November 2008 Archives

I usually avoid going out on Black Friday on account of I'm allergic to teeming hordes of frenzied people cramming the spaces I wish to occupy. The sad thing is that my annoyance has nothing to do with Christmas shopping.

I needed to do some routine errands, which included filling a prescription for an ointment for a family member. I dropped the prescription off on my way out, and after about 45 minutes to an hour of running around, came back to the drug store to pick up the 'scrip.

I used their little drive-up window. "That'll be $10 please." I put my payment into the little door thing, then waited while she rang up some other guy who just at that moment walked up to the counter inside

I waited a bit longer as she disappeared out of my view. When she came back she said, oops, they're out of that stuff. She called to another pharmacy up the road, and they had it in stock, so the pharmacist lady forwarded the 'scrip info with instructions that I'd be there in 15 min to pick up. She handed back my payment.

I had one more errand to run -- a Wal-Mart that presumably had an item in stock that had been on sale for Black Friday. I drove past the pharmacy that had the ointment in stock in order to go to Wal-Mart to look for the sale item. That took about a half hour, maybe a bit more while I piddled around looking, finally asking, and learning they had sold out of 'em. No biggie, I'll find another somewhere.

So I headed back home, stopping at the second pharmacy. Waited in line while a really really loud guy argued with the pharmacist about why the orders on his prescription were wrong and the pharmacist, reading the prescription, said she could not fill it until Sunday.

He said, "I'm going out of town on a road trip!"

He said, "They got the date wrong."

He said, "I've only been having that filled every 30 days since forever."

He said, "No, see, you didn't fill the last one all the way."

No matter what he said, the answer was the same.

Finally, it was my turn, and I strode up and said, "Picking up," and gave the name. The guy looked in the little bin. He looked a second time.

"It was phoned from the other store," I said, helpfully. He looked yet again. He looked at the logs.

"Oh, we haven't filled that yet. It'll be just a few moments. We'll call you when it's ready."

A few moments later a young woman with two little girls came up. She looked at me. "You standing in line?" I was hanging out in front of the pharmacy window, but not in line so I motioned her ahead. She went to the counter and handed in her prescription. Then she went over to the waiting area and sat in the chairs. The little girls played "make believe shopping" in the toy aisle.

Still waiting ... about five/six minutes of the girls chirping and doing loud little girl things, while Kenny G caused all narcoleptics within hearing distance to seize up as the audio system played his rendition of "White Christmas", the pharmacist announced some name -- not mine.

The young mother got up and picked up her order. Yeah. The woman that had arrived well after I did. I stood immediately behind her, at that point.

I was all ready to bark, "How did that happen?" but he did not give me the chance. He went over to a shelf, grabbed a bottle off of it, popped the bottle into a bag, printed out the info packet, then rang the whole thing up. "Sorry about the wait."

Yeah, sorry this, motherfucker.

Archer found this thingie. Archer rocks. So I aimed it at my blog.

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

Yes, I usually drive my race car to both my cop day job and my firechick night job.

There's a brain activity chart they show, too, that covers most of the left half of the brain, what with Thinking (logic 'n shit) and Practicality and Sensing (Order, Habit and Details). So troo, so troo. It also has a wee lobe shooting over to iNtuition (imagination). So maybe I only imagine that I drive a race car to my adventurous jobs.

Gotta question the "avoid inter-personal conflicts" result. Troll here, hello?

But I often like seek fun and action. That's the credo of Geek Girldom.

Go do your thingie and report back, 'k?

Would you take out an ad in the paper and publish your friends' home phone numbers?

Would you stick one of those magnetic signs on your car as you drive about with your friends' and relatives' names and addresses on them in large, readable letters?

Would you send copies of postal letters to everyone you know that list the home addresses of each and every one of them, irrespective of whether they knew one another -- and send a copy to a national newspaper for printing?

If not, then why not?

Finally, are you one of those who sends mass e-mails to everyone you know, putting the e-mail addresses in the "To" line for all to see?

Irrespective of your answers to the questions at the top, if you answered "Yes" to that last question, then do me and everyone you know a favor and cancel your Internet service immediately.

If you answered "pffft, duh, no, I mean, hello?" then you are excused and may go off in search of the perfect cupcake or wotever you find more interesting.

Everyone else, take notes; there will be a quiz later.

It's not information that can readily be used for identification theft, and it's not likely to give real life stalkers added fodder for finding you, but a person's e-mail address is personal information. It is information your friends and relatives have chosen to share with you to make it easier for you to communicate with them.

What it is not is information you have the right to share with others.

Why is this important?

Number 1: Your second bestest friend in the world will probably forward your e-mail to his third cousin's fourth wife's late child's dog's veterinarian who, as it turns out, was involved in a bitter lawsuit with one of the people in your address book and now has a way to harass his nemesis. Or something along those lines.

Number 2: spammers. They get e-mail addies from spyware planted on the computers of about half of your correspondence list. The rest they get by siphoning out of the zombie routers that might've helped send that joke along its way.

Number 3: It's fucking rude, 'k? It's pretty much exactly like sending the postal letter full of names and addresses to the newspapers and to everyone you know, or sharing the phone numbers with the world.

So what should you do?

Simple. Put the addresses in a "bcc" list. Put your own e-mail address into the "To" line.
Less simple: sign up for one of the many social networking sites or "communities" or e-mail lists and invite all your friends. Then use that site to communicate those mass jokes you just have to share.
Even less simple and not for the faint of heart: get an e-mail client that'll let you set up messages that go to a list of people individually. You supply the list to the software, it takes care of sending multiple messages one at a time to each of the people in your list. Ritlabs "The Bat!" lets you do that. Take care you don't trigger your ISP's spam laws, though.

I'm ranting about this because my personal e-mail address has again been compromised to the point of becoming nearly useless. Anti-spam 'ware is only somewhat helpful and often shitcans perfectly legit messages which is a pain in the arse. I now get to go to some lengths to scrub my mail so I can get the good stuff and never have to see the shit that has been added because friends and relatives thought it was just peachy to send my personal address to people I've never heard of before.

'k. Done now.

There are a few questionable statements here, but I guess if you live in a place rife with flying bullets and can't afford Kevlar©, a cellphone'll do the trick:

A stray bullet hit a man in his chest while he was mowing his lawn Saturday, but he escaped injury because the bullet slammed into a cell phone in his pocket.

R.J. Richard of Slidell said he was working in his yard when a large-caliber bullet slammed into his chest.
[...]
Richard said he didn't know what hit him, but he knew something was wrong. When he tried to dial 911, his cell phone fell apart in his hands.

The stray bullet had hit his Motorola cell phone. Richard said he normally keeps the phone in his pants pocket, but that day he had it in a pocket over his heart.

So having a pocket over your actual heart seems a bit of an odd location. Most shirt pockets are higher. But never mind that. I think what I like about this story is that it is so full of hopefullness:

"It increased my faith," R.J. Richard said. "I am hopefully more humble. I hopefully will love my wife more and quicker."

Cell phone manufacturers can probably do something with this story in their ads. Y'think?

I am sure I have mentioned before that I am a Gadget Girl©. I lurve cool electronic gadgets -- whether or not they vibrate, I'll have you know. The latest cellphones, smartphones, PDAs, music players, pocket-sized cameras, GPS navigation stuff, computer accessories and, of course, all the cases, Bluetooth stereo headphones, en-bling'd earbuds, hoses, nozzles , and such stuff that goes along with 'em usually make their way into my arsenal.

While I don't have to be an Early Adopter -- my first iPod was a 5G (5th Generation) -- I do have a hankering for upgrading when something newer and shinier is released and vetted. So when the iPod Touch came out, after a time, I found I could not resist getting one.

The current economic crisis is not a result of my unwillingness to spend.

I am reluctant to get rid of an older device if it can still serve a purpose, however. So it was that when I was getting ready to go on a trip and wanted to travel light, I found that hanging on to the old 5G iPod turned out to be a good thing.

I have a reasonably large library of audio and video files in my iTunes. Large enough that I decided to move it to a roomy external hard drive so my aging laptop's somewhat smaller drive wouldn't choke. This presented a problem. I could not easily travel light if I had to pack the bulky drive. While I drool for one of those teensy but giga-spacious Western Digital Passport drives, I could not quite justify the pennies from my piggy to satisfy the yearning.

That's when I thought of my older 30G iPod, which had been relegated to becoming the more or less fixed jukebox in my bedroom. It doesn't have a very reliable drive when compared to, say, a Maxtor, but it is a tiny, portable and roomy hard drive provided at no additional cost to me.

I could store a copy of my library on the 30G iPod drive. It fits in my pocket. It's, well, free. Win-win-win.

Well, except for making that combination actually work proved problematic as iPods have firmware inside them that forever identify them as iPods when connected to a computer running iTunes. Yes, yes, they can be treated as a drive, but iTunes is just dumb enough that it had heartburn over having two iPod devices connected at the same time.

As well, the juice provided by a USB hub wasn't quite strong enough to handle both devices at the same time. Since I also have a wireless mouse and so need the use of more than the two USB ports provided by my laptop, I needed to find a way to work this. Took a bit of searching and asking questions of the fabulous folk who frequent iLounge, but I did make it work.

The instructions for doing this follow.

[Additional note: flash drives are way more reliable than the traditional disk drives, and Samsung is coming out with some pretty spacialicious Solid State Drives (SSD's) these days.]

If you you decide to buy a new 'puter and make the decision to accept Vista (as opposed to buying a Mac or something with Linux, or buying one where the manufacturer includes XP with Vista so you can boot into XP), you probably want to investigate the chipset and whether it truly is capable of running Vista.

According to previously unseen e-mails unsealed late Friday by the judge in the ongoing class action lawsuit against Microsoft, HP (NYSE: HPQ) executives were hopping mad about Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) decision to certify computers running Intel's 915 graphics chipset as capable of running Vista. The chipset was not capable of supporting Windows Vista's new device driver model.

While HP is rightly unhappy -- having invested manpower and money to adhere to the requirements only to be undercut and to lose the competitive advantage -- at least one Microsoft exec had the rightness of mind to likewise be fuming. Jim Allchin was one of the two co-presidents of Microsoft's platforms and services unit, which oversaw Vista.

For his part, Allchin hit the ceiling over the changes to the Vista Capable standards, which were made in his absence. 'I am beyond being upset here. This was totally mismanaged by Intel and Microsoft. What a mess. Now we have an upset partner, Microsoft destroyed credibility, as well as my own credibility shot,' Allchin said in an e-mail to CEO Steve Ballmer.

An e-mail from Ballmer in response to Allchin's message appears to beg off on any responsibility. 'I had nothing to do with this. Will [Poole -- at the time senior vice president of the Microsoft market expansion group] handled everything,' Ballmer replied. 'You [sic] better get Will under control thanks,' he closed.

Although Allchin, according to the e-mails, tried to get the Intel decision rescinded, he was unsuccessful. Both Allchin and Poole are long gone from Microsoft at this point.

I'd like to think Allchin resigned in angry disgust and Poole was fir^H^H^Hasked to resign sans compensation. I've not hit the blogosphere to find out the dirt. I know I've been leery where Vista is concerned anyway. I am glad my present 'puter, while aging, is still capable of doing what I need for it to do. When this one is ready for that vast toxic recycling dump, however, it's probably time for a Mac or a Linux box for me.

When the legislators gave the National Do Not Call Registry teeth, they made sure their own self interests were served. The language of the Do Not Call law includes "telemarketers", but specifically does not include political organizations or charities. A political organization does not fit the definition of "telemarketer," you see.

Raise your hand if you were pestered by robocalls (pre-recorded message automatically sent to hundreds or thousands of phone numbers culled from lists) from various candidates and campaigns this year. Raise your other hand if you found it at least as annoying as a call from a telemarketer, if not more so. Raise your voice if you want it to stop.

You get your number on political robocall lists in a number of ways, some of which include providing it when you register to vote, or when you sign a petition. The robo 'ware is well designed and will leave messages on your answering machine, so you can't easily ditch the calls. They'll use the numbers of ordinary people who've volunteered, so the call can look like it's coming from a private individual and not an organization, which might fool some of you who screen calls and avoid the ones that look like political organizations. My number ended up on lists long ago and I've been working my way through getting it back off again. This topic has me incensed enough that I vowed to NOT vote for anyone or any initiative that indulged in this strategy because I believe that my phone -- for which I pay and I have expressly for my use -- is a part of my personal, private life.

I would not let someone just open my front door, walk into my house, and hawk their views or wares. Why, then, should I accept letting them ring my phone, disturbing my work, my relaxation, my family time? If I don't appreciate my neighbors and friends shoving their heads through a door or window, unbidden and at random times to tell me their political views, why would I want to listen to a random stranger exhort me to vote Yes on Proposition X? I do not mind hearing what they have to say on TV, or on blogs, or while standing on street corners or at the mall. I support their rights and their duties to express their views in public places. Just stay the hell out of my home.

It's too late for this political season, but it's not too late in general. Let me ask again: Raise your voice if you want it to stop.

Start by signing up for the grassroots National Political Do Not Contact Registry. Contact your congresscritter and let him or her know you will throw his or her butt out of office if you hear from him or her during your dinner time. Speak to the media. Write letters to the editor. Blog about it. Re-register for your political party of choice and leave off your phone information and demand that if they do not provide a way for you to get off of their lists, they need to fix that.

Do Not Call should really mean Do. Not. Call.

Stop Political Robo Calls!

(Sign up for FREE) StopPoliticalCalls.org