The Occasional Blargh

Small town news. . .

A friend of mine lives near where a recent fuel spill accident occurred. Sending me the story from KTRE television, I'm struck by the next to final sentence, which is far more casual than what you would get from a major market station.

Love's trucking company is responsible for every penny spent on the cleanup.

And they mean every last penny...

Please Stand By. . .

Yeah, I promised back on Saturday that I would post a follow up "tomorrow". Well, it's time everybody learned that "tomorrow" doesn't mean a thing to me. It is an empty word indicating that I am too lazy to finish developing a post, and I hope you all will forget about it. Actually, I got sidetracked that possibly that the power button may have been broken even before Microsoft found it. Or more accurately, there are two symbols, slightly different, which is used for the power function. The issue is, the symbols might have slightly different meanings.

And you thought turning something off would be simple. . .

Anyway, I want to ask Hewlett Packard why wanting a better graphics card in my computer requires fancier casing as a prerequisite.

(I've narrowed down the system options for my notebook to HP, Lenovo (formerly IBM), and by reader's choice Apple).

(And yeah, a smart-ass could say the same for Apple, but I like that case. I wish I had the $2,000 for it, but I like the case.)

Did Chris Rock predict it?

This is an open to the Chris Rock Show from several years ago. Did Rock actually predict the future? You decide...

Chris Rock Sees The Future

How Microsoft Broke the On-Off Switch. . .

Shutting down Vista

Thanks to a little prodding from Joel Spolsky, Moishe Lettvin tells us exactly who is to blame for the broken "power button" in Window Vista-- or, why I have to dig around through a labyrinth of switches and knobs¹ in the Control Panel to get the power button to do what most of mankind has agreed that the power button should do: to turn something that is on off! I hope they got hundreds of bug reports for that idiotic design decision. I sent in my share.

Between this, and the nice steady stream of class action settlement letters I keep getting by virtue of the great hardware of the machines I purchase (come back tomorrow for that posting -- but as a preview, take a read at my earlier luck with computers), maybe I should risk it with another manufacturer.

But only if that Dodgeball kid is fired as their promotional spokesperson. He's just so smug, I'm almost inspired to write a If I Did It... book myself!

_____
1. I'm not kidding! It's a nine-step operation to make the off-button act right!

You Have Pressed '1'. You May Now Continue.

As an update, I'm not sure if Flexcar sanitized their phone-tree, but they appear to have resolved the overcharge on the bill. Now, to wait for my credit card statement.

Press '1' to Continue

"Well, I have to transfer you to the DC billing department. Please hold."

This is what I heard shortly after I started trying to dispute a charge levied by Flexcar. This wouldn't be a complaint, except that to get to this operator, I had to navigate the phone tree of (877) Flexcar. "For billing questions, please press '5'." I pressed 5. "For Washington, DC, please press '3'." I pressed 3. Well, silly me, I assumed that that would transfer me to the Washington DC billing department.

Why even bother with a phone tree, if I will have to ask to transfer to the same department that I originally requested through the multiple-choice phone maze?

Well, they eventually transferred me to the voice mail of the lady who handles the billing for Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC, so maybe possibly someday she'll call or email back something. Of course, my luck will probably stipulate that she has already went on Thanksgiving holiday, and no one will look at this until December.

The American Way (cont'd). . .

Flipping to the other side of the coin, I'm now reading a feature piece in USA Today (part of a series in conjunction with ABC News) concerning twentysomethings falling into debt. The majority of it falls into student loan debt (college is less and less affordable for most of us), though that still leaves thousands of dollars lost because instant-gratification with credit cards trumps saving in America. (Plus, the credit card industry loves to sit in booths on campus encouraging anyone to sign up for thousand of dollars of free credit -- "Do it to build up your credit score," they say. "It will help you get a car or a house," they promise.)  I'd also would be remiss if I didn't mention how much water the Congress had carried for the credit industry, while so generously cutting college grant money and hiking loan rates (those upper income tax cuts don't pay for themselves -- no matter what your local supply-sider says).

Tuesday update: Added link to the story from ABC's World News Tonight.

Charlie Brown: Updated for Today's Animation Executive of Discriminating Taste

Let's face facts.

Charlie Brown and friends would never last more than an episode on television today. How can a kid today possibly relate to such a cast of well-adjusted, prepubescent children with freakishly small eyes and limbs. The characters arn't even rendered with sharp angles. The guys don't have gravity-defying hair. The women lack gravity-defying, well, womanly adornment. There's not a giant robot or a mutant alien or a pervert with a laser weapon among the cast. A deranged dog and a lack of parental oversight is a bit of a start, the Peanuts gang is really gonna need serious work to make them cool with todays kids.

Fortunately, the success of Loonatics Unleashed has given us a template as to how to modernize Charlie Brown and friends!

(If anybody knows to whom I should credit for that Charlie Brown reimaginations, drop me a line. I see they're signed by a "GNAW".)

UPDATE: Well, I found Gnaw.

Tempting Fate: Election '06's Worst Timed Article. . .

What an interesting campaign season Campaign 2006 turned out to be. It has been over a week since the Democratic Party won control of both the House and more improbably (at least by predictions of the majority of pundits and of the Iowa Elections Market) the Senate.Given some of the hyperventilating of the conservative blarghosphere, I was expecting to wake up to scenes of this last Wednesday morning. Maybe Apocalypse starts on January 4th.

Mining through the handy archives of the conservative polling and news aggregation site "RealClearPolitics", I got the chance  to see how coverage and opinion flowed about this campaign. It's nice to have the filter of history to give a sense of neutral detachment to the endeavor, as well as freeing me from having to come up with something to say quickly enough for it to be relevant, but to focus on snark. Such as cruelly mocking this article by Ralph Z. Hallow of the Washington Times which was hopefully optimistic on the Republican Party's chances of retaining control of Congress. Titled "GOP's uptick just in time for Election Day", it was published on September 26 -- forty-two days before the election. Or the day before  the widely-read Wonkette blog would link to explicit emails that Representative Foley sent to a Congressional page. Two days before ABC News published a story about those emails. Three days before Foley resigned, and a scandal broke that helped to destroy a party. Three days after the Hallow declared that all was well.

Get a little culture from YouTube. . .

YouTube isn't just for angst-filled videos of bored youngsters and stuff from TV shows, of now and then. You can also find musicals and opera on it as well. The New York Times links to several.

The American Way...

In high school, I truly, truly hated these kids. These were the kids who lorded over us with their (parent's) personal wealth. Here is an 18 year old with two cars, costing over $50,000 each -- a Range Rover and a Mercedes! They both are gifts from her father, who sells luxury cars.

Part of this stems from being raised in a (relative to them) poorer household -- part of it comes from the fact that some of these kids don't seem to even appreciate the good fortune they have, or understand that an annual European vacation is not commonplace. Let me contrast this with the guy who drove a 1970 Dodge all of his life, but wound up donating $5 Million dollars to his synagogue.

QotD: OS Preference

Windows, Mac, Linux - What's your preference and why?
Submitted by ramblingsbymark.

I use all three. Linux annoys me the most. Honestly, I like features of Windows and features of OS X so it evens out.

QotD: My Dream Career

What's your dream career? 
Submitted by Something.

Cartoonist, illustrator, animator, or comic book artist and/or writer. It just seems like absolute fun to draw for a living.

The Bill O'Reilly Stupid Comment of the Night. . .

I guess I was lucky. Thirty-seven seconds into stumbling on to Bill O'Reilly's show, he makes this brief comment for me during this throwaway comment to Dick Morris on the culture wars:

Seven out of eight states say no to gay marriage. Only Arizona, which used to be Barry Goldwater country, said "eh, we don't to ban it outright"!

He says that as though that it somehow contradicted Goldwater's philosophy. Barry Goldwater was a libertarian, for Pete's sake! Yes he would be against banning consenting adults from doing whatever the hell they want in their bedrooms!

Of course, Dick Morris is as useless as always about punditry as usual, speaking of "liberal judges" and other contentless buzzwords that make him such a perfect pundit.

North, Sterling and SterlingNorth

How did you pick your Vox name? Does it mean something? 
Submitted by LeendaDLL.  

I'm trying to get the estate of the author of Rascal to sue me for defamation of character. Honestly, I really don't remember how I chose this name, except that this was a misspelling of the username I wanted for my Rocketmail account (now part of Yahoo, but still with the ancient @rocketmail.com address). "Sterling" was taken, so I tacked on a random adjective to the end, and thus I unwittingly usurped the name of popular children's book author. Interestingly enough, I learned later that a child of his lived in nearby (to me) Arlington, Virginia back in 2002 he was arguing that the state's tax code was unfairly favoring him at the expense of the less well off. I'd search for the article mentioning him, but I pretty much destroyed Google through my continued use of this alias for myself.

Anyway, to the family of Sterling North, and fans of his work. I apologize.