It's Not About Religion

So, part of me is a bit squicked by the feds' attempts to force church-funded employers to offer counter-faith services as part of their employment benefits. I think it mostly comes from the standpoint of "keep da gummint outta things" feelings I generally hold to.

I think we've kind of moved (or at least those who have money to lose on the deal) from a country where you're "free to worship how you please" is being replaced with the supposition that "if I claim religion, I should feel free to act however I please, so long as I can site religious beliefs as my rationale."

When I look at the specific issues, it strikes me that the potential for conflict wouldn't exist if the potentially-effected organizations stuck to their operational cores. If they wanted to offer public services and chose to only people those service providers with people who were strictly volunteers rather than employees, there'd be no problems. In the capacity of a volunteer organization, indeed, the government would have no place to dictate acceptable compensation and benefits arrangements.

It's that these organizations have crossed from being volunteer-efforts to being employers that introduces the problems. Realistically speaking, as an _employer_, they should be subject to the same standards, expectations and legal obligations that any other employer is subject to. Even if the money for that employment comes from purely church-derived sources, it's still an employment construct rather than a volunteer construct. These organizations are already subject to other regulatory processes because of the industries they play in (just cuz it's "God's hospital" doesn't mean you get to ignore health regulations such as HIPAA) - so why should they be exempt from regulations surrounding terms of employment?

But, that's just my view on things. I don't really have any skin in the game, one way or the other (I'm not religious and I don't work for church-funded organizations - I'm just a tax-paying citizen).

Fucking *OUCH*!

Before going to the dentist, my mouth was aching, but at an ignorable level. AFTER the dentist, I'm wishing I had some topical anesthetic (hopefully, the Bookers bourbon will make a worthy substitute). 

Now, I get that they wanted to figure out which tooth to X-ray, first. But I think the tooth-pinging thing may have utterly pissed off the faulty tooth. This is gonna be a long-assed wait for the periodontist and endodontist consults - and an even longer wait to actually getting this shit taken care of.

No wonder there's people out there that think that going to doctors is what makes you sick.

PSU Proud

Most of the time I find things online that've been done by PSU (my alma mater) researchers, I'm kind of impressed by what I read (and puff with a little bit of pride). This most recent article, I'm not sure what to feel. Either way, I must go grab my morning Mtn. Dew... 

You Sunk My (Electronic) Battleship!

Did toy manufacturers learn the wrong lessons from Electronic Battleship??

When I was a kid, toy manufacturers tried to make old games and toys more "relevant" by "modernizing" them. Apparently, games like Battleship were much more likely to be desired by ADHD-addled kids if they made it "electronic".

Yeah, "not so much".

Judging by the new story that was just on Fox5DC, it looks like toy manufacturers are gone once more into the toy-modernization breech. Parents that don't like the mess of crayons are being offered Crayola electronic crayons (basically, a very limited use iPad like toy that replaces real crayons with a touch-sensitive coloring app). Classic board games are either being re-created as Android/iPhone apps or having links to online components added to the games.

Freaking awesome.

Funny How That Works

Every so often, I receive emails, like the following, from Verizon:

Dear Customer,


On, or after, March 15 2012, Funimation (channel 262) and Bridges TV (channel 278) will be removed from the FiOS TV® lineup and you will no longer be able to view this content.


This programming has been discontinued due to very low viewership and the continued effort of Verizon to offer our customers the most popular channels while keeping our rates reasonable.


We appreciate your loyalty to Verizon FiOS TV and apologize for any inconvenience.


Remember that you can access the most current local TV line-up 24 hours a day/7 days a week at verizon.com/fiostvchannels.


Thank you for choosing Verizon.


Sincerely,


Verizon

I have yet to receive an email such as this telling me that they are increasing the number of free/included channels I have.

I guess I can expect to see even more "VOD" channels showing up in my channel guide. Verizon FiOS has been absolutely awesome about winnowing down our included channels ...and replacing them with their Video On Demand channels (and, how "on demand" is it when you have to wait for a show's start time??).

Fuck you, Verizon.

Modern romantic Valentines Day:

 ...playing co-op firefight doubles on Halo.

Old Sayings

"Liberal Arts degree: knowing just enough about everything to be really annoying."

I'm a tech guy. But, I'm the kind of tech guy that more than a few other tech guys have wondered "WTF" about over the years. Even though I've worked for a number of IT software and hardware vendors - either as a direct employee or a hired-gun (a.k.a., "third party consultant"), I don't have the educational pedigree of someone that does or has done the stuff I've done. I don't have a CS degree. Hell, I don't have a "hard degree" in any of the sciences. Nope, I have a BS in Psychology from a very large state university. So, I'm one of those annoying liberal arts assholes. Which, probably explains part of why I've been kind of all over the place, professionally.

What's the More Apt Description.

If asked which were the better description of my job, I'm not sure I could pick a winner between "cat-herding" or "goat-rodeo". Both are apropos. "Cat-herding" is more generic, however. Given who I've spent the last several years working for, "goat-rodeo" is probably more aptly-specific and technically correct.

Celebrity Death Watch

Clearly there's something wrong with me that, almost every time they announced that some celebrity has died, the most emotional response I can muster is something akin to, "and...?"

Sorry, but not everyone's passing is a fucking tragedy.

Not everyone's death is a surprise. Many celebrities' deaths are only surprising in that they managed to live as long as they did. Others are people you assumed died long ago (e.g., the only surprise I'll have when Abe Vigoda finally kicks it is the surprise that he was still alive - dude's older than friggin' God, by now).

Death doesn't wash away all sins. Not everyone is worthy of the sanctification that the popular press seems to like to try to convey.

Sorry, but, if you weren't a meaningful part of my life, I probably won't care if you've died - not matter what level of notoriety (or notoriousness) you might have achieved.

Internet "Facts"

When reading "interesting facts" on random internet pages, I often wonder what percentage are correct "facts". Most of these pages need to limit themselves to one "fact" per page. It seems like the more "facts" they try to stuff on the page, the greater the likelihood of publishing a "fact" that isn't quite right. Many "interesting facts" I see in such lists include at least one fact that is either:

• A misinterpretation
• A mischaracterization
• Out-dated
• Out-right wrong

I can at least forgive the first three ...if they're presented in good faith. However, many times, it seems like people are either presenting things as "facts" when, in reality, they're not - but they conform with an over-arching agenda the author is trying to support.

At any rate, when I see such "errors" - particularly when you can tell they aren't in good faith - it makes me doubt everything else in the list. The only saving grace of the other (now) doubtful facts is if I already knew them to be true and accurate (even then, if the errors and/or distortions are grievous enough, it will cause me to go research to verify that my prior understanding is correct or at least still valid).

Easy Fashion

So, there's a service out there that lets you fill out some interests/preferences form and will send you a regular package of new, complete (head-to-toe) outfits. Given what's in my closet, I'd be interested in seeing what arrived (and how much I'd have to send back).

Too Many Choices

To be honest, after a day of decision-making, I don't like to have to make choices and decisions in my off time. Least of all, do I like to make choices and decisions that have no real bearing on anything meaningful. It just feels not worth the effort.

Food/meal choices fall into this realm. It's part of why I like when a meal is just set in front of me to enjoy (and don't ask me what wine I want with it, for god's sake!).

Weekends are the worst. Because of how fluid and unstructured weekends' planning tends to be, meals tend to fall by the wayside. Why? Because there's many times that, because of the shear number of choices and the shear lack of how much it actually matters, I find myself completely unable to decide. The net result is that I'll end up not eating, at all, because I couldn't decide from all of the choices - particularly when it comes to things like ordering in or eating at a restaurant. Hell, just choosing where to go or to order dinner from uses up the last of my decision-making capability. To then try to sort out what, in particular, to order (especially if the menu is lengthy) just leaves me paralyzed.

Fmeh.

Winter Splits

What do you get day after splitting your lips in 7 places? Lotsa hurty, dangly lip-skin. Stupid winter.

I Keed

Is it bad that, when my wife asked about the possibility of taking dance lessons, all I could think of was, "do they make steel-toed dance shoes?"

Tripping the Web Fantastic

One of the down sides of being easily bored and seeking relief through "teh intarwebz" is where that relief-seeking might take you. Today, for whatever reason, I ended up Googling about for metal covers of pop songs. I gotta say: there's something mildly disturbing about a Children of Bodom cover of Brittney Spears's Oops, I Did It Again. I'd say that their cover sucked (and it did), but I'm not sure how much of that was because Children of Bodom's music sucks (it does) and how much the material they were covering sucked (it did). So, I'm not sure it's fair to say their cover sucks as just a standalone statement.

How can a DC-plated Chevy Tahoe possibly be considered a "practical" personal vehicle?

Quote of the day "there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals"

They Call It Security

As someone who's had a history of taking liberties with poorly-protected systems (eveyone's young, once), I recognize the value of locking down technology. Because I know there are bored people out there and because I know there are truly malicious people out there, I make efforts to protect things against them. I understand the value of "systems security".

That said, I have to deal with others interpretations of what it means to make a system "secure". In general, security is at odds with usability and functionality. The key to good security is finding "balance". Sadly, so much of systems security is left to people who've never broken a system and who've only ever read papers, articles and/or books on security. So, when someone writes a security recommendation, the typical security person takes that recommendation as gospel or comes to the wrong interpretation of that recommendation (or fails to consider the impacts of what following a recommendation is).

This type of blind approach security always leaves me scratching my head. Invariably, the people implementing these policies in a context of ignorance leave gaping holes in systems. They'll lock down an avenue to a given piece of information. But, because they don't really understand the systems they're securing, they don't realize that there's a dozen other ways to get the same data (or that some data are critical to overall system usability and maintenance). In the end, it leaves you, as a system user, wondering "what the hell were they thinking" or "what the hell was the point of doing X". Today, what I found myself wondering was, "who the fuck removes `whereis` from a standardized UNIX deployment??"

Cultural Longevity of Memes

Prior to the rise of "Internet culture", one of the more interesting cultural barometers were the use of slang terms and other idioms. How many kids that grew up on the seventies still use the term "cool" to describe things. How many remember using the term "bad" to refer to something that they actually meant as "good". Most of us could probably think of hundreds or thousands of things we used to say - and that sometimes slip out in current conversation and horribly date us by their use - that we've allowed to fall by the wayside.

Internet memes seem to be another type of cultural barometer. They have a quick onset, and then a long period of "dude, that's so over" use-period ("FAIL", anyone?). But still, it makes me wonder how long these "over" things will persist. Will my friends' children understand "FAIL"? Will people that used these terms or otherwise participated in these memes still recall them decades from now. For instance, I sort of wonder what the reaction of people twenty years from now would be were I to walk up to them and say "badger badger badger"?

The Reek from Over the Cube-Wall

Like many people in the modern, western economy, I work in an office building. And, like most such people, I work in what I "lovingly" refer to as "cube land". Aside from lack of privacy, willingly or (more frequently) unwillingly taking part in (or being subject to) random conversations, noise and other office realities, there's the smells associate with cube life.

Today was another adventure in office smells. This seems to most frequently be an issue around lunch time (or worse: about an hour or two after lunch has passed). Today, this smell came creeping over the wall. I had a hard time identifying it at first. But, as it settled into my cube area like some reeking, putrid cloud, all I could think was, "when your lunch smells like a combination of cheap top ramen and burning tires, you need to reconsider your dietary choices."

Ugh. Still. Better than going in to use the mens room only to find that your co-workers don't understand the concept of the "courtesy-flush".

Girl?

I did not watch the Super Bowl, this year. I had no interest in the teams playing. The commercials - frequently the best part of the whole thing, any way, were all immediately available to view online. I had no interest in this year's halftime-show installment of the over the hill gang.

Once the Super Bowl was over (thank you FaceBook for being the barometer for this), I hit the NFL.Com website to see if the commercials were decent. Some good ones (the various car commercials seemed the best) some mediocre ones and some that made me wonder why they bothered (pretty much all of the movie ones - especially the one for Phantom Menace - sucked).

FaceBook, Twitter and Plus were all aflame with how good Madonna's performance was (even with an undercurrent of "I don't know why she didn't play the 80s classics" and "I don't care for the new stuff). People were talking about it at work and it was being mentioned on all the news. The news stories, however, were the most annoying.

Madonna hasn't been "The Material Girl" for twenty plus years, now. When you're post-menopausal (presumably), you're no longer a "girl". If the AARP is starting to recruit you, you're no longer a "girl". If you look great from a distance and in soft-focus, but closeups reveal aged, crepey skin, you're no longer a "girl". As such, it's more than slightly ridiculous for newscasters to still be referring to Madonna as "The Material Girl".

I'll Take "Things That Are A Given" for $1000, Alex

I live in the DC metro area. I've lived here since the early 90s. I remember the "bitch set me up" news stories from before I moved here. Living in the DC area, certain things are just a given:

• DC-area police - particularly in the District, itself, and in Maryland (PG County, especially) are frequently brutal thugs that would cause the old Nazi brown-shirts to say "I think you crossed a line, there, bud" 
• DC-area politics are comically-corrupt.

I accept that corruption is rampant throughout the US political landscape. However, the level of low-rent criminal acts that happen around here are positively laughable. I mean, FBI's knocking at your door and your best idea is "shove the money down your panties"? Amateur-hour shenanigans aside, though, the corruption is so rampant that, when it inevitably makes the local nightly-news, you can't help but ask yourself, "how is fraud within the DC government even news any more?"

Careless Whispers

One of the joys of being married is sharing a bed with your partner. In the winter-time, you can leave your bedroom ice-cold and snuggle under layers of quilts.

But, it's not always "roses". If you're like me, you occasionally have to cope with a bed partner that talks in their sleep. Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's maddening. Mostly it's just an annoying disturbance of your sleep.

I had my alarm set for 6:00, this morning. I didn't need to set it because I had a "natural" alarm clock. My wife was dreaming and, as sometimes happens, she was talking in her sleep. She was angry with whoever she was addressing and was cursing up a blue-streak.

You know what's a perfect start to the day? Being wakend by your bed-partner's tourettes-like sleep-vocalizations. Who needs an alarm clock?

Your installer is seriously going to fail if there's more than one /etc/*release file? You suck, HP.

You're a What?

The Internet: ruining your childhood one image at a time...

Hate sites with photo galleries that don't position the nav-arrows the same location for each page.

*YOINK* OUCH!

One of the joys of getting older is that, in addition to the hair thinning in the places that it's normal to be full, thick and luxurious, hair starts growing from places that it has no business to exist. While I'm hardly Mr. Fastidious or the kind of guy who's gonna go and get his back waxed, I also don't like for the hairs in my nose to make me look like some kind of freakish New Years party favor. So, when I notice that such hairs are becoming visible, I endeavor to remove them. Yet, in doing so, I always find it to be an exercise that ends in unbidden tears. Why does it seem like nose hairs have a direct connection to the tear-ducts? What evolutionary advantage did it server for those hairs to be there in the first place and why make their removal so painful.

Argh.

Too Many Hotels

I was killing time, using StumbleUpon (if you want to make massive chunks of your life disappear, install the StumbleUpon plugin for your browser). A photo of a nude woman came up (NSFW, so I'll only post a link to it rather then embed it in my post). As I looked at the surroundings of the photo, I realized that it looked very familiar.

Now, because I've held several travel jobs, during my adult life, and have spent a crap-ton of times in a lot of different hotels in the US, Canada and Europe - mostly Marriott properties. So, either I've been to the hotel where this picture was shot, or it was shot in one of the chains I've stayed in. I think it's more likely the latter. The interesting thing with the photo is that it appears to have been taken in one of the lobbies of whatever hotel it was taken in. The photo has no EXIF data with it, so, can't verify that it was taken "after hours". Would have been funny had it been an after hours shoot and a guest happened to stumble down through the area on the way to trying to buy something at the front desk's shop ("sorry: was just looking for a new toothbrush").

Riding the Uni Horse

I like to say that I'm the kind of person who's willing to try anything one - twice, just in case the first experience was an anomaly - before saying "I don't like it".

For me, the one sushi, uni, fell into this camp. Uni had always been one of those things that was usefully primarily as a dare or as an initiation rite. In the DC area, the uni that is served is generally disgusting. Eating it is an experience akin to trying to eat an old, dirty and moldy kitchen sponge. I'd long ago given up on it as being fit for human consumption.

A few years ago, while on a business trip to Chicago, I discovered this wasn't exactly the case. I'd been invited to dinner by friends of my wife, Donna (who I'd brought along on this business trip). They took us to this great sushi place in Shaumburg, IL (happened to be about a 2mi. drive from our hotel - how fortuitous!). I'd ordered the omakase sushi menu. I'd asked that they not include uni in my order, given my prior experiences of it it. However, when my plate came out, there sat a sample of it on my plate. Crap. Well, it was paid for and I'm too cheap a bastard to just waste things, generally. Besides: everything I'd sampled, thus far, had been exceedingly good, so, I gave it a shot. Instead of being nasty and unpleasant, it was an interestingly complex experience. It was kind of like eating slightly-squishy sweetened sea-water (and, yes, I know that doesn't sound good, in the traditional sense, but it was rather an *interesting* experience - and, for me, "interesting" often trumps the whole good/bad thing).

With this experience in mind, I modified my stance on uni. I was back to being willing to try it, but only from places whose sushi I *really* trusted and only when it was explicitly recommended by a sushi chef I trusted.

Today, the uni was recommended by the guy at our regular sushi place. So, I figured, "why the hell not." Now, it wasn't as good as what I'd gotten at the place in Shaumburg, but it also wasn't bad. I dunno that I'd order it again, but, if it was put in front of me, I wouldn't automatically pass, either.

There's a Fine Line Between Cute and Creepy...

...And this girl frequently crosses it:

How a Musician Knows They're Past Their Prime...

...They're asked to do the Super Bowl halftime show.

I mean, since the whole "wardrobe malfunction" episode, it seems like the Super Bowl halftime committee set some kind of age-floor (50?) on who could perform. I can only assume that no one over that age is gonna try to flash the crowd/camera because most people over 50 - particularly ones who've spent their entire lives partying a little too hardy - know that no one wants to see that wrinkly, floppy shit.

Whatevs: all praise the safety of mediocrity.

Cats Are Great

...If you like to receive daily doses of neglect and disapproval.

Over my 42 years, I've had several sets of cats. Currently, I've a brother/sister pair of bengals. For cats, they're pretty damned social. They love people. The love to just hang out. If they were politically motivated, they'd be part of the "Occupuy Your Lap" movement.

Even so, they're still cats. If they do something ungraceful - such as falling out of their cat-tree - they give you that "you didn't see nothing" look. If you've left them home alone to long, they'll sit in the center of the room ...with their backs to you, very pointedly ignoring you.

Still, this pair is a lot better than most of the cats I've encountered over the years. I've never understood friends who've had cats that only ever seem to come around when they're hungry - otherwise hiding under a couch or some other dark, quiet nook in their owner's house or apartment.

Waiting for Technology

One of the realities of life with technology, particularly when you work in IT, is waiting for data to transfer. Today, I needed to download a new application to test and ready for implementation. While I'm old enough to remember 1200bps modems and old enough to remember how "fast" the old NSFNet seemed, all of that is forgotten when you're trying to download a multi-gigabyte file over your office's overloaded "high speed" internet link.

So, "how to kill time while 25GB of files FTP down?" FaceBook, Plus and Twitter - maybe a bit of StumbleUpon, too. I can only thank the powers that be that, at my particular office, they haven't yet seen fit to block those sanity-savers. I'd have to killabitch if I had to sit and watch the creeper-bar while I waited for files to download.

Channeling Brezhnev

Why does it seem like, the older I get, the more my eyebrows try to channel Brezhnev?

That's the question I posed to my friends on FaceBook. One astute commenter pointed out that most people - at least the ones on social media sites - probably aren't old enough to remember Brezhnev:

This guy, right here: look at them eyebrows (that's your future, son!)

I replied that, if they ain't old enough to know who Brezhnev is, they're likely not suffering the eyebrows problem, either.

Sadly, not long into my twenties. I lost my hair (if you Google around - perhaps even looking at my Google+ profile - pictures of me are easily found). So, while my eyebrows are growing progressively bushier (I tweezed a brow-hair that was like half an inch long today!) - and my ears, etc - the rest of the hair on my head has been going the way of the dodo. Hell, even my goatee is now mostly white (though that started in my mid-20s, too).

And, while the overall greying of my goatee combined with my baldness and build make me look like someone created some kind of Brundle-Fly by tossing Colonel Sanders and a meth-dealing Hells Angel in a teleporter-pod, I can mostly take these signs of aging in stride. What I have problem with is why the fuck are my eyebrows mutating into something that the Farmer's Almanac can predict winters by? And, the white in my beard was ok, but the stray white ones in my eyebrows are really quite a bit too much.

/me sighs

Sounds Good On Paper, But...

Today, I was Stumbling around when I came across the New York Times article titled "Average is Over". It does make an interesting point about how, when your labor pool is global, any given labor resource needs to have something that makes them a more desirable source of labor than any other given worker.

I think what the author fails to factor in with this race to the bottom for labor is, "who are you producing for if most people have no worthwhile jobs, and therefore no money, to be able to afford those low labor-cost products?" I mean, it's great that you've got nearly a billion Chinese to produce low-priced goods for consumers throughout the globe, but who's gonna employ that cheap labor when the people elsewhere in the world can no longer afford those goods? Eventually, while chasing the cheapest labor, you reach a point where no labor is cheap enough. Then you have lots of idle people out there who can't afford, not only those cheaply-produced goods, but things like entertainment, healthcare and food. It's not a "sustainable" model.

And those idle people that can't afford anything - how do you think they're eventually going to react? What do people with nothing to lose - jobs, ready ability to purchase food and healthcare, etc. - do with all the free time you've given them? If they don't end up dying from their lack of access to food, healthcare, etc., they end up pissed off with a feeling of having nothing to lose. Shortly afterwards, even if your economies haven't failed due to there being no one capable of buying things, your societies fall apart from all of the crime and violence caused by the people with nothing to lose and everything to gain by forcing a change in the new status quo.

Interesting times ahead, folks. It's either gonna get extremely ugly or there's gonna be a sea-change in how the global economy works. Then again, outside factors (such a a global pandemic) might remove this excess and under-utilized global population. 

Clock's ticking. Hopefully, the bell goes off after I'm not around to care about it.

This Is Gonna Be Epic

I'm still really looking forward to this:

However, I fear that it may not get any screenings in the US (or, if it does, none near enough to me).

They are taking orders for a BluRay box-set on their web site. However, at €300 (just south of $400 at today's exchange-rate)  - plus shipping from Europe! - that's a lot of cheddar to drop on something you've never seen. It's an especially big gamble when the best you can hope for is that it's going to be some kind of awesome, cult-worthy  cheese-fest.

Oh well... I wait with bated breath (and, in case you weren't sure, that is the correct spelling of the term: we're not trying to catch fish, here). Hopefully NetFlix or some online streaming service will pick it up (or they offer a more realistically priced BluRay or download option).

Geico Goes to the All Star Game

So, my boy, Scotty Hartnell (formerly known as "bird-dog", frequently referred to as "Captain Gravity", and now widely known for the #hartnelldown hash-tag on Twitter) squeaked into the All Star Game. Don't get me wrong: I'm really happy for him. He's one of the players that actually seems to really want to be there rather than giving you the impression that the All Star Game is on a par to jury-duty. That said, in an event that's all about the NHL's pretty players and scorers, what's he gonna do there? Do they have an "agitation" or "crashing the net" skills competition?

Any way, congrats, Scott. Know that my wife has a crush on you and is really happy for you. If you're ever in the DC area, don't let her buy you a drink: I can't guarantee that she won't have roofied it so as to have her evil ways with you.

"The Blair Moon Project"

Watching "Apollo 18" is kind of like watching "The Blair Moon Project". Hopefully, this will be the last "documentary-style", "shaky-cam" movie I ever subject myself to. Really? The moon rocks are alive and look like some kind of space-crabs?

They tried way too hard with this one and it suuuuuuucked!

I've seen worse movies - hell, I have NetFlix, after all - but this was just really sucktacular. Sadly, it's not so sucktacular that you just shut it off and be done with it. No, you sit there hoping it gets better, but it never really quite does.

More Than Joe

I wonder what will have the greater impact on PSU-giving: Joe's death or the actions of the BoT?

I mean, the actions of the PSU Board of Trustees throughout the entire Sandusky affair has been, to be charitable, "shitty". Unlike Paterno, who had the decency to publicly express that he wished he'd done more, I've not heard anything approaching such a sentiment from the BoT. All I've seen is piss-poor attmpts at "damage control". If anyone's done more to damage PSU than Sandusky, it's been the BoT and their shabby actions after the whole thing became public.

That said, I'm a second-generation Penn Stater. JoePa, as the face of the University, was a link between my father and myself. My father's dead, now. With Joe's passing, a link to my father has also disappeared.

My giving patterns that may have been positively impacted by that link, no longer are. All I have left are my own memories of PSU and the image of PSU. Unfortunately, those images of PSU are greatly impacted by the atrocious handling of things by the Board of Trustees. They show an institution that's headed by a group of characterless, soulless old men without a shred of decency or honor. That's not much to make me want to give.

Remembering JoePa

I grew up in a Penn State household. My dad went to Penn State. His older brother went to Penn State. I grew up with Penn State football on the TV every weekend. I was brought up with the lore of Joe Paterno. It was pretty much a fait acompli that I was gonna end up going to Penn State when my time for college came (and I did).

I never knew Joe Paterno, only what his football program stood for and what the associated University also (supposedly) stood for.

During my sophomore year at Penn State, I worked as a cashier at the Giant off of North Atherton (in State College, PA). I was working the express line, that day, and JoePa came through my line. I remember two things from that:

1. how he didn't look nearly as short, standing there in front of me, as he did on the sidelines surrounded by truly big football players. I've seen estimates in the 5'7" to 5'8" range. That said, I'm a fraction of an inch shy of 6'0" and I don't remember the man standing across the register from me being 4+ inches shorter than me.
2. how "normal" he was in just interacting with me. Seemed like a genuinely nice and grounded guy.

So, yeah - didn't know the guy and that was my only real exposure to the guy. I just know that he had a tremendously large impact on a lot of people - not just his players - even if just indirectly.

And, for me, with the death of my father in 2009 now being followed by the death of Paterno, it's like one more link to my father has been severed.

Delicate Foods

Tonight, my wife and I went for a sush-dinner at Hana Tokyo (in Alexandria). We've been going to this place for years now. For the most part, it's always been a really good experience. Prior to tonight, the only thing approaching a bad experience was getting there on a busy night and not being able to get seated quickly.

Tonight, we were able to get seated quickly. While the place was slammed like it usually is on a Friday - their hibachis are very popular, apparently - we'd called ahead to make sure we could get a table. I dropped Donna off at the door and went to find parking. By the time I got there, they were just about ready to seat us at the sushi bar.

We like going here because they frequently have interesting specials (though, with as frequently as they have otoro, they should just have it on the regular menu). We split a Dragon Roll order. I got my usual salmon roe nigiri with uzura and a Philadelphia hand roll. I also ordered the otoro, eel, cobia, Japanese snapper and mackerel. Donna ordered her stuff, and then we proceeded to wait.

After our food was presented, we started to eat. Donna had "textural-issues" with one of her items and asked if I found it similarly "not quite right". Taste wise, it was fine, but the fish, tonight, just wasn't a firm an crispy as it usually is. The otoro wasn't quite as buttery as it normally is. Even my salmon roe wasn't quite as perky as normal for our meals there.

At the end of the meal, the chef asked how our dinner was. I asked if they'd had to buy from a different source, today, noting that the texture had been not up to their usual standards. He had the manager come over and ask us more about the meal. When I pointed out that, in the (probably five or so, at this point) years we'd been coming there, we'd always been very pleased with the meal - which was why we'd been repeat customers for such a long time. He asked if the texture on the fish was wrong, to which I'd answered that, while the flavor had been as expected, yes, the fish didn't have the pleasing mouth-feel that it usually does. So, supposedly, he'll be talking to his suppliers at their next order.

That's the funny thing about fish - particularly uncooked fish: it's very fragile. Even if it starts out as high-quality stock, if there's too much variance in temperature between catch and delivery, it causes the cell structure to start to break down. Delicately crispy fleshes, such as that of cobia, become mushy. Buttery cuts, such as the otoro, lose that butteriness. Roes lose their perkiness.

If you eat your fish cooked, much of the textural subtleties tend to be lost, any way. Variances in the delivered meat is much less important because the cooking breaks the meats down, any way.

I don't consider myself to be a sushi snob, but, sometimes, it's just not quite right. And, that was what tonight was: not quite right. I've had sushi at places where it was decidedly not right. I've even had it where it was utterly indifferent. When you have a place that performs as consistently well as Hana Tokyo does, it's kind of jarring when they have a miss.

Oh well, we'll be back again. They've had several years of good performance. So, hopefully, tonight was just an off night that was beyond their control.

Marketing Geniuses

I gotta say, if there was a possible way to fuck up the marketing of the NHL Winter Classic, the various outlets found a way to do so.

I should not have seen empty seats in the stands. But, when you're setting extortionate purchase-terms for season ticket holders (you had to buy tickets to all three WC events if you wanted to be allowed to buy the "main event" tickets), you pretty much guarantee that a significant chunk of the tickets will go to scalpers ticket purchasing services and package promoters. And when those outlets are charging as much for a pair of seats as an entire season ticket plan, you're gonna have a hard time filling all the seats.

Back in November, when the NHL Shop started the Winter Classic marketing blitz, I'd ordered a pair of "authentic" Winter Classic jerseys. I'd figured "since I can't reasonably afford to go to the event, I can splurge on jerseys for my wife and me". So, I put in the order for the customized jerseys - a Hartnell/19 for Donna and a Timonen/44 jersey for myself. The order sheet said to expect fulfillment around Decemer 15th. At the time, that was a nearly three-week wait, but, "whatever".

Christmas came and went and still no jerseys. So, I called up the NHL Shop to find out where the hell they were. I was told, "they haven't arrived at the warehouse, yet, but we're expecting them in soon enough to have them to you in time for the game." This was not at all reassuring, but, "what can you do?"

The week of the Winter Classic, still no box with jerseys were to be found at my door. So, I called them again. "They still haven't arrived at the warehouse". I was a touch incredulous at this and pointed out that there wasn't much time for them to get them and get them to us. I was told how sorry they were for the delay but that there was nothing to be done.

The Winter Classic came and went. Jerseys never arrived and no indication of what the fuck had happened to them showed up in my email. Yesterday, I called to find out "whut the fuck." The person I got hold of gave me the same story of "they still haven't arrived at the warehouse." This time, however, they told me I could call back the following week to open an investigation or I could cancel the order. Having been waiting nearly two months for this disappointment, I told the CSR that I wanted to just cancel the order since they were well late and they were able to give me no indication of when or if I might ever see them. She canceled the order and gave me a cancellation number and told me to expect cancellation confirmation to show up in my Inbox (no such confirmation ever came). She then asked if there was anything else she could do for me. I took this opportunity to point out that she and the NHL had, to date, done nothing for me, so how could she do "more". I also pointed out that their order fulfillment was abysmal and that I'd never bother to try to use their service again (and, to anyone reading this, I'd advise a similar path). She gave another useless apology before we concluded the call.

Today, I spoke to someone that sells NHL merchandise for a living. I was informed that he'd only been able to get a very limited quantity of them and had sold out several days ago. Additionally, the manufacturer, who clearly had a hot commodity on their hands, wasn't going to make any more (and, looking at shop.nhl.com, today, even they aren't advertising them any more).

I am, to say the least, a touch incredulous at how stupid this is. I mean, they were selling these jerseys for $350 per unit. Rather than cranking out more to sell, they opted to discontinue them and sell only the much cheaper "replica" and "Premier" jerseys. I'm sure, at some point, we'll hear how problematic mechandise forgeries and the like are to these companies (I've already seen the "don't settle for cheap immitations from Asia" on some sites selling the Indonesian made "Premier" jerseys). Yet, when they have the opportunity to sell things that people want and are demonstrably willing to pay for, they choose not to. That leaves people with the choice: of be price-gouged by third parties that bought big, early so they could price-gouge later; settle for lesser goods from "legitimate sources" or, since you can't get the thing you really wanted in the first place, buy fakes. If the recording and movie industries have shown us anything, it's that people will either do without, or will resort to piracy to get the things they want.

Stupid.

All I can say is, "fuck you, NHL" and "fuck you, Reebok". I hope the lot of them die in a goddamned fire.

A Cautionary Tale?

As I wait for it to get closer to time to get ready for New Year's festivities, I'm sitting here watching TV. As I scanned through the online "what's on" guide, I saw that National Geographic TV was running one of their Aftermath shows.

The series, as a whole, is based on some fairly far-fetched premises. However, those premises were, previously, ones that conceivably have the capability of having a "life goes on" outcome. The episode that's on,now, Population Explosion, doesn't really fit that mold. It has as its premise that (somehow) the earth's population has somehow managed to double overnight.

Yeah, I get that this is supposed to be a cautionary tale for our future that collapses the time-frame of whats to come as the Earth's population doubles on a more natural time-scale. However, doubling over a course of decades versus over the course of a day (or even months) results in a completely different set of stressors and outcomes. Population is an inherently self-limiting problem. Explosive population growth is even more self-limiting. I'm not seeing on this episode that people have somehow become immortal, so a lot of the problems they're positing seem unlikely. Long before we'd have to worry about creating new housing, beefing up infrastructure and finding more farmlands, energy and other resources, people would have already started to die, on a massive scale, from lack of food and environmental exposure. Let's face it: if you doubled the human population, overnight, and even had double the farmland (and seed-stock) available to plant new crops on, those crops aren't going to come online for a month or more - billions will have starved before then. Along with them starving (and running out of water), your doubled need for housing is going to disappear.

Oh well.. I guess National Geographic had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for this one. Seriously, this one borders on the mind-bendingly stupid. Would that doubled population still exist three (or more) years from the doubling-event? Don't think so. I have my doubts that, post doubling, we'd even have our current levels of populations surviving over the course of even half a year, let alone ofter three. The damage and deprivation caused by that doubling would be severe. Not only would all of the new population not survive, but a significant chunk of the incumbent population would die along with them.

Sorry, National Geographic, but gonna have to give you a big, fat "F" for this bit of shoddy programming. This is even worse than the A&E's Ancient Aliens shows.

Value Proposition of Movies

Last night, a buddy of mine and I went to go see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. It wasn't a horrible movie but it was hardly "art". Two tickets for the non-3D version ran $24. Add in two 1qt bottles of water for $9 bucks (that's $18/gal. for water - even at its peak, gasoline wasn't that expensive) and you're at more than $30 for two hours of mid-grade entertainment.

Today, while at work, a box arrived from Amazon. In that box was the full, 8-movie BluRay set of Harry Potter movies. Sixteen or so hours of quality entertainment. Total price? $60. And that's $60 for unlimited viewings by me and any number of other people that might come over during our ownership of the discs (and, lets not forget loans/swaps with neighbors and friends).

So, tell me, again, why Hollywood thinks that piracy is why annual ticket sales are down by a half-billion seats?

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind spending money if I'm getting good value. But when every trip to the theatre becomes a $20-$40 gamble whose odds are worse than rolling a hard-8 in Vegas and it should be fairly self-evident why everyone's staying home.

FaceBook Timeline

A week or so ago, I disabled my FaceBook account. I'm almost tempted to reactivate it to see what my Timeline looks like. Unfortunately, it seems that FaceBook only is granting you seven days from activation to edit your Timeline contents.

Given how much data I generated since opening my FaceBook account, I don't think seven days is going to be enough time to do the requisite edits of my Timeline page. So, it kind of removes the desire to re-activate.

Oh well: I'm sure that FaceBook will eventually make activation of Timeline not an option, which will pretty much completely remove any desire to reactivate my account.

Quality Verizon Wireless Technical Support

Still kind of chapped at VZW. I'd done the OTA update of my phone to get the device and SD card encryption that was listed in the update's feature list (http://support.verizonwireless.com/pdf/system_update/droid_charge.pdf). Yet, when I looked through my phone, I couldn't find a method for enabling the encryption.

Initially, I opened a support case with VZW via the web portal. They took forever to get back to me, then, when they finally did, the instructions they gave me were wrong. When I pointed out that they were wrong, they eventually responded that I needed to call in and speak to a support rep to walk me through the procedure.

I then called in. The first-line support rep didn't know what I was talking about, so, she called one of her "back line" support folks. She was apparently informed that the encryption was automatic. Seemed unlikely. Seemed more likely they were just trying to get me off the phone.

A few days later, I decided to try sending a Tweet to VZW's twitter-based support account. We went back and forth. Finally, they asked where I saw that this feature was even available. I sent them the link at the Verizon site (quoted previously). After that, their Twitter team stopped responding to me.

I can only surmise that Verizon's official company policy on support is to stop providing support as soon as someone has a question they don't know the answer to. Awesome, guys. That's a really great support model.

Even better: since doing the stupid OTA upgrade to get this feature that no one at VZW seems to know how to activate, my device's GPS and LTE antennae have become flaky.

Good work, Verizon Wireless. And, a hearty "fuck you" for your shoddy efforts.

Anniversaries

Not quite sure how it passed me by, until today, but it did. Maybe it's a good sign. Still, it did hit me,  that, two years ago, today, I woke up for the first time with no person of last resort to talk to.

Even given how much I write (or perhaps that's a proof of its own), I am a classic introvert. While I've got a number of people I'm friendly with,  I don't actually count many people as "friends". I'm one of those people for whom "friends" are people I share a deep connection with. Everyone else lies somewhere outside of that term. Hard to explain if you don't share a similar measure for what you refer to as "friends".

At any rate, my father was one of the few people I counted as a friend. He and I could talk about anything and everything. From the most cerebral to the most inane of topics. We could speak briefly. We could speak at length. We could convey volumes in very few words and we could spew volumes of words and say next to nothing. More importantly, we could exchange ideas without taking personally things that most others would take personally.

Really, my dad was one of the few, possible only people in my life that I could speak freely and fully with. Sadly, with him gone, I've no longer got such outlets. And, while I very rarely availed myself of that outlet after I moved out, I always knew that it was there if I ever really needed it. Now, that's gone. Now, I have no one really left to speak freely to.

I Don't Cry for Paterno

While I am a graduate from Penn State University (PsyBS. `92), I've never considered myself to be part of the "bleed blue&white" crowd. To me, Penn State was where I spent five falls, four springs and three summers collecting a piece of paper and getting a lot stuff out of my system.  My reduction of the experience to bland descriptions of my time there is not to be construed with me saying that I didn't enjoy my time at Penn State. It's not to say that I didn't go to a lot of football games, parties, etc. I'm simply putting it out there that I didn't have a lot of personal investment in being a "Penn Stater".

That said, it's hard to spend that significant a chunk of time, surrounded by a particular culture, and not absorb at least some of it. The lure of the cult and Blue&White is hard to resist. And, even if you don't end up bleeding Blue&White, you are changed for having been there.

I was also very fortunate to have been at Penn State when Joe Paterno was still looked upon by many as some kind of quasi-deity and/or paragon of virtue. It's hard not to buy into that. It's hard not to want to buy into that. And so, to a degree, I did.

In watching the current horror-show unfold in the news, I can't help but be saddened by it all. The rational me always knew that Paterno was human. The rational side of me always knew that, as a human, he had to have flaws. And, while being rational allows you to not be completely taken by surprised when those flaws come to light, it still doesn't stop that gut-punch feeling when they finally do.

In the end, though, I don't know what's sadder: that he didn't (and couldn't possibly) live up to the legend, or that there seem to be so many people eager to participate in the sadistically gleeful feeding frenzy around the destruction of that legend. Watching it all is like watching when a malicious older sibling takes special joy in the distress caused by telling a younger sibling, "Santa isn't." I take that back, I do know which is sadder.

It Tastes Like Winter

I think chestnuts are an underutilized nut in the American diet. Previous to this fall, it had been at least two decades since I'd had anything featuring chestnut. Last month, while Donna and I were celebrating our Anniversary down in Williamsburg, we were served a chestnut icecream with our dinner. Tonight, Donna made a brusselsprout (another under-used food) hash for dinner that featured a heavy use of chestnuts.

There's just something nifty about chestnuts. They've got this lovely, delicate, earthy-sweet flavor. It lends itself well to both sweets and to savory food-stuffs.

Tonight's hash was something that Donna just winged. Basically, she took her usual brusselsprout hash, and enhanced it with white wine and chestnuts:


Ingredients:
• 10 chestnuts
• 2 pints fresth brussel sprouts (trim, cut in half, then slice thin)
• 6-8oz crimini mushrooms (sliced)
• Penzeys Fox Point seasoning
• dry white wine (recommend a sauvignon blanc)
• extra virgin olive oil
• butter (a good, rich, European-style is best)


Chestnut prep:

1. Slice an X into the flat side of each chestnut
2. Scatter nuts onto flat baking sheet and roast at 425 degrees for 15-25 minutes
3. Let cool enough to handle, then peel.
4. Chop chestnut meat into crumbles and set aside

Mushroom prep:

1. Sauté sliced mushrooms in large skillet in a mixture of olive oil and butter
2. Season with fresh-ground black pepper and liberal dash of Fox Point seasoning as they cook
3. Cook till browned
4. Remove mushrooms to bowl and set aside

Cook:

1. In same skillet, heat and melt 1Tbsp. of butter and 1 Tbsp. of olive oil
2. Add brussel sprouts and saute till they edges begin to brown (about 8 minutes)
3. Add half cup of white wine and let cook till wine is mostly gone.
4. Season to taste with more Fox Point.
5. Add in chestnuts and mushrooms, stir well and heat through
6. Serve

The hash worked very well with a nice, rare sirloin (in our household, we generally use bison, but standard beef would likely do, as well. Garnished with some locally-sourced dark cherry tomatoes. Served the meal with red wine (the Vicious Petit Sirah's cranberry notes were a very nice complement both to the hash and to the sirloin).

Brusselsprout/Chestnut Hash with Bison Sirloin

Listening to the printer churn away on a thousand page document is like listening to trees scream.

Shared Spaces

In the enterprise I work for, there's more employees than there are desks to seat them all. This is resultant of a number of factors: frequent need for people to work at different locations, people that telecommute regularly, and just an overall short-fall of available office/desk space.

For the most part, this hasn't been a problem for me. If anything, it encourages me to work from home (and, I tend to get more done while working from home, at any rate). Unfortunately, when we have our meeting days, it causes a larger number of people, than normal, to concentrate in the meeting facility. This tends to create an acute shortfall in desk space. While I have an assigned seat in the building where our large-group meeting is held, most attendees don't. So, if I arrive other than ass-early the day of the meeting, I frequently find my desk occupied by visitors.

On days where I'm not going to be busy, elsewhere in the building (typically, when I'm stuck in one of the labs), I politely evict the visitor. If I know I'm going to be elsewhere most of the day, I typically just set my stuff in my cube and let the visitor continue borrowing my desk. Generally, it's not a problem - if I'm not using it, I don't care, overly much, if someone else does.

That said, there's always people that seem to feel compelled to abuse the courtesy. Most frequently, the abuse are merely annoying. Generally, it's limited to my stuff being moved out of their normal places or paperwork/trash being left behind. While annoying, it's not a big deal. What is a big deal, however, is when people "borrow" stuff from my desk (note to people who borrow desks: if you find things like plastic silverware, blank CDROMs, pens, etc, in the desk, those are not consumables there for use by all an sundry. I pay for the shit sitting in my desk and your use of it is petty-theft).

Oh... I also always love when visitors take it upon themselves to make themselves at home at my desk by adjusting my seat to their personal comfort. It's oh so lovely to come back and find my chair's settings completely jacked up. It's also nice when one of the visitors has been eating at my desk and left food debris ground into the chair's fabric.

EMS in The `Hood

Dunno what's going on in my neighborhood, this week, but it seems like there's been lots of EMS activity every day. While we live near a couple major routes used by the local EMS to get around, that traffic is usually just passing by our neighborhood. This week, they've actually been stopping in the neighborhood.

Today, when I came home from work, an ambulance was stopped in front of a house three houses down from mine. Unfortunately, they were parked in the middle of the street with no indication of moving. Further misfortune is the fact that my street is a long, curving, one-way street. So, my choices were to: wait for it to move, do the long reverse the wrong way down the long, curving narrow street, park and walk the rest of the way home.

I'd considered backing, given that there was another side-street I could reach my house from. However, the length and curving narrowness of my street, combined with the relatively short walk and temperate weather, made me opt to just park and walk home.

As I passed my next door neighbor's house, she'd asked why I was walking rather than driving as I usually do. I indicated the ambulance with a somewhat annoyed look on my face. She informed me that it had been there, like that, for at least half an hour.

As I'd walked by, I'd noted that there was an empty stretcher in front of the house the ambulance crew was attending to. The door had also been hanging open, with no real sign of activity. It struck me as odd, at the time. My neighbor's mention of when it had arrived made me think, "if the ambulance is there for over an hour and the stretcher's empty on the lawn, someone's probably died." I noticed more than an hour later, that the ambulance was still there (though, thankfully, they'd since chosen to move it enough for traffic to get by). Given my prior thoughts, I looked to see if there might also be a Coroner's vehicle nearby. None was in evidence, but, perhaps I'd missed its coming and going? At any rate, the ambulance finally left the scene a little more than two hours after I got home.

Still don't know what it was all about. Generally, when an ambulance is called, they arrive quickly, act quickly and depart quickly (that whole "critical first hour" thing usually driving the pace). If an ambulance lingers, it's generally a sign of something not - or no longer - being an emergency. If something's not an emergency, you generally don't summon an ambulance and incur the visit's expense, so, lingering ambulances are generally a sign that an emergency became a non-emergency. Typically, this is because there's nothing urgent the EMS crew can do for the summoners - in other words, someone has died.

I'd also noticed, as I'd passed the house, that there had been a "For Sale" sign planted on the front lawn. It kinda made me wonder if, perhaps, the owner had had financial difficulties resulting in an attempt to sell. I further wonder if, maybe due to the current housing market, the owner couldn't get it sold before panic/despair set in and that, perhaps, the ambulance was called for a suicide. Still don't know. And, while it's morbid to ponder it and write about it, I don't feel inclined to inquire further. Don't want to cross the line from merely morbid to ghoulish.

Loves Me Some Cheesery

This movie, if they ever get it made, will probably be utterly horrible. But it looks so cheeserifically awesome that I'm probably gonna have to go see it (or download it, if it's only available that way):

Moon-Troopers from Iron Sky

I mean, c'mon: NAZIS IN SPACE! As it is, you have zepplin-style mother-ships disgorgin swarms of flying saucers. Only way it gets better is if they sneak in some zombies.

Diminished Highs

There's good and bad to being goal-oriented (though, in truth, it more frequently seems to be bad than good).

The good is the sense of accomplishment you have when you finally reach that goal. To a lesser extent, there's also that sense of joyful anticipation when the achievement of the goal is imminent.

The bad: the impatience to achieve that goal; the frustration of things outside your control thwarting the accomplishment of that goal; people pestering you about when you're going to achieve that goal, especially when they are responsible, in no small part, with your inability to get it done; the "now what" feeling that immediately follows the sense of accomplishment of achieving a goal.

On balance, I just can't tell, any more, whether the high of reaching the goal is anywhere near enough to balance out all the other things. I guess what I loved about consulting was that the "high" I got from achieving goals came so much quicker and more frequently. And, before you could fall into the abyss of "what's next" and the frustration-cycle of the path up to the next achievement, you already had your marching-orders for what to do next.

Grimm Reality

It looks like NBC is playing with social media to promote new programming. If you follow their Twitter account for the soon-to-air series, Grimm, they'll private message you with a code that allows you to preview the show's pilot.

When I'd seen the commercials for the show, it had piqued my interest. So, I hit their "follow" button Twitter. A short while later, I got notification of the private message's arrival. Donna and I sat down and watched the episode. It wasn't horrible. Has a decent enough premise. However, it was a bit on the predictable side.

I can't say that I'll go out of my way to watch the show, but I won't avoid it, either. If I happen to hit the channel when it's on, I might watch. If the actual series is better than the opener, then I might seek to watch it. Who knows, it could get good. Star Trenk: Next Generation started out poorly, then eventually found its stride. But, for now, it's a bit weak.

Which Side of the Bed?

Frequently, I wake up before I really want to. Generally, my body seems to only want about 3-6 of continuous sleep. So, if I go to bed much more than five hours before my alarm is due to go off, there's a better than even chance I'll wake up before my alarm goes off. Unfortunately, that generally happens close enough to when I'm due to get up that it's not even worth trying to go back to sleep. Frequently, I just lay there, waiting for my alarm to go off, to actually get up out of bed.

This morning, I woke up before I wanted to. I'd gone to bed just after midnight, but, wasn't due to wake up till at least 8:30 (so we could make the regular pilgrimage to the Saturday farmers market in Falls Church). I spent a few hours memory-walking, while waiting for my alarm to go off and wake Donna.

 

When I say "memory-walking", it's basically just me sitting/laying there and letting my mind float over my past. I just sorta bounce from memory to memory, letting the threads of their interconnectedness play themselves out. The bouncing is rarely linear. I can find myself remembering things as far back as my first days of preschool or my earliest nightmares/dreams to things that have happened as recently as just a few hours' previous. They can come in any order. One recalled memory triggers the next. It's fascinating how the memories string themselves together; how they order themselves; and how vivid they tend to be - even the extraordinarily mundane ones.

 

It accomplishes very little, but, it's good existential-wanking, I suppose. It's a far better way to while away the time than the ones spent contemplating darker thoughts.

Money vs. Happiness

Just saw an infographic claiming the median household income for Fairfax county in 2010 was $113K.

Back in the 2005-2006 timeframe, there was a global income study that supposedly concluded that $75K was some kind of magic income number beyond which you reached a point of diminishing returns for increased happiness. Presumably, since that figure was shown in USD and was a global study, that magic number was normalized against some other measures. I would presume that they chose to normalize against each studied country's median household income at the time (about $48K in the US in 2006). That means that $75K figure would represent a figure that was 150% of the US median household income.

Given the number in the infographic and the presumed method for deriving that $75K figure, I would have had to have been earning just shy of $177K in 2010 to be making the normalized equivalent of that magic $75K figure. On the plus side, I guess that means I've not crossed that diminishing returns threshold. However, there are definitely days where it feels like it.

Even though I now make several times more than I did when I was much earlier in my career, I'm not sure the salary improvement is  linearly-reflected in overall life-happiness. I'm not sure there's even some kind of parabolic curve I could chart (passing through the peaks and valleys of life-happiness).

Maybe times have changed. Maybe it's not (or never was) the kind of statistically meaningful figure that some people like to quote. Maybe it wasn't so much a diminishing-returns point but a peak-return point. Dunno.

Police Games

Had the news on, this morning, as I readied myself for work. There was a story on about the turmoil in Greece related to the austerity measures. Protesters were hurling rocks and such at the police and government buildings. The police were responding by hurling smoking tear-gas canisters at the protestors. All I could think was, "so the Greeks were playing rock/paper/tear-gas, today?"

Placement Is Key

At the office building I frequently work at, the restroom doors are all on hydraulic openers. Several paces from each such door, is a pressure plate you smack to activate the doors (they look just like the ones you see at hospitals for their big, swinging automated doors).

I will admit that I tend to walk faster, from place to place, than a lot of people do. I'm fairly no-nonsense when I'm going places. I want to get from point A to point B as directly and quickly as possible. So, I frequently find myself having to wait whenever I encounter automated doors.

This week, some of the bathroom doors at work had signs on them saying something to the effect of "automatic door: do not manually open". Well, that's fine in theory. However, if you don't want me yanking the door open, you need to make sure that, by the time I reach the door after hitting the pressure plate, the door is open far enough for me to pass through it. The bathroom doors at work just don't manage that "trick".

Seriously: if an automated door opens slower than a bank vault, and you don't want people manually opening it, set the activator button further from the door!

Not Quite Integrated

Google is trying to link together their various services (Picasa, BlogSpot/Blogger, Plus, etc.). It's sort of a Good Idea™, but it's "not quite there," yet.

I'm one of those people who uses online services like Picasa as a cloud-based backup of my home storage. I use BackBlaze for my general data (really sweet service: I recommend it to anyone that has a good up-stream connection and gives a crap about protecting important electronic documents, images, etc. against hard drive failures or home disasters) and I (currently) use Picasa for my photo memories (Flickr has better storage pricing, but, when I was making the decision, Picasa had the better management software).

When I first opened my Picasa account, it was very much a stand-alone service. This was reflective of it being one of Google's many acquired services. Eventually, I noticed that images I'd posted via my BlogSpot account were automagically showing up in my Picasa account.

When I cashed in my Plus beta invite, one of the things I had to do was link my Picasa account to my Plus profile (no choice was given: if I wanted to try out Plus, I either clicked on the "accept" button or I couldn't do Plus - in retrospect, the latter might have been the better option). It didn't seem like too big of a deal at the time, so, I clicked "yes". I didn't post my first photo to Plus for several days after joining up (might have even been a couple weeks). It was several days, after that, that I noticed Plus-posted photos were showing up in my Picasa account.

Honestly, I think what alerted me to that fact was that Donna and I were out and wanted me to show some pix of our dogs to friends. So, I fired up my Android phone's "Gallery" application and noticed there were photos showing up that were from Plus. When I got home, I logged into Picasa and, sure enough, there was an album (tree) of my Plus-originated photos.

Sidenote to Google: data aggregation is great, in theory, but the way you're doing it for me - and not giving me any good method to manage or override - makes my data utterly chaotic: not good. At least give me options to determine what things appear in multiple applications. The first time I end up embarrased by your "helpful" stream-crossing, you can expect a subpoena. 

It was mostly a shrug-worthy moment. I mean, at least I knew how to get at photos after I'd posted them via Plus. It did raise the concern of, "do Plus photos count against the Picasa quota I bought"? I'm hoping that what I discovered today indicates that the Plus folder-tree doesn't count against that quota: 1) it's the only album that seems to allow sub-albums; 2) unlike all of my Picasa-originated albums' photos, the Plus originated photos don't seem to be online-editable the way my Picasa-originated ones are. Dunno. It might be buried in a Google FAQ (or similar document) somewhere, but there's no quick indication of it.

I'll give Google kudos for making data available. Unfortunately, what Google really doesn't seem to get is that masses of data suck if you don't have good tools for logically-ordering them. And, no, I don't consider having a search engine to plow through the data-heap to be a good organizational method or solution for masses of data.

Damage to Program Reputation

Yesterday, Twitter was flying the Fail-Whale  (at intervals) due, in part, to Steve Jobs's death. Many of my friends were posting their condolences messages to FaceBook and/or Plus. I suppose it's all a nice tribute to someone whose singular vision helped shape an industry. But, at the same time, there's that part of me that was pissed by it all.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not denigrating the man's professional accomplishments. I'd be a fool to try to claim that he didn't have profound influences in a number of technical areas. My main beef is that, much like many people who had power derived from their mone and success, the man used that power to cheat. Worse, where he cheated helped to further damage an already problematic system - the organ donor program.

I've long had a problem with the whole organ donor program. The people who give their organs typically see nothing in return. The organ donor programs try to spin the whole thing as an enobling endeavor where a senseless death can be made meaningful.

Bullshit. While the families of the deceased are being fed this bullshit message, everyone else involved in the process are moving around piles of money. It's not like the doctors, nurses, hospitals (etc.) are working for free. It's not like donor recipients are getting the organs for free. And, worse, people with money and power are able to shove piles of money (or maybe just influence) and get themselves jumped ahead in line. 

The first memorable instance of this for me was when former PA governor Casey did it in 1993. Within a day of the need for a multi-organ transplant being determined, he "somehow" ended up at the head of the line for the procedure.

Jobs's instance wasn't quite so glaring. He actually set up temporary residence in state with favorable waitlist times. Thus, instead of waiting the best part of a year for a transplant, he only had to wait two months. By itself, this could just be chalked up to exercising one's money to move where the wait lists are shortest (Tennessee is a short-wait state for livers, for some reason). And, I could deal with that. However, Jobs's health history made him a sub-ideal candidate. With the organ transplant triage systems, people with a history of cancer - particularly a recent and/or active history - are generally given low to no priority on transplant waitlists.

Given the scarcity of available organs, it only makes sense: not only do you want an organ to go to someone with the best tissue-match, you want it to go to someone with the best, overall, prosspects for long-term survival. Cancer patients - particularly ones with recent and/or active history of the diease - generally aren't considered a good, long-term risk for an organ transplant. Judging by the time displacement between Jobs' transplant and his eventual death, he bore out this poor-risk rationale.

I can't help but think that, had Jobs not used his money to put himself someplace where he could jump the line, someone else might have gotten that liver. Further, "someone else" would likely have not been given special consideration in spite of a sub-ideal health history. The liver that died with Jobs might still be acting as a life-saver for someone else.

Yeah, that's a lot of mights. It's a lot of speculation. But, it just reinforces my whole distaste for the organ transplant system in the US. It contributes to my desire to not donate my organs were I eligible to do so. I mean, we have a system that essentially supports organ-selling where everyone but the organs' prior owners profits, but the donors' survivors see nothing of it but "nobility". Screw that. The "nobility" just strikes me as a very cynical method to get people to part with things for free that have a high, real-dollar value. And, at the end of the day, the people most likely to give out of charity are also the least likely to ever benefit from such charity (i.e., they aren't the class of people that will get preferential treatment due to social positioning).

For now, if anyone wants my organs, feel free to bid for them. If I pre-decease my "family", they're gonna be in a sub-ideal economic state. The least I can do for them is try to get them the last dollars my corpse can yield. And, if I can't do that, then there's no way I'm risking some monied line-jumper benefitting from my death. My organs die with me unless I'm able to put stipulations in place for who they may be "given" to (i.e., someone in the same or lower economic class and who have financial dependents that would face genuine hardship were they to die). Without those kinds of assurances on who can have them, no one can have them.

Yeah, that's selfish - I'm just making sure I'm not participating in a sham.

Restaurant Reviews

Recently, Donna and I took a mini-vacation to Williamsburg, VA. While there, we stayed at an "inn" at the Williamsburg Winery. It was a nice experience. We toured the winery and had a really nice dinner at Café Provençal, the inn's on-sit, gourmet restaurant.

We'd scheduled our trip a bit oddly: Sunday arrival with Tuesday departure. We'd done this mostly to try to avoid weekend crowds. Unfortunately, it also meant that a lot of things that would be open during a summer stay were closed.

While we would have gladly eaten a second time at Café Provençal, that wasn't an option. They were closed on Mondays. So, Monday night, we drove into Williamsburg to "forage".

We came to a restaurant named Opus 9. It was a higher-end chop house, probably designed to compete with places like Ruth's Chris. They had decent food and decent wine selection. And, they were priced in a similar bracket to Ruth's Chris (two people with meal, desert, cocktails and wine came to a little over $200 before tip).

In general, I don't so much care how much a given dining experience costs. That said, I do judge a place on value for the money spent. To whit, I've been to places where a $600 meal for two was a bargain and places where a $20 bill for two was an absolute rip-off.

Opus 9 was competent, but not a superlative value - particularly not when compared to what I get at home or what I'd had, the night prior, at Café Provençal. 

A few days after we got back, I got an email from US Air's "Rewards Dining" program. Turns out the Opus 9 was a program participant, thus I'd earned miles from having eaten there. So, "bonus." To get the extra points for the dine, I submitted a review. Overall, I gave Opus 9 a positive review. However, I'd noted in the comments section of the review:

The food wasn't awful, it was simply unremarkable. I don't have a problem with expensive restaurants, but I do expect to receive a good value for money spent (whether my tab comes to $20 or $200). The experience and food while "ok" simply weren't worth the extreme premium (especially for the overall area's cost of living) prices."

In retrospect, that comment probably seemed more negative than intended. It wasn't meant as a "don't go here" type of review, and I wasn't trying to trash the place. I was just expressing that, while what I got was good, I felt it was overpriced for what was delivered.

Today, I got an email back from the restaurant regarding my review. It was a nice, polite response, basically asking what could be done to improve the experience so as to raise the value proposition. So, I replied back:

The review may have been received as more negative than it was intended. I'm not saying that the meal or the experience were bad. Indeed, the menu had a good selection, the ordered food was competently prepared, the restaurant's facilities were rather nice, and the service was good - particularly given our server's experience level. That said, given the food quality/preparation, I would have expected a bill that was 65% of our total.

Overall, you probably suffered from two things: 1) my wife and I are probably overly particular about our food - when eating at home, we eat (almost exclusively) locally-sourced, seasonal foods and my wife is an a rather good cook; and, 2) we'd eaten at another, similarly-priced restaurant, the night before that had both better quality food and more-personalized preparation. So, we may have not been coming from a "fair" starting point. That said, once a two-person meal gets into the $200+ range, that kind of comparison is inevitable.

My overall suggestion for improvement of the food might be to make your menu selections more seasonal and, even if you can't alter your menu to be fully-local, create some selections that emphasize local food. Williamsburg is local to some really great food sources (there's really local produce and meat sources within a 100mi radius). It would be awesome if those local products could be played up and showcased.

In reading it, it felt kinda snotty. Unfortunately, I didn't really know how to give a critique of my experience without coming off that way.

It's episodes like this that really makes me question what I've become. I mean, it's not like I'm the offspring of monied parents. I wasn't one of the preppie kids, growing up. Hell, at one point in my life, I sorta lumped myself in the category that my punkier friends were in. Yet, somehow, as an adult, I've become a yuppy - and the whole exchange made me feel like a yuppy-tool.

At the same time, looking back, most of those tendencies have always been there. In general, I've preferred to do without rather than do with less than I wanted. I've always been a bit of an elitist - which, I might even be able to justify to myself, if I had some basis from which to be elitist. But, in reality, I don't. I owe a great deal of where I am to a fortunate set of circumstances and a willingness to exploit the opportunities that presented themselves. So, "what am I," and "how did I get this way" (and, yeah, you can set that to the tune of Once in a Lifetime).

The Pain of Bully Ownership

Since shortly after moving in with my now wife, we have had one or more dogs. Due to my wife's allergic sensitivities to longer-haired dog breeds, all of our dogs have been bull mixes: our first pair were an American Bulldog/Boxer-mix and an American Bulldog/Bull Terrier-mix; our current pair are an American Staffordshire Terrier and a American Pitbull Terrier. All four have been great dogs. They've been friendly, happy, people-oriented dogs.

We frequently take our current pair for walks around the neighborhood. Most days, our walks are uneventful. We walk anywhere from a half to a mile-and-a-half around the neighborhood.

Late yesterday afternoon, we took our dogs for a walk. My wife wanted some stuff at the local convenience store, so, we leashed up the dogs and walked over. We decided that, rather than walk the short way around our block and back to the house, we would go home by the long way around our block. 

I'd had my head down, grinding documentation for work, all day. I had no real grasp on what time it was. It turns out, our walk back to the house coincided with when the local middle school was letting out. As we were comeing to the end of our block, the school bus left off a mob of kids. Several of them caugh sight of our dogs and came ambling over. They did the usual thing of asking "are they friendly" and, upon giving our affirmation, began to fawn over the dogs. We stood around and chatted while the dogs happily soaked up the attention. A couple minutes into this, one of the kids said, "wow, she's really pretty (referring to our blue-eyed dog, Lady): what kind of dog is she?" I replied, "she's a pitbull". All but one of the kids tensed-up and stepped back. Fortunately, the one most engaged in fawning over Lady kept right on going. She pointed out to her friends that "there's nothing to worry about - they're friendly dogs". They relaxed but didn't return to fussing over the dogs (though the one continued her attention). 

This strikes me as really sad. I mean, here they were, happily interacting with the dogs while they were unaware of their breeds. However, upon hearing the word "pitbull", immediately changed how they saw the two dogs. I get that pitbulls have had a lot of bad press over the years. And, if I were going just by that, I'd be wary about approaching them - moreso than, say, a Shi-Tzu. But, to have been interacting with demonstrably friendly dogs and then going cold at the mention of a breed? It just doesn't make sense: act based on what you see before you, not what you see re-hashed in the fear-mongering press.

 

Bygone Era

Being in middle and high school in the farmlands of PA, it was always such a freaking score to be able to find a place that had their stuff on the shelves. I mean, we had the local college station (WDCV) where we could hear all this great music, but no place to buy it (and, when you could find it, it was twice as expensive as the garbage on regular radio).

On the plus side, when I went away to college, it wasn't until my junior year that most other people started to be aware that I had a good music collection to raid (and my collection became an involuntary musical resource for a lot of people in my dorms and apartments). What started out as "1001 bad groups" (my cousin, John Kling, had similar tastes in music, and, one of his fraternity brothers did a charicature with that title) became the music resource for a bunch of people. When I started at PSU, I always had to scrounge for people to drive all over the state to go to small clubs to listen to bands we liked. By the end, could easily find people to make the weekly drives all over the state. 

Still and all, by the time I had the money, means and traveling companions to be able to see REM, live, they were well into the peak of their career. The best I could do were shows like the one at the old Capitals complex in Bowie, MD (please don't ever ask me to call it US Air Arena). Seating was awful, but was still a great show (well, Stipe still had an awful tendency to go on long preaching jags - you kinda just wanted him to "shut up and play" - but still, it was a good show). So, never got to see them in an intimate setting.

Oh well, era long gone. I was actually kind of surprised by the announcement, given that I'd sorta lost track of them. I'd thought they'd faded out 10 years ago.

Automatic Morbidity

Discovered one of the weirder things about this modern, socially-connected era. As friends, relatives, etc. die, not all the automated tools out there are willing to let you move on. It's kinda weird when your social reminders calendar shows a recently deceased friend's impending birth date. All you can think is, "thanks for the reminder, FaceBook."

Fuck You, Huffington Post

huffingtonpost.com can eat a whole bag of dicks. It's really rather presumptuous to put up a "please connect with facebook" prompt that, the only way you can get it to go away is to allow them full access to your FB profile. Fuck. That. Noise.

Even better is, because of the way they've coded the popup, it causes my Chrome toolbar for StumbleUpon to no longer render. So, I can't even use the "no more Stumbles from this site" option.

Not Acceptable

I do *so* love having to edit my computer's hosts file just to blacklist a goddamned site.

Fuck you, Huffington Post. I hope you and everyone involved in your organization dies a slow, excruciatingly painful death.

UMD Just Put Out My Eyes With a Hot Poker

Good God: it looks like Maryland's state flag threw up on the UMD football team's helmets/uniforms.:

And, if the uniforms weren't bad enough on their own, they flag-puked all over the shoes (they're so nicely dressed in their matchy-matchy shoes!):

And, as bad as these atrocities are, we've got more eye-blights to come...

Seriously, other than "we can sell so many more souvenir jerseys!", w.t.f. was UMD thinking? I thought that, with the Oregon Ducks playing out of conference and out of time zone, I'd not have to be subjected to this kind of poncery. Yagh.

Time Differences

I dunno whether to be impressed with myself or absofuckinglutely livid at the contractor who was "helping" me most of the summer. I'm pretty sure I'm livid.

In the space of about three hours, I was able to just run through building and linking three functional backup servers - inclusive of downloading and staging software and repeating two of the servers (because I forgot to capture the install session to a text file). The contractor who had been previously "helping" me, had taken over two and a half months and been unable to achieve the same feat.

Now, I get that I am fast at doing things, but a time differential of two months versus three hours??? I dunno how a person with anything resembling personal or professional integrity can bill that much time and accomplish so little. W.T.F.

Over-thinking It

I'll be the first to admit that I don't necessarily think the same way most people do. I'll also admit that I frequently overthink things that most people just let slide - for which they seem happier for having done so. It really makes relating to things - particularly popular fictions such as movies (or the news) - difficult for me to do.

Recently, I watched another post-apocalyptic movie via an online video streaming service. I think it was via Zune, this time, rather than the usual NetFlix. At any rate, we just watched the movie Priest. Like many post-apocalyptic dystopian fictions, the world of Priest was mostly a wasteland. All of humanity had retreated from the desolate countryside into equally as grim walled cities.

 

As I'm watching this movie, I'm bugged by this common dystopian view. I mean, I don't necessarily have a problem coping with the idea of grim cities - urban existence is almost inherently grim. What I have problem with is the dichotomy of the "safe" megalopolis surrounded by the dangerous and desolate wastelands. I can't get past the basic, real-life problem of resources I mean, I've never quite understood, "where does the food come from", in the wasteland/mega-cities school of dystopian sci-fi. And, from there, the rest of my ability to enjoy a mediocre story goes downhill.