Musings on Mega Lotteries

Each time one of the big US lotteries reach stupidly-high prize levels, it causes me to ruminate on a number of things. I've never had illusions that I might win a meaningfully, life-changing prize, but it's still nice to think of the possibilities. This time, as the prize number became more and more stratospheric, it caused me - prompted or of my own accord, a number of things.

I'm kind of a statistics geek - not so much from the standpoint of being massively into specific statistics but more from the standpoint of being amused by people's habits and interests. I've got to think that things like mega lotteries cause all sorts of interesting queries to end up in Google's data banks. It would be sort of interesting to see what lottery-related questions are asked, how they're asked, how frequently they're asked and how the relative frequencies change as new numbers about the size of the prize come out. For instance, did people ask questions like (because, obviously, these are questions that occurred to me):

• What are the community-property rules of my state and how do they relate to lottery winnings?
• How often do married lottery winners end up divorced after winning?
• Is the post-winning divorce rate any higher than the average divorce rate or the divorce rates of couples who've experienced severe economic stress?
• Of those divorces:
  • how many are prompted by the lottery winnings (i.e., bickering over what to do with it, etc.)
  • how many are simply enabled by the lottery winnings. That is, are they couples who would have otherwise divorced, sooner, but didn't have the financial wherwithal to do so (say because they couldn't afford to live on their respective individual incomes or whatever) or were they simply not quite in love any more, but stayed together because they couldn't think of a compelling enough reason to break up.

You're probably noticing a theme, here. Yeah: I'm married. So, I think like a married guy. I can't honestly say that, after winning a huge jackpot, I'd still be long-married afterwards. Not that I'm actively seeking dissolution of my marriage, but money does weird things....

The other thing(s) that come up are peoples' reactions to lottery moneys they never receive.

More than a few people, after the lottery has ended with a winner (that isn't them), express things akin to sour grapes. There's a tendency to look at whether the winner(s) were deserving of the prize awarded. Often times, it's simple matter of being able to identify with the winners (e.g., "that's why I never win: I don't live in a mobile home"). Other times it's along the lines of "he already had money - he didn't need to win that prize" (because, hey, there's anyone out there that needs $640Mn - especially more than the person complaining does)

Whatevs. Not like someone esle's winning the jackpot diminishes me for having not won. Got other things to worry about (some might say, "clearly, given the bulleted list of questions, above").

The most baffling thing, however are the people who seem to think that certain prizes aren't worth winning. It's compounded by who some of these people are. Case in point was a couple years ago, just after one of the big lotteries had paid out a $300Mn+ prize. At any rate,  I'd had an extra dollar in my pocket, that day, so I opted to buy a lottery ticket. The prize in that day's drawing was "only" 15Mn. The woman behind the counter asked me why I was wasting my money on such a small payout. All I could think was, "fucker, 15Mn is more than you're gonna see in a lifetime (as a 7Eleven clerk, she couldn't have been clearing much more than minimum-wage): who are you to turn up your nose at 'only' $15Mn?" I mean, seriously, while even a $1Mn lottery winning wouldn't necessarily be life-altering to the point of allowing me to retire early, etc, it would still allow me to pay off my mortgage. Given that my mortgage sets me back $30K/year, even if I changed nothing else about my life, I could either just piss away $30K/yr on things like vacations and "toys", or, I could take a job I really liked rather than one that ones dictated by financial needs, etc.. So, yeah, it's "only" $1Mn - I just don't how you could ever possibly question why anyone would "waste" $1 on such a "small" prize.

Oh well, there's no accounting for what goes through other peoples heads.

So You Wanna Screen Employee's FaceBook Pages?

It used to be, some employers liked to do online background check of job candidates by seeing what people were publicly-posting to the FaceBook, Twitter and other online presences. While creepy, this was all public material, so, you could let it slide. Recently, as people have become more sharing-aware, people are doing things a bit more privately. A once useful resource for info-trolling is becoming less so. What's the reasonable thing to do: realize that a tool is no longer useful and move on to bigger and better things or try to force your way into people's intentionally private lives?

Here's a hint: trolling for things that used to be public gave you a barometer of how much discretion potential hires displayed. as an employer. At this point, it should be more than enough to be able to determine, "this guy understands discretion" or "this guy is completely indescrete". An employer should never try to think that it's their right to rifle through a candidates off-the-clock time.

Here's how I look at it if you go to check up on a candidate and find nothing public on their FB page:

• The stuff posted to their FaceBook page (etc.) was set to be visible to specific audiences was it was done so for a reason
• Your insistance on logging into their account gives you more than just a view of the candidate's live, it exposes eveverythin their friends have shared. While it may be arguable that it's reasonable for you to see what your candidate is sharing, it is completely unreasnoabl and unjustifiable to try to see what others are sharing with your candidate. Even if the candidate is willing to give up their own privacy, they have no right to hand over the privacy of their friends and you have no right to demand it and no justifiable reason to business see it.
• FB is single signon service for a lot of other sites. By demanding access to your candidate's FaceBook profile, you're also demanding access to every site that uses the FaceBook SSO engin. You compromise privacy on all those sites as well - many of which are even less relavant to the suitability of the candidate than what they may be saying on FaceBook.
• For anyone - employer, employee, job candidate or a retiree - entering credentials on a foreign computer is risky at best. If it ain't your computer, you never know if there's a keylogger installed on that system. Worse, you don't know if any such keyloggers are controlled by the computer owner (the employee or their employer) or whether it's controlled by the creator of malware.
• Given that FaceBook info is a treasure-trove of information for identity thieves, it exposes ALL of the candidate's other accounts - whether they leverage the FB SSO or not - to informed-cracking attempts ("Bob has a pet dog named 'Sparky': wonder if that's one of his password-recovery answers?").
• Depending on how an employer is running their computers, it's also possible that the candidate's FaceBook profile may have other kinds of hidden treasures. A sloppy (or privacy-conscious but devious) job candidate may have malware apps in their profile. Logging into that profile may provide a nifty vector for malware to enter your computing environment. And, frankly, if your invasion of your candidates privacy ended up damaging your network, you would absolutely deserve it.

Overall, it seems to me that, if a potential employer asks for FaceBook (et. al.) information, they should be joint and severally liable to the account-owner, any site that uses the FaceBook SSO engin, everyone on the candidate's friends list (directly or indirectly) and to any site breached using information from that snooped-on FaceBook account to guess credential-recovery information. I have to think that a half-competent lawyer is going to be able to arrange quite a respectable class-action suit against the snooping employer. I also have to think that a lot of people are gonna want to help with that effort, as well.

To me, as a smart employer, it just wouldn't be worth any information gained from such snooping when measured against all the potential damage it could create or all of the legal liability it would cause to be assume. Even if the ethics of it are merely questionable, all of the other possibilities just scream, "don't do it".

Riddle Me This, Batman

For the last couple months, my laptop's built-in WiFi has been getting progressively flakier. I finally got around to calling HP to see about warranty service (3 year warranty on this beast). The helpful CSR asked me for my identifying info to verify my warranty coverage, then asked me to go into device manager to see which WiFi option was installed in my laptop.

I'd always *thought* I'd had the BroadComm 802.11a/b/g/n+BlueTooth in it. However, Device Manager said I had an Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN adapter. This is a user-replaceable component, so, HP sent me out a replacement.

The replacement arrived Tuesday. Since it was mostly working, Tuesday, I put off putting it in till it crapped out completely, this evening. I powered the thing down, unplugged it and popped the battery out. I removed the screw from the panel over where the replacement WiFi card plugs in and opened it up.

Now, here's where it gets really fucking interesting: there was a SLOT for the WiFi adapter, but there was nothing in the goddamned slot. Even more, not only is the slot empty, but there's nothing rattling about inside the case. Obviously, I'm wondering "how the fuck did this thing's wifi connectivity *EVER* work??" But, I pop the new adapter into the empty slot, button her up, restore the battery and power cord and power on. WiFi's working and happy, again.

So, I gotta wonder, "do I now have two WiFi adapters in this beast that have the potential to conflict if the original ever wakes up again? Or, was the original one integrated and the presence of something in the slot deactivates it?" This leads to the final mystery of, "if the latter is the case, why the hell did they send RMA paperwork?"

I fucking hate mysteries when it comes to computers.

Life As An Engineer

Today, I think I coined a new work-related term: "multi-blocking". It's sorta like multi-tasking, but different.

At any rate... "Multi-blocking" is the (necessary) habit of running multiple, concurrent projects, but letting "blockers" determine which project goals you're actively working towards at any given time. That is, you work on a project until some dependency stops you, then hop onto the next most pressing project that isn't blocked.

Other interruptions to multi-blocking can be "suddenly critical" things that aren't on your project plans being dumped into your lap. These either get added to the multi-blocking queue or supercede everything in it.

The big down-side of this working-model is when you reach a state where you're 100% blocked. Then, it's total frustration time. If this happens frequently enough, or you're given a superceding task that also blocks, it can cause a total freak-out of frustration and denial of satisfaction.

WTF, NBC?

To be honest, I fucking hate when hockey games are covered by NBC. While it's awesome that, when NBC covers games, I get to see them in high-definition, the cost of that high-definition coverage is I have to listen to the inane chatter of Pierre McGuire, Mike Emrick and Eddie Olczyk (and other seemingly worthless sportscasters). Of course, it's even better when they go to the studio: the best they could come up with is Mike Milbury?? Good Christ.

NBC: you're a big network. You have lots of money. You have a big name. You have no fucking competition for talent. Why the fuck do you give us this cast of clowns, year after fucking year? What the hell is wrong with your organization that you can't draw real talent - and, given how much money and name-value you have to have, it's gotta be that your organization sucks so much that good people won't work for you at any price.

At least now I understand why, when Fox won the NFL contract, they were able to snag the Madden crew and the Bradshaw crew. It's gotta be an organizational thing: no one wants to work for NBC. And, given the quality of camera-coverage of games - both NFL and NHL - this extends not just in the broadcast booth, but into the control room and the camera crews.

Awful. Just. Fucking. Awful.

Beware The Genie

Often times, it seems like life is governed by a mischievous djinn. Life frequently seems all too eager to give you exactly what you've asked for, even if what you've asked for isn't really what you meant.

When seeking "balance" in life, it's a good idea to know what that can mean. On the face, "balance" seems to be a worthy goal: no one part of your life dominates the rest. However, just wanting "balance" leaves a lot of wiggle-room for the Universe to exert its interesting sense of humor. It means that, if your life has, on the whole, been pleasant, that seeking balance implies that you need to offset the pleasant parts with misery. It can also mean that, if one area of your life is miserable, "balance" could be enforced by making everything miserable (uniform-misery is its own kind of "balance").

The Universe can be annoyingly literal. If you don't want it to screw you over, you need to be very specific in what you ask for so that there's no "wiggle-room" left for creative interpretations.

Sales Don'ts

Wasted two+ hours of my life meeting with a vendor for a lunchtime presentation.

The lunch was at a restaurant that, of the dozen or so times I've had to go, I've had an edible meal maybe twice. None of those two occasions coincided with a meeting. I'm pretty sure that Rosa Mexicano is unable to make meals for groups and have the results turn out well. Today, I just skipped th food altogether - which was easy, given that they opted for family-style service and I seemed to be sitting in a passing dead-zone (oh well). So, needless to say, as we were entering the second hour of the meeting, I was beginning to itch for the door so I might go some place and get food.

The seating, overall, was weird. Normally, when we've had meetings at Rosa Mexicano, there's five or six six- to eight-top tables set up and we spread ourselves out amongst them. The vendor's sales team didn't want people staying too far from the action, so they opted to array four tables into a horseshoe arrangement. Now, I get what they were trying to accomplish, but forcing my to sit cheek-by-jowl with others - especially when food's going to be served and even more especially when it results in tons of wasted space in the room - isn't a way to get on my good side. I like having plenty of personal space. I find being crowded to be unsettling and detracts from my ability to attend to things other than the fact that I'm being crowded.

Given who the presentation was for - a group of engineers who worked for an organization that uses closed networks - one wonders why the vendor's sales folks were so keen to crow about the ability to manage their storage with an iPad app. Given our environment, ability to manage devices from a moble phone or tablet just isn't a priority. Given my feeling about Apple, in particular, it quickly became grating how much time was wasted on the topic.

Lastly, I've been dealing with technology for a long time, now. I've used it in a lot of "edge case" and "forward-thinking" scenarios. That means that I've seen a lot of interesting technologies used in a lot of interesting ways. Giving me a presentation that slags on buying component technologies and going the DIY route, and then pushing how great your solution is when all I'm seeing is shit that I've done years' or decades' previous just doesn't sit well. The reason all your crap is, essentially, old hat to me is because the stuff I did was "DIY". Doing things "DIY" means that I don't have to wait five-plus years for some vendor to discover "hey, if we package this into a turn-key bundle, we could sell the hell out of this stuff". So, don't slag on DIY, especially if your solutions are all things I've already seen, played with or done.

I dunno ...the whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way. Yeah, some nifty, potentially useful stuff, but it was all presented so wrong. It was like a flashback to my SGI days: great technology that was poorly-sold.

Shifting Priorities

One thing I do feel fortunate about when I grew up: even though NASA was winding down, they still did a lot during my youth. I still had the ability, while watching Star Trek reruns, to think "we've got guys working towards those ends - someday, some of this stuff might happen".

 

I'm also kind of sad that my introduction to Tyson was via a damned Internet meme...

 

But, hey: at least the guys on Wall Street didn't have to worry about losing their homes. At least the guys on Wall Street didn't have to worry about consequences. And, that's the real "American Dream" now, isn't it: to be so rich that you're untouchable.

Fuck space.

Little Highs

You know what feels really great? What feels like a little jolt of energy or adrenaline, each time it happens? Being "done" with something. That feeling of accomplishment you get, each time you've completed something and turned it over is just freaking awesome. It was one of the great things about when I was a consultant: I got frequent, regular jolts of that "done" feeling.

About the only thing that's in the ball park is being "next" - particularly if you've been waiting a long time. I think the reason for that, though, is two parts: you're now "done" with being in queue and you're able to start anticipate the rush of being "done".

Murder-Worthy Email Habits

To start with, I think that whoever invented email read-reciepts (and, in case they're different people - whoever came up with the idea) should be stripped of their skins and then dipped in lye or something likely to cause even more discomfort. I fucking HATE email read receipt requests.

If you're one of those people that thinks setting a read receipt request on emails is a good idea, I'll clue you in: it's not. It makes me and most people fucking hate you. If I'm working with an email client that gives me the option not to send a reply, I will never fucky hit yes on the "permit read-response" pop-up. The only way I'm ever hitting "yes" is if my email client ever offers the option to send a custom reply. If it does, you won't like that edited response.

To me, the read receipt request is just snotty. When I see one, the way I take it as "this fucker doesn't trust me to read his emails." Worse, I take it as a really passive-aggressive and cowardly way to convey that distrust.

I live on trust. If I get the impression you don't trust me - especially if I've done nothing to earn that distrust, then I really want nothing to do with you. Simply put, I can't trust someone that (obviously) doesn't trust me. When I see that read receipt request, it does nothing but create contempt in me for you.

The only thing that makes it tolerable is that most of the people using them seem to be fairly clueless - either technically or socially. I get that they may not mean it the way I interpret it. Because I'm a fairly direct person, I'll usually let the sender know, "I don't appreciate this" and tell them why.

If they persist in their cute little habit, that's when they can expect me to stop replying to their emails because I've set up a rule in my mail client to "auto-sort" their communications into a "never gonna read this" folder.

R2D2 was a sailor?

No wonder C3PO could understand him...

Bad Commercials

Like any (relatively) normal person, there are commercials I like and commercials I don't like. In general, I prefer funny, clever and/or weird commercials and I fucking hate annoyingly stupid commercials. Right now, there's this commercial on - I can't remember whose commercial it is because I'm so annoyed by the content - that's been running frequently. It features this cloying family of helicopter parents cooing about their kids "activities" - talking about being mathletes and how "ballet season" is soon to start.

It makes me want to punch the actors and writers of the commercial in the head. Basically, I think that any person/actor/character that utters the term "mathlete" needs a punch through the skull.

Freakish Weather

I've been complaining, a lot, this year about our lack of a meaningful winter. It's been, for the most part, freakishly warm and utterly bereft of snow. It's not that I want my February cold, it's that I fear what August will be like when it's frequently warmer than 60° in February.

DoNotCall? How about "DoNotBother"?

When the feds first came out with the Do Not Call registry, a few years ago, I signed up immediately. And, for the most part, all seemed good. The only tele-spam I got was the stuff that's allowed (political canvasing, charity, and businesses that I already have a direct association with).  And, because I don't generally give out my phone number to anyone, I pretty much never got calles.

For the last several months, however, I've been getting tele-spam from some company down in Florida. They seem to go by variations on the name/initials, "WCA". Whenever I punch their numbers into a Google search, it invariably points to various tele-spam complaint forums.

Their calls fall squarely into the rules defined as "not allowed" and "not excepted" (and, no, I don't mean "accepted" - I mean that the nature of their calls isn't in the list of rule-exceptions). So, each time they call, I immediately browse on over to DoNotCall.Gov and file a complaint.

I'm on my fourth complaint, at this point. Yet, the calls keep coming. So, I have to ask, "does filing a complaint with donotcall.gov actually accomplish anything?" I'm tired of WCA's bullshit robo-calls. If the Do Not Call registry actually means something, these guys should be getting sanctioned. What's more, they should be getting sanctioned at a rate that is high enough to make their activities unprofitable, not just at a rate that can be accepted as "the cost of doing business".

Oh well, I guess the whole Do Not Call thing was yet another one of those "do something for votes, just don't do anything meaningful" types of things.

My Friend, "Too Fat"

A friend was lamenting his weight gain of recent years. And was saying he thought it was time to do something about it. To justify the "do something", he started rattling off a bunch of "you know it's time, when...".

I was amused by some of the items on his list, so, I decided to add some of my own. I'm not sure he was amused when I added, "when your belly button has an event-horizon, it's time to go on a diet."

Weird Things Online

I've the feeling Donna would want one of these for her collection:

Found at Gorey Details

The Joys of Interoperability

Like many large-scale and collaborative operations, we have need of replicated common file-stores. The method we'd been using was fine from a collaborative standpoint, but not so good from a replication standpoint. So, the onwer of the repository opted to move the repository to a new server so that a replication solution could be used.

Unfortunately, the default security settings on the new server made it so the share wasn't usable from Linux clients or from Windows clients not joined to the same domain as the share server. I found the fix and wrote up a page on the subject. But still: I really shouldn't have to bust out regedit (and reboot) just to mount a CIFS export.

Weather really needs to cool the fuck down so we can get some snow (big snow would be great).

Cheese Don't Fail Me Now

Tonight, Donna made a wonderful dinner of cassoulet. We had a guest over to help us eat it. Even pared-down, cassoulet recipes make for a lot of food. Besides: it meant that someone else could bring wine.

After killing the dinner, we opted to hang out for a bit and watch movies. Having an XBox and FiOS, we have a lot of movie options without having to leave the house. I decided to look through our Zune options, first. As I scanned through the "New Releases" menu, I found Nude Nuns with Big Guns ...How do you NOT watch that??

Well, in hindsight, you just go right the hell ahead and skip it. It was rather sucktastic. I'd assumed it'd be in a similar category to Machete: so bad it's good. Nope. It was just bad - awful, actually. I'd embraced the cheese and the cheese utterly failed me.

I Like Mountain Dew...

I like Mountain Dew, especially the "Throwback" stuff. I guess because there's so many cocktails that feature any given softdrink I figured I'd look to see what might be out there for Mountain Dew. So, I put "Mountain Dew cocktail" into Google and I found a page on the subject. Most seem like fairly predictable variations on other common, citrus-based cocktails. That said, I think I'd be hard-pressed to like even a few of these...

Laptop Cleanup Day

My work laptop has a 250GB hard drive in it. Years ago, I would have assumed that was more than plenty of space. Nowadays... "not so much". Even though I keep a lot of stuff offloaded onto my (once ginormous 1.5TB) NAS, crap still manages to build up and eat all the space on my laptop's hard drive. Every so often, I dig through the crap to delete the stuff I don't need and offload the stuff that I want to keep.

I only ever have my laptop connected via WiFi and the network my old NAS is connected to only runs at 100Mbps. So, it's a slow process. The NAS, itself, is fairly old and, by reasonable standards, rather under-powered. Factor in the flaky wireless on this laptop and the crappy AP that Verizon provides with their FiOS service (I'd tired running a couple network configurations that allowed me to not use their AP, but none of them really played that well), and it's rather a slog to move things from the laptop to the NAS. I'd identified one particular set of files I wanted to offload. I did the click-n-drag to start the move and the dialogue box came up with the estimated time to do the work: 9 hours to move 36.4GB worth of files to my NAS? Seems reasonable (!), I guess.

Obviously, I canceled the job and re-evaluated whether I really needed to keep those files. I looked at them, again, and decided that I did. However, I wanted to organize their storage a bit differently than I'd originally set the transfer up for. I re-started the transfer - this time as three, smaller moves. Same number of files. Same amount of data. All in all, only actually took a little less than an hour and a half to do. Still butt-slow, but much more bearable than nine-plus hours would have been

Not a "LOL", But Definitely a "Snerk"

I think I found this site via StumbleUpon. It may have been directly sent to me or I may have just clicked on a link on another page I'd Stumbled.

Food On My Dog is definitely a silly and amusing site. Now, there wasn't anything on it that actually evoked a LOL from me, but it did manage to evoke a snerk. Good stuff. Very patient bully.

People of Walmart

I'll admit that, from time to time, I'll go check out People of Walmart to see what displays of human heinousness is to be found. That said, please tell me I'll never see this guy's picture [note: no actual picture, it's just a news story, so you shouldn't have any problems keeping your lunch down] on there!

On a related note, if you're ever feeling like you need to do something towards appetite-control, just watch this video:

Linux 10.0?

In reading this summary of Linux 3.0, one wonders if we'll ever see a Linux 10.0? I mean, it's interesting that the OS that Linux is spawned off from is, itself, is over forty years old. I guess it's conceivable that Linux - particularly if you'd count it's direct descendants (such as Android) - might create a century-long chain. It wouldn't be any less mind-numbing a thought, when you consider the overall pace of change in technology and how many technological deadends there've been just in my lifetime. I do gotta wonder, if a centennial edition of Linux ever sees the light of day, whether it will even slightly resemble its progenitors.

Inspired Advertising

I've said it before, I'm sure I'll say it again: if more advertising were well-conceived, fewer people, myself included, would have problems being advertised to. Yes, I get that we all have different tastes and that few attempts to sell will work universally well - but then, that's what the various targeted-advertising engines (like Google and FaceBook) are supposed to help advertisers do. The advertisers just gotta keep up their end of the deal by actually making an effort to reach us beyond just shoveling any old steaming pile of shit in front of us and saying, "eat."

At any rate, found this one Australian college's commercial online, recently. It's wicked funny, if a bit gross:

While I'm happy with the school I went to, I don't think I'll ever see my alma mater advertising itself like this.

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.