Sometimes I just feel compelled to share nonsense, random thoughts, and sometimes just stuff I want to save
I’m still sick. I should not be at work right now. I should be at home, in my jammies, asleep.
Delirium and the giggles have set in. I wonder what I’ve been e-mailing my clients all morning? Gah, it’s only 2pm. In three more hours rainbow armadillos shooting stars out of their butts will seem the status quo.
I really hate January and February. This year, I have 3.57% more contempt for February since it is a leap year. Historically, these are dark and foreboding months for me. I am grateful this month is nearly at an end, but fearful for what lies ahead. I’m not overly superstitious, but like any reasonable man I believe robots work better with Daft Punk and the first two months of every year the darkest months indeed.
One little bright note. Not this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special, but last year’s, had such a brilliant opening monologue.
“On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact mid-point, everybody stops and turns and hugs. As if to say, “Well done. Well done, everyone! We’re halfway out of the dark.” Back on Earth we call this Christmas. Or the Winter Solstice.”
On December 22, 2011 I happened to be having lunch with a friend. As I did so I noticed there was a nearby table with about eight or so people. I happened to overhear them toast the winter solstice. That, in turn, made me think, “Hey! We’re halfway out of the dark!” That thought does warm me some now. If this were merely a matter of seasonal affect disorder or just a superstition about the dark, that would be one thing. Instead, my personal attitude of loathing towards these first two months is borne of a long experience. Bad things just seem to stack up in these months.
If the posts on this blog take a melancholy turn for a bit, please do excuse.
This past Thursday one of our kitties was acting very lethargic and withdrawn. Highly unusual behavior for such a social, friendly, and outgoing creature. We took her to the vet for tests that day and heard back from them on Saturday. I was in a meeting in San Francisco when I got the news. I left the meeting immediately and rushed home, picked her up, and took her to the vet. Her kidneys were failing and there was very little to be done. They tried to hydrate her, but she kept getting worse. When it became apparent there was nothing more that could be done, we sat with her, talked, petted, and kissed her.
Our kitty had such personality – affectionate, friendly, curious, and adventurous and we will miss her terribly.
It was tough telling our daughter. We answered her questions the best we know how. But, how do you explain the absence of a thing? As amazing as the Greeks were, they didn’t have a concept of “zero” of nothingness. I must say, she’s dealing with all of this far better than we are.
I’m not going to actually link to DMCA dot com because I don’t want to send any Google juice their way. 1
This is just so freaking evil I cannot believe I didn’t think of it. 2 DMCA take-down services? Are you kidding me? They’ll charge you $10/month for the ability to send e-mails. The only thing they really have going for them, from what I can see, is a really nice domain name and a snazzy website. Watermarking images and little badges on your site does more to market them than it does to protect anyone.
Edit: Oh, yeah, thanks to Tbuser for the link!
I came across this website as a result of something I was researching for work.
I merely thought the website was bad until I saw a rainbow armadillo shoot stars out of its butt.
Then I realized it was all so much worse. It is perfectly safe-for-work. It may send you into seizures, but it’s safe for work.
Okay, I get that you want to show Sherlock in the UK before it airs in the US, but really? Those in England got to see it on 1/1/2012 and those in the States have to wait until 5/6/2012 on PBS. My DVR doesn’t go out that far.
It’s been nearly one and a half years since the first season – which is plenty of time to work out any of the licensing issues required for a simultaneous airing wherever. Delaying or staggering releases only encourages piracy.
I’m tempted to find a way to purchase the Euro-centric region DVD when it is released and then find a way to play it. Meh.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to lose weight. I’ve used Fitday.com in the past with a lot of success.
Unfortunately, they’ve redone their website it is almost totally unusable. It’s always been an annoyance that the site doesn’t remember me if I close the tab and come back 1 minute later. Cookies and session management are important. But, now I have to go to the site, log in, click away from the beta site to use the old, and then the page times out.
Oh. It looks like this is mostly a Firefox problem? It’s working okay in IE. I like some of their new UI changes, but much of it isn’t very good. I know it is a free site, but if it is not usable, then it doesn’t matter how many Google ads you have. The Google ads should be moved so they are less obtrusive. The AJAX’y bits are nifty, but not everything requires or should be this interactive.
Well, now that I can open it in IE1 I guess I’ll give it a fair shake and let you know how it goes. :)
Some friends of mine wanted help with their Verizon account. Basically, they had1 six wireless lines. I’m a pretty tech savvy guy and I’ve got two. But, nevertheless, they had six – one of which was a smart phone line with a data plan they had reduced to a normal phone plan and a wireless card plan. But, they wanted to cut back to only three lines. The problem was that of their six lines, three had had 15 months on their contract, one was their wireless card with days to go before it was out of contract, and two were their personal lines that were already out of contract. To make matters worse, one of the three 15-month-to-go lines was the former smart phone plan – which meant its cancellation fee was more than twice that of the other two lines due at the same time.
If they had just cancelled the unnecessary lines, they would have been hit with $530.00 in cancellation charges. Since their two personal lines were out of contract and the wireless card was days away from being out of contract, it would have cost them only $590.00 total to walk away from Verizon forever. 2
After talking to a Verizon representative on their behalf I discovered that you could switch phones among plans, but that if you did so you would have to assume the new plan’s phone number or get a new phone number altogether. This made matters both more simple and more complex. Here’s the solution we came up with:
My friends could actually have saved another $70 or so by swapping the wireless card onto the third line with 15 renaming months, but doing so would have meant a change to their plan which currently has unlimited data.
The practical upshot of all of this is:
Here’s my take on this. When someone has six lines with your company, you shouldn’t require this much jumping through hoops. You should help them out to do what they want to do. If Verizon’s support person3 had the authority to realize what a waste of time and effort messing with these contracts would be, they would have said, “I tell you what – if we fiddle around with your accounts, we could find a way to cut $400.00 off of all of your line cancellations – at the cost of requiring you to choose new phone numbers. Why don’t I just waive $400.00 of these cancellations charges, let you keep your numbers, and extend all three of your contracts by 15 months?” This process would have taken 5 minutes and left their customers feeling very happy.
Ultimately, this is why it is important to hire good customer support staff – people who have the creativity to find a reasonable way to handle a situation and have the authority to implement it.
The Christmas season always reminds me how much I dislike and avoid shopping when I can. I especially avoid retail stores and do my best not to enter a mall. 1 2 If there’s something I’m interested in, I’ll typically window shop for ages. 3 This process, much like the process of me researching my MakerBot Cupcake, takes forever while I read basically everything published online4 , including the manuals, raves, complaints, any every little thing about it.
I’d say about 80% of the time I’ll window shop and then just decide I can live without whatever it is I was fawning over. About 10% of the time I’ll try to build or make one of whatever it. And, that last 10% of the time I’ll eventually pull the trigger.
I have another website/blog that I’ve really basically neglected the hell out of. Due to some new developments related to that other blog, I put up three posts in the last month. Which is cool and all except…
Now I’m getting pelted with spam through that blog and to the address associated with that website. I suppose as the spam kings realize a blog is even slightly active, they decide to start spamming the authors.
