The Court

Ever notice...

2008-09-02T11:00:00.002-04:00

Ever notice how when the 17-year-old child of a Democrat has a child out of wedlock, it is a degradation of our morals and ethics and represents a failure of the parent to teach self control and how important it is to obey God's law, but when the 17-year-old child of a Republican has a child out of wedlock, it is an entirely different reaction.

"It reinforces the fact that this family lives its pro-life values." —Grover Norquist

"Fortunately, Bristol is following her mother and father's example of choosing life in the midst of a difficult situation." —Tony Perkins

"This is the pro-life choice. The fact that people will criticize her for this shows the astounding extent to which the secular critics of the pro-life movement just don't get it. Those who criticize the Palin family don't understand that we don't see babies as a punishment but as a blessing." —Richard Land

"[The Palins] should be commended once again for not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances." —James Dobson

The kicker from the CNN article: "Some evangelicals gathered in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, for the Republican convention speculated that the news would pose more of a problem for Democrats than for the GOP ticket."

Um... Excuse me? Bristol Palin gets pregnant, and it poses a problem for the Democrats? For the record, I couldn't care less that Bristol Palin is pregnant. I don't see her decision not to abort as some wonderful thing; it was her choice, more power to her, and I hope the child grows up in a loving family who is able to care for it. I certainly am not going to be any more or less likely to vote for McCain/Palin because of this news, and anyone who is swayed one way or another because of it is pretty superficial and short-sighted.

But what I can't help but boggle at is the unmitigated gall of those who hold such a blatant double standard of right and wrong, those who are trying to spin this news item as a positive thing. A 17-year-old girl was having sex out of wedlock and accidentally got pregnant. Forget for a second who she is and imagine that we're talking about the daughter of a woman living in the ghetto on welfare. Republicans point to her as an example of how immoral Democrats are, how immoral welfare recipients are, and if she's not white, even (among the racist of them) how immoral her particular race is.

Where have the Republicans been until now? Why have I never before heard them call babies of 17-year-old unmarried girls "blessings?" (Oh, I've heard plenty of other names they've used for them, though.) Why is it that I've heard so much criticism of the lifestyles and choices that lead to this situation, but now, such criticism is verboten? Why is it that the Democrats—you know, the people who are usually the ones who want to realistically address the problem of teenage sex and the consequences thereof—the ones that are going to have a problem with this?

And, although it might be a low blow, now more than ever, it HAS to be said: People who think that only abstinence-only is an acceptable form of sex education are hopelessly naive. Sarah Palin believes in abstinence-only education, and has undoubtedly practiced it. I strongly suspect that Bristol Palin has never had a serious conversation about sex with her parents or teachers beyond, "Don't do it." Obviously, her abstinence-only education has not provided her with the knowledge and background she needs to make informed choices and good decisions when it comes to having sex, and this is a direct result of it.

So as politically incorrect as it might be, I do criticize Bristol Palin for having a child out of wedlock at 17. I don't want to crucify her; she made a mistake and hopefully she'll be able to make the best of it that she can, and I genuinely do hope that her family supports her. But it absolutely kills me that the people who, for all of my life, have been the ones who sit back and judge people like Bristol Palin—and, let's not fool ourselves, will continue to do so—have suddenly decided that in this case, she's great and wonderful for being unmarried and having a baby at 17. Even more, I do criticize the Republican and religious right's push to not teach kids what they need to know about sex. If by some weird chance McCain/Palin manages to win this election, hopefully abstinence-only eduction will finally be relegated to the nutcase hokey idea that it has been all along.

Five-Dollar Subs

2008-04-14T17:24:00.008-04:00

So, a funny thing happened today. I'm testing out some mailing list software, and I wanted to see how the HTML features work in it. I downloaded the latest version of Mozilla Thunderbird and fired it up. When I did, it had remembered all of my old account information for e-mail accounts that are still valid, but that I don't use.

In my inbox, I see a few very recent e-mails saying that my blog had comments on it. Comments? On a blog I haven't maintained for, wow, over a year? Sure enough, I saw where several people had commented on my Stamped or Metered? post. I couldn't help but start browsing around a bit more to see what else people have been saying. I deleted a few spam comments, and saw where one guy (I see you, Danny!) asked when I was coming back.

Well, I don't know if Danny is still out there, but I am.

I try to start posting again. After all, it's not like I've stopped observing stuff...

Say, that reminds me of something that I've been dealing with lately that has me scratching my head. Some of you might have noticed that Subway, one of my favorite restaurants, has a promotion going on right now where you can get any footlong sub for just $5.

Now normally, I just get one of the combos. A footlong sub, chips, and a drink for some slightly discounted rate than buying them all separately. But now, with $5 footlong subs, it throws a bit of a kink in the works. Which is financially better? Getting a footlong sub for $5 plus chips and a drink, or getting all three at a discounted price? I love Subway, but whenever I have to make a choice like that, I always have the unsettling feeling like they're out to confuse me with the options, and some guy is in the back room giggling with glee, saying "Look! We got another one!"

One day, while standing in line to order some vittles at the Varsity in downtown Atlanta, I noticed that they have combos consisting of various food items--a hamburger, two chili dogs, two slaw dogs, etc.--plus fries or onion rings and a Coke. Being pretty handy at math, I calculated how much the discount was for ordering a combo. I was sorely disappointed when I learned that the discount was exactly zero. If you ordered a number one combo (two chili dogs, fries, and a Coke), it costs exactly the same as if you order two chili dogs, fries, and a Coke, all separately.

So today, I went to Subway determined to get to the bottom of their pricing scandal. Here's what I came up with:

$5.99 for a BMT
$0.89 for a bag of chips
$1.29 for a small Coke
$1.49 for a large Coke
$2.20 to make a sandwich order into a combo with chips and a large Coke

Well, that's interesting! They don't post prices for combos like most fast food restaurants do. Instead, it's just a fixed add-on price. Separately, the chips and Coke will cost you $2.38, which means that by ordering the combo, you're saving a grand total of $0.18, no matter which sandwich you order.

So how do you come out better? By ordering the combo, or by taking the any sub for $5 deal?

Well, since a BMT is normally $5.99, you save $0.99 by getting it for $5. This is more than the $0.18 you save by getting the combo, so it's better to take them up on the promotion. All of the sandwich prices I was looking at are over $5.18 except for the Veggie sandwich ($4.99), so this is true in general as well.

However...

All of this is assuming that you want a large Coke. What if a small is good enough? In that case, you can really rack up the savings! Note that the savings of a small Coke over a large Coke is $0.20, which is two pennies more than the savings of the combo. This means that even under normal circumstances, you save a couple of pennies if you forego the combo completely and buy the small Coke instead of the large. If you're actually eating in the store, this is a no-brainer. Besides, Jared didn't get svelte by being too lazy to walk over to the machine and get a refill. With the any sub for $5 promotion, you save those two pennies plus the $0.99 (for a BMT; your sandwich may vary).

So boiling it all down, here's how much your food will cost by ordering it various ways:

$7.18 for a $5 BMT, chips, and small Coke
$7.38 for a $5 BMT, chips, and large Coke
$8.17 for a normal-price BMT, chips, and small Coke
$8.19 for a BMT, chips, and large Coke combo

One final note just for fun. Next time you're in your local Subway, ask the person who rings up your food what BMT stands for. If they actually know the answer, leave your change in the tip bucket.

Epilogue

You know, I can't help but wonder if it's all worth it. Sometimes, I honestly believe that there's a market out there for a restaurant--or any type of retail store, really--that advertises that they will never have any coupons, specials, combos, or any other type of deals. The prices posted are exactly what you'll pay each and every time, no more, no less.

Shades of Gray

2007-03-12T11:36:00.000-04:00

How often has some person of fame or notoriety been found not guilty of some heinous crime and everyone stands around and wonders, "How could that happen? Were the jurors on drugs?" Sometimes it just seems grossly unfair that someone who is very likely guilty as sin gets off scott free.

I think what a lot of people don't get is the whole "reasonable doubt" thing. This term is deliberately left vague by the law so that jurors—who are supposedly reasonable people—can decide for themselves exactly what reasonable doubt is.

Let's take the Michael Jackson case, for example. I wasn't a juror, but from what little I saw and heard on the news about the case, I had reasonable doubt that he is a child molester. Is he weird? You bet, he's very odd, and I think he might have done it. But that's not the standard we use to find a person guilty and to take away his right to life, liberty, and whatever bizarre pursuits make him happy. The fact is that I think that the accuser's family is seedy, and I think it's entirely possible that they were trying to use the boy's relationship to Michael Jackson to extort the famous star for lots of money. Therefore if I were on the jury, I would have likely gone with not guilty as well.

In the OJ case, I feel differently. From what I saw and heard on the news, I don't have a reasonable doubt that he is guilty of murdering his wife. The jury obviously felt differently. Maybe they saw and heard stuff that I didn't. Maybe I saw and heard stuff that they didn't, which is a problem that should be addressed. But as cold and selfish as it sounds, I would much rather OJ, who is likely a cold-blooded killer, go free than for there to be a chance that I get wrongly convicted of murder because the standards of conviction have been lowered.

Perhaps another problem is that there are no shades of gray in criminal case verdicts. The person is either guilty or not guilty. There is no "probably guilty" or "maybe a little guilty." Is this a problem that could be addressed?

Maybe instead of having to render one of only two choices, jurors can vote on how guilty a defendant is on a scale from one to ten. OJ? Nine. Michael Jackson? Six. When the trial is over, you average the verdicts and base the penalties on how high the verdict is and the crime committed. A ten for first degree murder will get you locked up for life with no chance of parole. A five will get you locked up for a few years. A two will just get you a stiff fine. Verdicts would be cumulative, of course, so if you get convicted with a seven, then you get out and get convicted again with a three, it counts as a ten and you get put away for life. Maybe after a period of time, old verdicts lose some points to account for youthful indiscretions. Maybe verdicts should even be published on the Internet so you can find out how likely it is that your new next door neighbor is a child molester. "Ew, a six? Well, I won't keep my kids locked inside the house, but they sure as hell won't be going to any sleepovers!"

We want your blood... but not all of it

2006-09-13T19:24:00.000-04:00

Wow, I need to write more often. Oh well, I'll try.

Anyway, yesterday, the Red Cross came to where I work to take blood from donors. I've donated at every blood drive I could since the very first one I was eligible for in high school. I donated all through my college years and I continue donating to this day. (Well, yesterday, anyway.) I figured that now would be a good time to share a couple of some amusing (hopefully!) stories from my donating experiences.

I was always amused in high school when the jocks would race to see how fast they could fill their pint-sized bag with blood. More than once I saw guys pass out for doing so, and it was funny. Once, a girl actually went into convulsions, which was pretty freaky. The nurses were right on top of it, though, and she was okay after minute. (She ended up getting the rest of the day out of classes, though. Wish I'd thought of that earlier.)

When I donated once at college, the nurse asked how I was doing. I told her I felt a little light-headed, but was otherwise okay. I didn't mean that I was about to pass out or anything, but boy, did she ever take me seriously. Before I could say another word, there were three nurses propping my seat back and massaging my legs. (Wish I'd thought of that earlier, too!)

Fast forward several years. At one of my jobs, they had the bloodmobile come out. The nurse who asks you all of those personal questions ("Have you ever had sex with a prostitute, even once?") happened to be a man. Since they are kind of weird questions, I usually try to mess with the nurse a little, just to make the situation a little more light. ("Not that I know of...") The guy was completely oblivious, though. No pause, no smile, nothing. If anything, I think I was irritating him.

So when I got in the little donation pod thing and the nice lady who was my donation nurse came over and asked me how I was doing, I told her I was fine, although the guy who asked me the screening questions was a little creepy. She tells me, and I'm not making this up, "Oh, he's my husband!" I swear, I had a bruise almost from my shoulder to my wrist.

My worst donation experience was the one before yesterday. The Red Cross called me at home and wanted to schedule a donation at one of their donation centers close to where I live. Sure, I said, and I went by there. The nurse couldn't get the needle situated correctly so that she could tape it down, so she just stood there and held it. So far, so good. Except when another nurse behind her called her name. She turns around and says, "What?" as, I swear, I think the needle pokes right on into my elbow. I made a sound akin to a squealing, a sound that I really didn't know I was capable of producing. She turns around and says, "Oh, I'm sorry, did that hurt?" Um, YES!!! After that, the blood stopped coming through, and they had to stop the donation halfway through. My arm was sore for days, something that's never happened before or since. The worst part of it was that I didn't even get a sticker for trying to donate, and the lady up front told me, "You need to remember this, and drink more fluids before donating next time." (I drank two bottles of orange juice that morning, and it was only 11:00am. I don't know how much fluid she expected me to drink.) Obviously, I haven't been back to that donation center.

So that brings me to yesterday's donation. They did something new yesterday, they did an apheresis donation. They wanted just my red blood cells, so they hooked me up to a machine. A pint of blood came out, and the machine spun it and separated it into its components. There were two bags hanging on the machine: one bag held really, really dark blood, and the other held yellow goo. The yellow goo got pumped back into me, and the process was repeated. That way, they get twice the amount of red blood cells than a normal donation.

It was pretty cool, I suppose, although being a relatively new process, and not used to having stuff actually put back into me, I was a little nervous. After it took the first round of blood and I was waiting for it to finish separating it, I was looking down at the "input" tube filled with saline. ("Starter fluid" that gets pumped into you until the yellow goo gets pumped back in.) I asked the nurse, "You know, I probably should have asked before, but am I going to be writhing in pain in a minute when the pumping back in part kicks in?"

She said no, but she did say that the saline and the goo would feel kind of cold. See, body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Room temperature in there was around 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The saline was 70 degrees, and the goo had lost several degrees while it was in the bag waiting to be pumped back in. She said that it would lower my body temperature, and asked if I wanted a blanket.

I told her no, I was fine. I was a little chilly already, but I can usually handle cold okay. Within five minutes, though, I was freezing my butt off. It felt like cold water was being poured down my arm. That wasn't so bad, it was actually kind of neat. But when the coolness started circulating, I was begging for that blanket!

I don't think I'll do apheresis again. They said I have to wait twice as long before donating again. In my mind, that kind of defeats the purpose of taking twice the red blood cells. I mean, in the end, it all comes out the same. For another, when you give whole blood, they get the red cells, the platelets, and the plasma, and they use all of it. Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't see how it benefits them. If I do donate through apheresis again though, you can be sure that I'm going to be bundled under that blanket before I start!

Food

2006-02-11T04:14:00.000-05:00

You know what word I absolutely hate? Food. It's just an ugly-sounding word. Say it out loud. "Food." Say it slowly. "Fooooood."

This is the word we give to the stuff that we need to live. Food. Rhymes with rude. And lewd. And crude. Nasty words, all. Food, yuck.

The Spanish-speaking world has a cool word for food. It's called comida. That's a cool word. I can't think of anything that it rhymes with right away, but it's got spunk. There are three syllables, which means it has some meat to it, something you can really sink your teeth into. At the same time, that "ee" sound in the middle makes the word almost playful, something that tempts you, something that you desire.

I think I'm going to have to give up the word food. I just don't like saying it.

"Hey, you want some food?"

"No, thanks."

"Why, not hungry?"

"No, I'm starving, but it just sounds nasty."

I've been thinking of what word I can use instead of food for food. Sustenance. Too hoity-toity. That's like calling your dad Father. Something that only Rockefellers and Vanderbilts use. Hmmm. Grub. No, that's even worse than food. I don't like the idea of calling the stuff I eat the same word that means a small worm. How about chow? Not bad, not bad.

Wait, I've got it. Vittles. It's perfect! Playful and colorful, and as a bonus, it's a word that reflects my Southern heritage. It rhymes with little and middle. Hey, little middle, it even conveys a sense of heath and fitness.

"Hey, you want some food?"

"No, thanks, but I could sure go for some vittles!"

Help me out, folks, let's get the vittles ball rolling. After that, maybe we can do something about the word gum.

Injustice

2006-01-22T08:17:00.000-05:00

What kind of punishment do you think a guy should get if he pours gasoline on his wife, who is recovering from knee surgery, and throws a lit newspaper on her, killing her by burning her alive? What if he said that the reason he did it was because of years of emotional and physical abuse, a claim that her relatives say is just plain not true?

Death? Life in prison? How about only 25 years in jail?

Well, to my knowledge, that's a purely hypothetical situation. But with the genders reversed, it's not. A woman in Missouri who did just that to her husband was sentenced to 25 years in jail.

Now, I'm not saying that her gender has anything to do with her sentence, but 25 years for killing a person by dousing them in gas and setting them on fire? That's just not right.

On the Transport Workers Union Strike

2005-12-20T17:54:00.000-05:00

You know, I've been disappointed with unions in this country lately. For the most part, they are organizations that work in collusion with the management of the companies where their members work and try to screw their members out of dues without providing any kind of meaningful representation.

That's why it's refreshing to see a union like the Transport Workers Union (TWU) in New York City finally take a stand for what's right, even under the intense threat of severe penalties imposed by the "company," which in this case is the government, that its members work for.

Mass media news gets on my nerves, because it tends to focus so much on the results of the strike—commuters having to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and such—and neglect the issues that underlie the strike.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is trying to change the contract with the TWU in two important ways that are the basis of contention: First, workers' pensions will only be fully vested when they turn 62 instead of 55, and second, the MTA wants to have all new workers pay for their insurance benefits.

Now, if the MTU were about to go belly-up, I would say that they're justified in cutting costs to ensure the long-term financial health of the system. But that's not the case. The MTU actually has a surplus to the tune of a billion dollars. So why is an organization with a billion dollars in the bank trying to screw its workers out of health insurance and pension benefits?

Something else really bothers me about this case, too. If these people worked for a private company, they would be fully within their rights to strike as a tactic to get what they need. However, these people happen to work for the government, not a private company. So unlike a private company, the government can use its police powers to try to force these people to work, and it's already done so. Unlike unhappy auto workers, when the TWU members strike, it's against the law.

The MTU decided that it would flex its government muscles to try to keep its workers from striking. It got a court injunction against the strike, and its workers are now being fined for being off the job. That's right, not going to work is now a criminal offense, and I think this sets a very dangerous precedence for the future when our government—the country's largest employer—mistreats its employees.

Another thing that really bothers me is how badly government officials are maligning the union in the press. George Pataki, the governor of New York, said, "They have broken the trust of the people of New York. They have not only endangered our city and state's economy, but they are also recklessly endangering the health and safety of each and every New Yorker."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, "You can't break the law and use that as a negotiating tactic. This is unconscionable."

Why does this bother me? Because these guys are playing two roles in this little dispute. First of all, they are the leaders of the city and state of New York. As such, their job entails looking out for the health and wellfare of the citizens of New York City. With words like these, these two men have the power to scare the bejesus out of people, and that power shouldn't be taken lightly.

But these men also have another role in this dispute as well. They are leaders in the government, which is the employer of these workers. As such, that makes them the very same management that is fighting the union. In other words, in this case, they are clearly not merely observers making disinterested comments on the strike. The are trying their best to shift the blame for this fiasco off their own backs and onto their opponents by abusing their positions as government leaders. That is something that the mass media press clearly isn't stating enough in its reports.

Michael Bloomberg says that the works are "thuggishly" turning their backs on New York City. Let's see who is acting thuggish.

An organization with a billion dollar surplus is cutting retirement and insurance benefits of its employees. When the employees resort to the only method available to them to fight back, the organization fines their union an unheard-of five million dollars, plus one million dollars a day. Further, the individual members of the union are fined $25,000 a day. These are workers that make between $47,000 and $55,000 a year. So much for the Eighth Amendment, which requires that excessive fines not be imposed. Now, who is resorting to thuggish tactics here?

I'm annoyed at the people out there who think that the TWU should just go back to work, or that think that the union is using strong-arm tactics to get unreasonable demands. I always thought that the American Way was to cheer for the little guy, and the TWU in this case is definitely the little guy. They are being hammered incredibly hard, I think, to serve as an example to others: Don't mess with the government. If they lose this battle, it will be just another win in a long string of victories by large organizations and companies to screw average joes out of what they work hard for. Worse, it will be a strong incentive for other government organizations around the country to use screwing its employees as a means of saving more money, even if—as in this case—there's really no need to. We should all be standing behind the TWU and cheering them on!

MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow said the strike is "a slap in the face" to all New Yorkers. I couldn't agree more. But he left out the part about how he is the one slapping.

Whoops! Mandatory recycling

2005-09-24T12:25:00.000-04:00

First of all, let me make this perfectly clear: I support recycling. I think that using stuff over instead of throwing it away is a wonderful idea.

That being said, I also understand people who don't support recycling. It's inconvenient, and there are some people who are actually anti-recycling because they contend that recycling actually uses more energy than it saves, which contributes to this tiny blue marble's problems instead of helping to solve them.

Just about everywhere I've ever been, recycling has been a purely voluntary effort. Companies these days are making it easier to do by distributing recycling bins for various and sundy items throughout their premises. I admire this kind of effort, because if you make it easy for people to recycle, people will generally recycle.

At my company, they did this. Every desk got a green paper trash bin, and all of the breakrooms have large containers marked "Cans and Bottles." For the most part, people use them, and everyone is happy.

Everyone, apparently, except for a few recycling nuts who managed somehow to get the attention of upper management.

A while back, things changed when a new policy was born. Now, recycling is not a volunteer effort at my company, it is mandatory. You heard me right, mandatory.

How is this enforced, you're wondering? Simple. The cleaning services people now have the added responsibility of eyeing your trash as they throw it out. If they spot any bottles or cans in your trash, they are required to not pick it up. All of our trash bins are, of course, those short little office trash bins, so after a couple of days of this, you have nowhere to throw anything away.

To let you know that you've screwed up and are violating the company's mandatory recycling policy, the cleaning services people have to leave a little card on your desk to explain. These red cards have become known as "whoopses" around the company, and this is what they look like (with the company name and contact information removed to protect the, uh, innocent?):

In case those letters are just too tiny, here's what it says:

WHOOPS! We found a "mistake" in your bin last night. Hey, we understand mistakes happen. However, please help protect our business and the environment by making sure your refuse and any recyclable items are placed in the appropriate bins. We will be happy to resume service once these items have been removed. Thanks for your cooperation. For questions regarding the Company's recycling program, please contact (internal extention of the facilities department).

Is it my imagination, or is this incredibly condescending? Now what was supposed to be a form of mild castigation has become a joke. There are even some people in my group that have started collecting these cards and tacking them to their wall. It's gotten so bad that the cleaning services personnel ran out of the cards and are now are usually forced to hand out black-and-white photocopies of the cards. Now, to reclaim the aluminum in a soda can, the company is spending paper, toner, and the energy to fire up a photocopier (which, I can tell you, is no small amount).

One guy actually never bothers to put any recyclable materials in the recycling containers. He gets a "whoops" almost every day, and two or three times a week or so, he takes his bin to the big trash can in the breakroom and empties it there. He doesn't care, and although I support recycling, frankly, I don't blame him.

And the cleaning service people hate this policy. As you can imagine, they are usually the ones that take the brunt of employees' irritation, and many people incorrectly believe that they're the ones to blame for this idiocy. Their reputation is getting a serious and completely unwarranted black eye out of this because it is 100% not their fault. If they don't enforce the policy that my company has set forth, they'll be fired.

I wish that I could conduct some sort of study to find out exactly how much additional recyclable materials have been reclaimed since this policy has been in effect, and compare it against how much more energy, money, and other recyclable materials have been consumed in its implementation. I would be willing to bet that when everything is added up, the conclusion would agree with what I thought should be obvious in the first place: Recycling should be a purely voluntary effort.

The thing that really gets to me, though, is the thought that someone probably got a nice raise and a fat bonus for thinking this boneheaded policy up. (sigh)

Anonymous Comments are Back!

2005-08-22T16:15:00.000-04:00

Update: This post is an update to an earlier comment I made upon the blog being vandalized.

Great news! Blogspot, the home of my ramblings, has added a feature called "comment verification." Basically, if you want to add a comment, you now have to type in a word to verify that you are not a machine vandalizing someones blog.

Since I hated making people register with me first, and since I think that this will work much better, I have re-enabled anonymous posts.

Thanks for your patience while this was hammered out!

A Quantum Leap

2005-08-10T17:04:00.000-04:00

Today, I was reading a site about a new product called promise.tv. It sounds pretty cool. What it does is record every channel that's broadcast (at least, all broadcast channels in the UK) for a solid week. Why? So that if you forgot a show was on that you wanted to watch a couple of days ago, you could still tune it in.

In the description of promise.tv, it says, "This represents a quantum leap in technology over existing video recorders or PVRs." Yes, it may be important, because I think that eventually ALL television will be watched on demand. I dream of the day when you can pay a monthly service fee to your media provider, punch a few buttons, and watch anything that has ever been broadcast.

But I gotta say, I loathe the phrase "quantum leap." It's a phrase borrowed from physics. In its native field, it represents a movement of electrons within an atom between states of energy. The literal definition is any movement from one discrete state (here) to another (there), with no "in between."

Why does it bother me so much? Because its meaning has been completely twisted into something that's not even vaguely related to its original meaning. Take the promise.tv, for example. A real quantum leap would indicate either a subatomic distance so small that it couldn't be measured or something new that could have no half-way step in between. The first definition just plain doesn't make sense, and the fact that someone could have just as easily come out with a PVR that records a full three days of programming shoots down the latter definition.

Oh well, I guess it's just me being nitpicky. Whatever the case, Quantum Leap was still a hellova cool show...

"ET" to Phone Home... Again

2005-07-28T00:53:00.000-04:00

I just read on Dark Horizons (a sci-fi news site) that there are murmurs of doing a sequel to E.T., complete with Drew Barrymore and Steven Spielberg.

At first thought, I thought this was a horrible idea. As a kid who saw E.T. and enjoyed it immensely, I thought, "Nothing good can come of this." The more I thought about it, though, the more I started to think that it's not a half bad idea. But if they do the movie, they should change it somewhat to make it fresh and interesting. I kind of like this idea:

The aliens, mad about our little E.T. buddy almost biting the big one due to those mean Earth scientists, decide that this little blue rock must be taken over. They attack with their lasers and radiation weapons, killing Elliott in the opening salvo. Drew Barrymore, as a grown-up (and scantily clad) Gertie, has to fight them off with guns, grenades, and guts. In the final scene, she must fight hand-to-hand against the very E.T. that was abandoned on Earth years before. She helped to save him 25 years ago, but now, all she feels the stinging pain of vengeance.

I don't know about you, but I would go see it!

Mandatory Insurance Laws

2005-07-22T11:26:00.000-04:00

I just got through paying yet another insurance payment to my car insurance company, and I thought I'd take a few moments to put these thoughts out there.

I personally think that insurance is a complete waste of money, and insurance companies are the second dirtiest industry in this country today only behind the tobacco industry. I don't spend a cent on insurance that I don't have to because in my mind, it's like gambling in Las Vegas, except you're betting on the odds of something bad happening (e.g. getting into a wreck) instead of something good happening (e.g. winning a million dollars). I don't like gambling except as a rare entertaining diversion, yet I am forced to by law.

My car is paid for, free and clear, and has been for several years. Given a choice, I wouldn't spend a cent on insurance for it. Yet every six months, I still have to send a check to an insurance company for liability insurance. In case someone's not familiar with this concept, liability insurance pays other people for any damage I might cause in case I do something stupid and cause a wreck. In the state of Georgia, liability insurance for a car is required in order to legally drive it. If you don't have liability insurance and you get caught, there are stiff fines and possibly even jail time, and the real possibility that you'll lose your car.

The concept, of course, is that everyone who drives a car should be financially able to pay for any damage they cause while doing so. If I don't have liability insurance and I cream a $100,000 Mercedes, the owner of that car would be stuck with the bill since I don't have $100,000 sitting around to pay for it.

My problem with the concept is that there are a whole bunch of flaws that turn the nice thought into just a bunch of laws designed to screw ordinary people and to make insurance companies a lot richer. Here is my laundry list of problems with mandatory liability insurance laws:

Many people still don't have the mandatory liability insurance, so if you want to be covered in case someone hits you, you still have to have uninsured motorist insurance, which covers you in case someone without insurance creams your car. Whether or not the person who hits you has insurance, the damage to your car will still be paid for. If you are making car payments on an automobile loan, uninsured motorist insurance is almost always required as a term of the loan.
In theory, since everyone is now required to carry mandatory liability insurance, the cost of uninsured motorist insurance should be drastically reduced, practically next to free, since there are significantly fewer uninsured motorists on the road. In reality, the cost of uninsured motorist insurance has only gone up. The insurance companies are pocketing all of the extra government mandated income.
There are people in the world, like me, that could pay for any damage that I may cause while driving. At least, I could certainly handle the cost of any damage I may cause up to what my liability insurance would pay. It wouldn't be particularly easy or convenient for me, but I could still do it. By forcing me to pay for liability insurance, the government is taking away my freedom to choose how I spend my money and how much financial risk I can be willing to take with my money. In this sense, I consider my thoughts on this issue to be Libertarian or even Conservative (gasp!).
Forcing people to have mandatory liability insurance can actually encourage people to drive less safely. Why? Because if I don't have insurance, I am a lot more likely to drive very carefully, because I don't want to lose a lot of my personal wealth for being stupid and causing an accident. If I know I won't lose anything, I would probably be a lot less worried about damage I might cause to other vehicles. I find it hard to believe that I'm a weird rare exception.
When government forces me to spend money on something, I consider that to be a tax, and as a tax, I believe that the receivers of that money should be held accountable to the taxpayers as to how much they can charge and what rules they must follow. The insurance industry, especially automobile insurance, is highly unregulated. They can charge whatever they want and act however they want, and the people have no choice but to keep paying because government requires it. The cases of insurance companies screwing people out of legitimate claims are too numerous to list here, and it's just not right. Oh, these government mandated payments aren't tax deductible, either, and as far as I know, there aren't any programs to help low-income make these government mandated payments.

So although I think the motivation for requiring people to have liability insurance is a good one, I strongly disagree with actually enacting it into law. I don't want to get stuck paying the repair bill for someone else's stupidity any more than the next person, but mandatory liability insurance laws doesn't prevent that, they only cost responsible people a lot of money and make insurance companies a lot richer.

Why No More Comments?

2005-07-21T22:01:00.000-04:00

Well, there's an chance that some of you may notice that I have disabled the ability to post anonymous comments to my blog entries, and I wanted to take a moment to explain.

First, let me be clear about one thing: I do not want your personal information. Frankly, I don't care who you are, and all things considered, I would just as soon let you post anonymously to your heart's content. I do not have this blog to spam people with penis enlargement e-mails, to boost anyone's Google ratings, to collect a nice fee for ads, or any other ulterior motive other than to convey a brief sense of what goes on in my head. Hopefully you have noticed that there are no ads and, for the record, will NEVER be any ads on this blog, no matter how popular it may get.

Unfortunately, though, it was the recent victim of link spam, otherwise known as blog spam or comment spam. Basically, someone has set up Web-bots to automatically post massive amounts of crap.

What kind of crap? Well, when I got home tonight, I noticed that there were 35 new comments in my latest blog entry. All of them were either white supremacist trash, solicitations to get to know Jesus, or other such crap. Obviously, if anyone read some of these comments before I was able to delete them, I apologize and assure you that it was most definitely without my consent and it won't happen again. Some of them had Web site links embedded, designed to boost crap Web site ratings on Google. I deleted them all, of course, and changed the settings on this blog so that only "members" of the blog can post comments. A member is someone I have manually added to be able to comment, so if anyone particularly wants to be able to post comments, e-mail me and let me know. (If you don't know my e-mail address, then sorry, but I don't know you well enough to allow you to post comments.)

If you're not familiar with the seedier side of the Internet, you may be asking yourself at this point why someone would do something like this. Though there are many answers, the vast majority of people who do this kind of thing are the type of people I call "schoolyard bullies." They're the people who make other people's lives miserable for no other reason than the fact that they can. They aren't able to make any positive contribution to the world, so in a pathetic attempt to feel important, they try to destroy everything to bring it down to their level. Obviously, it doesn't work and only makes them look sad and foolish, but on an Internet where people can—and should be able to—stay anonymous, it's just a way that these worthless people get their cheap thrills.

I guess in a weird kind of way, I should be happy. After all, until now, my blog has been just an anonymous corner of the Internet that not many people knew or cared about. Now, apparently, it has attained a high enough status on the public radar to be worthy of vandalization. In a way, this incident makes it clear that my blog is now more popular than just one of the billions of throwaway places that litter the 'Net. Of course, it makes me sad that there are schoolyard bullies in the world and that we have to take away their toys, but not only will I live and be happy in spite of it, I'll keep posting so that everyone else can know the ramblings of a tired mind.

The funny thing is that though I don't have a specific name ("Anonymous Coward" will do just fine, I think), I have an idea who may have pointed the blog spam bots to my blog. And to that person out there, wheverever you may be, I'd just like to say that I'm glad you cared enough to stop by, and I hope you enjoy my future posts! :-)

Update: Hey, I was right about my assessment in the last paragraph. My secret admirer posted a reply and confessed. The conversation since has been rather amusing to me; you should check it out if you have a few minutes to waste.

Three Letters from Congressmen

2005-07-18T14:27:00.000-04:00

Wow, two updates for the price of one! This weekend, I got another letter from a different Congressman, this time from John Linder of the U.S. House of Representatives. Also, I dug through some old mail and found that I had indeed also received a reply from Johnny Isakson, which is three replies for three letters. First things first: I offer my apologies to Mr. Linder, who I incorrectly identified as one of my senators in the earlier post. In fact, he is the Seventh District Representative from Georgia. The two senators, of course, are Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson. It was a stupid mistake made in the heat of trying to get the entry posted. And, of course, I hope no one took my earlier post as a knock on Senator Isakson, whose letter I promptly received before the other two.

The text of my letter was exactly the same as that posted in the comments of my earlier post. I've posted Senator Isakson's and Mr. Linder's complete replies to me in the comments of this post. I've reviewed both letters below for no good reason other than I've got a little time to kill today. These reviews are based solely on somewhat objective measures, not on politics or beliefs.

On informational content, the clear winner is Saxby Chambliss. His was the only letter I received that exceeded a single page. While normally I admire brevity and succinctness, Senator Chambliss's letter clearly had more "guts" to it than the others did. He was the only one who mentioned any details about what Congress is doing to resolve the problems facing Social Security. He quoted sources, dropped names of political rivals he's working with, and made a stand on the issue. Well, as much of a stand as a politican can make, anyway.

On personalization, Johnny Isakson gets kudos. His was the only letter that didn't seem to be a form letter in its entirety. I was very impressed when at the end of his letter, he says, "[T]hank you for your suggestions on how best to reform social security. Rest assured, I will keep your thoughts in mind as Congress discusses this vital issue." Nice. Although whoever typed this forgot to properly capitalize "Social Security," at least one of them tried to make me feel like someone read the letter that I sent and responded specifically to what I wrote. I think all of the signatures were printed on the letters instead of personally signed. I've copied scanned pictures of all three below.

As mentioned before, Saxby Chambliss's signature is broken by the print on the letter. If the letters were raised or made of some sort of wax ink, I could explain it away, but they're not. Johnny Isakson's signature was obviously printed. When I did a high-res scan of it, you can actually see the aliasing ("jaggies") produced by the printer, and worse, you can actually see spots where the resolution of the printer isn't quite up to snuff. The content of the letter was the most personal, but the signature was obviously a printout.

John Linder's signature at a glance looks geniune, as if it were made with a blue magic marker. Why anyone would sign a letter with a magic marker is beyond me, but whatever floats your boat, I suppose. The places where lines in the signature intersect (e.g. where the extension line of the capital J crosses through the rest of the name) are darker blue than other places in the signature, which is clever. However, when I flip the letter over (does that make me a flip-flopper?), there is no bleed-through at all. Now I don't know if you remember when you were five and drew on paper with a magic marker, but my mom would always fuss at me if I didn't have something under the paper I was drawing on to absorb the extra ink. The letter's paper doesn't really look special, and I would expect the same bleed-though to happen on it if Mr. Linder had really signed the letter personally, but there is none, nada, zip. Just to test my theory with scientific investigation, I got out a Sharpie® and signed my name on an unused part of the letter. I didn't have blue, but you can see the results below of what happens when red is used:

I'll let you decide what to make of the signatures. By all means, post a comment and let me know if those thoughts run deep.

As for style, it's a toss-up. Saxby Chambliss's letter is printed on a slightly thicker stock of letterhead; the other two letters are on thinner paper. This gives it a bit more of a professional and "Congressional" feel to it. John Linder's tone was a bit more informal than the others, and I've got to admit that it makes him seem a little more like just an average kind of guy than the others. Saxby Chambliss was never anything but formal and, one could argue, slightly inapproachable. Saxby Chambliss's letter was the only one that used the standard convention of having the person who typed the letter's initials at the bottom. There is a small "SC:ca", indicating that the letter was written by Saxby Chambliss (initials SC) but typed by someone else ( initials CA). However, this was slightly undone by the fact that all three letters were watermarked with The Great Seal, but Saxby Chambliss's letter was printed with the watermark upside down. John Linder's had the watermark with the correct orientation, but it was marked with the wrong year (2004, instead of 2005 as the other letters indicated). Oh well, I guess I'm just being picky now, and I certainly would never base my vote on whose watermarks are correct.

If you find this entry remotely amusing or interesting, I highly recommend that you read The Senator Prank by John Hargrave, who pretended he was a fifth grader and wrote to all 100 U.S. senators (as of 2003), told them that he wants to be a comedian when he grows up, and asked them what their favorite joke is. And, of course, I highly encourage you to write to your own Congresspeople or even President Bush and let them know what you think about the issues of the day.

Found... Finally!

2005-07-12T12:42:00.000-04:00

Update: This is an update to an earlier post about my new cell phone woes.

Well, I finally have cell phone service with Verizon. After the guy I talked to yesterday hadn't called back by noon, I called their customer service department once more, this time in obvious exasperation. I laid the whole story out, including that she was the fourth person I had talked to (I also went to a local Verizon store on Saturday, which accomplished nothing). I said that I was having serious doubts about Verizon. After all, if it was this hard—almost a week and counting—to get my phone set up, then how would they respond if I had any other problems?

Dionne, the customer service rep, asked me for one number, the order number from when I originally placed the order. She looked it up—something that no one else I had talked to had been able to do—and said that the order looked fine. She explained that she'll have to build me an account since the old one somehow got overwritten. She asked if she could call back in ten or fifteen minutes, and I said sure, if it will mean that I can get the problem taken care of once and for all.

Well, ten or fifteen minutes later, Dionne called back and said that it was taken care of, I can dial *228 now. I did, and it worked! So I made a test call, and it worked too! I asked why in the world it took that long and talking to four different people (actually around ten, when you include being transferred from department to department) for that ten or fifteen minute problem to be fixed. She said she didn't know, all they had to do was build a new account (with the company discount, of course!), and that she wished that I had talked to her first. Well, I do too, Dionne, and I'm glad that someone at Verizon knows how to handle this problem.

Of course, I still have to wonder, how did my account get overwritten in the first place? I asked Dionne about this, and she said that apparently what had happened is that 1) I ordered the phone and service, 2) they created an account and shipped me the phone, 3) before I got the phone, someone else ordered a phone and service and activated their account, 4) since I hadn't activated my account yet, it took that as the next number in the block, and 5) I had heartache.

Shouldn't their systems know about this possibility and reserve new numbers and accounts for at least several days to get the person who ordered service a chance to activate it? It seems to me that what happened to me would be virtually guaranteed to happened to anyone who ordered service over the Internet. If that were true, I would think that there would be some serious hell to pay at Verizon, so I'm guessing that for most people, it works fine. I'm guessing that for some weird reason, it was just my order that got screwed up. I hope that the problem I went through doesn't just get lost in their system and chalked up as a glitch. I would hope that they really care enough to not want any more customers to have to go throught what I have.

Oh well, I guess we'll see, and if you order Verizon service through the Internet, good luck to you. In the meantime, I've got some free phone calls to make...

Milking the Sheep

2005-07-11T23:37:00.000-04:00

I usually make a deliberate effort to keep my blog rather apolitical, mainly because I want people to leave comments without getting into arguments. I have been working on a political blog to go side-by-side with this one, but I haven't published it yet. Maybe someday when I'm feeling particularly ornery, when you least expect it, BAM!—it will pop into existence Emeril-style.

Most people who know me, though, are well aware (too aware, sometimes) that I'm a rather liberal Democrat. As such, I have engaged in various Democratic pursuits in support of the party and the candidates. And, as I expected, this seems to have had the rather unfortunate side effect of getting me on mailing and calling lists that I really would rather not be on.

This morning, bright and early, I got a call from a fellow who said he was with the "Friends of John Kerry." Wow, a Friend of John Kerry was taking time out his busy day to call little ol' me! What could have I done that was so special to rate a personal call from a genuine Friend of John Kerry?

He explained that he was trying to get support for a bill in Congress to provide free medical insurance to every child in America. He said that they have a list of names of supporters of the bill with over half a million people on it, but they are trying to get over a million names before taking it to Congress. He wanted to know if he could put my name on the list of supporters. Sure, I said, I think that every child should have health insurance, and those who are not able to because of their parents' financial situations should have it provided.

Of course, I was just humoring the guy. I mean, I didn't lie, because that's how I really feel. But he wasn't fooling me and I sure as heck wasn't fooling myself; I knew what was inevitably going to come next. Sure enough, he didn't let me down.

He then explained that in order to reach as many people as possible, they needed funding to continue the campaign to get names on the list, and asked if I could make a donation to their cause. Of course, they could accept credit cards for my convenience. Yep, there it was.

I wasn't really rude, but I probably wasn't especially tactful, either. I said, "I'm not going to give you money, I don't even know you!"

His response genuinely amused me. He said, and these are his exact words, "I told you, I'm with the Friends of John Kerry. You know John Kerry, don't you?"

I almost literally laughed. Was he kidding? "Well, of COURSE I know John Kerry, but I don't know YOU. All I know is that you're an unsolicited caller trying to get money from me. I don't have any particularly good reason to believe you." At that point, I decided to try a slightly different tack. "Say, if I were to give you money, exactly what would it be used for, anyway?"

He said that it would be used to cover administrative costs of the campaign to get names on the list of people who support that bill, because we have to show Congress that all these people are concerned about that issue. He then proceded to explain that when people give money to anyone, like say, the Red Cross, a certain amount of it goes to pay administrative costs because they're so expensive.

I said, "Well, that's one of my issues with what you're telling me. It sounds like ALL of this money is going to administrative costs. Is any money going to actually do something productive? Like say, helping to pay for insurance or medical costs of children?"

No, he said, and at least they're up front about that. The money would be used solely to get the word out and get names for the list.

I told him that I'm sorry, but I think my money could be much better spent—and much more effective—in places other than paying for telemarketers. At that point, he could plainly see that he was not going to get any of my money, so he said thanks for the support and hung up.

You know, I have friends who are staunch Republicans, the kind who are involved in various endeavors and who provide financial support to the bast— er, people who run that party, and I know that the kind of calls like I got this morning are not a uniquely Democratic thing. I have little doubt what kind of organization this guy is involved in. They call and ask people for money, and when they get lucky enough to get some, they keep it for themselves. I don't know whether or not they'll actually turn the list of names over to John Kerry as a list of supporters for some sort of bill to provide health insurance to children, but I'm guessing probably not. One thing's for sure, though, they will definitely sell that list to anyone else who will give them a few bucks for it. It's downright seedy, and it really hurts me to know that there are people out there—good, honest people who want to help out and make the world a better place—who will fall for this kind of crap.

I can think of about a hundred things that could be done to end these kinds of shenanigans, but the sad truth is that as long as a political party can make a few more bucks by selling the names, addresses, and phone numbers of its supporters, it will continue. And what's even more true than that is that as long as scummy scammers can milk people's goodwill for a few bucks, they will always be eager to try. (sigh.)

I hope I'm not sounding preachy, but if you give to a political party—or any other organization or charity, for that matter—please be aware that there are bad people out there who want to use your goodwill and take a few of your bucks. No matter how much you support a charity or cause that someone calls you about, remember that these people are still telemarketers and their goal is to get you to give up your hard-earned cash. Never ever EVER give out any personal information to a stranger who calls you, no matter WHO they say they're with or how much they seem to already know about you! If you want to donate to a charity or a cause, make sure that it is with someone you already know and have heard about, and especially, make sure that YOU are the one initiating the transaction and that the money is going to who you think it is going to.

Be kind. Be giving. Be involved. But more than anything else, be smart. Because to scammers, you're nothing more than just another sheep to be milked, and I'm sure that giving money to pay scammers is a cause that we can all agree is most definitely NOT worthwhile.

Lost Without a Trace

2005-07-09T12:15:00.000-04:00

Update (July 11): I talked to customer support today. I posted the nitty-gritties at the bottom of this entry.

Well, this is sort of weird.

Almost my whole family uses Verizon Wireless as their cell phone service provider. I subscribed to Cingular three years ago becuase they had a special discount plan with my company. Now, Verizon does too, so last Wednesday, I decided to switch so that I could talk to my family long distance without ever having to worry about whether it's a night or weekend. (Plus, I'm getting almost twice the non-Verizon minutes for just two bucks a month more.)

So I got on the Verizon Web site, picked a plan and a phone, and gave them more personal information than I was really comfortable giving anyone. (They want my driver license number!!?) They shipped it FedEx two-day, so last night when I got home from work, I had a shiny new phone waiting for me on my doorstep.

It was like Christmas. I tore into the package and took out all of my "Welcome to Verizon!" shtuff. I threw the contract terms aside and pulled open the bag that had written on it in big black letters, "READ YOUR CONTRACT TERMS BEFORE OPENING THIS PACKAGE!" I waited in anguish while the phone took three and a half hours to charge up. Finally, I was able to register it and start using my shiny new phone!

There was a sticker on the front LCD that said to dial *228 to activate my phone. So I eagerly punched in *228 and hit send. "Welcome to Verizon Wiress over-the-air programming. This call is air-time free. Para español, oprima tres... Press one to program your phone. Press two to update your roaming capabilities. (Not feeling too adventurous, I pressed one.)... I'm sorry, but we are unable to program your phone at this time. Please call Verizon Wireless from a land line phone and a customer service representative will be happy to assist you."

¿Qué es esto? It didn't work? Maybe their system was just glitching. I tried again. Same thing. I tried several more times. Nothing. I tried calling their customer service number. They're closed, and won't open until 11:00am EST on Saturday! So I grudgingly went to bed and slept in. (Okay, the sleeping in part wasn't so grudging.) At 11:00am EST, I called customer service.

They asked me for my name and cell phone number. The cell phone number is printed on the receipt that they sent me with the phone, so I gave it to them. The girl on the other end says, "That's not the information I have. I'm showing that that number belongs to a Miss Cunningham." I told her that that was just plain incorrect. She asked me for my name again. I told her, and after a few seconds, she says, "I don't see any orders under that name. What's your Social Security number?" Again with the personal questions! I'm half-tempted to ask her what her favorite sexual position is, but I bite my tongue and grudgingly give her the number.

At this point, there sure is a lot of gruding stuff going on, and I'm thiking that can't bode well for my future relationship with Verizon Wireless.

Anyway, she again says that they have no record of that account, and they'll have to assign me a new number. Okay, I say, let's do that. She then tells me that they can't do that, I'll have to call a different number on Monday. Apparently, all record of my ordering service with Verizon Wireless has been lost without a trace, in spite of the fact that I'm sitting here holding a brand new LG VX7000 cell phone, a customer receipt, and a welcome package.

MONDAY!!? I can't activate my phone for another two whole days after already waiting one? Crap, it really is like Christmas! You have all these pretty boxes laying around with stuff you know you're going to love inside, but you can't open them up and use them yet; no, you have to just let them sit there and taunt you until some arbitrary date in the unbearable future!

Oh well, Monday it is, I guess. I can't believe that they would have their support set up in such a manner that one wouldn't be able to active his or her phone as soon as he or she gets it. I can't help but wonder if they've ever lost any customers in the time between when they received a phone and when they activated it.

In the meantime, I guess I'll browse around the Internet to see if there are any cool hacks for this phone. Who actually pays for ring tones, anyway? Maybe if I get really bored, I'll call my new cell phone number and yell at Miss Cunningham to give it up, it's mine now.

Update: Well, I just got off the phone with customer support yet again. He reiterated that they cannot find me anywhere in the system. He said that he's going to have to create a new account for me, but that they can't activate the phone until tomorrow morning. Why? Because apparently, "The IT guy who has to do it leaves at four o'clock." Are they serious?

Now I am irritated. I can't understand for the life of me 1) why this is so complicated, and 2) why they don't have people available to solve these problems when they come up, even during so-called normal business hours! If Verizon wants to make a good positive impression on customers from day one, they are failing miserably. It has now been three days and counting since I received my phone and welcome package, and I still can't use it.

Stay tuned, there's more to come, I'm sure...

Tie a String...

2005-07-07T11:06:00.000-04:00

Have you ever see the little cliché picture of a finger with a string tied around it? You know, the little picture that is supposed to indicate a reminder for something?

I just have one question: How in the world can you tie a string around your own finger, when you need that finger to tie the string? All of the little pictures I've ever seen have nice little round bows, as if it was tied with the delicacy of a shoelace. Well, for the record, I've tried to tie a string around my finger like that, and it's just not possible.

The truth is that you need someone to help you by tying the string around your finger. And if you've got someone to help tie the string, why can't that person just help you remember whatever it is you're supposed to do?

Just a thought...

A Letter from my Congressman

2005-07-02T18:07:00.000-04:00

Update: This post is an update to an earlier comment I made in my "Stamped or Metered" entry on May 19, 2005.

In addition to the letter from my homeowners association, I also received in the mail today a letter from one of my senators, Saxby Chambliss. I won't get into the Social Security discussion again right now, but I do want to talk a little bit about the response itself. I'm a little honored that he bothered to reply, but disappointed in that it is obviously a form letter that someone pulled out of the "Social Security" stack. I'll post the entire text of my letter and his response in this post's comments in case you're curious about the exact exchange, but in this post, I have to at least show you his signature:

Notice that it's in blue, as if signed in person with a felt-tip pen. It kind of makes me feel important that a big-time US senator thought about me for a few minutes in his busy day. However, if you look closely, notice that the bottom loop of the "y" in "Saxby" is broken by the typewritten "l" in "Chambliss." Hmmm...

I do wish that his staff person who read and processed my letter had at least modified the basic form letter by putting something like, "Thank you for your ideas," or "I will consider the suggestion you have made," or at least something that indicates that the letter wasn't just OCR'ed and tagged as "Standard Social Security response letter number three." Oh well, at least I did receive a response, and one jam-packed with information about Social Security, and it pretty much spells out what his position on the issue is.

I never received a reponse from John Linder, my other senator, so I'm guessing that he's actually still pondering the idea carefully and taking his time so that the response will be really important and insightful.

The Evil Homeowners Associations

2005-07-02T17:25:00.000-04:00

I find myself having to rant yet again. There's just so much stupidity out there, it's hard sometimes to find time for the happy things in life. Oh well, here goes.

Today, I received a letter in the mail from my homeowners association (hereafter called "HA," because "homeowners association" is too much to type). In case any of my readers aren't familiar with these evil organizations, they are organizations set up to, in theory, make sure that people's property values don't down go down because of boneheaded neighbors doing stupid things to trash up the neighborhood. In practice, all HAs I've ever heard of exist to pretty much make normal people's lives hell by irritating them with petty complaints. I've never heard anyone say, "Gosh, my HA really helped me out!" The only comments I've ever heard about HAs were that they were bothersome at best or downright evil at worst.

For example, today I got a nastygram from my HA. It says that I'm in violation of the covenant (the agreement between a homeowner and the HA). To get back into compliance, I need to: "Weed eat around all beds, edge around the beds to redefine the edges, clear out grass/weeds from beds and apply fresh pine straw through out."

Now, you have to understand that I am basically a lazy person, and I hate yardwork; nevertheless, I do try to keep my yard from being a jungle. I would call my efforts around average, which is really what I shoot for. Some of the landscaping in my neighborhood looks a lot better than mine, some looks a lot worse. You also have to understand that this is not the first such letter I've gotten from my HA. In a typical year, I get three or four of them for stupid petty stuff.

Also, you have to understand that HAs have legal backing, and in theory, if you don't comply with their whims, they can sue you and force you to. And to top it all off, you have to pay them yearly fees for the privilege of living in the neighborhood. My fees are around $320 a year, but depending on where you live, they can be a lot more or a lot less. At the last HA meeting our neighborhood held, we had around $150,000 sitting in the bank from fees collected, and this amount has never shrunk on a year-to-year basis. This really adds to my resentment of my HA because I feel like I'm paying a bunch of money expressly for the purpose of periodically being harassed with nasty letters.

My personal opinion is that in theory, HAs are a good thing. To make the implementation live up to the idea, a few things need to happen. First of all, they need to stop bugging me and other people like me. These stupid letters need to be sent only to egregious violators of the covenant. Why? Because my average-looking yard is not lowering any of my neighbors' property values. Even if I had a below-average yard, they still need to keep their stupid letters to themselves. Only if my yard looks genuinely terrible should I get a nasty letter. If I had an old jalopy up on blocks in my yard, then yeah, I should get a letter. If my edges aren't golf course manicured, then they should leave me the hell alone. After all, I paid $200,000 for this property, and if I want my edges a little undefined and it's not hurting anyone, that should be my perogative. Second, I think that all HAs should put in writing some maximum amount of money that they will ever keep in the bank, adjusted for the cost of inflation. If the balance ever goes above that amount, everyone receives a discount on the fees they have to pay that year.

I'm half tempted to run for president of the HA for my neighborhood. It's really something that I could probably win uncontested, because it's a pain-in-the-ass kind of thing that no one really wants to do. When elected, I could then not-so-respectfully tell the agency that runs our HA to go to hell and to take a fresh bale of pine straw with them to spread through out. Then I could go find another agency to run things here and specifically instruct them to never bother the residents unless at least two complaints from two different residents are received about someone.

I would have done it already, but like I said, I'm basically a lazy person.

A buddy of mine at work once told me a story about an HA he's a member of in Florida. Because his house is in a touristy neighborhood, the HA fees there were outragous. If I remember correctly, they were like $1,500 a year or so. Anyway, one of his neighbors needed to replace his roof because some shingles had blown off. He spent a lot of money getting a nice new roof put on. The problem is that they no longer sold the exact model of shingle that he had on it before, so he picked out the closest one he could find and had them use it instead. My buddy said that he honestly didn't notice any difference, but the HA did. Apparantely, this guy and the guy who ran the HA were not on good terms, and the HA had pestered him several times about such stupid stuff before. This time, the HA sued him for modifying the appearance of his house without the HA's consent. That was the proverbial straw the broke the camel's back, and he fought back. He countersued for several thousands of dollars for harrassment and won. Guess who had to pay him the money—that's right, the rest of the residents of his neighborhood. So the HA's repeated stupidity actually cost the residents a bunch of money in addition to the $1,500 they had to pay in fees that year.

I think I'm going to go take some pictures of my yard and save this letter.

A Spectacular Mistake

2005-07-01T11:20:00.000-04:00

Because they said it a lot better than I could have, this is the text of a statement from the Electronic Frontier Foundation released last Monday, June 27, 2005:

Today the Supreme Court issued a ruling that could impede makers of all kinds of technologies with expensive lawsuits. The long-awaited decision in MGM v. Grokster states that [peer-to-peer] software manufacturers can be held liable for the infringing activities of people who use their software. This decision relies on a new theory of copyright liability that measures whether manufacturers created their wares with the "intent" of inducing consumers to infringe. It means that inventors and entrepreneurs will not only bear the costs of bringing new products to market, but also the costs of lawsuits if consumers start using their products for illegal purposes.

"Today the Supreme Court has unleashed a new era of legal uncertainty on America's innovators," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF's senior intellectual property attorney. "The newly announced inducement theory of copyright liability will fuel a new generation of entertainment industry lawsuits against technology companies. Perhaps more important, the threat of legal costs may lead technology companies to modify their products to please Hollywood instead of consumers."

The Supreme Court has also ordered the lower court to consider whether peer-to-peer companies Grokster and StreamCast can be held liable under the new standard. StreamCast is confident that it will pass muster under the new, multi-pronged test.

MGM v. Grokster was brought by 28 of the world's largest entertainment companies against the makers of the Morpheus, Grokster, and KaZaA filesharing software products in 2001. The entertainment companies hoped to obtain a legal precedent that would hold all technology makers responsible for the infringements committed by the users of their products. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with StreamCast counsel Matt Neco and Charles Baker of Porter and Hedges, defended StreamCast Networks, the company behind the Morpheus filesharing software.

The entertainment companies lost their case in District Court, then lost again on appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The lower court rulings were based on the Supreme Court's landmark decision in the 1984 Sony Betamax case, which determined that Sony was not liable for copyright violations by users of the Betamax VCR.

You know, most of the time, I admire the level-headed decisions that the Supreme Court makes. But when they get it wrong, they almost always do it in a pretty spectacular fashion that will have negative repercussions for decades to come. Anyone remember studying Plessy vs. Ferguson in history? It was the case that reinforced "separate but equal" laws. The decision was made in 1896 and lasted until it was overturned in 1954 by Brown vs. Board of Education. This is one of those instances in which I think that the Supreme Court really screwed the pooch. This time, it wasn't to civil rights, but to another of the foundations of what is supposed to make this country great.

This is yet another significant blow to what used to be one of America's most vaulable assets: its ingenuity and innovation. What this means is that if you make a product and people co-opt it to use for illegal purposes, YOU can be held liable, regardless of legal and legitimate uses your product may have. Before last Monday, this was not true. It's what allowed for such devices as VCRs to exist (a legal battle that was resolved over 20 years ago).

So now, when people (as a lot of software is developed by individuals, not companies) develop new products, they not only have to worry about the normal concerns of whether or not people will want it and whether or not it's safe, they also have to have crystal balls to determine whehter people will start using it for illegal purposes.

I hate to sound like an alarmist, but is it any wonder that we're losing our technological edge in the world today? Is there really any doubt that America will soon be a second-rate country when it comes to innovation, one of the basic underpinning of our whole economy? Not in my mind. People in this country today are scared to be clever because the smarter you are, the more jealous companies will go after you to protect their precious revenue sources. Now, our lawmakers and courts are openly complicit with corporations in this effort. I know that if I ever release or contribute to any open source software, I will only do so anonymously, because I don't want anyone coming after me. (Note that the products that the defendants produced in this lawsuit were not open source, but the same principles apply to ALL software.)

What is really nagging me at this point is that I wonder what effect this will have in other industries? The gun manufacturing industry has lobbied quite successfully for years that they should not be held liable for the illegal uses of their products. It seems to me that this decision completely overturns that argument, because now, they should know in advance what the people who use their products will use them for. It will be interesting to see if this case is used as a legal argument in those lawsuits. Of course the gun manufacturing lobby has lots and LOTS of cash that it generously gives away to politicians, so I doubt that anything remotely logical will make a difference.

The Large Moon

2005-06-25T18:00:00.000-04:00

I was just reading an article referenced on Slashdot that supposedly explains why the moon appears much larger on the horizon than when it is high in the sky.

The nuts and bolts of it is that it is just an optical illusion, and that the moon is, in fact, the same size. Many of the comments about the article go to expound on the thoughts in the original article.

Excuse me, an optical illusion? Am I just a dupe? In my experience, the moon appears WAY bigger on the horizon than high in the sky, and the claim that it really isn't flies in the face of my repeated observations since I was a kid!

Now, I'm not foolish enough to assume I'm 100% right, but I had just assumed that the reason was due to a "lens" effect of the atmosphere. When the moon is on the horizon, there is more of earth's atmosphere in the way, and it is thicker, being closer to the earth, that acts as giant lens that magnifies the moon somewhat. This also explains why it is darker, too--the same amount of light is dispersed over a larger area. It also happens with the sun, which appears much larger just at sunrise and sunset than at high noon.

The article, and several of the commenters, say to take a coin or rolled-up paper and hold it up for comparison and the optical illusion will be evident. I think I'll do something even a little more scientific. The next full moon is on July 21. I am going to use my digital camera to take high-res photos of the full moon high in the sky and on the horizon and figure this thing out once and for all. If I'm really motivated, maybe I'll even throw together some ray-tracing diagrams to show what results would make sense.

Whatever happens, I'm sure there will be more to come on this subject. Also, whatever happens, nothing will take away from the coolness factor of a huge moon on the horizon.

Edit: After re-reading this post, I hope my meaning came across the way intended it. I know, of course, that the moon isn't physically bigger. (Duh.) What I meant was that the moon appears bigger. That is, the size of the disc as it appears in the sky, not the actual size of the sphere in space. Hope no one thought I was being too stupid!

I Want Kids, Just Not My Own

2005-06-17T18:35:00.000-04:00

First, let me start by saying that I'm not knocking having kids. Some folks are natural born parents. My mom was one of those folks. She had more patience than anyone I knew to put up not only with me, but three more as well. I don't know how she did it, and there is no one--literally not a single person on earth--that I have more respect for today.

I'm not one of those people. I don't hate kids, I'm more of the attitude that I can take 'em or leave 'em. Therein lies the problem. Having kids is a 24x7 job, or at least it should be for optimum results. As for me, I can't even keep a house plant alive. I imagine that it wouldn't take too long for law enforcement to get antsy after you accidentally forget to feed your kid for the third day in a row.

Plus, I remember some of the things I did when I was a kid. In hindsight, some of them were truly disgusting, though I didn't really think that much about it at the time. For example, I remember one time, my mom bought some mint-flavored dental floss to try to encourage me to floss regularly. I thought it was pretty cool that the dental floss was like candy! So one day, when everyone was gone, I snuck into my mom's bathroom and got out the minty treat. I pried the plastic spindle out of the small case, popped the whole spool in my mouth, and proceeded to suck on it like you would stringy jawbreaker. I wasn't a stupid kid, I knew that I had to suck on it carefully so as to not unravel the string. After all, if I wasted the dental floss, I knew my mom would be mad at me, because it was her dental floss, too. After thoroughly extracting the flavor, I carefully took the spool out of my mouth, dried it with some toilet paper, placed it back on the spindle, and popped the whole assembly back in the case. I even carefully threaded the floss through the little hole in the top and routed it to cutter, and no one would ever be any the wiser.

Now it's important to point out that I didn't do this with malicious intent. I was very young at the time, like maybe eight or so. It never occurred to me that other family members would care if I had been sucking on the dental floss they're using to clean their teeth. As far as I know, no one ever found out about my tasty treat, though some might now. (Sorry, sis, I hope you weren't eating lunch while reading my blog...) The point is that if I did have kids, I would probably live in constant fear not so much for their safety, but mine.

I suppose that it's for the best that I don't have kids right now. They would undoubtedly turn out pretty warped, though I like to think that they wouldn't be Dahmeresque. Anyone who has read Calvin and Hobbes knows what kind of dad I would probably be.

On an almost completely different topic, you know what I do want? More neighborhood kids. You know, the kids that play out in the yards. I wouldn't even mind if they played in mine, except that they might trip on the weeds I call my lawn. When I was growing up, there were always a ton of kids out and about in the neighborhood. I myself partook in many a dirt clod war and tree climb. We used to play basketball with a makeshift hoop (which until I got a shiny basketball goal one Christmas was an old bicycle tire). We used to play nerf touch football. We used to go out into the woods and set fires. That last one ended when one of my friends--I swear I don't know who--let one get out of control and the fire department had to come out.

Now I'm usually not one to pine for the good old days, because frankly, I've got too much cool stuff now to play with. But thinking about my weed garden, another thing I really miss are the teenagers trying to make a few spare bucks by mowing people's yards. Though I was the only boy, I never had to mow our grass. When it started getting kind of high, a neighborhood kid would come around and offer to mow it for twenty to thirty bucks. My mom would always agree because lawn mowers were expensive. Now, if you want someone to mow your grass for you, you have to get a "lawn maintenance service." I don't know how much they are, but I'm betting it's more than thirty bucks a mow. My lawn mower cost about the same as four or so lawn maintenance service mowings, so the financial incentive just isn't there now.

No, I think that most of the neighborhood kids are probably inside playing video games these days, and all of the teenagers are working at the local grocery store or McDonald's. Meanwhile, I figured out today that lawnmowers, like cars, have air filters that should probably be cleaned or replaced more often than once every three years. I guess I should have mowed our grass when I was teenager and I would have probably known that already.

A Great New Show

2005-06-15T23:30:00.000-04:00

First of all, I'm sorry I haven't posted anything in a while. I started three separate entries that are waiting in my "Drafts" queue that I need to edit and post, so there will likely be a few entries posted this week to make up for lost time. :-)

I don't want to sound like a commercial, but I just saw a great new show on television, one that will probably be highly underrated and eventually die because 99% of Americans want to see sex scenes and shoot-outs instead of really intelligent programming.

If you have watched the documentary movie Super Size Me, then you are already familiar with Morgan Spurlock. He's the guy that ate nothing but McDonald's menu items for thirty whole days. I thought it sounded like a dumb idea for a movie, and it would just be wasted time to find out something painfully obvious: live off of fast food and you'll get fat. Well, one day I was bored, and I had heard a lot about the movie, and it happened to be on one of my premium satellite channels, so I watched it. I was delightfully surprised, because I really enjoyed the movie a lot.

Yes, he did gain weight and yes, I fully expected that. What made the movie interesting, though, were the other health affects it had. Also, it wasn't just a bunch of "here I am eating a Big Mac, now I'm weighing in, now I'm eating a Quarter Pounder, now I'm weighing in..." The guy also put in a lot of interesting research and other information about health in general, the fast food industry, and other related topics. If you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend it.

Now, Morgan Spurlock has a new television show on the FX network called 30 Days, where people walk a mile in other's shoes, so to speak, for a month. The premiere episode was Morgan and his fiance living off of minimum wage for thirty days. Future shows have a Christian living as a Muslim, a straight man living with a gay roommate, and so on. The show had a very Super Size Me feel to it, with documentary information interspersed with the struggle of Morgan and Alex trying to make ends meet.

If you have a chance, I recommend that you catch it when you can, and if you like it as much as I do, you spread the word. The show comes on Wednesday nights at 10:00pm Eastern on FX.

A Week of Nothing

2005-05-26T14:00:00.000-04:00

Have you ever had a week that seems completely inconsequential? The kind that when you reflect on it, it just seems that there was nothing special about it? I've just had one of those weeks. I'm a little hesitant to even post anything to the blog because there was nothing particularly exciting, amusing, or annoying enough to report. (And you know how much I like getting on the soapbox.) So instead of writing a long post about any particular thing, I'm going to write a few short paragraphs about random things.

There are three types of people that I can't stand. The first is hypocrites. The second is people who keep secrets. And I'm not going to tell you what the third type is.

A buddy of mine that I work with turned in his notice on Friday. He got a better job and is moving to another state. Oh well, it was nice knowing him. He insists that we'll keep in touch, but I doubt we will. Not that I don't want to, but it probably just won't happen. Realistically, it's very odd when one keeps in touch with one's former co-workers. Everywhere I've worked, there have been people that I thought I would keep up with for life. Very rarely have I actually kept up with anyone for more than a few months afterwards. There are exceptions, but few and far between. That's why when people leave my company, I usually tell them something like, "Well, it's been nice working with you. I know you think we'll probably be buddies well after our respective retirements, but in the likely case that we'll never see each other again, good luck with that life thing you've got going."

I hate yardwork. I can't help but wonder: If they can genetically engineer corn that can feed the world, why can't they genetically engineer grass that I don't have to water or mow and that kills any weeds and ants that try to grow with it? Or shrubs that I don't have to trim? Or flowers that I don't have to, well, kill?

I hate housework, too. It's so unfair. No matter how clean you try to keep everything, it just constantly gets dirty again. Dusting is the most unfair of all housework, I think. No matter how little you do to mess up your house--even if you die in your garage and just lie there and rot for a few weeks--the dust still builds up. I've gotten to the point where I don't dust and just let a layer build up on everything. Why bother? It will just come back. I wish that some fashionable icon would make dust an "in" thing, so that everyone wants an inch covering everything. "Wow man, this dust is awesome!"

Well, that's all for now. Maybe I'll post a few more thoughts later this afternoon

Stamped or Metered?

2005-05-19T16:10:00.000-04:00

For those of you who don't know, I subscribe to Netflix, an Internet movie rental service where for one flat fee, you can rent as many movies a month as you want and keep them as long as you want with no late fees, and the only catch is that you can only have a certain number out at a time. (How many depends on how much you're willing to pay; in my case, it's five at a time.)

They send you the movies in a fold-over envelope that, when opened, becomes the postage-paid return envelope. It's one of those standard ones that, in the corner, says, "No postage necessary if mailed in the United States," like the ones you get in all that junk mail you receive every day.

Completely unrelated to that is the fact that my mom used to work in an office where they had a postage meter. You can actually buy one yourself if you run a small business, and not have to worry about getting stamps at the post office.

Completely unrelated to that is the fact that every once in a blue moon, I still mail a letter to someone using an old-fashioned envelope and a stamp. These are usually bills, invitations, and the like, but on special occasions may even be something like letters to my congressmen.

Where am I going with this? Well, at the post office, there are always two mailboxes for outgoing mail. One is labelled "STAMPED" and the other is labelled "METERED." It's pretty obvious that old-fashioned letters I mail with a stamp go into the STAMPED box. Letters that my mom's old office, using the postage meter, mail go into the METERED box. But what about my Netflix returns? It's not really stamped, because there's no stamp. It's not really metered, because there's no meter. It's just "No postage necessary." I always drop them off at the post office because if someone sees me putting red Netflix envelopes in my mailbox every few days and raising the flag, they might get the wise idea that it would be a nifty source of free DVDs.

So when I go to the post office to drop them off, I'm always confused. I usually just pick one at random to drop them in. They've always made it back with no problem, but I get the weird feeling that they hate me when I put them in the wrong box. "Well, crap, he has screwed us yet again. Do I look like his personal mail sorter? I guess he thinks he's more important than all those other people in his his ZIP code. Like I have nothing but time to put up with this *#@$!. That's it, I've had enough, I'm going home to get my gun. I know where you live, because I'm the postman!

Fortunately, I haven't had any repercussions that dramatic yet, but still, I'm just odd enough that it worries me that someone at the post office may think I'm being dense by not putting my mail in the right box, and I'm really zany in that if I can make someone else's life a tiny bit better with little or no effort, I will endeavor to do so.

Since I work at night right now, I decided to go up to my local post office during the day to see if I could find out a little bit more information. I didn't want to tie up the lines for no reason at all (my local post office can be quite busy), so I tried to go when I thought that the lines may be real short (10:30am, in case anyone wants to know the "sweet spot") and wrote three letters to my two senators and my representative with my idea for Social Security that I wrote about a few weeks ago. I figured that maybe the prospect of earning $1.11 (37¢ x 3) would help make my stupid questions a little more palatable, and it makes me feel all warm and gooey that I'm making a half-hearted attempt to be a responsible citizen.

So off I went, letters in hand, to ask the pressing question, and maybe even learn something in the process. I timed the dead hours of the post office pretty well, there were only two people in front of me and no one came in behind me while I was there, so for those who might be concerned, I didn't waste any taxpayer money by tying up government workers who would have otherwise been occupied.

I talked to James, who was more than friendly and very helpful. I gave him my three letters to my congressmen, and started asking him questions. First up was the stamped vs. metered question. I asked away, and James told me--drumroll, please--that these envelopes belong in the metered mailbox. He said that these envelopes are still technically metered, even though the graphic isn't produced by a postage meter. I promptly apologized for all of the times I put the envelopes in the wrong box, and he said, "That's okay, sir, we sort them out." I assured him that I would put them in the correct box from now on, and he said, "Really, it's okay, we get paid to do this."

Paid to sort out mail? I wasn't shocked by this, but I thought they had machines to do this kind of thing. I asked about that, and he said no, at a branch office like this one, they sort all of the mail manually, no machines. Someone cracked a joke about if they got some of those machines, they wouldn't need James any longer. (I disagree; James was providing me a valuable service at the moment!) I mentioned that when I print out envelopes, I usually print them with barcodes on them from Microsoft Word, and asked if that really helps since they sort everything by hand. He said that if it's staying within my own ZIP code, it doesn't really, but that if it goes to another city, it spends considerably less time at the central post office in Atlanta, where they do have machines that automatically sort the mail. I also found out from the USPS Web site that businesses that bulk mail can get discounts for having these barcodes on their envelopes. I really was disappointed that they have no fancy cool machines to sort the mail at my local branch; I was seriously considering asking for a quick tour to see them working if they did.

While I was there, I asked one more question I sometimes wonder about. If I put a piece of mail in the post office mailbox instead of my street mailbox, does it get to its destination any faster? James said that no, all of the mail is sent out at the same time each day, whether it comes from someone's house or is dropped at the mailbox. Interesting.

So there you have it. Next time you send something back to a company in a postage-paid envelope by taking it to the post office, be sure to drop it in the METERED mailbox, not the STAMPED mailbox. They won't hate your guts if you put it in the wrong box, but it's just the right thing to do.

Bless This Food

2005-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

The other day, I was thinking about a curious habit that a lot of religious people have, asking the blessing at meals. When I was a kid, we did it before every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I still remember the words: "God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food. Bow our heads, we are fed, give us Lord our daily bread." I remember wondering why we were so thankful for bread when we were eating tacos, but I was just a kid. When I got a little older, I figured out that grown-ups usually ask the blessing a little differently. My mother used to use, "Our heavenly father, we ask you to bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies..." Except for really long-winded blessings like the preacher would say when we had fellowship at the church, it usually always boils down to the same idea, "Hey, thanks for the food, God, I really 'preciate it!" I never understood why my mom would use such fancy words when that short sentence pretty much covered it and would allow us to eat a lot sooner.

I'm reminded of something one of my sisters said when I was little. In her defense, she was little, too. I was about to eat something before the blessing was properly asked, and she quickly admonished me: "You can't eat before asking the blessing, you'll choke!" So for a few years after that, I always dutifully asked the blessing not out of any particular sense of gratitude, but for fear that God would smite me Darth Vader-style, unable to breathe for not doing so. I also remember a few pieces of food going down the wrong pipe now and then and thinking that I must have somehow screwed it up. Only after numerous repeated observations of people eating without audibly asking the blessing first did I figure out that failure to ask the blessing correctly and choking were probably unrelated events.

I find it curious that people express such divine gratitude for food. I mean sure, we all need it to survive, but it's not like God gives us the stuff for free. Since I'm not a hunter and my greenest thumb is pasty white, I have to go to work to earn money for the food I buy and eat, and since I usually have to just grab something very quickly on the run, most of what I eat isn't exactly manna from heaven. People don't ask the blessing for other stuff they have to work for and buy, do they? "God is great, God is good, thank you for this chair of wood..."

They don't ask the blessing for other life essentials, either. I mean, think about it, water is even more essential to life, but I've never seen someone bow their head over a water fountain thanking God for it, and most of the time, it IS free or at least trivially cheap. No one asks the blessing for walking into their comfortable shelter, or when they put on their nice warm winter coat. "God is great, God is good, thank you for this coat with hood..."

Is it too much of a shortcut to express gratitude for what you've eaten during the day during your nightly prayers? "Lord now lay me down to sleep, I pray my Lord my soul to keep. Thanks a lot, the food was great, my hunger it did satiate..." Sure would save everyone a lot of time, and would probably avoid a few awkward situations when people are eating in public and such.

When I started school, we all had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. You couldn't just stand up and say, "Sure, I'll be loyal to the U.S.A.," it was a specific set of words. For those like most Americans who have forgotten it, the complete verse is: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Even though I recited this from my first day of school, I had no idea what the word "allegiance" meant, what a republic was, or even the concept of indivisibility (I actually remember calling our country "invisible" for several years). I was simply reciting something from rote that I really didn't understand at all.

I suspect that for most people, the same is true of asking the blessing. It's just a habit, something you picked up from your parents as a kid. That's why "the blessing" is a noun, like "the pledge." It seems to me that if people were genuine, they wouldn't say they were asking "the blessing," they would say that they were asking for God to bless--a verb--the food they were about to eat. By trivializing it to a mere recitation, in my mind, they are completely missing the point of the process. I would think that God would rather have one be inconsistently but genuinely grateful than consistently trite.

I don't ask the blessing myself, and I honestly can't remember the last time I did. But if I did, I would try to do it in such a way to express how much I appreciate this meal at this particular point in time. It wouldn't be a cute little poem, it would be in language I would use to thank a good friend for a gift. Let's see, something like, "Thanks, God, you know how much I like lasagne, and this lasagne really smells great. I'm guessing the cheese is really gooey, and man, am I looking forward to that! The salad dressing was a little runny. I still liked it, but if you've got some pull with the manager, you might want to give him a sign or something so that the next set of folks that come through will be even more grateful. But hey, I'm going to go ahead and dig in now before it gets cold, so thanks again!"

I suppose you'll have to decide for yourself what a proper blessing is, but hopefully I've gotten you to think about it a little. And if I ever die from choking on a really good lasagne, you'll know I screwed it up.

A Scary Quote

2005-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

I ran across this one today, and thought it was very scary, considering a lot of stuff I see, hear, and read today:

Of course the people don't want war...But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.
--Hermann Goering

I'm not an anti-war activist or anything, because sometimes I feel that it is justified. But I do feel extremely manipulated. And that's not past tense, either, it is still going on today. I guess that collectively, we've learned very little over the years.

Application Blocking

2005-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

I really do try to keep this blog from being a gripe fest, but sometimes I just can't help it.

My company--I won't name names (yet)--never ceases to amaze me in the number of ways it finds to be stupid. Today's little surprise was that when I tried to pull up a Web site, I got a nice little dialog box explaining that my workstation policy doesn't allow the application to run. Not the Web site, the application itself. The application, of course, is Mozilla Firefox, the Web browser alternative to Internet Explorer.

For those who don't know, Firefox is an open source software application that has recently garnered much publicity for being much safer and more secure than Internet Explorer. I happen to like it because it has better features, such as ad and popup blocking. But at my company, it is specifically listed as an unauthorized application that must be blocked from running.

Why? I'm sure that the powers-that-be would come up with some nonsense about standardizing all of the workstations, but I know it boils down to one thing: control. A lot of people in IT have a nasty habit of thinking that because they are provided the means of doing something, they must do that thing. In this case, it's restricting applications that can be run.

How do I know? Because I've reluctantly been on the other side of this fence several times. My background is as a systems administrator, and I've had several heated exchanges with managers who wanted to do everything they could to snuff out any individuality in machine configurations. One particular incident that comes to mind was an IT manager who wanted to lock down what wallpaper was used as the background for every machine in the company. Why the hell would we want to dictate the wallpaper on a user's desktop? "Standardization," he said, but I knew that the real reason was a lot simpler: Because we can.

The thing is, though, that users aren't robots. Big corporations try to imagine us all as interchangeable cogs, but the truth is that everybody works differently. Even though the corporate standard is Internet Explorer, maybe I'm more efficient and productive with Firefox (I am). Maybe I will use Firefox to try things work-related that I cannot try in Internet Explorer (I will). Maybe I just plain like Firefox better (I do).

What IT people often forget is that IT is supposed to help people get their work done, not keep them from doing their job. Being in IT myself, I understand all-too-well that sometimes you have to restrict something to protect the integrity of the systems and the data, such as keeping people from running viruses and such. I understand keeping people from doing something illegal, such as running unlicensed copies of software. But stopping users from customizing their machine to maximize their own productivity--or even to simply appeal to their aesthetic sense--is unprofessional and just plain stupid.

By the way, the Firefox-blocking thing is easy enough to work around. I simply renamed the firefox.exe executable file iexplore.exe, which of course, is not blocked. I am once again browsing in peace.

Cable vs. Satellite Update

2005-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

Well, I got Comcast to come out and try to fix the problems discussed in an entry a couple of weeks ago. Here's what happened.

The first thing the technician does is whip out a device that measures signal strength and took a reading from the cable at the cable box. "Yep," he says, "Here's your problem. The signal is at minus nine." Oh my god, minus nine? Does that mean that it is actually sucking a signal out of my television? I guess not, and when I suggested it, he didn't look amused.

He asked to see where the splitter was upstairs, so I took him to it. I was dreading this, because I knew what was coming. I actually wired my house with cable myself. I used good quality RG-6 coax cable, but the splitter in my wiring box is a rather crappy six-way splitter. I haven't been using it because the satellite cables all go from the dish straight to the tuner via one splice, but like I said, I knew what was coming. "Um-hmm, this is the problem. This won't do at all." I explained that I tried disconnecting the input and plugging it straight into the cable going to the living room (bypassing the splitter) and still got the same result. He didn't look convinced, and whipped out a shiny new two-way splitter and plugged in the input and output cables to it. One thing I've gotta say, these cable technicians do have cool toys, and I really do want one of those thingeys that will tell me the signal strength. I'd love to go to my friends' houses and impress them by saying stuff like, "Your signal strength is at minus two" and then whipping out shiny new splitters. But I digress...

We went back to the living room, and he took another measurement. "Yep, that's a LOT better. We're at plus one now." I think I actually saw my poor television breathe a sigh of relief, as if a great burden were suddenly lifted from it. We plugged everything back up, turned it on, and the picture was exactly the same: grainy and snowy. "Yep," the technician told me, "That's better!"

"Better!? No it's not!" I flipped over to my satellite box (still connected) and said, "That is better! It doesn't have to be that good, but it has to be a lot better than (flip) this!"

"Ah, I see," he said thoughtfully. "Well you see, the satellite is digital, and the cable is analog. We're working on converting everything over to digital, but you've got a lot of people who still want to watch television without a cable box."

I then took to something I usually try to diligently avoid: giving people who have no say-so whatsoever advice on what a company ought to do. "I don't understand why until everyone is digital you don't just pipe both an analog version and a digital version of all of these stations over the cable. That would make everyone happy!"

He said something about them working on it, but it's at least a few months away. I don't think they're working on it, and even if they are, I'm not watching a crappy television signal for a few months if I don't have to. I thanked him for his time, gave him back his shiny new splitter, and sent him on his way. After he left, I called Comcast and told them sorry, I just don't like it, and on Monday, I returned all of the equipment they installed the first time out.

So that's the status of things. I'm still somehow managing to get by without HDTV. Maybe I'll put up an over-the-air antenna and hook it up to another input on my television. Maybe I'll wait until later and see what DirecTV does. Maybe in six months we'll all be watching television over the Internet. Whatever the future holds, that's my account of the past.

As a post-note, I just noticed that the Comcast links from my original post won't let you browse their site without you giving them your address, which frankly is none of their business, so I have removed the links. If you're interested in cable service, their Web site is http://comcast.com. Give them your neighbor's address instead, they watch too much television anyway.

A Social Security Solution

2005-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00

Okay, I've been hearing a LOT about Social Security lately, specifically about George W. Bush's desire to partially privatize it.

There are good and bad things about this idea. Each side wants everyone to pay attention to their arguments and ignore the other side's.

On the one hand, partially privatizing Social Security will help meet the financial demands of the system. Social Security is expensive. I mean, REALLY expensive. If I recall correctly, I think it's the second largest expenditure from our nation's budget. Although Democrats and Republicans argue over exactly when benefits will be cut, almost all do agree that the day will come in the not-too-distant future. The system is unsustainable as it is, and it will have to be changed one way or another at some point.

On the other, I have some serious concerns about privatizing Social Security. The first is short-term costs. You see, most people have the mistaken impression that Social Security is some sort of account that they have been paying into over the years, and when they turn 65, they'll get that money back. Oh how wrong that notion is! In fact, Social Security is a tax, just like any other. The money you pay in isn't being saved for you, it is mostly being paid out to the people who are currently on Social Security now. If Congress put an abrupt end to Social Security today so that you could save your own money for retirement (i.e. a full implementation of the privatization plan), the people who are currently on Social Security would suddenly be cut off after having paid into the system for all of their working years. The money that was funding their monthly check--your Social Security tax--is now going into your private retirement account! I can't tell you how frustrated I get when I explain that to people and they say something like, "They have to give me that money back, I've been paying it all these years!" No, they don't, and demanding your Social Security tax money back is about the same thing as demanding the money back that you have paid in income taxes and sales taxes over the years because it was your money. Maybe it was your money, but it's already been spent by your crazy Uncle Sam!

Also, I am concerned about the possibility of people losing their retirement money. Right now, in spite of how the system does need some sort of reform, Social Security is a guaranteed payment. You will get x dollars a month, no matter how smart or how stupid an investor you are. If you take away that guarantee, you will have people who invest their money badly, and come retirement age, they'll end up with a lot less money than they need to live. What happens to them? Do they get thrown out on the street, subsisting on welfare? Has that really improved our system or saved us anything? I think not.

I'm stymied about the first problem. The fact is that any money you take out of the Social Security system will have to be made up for somehow. Since I'm adamant that we shouldn't run a budget deficit (which we already are), government would have to find a way to cut spending elsewhere to come up with the dough. Government cutting spending? Ha!

The second problem is easily enough solved, though. The answer, I think, is simple. Let people invest their money, and when they get old enough to start taking it out, if the amount is less than Social Security would have been, subsidize the difference.

I know, conservatives are thinking, What!? Government pay people for making bad investments? Damn straight, for a couple of reasons. First of all, you're already taking away a benefit that they have been paying into all this time, and these people deserve some sort of assurance that they won't get screwed for it. Second of all, assuming that most people will not invest badly or the market tank too much, it will be very little money, way much less than the current second highest government expenditure.

Besides, it's a moot point, right? According to conservatives, everyone will make more money with private accounts, so under this type of plan, government will never have to actually spend any money on this, right? Right?

Well, that's my humble contribution to the solution. Now if we can figure out some way to pay for it without exploding the deficit (which Bush's plan doesn't address), then maybe we'll have a plan that I can sign on to.

The Days of Yore...

2005-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

Tonight, I've decided to post something a little more upbeat (or more likely, offbeat), something truly random that just floated through my brain.

You know what is fun? Role playing games. Yeah, I mean computer games too, but mainly, I'm referring to the old pencil-and-paper games epitomized by Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980's. I fondly remember messing around with the game with some neighborhood friends when I was in elementary school. I long for the days when my poor wizard's life hung by a thread, completely at the mercy of some hidden information known only to the godlike Dungeon Master.

In college, I met another group of folks who loved role-playing games. One guy who lived across campus from me was particularly good at running sessions. Mike would always really get into the part: talking in corny accents, giving us pre-prepared maps, and the like. Man, that was fun, and I really got into it.

Sadly, I think that no one new to the genre today really understands what it was about in those days. In our new age of computer game masters and their unrelenting adherence to the mechanics of the game, all the games have become roll playing games. People no longer play for the enjoyment of escaping to a different world in a different time, they play with the unmitigated desire to win. Everything seems to boil down to stat-maxing and power-leveling. It's all about finishing this story arc to get the next cool weapon. It's about being able to kill people in PvP combat and avoid being killed by someone just like you with a slightly more powerful character.

Lately, I've been playing an MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) called City of Heroes. I really do like it a lot because it is such a clever idea and a great implementation of that idea. However, even in what I consider the best of the modern role-playing games, there is a lot lacking. You see, I'm a superhero in the game, defending the citizens of Paragon City against evildoers with all sorts of nefarious plots. A noble goal, but it's hard to feel very heroic when all of your conversations are limited to things like, "Hey, can you help me with a sewer run? I'm trying to get to level 38 and need to farm some krakens. We don't need to kill the hydra, because I'm only two bubbles away."

If this were a traditional role-playing game of old, my character's response would be something along the lines of, "Level 38 of what? If there are kraken in the sewers, we need to quickly send out an alert on the comm channels to fight this menace! And why would we not kill a hydra if there is one there? It could cause untold mayhem in the city! And what are these 'bubbles' of which you speak?"

Unfortunately, I'm usually only four or five bubbles away from leveling myself and getting a cool new superpower, and such responses are usually met with comments like, "nvm weirdo, i'll find someone else." They totally miss the point. Even the self-professed role-players in the game usually degrade into game-speak a large part of the time. I've tried to lead missions before while role-playing exclusively, refusing to engage in game-speak, and I'm not sure the other people in the group knew what to think. They seemed to enjoy it, if for no other reason than it was different, but the game mechanics were still a major factor in their gameplay. No one was willing to sacrifice experience points for, well, the role-playing experience.

I don't know, maybe I missed my calling. In college, I was forced to take a fine arts class as a requirement of graduation. Most people suffered through a quarter of music appreciation, but I wanted to do something a little different. I took a class called "Acting Workshop for Non-Majors." In the class, we mainly created improvised scenes that focused on a specific topic of the day, such as setting, props, character, and dialog. I had a blast because improvising was a lot like playing a role-plaing game minus the maps, miniatures, and dice. All I had to do was imagine I was someone else, at times someone totally unlike myself, and do what they would do. I got an easy A in the class (okay, I guess there was still an element of "winning") and it was by far the most fun I had in any class.

Who knows, after posting this, maybe I'll look around to see if there is a local role-playing group around town. Sure, people might think it's weird and geeky, but that's never stopped me from doing stuff like that before. And damn, it sure is fun!

Cable vs. Satellite

2005-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

I admit, I'm a televisaholic. I LOVE television, and I have since I witnessed the crazy antics of Big Bird, Tom and Jerry, Gilligan, and all the others. A while back, when my old Zenith finally bit the dust, I bit the bullet and got what I consider to be a really nice television. It's a Sony 34" HDTV, and it truly is a thing of beauty. The only problem is that I had DirecTV service, and at the time, if you had an HDTV, you had to make a choice: HDTV or TiVo service. Having never really witnessed HDTV in action, I decided that I really like my TiVo service better, so it was a no-brainer: I can live without HDTV a little longer.

Well, now DirecTV has an HDTV DirecTV service with TiVo service included. (I call it HD DirecTiVo, for short.) But if you want it, there's a hefty price tag. They don't let you lease the receiver, so you have to pay $1,000 for the box up front, plus an extra $11 a month for the service. For that wad of cash, you get 12 high definition channels. That's right, $1,000 plus $11 a month for TWELVE channels. God, I want HDTV, but there's no way I can even come close to justifying that. (Especially considering that five of those channels--the broadcast networks--are available to me, even without satellite or cable service, via an "over-the-air" antenna, which is how you get those five channels from DirecTV anyway...)

Enter Comcast, our local friendly cable company. Comcast has a comparable service, but they allow you to lease the box, and you don't need an over-the-air antenna. For this, they charge an extra $10 a month to their cable service. So for about the same price as I'm paying DirecTV every month, I can get HDTV channels, too. So far, so good, or so I thought. I called and ordered installation last Friday to check it all out. Yesterday, a technician showed up and installed the cable boxes. The first thing I did, of course, was tune in to some of the HDTV channels. I've got to admit that they're mind-numbingly gorgeous. The picture is better than anything I've seen on a television before. However...

It didn't take me long to figure out why I switched away from cable in the first place. I tuned in to some of the standard definition channels, and the signal is absolute crap. I mean crap to the point of having a rabbit ears antenna would be better. This is the dirty little secret of all those cable companies when they're pitching their "digital" cable service. Only SOME of the channels are digital. All of the standard cable television fare--broadcast networks, CNN, ESPN, Sci-Fi, etc. are analog channels, not digital. This means that's not any better than the cable service you've grown up with and loved for the past thirty years. Only some of the newer channels and the premium movie channels are digital. On satellite television, ALL channels are digital by necessity, so the quality of the picture is much higher than the analog channels offered by the cable companies.

How much better? Well, see for yourself. I took photographs with my digital camera of the satellite picture and the cable picture of a scene. (That's Cleavant Derricks, who plays Rembrandt Brown on Sliders.) Unfortunately, this is no exaggeration, this is what it looks like in honest-to-god real life:

The top picture is satellite, the bottom cable. Which would you prefer? Even at the low resolution I used for this blog, the difference is painfully obvious. The cable technician worked on this problem for around an hour and a half while he was here. He changed the connectors at the street, the connectors on my house, and adjusted a bunch of stuff, all to no avail. Before he left, I was able to show him side-by-side the difference between the Comcast service and DirecTV. He said that yes, the Comcast service was significantly worse, but he had done all he could and that at this point, I need to place a service call. (More on that in a second.)

Another complaint I have is with the Comcast guide. Before I rant, I'll post a couple of more pictures for comparison. Before you read on, look at the pictures and see if you can figure out what I don't like about the bottom one:

Like everyone else, I HATE advertisements. I grudgingly accept them when people are giving me stuff for free or at a lower cost. But I PAY for cable service. They're already making money off of me through my monthly service fee. That's not good enough, though. They want to make even more money from paid sponsors, and to hell with what I--a paying customer--think about it.

And what do I get for these ads? Less than nothing. Notice that on the DirecTV guide, I have a nice little picture-in-guide that allows me to keep watching the channel even when the guide is up, and a VERY nice summary of the show that is selected. Also notice that I get to see what is on over the span of an hour and a half. On the Comcast guide, I get nothing but ads and the ability to see what is on right now. Sure, I can navigate around in the guide, but to see what is coming on in an hour, it takes me a lot more button presses than it does on the DirecTV guide. The reason? Because Comcast is greedy and wants to force ads on customers that are already paying. To me, that's inexcusable.

A few other screwy things have gone wrong, too. Comcast screwed up my order. When I placed the order, I told them I wanted the Digital Gold package, with HBO and Showtime. I didn't get either. And now, the second cable box on the television in my bedroom isn't working. I get nothing but static on it. If I plug the cable directly into the television, I can see the analog channels I receive (in all their crappy quality), which means that the cable connection is fine. When I plug it into the cable box, I can see menus (as evidenced by the picture of the guide above), which means that the connection between the cable box and the telvision is fine. The problem has to be with the cable box itself, which stopped working around three hours or so after it was installed.

So today, I called Comcast with all of these complaints. I told them that they're going to have to fix at least the reception problem and the cable box problem or else I'll cancel my service as fast as I ordered it. (Fortunately, I haven't canceled my DirecTV service yet!) They're sending a technician out this Saturday between 2:00pm and 5:00pm to hopefully fix these problems. While on the phone, they did enable the HBO and Showtime channels. I really don't understand why they didn't have that taken care of before the technician left. Also, I still don't get some of the HD channels I'm supposed to even with what they did over the telephone, so hopefully the technician that comes out will take care of that, too.

I guess we'll see, but right now, I'm really skeptical. I do know that DirecTV announced in September of last year that they will be dramatically improving their service this year with the launch of two new satellites that will pipe out enough HDTV local television to forego the need for an over-the-air antenna. Also, industry insiders are saying that DirecTV is planning on dumping TiVo to make their own personal video recorder box. If they do, maybe they'll come out with new leasing plans that will allow one to get these boxes at an incremental monthly cost instead of paying a massive wad of cash up front. With both of these developments, I will seriously reconsider the HD DirecTV DVR service then.

I'll post an update later on what happens when the Comcast technician comes out.

Epilogue

When I called Comcast to complain about how much my cable service sucks, and after explicitly telling them that I was very tempted to go on and cancel my service after only a single day, the lady asked me with complete sincerety if I was interested in Comcast's high-speed Internet service. I couldn't help but laugh. The nicest reponse I could come up with was, "Let's just see if you can get the cable service working first."

The Perils of Software Activation

2005-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

You know, I really do respect software developers and intellectual property rights. I am also keenly aware of how bad a problem piracy is. I won't try to defend people who use illegal copies of software on their machine, as I firmly believe that if you are not willing to pay for software that you do not use, then you should find an alternative. (ahem... open source... *cough*!)

However, I do have some serious qualms with the practical aspects of one of the most common methods of keeping people from using illegal copies of software: software "activation." In case you're not familiar with what this is, it works as follows. When you install software that requires activation on your computer, the software "calls home," usually by using the Internet to contact the company that publishes the software. The software then transmits a sort of password, usually based on details about your machine. A simplified example would be the software adding up how fast your CPU is, how big your hard drive is, how much memory you have installed, and send that number to the software publisher, which then provides a key to the software based on that code.

If you give your legal software to your friend to install, it won't work, because his machine has different numbers, and the password won't match. However, this scheme is ruthless in its assessment. If you buy another computer and install the software, guess what--the software you paid hard-earned cash for will no longer work! At the very least, you will be forced to call the software publisher and try to convince them that you need the software activated on your new computer, at which time you will probably be asked some harrassing questions and feel like some sort of criminal for simply buying a new computer.

At the very worst, you may be told something along the lines of "You're only allowed to use the software on the original computer, buy another copy," at which time you're SOL. That's right, the industry that whines so persistently about people "stealing" software has effectively just stolen back software that you paid for!

Here's the icing on the cake: There is a sizable contingent of people who are dedicated to the task of "cracking" protected software. That is, if you're smart enough to acquire an illegal copy of software that requires activation, there's a 99.9% chance that you're also smart enough to download a small illegal patch that changes the software so that it no longer NEEDS activation. The end result is that while this activation scheme provides intermittent hassle for legitimate users, it provides very little protection against the type of theft that these companies are worried about.

So what is the answer? I may not be smart enough to have The Answer™, but I am smart enough to know that it is actually better accept the fact that a lot of copies of your software will be installed illegally than to piss off your paying customers and STILL have a lot of copies of your software installed illegally.

I don't know who the first company was that started requiring activation, but Autodesk's AutoCAD was doing it in 1995, forcing customers to call a telephone number during regular business hours in order for the software to work. As a consultant, I was endlessly frustrated by not being able to install an industry-standard CAD application after hours, when most of this type of work is done! Microsoft is the company that popularized this practice. Windows XP requires activation, as does Microsoft Office and several other Microsoft applications. The reason I'm writing about it this moment is that I would really like to buy a piece of software called TMPGEnc XPress, but they not only require activation, now they're requiring that the software continue to periodically call home for license validation!

I sent the following e-mail to the company just to see what kind of response I get. I suspect it will be something along the lines of, "Like it or lump it," but I am genuinely curious as to how the company addresses the serious downsides of keeping their own users from using legally bought software. And after using their software for a trial period, I'm also genuinely interested in buying a copy, but I am very hesitant to do so, given that for purely non-technical reasons, I could easily be denied my use of it in the future. Here is the e-mail, and I'll post a follow-up if I get a response:

I am considering purchasing a copy of TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress, possibly with a copy of the DVD Author 1.6 software, but I have some questions regarding the periodic license validation. I am referencing the information provided in the following link:
http://www.pegasys-inc.com/en/info_lic_val.html

Specifically, I have three main concerns:

First, as I tend to test a lot of software for personal and professional purposes, I frequently make and restore hard drive images on my computer. I have had some trouble with software that periodically "calls home" in the past in that sometime in the normal course of using my computer, a software key or other piece of information is updated, then I restore my hard drive to an earlier image, after which the software no longer believed it was validated. Can you please elaborate on exactly what information is retrieved when TMPGEnc renews its license validation as I would like to ensure that such a situation does not arise?

Second, as a matter of course, I frequently upgrade and swap hardware in and out of my PC. Over the course of the past year alone, for example, I have at various times swapped out my motherboard, CPU, three hard drives, upgraded my DVD burner to a dual-layer model, and added memory to my system. In your explanation of the license validation, you say, "The identifier key is unique for each computer..." This has bitten me with several products in the past that require activation and/or maintain validation in that over the course of time, the software stopped recognizing my system as the same system on which the software was installed. I actually was forced to stop using a legally purchased software application when the company demanded information from the original purchase that I no longer had available. How does Pegasys handle this situation when it occurs?

Third, although rare, I have also had software stop working when the company that requires validation went out of business. At that time, I was forced to acquire an unreliable (and possible dangerous) hack to the software to enable it to continue functioning. Although I am certain that you do not wish to ponder this contingency, what guarantee do I have that should Pegasys cease operations or stop supporting this product in the future, that I will be able to continue using it?

I certainly appreciate that Pegasys has put a lot of time and effort into the creation and maintenance of TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress. It performs very well, and I am sorry that my trial period of use for the software will expire in a few short days. I am impressed that it has become somewhat of a standard by videophiles and the pricing is very competitive with other comparable products. However, as I am sure you can understand, if I do purchase your product, I want to ensure that I am making a decision for the long-term use of your software. Any useful information you can provide to answer my concerns would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
(me...)

RESPONSE

I received the following response today. I don't know whether or not I'll purchase the software. On the one hand, I've tried it, and it really is a good product. On the other, I really don't want to support this type of activity because of the reasons stated and becuase I feel that it only serves to add hassle to legitimate users. Anyway, I'll let you decide for yourself what you think. Here it is:

Thank you for your interest in our software.

When activated, manually or automatically, the validation routine sends to our server your license key and some information aimed to individualize the host machine. Returned key contains the validation and time information. There are 2 possible cases regarding disk image swapping. The first is your latest disc image contains data from a previous validation period so the validation system will ask you to renew. The second case is the image contains data from the current validation period, the software should start without asking.

You can change everything, but in some cases the validation routine may have to recalculate a machine key and send it to our server along with your license. Enventually this is the server that decides to validate or not. Unless you keep changing your machine and system within a relatively short period you should not have problem to gain the validation. In the worst case just contact us and we reset the server.

We do our best to keep the business running, but we do not what tomorow is made of. In case we disappear the validation system will certainly to continue to function independently since other software or content makers are starting to use it. If we have to close everything, server included, I do not know we will do but will take the best possible decision for our users.

If you have more questions do not hesitate to contact us.

UPDATE (May 3, 2005)

Well, I sucked it up and bought the software. I really didn't want to because of the whole license validation issue, and if I had the time and energy to put into using an open source tool, I certainly would have. Unfortunately, the open source tools in this particular area (transcoding video files) are still a little skimpy and very not-user-friendly, something I hope that people a lot smarter than me are working to rectify. As soon as I can switch, I likely will. But in the meantime, as I said, I am using the software and therefore am obligated to pay for it.

Plus, the guy did bother to send an individual response, which counts for a little something, even though I don't like the answers. I do, however, like his phrase, "...we do not what tomorow is made of." I think I'm going to start using that one. I'm thinking of going to see a movie this weekend, but I don't know what tomorrow is made of.

Time to change the clocks again...

2005-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

I hate Daylight Saving Time. No, loathe may be a better word. Seriously. For the life of me, I can't figure out how someone actually came up with this harebrained idea and why anyone would actually like it enough to actually do it.

I can imagine a bunch of people sitting around ruing how miserable it is in winter that the sun sets earlier. One of them (a fellow by the name of William Willett, in fact) pipes up, "Hey, I have an idea, let's just pretend that it's an hour later than it is, so tomorrow at this time, it will actually be an hour earlier!" The others agree, and so they go about their business, pretending that it is an hour later than it actually is.

So far, we just have a few nutjobs walking around with their clocks set an hour ahead of everyone else's. But somehow, these nutjobs managed to convince government to go along with them (okay, maybe that part isn't so hard to figure out), which in turn imposed this lunacy on everyone else. Why weren't these people mercilessly mocked and shamed back into normalcy?

So now, we have Daylight Saving Time. We just sprung forward, which means that we're pretending it's an hour later now. What it really means is that once a year, everyone has an automatic excuse to be late for work. Some of them probably forget to set their clocks back. All of them claim to have forgotten. Everyone else looks at them in sympathy and agrees, "Yes, that's understandable." It also means that the sun doesn't come up until around 7:00 in the morning where I live. Since I work the night shift, that means that I'm really tired and driving home in the dark just when traffic is getting heavy with the morning rush hour. Since I work with a lot of people in different time zones, it also means that I have to get used to writing EDT after all times instead of EST, and then changing back in six months.

All of that sounds like minor inconveniences, but what really irritates me is that they're caused by an utterly ludicrous concept. Not too long ago, someone commented on Slashdot that noon is in theory supposed to be the time of day when the sun is more or less as high in the sky as it will get, and midnight is, well, the midpoint of the night. Not any more, we have government to redefine the concepts of noon and midnight. Now, they're just arbitrary times of day, like 9:17am or 6:38pm. If we don't like when those times are in reality, we can just arbitrarily change them!

Well, I think that's stupid. I think that if you don't like when the sun rises and sets, you should complain to God for making it that way instead of trying to dink around with my clocks. You may think an extra hour of sunlight when you get home is nifty, but I hate that that I've lost an hour of sunlight in the morning, and I have nature and thousands of years of human history on my side.

My New Thing Learned

2004-12-27T20:08:00.000-05:00

They say you learn something new every day. Well, my day is now complete!

Not long ago, I heard for the zillionth time about how badly the Chevrolet Nova did in Spanish-speaking countries because "no va" in Spanish literally means "it doesn't go." I've studied Spanish for several months now, and for what it's worth, this gringo knows that "no va" does indeed mean "it doesn't go," so I just figured that this classic example of international marketing fiascos was true.

However, in this particular conversation, someone else piped up and said, "That story isn't true." They didn't provide a convincing reason why they thought it wasn't true, and since I was so smart and knew for a fact that the translation was correct, I figured that they probably just didn't know what they were talking about.

Well, chalk one up for the skeptic. According to an article on my favorite urban legend debunking site snopes.com, the story is indeed not true.

Oh well, I don't feel too bad. It's such a good story that even reputable sources such as the Detroit News are continuing to write about this myth as if it were a fact.

Oh well, maybe now your day is complete, too!

2005 New Year Resolutions

2004-12-26T13:02:00.000-05:00

I've never been much for making New Year resolutions. After all, if there's something you should be doing, why is January 1 so special for starting to do it instead of today? (Or tomorrow, if the stores you need are closed...)

Well, after taking a while to think about the state of my life, I think I'm starting to grasp it. There are several things I want to change about my life, and most of them range in difficulty from moderate to hard. On any given day, it's really easy to say, "I really ought to change that, and someday I'll get around to it."

The problem, of course, is that there will always be someday to change these things, and that someday never seems to be today. Tomorrow is just as good, right?

At some point, if you really want to change these things, you've got to choose a day. I guess any given date would do, but on January 1, things seem to be particularly new and the date is very symbolic for beginnings (as in, beginnings for change). So one of the first things I'm changing is my mind about this whole New Year resolution stuff. I'm going to start making New Year resolutions and try in earnest this year to make some positive changes in my life.

Here is my short list of things I want to be significantly different in a year, in no particular order:

Get a new job
I hate the phrase "no-brainer," but this is a good situation in which to use it. I hate my job. It's extremely boring. Not boring in the sense that I don't have enough to do, I mean boring in the sense that when I'm at my busiest, I'm the most bored. It's just that tedious. Add to that the fact that I'm making less money than I've made in six years, that half of my shifts are at night, that I work twelve and a half hours at a time (longer than any human can consistently perform any task well) with no vacation, holidays, or sick days, and that the company I work for has instituted a policy of systematically avoiding any commitment to its employees, and hopefully you'll agree that it's time for a change.
Build friendships
I hate to admit this because I like to be independent, but I fear that I've let several really good friendships lapse over the years. We still see each other, but it's just not the same. Everyone (especially me) is busy with their lives, and we never seem to have the time to do much with each other any more. The result is that the "good old days" seem irrevokably and needlessly lost. I'm going to start doing something with various friends at least twice a month and try to start rebuilding the closeness that has slowly eroded over the past few years.
Wear size 34 jeans
This is probably an ambitious goal, since it means that I'll have to lose somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 pounds, but I know I can do it. When I've tried to, I've never had much trouble losing weight, it's just a matter of trying. Every once in a while, I decide I'm just plain too big, and I have to start trying again. I'm at that point now, I've "let myself go" for too long. Time to trim back down some.
Learn Spanish
This will probably be the easiest goal to work on. I won't be fluent, of course, by the end of the year, but hopefully I'll be able to understand Univision and Telemundo a lot better than I do now. I say it's the easiest goal because I'm already committed to a Spanish class that will last four months, and I plan on signing up to keep going through the rest of the year on further.
Finish building the MythBox
If you don't know what this is, then too bad; I'm not going to go into detail here. My goal is to have a stable working model by midyear, and to develop the idea to completion with significant progress by the end of the year.
Keep my house clean
My house has been a disaster area for the last two years. I have made some headway towards getting it clean in the past few weeks. I don't mean just throwing everything in the closet like I usually do, I mean having papers filed away, old clothes donated to charity, junk thrown away, etc. I've really grown up to not mind living in a rat's nest, and that's got to change. Given my laziness and tendency to procrastinate, this will probably be the most difficult resolution to follow through with.
Get my finances in order
This will probably be the second hardest goal for me to accomplish. I hate to admit it, but I have a tendency--like most Americans--to live a lifestyle precisely tuned to exactly what I can. If I make it, I spend it. I need to exercise more fiscal responsibility. I need to pay off my credit cards, make a dent in my student loans, and save more money. I'll figure out the details a little later, but the thing I know for absolute certain is that the credit card debt I have right now is totally inexcusable and WILL be the first thing I tackle.

Well, that's a good start for now. I'll post some updates as I make them. In the meantime, unlike in years past, I encourage everyone out there to take a full half hour--don't skimp on me!--to ponder at least two or three big things you want to change about your lives and what productive steps you can take towards making those changes.

Because hey, January 1 is as good a day to start as any!

See ya next year, KS

More Olympic Silliness

2004-08-22T11:48:00.000-04:00

When will it stop? Not today, apparently. CNN is carrying a new story. The International Olympic Committee is now prohibiting competitors, coaches, support personnel and other officials from writing firsthand accounts for news and other Web sites.

This is pretty major in my humble opinion. The reason why this was done is to protect the media's exclusive broadcast agreements. According to CNN, "The Olympic guidelines threaten to yank credentials from athletes who are in violation as well as to impose other sanctions or take legal action for any monetary damages."

I'm sorry, last time I check, in THIS country, we had a little thing called freedom on speech that was written into the highest law of our land. When will this silliness stop? I suppose about the time when the few people left who watch the Olympics now finally give up.

Wanna Buy a Shoe?

2004-08-19T17:57:00.000-04:00

I always thought the Olympic Games were pretty cool. For a couple of weeks every four years, the world (at least most of it) came together in peace in the name of friendly spirited competition. The athletes could do things that most normal people just dreamed of, and it was always a lot of fun to root for the good ol' U. S. of A.

Now, I'm disgusted at the Olympic Games^TM. This year, I've barely followed them at all. Furthermore, I'm really starting to think that the world would be a better off place without the Olympic Games^TM at all. Why? Several reasons.

First and foremost, there is the commercialization of the Olympic Games^TM. Over the past two weeks, I've read two articles that have really upset me. The first one said that people bearing products and/or logos of Olympic Games^TM sponsors would be allowed inside the venues in which events were held, but that people bearing products and/or logos of non-sponsors would be forced to dispose of them or otherwise hide them. As a simple example, if you wear a Coca-Cola shirt to the soccer stadium, you'll be allowed in because Coca-Cola is a sponsor. If you wear a Pepsi shirt, you'll be asked to wear it inside-out or else be turned away. Personnel inside the venues are monitoring spectators as well in case someone slips through or (gasp!) turns their shirt back out the right way once inside. The second article said that because of a sponsorship contract with the U. S. Olympic Committee^TM, all American athletes must wear an Adidas branded outfit when they accept medals on the podium.

This presents several (hopefully) fairly obvious problems for me. First of all, there's the insane notion that the Olympic Games^TM is an event where all types of people--black, white, man, woman, young, old, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, communist, socialist, democratic, capitalist, whatever--can come together in peace, except for those damn Pepsi drinkers! Second of all, I'm more than a little curious what would happen if an athlete refuses to go along. What would happen if Jim Bob on our Olympic foosball team decides that he's got to have a cool Mountain Dew before his gold medal match, or (more likely) he has a lucrative deal with Nike to promote their new Air Pong line of sneakers? Would Jim Bob be told that he couldn't play? Are we really going to change our motto from "Faster, Higher, Stronger," to "Those who are corporately approved to compete?" It's funny how those Romanian girls aren't forced to wear any logos, yet still manage to win gold medals, isn't it? Maybe the U. S. Olympic Committee could learn a lesson: It's not about what logos are on the outside, it's about what guts and heart are on the inside.

Next on my hit list of things that are world-record screwed up with the Olympic games^TM is this concept of exclusive broadcast rights for the events. Basically it goes like this: NBC paid a big wad of cash so that it and only it can show any events here in the United States. NBC doesn't show us Olympic ping pong, which I would kind of like to watch. What if ESPN wanted to show Olympic ping pong--a sport that NBC isn't going to show anyway? No can do, they would get sued. What if I wanted to watch the women's gymnastics live before I read the results in the paper the next day? No can do, NBC has decided that such a big event will be time delayed for best Nielsen ratings, so I am forced to watch it after I already know the inevitable conclusion. End result? Boooooring, and anything I or anyone else wants to do about it is illegal.

This has led to two silly circumstances already. The first one related to our northern friends, the Canadians. Television stations in Canada broadcast most of the events live so that if someone did want to watch women's gymnastics at 3:00 in the morning, they could. Then, of course, they would rebroadcast the big events when everyone else could watch, too. Canadian citizens got the best of both worlds and a lot of choice in how they wanted to see the events. Unfortunately, though, we in the United States don't get that same choice or privilege. Beginning four years ago with the Sydney Olympic Games^TM, when NBC did not air any live footage of the games, and continuing now with the Athens Olympic Games^TM, NBC warned people that if they try to get the broadcast in any other manner than over-the-air antenna (for example, by satellite), NBC would sue them. NBC's chairman of sports Dick Ebersol said, "Who in their right mind would tell us to put finals on from 4 to 7 a.m.?" Uh, that would be us, the customers, Dick. (Article at CNN)

The second silly circumstance is that sites offering coverage of the Olympic Games^TM on their Web sites are being required by the International Olympic Committee to block visitors from the United States from accessing that coverage. The end result is that many Web surfers in Great Britain will have better access to watch the Olympic Games^TM than television viewers here in the Unites States. (Article on Wired) Thanks, NBC, and especially thanks, International Olympic Committee, for trivializing and commoditizing what was once the biggest sporting event in the world, and allowing our coverage of that event to be worse than any other civilized country's.

I've got a few other gripes that have been bothering me for a few years, such as staggering the summer and winter games so that the Olympic Games^TM only happens every two years now instead of every four (yet another IOC money grab at the expense of the prestige of the games), the doping scandals that continue to plague the games, and so forth, but these are very minor and, until the other problems are addressed, inconsequential.

I hope that someday, the IOC regains a little bit of sanity and the Olympic Games^TM once again is restored to the former glory and excitement of the old days of the real Olympic Games. But now that the IOC has tasted the money behind mass commercialization, I'm not holding my breath. I suspect that they will continue to milk the cash cow until all dignity is gone, because "Faster, Higher, Stronger" will never be as appealing to the pocketbook as "More, more, more."

Is God Naked?

2004-07-17T03:28:00.000-04:00

A lot of people sure are interested in religion these days. Are you a Christian? Jew? Muslim? It doesn't end there, though. Are you a Catholic or Protestant? Baptist or Presbyterian? Southern Baptist, Primitive Baptist, or Independent? One can't even profess a lack of religion. Are you a pagan, agnostic, or athiest?

Well, I hate to disappoint, but I don't intend to answer any of those questions here, at least not tonight. I do intend to put forth a few thoughts related to the subject, though, and if you can figure out what religion I am, then I suppose you're probably one step ahead of me.

I was watching television one night. I don't remember what show, but whatever it was, they showed God. It was the classical image of God, the one that looks like the one in pictures and paintings I've seen since I was little: the wise old bearded God in long flowing robes. For some reason, my mind lingered on this image for a few minutes. I find it hard to believe that God actually looks like that. Didn't some old painter just make it up based on some fundamental images associated with characteristics typically used to describe God? God has been around since before time, so he probably looks something like men in those really old paintings; you know, the old Greek art. Yeah, definitely in a toga.

But that can't be right. After all, we're just mortals, and surely God doesn't have to conform to our image of these characteristics, and surely the images associated with these characteristics have changed throughout history. I have another idea. You know, the Bible says that God created man in his own image. We're all born naked. Heck, even Adam and Eve were created naked, and only developed a fashion sense after getting a sinful case of the munchies. Logically, wouldn't it follow that God is naked, too? It sounds juvenile and facetious, but I'm thinking that it has to be right, doesn't it? I suppose so, and even though that means that there must be nothing wrong with being naked, I can't help but giggle at the thought of God roaming around heaven in the buff for all to see. At the risk of offending, do you think that our male relatives who have gone to heaven secretly compare themselves to the "Big Guy?"

On a little bit of a more serious note, it does raise some interesting religious questions. If we should strive to be closer to God, wouldn't it follow that going around in our birthday suits should be thought of a pious thing to do instead of generally condemned by law? Why is it that Adam and Eve were ashamed when they realized that they were naked? Wouldn't it make more sense that they should be ashamed for not being naked? In our supposedly civilized society, we think of uncivilized tribespeople romping around without any clothes on as primitives that someone should train to be more decent. Aren't they the ones with the right idea, not us?

I don't know, but next time I'm flipping channels and catch some nature show with gorillas getting it on, I just don't think I'll ever be able to laugh at them again, and part of me thinks that that is the real shame.

Oh well, until next time, have fun!

Well, It's a Start...

2004-07-16T23:35:00.000-04:00

Just what the Web needs, another person who think he's got the answer to everything. Well, it had to happen sooner or later, so here goes.

I suppose my first post should just be a test of the system, so here it is. Is it working? Yeah? Good.

Let's see, how does one start a blog, anyway? I suppose with what I'm doing and thinking right now is a good enough way.

I'm a shift manager at a datacenter, overseeing a bunch of computers and the technicians who make sure they (the computers) are comfortable and happy. Right this second, it's almost midnight, and I have six hours to go before I can go home. As you can imagine, on a Friday night, all is quiet. So here I sit, playing with a blog, and listening to Sheryl Crow on my mp3 player (don't panic, RIAA and/or Sheryl, I own the CD). Kind of funny, she's singing to me that a change would do me good, and right this second, I couldn't agree more.

I'm thinking about how nice it would be to work so-called normal hours again, the kind where you actually get to see (instead of merely pass unconsciously though) daylight, where people actually have a good idea when you're working and when you're off and ask you to go out and do things with them. Not that they don't now, but I have to turn them down most of the time because of my schedule or plain old fatigue. (Now she's singing that this is home, and considering where I am, that's a little depressing.)

Of course, I can't complain too much, because I do have a job, a situation that is better than several people I know who can't claim that. And it is more or less a good one, not too stressful, other than the stress of the weird hours. My boss is nice, I don't think I'm in any imminent danger of being let go, and I get paid okay for what I do. All in all, it's not a bad deal. Except when I'm here and all I really want is to be at home sleeping. Now she's singing "If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?"...

Well, I guess that's good enough for an initial entry. I promise that things will get more interesting as I go along.

For now, I'll leave with some thoughts of things I think are kind of funny and strange. First of all, I've been reading that Bobby Fischer, the famous chess player, has been caught in Japan, and is facing extradition back to the U. S. Extradition. I was blissfully ignorant of the fact that he was even in trouble! Turns out that he played chess in Yugoslavia back in the days when we were bombing them, and that violated our sanctions. Playing chess in Yugoslavia was illegal? Oh well, in my reading, I discovered he is a raving anti-Semite. The things I don't know never cease to amaze me. Here's the story on CNN.

Also, I was listening to NPR on my way to work this evening, and they had a segment on how the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, has had a line deleted from the manual from the Department of Health and Human Services that said, "Obesity itself cannot be considered an illness," which opens up the possibility of weight treatments being covered. That's great, but he was cracking me up. Some of his quotes were things like, "When you look at the figures in America today... We have a huge problem in America." If you're interested, you can listen to the whole segment on NPR's site.

Last, but not least, I ran across this political cartoon from the Atlanta Journal Constitution's Web site, which I think is hilarious. Enjoy!

Gotta run, so until next time, have fun!