Land of Oz

Just How Stupid

and lazy are we getting? Here's recent news story headline, "Apple Releases Software to Set IPod Volume." If you haven't heard, some cretin masquerading as a human is suing Apple because the Ipod can play music too loud. Notice the "can play" part of my statement. It seems that he is complaining that because the Apple Ipod can be played loud it must be played loud. I heard he bit off his volume control finger while listening to Yanni, but I can't confirm that.

I know this may be a leap for many people, but the Ipod has a volume control. OK, I haven't actually used one, but there's strong rumors that it's possible to adjust the volume of the player manually. Even the Apple web site has hints to that effect. Next thing you know people will be suing tobacco companies because they claim they didn't know smoking was bad.

On a similar note, the Beatles music company called Apple is suing the Apple computer company called Apple over the name Apple. It seems that the Beatles' Apple, not to be confused with VW's Beetle or Johnny Appleseed's apple, had an agreement with the computer Apple that the computer Apple wouldn't delve into music under the Apple name, like the Beatle Apple does. Not that I'd even known there was a Beatles' Apple. It seems the Beatle Apple came into being about seven years before the Computer Apple, but quite a bit after the Johnny Appleseed Apple, but interestingly the same year as the VW Beetle. At this time it's unknown if Fiona Apple, Apple Vacations , Washington State Apple Commission, Apple Valley, California or Apple Hill Growers plan to joint the lawsuit.

Labels: apple, gripes, tech

DST

Once again, that stupid time of the year is upon us. Daylight Saving (not savings) Time - Spring back and Fall forward, or is Spring ahead and Fall behind - whatever... Twice a year, based on some strange supposition of energy savings, war time constraints, and what-have-you, the clocks have to be changed. This coming Sunday, at 0200 it instantly becomes 0300. Which means if you had a 0230 appointment on April 2, you're screwed.

This time changing is based on solar reasoning, not lunar, as the lunacy of it would suggest. It seems that if you move the clock ahead, the sun shines for an hour later in the evening giving us an hour more to do things that we couldn't do if it was dark. Now, I don't know about you, but the place I work at has its lights on 24/7, just like most offices these days. The energy Gestapo of today won't even make windows you can open for a breeze, let alone rooms where you can see without lights. The logic of which escapes me. Sealed windows and enclosed rooms result in such energy saving habits as having the building heat on when it's 70 degrees outside or needing to run the air conditioning when it's 55 degrees outside. Not to mention needing the light turned on at high noon.

Having been raised on a time zone border makes this whole thing about time changes and time zones a royal pain in the butt. Lets just stick with GMT. That way an appointment at 1700 is at 1700 no matter where you are. When I was growing up we used to have to add an hour to the TV listing in one newspaper to see when the show would appear on our home TV. You'd end up making statements like, "let's leave at 4.30 so we're sure to make it at 4.00." or "OK, it's 10.30 on my watch, we have just enough time to get home before 11.00, so we can catch the start of the 10.00 news." Of course, one advantage was that on December 31, we could get drunk at midnight to celebrate New Years, and then drive across the street to celebrate it at midnight an hour later all over again.

Hot Dogs

Have you noticed that hot dogs can be hard to find nowadays? The other day I had a taste for a hot dog and tried to remember where I could get one. There is a multitude of restaurants near my office. All the usuals, from Macdonalds to Taco Bell to Arbys and more. However, there isn't one that sells hot dogs. In our town there is a place called Michigan Coni-Island, but it's quite a ways from work. There's also a local joint called Old Towne Drive In, but it's even further.

I did find out that Culvers had hot dogs. Pretty crappy tasting. Now I know that hot dogs aren't necessarily something of great cuisine, but these were pretty bad. They had a somewhat dried-out or over-cooked appearance and had a slightly plastic taste. Home Depot, right nearby has a guy with a steam wagon selling hot dogs. I should have eaten there. I've given up on Culvers. The main thing I hate is that after you order, you get a number and a drink cup. All the condiments are on a stand. You have to fill your drink cup, grab napkins, ketchup, etc. and haul all that to your table in your hands. There's no tray - the clerk has to bring that out - which means, once they bring it out, you have get up again to go to the condiment place. Just bad planning any way you look at it.

Speaking of hot dogs, which a lot of people don't like to, I like to eat them now and then. Yes, I know they're made out of stuff that probably barely exists in the realm of meat, but they can be tasty. The Old Towne Drive In has good hot dogs - but their onions are intense. After eating a hot dog with onions there, you have to air out your car for a day or two. By the way, the Old Towne is a real, honest-to-goodness drive-in with curb service and everything. They offer the best onion rings in town, and the hamburger is surprisingly good. Best of all, it's not a franchise.

A good local brand of hot dog to buy and take home are made by Kogel. These are very good tasting, not overly fat and with no "odd" taste to them. The skins also have a slightly crunchy feel/taste when you bite into them. Highly recommended. Those are what the Home Depot guy sells. Just stay out of Culvers if you have a hot dog urge to fill.

SPI - Avalon Hill

Ring any old bells? I was looking at some of my old Strategy and Tactics magazines last night. For you youngins who only know computer based war games, back in the olden days (mid 70s - early 80s) wargames were played either on paper, most often on hex overlayed maps, or with miniatures. Like the LAN parties and such of today, we often had large groups of geek/nerds gathered together over paper and dice to fight wars like Borodino, Chinese Farm, and others. There was one upstart company, Steve Jackson Games, that made itty-bitty games that came in plastic envelopes and cost about $3 - Ogre/GEV being probably the best of the breed. On the other extreme were multi-map monstrosities that cost $50 or more and could cover several tables (wooden) with maps and tables (paper). War in the Pacific and War in Europe are two that come to mind. While I don't know of anyone who completed a War In Europe campaign, I did have a hand in setting up the full complement of maps and charts. I belonged to a wargaming club back around 1978 that was called the Wichita Wargamers and was based at McConnell AFB. We actually managed to get the MWR office to help us buy games and give us a room to play in.

For awhile, a friend and I would play in my office area during our lunch hour at McConnell. We used a locker room and were able to keep our map stored up out of the way between games. He was into the Civil War and Napoleonic era while I enjoyed NATO/Warsaw Pact type situations. If you read this (and I confess, I've forgotten your name), are you still painting 54mm miniatures?

I still have quite a few of the old SPI games sitting around the house. Many of them are still in the flimsy plastic trays/boxes. Interesting concept, but not very durable. They were blow molded black plastic with a cardboard back. There a lot of small compartments with clear plastic covers that didn't quite stay in place. They did however, make a great way to keep and organize the small pieces and dice.

Progress - too far?

Digital photos - you can pick up a Matthew Brady photo from 1863 and look at it with no problems at all, and it'll probably still be good in 2064. That CD you have your images on will probably be toast within 10 years.

Cell phones - camera, music player, special ring tones, video player -- yet there's a commercial that asks, "Can you hear me now?" and causes no surprise.

Electronics - back in the olden days, you had to get up and turn the TV or stereo on. Now you have to figure out what combination of five remotes to click in what order to watch F Troop.

Televsion shows - I grew up watching five channels that garnered nationwide acceptance and audiences. Now there's 150 channels and I'm still looking forward to watching F Troop.

Fast food - The menus are numbered and color coded; they take cash, credit and debit cards; there's an international presence; and after in line for twenty minutes, the idiot in front of you is still going to take 5 minutes figuring out what to order when he reaches the counter.

Computers - there's one gig of ram, 400 gigs of hard drive space, a 3 gigahertz clock speed and it now takes longer to turn on the computer and write and print a letter than it did on my 16 kilobyte ram, 70 kilobyte floppy, 1.77 megahertz clock speed TRS-80 Model 1.

Palm computers - my Palm IIIxe works for a month on two cheap AAA batteries that I can buy anywhere. The newest palms last a few days on lithium-ion rechargeables that require you to be near an outlet to charge.

Stupid News at Random

Religious tolerance
"We will invite him again because the religion of Islam is one of tolerance. We will ask him if he has changed his mind. If so we will forgive him," the judge told the BBC on Monday.

But if he refused to reconvert, then his mental state would be considered first before he was dealt with under Sharia law, the judge added.

Abdul Rahman is charged with rejecting Islam and could face the death sentence under Sharia law unless he recants.


And he didn't know it was bad for his health
The lawsuit against the tobacco company [US$50 million awarded] had been filed in California state court by Richard Boeken, who said he smoked two packs of Marlboro cigarettes a day for decades. Diagnosed with lung cancer in 1999, he was 57 when he died in 2002.


We're making progress
As many as 700 people have been killed in sectarian violence since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra and the subsequent car bombings and mortar attacks in the Sadr City slum March 12.

Baghdadis voiced anger when asked about their lives as the war entered its fourth year.

"Since (U.S.-led troops) came into Iraq, we get nothing," said Ali Zeidan. "Three years have passed by for the Iraqi people and they are still suffering psychologically ... and economically."


Fiscal responsibility
US President George W Bush has signed a bill to raise the national debt ceiling to nearly $9 trillion (£5.12 trillion).


Mammy and Pappy Bell
Recreating a monopoly will help the consumer. (OK, this isn't a quote from the news like the others, but it's generally close. Remember when Ma Bell was divided to help the consumer way back when? Like having no competion today is going to help us peons. Bush and big business add another win to their coffers.)

Illegal Acts Polls

Here's some "facts" from a recent article about grass in Canada, "In 2004, the Canadian Addiction Survey found 44.5% of Canadians reported using cannabis at least once - up from 23.3% in 1989. The proportion of respondents who admitted to using cannabis in the previous year was 14.1% - compared with 9.7% of Britons and 10.6% of Americans in equivalent surveys."

Why on earth do people keep quoting this type of statistic? Do you really think that people are going to accurately admit to illegal activities that could result in having them become a convicted felon? And if the respondents don't realize that, are they really smart enough fill out a survey?

Sure, we've all heard terms like non-attributable, anonymous, won't be identified, etc. used during surveys. Does anyone today honestly believe that kind of crap is true? I've gotten surveys in the mail that claim to be anonymous and they have my mailing label on the back of them. I've gotten barcoded surveys at work. I love the surveys that come to you from work over the company intranet and claim to be anonymous - just how stupid do you think your employees are?

And then there's the people who answer these things. Yes, judge, last week away from everyone where no one could see me I indulged in several illegal acts including, blah, blah and especially blah. And I did those things at least 4.7 times a month for the past 3.2 years while I was between the ages of 32 to 39 -- and here's my wrists, just clamp them cuffs on them.

59 - 9 - 55 - 300+

Has anyone noticed that the bodycount news from the war in Iraq has become very low key this year? Did you have any idea that 59 military died in February and 9 have died so far in March? That's a helluva lot of bodies for someplace that is supposed to be improving. These figures come from Antiwar.com but I don't see any reason to believe it's being faked.

On a similar note, according to the BBC News, "At least 36 people have been killed in three car bomb attacks in Baghdad, bringing the total killed in the day [Sunday] to more than 55, Iraqi officials say." and I've heard that the number of wounded for today is over 300.

It's nice to know that India's nuclear weapon program has gotten Bush's blessings. I'm sure Pakistan is thrilled to hear that. However, I'm sure we're more interested in China's thinking about India's nukes. But of course, unlike warmongering Iraq and Iran and their real and imagined nukes, India, Pakistan and China are just peaceful Asians that are on the best of terms.

Spam

Here's a quick printout of some spam from today. This is only about a third of the ones I got with generally the same title. Come on people - do you really think that sending me a dozen copies of the exact message are going to increase the chances of me responding? Like gee, if there's 22 identical copies, the message must be important?


Every now and then I review the crap in the spam folder of one of my accounts just to see what's going on in there. This account, from yahoo, gets around 100-300 spams each and every day. It's one of my "throw-away" accounts so I expect that. If I have to register with an email account someplace I use this one - so naturally it gets spammed a lot. However, I have a hotmail account for almost the same reason and it gets less than a couple spams a week. I haven't quite figured that out yet.

Let's say I was in the mood to buy something or otherwise respond to a spam message. Would I really respond to a company that can't spell or even use half-way correct grammar? I know I've brought this up before, but just what kind of idiot must you be to respond to an email that can't even spell its title correctly. I know they do that in the hopes of getting past spam filters, but what kind of burned-out brain must you have in order to answer one of these emails? Are you actually going to trust your health to a company that can't even correctly spell the medicine it wants to pawn off on you?

The most amazing thing is that people do - every day. I've seen numbers that say if spammers get a 1:10,000 respond rate they can make money. That must mean that one out of every 10,000 individuals smart enough to turn on a computer is stupid enough to respond to some idiot's spam -- and that's frightening.

Things that piss me off at work

OK - I guess I should say more things. Anyway, here's a small list of things that people do at work that really set me off. I suppose if people do them at places other than work, it'll piss me off as well. People who:

Wipe their boogers on the wall by the urinal.

Leave two almost empty pots of coffee burning on the coffee maker.

Spill sauce in the microwave and leave it to bake.

Prop the passcard locked door open with a coat hanger.

Get mad when I don't let you in the passcard locked door.

Pee on the toilet seat and leave it spattered in yellow.

Poop on the toilet seat and leave it smeared in brown.
      yes - really...

Leave piles of sliced paper pieces under the paper cutter.

Burn popcorn in the microwave.

Hold conference calls in the cubicle near mine.

Hold long drawn-out soliloquies about nothing next to my cubicle.

Hitting me up for donations for people I don't even know.

Hitting me up for donations for people I know but don't like.

Never being on the receiving end of those donations.

Signing cards for those people I don't know, don't like or don't care about.

Supervisors enforcing some rules for some people but not all rules for all people.

Being one of those people.

Leaving hot chocolate powder/sugar/powdered milk/coffee grounds/ on the coffee bar.

The cleaners moving my trash can from where I want it to someplace else.

Running the smokers gantlet on cold mornings.

People dumping their trash in the parking lot.
And yes - people really do this and more where I work. And no - it's not kindergarten or a hospital for the mentally defective (at least I don't think it is).

// posted by Jim-of-oz @ 3/08/2006 11:18:00 AM

Random Thoughts

Just a few random thoughts while I get back into the swing of blogging things again:

Just because: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." - Donald Rumsfeld

We hate those darn Arabs running our ports - unless it's to put more in more oil for our Dodge Hemi maxicab pickups, 400 HP "family" sedans, and 8,000 pound 6.6 liter V-8 go to Louis Vuitton Hummers.

People getting shot in the middle of the day in the middle of a crowd and nobody sees nothin' except people yelling at the police for not doing nothin'.

"Consumer driven healthcare plans" which means the consumer will be driven crazy trying to figure out how to pay for what their company planned.

How a shooting 8000 miles always increases gas prices instantly, yet it takes a company 4-8 weeks to process a rebate check.

Why so many letters in the newspaper from christians talk about how much they hate gays -- or hate anything else they don't agree with.

A line item veto on the Bill of Rights.

Canadian border guards - Hi, anything to declare? Welcome to Canada. US border guards - is that a bomb in your pocket? Who you're here to kill? you're going to overthrow what? - you're sneaking in because why? Go away and don't come back. (OK - not always, but more than should be.)

We've run this company into the ground and are going bankrupt and because you've done all that we've demanded, we will get bonuses and you will take pay cuts - at least those who still have jobs...

Low fat, high fat, no fat, lots of fish, no fish, some fish, low carbohydrate, high carbohydrate, no carbohydrate, dark green veggies, all veggies, some veggies, no veggies, 8 glasses, no glasses, some glasses of water diets are good or bad for you.

Law and Order

Besides being the name of one of my favorite shows, this subject came up this morning. Listening to the news as I drove to work, there was a short story about a local murder trial. Some parents are being tried for the murder of their daughter with learning problems and each is accusing the other of being the one responsible.

However that isn't really what this is about. They played some testimony by the daughter's school principal who stated, "she was loved by everyone." Which flashed me to the L&O television show. How many times has Brisco or Fontana or Green questioned a witness (sidebar: does L&O have skels or only NYPD) about some victim and "she was loved by everyone" comes up. Talk about perjury. First, I doubt if anyone - especially a student slightly different in high school - is loved or even liked by everyone. Second, how does the principal know "everyone"? 6.5 billion plus people (as of last weekend) is a lot of people to know well enough to know how they feel about one student in Michigan.