March 2008 Archives

I have been called "a man with boobs." I take that as a compliment because it was a guy saying it, and we all know how guys think that guyness is all that, and boobs are really terrific, so the absolute best thing in the whole universe would be to be a guy with boobs.

Okay, maybe that's second best. Perhaps the bestest of the best things in the entire male universe is to be a double-jointed-from-the-waist guy with boobs.

Yet, in spite of my guyness, and maybe because of my boobulous qualities, I have to confess that I am somewhat unsure what is meant by this quote:

You know he just plain needed it. Raise your hand if you don't know what I mean by that. You liars.

The fabulous, hipper than a lizard, Don penned that in his blog recently (see cite) while talking about "The Curious Calamitous Case of the Congressman and the Call Girl."

I have my theories, however, and I'm gonna share 'em with you before Don calls me a liar, 'k?

Gotta warn you, I really am a woman and not only that, but I was an impressionable child in the late sixties as well as a teen in the heady seventies. That means I interpret Don's statement, "You know he just plain needed it" through my own girlie filters that include a vague and fuzzy rendition of "all men are pigs" absorbed from my younger years when exposed to the bra-burning women's liberation movement through sit-coms and media.

What I think Don meant by that is that there are, and always will be, men who just plain need down and dirty sex for the sake of sex. Maybe it's all of you, except for Don and maybe one other guy. We're talking risky sex. Sex that means -- to you pigs -- power. Sex you probably are not getting at home because what you get at home is safe, accepted sex and probably even predictable sex set to some rules the little woman has crafted and you comply with because, hey, it's sex, man. There is some rutting animal need inside of each microscopic drop of your testosterone that is grunting right about now, dreaming about dirty hot weasel sex in the grime of your grandpa's hay loft and, man, you don't even have a grandpa with a hay loft, but you dream it anyway.

That's what Don meant.

How'd I do?

'Dust asks this question in his blog. I don't think I've ever done one a these, but seein's how I'm looking for reasons to not work on my taxes ...

I'll poast part of it -- got 132 songs in it right now -- so here's the top 40 that came out of the most recent shuffle:

• Swing Low Sweet Chariot Ladysmith Black Mambazo w/China Black
• Nights in White Satin London Symphony Orchestra Symphonic Rock: The British Invasion, Volume 1
• Bad Moon Rising Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Soul Makossa Manu Dibango "Wakafrika"
• Layla Eric Clapton Unplugged
• Hotel California The Eagles Hell Freezes Over
• Afro Blue Mongo Santamaría Afro Roots
• Ruins Melissa Etheridge Yes I Am
• Song For A Winter's Night Gordon Lightfoot Gord's Gold
• Touch And Go Emerson, Lake & Powell
• Pleasant Valley Sunday The Monkees The Monkees Greatest Hits
• Over the Rainbow Eva Cassidy Songbird
• Beethoven: Piano Sonata #14 "Moonlight" Mihaly Bacher
• Telegraph Road (Live Remix) Dire Straits Money For Nothing
• Shaman Toby Twining Shaman
• Just A Gigolo Thelonious Monk Misterioso
• But Who May Abide The Day Of His Coming Patti Austin Handel's Messiah, A Soulful Celebration
• Grieg: Peer Gynt In The Hall Of The Mountain King Leonard Bernstein
• Black Water The Doobie Brothers Best Of The Doobies
• Juke Box Fury Rickie Lee Jones Rickie Lee Jones The Magazine
• True Colors (Acoustic) Cyndi Lauper The Body Acoustic
• We Will Rock You Queen Greatest Hits
• Tribute Tenacious D
• Daddy's Got A New Girl Now Spyro Gyra Rites Of Summer
• Benedictus Simon & Garfunkel Collected Works (Disc 1)
• Songs From The Wood Jethro Tull Original Masters
• Boil The Breakfast Early The Chieftains The Best Of The Chieftains
• Fat Bottomed Girls Queen Queen Greatest Hits
• Mars, The Bringer Of War Adrian Boult Holst: The Planets
• Didn't leave nobody but the baby Alison Krause/Emmy Lou Harris Brother Wherefor Art Thou
• Such Great Heights Iron and Wine Such Great Heights Promo
• Grim Grinning Ghosts Barenaked Ladies Disney's Music From The Park
• El Tango De Roxanne Moulin Rouge
• Jambalaya (On The Bayou) Hank Williams 24 Greatest Hits
• Monkey Hill Gov't Mule Allen Woody/Warren Haynes/Warren Haynes, Allen Woody Gov't Mule
• Nine Crimes Damien Rice O
• Linus & Lucy Wynton Marsalis Joe Cool's Blues
• Moroccan Ashes Keiko Matsui Doll
• Never Saw Blue Like That Katie Reider Simplicity

And there you have it.

I crank up fairly easily when I experience poor service, or idiots in the call centers, or extremely brain-dead ways of doing things. Since poor service, call center idiots and brain-deadery seems to be the norm these days, you can bet I'm cranked up quite a lot.

So it is a real treat when I get to actually compliment a company for providing good service. In the case of Maricopa Water Processing Systems, the company that provides service for Kinetico© brand water softeners, I did not get just good service. I got excellent service.

My softener is eight years old. Kinetico warranties their products for ten -- parts and labor, with a service call charge. Over the past 6-9 months my water has been growing steadily harder. Sporadically I'd get soft water, but most of the time it felt scaley and hard, like little crystals of calcium were growing on my skin as I showered, or lodging in my clothing as it was laundered. The system would cycle fairly often as well.

The first really good thing was that when I called them, I got an actual human being. A real voice, that responded realistically to my questions. She connected me to the service department where I spoke with a woman named Gwen who took down my information and set me up for a service call right then and there.

This process used to be the norm. It's so NOT the norm now, that it's noteworthy.

It took two service calls to finally pinpoint the cause. The softener system itself was fine, which made it tough to debug. Ryan, the tech who solved the problem was punctual, knowledgeable, non-intrusive, thorough. He didn't stop at the first problem he found -- he continued looking and testing and probing each possible problem area, found two problems -- one was a leaky bypass valve and the other was salt built up and lodged beneath a screen at the bottom of the brine tank because we had used crystalized salt rather than salt pellets -- and fixed them. I paid for only one service call.

I wish, oh how I wish that all companies could manage to go back to this way of doing business.

There is so much blogfodder today and yet it's all already been blogged to death. Instead of working on taxes, I suppose I should've been staying on top of these vital issues, but I didn't, so there you go. I do want to add my voice to this news item, however.

Verizon won a chunk of the C block in the 700 MHz auction.

Stop yawning. This is important.

Cell services use radio frequencies. Cell services are growing -- bandwidth, speed etc. becomes increasingly important to cell service providers as more users crank up the texting, web browsing, music and video downloads, etc. We old farts mostly sneer "who would want to watch a tv show on a microscopic sized screen" but we forget that we used to be able to see and hear things our parents couldn't when we were young and fresh. People are even mo-blogging -- using their mobile devices to snap photos, take video, and upload those with content to their blogs all from their phones. They really would like it if their cell phone -- and I use the term "phone" very loosely at this point -- responded much the way their broadband connection at home does.

This is why bandwidth and spectrum is important to the carriers, so when the old analog television signals are shut down in 2009, the cell carriers want to be ready to move in and take over those frequencies, stringing up their very thick strings and very heavy duty paper cups.

So the very big deal about this is that the big cell carriers -- the Verizons, AT&Ts, Sprints, et al. tend to be proprietary about who they let onto "their" network. Sign a two year contract, you get roped into using the equipment they pre-chose, and the features and software they permit. A person buying a Moto Q9m Smartphone cannot use the built-in GPS receiver, because Verizon disabled it. The owners of the Q9h on AT&T or the Q9c on Sprint can use it. Similarly, it's extremely difficult to install your own ringtones on Verizon phones because Verizon would really rather you purchased your ringtones over the air from the vendors they have contracts with. They make it difficult for you to use the phone the way you want to. As well, you can't use an iPhone on a Sprint network, or take your Treo from Verizon to use it when you sign up with Alltel. The list goes on.

Some of this is because of differences in the technology behind the phones themselves CDMA versus GSM), but moving forward that will be less of an issue as most carriers upgrade their networks to take advantage of improvements that will make the cellular network as broadband and high speed as you experience with your computer, nearly. They're almost all converging on the same technology, known as LTE, or Long Term Evolution.

Of course most of you have read or heard that this 700 MHz block has strings attached -- Google and a variety of "free the airwaves" consortia successfully lobbied the FCC to put rules into place for the use of this spectrum: they had to be open. The providers who win blocks in these chunks of the airwaves have to build up networks that permit the end users free choice of phones, and the ability to load whatever software they wish on them (i.e. whatever software is available for the phone).

This is good news, but I'm a bit skeptical. Of all the players, Verizon has been the most oppressive when it comes to what the end user may or may not do, and the most vocal against regulations requiring an open network. Verizon has one of the best networks around, and a lot of that is due to the constraints the carrier has placed on its equipment and the devices that connect to it.

While some of the limitations are because the carrier wants to maximize its profits, many of them are designed to keep things working flawlessly. The more variety you have in devices, the more blue screens of death you are likely to encounter. The more hacking, the more difficult it will be to maintain system connectivity.

I seriously doubt Verizon will honor the open-network concept in the way the Googles and the free media advocates envisioned. They will comply with the letter of the law, of course, but will find ways to continue to be kings of the cellwaves. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Me, I envision vast armies of lawyers sharpening the stubs antennas of their Blackberries as they ready themselves for many a suit and countersuit in the Spectrum Compliance Wars to come.

My mind reeled. The small item I needed weighs less than half an ounce, but the shipping cost was... well, it didn't seem justified. I didn't really have a choice because this was the only place that sold this item, I couldn't get it locally, and, well, there you are.

When UPS delivered a fairly large box to my doorstep I was mystified. What on earth had I ordered that needed a 12 by 9 by 5 inch container?

Inside was like one of those surprise toy hoozies you used to be able to get -- keep unwrapping until you get to the prize inside. The cardboard box enclosed some of that inflated plastic baggie padding, which surrounded a wad of bubble-wrap, which surrounded a plastic envelope containing the one-and-a-half-inch by one-inch by three-eighths inch item I had ordered.

I was reminded of this when I read a comment from someone at work, who had this experience:

I ordered a download copy of [some software] a while back. I downloaded the file, no biggie [but] the next day I got [an] 8x8x8 box full of bubble packing to protect a THANK YOU note for my order. Nothing else in the box.

So he didn't have to directly pay shipping, but d'ya think the product price might be reduced a smidge if they just go to e-mail?

Doing sitemeter dumps and examining the search terms peeps use when popping into your blog is always good for a good, quickie, cheap blog larf, so while I snoozed through an early-morning meeting I decided to collect a few of my own.

There's a lot of interest in meth and pseduoephedrine. I wonder, though, if I should alert the authorities in Oklahoma that someone in their K-12 school system has been googling "mexican meth recipes". Research project, maybe.

Someone hailing from Jefe's locale is interested in learning how to "clean oatmeal off of bowls". This makes me feel better. Maybe I'm not the only one who creates nuclear waste for breakfast.

Everyone in India is excited about "Caesar's Last Gasp." School project? News report? TV show? WTF knows.

Someone working for Johnson & Johnson is checking up on mentions of "pronouns phenylephrine". New product? I have to hope these new pronouns phenylephrine pills will help my sinus issues.

It's 2:25 ayem in my part of the world. I've been awake, bang-straight wide awake since 1:30. This is starting to be more normal than not for reasons I do not understand.

Let's see, I have a sinus headache, it's tax season, and I have a list of to-dos that, if it were measured in pounds, would break an elephant's back to carry. Pile that on top of the personal drama on-going in the world o' gekko.

The part that really pisses me off at the moment?

The 24 hour gym I belong to doesn't open until 4.

Yes, this is a plea for sympathy.

Dat one big LOLcat!

A story about a doctor being interviewed about a research finding had me laughing. Dick Harper has some amusing observations concerning a pediatrician's alarmist commentary concerning phthalates:

 


The problem here is whether we should be exposed to fear mongering backed up by imaginary science.


 

First, wrap your heads around the concept of the virtual world -- in on-line interactive games like World of Warcraft and Ultima II, as well as on-line virtual "communities" such as Second Life. You interact with other actual people in the form of "avatars". People who do this tend to say "you're in a 3D world, with a 3D representation of yourself" but that's just plain silly. It's a 2D representation of a 3D experience that replicates an artificial version of life.

But, I digress.

Second, wrap your heads around the very real notion that people trade physical, real-life money for virtual things to use in these virtual worlds. Weapons, fairy wings, hair, clothing, land and buildings (they call it "real estate" but I'd probably have called it "fake estate"), and so forth. If your character in a game has a magic sword, you, the real you, can go on e-bay, list it, and get real actual money for it -- hundreds and sometimes
*thousands* of real dollars. You arrange to "meet" your buyer in the game at a pre-arranged virtual meeting place and hand him or her the magic sword, and somehow they are happy.

So. Given that. Here's why the Chinese -- who are still under a Communist economic and political system, mind you -- are more evil than anyone has imagined:

Reportedly they have instituted factories -- real physical buildings -- where they have legions of young Chinese people working 12 hour shifts with a couple of days off a month playing the games in order to acquire these virtual objects, or the virtual raw materials to craft virtual objects. The children are paid 30 cents an hour which is a princely sum. Their owners^H^H^H^H^H^Hemployers keep the stuff and sell it to the gamers who are there to, well, waste their income and their time playing the games.

My twenty-plus year old Sharp Carousel II combination convection and microwave oven finally burnt out. It served us well, over the years and it took me quite a bit of research to locate a replacement that had the features we had come to know and love, and was reasonably intuitive to use. The new microwave -- a Panasonic -- has a "delayed start" feature.

I decided I would have instant oatmeal this morning cuz I was in a hurry so I checked the manual on using the delayed start feature. (By now, little warning bells should be sounding in your head).

1. Key in the time for delay. Example, to delay start for 5 minutes, key in 5 0 0
2. Select power setting for cooking. Example, to cook at power level 6, press the Power Level button 5 times
3. Key in the cook time. Example, to cook food for 10 minutes, key in 1 0 0 0
4. Press "Start"

The timer will count down, the manual said, then the cooking will commence for the selected amount of time at the selected power level.

• I keyed in a delay time of 30 minutes: 3 0 0 0
• I keyed in a power setting of 8: Power Power Power
• I keyed in a cook time of 65 seconds: 6 5
• I pressed "Start"

I went to shower. <-- AD, take note

When I got out of the shower, the house smelled like something was burning and the dogs had worried, uncomfortable expressions.

The blackened mass in the bowl, formerly known as "oatmeal", was still giving off fumes that had yellowed the interior of the microwave. So much for being in a hurry; I spent a good deal of time wiping down the microwave while the bowl and its super-heated carbon contents crackled as it cooled on a hot pad on the counter. The house reeks.

When I was finally ready to leave for work, the dogs were still wearing worried, uncomfortable expressions and Teegan attempted to dine al fresco. Sadly, her bowl remained inside the house, affording Murphy the opportunity to pwn both bowls of food. When Teegan gave up on attempting to teleport her dish and finally came back in, Murphy let her know that she, Murphy, pwned Teegan's bowl.

I let Murphy know that I pwn both bowls.

Anyone know if dog spit gets rad-hardened carbon off of ceramic?

Here's a cute little word game where you start with a word and change one letter at a time to come up with different words. It has whiled away some hours spent on planes or during road trips.

It goes without saying that there is but one step to go from the good word "math" to get to the evil word "meth." Regarding meth, the steps that the federal government has taken to control methanphetamine production is pissing me off for numerous reasons beginning with "limiting my ability to obtain pseudoephedrine."

I'll be showing you some math in a bit.

First, let me point out that I am not a meth cook nor do I play one on the Web. I am, however, a person who suffers from constant, relatively low-grade allergies. If untreated, as the day progresses the sinuses in my head swell to the point where I suffer from a headache that makes a migraine feel like tickling. One 12-hour Sudafed© taken in the morning keeps me from suffering. It's relatively cheap, does not require me (or my insurance provider) to pay through the nose for prescription drugs or doctor visits, and it's very, very effective. Pseudoephedrine works. For me, at least, phenylephrine, the "decongestant" agent used in Sudafed PE©, does not do a damned thing. It may not be only me, in fact.

Phenylephrine has recently been marketed as a substitute for pseudoephedrine, (e.g. Pfizer's Sudafed (Original Formulation)) but there are recent claims that oral phenylephrine may be no more effective as a decongestant than placebo.

On a regular basis, then, I get to stand in pharmacy lines, hand over my driver's license, get entered into tracking logs, and get my dole of this brain-saving medicine. I am not going to go into the usual rant-like issues with the laws requiring control of products containing pseudoephedrine -- including the contra-American presumption that I am a drug dealer. Those topics have been blogged and articled to death.

Instead, I'd like to explore the actual limits they've imposed on the quantities of this product -- because at one store, one day, I was prevented from getting some after I'd run out, simply because I had already picked up more than my permitted quantity after I had done favor for a family member.

Let's start with the limitation part of the law:

• Daily sales of regulated products not to exceed 3.6 grams without regard to the number of transactions


• 30 day (not monthly) sales limit not to exceed 7.5 grams if sold by mail-order or "mobile retail vendor"


• 30 day PURCHASE limit not to exceed 9 grams of pseudoephedrine base in regulated products (misdemeanor possession offense under 21 USC 844a for the individual who buys it)

'k, now let's do the math: How much Sudafed© does it take to make meth?

The pills usually found at meth lab sites are the 60 mg or 30 mg dosages. It takes 472 pills containing 60 mg of pseudoephedrine to make one ounce of methamphetamine. The typical lab discovered by law enforcement in Arizona produces less than one ounce. Meth is typically sold in ¼ gram increments (for anywhere from 15 to 20 dollars per ¼ gram). There would be a little more than 28 grams in one ounce produced by a meth lab. If sold in ¼ gram increments that would yield $2,240.

My beloved 12HR Sudafed© contains120mg of pseudoephedrine. Thus, to make a typical production run in a hypothetical lab, I would need 214 of the white tablets to make the seven packets I would then presumably sell.

By law, I am permitted to buy one 20-count package of the 12HR formulation per day, up to three per 30-day period.

One package contains roughly 8% of the amount I'd need to make a single supply of meth. The 30-day limit gives me 60 tabs, which, at 2 per day for a month, is twice what I as an individual use. Those 60 tabs are about a quarter of what a meth cook would need for his two thousand dollar income.

I am not, however, merely an individual. I am a member -- the shopping member -- of a family. The family has allergy issues. We also get colds. It'd be easy to blow through those three packages -- the purchase of each of which requires three separate trips on three separate days -- well within the month and be left needing.

Doing the math, then, in order to both stay legal and supply the family's needs I and another legal adult member of my family need to shop on three different days within a month to get a family's month's supply of a medicine we rely on to prevent the killing rampages we might otherwise go on.

Meth cooks, meanwhile, just smurf around from store to store with their fake IDs and gobble up whatever they need. The number of US meth labs has reportedly dropped since Bush signed the law, but meth use is increasing, and production in Mexico has surged. The really fun part is that apparently the Mexican meth cooks are getting most of their pseudoephedrine supplies by smurfing in the US!

I have seen no data that this drastic limit in the amount a person may legally purchase is significant in the reduction of US meth drug lab seizures. Eight and twenty-five percent. The law could be rewritten to double those limits, which would alleviate my potential suffering and probably not harm the efforts at reducing meth trafficking. For that matter, so long as there is demand, and so long as the price is affordable, there will always be a supply.

Gotta love it when the law does so much to cause law-abiding folks pain and so very little to, well, actually provide law and order.

My head really hurts now.