Smith

A friend of mine called me recently and pointed out that Anna Nichole Smith was pregnant, and from this extrapolated that anything was possible - even that *I* would call him! - From this sad point of view I make my first blog entry in forever... Sadder yet that this is all I want to say right now!

two finger scrolling

I just have to say that my new MacBook Pro is the coolest thing since sliced bread! I have yet to try the lighted keyboard but two finger scrolling is where it's at! - This is all the better since hp bought it for me and it is all the talk at my gf's place of work HAL - Well maybe hal plus one!

SRTFN

Yes, a SRTFN button needs to be on every product. Stop, Right the Fuck NOW! - Especially printers and computers. Computers also need a previous screen - so NO MATTER WHAT you can go back to the mouse click right before you fucked up. I do it every day. Pay Now, and then you see the wrong shipping address on the screen right before it goes to the Order Confirmed screen. Or the spell checker lulling you into yes, yes, yes, yes as it repeatedly asks you to check the name of your town, your street, or whatever it comes up with - and then that one typo you skip on by, because why? - because you can't go back one screen and you have to go through the whole freaking thing again. - Yes, that's how you spell Ferd Berferd twenty three times...
But the SRTFN button would be key for printers that insist on spitting out pages of six random characters, one after another until it's out of paper... What is this, some sort of deal with Hammermill? - How many forests have been taken down because of that one extra sheet printed with some insidious line on the top. "Mapquest 1977 copyright" or something equally as enlightening, let alone the remarkable, and faster than that printer has ever moved, fuck up of spitting out tons of gibberish paper that causes you to either pull the sheet out of its little death-grip rollers as they protest with breaking sounds and not-supposed-to-turn-that-way clicks, or unplug the thing frantically as it uses all the photo paper in the house. SRTFN!

I have a coffeemaker that beeps when it's done. How nice. You have to unplug it to make it stop. Keen! - My favorite thing EVER! - beeping things. I have a UPS that I use for my cable modem and my wireless router. Both wall-wart transformer appliances with a total power draw measured in milliamps, thereby usable for hours plugged into the cheapest UPS on the market. Usually the cable is still connected eventhough some sap plowed into the power transformer upon the first snow - but NO, one must listen to an incessant beeping every minute, as the UPS dutifully warns me the power is off. SRTFN! - Of course the manufacturer tells me that all I have to do is install the software on my PC and go into it and turn off the alarm. How handy. I don't use a PC. In my industry if I were to walk into a customer site with a PC I would be laughed out of the building. I work for Hewlett Packard and they buy me the latest Apple computers just for this reason. I don't own a PC - don't even have one at work! - let alone having the god forsaken thing hooked up to the UPS. I just want the evil freaking beep to stop! - One customer service rep told me I could screw a wood screw into the cabinet and pin the little speaker, rendering it useless, but I couldn't find it, so I listened to the beep for a few hours and, as you can see, it only shortened my life a few years with the angst it caused. Alarm clocks have to be one of my favorites. Haven't used one since I threw papers when I was a kid and got up before 5. Even then I noticed I woke up right before the thing went off, so I just started waking up and it has failed me maybe once a year or so since. Much less than alarm clocks. Now I am in a household of alarm clock users. How often do they go off on the weekends? - With no one around? - I would say more than it actually is, I am sure, looking for just those times in my mind, but really - just short of locks, if anything else worked against the user so much, would it exist? And as long as I am on this rant, what do locks lock anyway? - what are we locking? - I'll tell you - fear - that's right F-E-A-R - nothing more - except when they work against their owner, then they lock YOU out - but other than that, I can assure you locks are tested less than .00000000001% of the time, let alone actually lock out the bad guys. They work against their owners 99.9999999999% of the time and are you really any less afraid? Maybe in the future we can have locks that report if they are even tried so we can see how silly it is to religiously lock them for no reason. My answer? - I lock things pretty rarely. I think it's kind of funny to see people get locked out of things, but when it's me it's never pretty. Nothing gets me to my core faster than being outdone by a machine, and one that is supposed to benefit me (aren't they all?) outdoing me gets me there all the quicker.

2002

It was several years ago when I bought a tired BMW 2002 from a guy in Hampton Beach, NH. There was a 20% incentive to remove it by the following Friday. I was motivated. My proximity to Hampton Beach was 37.5 miles. I was working in Woburn, MA and living in Windham, NH with my boss's brother and two of his employees who were young 20 something's guys from southern California. It was extemporaneous housing, recently out of the house from a marriage that floundered for 10 years or more before giving up a few years back - but THAT's another story! - Back to the getting of the 2002 story... - Friday afternoon - it started to snow - I had a U-Haul car trailer reserved in Derry or somewhere - I had an aging Ford Bronco with the all-important trailer hitch installed - this particular vehicle also had a snow blade mounted on the front - this Bronco, owned by the boss's brother was being borrowed after work on Friday - the trouble was Cheryl (the boss) 's brother was a major workaholic, and getting him extradited from the work place was a major feat in itself. On the way home we had to plow a couple of people's driveways, then we finally got to the house in Windham around 8 at night - I think it was in early February and the temperature was in the teens for a high. We dropped the blade off the Bronco and I picked up Josh - one of the two California guys living there. Went to the U-Haul to get the trailer in Derry, they were closing and we couldn't get the lights working so I was sent to another U-Haul in Manchester I think, and got it all working - then the trip to Hampton Beach - all we had to do was follow 111 - it was about 10:00 pm.

111 is an elusive road at best in central to eastern New Hampshire. After several stops and directions for corrections of course, we found the Bronco not so willing to start. Shortly after this, maybe the third or fourth stop, I noticed the lights dimming and I realized the alternator was not turning and we were running on battery. We came to some town, I don't know which one exactly, and pulled into an all night gas station and convenience store. At this point we opened the hood and I saw the water pump had come apart. I realized I had to tell the guy working the register that I needed to park the car there for the night and figure out a way home.

There was a guy in the store who overheard my plight. He was buying moist towlettes. He offered to give me a jump, having seen the hood up. I told him we didn't need a jump as much as a new water pump. He offered to look at the car and before I knew what was happening he was squatting over the engine, under the hood, with his feet on the fenders - it was then I noticed he was wearing just a t-shirt in the now single digit weather. He insisted I try to start it to see if we could drive it down to the place we thought it would probably get fixed. I remember him squatting, me seeing him under the open hood...

This guy, and I wish I was better at remembering names, because he had a really appropriate one, anyway - this guy was with his Aunt - a middle age overweight woman sitting in the passenger seat of a brand new light metallic blue Ford Taurus. She had bleach blonde hair in a short style and she didn't ever do anything but look straight ahead. Moist towlette guy started wiping everything in sight as we took off. Josh and myself in the back seat. He knew just where we lived in Windham.

"Do you want a moist towlette?" - "Now you're going to scare those boys to death," said the aunt, punctuated by moist towlette guy's name. He turned the music up as loud as it would go. He made the car go as fast as it would go (109 I think) He drove less than 10 miles per hour on the interstate. It was 35 miles or so... I turned to Josh several times apologetically and wondered if we were about to die.

Finally after one last run from "just rolling" up to top speed, we saw the exit. The road was just off the exit so we were excited with the prospect of living to see the next day...

"It's right there... here!" we said when we passed at 70+ mph, the turn. He locked up the brakes and turned the car so that it slid sideways and when we were perfectly in line with the road he shot down it like a flash! - I was impressed! - It was only then that I knew we were in the hands of someone who at least knew how to drive well! - he did the same trick pulling into the dirveway, but at 50 or so - still slick.

It was dawn, I remember standing in the front yard with Josh after we were out of the car and thinking that I could do anything - unstoppable, after facing sure death so well.

I got a ride to the garage the next morning and I got the new water pump installed, picked up the trailer at the first stop, then the car, a day late, and got it home and the trailer returned the next day. Just a typical weekend right before I went to Israel the first time... but that's another story!

dingdongheads

I am incensed over the latest Muslim nonsense. Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed with a bomb shaped turban or some such thing. Great that our government sponsored the proliferation of this for an entire generation in the 70's and 80's. My boss's boss fought against us in Afgahnistan when we were supporting the Taliban. He is Russian. Not too funny how this has come back to bite us. Evil communism doesn't seem so bad now, huh? - A self-curing thing, communism - I think if we hadn't given the USSR the extra incentive to fight the cold war it would have ended ten years before it did. What's the incentive to get up in the morning? - To be a surgeon and make just as much as the guy who sweeps the streets? We have an excellent system of rewards in the world. Let's call it: Survival of the Fittest. Take that incentive away by pretending everyone's equal and what do you get? - Looks like standing in line for toilet paper and vodka to me... ANYWAY - now we have an entire generation of ignorance on our hands. The last time something this bad had to be eliminated there was an entire race walking the desert for 40 years until that generation of idol worshippers died off. (Which reminds me, how do the Catholics get exempt from the third fourth and fifth commandments about bowing down before statues and worshipping graven images and such?) I digress... So how do we educate an entire generation of Muslims who have gone the radical route? It seems a losing battle... How can anyone who believes that their peace is so frail that a cartoon in a newspaper in a small European country is going to ruin their world be helped? Is it peace that they are after? - I just don't get it. The perplexity of Christians in Africa on the slaughter in God's name rings a bell... Did education rid this scourge? - One can still find radical Christianity mostly south of the Mason-Dixon line where thses odd spirals of rationalization still occur. Killing those who perform abortions - !? - I guess we all hear what we want when we learn about religions.... maybe everything.

I was heartened by an Israeli friend of mine who's accent was recognized by a Manhattan cabbie who was Muslim. She told me that he immediately said to her, "Do you know what the problem is over there?" - a rhetorical question at best - he was Palestinian - he continued, "Lack of education... " he explained that he was putting his two children through school - one a vetenarian and one a pharmacist - so that they could look above false beliefs and lead productive lives.

I remember working at a book publisher in Iowa and producing psychology books. Lots of interesting facts were gleaned from reading these books for graduate students... One thing in particular was a graph of overall happiness and what the income levels were and beliefs and what they read and such. The unhappiest were the extremes - including the richest - the poorest - the most educated and the least - it pretty much showed that an income above the norm, but not so high as to have skewed values was best for happiness. The agnostics were happiest, not the ultra-religious who are above their human doubting, or the athiests who's beliefs are just as religious, but against religion somehow!?

The above was all a rant, so rudely interrupted, that just kind of left off in the middle of nowhere... obviously pissy and of no value - however, now that I am FORCED to make a freaking account (pet peeve number 10,006) to post a comment on my LOVELY girlfriend's latest missive, I will put this up!