excuse me? What the fuck? If he's mentally ill and gone off the reservation, that's more of a reason to shoot him, not less. Off their meds is when a person who is normally quite sane and composed may in fact do something completely crazy like, say, try to blow up a plane. There are two types of people who do that sort of thing ... cold and calculating people (Al-Qaeda style), and mentally-fucked-up people (Hinckley style).

We shouldn't let ourselves get caught up emotionally in the whole "his neighbors thought he was quiet and loving" type of nonsense. His neighbors probably very very rarely saw him go off his medication, too.

I'm the first one to gripe about the "jack-booted thugs" these days, but I have to say that given what the media has released -- which I should point out seems to be heavily biased in favor of the dead guy -- I have to call it a clean shoot.

OK, here's a note out there to blog authors in general, but especially to one particular blog author who shall remain nameless.

If you allow comments, it is not so you can have a nice echo chamber where only people who are willing to "toe the party line" tell you how smart you are. It's for reasoned discussion about the topic of the post. That means that occasionally people are going to agree with you, occasionally they're going to disagree with you. The real test of one's beliefs and convictions is not how many other people think they're good, but can they stand up to critical debate. In other words, if you tell me that "such and such is so," be prepared to back it up when someone says "no, I don't think so and here's why."

Especially if it's not even that they're saying "your conclusions are wrong" but are actually calling attention to your factual inaccuracies.

Silently dropping those blog-comments onto the floor isn't the answer. Although it may seem like the easy solution, all it really proves, to anyone else, is that your position can't be defended. Deleting the comments which point out your errors doesn't make you look smarter, it makes it clear that you're an idiot.

You'll notice that the only time I've ever "censored" blog comments is when they're spam, not when they disagree with me. People disagree with me all the time, I've got no problem with people disagreeing with me. The only times I delete posts are when it's spam, and when it's something like "You're a dick. Fuck you," or other similar drivel. Post an actual argument, even a poor one, and I let it through. Debate promotes a better understanding of the truth. Neither side of an argument is ever 100% right or 100% wrong. The middle ground is where the truth lies and only by listening to both sides can you get to that middle ground.

And I guess I just feel sorta sad that there's morons out there who don't get that.

Katrina is wreaking havoc in the South, of that there can be no doubt, and my hopes for safety and security go out to everyone down there.

Everyone, that is, except Biloxi, MS Mayor A.J. Halloway, quoted in a CNN article:

"This is our tsunami," Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway told the Biloxi Sun Herald newspaper, referring to the December 26, 2004, tsunami that killed more than 226,000 people in the Indian Ocean region.

"This is our tsunami"?!?! Seriously, dude, here's a fucking reality check for you.

There were 226,000 dead people in the tsunami.
There are, right now, maybe 100 people dead from Katrina. That's being generous. Mississippi is reporting 55 right now, Florida 10. I'll pad a little for reports not yet in.

If ten times as many people died in Katrina as presently did, it still wouldn't come close to the death toll from the tsunami.

If one hundred times as many people died in Katrina as presently have, you'd still be a far fucking cry from the tsunami's death count.

If one thousand fucking times as many people died from Katrina, only then would you finally have reached HALF the death toll as the Indian tsunami.

It's tragic that anyone died at all, but don't sit there and have the balls to compare your pissant little "under 100 dead across a thousand or so miles of coast" with "nearly a quarter of a million people dead".

Jesus Christ, that's like seeing a hundred people trapped in a burning temple and saying "oh, woe is us, this is our Holocaust!" ... it's just so completely on the wrong end of a completely different scale as to be laughable, insulting, arrogant, and self-absorbed, all wrapped into a single nasty package.

As seen on Jurist, a New Jersey court of appeals has ruled that a company with no nexus in New Jersey (as it was previously defined) now is liable for paying New Jersey taxes simply because it ships product into New Jersey.

Seems like a good reason for businesses to simply say "We will not ship to NJ. Please move to a state that isn't as boneheaded as yours is. Thank you for playing."

Although, obviously, it's pretty tough for NJ to really enforce it (after all, with the company completely lacking in NJ nexus, there's no assets for NJ to seize or anything like that).

Also, the company probably should appeal...something about "interstate commerce" being the domain of the federal government, not the states themselves. I remember reading that in a document somewhere once...

On the way to work this morning, the "Check Engine" lamp lit on the dashboard. It occurs to me how much of a scam this whole check engine light is:

• It's designed so that the average, non-really-tech-savvy, consumer has no way to get access to the information it represents, or to reset it
• You have to get it reset to pass an annual state inspection in many states (including the one I live in).
• The dealer often charges a ludicrous fee - the last time I paid $149 - for them to send a guy out to the car, plug in the hardware, read the codes, and walk back into the shop. Seriously. At that rate, that box pays for itself in like 20 or 30 customers. After that, it's just pure ass-rapeage profit.

But it looks like I'll be driving the Jeep around for a bit, since I won't have any opportunities before GenCon to get the Miata over to either Middletown (where it got worked on last time) or Albany (closer).

Ugh.

So apparently, Congress has decided that they're going to extend the amount of the year under Daylight Savings Time by two months. Let us count the ways this is a dumb idea.

First, there's the fact that Daylight Savings Time's whole mantra "that you get more hours of daylight" is complete horseshit. An act of Congress doesn't change the shape of the Earth's orbit or the tilt of the Earth's polar axis. There's the same amount of daylight, it's just not necessarily convenient to the exact hours of working stiffs.

Second, why do we need more DST?

Third, imagine the costs of this.... the start and end of Daylight Savings Time has been hardcoded into the locale information of literally millions of computers all around the world. For this to work, they're all going to have to be upgraded to deal with the new date-ranges.

If you want to reform Daylight Savings Time, the reform is to make it go away. Seriously.

I got an e-mail earlier today, which said the following:

My email address is protected by Mail Authorization and Permission System (MAPS). You must register to email me. Registration is quick and easy and you need only register once to be added to my white list, thereafter you should have no problems emailing me. This is not unlike the authorization procedure in many instant messaging clients.

Ah, yes, yet another of those systems which say "Oh, look, I got spam. Here, why don't you sort it for me instead of me training my system to do it myself?"

So, in accordance with my long-standing policy of "Never register my e-mail address to allow legitimate mail to go through, and always confirm messages that are spam," I happily confirmed the spam-bounce Andrew was getting from one of my mailman mailing lists, so he'd get the junk in his mailbox.

He then sends me (or rather, the mailman owner address) a message telling me I've been "blacklisted" from his server (oh no!!) ... so I replied. Except this time I replied using my normal address, saying how those types of systems are bad by shifting the burden to innocent people instead of the recipient of the message, and explaining my normal policy stated above.

I then violated my normal policy by clicking that "yup, I sent this," so he would get my message.

His response to that was, first and foremost, to the "blacklisting", "You are now, asshole." ... then he calls me a "jerk off" and tells me to "Fuck off - talk to the people originating the problem, not me!"

I replied to him again, from a different e-mail address this time (at some point, Andrew will realize that I have about ten e-mail addresses in as many domains that I could use at will, let alone if I was to start using @yahoo.com or @gmail.com addresses). I explained to him that I was talking to the people originating the problem, because the problem was his misguided system which had sent me mail that I didn't ask for.

I wonder what new obscenities Andrew will send my way this time? Here's his e-mail address Andrew@DeFaria.com if anyone wants to help explain to him how stupid his spam-fighting strategy is. Updated: He sent me his vCard, so if you want any other information about him, feel free.

I went into the local Jiffy Lube today to get the oil changed in the Jeep and get its annual State Inspection before the end of the month. What I was confronted with when I got to the waiting room looked like a scene from a kindergarden, except with the authority figures removed.

There were three kids, an older boy and what appeared to be twin girls. By "older" I mean maybe eight years old. The girls were five. I know this because they told everyone. Over. And Over. And over again.

They're running around like three fucking banshees, screaming, yelling, etc. I saw the three kids go through no fewer than twelve coffee cups of water. (The process goes like so: One child decides they're thirsty, gets cup, goes to drinking fountain and proceeds to fill cup, slopping water all over the place in the process. The other two follow suit. Each of them takes like two sips of water and gives the mostly full cup to MoronDad, who sets it down and ignores it. Repeat this whole process several times until MoronDad has about a dozen coffee cups of water around him).

MoronDad and MoronMom are sitting in the waiting room. There's two of them, yup, it's true. Two people who ... well, we shouldn't say can't control their fucking kids, because I've got no idea, because they didn't even try. The entire time they were there, the MoronParents were filling out some paperwork or something for some pre-school or some shit, completely oblivious to the havoc their kids were wreaking.

Well, that's not true, occasionally, they'd notice something they were doing, but then completely act inappropriately. For instance, AnnoyingBratGirl#1 was grabbing coffee-stirrers by the handful and waving them all over the place, etc., etc. MoronDad's answer? No, not "throw those away now that you've had your disgusting little dirty mitts all over them". It was "put those kid-filth-covered stirrers back so people can put them in their nice fresh drinks and get whatever germs you've gotten all over yourself by crawling around on the floor for the last twenty minutes."

OK, maybe he didn't put it quite that way. In fact, he didn't even mention the germs or anything at all. He just told her to put them back. But that's what I heard in my head, honest.

About a half-hour into this ordeal, another woman walks in with her son. This is a mom who knows what she's doing. She's bought her son a brand new toy that doesn't require noise to play with it. A toy train with a couple other vehicles like a tractor or something. This woman has clearly been around the block and knows how to keep her kid from being an annoying pain in the ass.

Instantly -- and I really do mean instantly, they must be able to smell these things -- the three brats stop annoying some couple on the other side of the waiting room and make a beeline for the toys. Now, NormalKid is trying to play with his brand new choo-choo train, and AssholeBoy is grabbing it, telling the kid what to do, etc., etc.

MoronParents? Completely immersed in their paperwork, oblivious to what their kids were doing. I seriously thought about offering them crack cocaine right then and there to see if the parents would even notice...

For the next twenty minutes, this nice woman is now these annoying little brats' fucking babysitter. They take her kid's toys. She takes them back, and gives them to her son. They demand her attention. They (and this is funny) mock the quality of the toy that they are attempting to steal from its owner ("Look at this, this is all flimsy. This sucks," .. a direct quote).

I felt this urge boiling up inside me to say as loud as possible, "Excuse me, but can anyone tell me why the fuck this nice woman has been elected to be the babysitter for these fucktard kids whose parents are assholes?"

But I lacked the strength of will to make that big of a scene. I must be getting old and mellow or something.

So, I did the next best thing. Her car was coming out at the same time as mine. So I had the desk clerk get her paperwork and do it immediately after mine. I plopped down my credit-card and paid for her oil change. When she looked at me with this incredulous look and asked, "Why?!", I didn't bother to keep quiet when I said "Well, you've done such a fine job babysitting the kids of parents who can't be bothered to control their own kids, that I figured you deserved a break."

Turns out she was most worried that her son, who apparently can be very possessive about toys, was going to haul off and beat the crap out of the BratPack. I offered her an additional $20.00 if she could convince him to do it. :-)

I noticed the scowling looks from the MoronParents as I'd called them on the carpet in a way for their completely inappropriate lack of parenting skills, but who cares? Seriously, I can get behind forced sterilization of people who won't control their kids, especially after today.

Here's hoping that lady's day got a little brighter, anyway.

So he's being all gracious about it, and not pressing charges after a prankster squirted him with water from a squirt-gun at a movie premiere.

I feel so much better knowing that the lead half of TomKat is such a magnanimous man that he will let slide the despicable and vile act of anointing him with maybe .5cc of common tap water. I mean, seriously, the nerve of those folks! Everyone knows that only Evian, blessed by the holy leaders of Scientology, is ever allowed to touch The Disciple Cruise. Even the rain is specifically forbidden from falling on his head. If a scene in a movie requires him to stand in the rain, there's a lot of water blessing going on that day, let me tell you.

It was fucking water, you pompous, self-righteous ass. A guy squirted you with water, not like hydrochloric acid or something. If that's the sort of thing that sets you off, it's no wonder that whole marriage thing didn't work out for you before.

Dick.

Today I cleaned out my freezer. I decided everything in it must go.

Of course, that may have to do with my coming home to find the freezer door wide open, and everything inside it at room temperature.

Near as I can tell one of the cats, probably G'Kar, was scrambling to get up onto the top of the cabinets (or into the cabinets over the fridge), and pushed the door open with his rear legs. And it happily stayed open all day long.

Ugh. So much for that ice cream I planned to eat this evening.

I was reading this article which indicates that a new dollar coin (actually a collection of them, featuring the visages of U.S. presidents) is forthcoming.

The article laments -- over and over -- the radical "unacceptance" of the dollar coin by the American people, but then there's like an epiphany as the article says:

Supporters realize that the dollar coin is the Rodney Dangerfield of American money. So they make clear that any new coin would augment -- not replace -- paper currency.

You morons! The reason it doesn't get support is precisely because you don't eliminate the paper currency version. Why would a vending machine company expend the effort to retool all of their vending machines when they know people will have dollar bills? Why would coin-dispensing products like some cash-registers retool if they know the coin will be the red-headed-stepchild?

The fact of the matter is, so long as there is a paper dollar bill, a dollar coin will never be popular, because none of the places that we use our ubiquitous dollar bills will accept our dollar coins. If you want the dollar coin to be "popular" it has to also be "useful". If you want it to be "useful", you have to convince the various third-parties to retool in order to accept it. They're never going to do that unless they know people are going to have to use dollar coins and so that they'll have to accept them.

Seriously, this isn't rocket science, is it?

An Indian tribe, the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma, has started making tentative plans to build a casino in Saugerties, in a huge tract of undeveloped land directly adjacent to the exit from the Interstate.

It would, obviously, be a huge boon to the town. There would be plenty of people visiting Saugerties. No matter who says otherwise, people don't gamble 24 hours a day without stop. They go to restaurants, they like to go to shows, they like to shop. All of these things are things which would directly benefit the economy of the ghost-town that Saugerties has become.

Public reaction, so far, seems to be in the "how dare they" category, with the public railing against town officials for even considering the idea. They rant about the "evils of gambling", the "rampant prostitution that goes hand in hand with gambling", and no end of other crap.

Saugerties seems to think, somehow, that "in its present state" it offers some huge attraction to people to live there. Here's the reality check for you, are you ready? It doesn't.

Is it because of the high-tech schools and great educational system? Nope. While I will give kudos to many if not most of the actual educators in the Saugerties district, the schools themselves are horrid.

Is it because of the booming tourist economy? Nope. Let's face it... Having HITS there running events 37 days out of the year (call it 10% of the year) isn't going to sustain the entire town's economy. Having a Garlic Festival three days a year isn't going to sustain the economy.

Is it because of local industry and job availability? Hardly. Saugerties still seems to be living with this delusion that they're still as conveniently located and easy to get to as it was when IBM Kingston was still around. Again, the harsh reality check: They're gone, they're not coming back, and the sooner you adapt rather than simply repeat how close you are to stuff that you're actually far away from, the better.

As I see it, Saugerties' biggest problems are:

• It has historically been dominated by the senior citizens and retirees of the community. While that's great and all, it is far too easy for retirees who have less than 10-15 years left to go, to hold things back for the rest of the people who might want to live there for another 40 or 50 years. Anyone who has tried to influence a School Budget to get passed knows that one of the blocs you had to sway was the Senior Citizens' Home on Main Street (yes, it really is on Main Street), and that it was a tough sell.
• With IBM Kingston gone, and nothing of any significance replacing it, Saugerties has little to no job market to speak of. This means that youth who go off to school have very little reason to return to their home town.
• It is a little over an hour's drive to Albany from Saugerties, it is over 30 minutes from Saugerties to Poughkeepsie, where you could catch Metro-North into NYC. In other words, it is hell and gone from places with lots of commuter jobs. As a bedroom community, it is no longer "convenient" to a place to work elsewhere. Combine that with a lack of industry in the town itself, and you have a recipe for disaster.

I like my hometown, I really do. It has a great small-town feel to it, and preserving that feel is the right thing to do. BUT, by the same token, you cannot become so affixed to the idea of "don't change anything because it might change our town's feel" that you are unwilling to explore changes which might be able to do both. You can have a casino near a small little New England-style village, and have them co-exist peacefully. In fact, with proper marketing, you can have more than enough money coming into the town to be able to preserve that feeling for much longer.

Eventually, the town will have no choice, and will have to start accepting "whomever comes calling" because they will have run out of money, people will have run out of jobs, and things will just be at the point of no return. It is far better to get something in town that you can at least see large potential upsides to, than to be desperate 10 or 15 years down the road and have to settle for something far worse than what you passed up.

So now the latest horseshit to be foisted upon us is that somehow teachers using red ink for correcting papers is "harmful" and "bad".

Seriously. From an education system where it is the minority who actually can get through their thirteen years with any actual "aptitude", this is the sort of crap they waste their time and energy on?

"It's taken a turn from 'Here's what you need to improve on' to 'Here's what you've done right,"' Powell said. "It's not that we're not pointing out mistakes, it's just that the method in which it's delivered is more positive."

What a load of shite. Maybe the problem isn't the color of the ink, but the pandering to "being positive" instead of pointing out the errors the students are making. Stop making them try to feel good about themselves for the 14% they got right, and start getting them to work on the 86% they got wrong.

Teachers have been using red ink for years. One might even point out that back in the days when people didn't care about "making students feel good about themselves", our educational institutions actually produced people who could find their own country on a globe, or who might actually be able to tell you what the formula is for finding the area of a circle, or if they couldn't, they could at least make change for a purchase without needing the cash register to tell them.

I have friends who are teachers, so I know that the problem isn't "all teachers", but the fact of the matter is that if the system is going to pander to these "feel good" things, it's only going to get a lot worse before it gets better... and while it gets worse, you can expect to see a lot more jobs going elsewhere to countries that are serious about educating their young, not about coddling them.

... you could just go to a doctor when you needed to, and didn't have to worry about "in-network, out-of-network, referrals, primary-care-physcian" horse-shit?

So after taking close to the LD50 of Advil, I decided to call my Primary Care Physician (who I am scheduled to see next week for a full physical as my first visit), to see if I could come in today, and maybe get "some good stuff" to ease the pain.

Turns out my doctor can't see me 'til tomorrow. No joy.

So I decide to look for a local urgent-care facility that is in-network. Nope. None. No joy.

So I call my insurance company to see what my "out of network" coverage is. None. No joy.

But she transfers me to an in-house nurse, who goes over all my symptoms, etc., etc., and decides "well, the only thing you can really get is to contact your primary care physician again, and have him talk to you over the phone to prescribe to you like a day's worth of pain killer or muscle relaxant for the neck."

So back I go to the doctor. Call them up, ask to speak with him. He's not in at all today. I explain what my insurance company said. They're like "well, he won't be available until tomorrow."

"There's other doctors there, can I speak with one of them?" Apparently not, since I haven't been into the office yet, they won't actually let one of the other doctors phone-prescribe me what I need.

What the fuck is the point of medical insurance, if the whole process makes it impossible to use it? And what's up with doctors who actually can't fit in patients during the same day? Are we supposed to schedule in advance when we need medical attention?

Makes one kinda want to go postal.

I don't care how much it's raining, and how desperate you are to get to your car without getting too wet. If you're so stupid as to run out in front of a moving car without even looking, so you could make a beeline for your own vehicle, then maybe -- just maybe -- the world would have been better off if I had hit you and removed your chromosomes from the available pool.

I had to drop off my bundle of paperwork to the accountant this morning, so he could do up my taxes. Since I was going in a little late anyway, I added five minutes to my commute and swung by the Sheriff's office, intending to pick up the pistol permit paperwork I've been meaning to get. Turns out, the administrative staff has Good Friday off as a holiday.

Then, this afternoon, I call my doctor's office to set up an appointment for a routine physical and find out - lo and behold - they're closed early for the "holiday".

Seriously, what the fuck? It's not like this is some holiday where friends and family gather together to have a meal in celebration of some guy getting nailed to a pair of sticks and hung out to dry. Why is this a holiday? Are there really businesses saying to themselves "oh, we've GOT to give them Good Friday off, or they'll just take the day off anyway and there'll be nobody here..."

It's 100% purely a religious "holiday". It would be interesting for someone for whom Christianity was not their religion to try and make a legal case for being denied government services because the government office had closed on account of a religious non-event. It actually sounds like a pretty clear violation of the establishment clause to me. Wish I had the time and money to raise a stink about it.

CNN reports about how a judge ruled on a Wisconsin case that discusses something I've talked about from time to time. In the case in question, a high school honors-calculus student was told he had to do schoolwork over the summer, as part of the class curriculum. Failure to do so would, obviously, be detrimental to his grade. The student sued, saying that the school year as determined by the state is 180 days, and those days in the summer ain't a part of that. (and, hopefully, his argument was worded slightly more poetic)

The MoronJudge in quoted by CNN:

"Had the Larsons done a bit more homework," he wrote, they would had learned that "the people of our state granted to the Legislature ... the power to establish school boards."

Had the MoronJudge done a bit more homework, he would have realized that his ruling now sets a hugely dangerous precedent:

• Tired of getting yelled at for failing too many students, the local school board can now set the bar lower, requiring only a 45% to pass a class
• Tired of working long school years, the school board can happily lower the number of school days in a school year from 180 to, say, 50.

The states set standards for a reason. If this was a case where some school board was saying "people who get a 45% should get a diploma" the judge wouldn't even think of saying something as hideously stupid as "this is what school boards are empowered to do," he'd be pimpsmacking the board around. Instead, though, since all it does is affect "some snotty kid who is refusing to conform and do what he's told like a good little clone", the court can wield it's power with impunity.

This reminds me a lot of last week's episode of West Wing, where a group of middle-school kids demand that the voting age be abolished, and how they rightfully point out that the system is designed to subjugate them, take their money, borrow against their future, and give them no say in any of it. Nobody has to worry about offending "the juvenile constitutency" because they can't vote you out anyway.

If kids could vote, you wouldn't see shit like this.

There was an interesting post on New (Sub)urbanism about how the city of Chicago spent $270,000,000 on a huge piece of artwork for the city, but somehow managed to not make it a "work for hire" so that they actually owned the copyright on the artwork (thus making it in the public domain as a government financed product).

Instead, the artist still owns the copyright and has to be paid a tithe every time you use an image of it in any commercial context (apparently, because they're stopping professionals from taking pictures of it, demanding that they show their permits to do so).

Anyone who thinks copyright law doesn't need a serious overhaul, please step forward now, your Kool-Aid is ready.

Ya know, I occasionally get people complaining about when I vent about stuff. These are the people, and there's really only a couple people who are really bad about it, who tell me to mind my own business, or various types of snide comments about "why do you care?" or "why don't you stop ranting about stuff?" etc., etc.

Now, to these people, I have to ask a very serious question: If you come to a site entitled "Derek's Rantings and Musings", where the first thing that's mentioned is "Rantings", how can you try to act all disappointed about there being occasional rantings about things I find (bewildering, annoying, crazy, stupid, etc.)?

If you come to a site that specifically says it's going to include rantings, and have the balls to complain that there's ranting, then one seriously has to question whether you are perhaps visiting a site that you shouldn't be visiting. If you want to talk about a specific topic and say "hey, I think you're wrong about this particular topic and here's why," that's one thing. But people leaving comments that are essentially "dude, you whine too much, knock it off" make no sense to me... what did those visitors to the web site have as their expectation of what they'd find?

Doesn't seem to make much sense to me, that's for sure.

I have friends who are moving. They're moving about 2000 miles. They're driving themselves. They've got a 24 foot truck, which will be towing one vehicle, and a second vehicle being driven behind that.

There are things people do when they move that I simply can't fathom. They've hired a crew to come load their truck for them. Now, I'm going to let slide the whole "why are you moving yourself in the first place?" rant that the first paragraph would segue nicely into for a few minutes, because there's something about the present situation I want to touch on first.

They're hiring loaders... but yet, they still plan to "help" load the truck themselves? Isn't the whole point of hiring a team of loaders for several hours so that you don't have to touch a goddamned thing? If they're going to get themselves tired out running up and down stairs with shit, why are they spending money on loaders?

I won't even get into the "why are you stringing three vehicles together like this when you could just drive one vehicle, have movers move the second, and let a moving company follow behind with a truck full of possessions a couple days later" rant, because, well, that part just speaks for itself.

Four words. Are you ready?

Global. Warming. My. Ass.

I've always disliked the vending machine at the office. Although I think it's cool that it dispenses dollar-coins for change, it's got some of the goofiest design decisions. For example, it's entirely possible for a soft-drink bottle to drop down in such a way that it stands up on its bottom, preventing the door from opening.

At least in those situations, though, you can do the "rock the machine side to side until it tips over" game. That's not frustrating, that's just annoying.

Frustrating is putting your money in. Selecting "E7" for Coke, and having it say "Please make another selection"... when you can see that there's product in there. This vending machine has sensors all over the place, to make sure stuff doesn't get "stuck" (e.g., if the candy bar does pass the light sensor, it'll keep corkscrewing a little at a time until the candy bar DOES fall), but it can't figure out that there's a six-pack worth of Coke in there, and I'd really like it to dispense one for me?

I shipped out some (belated) Christmas gifts to a friend of mine in Canada yesterday. It amazes me how much paperwork is involved in sending stuff that, were I just driving it to Canada, would be simply be dealt with as "No" in response to the "Do you have anything to declare?" question.

Further, the chick at the UPS Store kept trying to downplay item values, even though I know it's not going to come into play because I'm nowhere near the "customs limit" for gift value.

UPS: What's this?
Me: Chocolate
UPS: Value?
Me: About eight dollars.
UPS: How about two?
Me: It's really eight.
UPS: I'll put down two.
Me: *sigh* ... whatever

Ordinarily I wouldn't use Brown, I swore off of them, but my "I'll pay for good service" thing only goes so far... The other carriers only offered overnight solutions (in the $80 for shipping range) as opposed to ground service ($14-15 range)... (although I discovered later, FedEx could have done it as a ground service, it just didn't appear on my rate-quote tool because I hadn't fed it the right arcane checkbox combination or something like that)

How can there be so much paperwork for something that doesn't actually meet the minimum valuation that you have to worry about for import? Who thinks this stuff up, the Department of Bureaucracy and Red Tape?

I think it's absolutely great that Amazon, and eBay/PayPal, and Google, and Yahoo are making such efforts to either collect directly for (in Amazon's and eBay's cases) or direct people to various NGOs which are trying to help the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. It's proof positive that people can come together and make a difference. When I checked a few minutes ago, Amazon had collected over four million dollars for the effort from its users.

The challenge I put forth is this: This country, here has its share of problems. We have homeless people, jobless people, poor people, you name it, all of whom could stand to benefit from exactly the same kinds of help you're offering people on the other side of the planet -- they need food, they need shelter, they need clothing, you name it.

I challenge these sites to put as much effort into collecting "relief" for their neighbors as they have for those people on the other side of the planet. It's not nearly so sexy from a PR standpoint, but just as needed.

For the record, I'm not holding my breath.

The AP is running a story about how Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to drive a vehicle to the South Pole, is all up in arms about how there is an "ice highway" being built to the research station now situated at the Pole.

Describing Hillary's objections, New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff said:

"He spent weeks battling against the elements to get to the pole and it was an enormous achievement.

Now you've got the concept of a marked route that takes away the challenge and the adventure of getting there and that is anathema to Ed."

Man, and I thought Hillary was an explorer, being the first to get to places like Everest's peak and the South Pole... Now I realize he's just an egomaniac. Can you imagine if Lewis and Clark had cried foul over the creation of established routes west? Or if Columbus had gotten back to Europe and cried out, "No dammit! My crew and I suffered horribly to reach the New World, how can you want to make ocean travel back and forth routine?!" There isn't an astronaut alive, I don't think, who believes that their risky trips into space are anything less than preludes towards allowing mankind to do so on a regular basis (even if the space policies of the last twenty years or so make that seem unlikely in the short term).

Seriously. What an asshat.

MBNA is running a promo for the NY Yankees credit card, where you can get a hand-signed 1999 World Series program, inscribed, The Last Home Run Of The Century.

From 1999? Not unless everyone else in MLB went into the world's worst fucking slump throughout the entire year 2000.

Didn't we establish all this several years ago? Seriously, were these people just asleep then or something?

CNN points to a story discussing how Green Arrow's sidekick, Mia, is going to turn out to be HIV-positive. It's going to provide a motivator for her, blah blah blah.

It's being written by Judd Winnick, best known as "that guy on the Real World who got really attached to Pedro the AIDS patient, who has a liberal agenda the size of the Mountain Time Zone".

Here's one thing you almost certainly won't see covered... every time Mia gets into a fight she's got a decent chance of breaking her own skin (or, more likely, being punched herself by a Bad Guy), and having blood spray everywhere.

You know. HIV-tainted blood. The kind that if it mixes with a non-infected person's blood, say via direct contact with the guy who punched her in the first place, can cause that person to become infected as well.

I'm betting that "spreading HIV via crime-fighting" isn't going to be on the list of topics. Well, not unless someone from DC Comics reads this and goes "Oh, shit, what the hell were we doing let Judd write activist-comics for when he hasn't got a clue how it'll destroy the character and either force them into early retirement or make them accept that they're passing the virus on to the bad guys".

Talk about "bad decisions"... Yikes.

I've talked about this before, but I can't help myself. Because a part of me wants to figure out exactly what it is you're supposed to do with people who are, without a doubt, among the most inconsiderate people on the face of the planet.

Last Night:
Derek: Hey, I'm bored. Come hang out.
George: Can't. Got a job interview at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, so I need to get to bed at a decent hour.
Derek: What's on your agenda for tomorrow?
George: Nothing.
Derek: Then come over after the interview. You can catch up on West Wing [he's been watching my season box-sets, trying to come closer to being caught up].
George: Sounds like a plan.

Noon today:
Derek: Hey, what happened to you?
George: I had to come home. The wife is doing some stuff this morning.
Derek: You going to come over and watch the game? [ 1 pm game ]
George: Yeah, I should be there a little after first pitch.
Derek: Cool.

4 pm:
Derek: "A little after first pitch"? You think you'll make it before the end?
George: I told the wife I'm heading out before 6.
Derek: Gotcha.

7:30 pm:
Derek [to George's wife]: Hey, where's George?
Wife: He's sleeping, and told me not to wake him.

.... Seriously. What a fucking asshole. I pissed away an entire fucking day waiting for this dick to show up. The sad part is that he's not intentionally rude, he's just, I dunno, too clueless in the realm of common sense to recognize that "if he tells someone he's going to be somewhere, maybe just maybe they set aside time for it, and gave up doing other things."

I've half a mind to invite him over one night and just go out and let him show up here while I'm not around. Make him drive down and back for nothing.

The local grocery store is observing "moments of silence" today at the various times things happened -- when planes hit particular locations, etc. New York City is having a "reading of the victims' names" ceremony thing, and all that.

I think we, as a country, need to decide something. It's a fairly simple decision: Is 9/11 worthy of being treated as a national holiday of remembrance?

My complaint is not that people are planning elaborate ceremonies or anything like that. My complaint is that places are doing so because they feel like they have to, because everyone else is. Whoever "stops doing it first" and "moves on" looks like a callous jackass.

I think if we're going to continue to have this societal expectation that "people take time out to remember" on 9/11, and take moments of silence or whatever, that we should just make it a Federal Holiday and that will be that. "Remembrance Day" or something, I don't necessarily care what you call it.

I guess I'm sick of people not moving on. If, as a society, we're going to have this be a regular thing indefinitely, let's formalize it and make it "real". Personally, I don't care which it is, but sitting here with forced-by-guilt rituals kinda annoys me.

How can this be illegal?

Woman goes into store with clearly fake novelty money of a George Bush $200.00 bill. (note that there is no such denomination, note that the pictures on the back of the bill are clearly quite silly).

Store clerk exchanges novelty note for $200.00 worth of merchandise.

I'm sorry, but I fail to see the problem. The customer did not misrepresent that the novelty note was money, because clearly there is no $200 bill, and George Bush does not appear on any of our currency. If the clerk accepted the Funny Money, it was simply a barter for goods. "One Funny Note in exchange for some Pretty Clothing"

We should not be protecting people from their own stupidity, I'm sorry.

As Jeremy pointed out, Friendster -- a "community-driven site" -- has fired one of its employees for (gasp!) being part of the blogging community.

Like Jeremy and many others, I took this as an opportunity to cancel my friendster account, and put as my reason for cancelling "you fire people for blogging." Maybe they'll get the message after a few dozen people do the same.

I don't want to name names, but there's people I know, who are probably extremely happy not to have taken job offers that Friendster made to them.

Much was made a few months ago about McDonalds getting rid of super size french fries, about how they were trying to be good citizens, preventing people from gorging themselves on fries, etc.

That story came out in March, but my local McD's only just finally stopped selling the super-sized potato product. Now, I order from McDonald's probably about once a week, give or take, and I'm a pretty boring person, so I know what the various things I order cost.

So I was a bit shocked to find out that my "usual order", with "large" fries substituted for "super size" fries, cost the same amount.

In other words, McDonald's did away with the larger product, and bumped the price up on the smaller one to what the larger one used to be. I'm effectively paying the same amount of money and getting less.

Now, here's the kicker where I become a sage of wisdom (or a moron). I predict that within 18 months, McDonald's will have an ad campaign centering around "you demanded them back, and we now comply, super size are back!" ... but they'll be back at a higher price point, since their price-point is now the large.

Any takers?

I want to rant a bit about the Olympics this year.

First, what is this crap that every single athlete has to be wearing Adidas gear, including (perhaps) athletes who sought sponsorship from Adidas and were turned down? Apparently, Adidas is the primary sponsor for Athens 2004, so all athletes, regardless of their actual sponsorship, must be displaying the logo of the corporation who has really done absolutely nothing for them. How wrong is that?

Second, NBC is completely boning things with their HDTV feed. I love that the NBC/HD feed is 24x7 Olympics, that's great. But why the fuck is is super-delayed? I mean, for example.

Closing Ceremonies

• Live - August 29th, 2100 Athens Time / 1400 New York Time


• NBC Standard-Def Feed - August 29th 1900 New York Time (five hours delayed)


• NBC Hi-Def Feed - August 30th 0400 New York Time (14 hours delayed)

Now, seriously, is NBC really attempting to shoot its own HD ratings in the foot? Show the fucking HD feed, at the very least, at the same time as the Standard-Def feed. I'd prefer live, but what the hell is this "you can watch it nearly a day later, and only at 4 in the morning". It's the closing ceremonies for heavens' sakes, it's not like it's women's badminton or something.

The venues are beautiful. I love the architecture and the design of the facilities (what I see on TV anyway), but... what the heck happened to attendance? I mean, I know at past olympics you felt lucky if you managed to get tickets to a prelim round, and were a god if you can get tickets to a final. I think I could fly over today, walk in, and buy tickets to final-round events, because there's hundreds or thousands of empty seats in these arenas. Not sure what the problem was there, but that's a travesty.

OK, I'm done with my rant.

I have absolutely no idea who this is, but the conversation he/she/it tried to have with me is too funny not to share. This is literally a random person IM'ing me out of nowhere, I'm not in a chat room or anything like that.

s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: hi a/s/l if you dont mind me asking?
dredd: wtf are you talking about?
s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: age/sex/location
dredd: who the fuck is this?
s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: um just someone who asked a question
s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: sorry for bothering you
dredd: go away
s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: why act like an asshole?
dredd: why message just completely random people? Are you that desperate for social contact? hire a hooker
s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: actually no
s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: sorry for fucking bothering you
s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: and by the way asking someones a/s/l doesnt mean i want to cyber fuck you
dredd: i never said it did
s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: could mean im lookin to meet new people as friends
dredd: it's just lame to bother random people
dredd: go bother people who are in chat rooms
dredd: they're asking to be bothered

OK, a history lesson for people. Once upon a time, there was a continent called Europe. In Europe, the license plates all pretty much looked the same from country to country, which would have been fine except that people in Europe like to travel from country to country, which makes the task of identifying vehicles extremely difficult.

So, someone in Europe had a really spiffy idea, which was to use a specified and documented list of codes for a given country, make it into a neat little oval sticker (or placard depending on the particular country's tastes) and affix it to the car. Now, a friendly law enforcement agent could tell that a given license plate (and it's car, obviously) belonged to whatever country was indicated by the country-code in the oval.

And life was good.

Later, some people began to see European cars which had been imported into America, and they were jealous that their German car didn't have a little "D" oval on it, so companies started selling replica oval stickers and placards, so that yuppie scumbags could look all pretentious in their Beemer that now appeared to have been imported from Germany.

But, life was still fairly good and decent.

Then, all hell broke loose, because some morons decided "Hey, why does Germany get an Oval and my podunk resort town doesn't get an oval?" So they would fashion up stickers and start selling them in the local tourist traps. Little ovals that said "OB" or "OBX" on them would start appearing on cars. Of course, since there's no central authority for them, unless you actually lived in the Outer Banks, you had no fucking clue what that stood for, so there had to be a little translation at the bottom of the oval.

And then once one tourist-trap loser-town started doing it, every other tourist-trap loser town realized "Hey, we can sucker convince our tourists to buy those as well!" and there were suddenly hundreds of obscure, meaningless oval stickers stuck to the ass-ends of cars all over the country, none of which had meaning really to anyone but their owners.

This story doesn't really have a happy ending, because now I have to believe that like a full 25% of all the cars I see these days have some stupid little oval on them, and I can't help but think how an actually useful feature was just completely trashed by ignorant morons with no clue.

OK, rant over. I feel better now.

I'm officially starting to get annoyed at cops who come up to a red light, at night, drive on the shoulder up to the light (passing traffic on the right), flip on their lights, go through the intersection, and then put the lights off and continue to simply patrol around.

There's no "emergency" calling them somewhere else, they just think they're too damned important to be sitting at a red light with the rest of us sheep civilians. If they're coming up the road, lights ablaze, and then go through the light, that's one thing, but when you aren't in a hurry at all, just saunter up to the light, turn on the light-bar that gives you the "ignore red lights" get-out-of-jail-free card, and then turn it off when you're done, then it's clear you're just being an asshole.

I would love to see a "whydidyourunthatredlight.com" site be set up, that documented as much information as possible about such things... date, time, location of the red light, municipality of the vehicle, car number or license plate number, etc. Maybe even a place for camera-phone pictures to be added if available. :-)

Then you could maybe convince the local citizenry to start asking "why exactly DID Officer Billy-Bob have to get through that light so fast?"

CNN is running a story about a woman who got fined $50 for, essentially, "bad food control" in Yellowstone Park (where it's important to keep your human food out of the animals' hands). She paid her fine and went on her merry way.

Coming home from a cruise, U.S. Customs agents apparently decided she hadn't paid the fine. They further decided that "not paying a $50.00 fine" was worth shackling her, detaining her at the border, and holding her until the magistrate she appeared before noticed that "Yup, she'd paid the damned fine already"

So there's a comedy of cock-ups here:

For as much as I complained before, let me instead now give kudos to SixApart for realizing that even the previous "Licensing Scheme 2.0" wasn't really right.

Licensing Scheme 3.0, though, will probably ease most peoples' concerns, including my own....

There's a free version, that is extremely limited in what it can do.
There's a personal edition, that can have up to five authors, and an unlimited number of weblogs for $69.95.
There's an unlimited personal edition, that can have unlimited blogs, and unlimited authors for $99.95.

... and then you have the various commercial licensing options which I don't think anyone thought were too terribly far off the mark, especially since it's now spelled out that "ad revenue" and "incidental revenue" such as tip-jars do *not* force you to move to the commercial license.

Congratulations to them for actually listening to their customers, and not being afraid to come back with multiple iterations until they got it right.

They're apparently remodeling the apartment above me. Near as I can tell, in order to do that, it must require a team of elephants in steel boots, several cases of C4, and a scraping down of every surface that ever existed in the apartment.

If I don't have my TV up full blast, I can't hear it. The entire apartment shakes (like the bookshelves literally had stuff fall off them) every 10 to 15 minutes.

Ugh. And all this on a freakin holiday?!!

I went to the grocery store the other day and tried to get more of my usual cereal, Alpha-Bits. They were out... and I was sad.

I went to the store today, for my "post-payday main grocery run", and found the still-empty spot on the shelf where my beloved breakfast cereal was supposed to be, this time with a small label next to the price-label:

NON-ORDERABLE

... and I was sadder. Now I have to go find a new breakfast cereal. On the rare occasions I actually eat breakfast, I've been eating Alpha-Bits for like thirty years. This pisses me off.

I was talking to Little George this afternoon, because he's coming to go over his GenCon Indy event selections before registration goes live on 5/7. So I speak to him at 5:30:

D: What time you going to be here?
G: Around 6, 6:15ish.
D: So, around 8 then?
G: No, I'm already doing my normal padding, that's about right, 6:15.

So I called him at 7:00:

D: 6:15, eh?
G: Yeah, I'm heading out the door in a few minutes.
D: Riiiight, sure ya are.

8:30... he's only just now (as I type this) pulling into my parking lot. I was right the first time. :-)

Your assistance is required not by me, but by the Peabody Orlando Hotel, who seem to be the only hotel in the friggin country who hasn't quite figured out the "internet access in the room" thing yet.

Connection's up... it's down, then it's up... it's down, but it tells you you're connected... then it's up, but has 43% packet loss to the hotel switch... it's back down, then it's up but refuses to give you an IP address... then it's up

All of this has been going on for about an hour or so. Seriously, as Jeremy complained, "This is not fucking rocket science."

So, if you're a network engineer who is competent, you may want to apply for a gig, they sound like they could use someone with a clue.

You're sitting in gate D5 today, heading to Orlando. You've got two kids who won't stop fucking shouting and yelling and screaming and running around and making noise. You're wearing a blue and white generic jersey style t-shirt with "18" on the front.

You're a bitch. Take some control of your kids.

This is the time of year (well, one of two actually) when everyone seems to rant and rave about Daylight Savings Time and either how cool it is, or how moronic it is, or how it made them (early,late) for an appointment, etc.

Here's my idea, call me crazy: Let's do away with timezones entirely. One time. Period. Full stop.

$ TZ=GMT date
Mon Apr  5 02:21:34 GMT 2004

That's what I could get behind. Everyone in the world uses GMT. No time zones, no time changes, etc. If you know that the office in London opens at 0900GMT New York at 1400GMT, you'll never have to look at a clock in San Francisco and mentally do math to figure out if the New York or London is open at the moment. You can look at a clock anywhere in the world, and never have to think to yourself "how many hours (ahead,behind) is {city}?" again. Because they're NO hours ahead or behind. They may simply keep different hours than you do (maybe they go in at 1400 and you go in at 1700), but the time will always be the same.

When I worked for Yahoo!Finance, this was actually one of the hardest portions of the monitoring code to write -- the portion which figured out "what time is it over in Tokyo? Is there Daylight Savings Time in that Time Zone right now? And, finally, is it between {market_open} and {market_close}?" How much easier would that have been to be able to say "Nikkei opens at HHMM/GMT and closes at HHMM/GMT, and you never have to worry about whether it's daylight savings time there or not, because there's no such thing."

How cool would that be?

Let me add that to my presidential platform... right up there with telling states they lose federal funding for roads if they use English measurements on road signs. All those tax-breaks the auto-industry gets? Gone, unless they start only including km and km/h on dashboards... Government funded weather stations? Only provide measurements in celsius, wind speed in kph, etc. ...

I'm all over the metric system, man. We're the only freakin country in the world that doesn't use it. We're like that last country a couple centuries ago who was still deciding the distance of a "foot" by actually measuring the foot of the current king. It's just dumb (not to mention it's already cost us millions of dollars when that rocket self-detonated because of an English/Metric foul-up in the software).

I was perusing my Amazon "Gold Box Deals" today and found this gem, which includes the following disclaimer:

Availability: This title usually ships within 8 to 11 days. Please note that special order titles occasionally go out of print, or publishers run out of stock. These hard-to-find titles are not discounted and are subject to an additional charge of $1.99 per book due to the extra cost of ordering them. We will notify you within 2-3 weeks if we have trouble obtaining this title

Seriously, if you can't actually even guarantee you're going to provide the product, and you're going to charge me extra to try, is that really the best item to include as a Gold Box item?

How dumb is that....?

No, I don't mean "that system that grants you a trial by jury", I mean the way the system treats jurors. Are we trying to make it so people don't want to be jurors?

Things I noticed, just at first glance, on my Juror Summons:

I was IMing someone this evening and made a comment to the effect of "my life is all about bureaucracy... my divorce is signed and waiting for approval by bureaucrats... my readmittance to Marist is signed and waiting committee approval."

I think there should be "Frequent Bureaucracy Points"... just like you earn frequent-flier miles for travel on airlines, you should earn points for how much bureaucratic hell you go through. You could spend the points on fast-tracking paperwork through the system... Got enough points? Well, your passport application won't take eight weeks to go through the system, you can have it tomorrow, sir. Things like that.

Why not? There's frequent-use reward systems for every other darned thing on the planet...

OK. Other people are free to do what they want with their blogs. They are, after all, their blogs. But, I feel the need to say this as a public service announcement of sorts:

If your opinion on a matter is so weak that you can't possibly allow a single dissenting opinion in your comments, where someone disagrees with you, then you are way too closed-minded to be worth reading in the first place. Surrounding your opinions with syncophantic "Yes, that's a great opinion," type comments may stroke your ego and make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but it doesn't make your position any more defensible just because you delete the comments you disagree with.

Which is a shame, because the blog in question was otherwise quite enjoyable to read, and written by someone who seemed to be able to discuss things intelligently.

If you allow comments on your site, there's a tacit belief that there's actual dialog, not just fanboys fawning all over you.

Sigh.

Some students decided to build a medieval siege weapon for extra credit in their history class, inspired by watching something similar in Lord of the Rings.

I don't know which is worse however... the fact that the article keeps referring to this device as a "catapult", or that nobody seems to have tried to stop them from doing so.

That device, folks, is a trebuchet. Another newspaper appears to actually have a fact-checker on staff and got it right, but it's annoying.

For the uneducated, including these students' history teacher, let me explain the difference, in very simple terms.

By and large there's a lot of similarities. A catapult can use weights to fling objects across distances, hopefully killing your enemies (it can also use other methods). A trebuchet, because of how it works, can only use weights.

A catapult is a fixed-beam delivery system. The projectile will move in, essentially, a semi-circular arc originating at the stable₁ point where it begins.

With a trebuchet, the delivery system is flexible, usually attached to the end of a fixed-beam by a length of rope, canvas, etc. This causes the projectile to whip away from the target at first, and then spin back around and, hopefully, release at apogee for maximum distance. The path of the projectile, including the portion before release, looks a lot like a one of those nautilus shells. This path increases the speed of the projectile far greater than its simple release would have, allowing for both greater distance and effectiveness.

This is your history lesson for the day. And yes, before anyone screams bloody murder about "ya got this part wrong" or "that part wrong", I'm speaking in very simplistic terms here. There are a bunch of other differences as well, I know. Catapults often use tension instead of weights, etc. You'd just be proving my point exactly, which is that The Tennesean's fact-checking teams suck wind, and the Herald-Chronicle ones have clue. If you live in the Tennesee area, you now know which paper is worth reading.

A ban on advertisements which use the sound-effects of any popular instant messaging client, the kind that make you walk over to your computer from your kitchen to see "who IMed you" right before you realize it was that damned cellular phone commercial again.

A ban on music which contains the sounds of sirens, so you immediately mute the song to try and find the direction the ambulance is coming from only to realize, well, it's not coming at all.

Up pops Yahoo Messenger:

nrisi: some babbling in a foreign language
dredd: huh?
nrisi: some babbling in a foreign language
dredd: dude, speak english or go away
nrisi: some babbling in a foreign language
dredd: you've got the wrong damn person, go away.
nrisi: who is this?
dredd: not the person you're looking for
nrisi: i know u personally
dredd: what's my name?
nrisi: dredd
dredd: no, my real name, numbnuts, you know since you "know me personally"
nrisi: insert some foreign name
dredd: No, you're wrong, please go away
nrisi: stop pretending
dredd: I'm not pretending.
nrisi: im one of ur officemates
dredd: I don't work in an office, so you're way off, pal. Please just go away
... and the conversation continued like this for about ten minutes until this dork finally realized "no, I'm not fooling you, you're NOT talking to who you think you are."

Seriously... if you're stupid enough that you can't figure out that "the other guy is supposed to be my friend, which means he should speak Tagalog, but he turns out not to know a single word of the language, so maybe, just maybe I'm randomly IM'ing the wrong damned person" then you should have your license to surf the Internet revoked.

The folks who are bombarding their elected officials "in defense of marriage" need to take a step back and think about something.

The problem, obviously, comes from the fact that the religious-right didn't "defend" marriage from government encroachment. When marriage became a "legal" state instead of a religious one, the government then has to "play fair" when it comes to anything about the legal entity known as marriage.

So what's the solution, as I see it?

Marriage, as a religious ceremony, gets you no legal privileges.

Wife dies, husband has no legal standing to automatic inheritances, etc.
Husband wants a divorce? Wife has no "legal" basis for demanding things like alimony, support, etc.

In order to also get "legal" standing, even a couple "married in a church before $DEITY" would then have to go down to their lawyers and draft up a contract delineating the terms of their "spousehood" or whatever. There could probably be some boiler-plate that most people use, etc., etc.

The legal document is what grants the legal rights and privileges currently associated with marriage.

Basically, if two people wanted to "get married" they could:

• Go to the church, get it done, and live as two separate legal entities under the eyes of the law, but "not in sin" in the eyes of their god
• Go to the church, get it done, and then head down to the courthouse whenever they so chose and enter into a Civil Union Contract which then grants them associated legal rights, the possibility for tax breaks, etc.
• Say screw the church, go to the court-house, sign the papers, and be "partners" as far as the government is concerned

The "standard" rules would apply to Civil Unions about "how many people you're allowed to have as a Civil Union Partner", etc. Churches, on the other hand, can go back to religious freedom and happily let you marry a dozen people if everyone's willing, because the religious ceremony at that point has no bearing on anyone's legal state. A religion or church can decide "we won't join a man and a man" or it might decide "we don't care who we join together in marriage so long as they love each other".

The trick is, essentially, to get the government completely out of the "marriage" business, since it's a completely religious act. (As witnessed by the shenanigans that had to go on in order for Utah to get its statehood)

At that point, the "seperate but equal" argument against civil unions (which, in their current implementation, is a very strong argument) goes away. Everyone who wants the legal rights and privileges has to get a civil union contract. The "discrimination" issue also goes away because anyone can get the legal privileges, and religions are free to allow or deny access to religious rituals at their own First Amendment whim.

If couples -- be they man/woman, woman/woman, or man/man -- want a "legal decree" let them go to a government agency. If they want a "religious decree", let them go to a church.

Why is this so hard for the politicians to figure out?

UPDATE: OK, after talking to some gay friends of mine, I hit on another idea. How to make this "painless" for straight people.

Clergy can be granted the ability to do the necessary countersignatures, etc., for the legal document. BUT, they only get that ability if they are willing and able to exercise that ability for any legally permissible couple who comes to them. In other words, Father Ignatius may not be willing to marry Bob and Dave, but if he wants the ability to join in Civil Union straight couples, he has to be willing to join in Civil Union the gay couples who come before him as well. If he can't "play fair" on the legal/non-religious privileges granted to him, then he doesn't get to play at all. (And, frankly, the priest shouldn't care... because he's not "sullying the sacrament of marriage" by signing their paperwork in any way).

Just a small point... this is obvious to many of my geek friends who telecommute on a frequent basis, but for some folks it seems to be a new concept:

Just because I work from home all day doesn't mean that I'm free to sit around and chat with you on Instant Messenger all day. Yes, I may take a break and feel no remorse about IM'ing then, just like I would if I was in the office, but don't IM me every morning at the same time, and get the same offended tone when I tell you I have to actually do the things that I get paid to do.

This public service announcement has been brought to you by, well, ... me.

If you were to be caught with a .20 blood alcohol content, driving your car south in the northbound lanes, you'd find yourself with a drivers' license, and probably spending 60 or 90 days in jail. The misdemeanour first-offence for DWI in New York has a sentence ranging from 6 months to a year in jail, $500-1000 fine, and a suspended drivers' license.

According to Arizona's statute, a first offence DUI carries a minimum of 1-10 days in jail, and up to six months in jail.

So can someone explain to me why a famous person gets the minimum sentence when, if it happened to you or I, that would probably be closer to the maximum end of the scale? There's also no mention of whether or not she was given the mandatory fine.

Even more interesting is that Diana Ross, with her .20 BAC met the statutory definition of "Extreme DUI, No Prior Convictions (.15% BAC)", which carries a minimum 30 days in jail, and can require the drunk-driver to have an interlock attached to their ignition wherein they have to prove they're sober before the car will start.

Yet, Ms. Ross will walk away with a mere two days of jail time, and no mention of a fine or any kind.

I need to be famous. Famous people get away with murder.

Yahoo sells pop-up/under ads.

Yahoo markets Yahoo!Companion which promises to block pop-up ads.

"Hi, we're going to make your life fucking miserable, and then use that to try and convince you to download an invasive application that could easily surreptitiously report back to us all your activity that you do, etc., etc."

Sure, their privacy policy right now says they don't, but they could easily change that on a whim, and how many of their users would really know enough or be smart enough to care about the change?

I remember my first concert... Iron Maiden on the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son tour, in the summer of 1988, at the RPI Fieldhouse in Troy, NY. It was so damned hot that summer that the fieldhouse turned on the ice so that it would counter the oppressive heat of the summer. By the end of the night, the ice was completely melted away, as one might expect.

I think I paid Ticketron about $19.50 for that ticket, including the convenience charges, etc. If I had ample ambition, I could find the ragged envelope that has ticket stubs going back to that first show (because I was the kind of kid who kept that sort of thing) and find out for sure.

A couple years later, in 1994, we marveled at the "greed factor" of the Woodstock94 folk, for their "ludicrously inflated" ticket price of $135 for the weekend...

I'd been waiting impatiently for two weeks for tickets to go on sale this morning for Iron Maiden...for the first time in years, they're bringing the entire stage-show over to the states, and on the road. The whole deal.

Except that it's about $70.00 per ticket before the TicketMiser thieves start tacking on surcharges, etc.

The cost of living in twenty years has not increased nearly four-fold, so what is there to explain this huge cost-delta between "then" and "now"? How much of this is the band's greed, and how much of it is the managers, promoters, venues, etc., all raping the concert-goer for big acts, knowing that people will pay it?

I'm sitting in the hotel getting ready to head over for my last day of training, and some talking head is on the Today show, talking about how "This is the year, you must get a flu shot, even if you've previously been anti-flu-shot, you need to get one this year!"

Of course, I think it's entirely possible that the same talking head said the same exact thing last year.

I'm trying to figure out what the reason for the sudden (in recent years), push for everyone to get flu shots.

"Many people will have side-effects including flu-like symptoms."

Ummm, dumbfuck, if I've just gotten an injection of flu vaccine, I'm willing to put good money on those not being "flu-like", but being "flu" (albeit weak flu). Yeah, I'll trade "a chance of getting the shit kicked out of me" for "a definite chance of getting the shit kicked out of me" anyday. Not!

"Some folks will have an allergic reaction to them, but that's to be expected, and is worth the risk..."

Ummm, maybe to you, but for me? I'll just opt to not get myself injected with some shit that's going to give me the symptoms it's being used allegedly to prevent, and might have even worse reaction than the flu it's trying to prevent if I turn out to have a reaction to it.

For as obviously imbalanced towards the "bad" as flu vaccinations are, one has to wonder why it's suddenly become so hip to demand that everyone get a flu shot. I'm not a conspiracy theory nut or anything, but it does raise odd questions...

Upon arrival at Stewart/Newburgh, I was informed by the ticket agent "you're a random selectee!" (it can't be THAT random because I tried to do that checkin from home thing last night and it wouldn't let me so I was already designated a security risk)

But here's the kicker.. How fucking useful is this for "securing the plane" if you tell me about it long before I get to the checkpoint? If I was a Bad Man, I would just hand off all my nail clippers and knitting needles to one of my co-conspirators who HADN'T been "randomly" selected.

In other words, all it does is piss people off OR give people a false sense of safety... Either way its a waste of time and taxpayer money.

I hope I'm selected for my return flight when I don't have anywhere to be the next day. Oooooo the fun I'll have.....

Dear Fox,

I watch baseball, especially the post-season.

You have been running the same ads for the same shows over and over again every single commercial break.

I'm now, officially, sick of your shows. They could be written by Tolstoy and I wouldn't care. You could have a Papal Decree saying "Watch Skin and you're guaranteed a spot at the right hand", and I'd still tell you to go fuck yourself on your fall season.

So here it is: Go fuck yourself on your fall season. If you've promo'ed it during the ALDS/ALCS/World Series, it won't be on my TV this season.

Love,
Derek

This morning's Today Show... by now everyone has seen the image of That Guy who tried for the foul ball in Game 6 of the NLCS, and who is being improperly blamed for the Cubs' unraveling. That Guy has since gone into hiding, because Cubs fans are threatening him, he has had to change his number, take time off from work, etc.

Well, The Today Show, apparently needing to fill dead air with dead talk, are interviewing his next door neighbors. Mind you, the neighbors haven't seen That Guy since before Game 5.

So what, exactly, do they have to offer? "Describe how you felt when you saw your friend on the TV?" Why do I care how they felt? They're his fucking neighbors.

God, I hate the media.

So as I'm sitting in a stairwell of a building in Yonkers, waiting for someone to come rescue Ray's keys from the office he locked them in, I decided to explain why it is I don't live in Connecticut anymore. I was reminded of all of this as I was driving to Norwalk tonight after work, so that Ray and I could go to the Sting concert tomorrow night in NYC.

White Plains to Norwalk is about 25 miles. The trip took me, literally, 90 minutes. For those keeping score, that's about 17 mph the whole trip. Most of that was actually at far less with a significant speed-up at the end.

Meanwhile, the Merritt Parkway, that large parking lot I lost an hour and a half of my life on, is like the land that cellular companies forgot. I know I have T-Mobile, the world's worst carrier, coverage-wise, but I've had that problem with Sprint and damned near every other carrier there is. You'll have five bars of signal then zero, dropped call, drive another mile, and poof, you're back to five bars.

At least in the more rural area I live in I know I'm going to have crappy cel coverage, there's no "signal taunting". And a "traffic jam" is when there's three cars in a row at the stop-light. Sure, it's hard to find a date who still has a full set of teeth, but at least you don't have to worry about some idiot woman in her BMW trying to run Ray's Tahoe off the road (and losing horribly I might add) where I live.

As if there wasn't enough bullshit at airports with people being forced to take off their shoes, unbuckle their belts, etc., now cel-phones, remote door-lock keyfobs, cameras, etc., are all now suspect.

I especially love the quote from Homeland Security officials:

One Homeland Security official said Monday that the new advisory should not discourage Americans from flying, saying officials now know what al Qaeda is working on and that the United States is taking steps to reduce the risk. From that perspective, the official said, flying is now safer than before.

Right, that's exactly what's discouraging me from flying. Not.

Let me be clear, what discourages me from flying are four-thousand different things that make me be considered a suspect and due "closer scrutiny". What discourages me from flying is being treated like a terrorist. What discourages me from flying is a two-hour line at check-in, because grandma's keyfob has to be screened through the CTX machine.

Some day, the airline industry may wake up and realize that they're floundering for two reasons -- a crappy economy, and folks like me who used to fly all the time, but who avoid it like a case of the Bubonic Plague now, not out of fear but out of frustration with the whole bloody process.

Anyone who's ever used Yahoo!Maps knows how flaky they are, giving directions like: Turn left on unnamed road for 0.0 miles.

Tonight they hit their limit with me. I was driving up to Vermont to visit with some friends, and Yahoo!Maps sent me up US-7. Which makes perfect sense -- if you don't know about the plethora of ferries that cross Lake Champlain and attach on their western shore to the freakin Interstate.

So, I ended up driving all over creation at 30-45mph through small towns when, if Yahoo knew how to use ferries, could have been MUCH easier.

If only there was a good TripMaker program for the Mac...

... is for the programming executives or the engineers, or whomever it is, at channels like Sci-Fi Channel or MTV who can't seem to get the following: Make your fucking program start or at at the time the program guide says it will. In other words, if Headbangers' Ball is going to run from 10pm to midnight, have the program start at 10pm. Not 10:05. If Stargate SG-1 is supposed to run two episodes back to back, don't have it start a few minutes late so that when I TiVo it, I lose the closing scene of the second episode.

Also, don't tell me "Well, you should turn on program padding in your TiVo, so it'll start recording early and end late", because that just means that since MTV/SciFi/etc. can't wire head and ass together with even medium grade copper, I should sacrifice the recording of whatever show comes on some other channel immediately preceding or following the MTV/SciFi/etc. show. I'm not going to give up two other shows just to watch the one show in the middle who can't seem to tell time.

If it happens again, I'll just say "Fuck it" and wait for it to come out on DVD.

There's something seriously wrong, when the room rates for a freaking gaming convention, which attracts a bunch of nerds who play Dungeons and Dragons, are more expensive than rooms at The Bellagio in Las Vegas, which is the Most Expensive Hotel In Las Vegas.

That's just freakin nuts. Glad I got someone splittin the room with me.

MSNBC (and others) are reporting about a bigass bioterror drill, spanning several cities and countries over the next five days and involving both a simulated nuclear attack and a simulated biological agent.

But, here's the kicker, what's going to happen is already known in advance. It's scripted. There's a detonation here, first-sightings of the biological issue there, etc. etc.

That's not a test, that's seeing how well you can stick to a script. In case 9/11 didn't teach us anything, the terrorists very rarely turn in their manuscript before its first public read-through.

Show me a real bioterror test. Do it when nobody is ready and waiting for the shit to start flying. Three months from now just say "some time in the next three weeks there will be a drill, codename whatever" and then pick a city and go.

What we're doing now, though, does nothing to test disaster preparedness.

What am I talking about? Headbangers' Ball, that's what.

Now, I'll stay quiet on the fact that my arch-nemesis, Metallica, were the hosts for its debut return to the airwaves, for reasons I'll go into later in the week.

It debuted not on MTV, but on MTV2, ... yeah right, you thought they might actually return to showing videos on the-channel-formerly-known-as-MTV? who's your dealer? Saturday nights @ 10 p.m., though, is going to be its regular slot, from what the ads say.

The modern world is great, though. I don't have to stay up late (TiVo is my friend), I can spin through the commercials, and if a video sucks, I can ignore it, too. All I get is, post-commerical-and-suckage, a straight hour of hard-as-hell tunes.

But is it any good? Well, I'll leave my "verdict" until after a couple weeks have gone by and they've gotten their vibe down, but it's definitely promising.

I'm a loyal TiVo customer. I bought a Series2 mainly so that I could get the Home Media Option, specifically so that I could stream my MP3s to my home stereo via my TiVo.

My bug is still not resolved, and it's a show-stopper for me, enough that I'll return my HMO option in a couple days at the end of the 30 day guarantee period if it's not resolved.

Let me describe it to you so that you can get it fixed lickety-split.

Now, I haven't lived in California in 15 months. Today in the mail, I got my

NOTICE OF DELINQUENT REGISTRATION FINAL NOTICE

which includes such verbiage as "FTB may garnish your wages, attach your bank account, attach real property you own, or seize and sell your real property."

Umm,... hey idiots. Why didn't you pay attention when the State Of New York told you 12 months ago to hand over the Title? It hasn't been a California motor vehicle in quite some time.

They have a form they want me to fill out and mail to them, if it's been registered out of state, but they don't include a postage-paid envelope. So, in other words, they want me to pay to clear up paperwork that they can't be bothered to keep properly themselves.

I called their number (interestingly enough, the number printed on the final notice is wrong, gotta love bureaucracies).

The conversation went something like this ...

So, as I mentioned the other day, I bought my tickets this morning for the Iron Maiden show at Madison Square Garden in July.

We got pretty decent seats, but what was truly amazing to me was the markup. I paid, no lie, 37% in various taxes, tithes, service fees, convenience fees, shipping, order processing fees and building facility charges (wait, isn't the TICKET the building facility charge?!!)

Ya know, I hate to be the curmudgeon, but I remember when I paid $14.50 for my first Iron Maiden show, and another whopping $1.50 in service charges on it, via TicketTron (which was later borged by Der Ticketmeister, can't have a competitive market, you can't milk outrageous fees if you have competitors because they won't charge so much).

I know tickets.com is trying to make some headway in beating down the Ticketmaster Beast, but they haven't managed to scare Ticketmaster enough to be competitive.

And they wonder why the present day concert scene isn't nearly as liquid as it used to be? Here's a tip: if you're charging people six to eight times as much as you used to, that might be indicative of a reason why we're six to eight times less likely to buy tickets.

I used to go to concerts all the time. I would go see shows at The Chance (which still, by the way, has decent ticket prices) about six to eight times a year at least, maybe more. Probably two or three shows a year up in Albany at the Knickerbocker Arena (I refuse to call it the "Pepsi Arena" until Pepsi starts paying me for naming rights as well), three or four shows a summer at the Orange County Fairgrounds, you name it.

Now? I'm lucky if I go see a couple shows a year, and the predominant factor involved is money. A night of entertainment is worth 20-30 bucks to me, but unless you are on my "A-List" you're not worth $60 or more per seat (plus transportation, parking, etc. etc.)...

When I pondered to Z today, "Maybe I'm just being overly disgruntled", he popped out the site's new tagline (above), saying "isn't that what it means to 'Be Derek'?".

I have to give credit where it's due. :)

I never thought I'd say this.

I miss the abysmally poor service that Charter Communciations gave me. Because, by comparison to the fucktards that work for Time Warner/Road Runner, they look like Nobel Prize winning physicists.

I called in like last Monday. Had an outage. They scheduled an appointment, then proceeded to fix the problem somewhere outside my house before the night was through.

I then had another outage on Wednesday night. According to the tech on the phone, I was "the first of many who will be calling me, because it appears wide-spread now that I look at it". Resolved a couple hours later. The tech calls me the next day, asking if they solved it the night before, I say yes, he doesn't bother to come.

I have the same problem again tonight. I call them. They say "it's an inside wiring problem, we can have someone there on Wednesday". I say "excuse me?"

"Well, there's a pattern of problems. It must be your inside wiring."

"There's a pattern of problems which always get resolved by someone who never comes to my apartment. It doesn't take a Masters Degree in Logic to figure out that means that the problem is NOT in my wiring but is, instead, somewhere that your head-end or outside-plant engineers have access to, they fix it regularly, and that instead of scheduling an appointment, you should page the on-call engineer to fix the problem."

"That's not how these cable systems work, sir, they're highly advanced --"

"Would this be an opportune time for me to tell you that I helped build a cable-modem ISP from scratch while Road Runner was still thinking about crossing someone's mind as a potential business idea?"

"Excuse me?"

"I know how cable modems work, probably better than you do, potentially as well as the head-end engineer does. The problem isn't anywhere near my inside wiring."

... but, unfortunately, logic could not prevail in the face of stupidity, and I'm now waiting for a field-tech to come out and pronounce the problem, as expected, to be somewhere up the line from me. At least I got a Monday appointment instead of Wednesday appointment.

Dial-up sucks, but it's almost starting to look better than Road Runner...

[Update: ... and, of course, 45 minutes later, it's working just fine. I called the woman back, said "Call the engineer you said you were going to call, have him make a note on my account of what he did, so the next time I call in, he can do the same thing," because part of the conversation that I hadn't mentioned was this whole "Well, I have no idea what they did the last two times, sir." routine. ... at least I'm not e-mailing via an IR-link to my celphone.

Every time the weather looks like it's "done" with winter-stuff, and the roads are dried up, and I think to myself "maybe I can start commuting in the Miata...," that's when Mother Nature, that cruel heartless bitch, decides to start snowing again.

1-3" predicted for today. Luckily, I got back from the auto body shop early this morning (got some scratches on the Miata that are long overdue for getting fixed), so now I can throw it in the carport again for a week or two until its time to bring it to the shop to get fixed.

The word is "NUCLEAR" not "NUCULAR" ya big fucking retard.

In other words, no surprises so far in tonight's press conference... blah blah blah we KNOW this is true blah blah blah trust us blah blah blah nucular weapons blah blah blah

I was watching the one a few seconds ago, where they talk about "His kid brother was killed here... by a driver under the influence... of marijuana.... he was the driver". Then there's the one where the kids are getting high in the bathroom at the concert and get busted by the cops, or the one where the girl is pregnant because she was high and had no self-control.

They all end the same way "It's more dangerous than we thought".

What a crock of shit. To me, all these commercials epitomize is the fact that our drug policy is utterly abysmal. Being under the influence of marijuana while driving is no more or less dangerous than driving under the influence of alcohol. Having sex with people while stoned is about as stupid as getting drunk and doing the same thing.

And don't even get me started on the commercial which seems to say "it's bad for you because we say its bad and will arrest you, COPS-style, if you disagree."

We need to legalize drugs. All of 'em. You want to put a poison in your body, it's nobody's business but yours. Pass laws if you want that say "insurance companies don't have to cover drug-related issues". How about an era of self-responsibility. If you want to shoot up heroin, be my guest. You shoot up and then go drive your car? Feel free to throw the book at the driver (make DUI/DWI significantly more painful for violators, because they're obviously not painful enough).

So as I noted a week or two ago, I switched to MCI's The Neighborhood service. So tonight, I had to make a call to a number I didn't know in California. I pick up the phone, I dial "411", hear the nice lady's precorded voice say "MCI!" and then ask me for city/state/name. When the human finally comes online, I'm told "I'm not eligible for nationwide directory assistance" and she proceeds to give me (as if I was an idiot) "510-555-1212".

Errrr, wait a second. What do you mean "not eligible"? So after I call the California number I needed to call, I call MCI Customer Service. I go three rounds of cluelessness with reps who insist "411 is incapable of giving you numbers outside your area", to which I say "no, it said nationwide directory assistance, the woman didn't tell me 'We're not able to do that', she said 'YOU can't have that number from me'" Finally after three or four rounds of that charade, I agree to have a manager call me back on the issue within 48 hours.

So, not feeling sated, I decide to call 411 again, this time I'll interrogate the directory assistance operator, and find out what her damage is. Again the familiar "MCI!", and the automated questioning. The human comes on, starts the spiel. I interrupt her, asking "Is it that you're not capable of providing nationwide directory assistance, or just won't give it to me?" "To you, sir," she says, "because you have a different long-distance company on your line."

"What?!" I shout, "I'm on the Neighborhood, I'm MCI, you're MCI, what's the deal?"

"No, sir, this is Verizon Directory Assistance."

... and then it all clicked. Because MCI stupidly decided to push that brand-recognition "MCI!" lady, it led me to believe (quite logically I believe) that MCI was providing the 411 service I'd dialed. They rebranded Verizon's service there, but weren't prepared for the logical fallacy they'd created in so doing.

Jackasses. It's a good thing this will save me beaucoup cash.

A week ago, my boss and I decided "Hey, if I'm going to telecommute three days a week, it's probably easier all around to have a separate line, let the company pay for both local and LD on that line and call it a day".

Now, I know that the last tenant in the apartment had two lines, because when they installed my service on my initial line, they had to come out and fix it the same day because it was all screwed up. (and actually keep that fact in mind later)

If only my second line installation could have gone so simply.

When I pointed out, quite publicly, to Yahoo! engineers, the problem of how boneheaded the text-messaging alert system was (in terms of pager/cel-phone # reuse by other people), I was mocked and laughed at. I'm pleased to see today's Slashdot story about someone having the exact problem I predicted would happen.

Sooner or later, someone is going to wise up to the fact that Yahoo is a Calfornia company, and California has a pretty decent anti-spam law that could be flexed against Yahoo for some serious coin.

This is why you'll never see the Yankees, or any other team with "class" selling naming rights to their stadium.

Let's assume that five years from now, Verizon buys SBC. So then we have a stadium that in eight years ends up with three names. If you want to reminisce about Barry Bonds' record-breaker, you'll end up boggling, "that was at a home game in San Francisco, was it SBC Park? Pac Bell Park? Verizon Park?"

Nobody has to think back to wonder what stadium Gehrig played at. It was Yankee Stadium. Period. Or where Yaz put in his years. It was Fenway. Period.

Teams which sell naming rights basically piss on the future memories of what happens there. Kids who've grown up to see Pac Bell Park (or others) have six or seven names aren't going to necessarily remember "what the park was called then"... they'll just remember "ahhh, it was a home game", or if it was an away game, it'll be like "it was in San Francisco".

Show some class. Name a stadium and leave it at that. If you want to rename it for some famous person or player (e.g., if a famous player dies and the team wants to honor the player or something), that's one thing. That's a one-time thing and you expect that the new name will last for the life of the park. But to have this turn into a bidding game, where brands change in megamerger land is just disrespectful to the players and fans alike.

Unions have helped out a lot of workers, in industries where the employee was frequently mistreated, taken for granted, or exposed to harmful conditions. But just as often, nowadays, it seems like unions exist just to keep themselves alive, and don't care at all what happens to the employees.

Take, for example, the recent United Airlines Mechanics Union rejection of a pay cut. United Airlines, like many airlines, sits on the brink of extinction (annoying to me because I've got a raft of unused frequent flier miles there that I haven't used up yet, but that's a different story). Every other United Airlines union has accepted a pay cut, because it's the only way to keep the company alive. If they didn't, it's likely the airline will file for bankruptcy.

So, the Mechanics' Union has obviously decided "it's better for our employees to have their job stability shot to hell by working for a company that is going to go bankrupt and possibly belly up completely, than it is for them to make a couple bucks less per hour".

How is that better for the employees?

The weather prediction for today was snow. Lots of it. 24 hours straight of either "Snow" or "Heavy Snow" so sayeth the pundits at weather.com, as well as the local news, etc. etc. Midnight to midnight snow.

I wake up this morning, there's an inch or two down, I realize "yup, it's still coming down, I'd better get up, get out before the 'Heavy Snow' starts, and do the grocery shopping I need to do since I won't be able to get it done tomorrow, I'm sure."

It's now before noon, the snow has practically stopped, the parking lot is cleared quite nicely by the management company, and I have to believe the roads are all in good shape. I worked from home today rather than "brave the roads in", when in fact the roads are probably perfectly fine.

Not that I'm complaining about working from home, but still. Idiots.

... or maybe Barry Bonds is just a dick.

At the World Series, they announce the starting lineups. Before the players come out one-by-one, the clubhouse-staff, the trainers, the second-stringers, etc. all go out to the line, where they wait for the first-stringers to come out and join them.

Now, ordinarily, from what I've seen, the coach goes out first, stands at the plate, leaving a gap between himself and the second-stringers, and the starters go out to home plate, high-five the coach and walk "out" the line til they get to the gap, and build the "line" to reach the second-stringers.

The Giants on the other hand did it a little different. Go OUT to the end of the line, high five the second-stringers and such, and then basically go "as far as ya can". You don't get to high-five the other starters in that direction, but it's a nice touch to give some recognition and attention to the other guys on the team.

Except Bonds. Straight to his spot in line, no high-fiving anyone on either side, as though he didn't owe a debt of gratitude to anyone for helping the team get to where they were.

Dick.

Marketing preferences: all set to "No!"

But, lo and behold, I'm now subscribed to the Yahoo!Paydirect Newsletter, and all I have to do is click here to unsubscribe.

I go check my marketing preferences. Yup, they're all still set to "No".

I go look at my Paydirect options. A-ha!, they tossed a newsletter into there and (of course) defaulted everyone in the world to Yes.

The definition of "confirmed opt-in" obviously eludes these assholes. Nor would they consider doing the logical thing and including it on the clearly defined "Marketing Preferences" page, no that would all make much too sense.

Who ya gonna complain to? Their abuse department? If they read it (in six months, that's the usual backlog), they still won't know what to do with it, because it's not a user spamming, it's THEM. You gonna complain to their upstream? Forget it, hosting companies are strapped for cash, they can't afford to try and come down on Yahoo as the spamhaus they are.

But at least it reminded me to cancel my Paydirect account so that Yahoo doesn't try to sell my financial information to someone as soon as they realize there's a profit to be made there. Wouldn't surprise me in the least.

There once was a time when I would go to Internet World for two or three days in a row, with it taking a day and a half to really give the expo floor the coverage it needed.

Some facts from my visit to Internet World today in New York:

Number of times my badge was scanned: 2
Number of business cards dropped in goldfish bowls: 2
Total elapsed time, taxicab-in to taxicab-out: 47 minutes

Sad.

Looks like Jeremy has about had it with the bay area....

Sad part is that from what I've heard, the problem probably is with his bill payment service not paying the bill on time, and the only saving grace for him will be that he actually works for said company so getting it resolved quickly will not be nearly so hard for him as it is for John Q. Citizen.

So my cable company, Charter Communications, is also (like many cable customers) my internet provider, mainly because I'd heard horror stories about SNET's inability to deliver DSL well.

I think I'm gonna say "screw it" and take a chance on SNET, it can't be worse than Charter. My average outage, at present, is around 36 hours, and I average about one a month it seems.

Oh, did I mention I'm down right now? And that I've been relegated to my "ultra-standby backup AOL dialup account that I reserve for when I'm on the road in low-brow hotels which don't have ethernet in the room"?

sigh

Why can't I have some nice neighbor with an open 802.11 base I could piggyback on for the evening.

Meanwhile, I'm now going to have to stick around at home tomorrow, when I really had plans to go to the opening of the Apple Store in White Plains (it's literally right across the street from my office).

At least there's a Yankees game on tonight that can hopefully distract me from my annoyance. It's amazing how long in my life I got along just fine without dedicated access. Once you have it, though, it's only when it's disabled that you realize how intertwined into your life it becomes. Watching a movie, looking up the movie on IMDb. Watching a news story, doing research about what they're talking about.

Crazy.

OK, I'm tired of dialup. I'm outta here.

[10 minutes later] - seems they're monitoring my anger, literally seconds after I posted this blog entry, I double-checked my connection and it was back. Crazy.

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. :(

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. ;-)

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.

... 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.

I was gonna say something about last night's rip-off All-Star Game ending, but Brother Wil said it as good as it could possibly be said.

Just read what he says, and then envision me at the end saying "WORD!"

If you're not a geek, feel free to skip this entry.

There is NOTHING more annoying to me than a tarball which opens up into "application_name/" instead of "application_name-X.YY.ZZ/" If I find whoever produces such tarballs, me, them, and a claw-hammer are going to have a little chat someday.

I'm off to see if I can rebuild the config files that just got trounced by "default settings".....