Merely Annoyed Would Be An Improvement

I keep watching the news about the obscenity that occurred Friday in Connecticut. I've already heard rumblings of the old, "guns don't kill people, people kill people" mantra, and a number of the individuals being interviewed have mentioned the enormous power of the gun lobby.

Before I go any further, let's get something straight: I am in favor of gun ownership. I grew up in a family with guns.

There was only a limited number of guns, and they were always stored properly. I was always carefully schooled not only in their proper handling, but in giving them the proper level of respect. While I lived with my folks, I always read the monthly issue of American Rifleman magazine.

Now let's take a look around. The Connecticut shooter killed his mother with one of her own guns and then went on a rampage with three of them. The latest reports are that she had five guns in the house, including several semi-automatic pistols and a military-grade rifle. One family member said something about her buying guns because "she was alone in a big house" and "she was comfortable with guns."

Waitaminit.

The slain woman -- and I do not intend to demonize her, I am simply using the example -- was worried about living alone (with at least one late teen/early adult son) in a big house... in a well-to-do neighborhood in a well-patrolled area in a close-knit town with very low crime statistics. The excuse of a poor little frail female alone in the dark in a big house rings hollow here. Then there's the nature of the weapons. I can understand owning a semi-automatic pistol; there are a lot of advantages for the person holding the gun in case it needs to be used, and they're often easier to use than non-auto firearms. But why five weapons? And why was it necessary for one of them -- the weapon that ultimately slaughtered all those kids & staff in the nearby elementary school -- to be a military-grade, semi-automatic carbine?

What are we planning to defend ourselves from?

Just days ago, I watched one of those "prepper" shows, where the entire purpose of the program was to see if people had built up a proper arsenal for self-defense and knew how to use it properly. There was a family of three who all ran up excellent scores in a military-style test, and there was a guy with a ranch out in the middle of nowhere who needed to make some adjustments before he could score well at long range but soon proved to be an excellent shot.

Waitaminit.

Papa in the family of three is retired military, and he has obviously taught his wife and daughter a great deal about weapons; their familiarity with both proper use and handling of their weapons was clear to see. While I didn't get a feeling they were "weird" or out of the ordinary in any way (daughter showed up for the test with iPod earbuds hanging around her neck!) I was a little put off -- as was the host -- by the sheer size of the family armory. I also had to remind myself that all the training, all the respect they had for the weapons and what those weapons could do, was based in making sure they were ready for a post-apocalyptic America where they would have to defend themselves against ravening hordes of I-don't-know-what. Is it really necessary for a family of three to have an entire armory to defend themselves against ravening post-apocalyptic hordes? (Hint: probably not.)

Then there was the ranch guy. He also had a very large collection of weapons, all supposedly to help him defend his land against -- you guessed it -- ravening post-apocalyptic hordes. His arsenal (and again the host was "impressed" by the sheer volume of weaponry on display) included, among other things a MAC-10 that can spray over 100 .45 caliber slugs in a minute and a .50 caliber monster that's closer to cannon than rifle (the military uses these to disable vehicles by shooting slugs through their engine blocks at long range).

Ravenous post-apocalyptic hordes be damned; I cannot find any excuse for a private citizen to need that kind of firepower, much less multiples of the weapons. The guy was literally, by his own admission, preparing to defend his land and supposedly his neighbors' against armies of invaders. It's not bloody likely that any such armies will be marching toward him through the Texas brush in his lifetime -- but God save the poor sot who gets lost on a hike or makes a wrong turn on an ATV.

---

After the first round of news about the Connecticut school shootings I flashed back to that show and others like it, and I realized that part of the problem is that we as a society have come to glorify this kind of quasi-military excess. We celebrate the fringe individuals who believe the world is ending according to Mayan prophecy, or that they will be overrun by hungry hordes of the undeserving unprepared after some kind of military / financial / political / natural apocalypse. We encourage them to be even more prepared for their personal nightmares -- more prepared in ways that make it much easier for them to do serious damage to the everyday John and Jane Doe on the street. God save the Does if they look the slightest bit post-apocalyptic!

(Remember the case a few years ago where a Japanese exchange student was shot dead on someone's front lawn because he went to the wrong house on his way to a Halloween party?)

---

Am I advocating gun control? Damn right I'm advocating gun control! Not the elimination of private gun ownership -- but the application of basic common sense.

Individuals seeking a method of self-defense in their own home do not need more weapons than they can carry, do not need a weapon that can hose down an area with multiple rounds each second, do not need military-grade carbines when even a simple .22 pistol or .38 revolver will kill several intruders quite dead just as easily.

Individuals who want to hunt animals in their natural habitat do not need a semi-automatic weapon that converts the prey to ground meat on the spot, do not need separate weapons for every 100 yards' difference in range, do not need a weapon that can kill at ranges over a mile, do not need a dozen or more rifles for a single hunting trip.

Individuals who have armed themselves because they "need" to defend themselves when (it's never "if," it's always "when") society collapses do not need more weapons -- they need counseling. There is nothing to stop these individuals from suddenly deciding "things have gone far enough" and that poor schlub a few feet away on a street corner or in a doctor's office or in a school or shopping mall is the cause. There is even less to stop these individuals from deciding "the end is near enough" and removing you, or me, or that little kid over there from the list of people likely to want them to share their stored provisions.

Individuals seeking to defend themselves in their homes, individuals participating in target shooting sports events, and individuals who are hunting in the wild do not need armor-piercing rounds, hollow-point rounds, incindiary rounds, or explosive rounds. Individuals do not need military-grade body armor to plink at tin cans, hunt deer, or check that noise downstairs in the kitchen.

Individuals who live in the middle of nowhere (never mind urban areas) do not need military-grade weapons capable of putting a slug through the engine block of a car a mile away. They do not need military-grade weapons capable of nearly vaporizing a meat-based target at 100 yards' distance.

---

The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of weapons ownership. It was written at a time when most households had a limited number of weapons that were used primarily to put food on the table or defend homesteads on the fringes of "civilized" territory. Individuals were well-versed in the use and handling of these weapons, and usually could only put out two, maybe three, shots in a minute. The Constitution's authors are extremely unlikely to have thought that it would be used to guarantee a single person's ownership of firepower equal to an entire brigade of 1800s infantry. Yes, I've hear the saying, "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" so I will repeat that I am advocating gun control, not gun elimination. I don't have the space here for all the references, so I'll leave it up to my readers -- but the majority of the mass shootings we have cringed over in recent times have been accomplished not with "outlaw" guns but with weapons legally purchased and registered.

It is time that we as a society cut down on the sheer volume of arms and armaments in general circulation. Can you hurt a lot of people with a knife, a lead pipe, a baseball bat? Sure you can -- but simply looking at crimes of violence anywhere in the world (I mean the raw numbers, nothing "adjusted" for this, that, or the other purpose or point of view) will immediately show you that such attacks account for fewer victims even though such weapons are easy to procure. It's slower, it's harder to accomplish, it's easier to stop, and only guns really allow attacks at distances more than a couple of free greater than the length of an attacker's arms.

It is time that we as a society stopped glorifying violence. There's no need to show 12-year-olds adult videos, but where is the sense in piling legal penalties for that act atop each other while a WWE match complete with trash talking, physical violence, and orchestrated disrespect is considered "good family entertainment." We need to stop marketing toy weapons under the guise of teaching "interpersonal skills." We need to stop making diplomacy a laughable example of stupidity while making massive military-style responses to the merest of slights an acceptable form of crisis management.

It is time that we stopped telling women they are supposed to be weak little dependent things, and telling men they aren't men if they're not virile super-beings capable of killing or impregnating on sight, depending on the whim of the moment. We need to stop looking at mental health services as just another good place to cut costs while tens of millions of dollars are spent on the making of a single movie about a fictional gun-toting hero righteously blowing away dozens of bad guys.

It is time we stopped demonizing each other, objectifying each other, seeking to magnify the differences that exist between each other, turning each other into targets instead of finding ways to agree that we disagree and leave it at that.

It's time people like me can return to merely being annoyed, instead of horrified.

Back on the Air...

Okay... My 5-1/2 year old Airport Extreme base station is in the garbage, the new one is hooked up, the frakking cable modem finally reset so that it could talk to both the Internet and the new Airport Extreme, and I even replaced an old Ethernet cable just for good measure.

I am, it seems, back on the air.

Oh, I still get to watch my TV screen go black at odd intervals for no apparent reason due to Comcast's antics, and sometimes when a show that has gone black suddenly comes back on my browser loses sight of the Internet, and the stupid HP all-in-one will happily wirelessly print as many test pages as the printer utility can send but steadfastly refuses to print a damn thing whenever I try to send any actual documents  to it[1], and the lights on the cable modem are flickering in a totally different pattern from what I'd become used to over the past several years...

...but (at least until the next piece of hardware fries or cable gets cut) I am back on the air.

I think my second long paragraph lists enough annoyances for the time being, so I am going back to bed and will make a "real" post in the very near future.

---

[1] This particular all-in-one uses the same 802.11n standard as the Airport Extreme and my MacBook Pro, and the print on the box trumpeted the fact that it would make itself an integral part of my home WiFi network... but somewhere along the line I seem to have missed some fine print somewhere about how picky it would be about which services were actually available via WiFi vs. USB vs. Ethernet, and more recently I discovered it seems to be one of a tiny handful of models that HP did not bother producing an AirPrint driver for so I cannot send anything to it from compatible smartphones or tablets... C'mon, HP, stop being so annoying and make all the products you trumpet as being compatible with certain standards actually compatible, okay...?

"I'm In Charge Here"

Aaah... that new car smell.

I have been enjoying it recently, having finally been able to replace my increasingly costly, decreasingly trustworthy old SUV with a smaller, newer model. Specifically, I now own a Toyota RAV4, and I have to say I am enjoying the experience even though I bought a fairly basic version of the vehicle.

However, nice as it may be, the vehicle has managed to annoy me in much the same way as many other newer vehicles have done when I have ridden "shotgun" with friends & family. The problem is simple: many of the features of the RAV4 and its brethren (sisteren?) challenge us poor, non-digital, squishy-soft humans for control. Witness:

Automatic windshield wipers need no human intervention to operate; they turn themselves on or off according to input from their built-in sensors. My vehicle does not have this feature, but my parents' previous car did -- and it was not the least bit unusual for us to be riding down the highway and suddenly have the wipers flick across the windshield two or three times for no apparent reason. Frankly, I would prefer to control if and when a piece of equipment that rises directly into my field of vision (and that can smear tree sap, bird droppings, et al. across the windshield) becomes active.

Automatic volume control adjusts the volume of the sound system to counter for road noise as the vehicle moves. The theory is simple: the sound will be slightly quieter when the vehicle is at a standstill or moving very slowly, slightly louder at speeds up to 47mph (the exact number may vary), and slightly still at higher speeds; this theoretically keeps the music at the same apparent volume to the listener. The only problem is that I am very much aware of the change in volume, and as much as I might appreciate the Toyota engineers' attempt at keeping my ears happy I cannot help but wonder why the problem of road noise versus my ears has failed to bother me in any of the other vehicles I have owned over the years.

Automatic headlights will turn themselves on and off according to how much light they sense (the sensors are usually inside the passenger compartment, close to the base of the windshield). My old SUV had fully automatic lights and I admit they were a convenience -- except for those times I was checking something in the electrical system and they would turn themselves off, or would turn on because the vehicle was parked in the shade or in a tunnel and I would have to manually adjust the brightness of the controls so I could see them. The RAV4 headlight's are manual-on but automatic-off if I forget to turn them off myself (an unfortunately commonplace situation to date)... but the automatic-off feature leaves the switch in the "on" position so when I start the engine the next day the instruments are essentially invisible.

Automatic power windows go all the way up or down with a single quick push of a button. This can be very helpful when approaching a drive-through service window, friends standing beside the road, or a toll booth -- assuming your vehicle is not equipped with a fully automatic toll payment system similar to E-Z Pass. But, as I quickly discovered, it makes opening the window just a little bit for a cooling breeze a real challenge. Opening the window just a couple of inches, or adjusting how large the opening is, very quickly becomes a test of one's reaction time; it is necessary to push or pull the window switch just so at exactly the right moment to stop the window's motion at the desired point -- a skill I must admit I have yet to develop.

Automatic environment control allows a driver to set a comfortable temperature once and then forget about the heating, air conditioning, defogger, et al. because the vehicle will do whatever is necessary to maintain that (supposedly) comfortable temperature. Speaking as the (previous) owner of several vehicles equipped with this type of system, I have to say that the idea is simple but execution thereof is... well, difficult. It was not long before I lost count of how many times I was suddenly blasted with hot air during a midsummer's day, or felt the air conditioner pumping sub-zero air into the footwell in the midst of a snowstorm. (And no one in my family has forgotten the first-generation "climate control" system on my folks' old Buick that literally melted a pair of my mother's pantyhose onto her ankles!)

Automatic memory seats (and sometimes automatic memory pedals & steering wheels) will memorize all your settings for height, angle, distance between items, lumbar support inflation, an other settings ad infinitum. This is great if you happen to be one of those people who never wear heavy coats in the winter but lightweight clothes in the summer, sometimes drive in constrictive clothing and sometimes in loose clothing, sometimes have a sore back or appendage(s), or any of the other day-to-day variations that can totally change the size, shape and angle of your pre-programmed comfort zone... Not to mention what happens to Driver A's settings when the same key is loaned to physically different Drivers B, C, and D...

Automatice Bluetooth connectivity means a driver never has to worry about hands-free phone laws; some subset of the vehicle's electronics will automatically pair with the driver's phone via Bluetooth. This certainly is a convenience... until one decides to use a headset for more privacy, or wants to have the radio continue playing emergency and/or traffic updates instead of turn itself into a speakerphone for every wrong number, or have a child sleeping peacefully in their car seat until the quiet music on the stereo is suddenly replaced by loud ringing and loud voices, or any number of other scenarios wherein quick and easy Bluetooth DISconnect -- the only option not offered by most such systems -- is the option of choice (or necessity).

I can certainly continue, but I think I have made my point. A "convenience" in a vehicle is not actually a convenience unless it is convenient for the person who is operating that vehicle at any given moment. Automakers are increasingly likely to install electronic systems for their "wow factor" without actually allowing the drivers of the vehicles to fully control their vehicle (and/or their immediate physical environment)... and once the "WOW!" has worn off, that is indeed...

...annoying.

As If A Frankenstorm Isn't Enough...

Having read more stories of near-misses by flying debris, homes and businesses lost, millions of dollars of damage, and storm-related disruption of lives than I was able to process properly, I began skimming through other stories in the news...

...and found something to be really annoyed about.

Assuming the effects of Sandy haven't forced some to remain closed, over 30,000 schools across the U.S. are scheduled to participate in "Mix It Up at Lunch Day" today (Tuesday). Sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center[1], this program has been running for over a decade and is slowly growing. It encourages -- one might say forces, in some cases -- students to spend their lunch period sitting and hopefully socializing with other students they would normally not socialize with in an effort to break down barriers, promote understanding, reduce bullying, minimize the negative effects of school cliques, create new friendships for students, and generally do some real (and needed) good in the world.

So of course there's a group of idiots opposing it.

It seems that a bunch of bigots based in Tupelo, MS calling themselves the American Family Association have wrapped themselves in the American flag, hoisted the cross of [their perverted version of] Christianity on high, and declared the event "a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools."

Say WHAT?

Despite homosexuality barely rating a footnote as one of many hate-related issues the program is trying to address, the myopic AFA leadership -- led by the (in)famous Rev. Donald Wildmon, frequent foe of programs promoting understanding and provision of basic human rights equally to all humans -- warned their membership of the "threat" and the AFA's "Director of Issue Analysis" (how's that for a self-aggrandizing job title?) actually equated the SPLC's anti-bullying program with poisoned Halloween candy in an on-air CNN interview.[2] AFA supporters subsequently barraged the SPLC with over 1000 angry emails and many schools with phone calls protesting the event and demanding it be stopped.

There is, luckily, a silver lining to this distinctly bigoted & distasteful cloud. Although a few schools asked the SPLC to remove their names from their website to avoid further attacks from the AFA (it is unclear as to how many have actually withdrawn from the program as opposed to simply not publicizing their participation), once news of the AFA's hateful stupidity began making the rounds of various mass media and the Internet several hundred new schools signed up for the program.

Nonetheless, this remains a prime example of both the serious chasms separating (some thankfully small, albeit loud) factions of society from intelligent civilization and the power that hate and bigotry continue to hold & wield in American society.

This is the 21st century, folks. We may not have flying cars, weather control, moon bases, and all that cool stuff, but one would have thought that by now we would be free of the kind of hateful, bigoted idiocy personified by the American Family Association.[3]

But we aren't.

And that's damned annoying.

---

[1] You can see the kind of work being done by the SPLC on their website -- I encourage you to click on the "Get Involved" link near the bottom of the home page.

[2] I find it somewhat ironic that part of the leadership of an extreme fundamentalist Christian group is using Halloween as an example of something good that can be perverted...

[3] I've visited the AFA website, and believe I am being exceptionally polite by just calling them hateful, bigoted idiots. Drop them a line to let them know what you feel about them, won't you...?

Proof of Life Off-Planet

I'll keep this one short.

We now have proof there is life on other planets (please note the absence of the word "intelligent").

Check this week's news stories for the names "Mourdock" and "Coulter" and read the comments they've made to get them in the news.

There is no way those two can be from this planet. (Please, God!) Real human beings can't be that frakking stupid...

Well, okay, they can.

But still -- those two just cannot be from this planet.

And they need to be extradited back home ASAP.

'nuf sed.

Semi-Wordless Wednesday

(D'ya get the feeling the communications problem extends beyond just the phone system...?!?)

Upgrade, Downgrade, Passing Grade, Failing Grade...

Aaaand I'm back.

Aside from now having a lot less free space on my laptop's hard drive (long story), my technical problems seem to have become something of the past; all I have to do now is deal with the fallout, the cleanup, and the catching up.

<sigh>

In any case, I have a new annoyance (just one of many) to share with you this evening.

To begin, I have to admit that my family has been sorely remiss in maintaining currency in our technology division. That is to say, we have been using old-fashioned "flip" type cell phones for at least the past five years, with nary an app in sight.

Until this past weekend, when the adults in my immediate family all became iPhone users. The adjustment has been interesting; despite a great deal of reading in advance of the purchase, I have an uncanny ability to forget how to do something just at the moment I want to do it, and then remember later when it's too late. (For example, missing a great photo of a beautiful double rainbow on the way to work one day because by the time I remembered how to access the camera and zoom it in, I was in heavy traffic and could not take the photo until both rainbows had faded from view -- if I had been using my regular camera, I probably would have been able to fire off at least five or six good images.)

Learning curve aside, I have to admit the darn thing is fun to play with... but that teaching my parents how to use their phones is proving a bit more difficult than I had anticipated.

But wait, I hear you say, you haven't used the word "annoying" even once yet! What gives?

The answer is simple: upgrades. Two, in fact, of very different kinds.

The first upgrade was a slightly unpleasant surprise during the actual purchase. I had spent a great deal of time on the Verizon website, picking through their calling plan information with a virtual fine-toothed comb so we could budget for the new phones accurately. Imagine our surprise, then, to be told that there would be an additional $30 "upgrade charge" per phone, a charge I had not found listed anywhere during my online studies. Oh yes, I'm sorry, said our sales representative, they're applying this to everyone who upgrades from an older phone to a new one, or from a regular phone to a smartphone. Okay, Verizon, I get it; the iPhone is heavily subsidized and you need to wring as much cash out of each one as possible... but it would be nice if you warned your customers in advance of this otherwise nearly invisible $30 fee.

The second upgrade was an even bigger surprise, although one that (I hope!) has no direct financial impact on any of us. You see, I spent some time this evening literally sitting between my parents on the family room sofa, walking them through some of their phones' basic operations step-by-step. We covered answering calls, reading and clearing messages, basic camera operation, how to view photos... all the kinds of things smartphone users take for granted but that they had never had to worry about with the older, simpler "dumb" phones. Things were going well (to be honest, better than I had feared at first) when I ran into a bit of a problem.

The subject at the time was ringtones, and once we had established that they should use different ringtones (and that I was going to be spending some time creating new custom ringtones for them), we were having fun comparing all the built-in sounds to the custom tones I was already wasting using my phone's memory for. I told my father he could choose different vibration patterns for the phone as well as different sounds, showed him how to do it, and turned to show my mother.

And simply could not find the setting on her phone. Several minutes of frantic tapping, swiping, and (I have to admit) cussing later, a dim bulb flickered on over my head. My father and I both had black iPhones while my mother and sister had the white models. Could it be...? I tapped my way through the menus on my phone to "Software Update" and very quickly had a message on the screen telling me my iPhone was running iOS6 and there were no further updates available. I then did the same thing on my mother's white iPhone...

...and promptly discovered that it was still running the older version of iOS. Oh, sure, it was offering to download and install the update right then and there (at no cost, thankfully), but we were all so tired by that point that we agreed I would return and do the update tomorrow... and we all now assume that my sister's white iPhone will need the same update.

All four phones were bought together, at the same time, in the same store, and came out of the same inventory stack. Why, Verizon, o why, are they running different versions of the operating system?!?

That is annoying. In fact, I think I can honestly say it is frakking annoying, since I am now guaranteed to have to dedicate another 30-60 minutes of an already busy day to doing what an equipment vendor should have done for me before giving me their equipment.

And now, if you will excuse me, I have another couple of thousand apps to sort through while I try to find some that mimic the functions of my decrepit old PDA that I had not realized I truly do need at work until after belatedly joining the smartphone revolution...

Pot and Kettle

There were many things said (and more than just a few inferred) during the televised debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan. It was obvious that there is little love lost between the two men, and far too many words were said for me to analyze the debate here.

Before going any further, let me say this: regardless of how I feel about any of the political parties and/or their candidates, there have been enough zingers and more than enough twisting of facts from ALL of them for me to be actively trying to avoid watching the news these days.

But there was that one moment during the debate where I just could. not. believe. what I had just seen and heard (and yes, where I was thoroughly annoyed by what was said). 

Both men were obviously trying desperately to get in just one more statement to counter each other as the moderator tried her best to rein them in long enough to move on to the next question, long after the alloted time for the particular subject they were chewing to pieces had expired, when Joe Biden made a negative statement about the effects the Republican platform would have on the average American. 

Paul Ryan's response was to shake his head, give the camera a smile, and say something to the effect, "there you go, that's what politicians do, they say things to scare people into voting for them."

Umm... excuse me a moment, Mister Ryan. You are an elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives. You are Chairman of the House Budget Committee. Before becoming an elected government official yourself, you worked as an aide to several other legislators. At the moment, you are the Republican party's official candidate for the office of Vice President of the United States of America.

You, sir, are also... dare I say it?  A POLITICIAN.  Yes, you are. Really. You are a RepRep. You are a Congresscritter. You are A Washington Insider. You are one of Those Guys Who Legislate Things.

So please stop insulting the intelligence of those who intend to vote for you, those who intend to vote against you, and those who have yet to decide how they will cast their votes. YOU are a POLITICIAN too, Mister Ryan, and no amount of theatrics will ever hide that fact.

Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, allow me to introduce pot.

Now stop being so damn annoying and -- all of you guys from all the parties! -- just tell us, honestly and openly, what you intend to do if elected and cut all the, "Oh, he's a politician, so he's slimy, but I'm not, so vote for me" crap.

<sigh>
Now, if you'll all excuse me, I have to surf on over to the Factcheck website and see if they can help me dissect all the verbiage that was flung across the airwaves Thursday evening. (And I encourage everyone else to do the same.)

Wordless Wednesday

WHOOPS! (Er, I Meant to Do That!)

Have you ever made a mistake?

Okay, rhetorical question; of course, everyone makes mistakes occasionally (perhaps more than just occasionally). It is simple human nature to be fallible... and to make at least a half-hearted attempt at making the unintentional mistake look like an intentional non-mistake.

This aspect of human nature extends to driving. Who among us hasn't, at least once, reassured a passenger that we're actually taking a shortcut... or that we jerked the wheel that way because of a squirrel running in front of the car... or any number of other similar "I meant to do that!" statements.

Unfortunately, some "whoops" actions seem to invariably lead not to a statement, but an action that serves to magnify the mistake. These are (all together now) annoying.

And, frankly, dangerous. Dangerous (and annoying) enough for me to present them here as an example to my fellow drivers of what NOT to do, no matter how embarrassing the lead-in mistake might be.

I actually had a different post in mind for tonight, but I had to dodge so many vehicles whose drivers were engaged in "I meant to do that!" actions that by the time I reached my neighborhood I had forgotten all about it.  The worst part was that the driver of each and every vehicle I (and others) had to dodge did exactly the same thing... but before getting to that particular detail, let me describe the "Whoops!" part of what each driver did. (To help create a frame of reference, I add here the fact that all this occurred on a two-mile stretch of a single road at 1:30 in the morning.)

• The person in a large, dark SUV who forgot to turn on the headlights and then suddenly decided to cut across two lanes in front of other drivers who could only see the SUV as a shadow;
• The person in a dark compact who neglected to stop at a stop sign;
• The person in a large, dark pickup who first thought he was passing his turn, then realized it was a block farther down the road;
• The person in a silver compact who assumed the six-lane road I was driving on had the same flashing red traffic light as his two-lane side road;
• The person in a minivan who neglected to look both ways before pulling out of a side street;
• The young dude in a hot-rodded compact who thought he could blast out of a parking lot before oncoming traffic reached the entrance; and
• The person in a dark midsize sedan who simply could not decide which was the right intersection at which to turn left, then suddenly decided it was this one.

What (aside from a lack of driving skill) did each of these people have in common? They all did exactly the same thing when they realized they had made a mistake:

They hit the brakes.

They hit the brakes and slowed to an almost complete stop.

They hit the brakes and slowed to an almost complete stop directly in front of the oncoming drivers (including yours truly) who were desperately trying to avoid slamming into the idiot who had just put themselves directly in our path without warning and with only inches to spare.

Amazingly, there was no vehicle-to-vehicle contact -- there were plenty of squealing tires, and a couple of shaking fists, but no actual accidents.

Just a lot of really, really annoyed drivers who barely managed to avoid running into a series of idiots who decided the best way to make a moving mistake look like a carefully thought-out action by stopping their motion.

So, dear reader, please remember: if you screwed up while driving, you screwed up while driving; anyone who knows you are a member of good ol' H. sapiens will understand and forgive you even if you fail to add a dangerous, badly-thought-out, and annoying cessation of motion to the mistake.

And you don't want to be that annoying, do you...?

"Please Stand By..."

..."We are experiencing technical difficulties."

Or some such thing -- first the laptop got weird, and then early on Monday my 1TB backup drive (which has about 700GB of backup and about 270GB of assorted files I wanted "live" but did not want to lose) decided to call it quits. Oh, it works (there are those annoying messages telling me my Mac can't mount the disk I "inserted" from time to time), and it knows exactly how much free space it has left, but it resolutely refuses to show me ANY of my files.

Of course, the basic-level disk utility can't do anything except tell me I need to back up my files and reformat the disk.

Duh.

Exactly what I'd like to do, but that "back up your files" part... well, that's what the meshuggineh thing was supposed to be for in the first place.

I'll be back "on the air" as soon as I'm sure there's nothing evil lurking inside my laptop.

<sigh>

Annoying. Damned annoying.

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday

"Just Pay Shipping and Handling..."

Instead of my usual "Wordless Wednesday" post, I thought it might be nice to actually type something here for a change. (I have been under the weather again -- yes, there is indeed a physician visit in my near future -- and that has made posting difficult.)

An acquaintance of mine works in an establishment where there is a coffeemaker dedicated to keeping staff well-caffeinated. He told me that this particular machine (they apparently last about two years each) cost less than $15 and had been in near-constant use for over a year without any problems. It was easy to use: remove the filter basket assembly, dump the used paper filter & coffee grinds out of it, drop in a new paper filter, drop the assembly back into the top of the machine, use the machine's carafe to pour water into the reservoir, spoon coffee into the paper filter, and press the obvious button on the front of the machine. Voila -- a few minutes later, the carafe would be full of hot coffee free for the taking. This procedure was very well known among the staff of several departments.

Or so he thought. A few Mondays back, he discovered that someone who did not know the procedure had tried using the machine over the weekend and threw away the entire filter basket assembly along with the used paper filter and coffee grinds.  (Just to clarify, this assembly is a large, solidly-made plastic bin with a large and obvious metal spring & valve assembly underneath that, according to my friend, definitely does not look disposable.) Without it, water runs too quickly through the paper filter to brew the coffee properly, and then just drops through a large hole over the carafe, splashing hot, weak coffee over an area roughly two feet in diameter.

After the inevitable grousing, search for the guilty party, complaining among the staff, and so on, my friend realized the coffeemaker was a major national brand that was sure to have spare parts available. A quick Internet search later, he had all the information he needed to order the missing part.

And then things got... all together now... annoying.

The manufacturer listed the filter basket/flow control valve assembly on their website for $8 in change. My friend, wise to the ways of online commerce, quickly ran a second set of web searches using the specific part number (a good hint to keep in mind, readers!) and was rewarded with two lower prices: a food service reseller listed the identical part for $6 in change, and a restaurant supply house listed it for a mere $4.50.

Happy to have found the part so easily, my friend completed the online order and stopped in horror just before the final mouse click: once shipping and handling had been added automatically by the vendor's website, that $4.50 part was suddenly going to cost him roughly $16.00 -- a 350% increase in cost and several dollars more than the original cost of the entire machine! Needless to say, that final mouse click was to close the browser window and not to authorize the credit card billing.

My friend then went to the site offering the part for $6, thinking they could not possibly charge as much for shipping & handing as the first vendor. He was correct, after a fashion; the final price (again not available until just one mouse click short of finalizing the sale) was roughly $12.50 -- a 190% increase in cost and a few cents more than the original cost of the entire coffeemaker. The manufacturer's online pricing proved no better, ending up a few pennies higher.

Needless to say, my friend has started asking co-workers for small donations toward the purchase of a new coffeemaker (hopefully of a design that makes it more difficult to dispose of non-disposable key components).

But let's all back up for a moment and look at the annoyances inherent in this sequence of events. (To save time, I will skip over the obvious annoyance of someone throwing out the coffeemaker's key component.)

1. The original manufacturer lists this one component of their product for roughly 50% of the total cost of the product;
2. The manufacturer's price is obviously highly inflated, since other general vendors are selling the identical OEM component at discounts of up to more than 40% as their regular price;
3. One of the online vendors insisted on collecting local state sales tax despite their being based elsewhere in the USA and this state not requiring such taxes under those circumstances;
4. All the vendors are charging shipping & handling fees that at best double the actual price of the merchandise being sold (at least in this case); and
5. All the vendors' websites hid the total actual cost of the merchandise being sold until the last possible second.

My friend and his colleagues have voted with both their feet and their wallets: they are not buying another Hamilton Beach coffeemaker, and they are not buying from that manufacturer's website or any other that charges such high fees for the privilege of shopping there. I will do the same, and urge all of you to follow suit. Maybe, just maybe, we will be able to convince online vendors that doubling (or worse!) the cost of their merchandise is not an incentive to buy from their websites.

Otherwise... well, prepare to be annoyed...

Wordless Wednesday

Once More, With Feeling...

Okay, once again, something has happened that makes no real sense.

This area commonly has thunderstorms. I am not talking about a few rumbles of thunder and a bit of quick rain; I am talking about multiple vertical lightning strikes[1] ... violent winds... heavy downpours... all on a fairly regular basis.

So why, if someone out there can tell me, do our public utilities keep failing due to "unexpected" heavy weather?

We had another set of heavy thunderstorms pass through the area again the other day while I was at work, and when I brought up the electrical utility's outage map I was presented with a large number of colored areas, each signifying hundreds (in some cases, thousands) of customers without power. A few moments after having my "uh-oh" moment, I received a phone call from my parents; their neighborhood had once again lost power.[2]

I left work with some trepidation, unsure if I was returning to a comfortable environment or a hot, muggy house with no lights or air conditioning. After passing several Pepco work crews as I drove down my leaf-covered block, I was happy to find my house  dripping but well-lit. Unfortunately, my mood changed within moments of walking through the door when I tried to check the Weather Channel and found I had no cable TV service -- and I really got cranky when I subsequently tried to check the weather online and discovered I had no Internet connectivity, either. (And did I mention all that static on my phone line?)

This is the 21st century. This is the nation's capital. This is a region where thunderstorms are a near-daily event and severe thunderstorms are almost as common as heavy traffic on the Beltway.

So why, o why, are we still losing basic utility services so frequently due to "unexpected severe weather"?

Get with it, Pepco, Comcast, BG&E, Verizon... you're all really annoying your customers...

[1] When my family first moved to the area several decades ago, we nicknamed the stronger nighttime storms "Maryland Specials" because at their peak the lightning came close to providing enough light for reading.

[2] Electrical power was restored near 11:00pm... and promptly went away again for no apparent reason shortly after midnight, only to reappear once again shortly before 1:00am.

Wordless Wednesday

All Clucked Up

SPECIAL NOTE: I am re-editing this 24 hours after its original posting because, when I came back to read through it one more time, I discovered that I had accidentally (yes, it really was an accident) deleted a few key words when trying to rephrase a couple of lines. In its original form, this post read as if I was labeling Chick-Fil-A as a terrorist organization and/or Dan Cathy as a terrorist. I did not mean to say that, and I do not believe that. However, if you read through to the end of the post -- where the missing text I had accidentally deleted has been re-inserted -- you will see what kind of label I think does apply to Chick-Fil-A and the WinShape Foundation. (I have also corrected mis-numbering in the footnotes, and corrected the name of the Foundation, which I had gotten wrong in the original post.)

To be honest, I had (and continue to have) no intention of turning this blog into a political commentary... but some issues go so far beyond being mere annoyances that I simply have to post comments about them.

The (now slowly semi-sorta fading) Chick-Fil-A uproar counts as one of those issues.

What is annoying me about it? Well, aside from what you will find in my previous post, I am seeing a lot of commentary about the whole issue revolving around the use/abuse of free speech. I am seeing an increasing number of posts from bloggers who are firmly against Mr. Cathy's (and presumably his chain's) stance on marriage that are saying something like, "It doesn't matter if I disagree with him or not, he has the right to say what he wants. If you don't like it, don't give Chick-Fil-A any money. All those mayors who want to block the chain from opening in their cities are wrong, because it's no different than rendering illegal any other business that they disagree with for any reason. They haven't broken any laws, and they haven't done anything wrong."

First, I want to state that I fully agree Mr. Cathy does have as much right to his beliefs as I do to mine, and he does have as much right to free speech as I do. Second, I agree that we should all vote with our dollars and boycott Chick-Fil-A if we are offended by his (and his chain's) stance. Third, I have to admit that I have real concerns about what happens to freedom of speech if expressing oneself can lead to anything that might be construed as supporting one's views banned or rendered illegal just because someone in a position of power disagrees with those views.

But let's take a look at that whole "they haven't done anything wrong" idea.

I know there are bound to be individuals working for Chick-Fil-A who are uncomfortable with Mr. Cathy's statements, so maybe, just maybe, I should not paint the entire chain with the same brush (tempting as it might be)... but the tight linkage between Mr. Cathy and the business make it impossible to do otherwise.

The U.S. Government regularly freezes and/or seizes the assets of businesses and charities it believes are actively supporting terrorist and hate-based organizations. The individuals employed by those businesses and charities may know absolutely nothing about those ties, but may unwittingly be helping to feed funds to...

...groups that engage in activities that deny individuals, groups or populations their basic rights;

The Cathys and Chick-Fil-A's "WinShape Foundation" have repeatedly donated large sums of money from the Chick-Fil-A chain to groups working to deny members of the LGBT community their rights, up to and including making it legal to fire them from their jobs for no reason other than their sexual orientation.[1,2]

...groups that engage in exerting strong influence on foreign governments to forward their agenda;

The Cathys and the WinShape Foundation have repeatedly donated large sums of money from the Chick-Fil-A chain to groups lobbying and "advising" a number of foreign governments, mainly in Africa, to ensure they enact and/or continue policies that agree with his personal views.[3]

...and groups that kill, or actively support the killing of, anyone who they find objectionable.


The Cathys and the WinShape Foundation have repeatedly donated large sums of money from the Chick-Fil-A chain to groups actively supporting, and possibly actively helping, some governments in Africa impose an automatic death penalty on anyone guilty of the "crime" of being a member of the LGBT community.[4]

No, I'm not screaming, "terrorist!" in Mr. Cathy's front yard -- but our government (under both Presidents Bush and Obama) has seen fit to apply the "hate-based" label to, and take action against, businesses like his with much less hard evidence firmly in hand.[5]

Think about it.

I'll leave the ultimate decision up to each of you... but I've made mine, and I can assure you it is not favorable for Mr. Cathy or Chick-Fil-A.

---

[1] Only 9 jurisdictions in the USA allow same-sex marriage: CT, IA, MA, NH, NY, VT; the District of Columbia; and the Coquille & Squamish Native American tribal jurisdictions. Three others (CA, MD & RI) have at least limited recognition of same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions but do not recognize any performed in-state. All other jurisdictions in the USA not only do not allow same-sex marriages, they refuse to recognize those that have been legally performed & officially recognized in any other jurisdiction. The Cathys and the WinShape Foundation have donated money in support of the expansion of "no such thing as gay marriage" laws in those few jurisdictions that do recognize them.

[2] There are 29 states in the USA in which an employer can legally fire an employee for no reason other than that employee being gay. The Cathys and the WinShape Foundation have donated large sums of money in support of expanding such laws to all states.

[3] There are 81 countries in the world in which being LGBT is either illegal or carries de facto punishments ranging from a few months in prison to flogging, life sentences, or banishment from the country. The Cathys and the WinShape Foundation have donated large sums of money in support of such laws both in these countries and in those that do not currently have such laws.

[4] In at least 6 countries countries where being gay is a crime, the punishment is death. Money from the Cathys and the WinShape Foundation is donated directly to groups supporting such penalties.

[5] The Cathys and the WinShape Foundation have donated millions of dollars to the Family Research Council, the Marriage & Family Foundation, and other groups actively engaged in "missionary" and "advisory" work in Africa in support of footnotes 3 and 4, above.

...and Cluck You, Too!

This is not a post about being annoyed.

This is a post about fearing -- truly, honestly, actually fearing -- the ethics and empathy of a statistically significant percentage of the population of this nation.

A firestorm was recently ignited in the media by the owner of Chick-Fil-A coming out against gay marriage. He said he was against it because it went against the biblical definition of marriage, and within hours (if not sooner) the pro- and anti- groups were slinging verbal mud at one another. The mayors of at least two large American cities made public announcements that the chain was not welcome in their city, the Jim Henson Company severed a long-standing business partnership with them, and the call went out to boycott the company. Not long after that, a counter-call went out asking everyone who supported the company owner's stance to make a point of eating at least one meal at the chain's nearest outlet on August 1st.

Although small in comparison to the crowds of people coming out against the company and its owner, there were some significantly long lines at many of the chain's locations on the prescribed day as thousands of people sought to show their support for... and forgive me for the language... "good Christian values."

Let me back up for a moment; if you have read any of my earlier posts, you will undoubtedly remember I am Jewish. I therefore want to make it absolutely clear that I do not consider myself any kind of "expert" on what a "good Christian" is, does, or believes.

However... I have been a member of homo sapiens and citizen of the United States of America for over half a century; I have spent a statistically significant portion of my life living "on the economy" in other countries; and my family is as diverse an agglomeration of ethnicities and religions as one is likely to find anywhere. I believe that those attributes give me enough "expertise" to comment on the behavior exhibited by the thousands of fellow homo sapiens who are also citizens of the USA, a nation established and very heavily populated by immigrants of many ethnicities, nationalities and religions.

(And yes, to state what is likely obvious, while happily heterosexual I strongly believe that every citizen of this nation should have the same rights as every other citizen regardless of any measure of difference between them and me -- including sexual orientation.)[1]

I will avoid commenting on the not-so-minor problem that the "biblical definition of marriage" was a small bit of text cherry-picked from a selection that includes many instructions and guidelines concerning marriage that these same individuals are likely to find archaic, repugnant or laughable (or described by many other similar adjectives). I am commenting on the groups, crowds, hordes (if some supporters are to be believed) who wanted to show their support for good Christian values by buying some variation of a chicken breast sandwich, wrap, or salad.

I may not believe Jesus was any more or less a child of God than any other human being, but I do believe the guy had some good ideas.[2]  Ideas like taking care of the aged and infirm... helping lift our fellow humans out of poverty... taking care of orphans... treating our fellow humans with love and respect... placing equal, if not superior emphasis on the good of others as we do on our own good...

I think (I hope!) you see what kind of Jesus' ideas I agree with. I also happen to know that the vast majority of people I know who follow any of the variants of Christianity/Catholicism agree with those same ideas and ideals -- and brother, believe me when I tell you I know a lot of folks for whom the cross is the symbol of their religion.


So, all you folks out there who stood in line to give your money to a fast-food chain owned by an already-wealthy family to show your support for "good Christian values..."


How long did you stand in line, and have you dedicated the same amount of time to volunteering in a soup kitchen, a hospital or nursing home, a library, a school?

How much did your meal cost, and have you donated the same amount of cash to a charity helping the aged, the infirm, the poor, the orphaned?

How much food did you buy, and have you given the same amount of food to a local soup kitchen or food bank?

How fired-up did you get over the chance to show how closely you hew to the values of your religion, and do you feel the same way about ridding the world of poverty, hunger, disease, human trafficking?

How angry did you get over the perceived slight to your beliefs and do you feel the same anger at unfair business practices, oppressive governments, drug cartels, systemic bigotry?


Okay... Maybe I am beating a dead horse by now, but I hope you get the point.  (And while there is certainly room for improvement, I actually do engage in some of the above behaviors as often as time and finances allow -- my house may not be solid brick, but it's not made of glass, either.)

Howzabout we all put aside trying to show our support for "good [group] values" and take some time to engage instead in actively supporting good human values? Maybe set aside all those "us versus them" differences just long enough to solve some of the problems that are actively destroying the lives of millions of our fellow humans in this country, in this hemisphere, on this planet every day?

Is it really so &@%#!  important to give your time and money to buying a stinkin' sandwich to show how much you support a specific viewpoint when so many people -- possibly on the same block on the same street in the same town -- can't even afford one for themselves? (If you bought food at a Chick-Fil-A franchise on the 1st and then gave it to someone who could not afford it themselves, then I have a sincere "thank you" for you -- but sadly I have not yet seen any such stories in any media outlets.)

C'mon, people -- if you want to put your money where your mouth is, if you want to show your support for the Good Things in your belief system... well, take another look at my "How..." questions above and follow through.

---

[1]  I was brought up believing the definition of different is "not the same" -- not "better" or "worse," just "not the same."

[2]  I am fairly sure I just created enemies in both the Christian and Jewish religions with that one sentence... efficient, n'est-ce pas?

Wordless Wednesday

Song of Suburbia: Groundskeepers

Aaand we're back... First I got sick, then I got really busy, then I got sick of being really busy... So let's get right into it, shall we...?

I am a suburbanite. I like a lot of what urban areas have to offer, but dislike living in apartments... not having parking... not having a yard... and a number of other unavoidable facets of urban living. The result is that, having been raised mostly in suburban environments, I am most comfortable living in  suburban environments.

Never mind the songs talking about rows of identical houses, or the stories about neighbors going to war over whose dandelions are seeding whose lawn -- as with any environment, there are positives and there are negatives.

This post is a gripe session about some of those negatives. (Big surprise, right?) In fact, this is just the first of what I intend to be a series of gripe sessions about the sounds that intrude, sometimes rudely, upon the relative calm that is supposedly a hallmark of suburban life.

For this first "Song of Suburbia" post, I give you -- The Groundskeepers.

Groundskeepers, Type 1

One of the main selling points of my home was the fact that it is on the edge of the development, backing up to a private golf course instead of more townhouses & garden apartments[1]. An added bonus was the fact that my block of homes backs up to the "rough," that part of the course that receives only the barest minimum of grooming.

Correction: my block of homes used to back up to the rough. For two weeks late last summer, I was regularly awakened early in the morning by the sound of bulldozers and graders as the golf course was "refreshed" and reconfigured. It was a minor annoyance that did not last a long time, and once the work was done my neighbors and I simply forgot about it.

This season has been a little different; now that a putting green has replaced the rough, I am often awakened two, sometimes three, times a week during the season at 6:30 in the morning when the club's groundskeepers use their industrial-grade lawnmowers and lawn vacuums to ensure the green remains properly groomed. Everyone else is required by law to wait until at least 8:00am (still not great for me, but at least it affords me an extra two hours of sleep)... but somehow a loophole was put into the law when no one was looking allowing special cases[2] to start making noise much, much earlier.

Annoying, noisy, and -- for individuals like me who work late into the night -- exhausting. But mainly annoying.

Groundskeepers, Type 2

Another landscape-based annoyance are the groundskeeping crews hired by the local homeowners' association to keep the common areas groomed. I appreciate what they do, but not how they do it; any day on which they are working is a day surrounded by intrusive noise. The mowers are started at 8:00am and usually are run continuously until 4:00pm or later with only a 30-minute lunch break around Noon. Even when the crew has finished mowing an area, the mowers continue running -- the crew uses them to shuttle back and forth between different areas in the neighborhood like oversized, roaring Segway Transporters[3].

But wait, there's more!  Once the Mowers have completed their work in an area, the Trimmers move in. These gentlemen have gasoline-powered line trimmers, with the engines mounted on frames they wear like backpacks. They work slowly along the sidewalks, neatly trimming the grass (but skipping sidewalks directly in front of houses, leaving the edges looking raggedy as a reminder to homeowners that they have to trim the sidewalks themselves). As they work, the trimmers will randomly rev their engines, applying more or less power based on how much trimming is needed -- while coincidentally varying the pitch and volume of the noise they generate in a particularly annoying random pattern.

And there's a special additional bonus! The cleanup crew -- some of whom were only minutes earlier Trimmers themselves -- are the last group of noisemakers. These gentlemen walk leisurely around the neighborhood in areas where Mowers and Trimmers have finished. Instead of using brooms to clean off the sidewalks, they use gasoline-powered leaf blowers that I and some of my neighbors have come to call "howlers" because of the noise they make. Revving the howlers' engines in random patterns of pitch and volume, these gentlemen (wearing noise-blocking ear protection the rest of us wish we had for ourselves) blast grass clippings, sand and loose gravel off the sidewalks -- usually onto individual homes' front walks & porches and/or into the sides of nearby vehicles. (As an additional annoyance, their ear protection leaves them blissfully unaware of any approaching traffic as they inevitably walk backwards into the street to admire their handiwork.)

The Howlers show up too late in the day to interfere with any sleep (I long ago learned to not bother trying to take a nap when they are anywhere near my block), but they certainly have an effect that belies the relatively small size of the individual blower units. Hearing the show you're tying to watch on television? Difficult. Trying to listen to music without noise-canceling earphones? Futile. Working in one's own yard amidst the flying gravel and dirt? Dangerous. Concentrating on one's work inside, with all windows tightly shut? Right out.

In short... well, you know: annoying. In fact, annoying the way an angry yellowjacket in one's shoe is annoying, at times. But usually just plain noisy, disturbing, and...

...annoying.

Next up: Lover Boy.

[1]  Never mind the fact that I have absolutely no chance of being able to afford a membership at the aforementioned golf course; I never could figure out the attraction of using strangely-shaped sticks to smack a defenseless little ball around in an effort to put it into little holes in the ground while avoiding ponds & sandboxes...

[2] "Special Cases" are those large-scale commercial property owners who feed large sums of tax money into the system and (purely coincidentally, of course!) occasionally feed large sums of donations into political campaigns.

[3] An embodiment of technology that seems slightly frivolous to me, but for which I am desperately trying to find a good excuse to buy one (once I scrape up the money)...

Blowing Bubbles... Up Where?!?

One of my co-workers lives in an older neighborhood where the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (the regional purveyor of piped-in dihydrogen oxide) has been slowly working its way through an update of residential water meters. In his case, this involved a work crew, a backhoe, and a trenching operation that left the home's yard scarred; replacement of several feet of feeder pipe; a large hole being made in the side of the house (thankfully closed up again at the end of the process); and, almost as an afterthought, a new water meter.

These new water meters are something of a technological wonder. No longer does the WSSC have to send someone to visit each individual meter to either read the faceplate dials of the older mechanical units or insert a reader probe into the data port of the newer digital meters. That is all so twentieth century, as the saying goes; the new ultra-accurate digital meters actually upload their data directly to the WSSC via satellite link, no human intervention required.

Or so goes the theory. The truth is, "Nope, don't work, no way, no how."

Perhaps I should be a little more specific. The data link works exactly as advertised. The problem is entirely constrained to the realm of accuracy.

Historically, water in this area has been relatively inexpensive; for the first few years I owned my current home, my average monthly bill was in the vicinity of $15 even when I rented out both extra bedrooms. Of course, those bills have become quite a bit more expensive in the intervening years, but water remains the least expensive service passing through the walls of my home by an extremely large margin.

Apparently that's not the case for homeowners with the new 21st century super-accurate digital satellite water meters.

The first WSSC bill my co-worker received for his small single-family home housing a frugal family of four topped a whopping $600. Yes, six hundred dollars' worth of water was supposed to have passed through all that new piping and through the sensors of that super-duper new water meter in a single month. Even my co-workers' neighbors with in-ground swimming pools had lower bills, so he immediately logged a complaint with the WSSC customer service staff.

Fast-forward a few weeks, and the next bill arrived in the mail -- the bill that was supposed to include a corrected balance for the previous month.

$14,000.00

Yes, fourteen thousand dollars for a smallish single-family home inhabited by two alert & oriented adults and two alert & oriented "tweenage" kids.

I visited the WSSC website just before beginning this post and checked their billing rates. The highest combined billing rate for both sewer & water usage is $15.90 per every thousand gallons per day -- for 9,000 gallons or more per day. (You can double-check my figures at wsscwater.com)That's nine thousand gallons or more of water per day, a rate of usage that is a physical impossibility for the plumbing in an average home. Even better, if you divide 14,000 by 15.9 you will see that it would take 880 days to incur the charges WSSC insists my co-worker's family owes on a 60-day bill.

My co-worker isn't annoyed; he is livid. His wife is upset and (rightfully) scared that WSSC will insist their insane bill is correct and take legal action to collect the full $14,000.

Me? You guessed it: I'm annoyed. I'm also frightened because I have heard through the grapevine that the WSSC is planning to replace all water meters in the region with the same model that is so thoroughly screwing over my co-worker; worried because I know the WSSC will do everything in their power to put the blame for similar errors on homeowners; and concerned because this is yet another example of how the most glaringly obvious errors remain unseen but actively enforced by the bureaucracies upon which we are all forced to depend.

But yeah, I'm annoyed. I hope other WSSC customers are, too.

---

ADDENDUM: 

When I got to work today (several hours after posting the original version of this post, above the divider line) I asked my co-worker how things were going with WSSC. He said that his situation has not changed yet... but that one of his neighbors is also lodging a complaint with WSSC now that his home has one of the new meters installed. It seems that this neighbor's house is not hooked up to the WSSC system -- it draws 100% of its water from a well  and pipes 100% of its effluent into a septic tank, both located on the property and maintained privately by the neighbor -- and yet WSSC is threatening him for nonpayment of his water bill. Go figure...

The Future Ain't What It Used To Be...

(With apologies to the authors of the book with the same name...)

I believe the proper vernacular expression at this point would be, "...aaaand we're back..."  Last Friday, much of the Mid-Atlantic portion of the Eastern USA experienced an event for which the word "weather" seems wholly inadequate. A set of merged thunderstorms moving steadily eastward from the Mississippi Valley came very near to smacking the entire DC metro area flat as a pancake. The result was outages (or disruption) of all the public services we depend on in modern civilization: electrical power for lighting and air conditioning (mostly gone), landline telephone service (disrupted), cell phone service (disrupted), natural gas (pumping disrupted), traffic signals (mostly gone), clean water (restricted use due to pumping station backflow), public roads (many impassable), fuel for vehicles (unavailable when service stations lost power)... the list goes on.

I am typing this late on Tuesday night, almost exactly four full days from the time the storms finally left the area... and thousands of people in the area still have no electrical power, over 100 intersections have no working traffic signals in this county alone, cable TV and Internet service are still spotty, and things like batteries & flashlights are just beginning to reappear in many stores.

Okay, I get it: this was a major storm, not your everyday summer evening thunderboomer that we are all so used to in this area.  (At one point, local Doppler radar showed an unbroken line of severe weather stretching from slightly north of Philadelphia, PA to well south of Richmond, VA.)  But consider, for a moment, the following:

- Many of the local providers of electrical power have been scrambling nonstop since "Snowmageddon" a couple of years back to trim trees away from power lines, refurbish or replace older equipment, and reinforce or re-engineer weak points in the grid, all while making darn sure the public knew all about all the good stuff they were doing.

- Weather forecasts at this time of the year almost always include severe thunderstorm watches or warnings, tornado watches or warnings, and high wind watches or warnings, and yet somehow the public had no clear warning of how unusually severe this particular weather event would be despite the storm system being tracked from its formation roughly 48 hours before reaching the area.

- A series of powerful thunderstorms, complete with extremely strong "microbursts" and mini-tornados, have repeatedly interfered with all the affected services over the past several years and yet none of the "preparation" for serious weather events was able to prevent said repeated disruptions, much less the massive collapse of almost all public services that for many people is still ongoing, 96 hours after this particular bout of severe weather left the region.

This is the 21st century, folks. You know -- moon bases, flying cars, weather control, all that jazz. Okay, the space program (at least in this country) has been sliced & diced almost out of existence, the flying car is still a concept very much in development[1], we are still learning how weather works with no sign of actually being able to control it anytime in the near future...

... but this is the twenty-first century. Why, oh why, can we not build basic infrastructure in a way that prevents a single bout of severe weather lasting only a couple of hours from absolutely obliterating all the services that make modern life different from life in the 12th century... and then remaining disrupted (or wholly nonexistent) for days at a time afterwards?

Yeah, I'm annoyed, you betcha...

---

[1] Considering how most people drive, I have come to believe that we are all far better off without flying cars... It's hard enough to travel on (or walk across) a road filled with vehicles that only move in two dimensions -- can you imagine the chaos if we had to worry about drunk, inexperienced, distracted, angry, sleepy, incompetent, and/or just plain unlucky drivers above and below us as well...?!?!

Short, Sweet, to the Point

In the past several weeks I have gone from being extremely busy with extended hours, to extremely busy with extended hours and severe sleep deprivation, to just plain old-fashioned sick. (No details, but if you enjoy feeling miserable, then have I got a diet plan for you!)

I have now (almost) returned to what passes for normal health, and have taken a firmer grasp of the reins attached to whatever it is that insists on pulling my career along at truly breakneck speed.

Readers (assuming this blog has any remaining readers) will begin seeing new posts very shortly. To use the vernacular, "We thank you for your patience and expect service to be restored very shortly."

(The difference being that I mean "shortly" in a matter of days, not some interminable wait during which both the local power company and CATV/ISP company amass large sums of payment for services not delivered... but that is an annoyance for future posts.)

Hasta luego...

Three Assorted Annoyances

First Annoyance:

No picture, but could someone please explain to me why a major CATV/Internet provider cannot keep their service running uninterrupted overnight? It's not like the servers have to get eight hours of sleep...

Second Annoyance:

There is a story behind this photo... The first cheesy snack jammed, so a second was purchased by the same person; it also jammed and pressed the first package even more firmly against the shelf above. A third bag was purchased by a second, more adventurous person (it is hidden by the first two bags); it came completely free but was somehow driven upwards by the rotating spirals so that it pressed the two other bags even more tightly against the shelf above. At that point, the machine stopped accepting sales for the jammed vending slot (as well as the now-blocked vending slot next to it), but a third person thought that something coming from above might free the jam and purchased the last bag of potato chips directly above all the other bags... which, weighing just a few grams, had insufficient mass to knock anything loose and simply joined the log jam. (The glass front of the machine is nearly invisible in the photo, but  provided the chips with a secure surface to lean against.) I could hear people banging on the machine, shoving it side-to-side and lifting & dropping it, for almost half an hour before the crowd gave up. Of course, this occurred after normal business hours on a Friday night before a three-day holiday weekend, so no one will be getting any snacks (or any refunds) until at least the following Tuesday... (Note: Yours truly did not participate; I was merely a bemused observer who happened to have a camera handy -- but I guarantee that several other people were quite thoroughly annoyed.)

Third Annoyance:

This chandelier is supposed to be lighting (and providing a welcoming atmosphere in) the foyer of a local nursing home. If you look closely, you will note it has sockets for 9 bulbs. If you look a little more closely, you will note it has 5 dead bulbs and a 6th is missing entirely. Ahh, so bright (not)! So welcoming (not)! So... well, annoying. It was dark in there...


Oh, well... have a good Memorial Day weekend anyway, everyone -- and please try to take a few minutes to think about the real meaning of the holiday. The United States of America owes a deep, unrepayable debt to its veterans past, present and future.

Oh, Please...!

Sorry for the gap in postings; life has been interesting of late... But (to borrow from the movies), I'm baaa-aack!

I have the kind of schedule that keeps me up late at night, so I have a chance to see quite a few commercials & infomercials that might otherwise not grace the photons emitting from my television screen. Some of them are truly laughable, others advertise products that sound so good, I go online to research them even before the infomercial is over. (Example: Lipozene. Short answer: don't bother.)

There is, however, something beginning to really annoy me about the majority of infomercials. (No, it's not the far-too-frequent fudging of facts; that's an entirely different can of worms). They insult my intelligence.

My current "favorite" is for a cute little device that will supposedly give me the ability to hear almost as well as Superman (my exaggeration, not theirs). I will leave it to others to test the various claims made about the capabilities of the device; I am simply having trouble getting past the opening moments of the commercial.

"Would you like to have sonic hearing?"

Hmm... Excuse me a moment while I check a couple of entries in a standard dictionary... Ah, here we go:

Sonic: of or pertaining to sound

Hearing: 1) The faculty or sense by which sound is perceived; 2) The act of perceiving sound.

Putting those two definitions together, it would appear that "hearing" is an ability related to sound, which means it is... sonic!

Wow. Big surprise (not).

A word of advice to advertisers: don't insult the intelligence of your prospective customers. Anyone who sees this particular commercial is likely to understand that "sonic" and "hearing" go hand-in-hand without the addition or intervention of your supposedly miraculous product. Would I like to have "sonic hearing"?  Gentlemen -- I already DO have sonic hearing! We ALL have sonic hearing without having to spend a penny on your product!

I will, however, give the advertiser credit for one thing: it is a rare gem of a commercial that manages to be so stupid within the first two seconds of airtime. (And please tell that otherwise very cute brunette in the background to not overact so much when she supposedly hears her boyfriend is planning to pop the question, okay?)

Annoying. Unimportant... but annoying.

What the [bleep] Are They Smoking In Arizona?!?!

Arizona has a new state law, specifically designed to make it more difficult for women to get abortions.

I am not going to get into a discussion about abortion, the moment when a soul is created, who has the right to decide such things, or any of the other myriad issues orbiting so much as the mention of the word "abortion" in... well, I was going to say "in polite company" but the truth is I can end that sentence immediately after the second quotation mark.

What I am going to comment on is a truly, massively, frighteningly absurd premise of the new law.

Part of the language in the bill establishing Arizona's new abortion law, just as in every other bill in the United States that deals with the issue, defines when a woman is considered pregnant. More specifically, it defines a temporal starting point for "gestational age" -- the age of the [baby / fetus / embryo / insert  your preferred term here] .

In their infinite (lack of) wisdom, Arizona's lawmakers have decided (against a great deal of scientific, medical, and otherwise educated advice) that the zero point in an unborn child's age is the first day of a woman's last menstrual period. NOT the day of conception, but the day on which the most recent pre-conception menstrual period began.

If you do a (very) little research on basic human biology, you will see that the lawmakers of the state of Arizona have decided that a woman is officially pregnant approximately two weeks BEFORE egg and sperm ever meet.

Take a moment to think about that. Go on, I'll wait.

dum de dum dum de dum dum de dum...

Got it? That's right. You can Google it. According to the lawmakers in Arizona, pregnancy does not begin when the cell membrane of an ovum is penetrated by a spermatocyte (in plain English, when the sperm fertilizes the egg, aka "conception"). It begins two weeks before sperm and egg come in contact -- quite possibly a point in time when the sperm and egg are separated by a gulf measuring thousands of miles.

This means (what a miracle!) that women in the state of Arizona are essentially pregnant each and every time they begin a menstrual period. One has to wonder how much longer it will be before one of the same group of geniuses who came up with this idea that the end of the menstrual period, or the taking of any medicines to lessen the unpleasant effects of menstruation, should be considered "abortion" as well.

Even without that... pregnancy begins two weeks before conception? REALLY?

I've had concerns about the future of this nation... but now I see the light at the end of the tunnel is indeed attached to a large, fast, and very badly driven truck...

Two weeks before conception?!?!

God save us.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

When I started this blog, I promised myself I would avoid some of the classic land mines -- religion, politics, religion, giving away too much information about myself online, and religion.

I am about to break my promise to myself, thanks to the efforts of some local fundraisers.

This past Sunday, as you probably are already aware, was Easter; a major holiday for approximately 235 million Americans. In keeping with the spirit of the holiday (despite incredible efforts to commercialize it), there were none of the usual plethora of fundraising phone calls that have seriously marred every. single. weekend. for the past several months.

Friday and Saturday, as many of you are probably already aware, were the main days of Passover, a major holiday for approximately 6.5 million Americans of the Jewish faith (among whom, as you are about to find out, I count myself). Unfortunately, I cannot say it was of equal importance to whatever group was under contract to conduct fundraising for the local firefighters.

Although the number of celebrants of the overlapping holidays differs by a factor of 100, we are still talking about roughly six and a half MILLION adherents of one of the major recognized "Western" religions... and one of the region's largest concentrations happens to be located in this county.

Imagine my family's surprise, then, to have the phone begin to ring literally in the middle of our seder the other night. My father answered the phone (more out of habit than by design) and found himself speaking with a gentleman who promptly asked him for money. No "sorry to disturb you," no "sorry for calling in the middle of a major holiday," just the usual polite-icized "we play an important role in the county and need you to give us some cash."

Granted, the county's firefighters do indeed play an extremely important role in the lives of the local citizens -- my argument is not with them (although some of the county's actions ostensibly taken on behalf of the FD over the past year are in my "ideas" file for possible future postings here). What has me annoyed (actually, to use the vernacular, I was royally pissed off) is the fact that one of the world's major religions was considered "off limits" to fundraisers while another was not.

I fully understand that society as we know it likely could not function if every holy day of every religion was declared "off limits" for non-observant activities -- but  Passover is a major holiday commemorating an event that echoes through through the history of several major religions, and is actually recognized and celebrated in a variety of ways by additional millions of Christians in the United States.

I think a little respect would be appropriate -- I would not make such calls on Easter, or Christmas, or the eve of Eid or Ramadan, and I am sorry to learn that others (allegedly working on behalf of a formal government-funded organization) could not put off their phone calls until the two (just two!) primary nights of this holiday had passed.

I'm not annoyed... but I will be once I calm down.

How about you?

Unfortunately, I *CAN* Hear You Now....!

I'm back.

I apologize for the long gap in posts; believe it or not, there are actually almost a dozen in various stages of composition (perhaps decomposition, in one case). In fact, I had one just about ready to roll when I realized it was not what I wanted to write about right now.

You see, part of what has kept me off the air (so to speak) has been a fairly serious bout of exhaustion. Part of the problem is that my schedule at my "real" job ("real" is in quotes for a reason... perhaps for a future post...?), although not overnight, tends to have me returning home at a time when most of my neighbors have already been asleep for two or three hours. The result is that, in order to get anything approximating a healthy amount of sleep, I have to be sawing wood well into the morning hours.

And what, you might be asking, is so annoying about that?

Well, aside from the complications of having a schedule offset several hours from the rest of the world, this means I am attempting to sleep during the same time many companies are trying to make sales... and organizations are trying to procure donations... and politicians are trying to convince me to vote for them and/or their compatriots. As one might expect, the result is very little actual sleep.

Thus the "annoying" in this post: Junk calls and Robodialers.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the term, a robodialer is not the bastard offspring of Robocop and the disembodied operator one hears when making long distance phone calls. Robodialers (sometimes called "war dialers" due to their ability to carpet-bomb entire area codes with calls in very little time) are devices that will call through a list of phone numbers, one after the other, depositing a recorded message at the receiving end before immediately moving on to the next number in the list.

I have no problem with the occasional phone call from a charity seeking donations... but things have really gotten out of hand. We are in an election year (like I really had to remind you, right?) so what seems like hundreds of pollsters, politicians, political party representatives, political endorsers and endorsees, and interest groups have all added their robodialers to the pre-existing chorus of magazine subscription companies, charities, cable television companies, phone companies, alternative power providers, et al.

In addition to the occasional mistaken call from a politician or group very much at odds with my personal beliefs who believe I'm a supporter of theirs, I am getting "personal" calls from: politicians asking telling me to support them or fellow party members; pollsters seeking my opinion on the record of politicians; alleged pollsters with thinly-veiled messages cloaked in the guise of "guided" questions; party representatives reminding me the world will end if I do not support their platforms; party representatives reminding me they need more money; special interest groups giving me the URLs of websites I "must" visit to read their version of How To Fix What's Wrong In The World; and many more, up to and including (much to my bemused but annoyed surprise) pollsters seeking my opinion on all the polls I am being asked to participate in over the phone.

The handsets for the wireless phone in my home have small screens on which they display Caller ID data for each incoming call; to date I have received more calls from "Unavailable" than anyone else, followed closely by "Out of Area" or "Texas" (apparently the entire Lone Star State is calling me...?) and then Godonlyknows how many assorted companies and collections of seemingly random letters attached to 800 or 866 numbers.

The surge in calls began in late February, but what seemed like a passing wave has assumed the proportions of the recent tsunami in Japan. During a phone conversation with a friend this past Monday, I heard the familiar Call Waiting "beep" three times in slightly less than ten minutes; each time it was "Out of Area" or "Unavailable" (my phone thankfully displays Caller ID data for incoming calls even when I'm already on the line). On Wednesday -- when I had called out sick from my job and spent most of the day attempting to sleep -- I counted no fewer than 17 of these calls between 8:00 and 10:00am (at which point I gave up and blearily moved to the living room sofa). When I returned home from work Thursday night (technically it was well into Friday morning), there were so many political endorsements on my answering machine that it began playback with a warning that it had less than 30 seconds of free recording time left out of a 12 minute allotment.

It is somewhat difficult to be annoyed when "exhausted" is really how I am feeling, but annoyed I am, indeed. My home telephone has ceased to be a tool I can use to communicate with friends and family; it has become a conduit through which seemingly every business, pollster, fundraiser, and politician in the continental United States regularly and frequently invades my home in a concerted effort to interrupt whatever I am doing (correction: whatever I am trying to do despite the nonstop interruptions) and make me Pay Attention to whatever it is they happen to be peddling or requesting at that moment.

"Why don't you put your phone number on the National Do Not Call Registry?" I hear you ask.

Ah, but I did that. Quite a long time ago, in fact -- and when I re-checked just this past February, both my home and mobile numbers were still registered and "protected" by the list. Unfortunately, semi-hidden in the verbiage of the bill that created the Registry are loopholes that allow political organizations, charitable organizations, and any business with whom one has "an established business relationship" (so loosely defined as to approximate "coexisting on the same dimensional plane") to legally and safely ignore the Registry and place calls to their hearts' content. This applies even to "unlisted" and "unpublished" phone numbers, as witnessed by my parents also being assaulted by nonstop junk calls.

So what am I annoyed about? Let me take a look... Phone calls spaced an average of seven minutes apart for hours on end... Check.  My phone ringing roughly every seven minutes while I am trying to sleep after a long evening at work... Check. Multiple calls from unidentifiable sources... Check. Multiple calls from unnamed sources with phone numbers that cannot be traced back to their source... Check. Robodialers leaving partial messages on my answering machine... Check. Individuals, organizations and companies calling at times of day when the majority of calls will be answered by recording devices and leaving messages ending in, "press 7 now to be removed from our list..." Check. Robodialers capable of redialing my phone endlessly at 30-second intervals... Check. The fact that the only way to stop all these calls is to cut off my friends' and family's ability to contact me as needed... Check.

You guessed it... I am annoyed. And I hope you are, as well; this is nonstop unsolicited (unwanted) "communication" that verges on harassment, and there is no recourse beyond cutting oneself off completely.

Perhaps the time has come for the citizenry to push for a real "Do Not Call" policy that is also actually enforced by the authorities...?