Category Archives: Freakin’ Idiots!

October 12, 2013 · 22:49

Scientific American And The Epic Fail

One of the more emotionally satisfying memories I have from my childhood involves Scientific American magazine. I was a voracious reader, wanted to be an astronaut, and didn’t have a whole lot of reading material or resources. In grade school I attended a private, Catholic school, and while there was a library, it had serious limitations regarding what I wanted to be reading. We didn’t have a whole lot of reading material in our home, other than a set of World Book and Childcraft encyclopedias. I had read them all cover-to-cover by third grade or so.

Then I found out that my father subscribed to a magnificent magazine called “Scientific American”. He had an engineering degree, and he told me that he liked Scientific American because it kept him up to date on a wide variety of areas of science and engineering. It was reliable, timely, and written at a higher technical and vocabulary level than the popular news magazines like Time or Life. You had to have a brain and some education to read and understand it, and it didn’t talk down to its readers. Not only did he subscribe, but he had stashed away several years’ worth of back issues. As long as I was careful and didn’t get them dirty or torn, I was allowed to read them.

Yeah, that was pretty cool.

Here was a source of real, actual grown-up science stuff, and not the pap that the other magazines had. Granted, Life magazine had a lot of big, color pictures from NASA and those were fantastic, but Scientific American had the knowledge and the science behind the pictures.

Not surprisingly, when I got out on my own, one of the first magazine subscriptions I got was Scientific American. There were years when I was putting myself through college when I might be looking for couch change for the rent, gas, utilities, insurance, tuition, or food, but I never let that subscription lapse.

Today, I still get the print edition and, like my father, I still keep the back issues. In fact, after my father passed away ten years ago, one of his possessions that I got which I prize the most was the boxes and boxes of Scientific American magazines from the 1960’s. Going through those boxes I can still identify them and remember articles just from the cover illustrations. It’s like a time machine that takes me back to a happy place.

With all of that said about my personal background in order to give everyone some context —

I’m baffled and terribly disappointed by what has happened over the last twenty-four hours with Scientific American’s blog website.

In summary, Dr. Danielle N. Lee, Ph.D., is a noted biologist who writes a Scientific American blog, The Urban Scientist. Yesterday she reported an exchange that almost defies belief in its foulness, complete lack of professionalism, and misogyny. In a brief exchange of emails with someone who claimed to represent Biology-Online.org, she was asked to contribute articles for free, a request which she politely declined. The response was, “Because we don’t pay for blog entries? Are you an urban scientist or an urban whore?”

Understandably shocked and outraged by this response, Dr. Lee wrote a blog article reporting what had happened and posted it to her site. She also started telling her friends and fellow bloggers about what had happened. At first, people started to realize that Biology-Online.org has some sort of marketing and advertising relationship with the Scientific American blogging site. Secondly, people noticed that Dr. Lee’s blog article wasn’t showing up on her Scientific American site. When inquiries were made, it was found that the article had been deleted by Scientific American.  The justification for the deletion came in a tweet (here, including the repsonses) from Mariette DiChristina, Scientific American’s Editor in Chief and Senior VP, who said, “@sciam is a publication for discovering science. The post was not appropriate for this area & was therefore removed.”

Incredible.

Infuriating.

Absolutely, 100%, completely unacceptable.

While the editorial leadership at Scientific American appears to have completely dropped the ball, the blogosphere reacted quickly. Dr. Lee’s friend and fellow blogger, Isis the Scientist, reposted the deleted article and started spreading the word. Dr. Isis followed it up with a second article today. The reaction also included many other bloggers who write on the Scientific American blogging site. As of this evening, Janet D. Stemwedel, Dana Hunter (here and here), and Kate Clancy have all posted articles that are quite pointedly not about “discovering science” but instead are wondering what the major malfunction is at Scientific American.

Other prominent bloggers have weighed in, including Maryn McKenna, Anne Jefferson, David Wescott, Sean Carroll, Joshua Drew, and Greg Laden. John Scalzi commented on it on Twitter, and the entire conversation generated in that thread is quite enlightening. My two cents worth on Twitter was:

Capture

As someone pointed out, even Buzzfeed is calling Scientific American to task for what they’ve done. Isn’t that a bit like the New York Times screwing up and being chewed out by the National Enquirer?

This is not rocket science. The proper response to seeing an employee or associate treating anyone with a lack of respect is to say, “Stop”.

When an employee or associate treats a woman like Dr. Lee was treated, the appropriate response starts with, “STOP! You are relieved of your duties effective immediately. We will discuss your future or lack of one with this organization later. We offer our utmost and sincere apologies to Dr. Lee. This despicable offense should never have happened. We will immediately begin a review of all corporate policies and procedures to make sure that all company personnel understand that such behavior toward anyone is completely unacceptable and that anyone displaying such behavior will be held responsible for their actions.”

Notice that deleting her complaint in an attempt to shut her up isn’t part of that response? Nor is coming up with a completely false and nonsensical excuse for deleting her account. Nor is then going silent.

We’ve seen this kind of unacceptable behavior over and over with politicians, both the disrespectful treatment of women and the ignorant belief that it can be swept under the rug once exposed to the light of day. (Can you say “Anthony Weiner”? Sure, I knew you could.) Politicians, unfortunately, are not expected to be tech savvy or internet savvy. (That’s so sad in its own right, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

While this kind of behavior has gone on (literally) forever, we’re supposed to be doing better in 2013. As a society, we’re supposed to now be more mature, more educated, more intelligent, more empathetic, more understanding, more responsible, and more civilized than we have been in the past. Yet in the past weeks and months there have been far, far too many examples of inexcusable behavior toward women in the tech industry, in science, in academia, in publishing, in SFF fandom, and in every aspect of everyday life.

When will people get it through their heads that this sort of behavior IS NOT ACCEPTABLE?

No excuses.

No exceptions.

And who in their right mind thinks that you can delete something and make it go away? Barbara Streisand and her lawyers were not tech savvy or internet savvy. Well-meaning buffoons and Luddites who try to ban books generally are not tech savvy or internet savvy. The folks at Scientific American, particularly the folks at Scientific American who are running their web sites and science blogs, really are supposed to be tech savvy and internet savvy. There appears to be no evidence of that in how they’ve handled this issue.

It’s tempting to say, “It’s a holiday weekend, this hit the fan late on Friday, so for the moment only, let’s give Scientific American the benefit of the doubt. We’ll wait until Tuesday and see what they do to make this right.” Tempting, but I’m going to resist that temptation. Unless the entire organization management is off in a retreat, sealed in a cave in the Pyrenees with no outside contact with the world, they must surely be aware of what’s going on. When you make a mistake this big, you can either hunker down and hope it blows over (a truly terrible strategy and proof that you shouldn’t be in charge of anything) or you can get on top of it by immediately starting to make things right. The problem has ballooned out of control over the holiday weekend — surely the corrections could be started in the same time frame.

One way or the other, the clock is ticking.

Your move, Scientific American. One hundred and sixty-eight years of excellence hangs in the balance.

Would you like to admit that you screwed up big time, apologize sincerely and honestly, and tell us what you’re going to do to make things right and keep them that way? Or would you like that 168-year-old reputation to be history?

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Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Moral Outrage

October 8, 2013 · 20:00

What Do Our Representatives Owe Us?

I haven’t written much on the current political deadlock in the US because I find that the whole mess tends to do bad things to my blood pressure. In addition, given that it’s a pretty central story to just about every news conduit every second right now, there are some far, far better wordsmiths than I weighing in. For example, Jim Wright has a truly excellent, civil, even-handed, and logical article over on his Stonekettle Station blog. There are body parts I would sacrifice or exchange if I could write that well.

Nevertheless, today a couple of thoughts came together in my brain that I need to put out there for discussion.

First, one of my all-time favorite plays, musicals, and movies is “1776“. We studied it in high school in 1971 or 1972 and I was enthralled. There was talk of our school doing it as our senior play and I was ready to just nail the part of John Adams. (We eventually did “Harvey” instead and I played Dr. Chumley.) I can still do whole sections of “1776” at the drop of a hat. If I see it being done live anywhere here in LA, I’m there.

A line from John Adams’ opening soliloquy has been widely quoted during the current (and previous) Congressional deadlocks:

“I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a Congress. And by God, I have had this Congress!”

You won’t get an argument from me.

Secondly, today I read probably the 100th news story quoting a member of the Republican “Suicide Caucus” (a term coined by Pulitzer Prize-winning, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer) justifying what they’re doing as follows – while a huge majority of Americans may think that what they’re doing is completely deplorable and despicable, their constituents from back in their (gerrymandered) districts are telling them to fight on, stay the course, keep doing what is perceived back in the district as the right thing.

With that article still rattling around in my head, I started humming something from “1776”. I thought about a scene late in the movie, just before the July 4th vote is taken on the Declaration of Independence. In this scene, a Congressional Congress delegate who has been instructed by his constituents to vote against independence instead changes his vote to what he believes is right, i.e., approval of the Declaration and freedom from England.

During this scene, a quote from British Parliamentarian Edmund Burke is given as a key part of the logic and thought process behind the change in his vote. I went and found the exact quote, from Burke’s 1774 Speech to the Electors at Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll (section 4.1.22 – worth reading the whole section even if you don’t read the whole speech):

“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Let’s think about that for a minute, current 2013 members of the House of Representatives.

You repeatedly claim that you’re taking these actions, as harmful and damaging as they are, because the folks back home who elected you are telling you that’s what they want? That’s really your story? That’s really your justification?

What if “what they’re telling you to do” is causing serious damage to huge sections of the country?

What if “what they’re telling you to do” is a real threat to put the country right back into another recession, or worse?

What if “what they’re telling you to do” has a legitimate chance of causing incredible damage to the entire world’s economy?

What if “what they’re telling you to do” can destroy the United States’ position as a world power?

What if “what they’re telling you to do” is a corruption of the US Constitution, not a defense of it?

What if “what they’re telling you to do” is insane?

What if “what they’re telling you to do” is treason?

(For the moment we’ll overlook the question of whether “what they’re telling you to do” is actually what they’re telling you to do, or just what some multi-billionaire, ultra conservative campaign contributors are telling you to do.)

In researching the Burke quote, I was surprised to find several sources referring to Burke as one of the philosophical fathers of modern conservative thought. It was also fascinating to find that Burke thought as he did because he believed that the common masses would be slaves to emotional and impassioned impulses, while a governing body of the elite upper class would be able to make rational, unbiased decisions when governing.

I’m open to the judgement that we could be doing that part wrong, also.

Let’s assume that the current conservative factions in our government would or should listen to the philosophy of one of the founders of their movement. Let’s assume that the current representatives are sane and intelligent, able to make rational, unbiased decisions. Let’s assume that they take seriously their responsibilities to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

Given those assumptions, how in the world can the “Suicide Caucus” justify their current actions based on the argument that “the folks back home are telling us to do it?” Would Burke clearly not demand that the representatives do what is right (based on reasoning and logic) instead of what the masses instruct them to do (based on uninformed or uneducated bias and impulsiveness)?

Conversely, if Burke is wrong and the “Suicide Caucus’s” responsibility is to either pass laws that their constituents demand or work to hold the entire country hostage, would they use the current legislative tactics if “the folks back home” had other extreme views?

What if the folks back home thought that women shouldn’t vote?

What if the folks back home thought that blacks shouldn’t vote, or even be granted citizenship?

What if the folks back home thought that only those born in the United States of US parents should have citizenship?

What if the folks back home thought that only property owners should be able to vote?

What if the folks back home thought that only approved Christian churches should be allowed, not Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, or any other?

Would any of these Representatives ever dream of blackmailing the entire country and holding the economy hostage over any of those extreme issues? If not, why do they think it’s somehow ethical, just, and justifiable to do that over the ACA, which is the law of the land after having been debated for years, modified, compromised, passed by Congress, challenged, ruled constitutional by a conservative Supreme Court, and given a mandate by the 2012 national elections?

The logic isn’t there – but we all know that. The question at this point is how we get the Congressional leaders to bother listening to their own founders, and be sane and intelligent enough to understand what he was telling them.

If only it were that easy.

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Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Moral Outrage, Politics

September 30, 2013 · 21:23

Something To Cheer Us Up!

It’s after midnight in Washington DC and the FREAKIN’ IDIOTS (you know who you are!) have managed their particular little epic fail. I was going to rant at length, but Chuck Wendig did it far better than I could ever dream of (WARNING – it’s really, really NSFW) here.

Instead, since I’m depressed and frustrated with all of that BS plus a bunch of other things, let’s just look at pictures of puppies and kittens. Maybe it will all be better in the morning.

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2001_0930AEMaybe October will be better.

 

 

 

 

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Filed under Cats, Dogs, Freakin' Idiots!, Politics

September 5, 2013 · 17:21

LADEE Launch on FRIDAY, September 6th

First of all, I’m an idiot. Again. (Is this how Charly felt about 70% of the way through “Flowers For Algernon”?)

Yesterday I wrote about the LADEE launch which will be visible (weather permitting) from a good chunk of the US east coast. I just gave you the wrong date.

The LADEE launch is Friday, September 6th, at 23:27 (11:27 PM) EDT. (It is not on Saturday, September 7th at 11:21 PM.)

It will still be an exceptional opportunity to see a US spacecraft being launched to the moon.

If you’re anywhere in the area of Virginia’s eastern shore, there are public viewing sites that have been set up for a (relatively) up-close view of the launch.

There’s a great article here on viewing from various cities.

There are great maps and even more trajectory animations from various cities here.

It’s a great opportunity, if you get a chance, go see it. Just make sure that you check any information that I give you before you rely on it because I’m a freakin’ idiot.

I won’t be watching the launch live, since I live on the west coast. I’ll just be over here in my padded cell, watching football and being kept away from sharp objects…

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Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Space

August 31, 2013 · 12:34

Irony Or Spite?

This morning one of our cable boxes died. I tried the standard simple reboot fixes, but it won’t reboot at all. When trying to boot up it says it’s downloading new software, but the process hangs (apparently at the same point every time) and there’s nothing to do except pull the plug and try again.

A call to customer service puts me on hold for over thirty minutes, then the tech is unable to remotely reset the box or access it at all, so I’m told I need a new box. Would I like to schedule an appointment for September 10th or bring it in myself to swap it?

Obviously I’ll bring it in, but they’re closed Sunday and Monday for the holiday, so it’s time to hustle over to their office to get it done today. Of course, being Saturday, there’s the line from hell here, take a number and wait. They were on #84 when I came in forty-five minutes ago, they’re now on #02, and I’m holding #18.

It is what it is. None of that is what I find “amusing”.

Here in the lobby they have a handful of TV’s showing various things, mostly college football games at the moment. But on the main screen they’re showing the US Open tennis coverage.

On CBS.

Me and a few million of my closest friends in New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles can not get CBS in our homes because of the current corporate pissing contest. (Extended rant here.) But they’ve got it on here in the lobby. So, is it on here because:

A) it’s irony. Probably lost on them, but they know there’s a really long line here and a lot of folks are missing this at home and would really like to see it and they’re cutting us a little slack because they’re warm and wonderful people.

B) it’s spite. They just want to make sure that we know that they have it, we want it, they’re not going to let us have it until their ass gets sufficiently kissed, and as long as they have us as a captive audience here in the literal sense as well as the figurative sense, they’re going to take the opportunity to really rub it into our faces.

Yeah. That’s what I thought, too.

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Filed under Entertainment, Freakin' Idiots!

August 25, 2013 · 17:32

Pawns

In a great many things, I’m pretty much a “middle-of-the-road” guy. I believe in moderation, common sense, and personal responsibility. I’m a pragmatist.

Take television, for example. It’s often fashionable in certain circles that I frequent to pooh-pooh television as garbage, the lowest common denominator, something for the common folk to watch, something that’s beneath anyone with advanced sensibilities. I think that’s bullshit.

Television, without a doubt, has a tremendous amount of absolute garbage on it. “Honey Boo-Boo” is my vision of hell, just about anything on MTV is stupid enough to make you weep for humanity, and I don’t even want to start on soap operas or the tabloid shows that obsess over the Kardashians and the teeny bopper celebrity de jour.

I think the vast, overwhelming majority of “reality TV” falls into the category of “utter tripe” – but then there are “Mythbusters” and “Dirty Jobs” and “NOVA”.

The classic sitcom is terrible, with fake laugh tracks, stale jokes, and stereotypical characters – but then there’s “M*A*S*H” and “Big Bang Theory” and “Modern Family”.

The cookie-cutter cop shows are a dime a dozen, most of them “ripped from today’s headlines” or “mismatched buddy cop” variants – but then there’s “NYPD Blue”.

These days there are also horribly crappy shows made for the cable networks, like “Sharknado” and “Jackass” – but you also get “Breaking Bad”, “Game Of Thrones”, “Homeland”, “The Big C”, and so on.

Television and Twitter have a lot in common. It’s probably accurate for both to say that they are 98% or more total slime, stupidity, and infantile drivel. But that other couple of percent can be pretty amazing at times.

What the “TV is beneath me, I never watch it” argument misses is that YOU GET TO CHOOSE. You get to make intelligent and informed decisions if you so choose. No one’s holding a gun to your head to make you watch “Maury” or “TMZ Live”. There isn’t going to be a quiz tomorrow at a police checkpoint where you have to prove that you watched “The Bachelorette” finale. You’re not going to be a social pariah if you’re not up to date on the latest plot twist on “Days Of Our Lives”.

By being elitist, you’re denying yourself the potential to enjoy some truly marvelous storytelling and entertainment. By being elitist, you’re telling me that you’re not capable of making intelligent decisions on your own, so you’re going to cower behind a facade of fake intellectual superiority. By being elitist, you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and then being stupid enough to be proud of it.

If you’re one of those elitists, what do you do for entertainment besides watch TV? Read books? Watch movies? Listen to music? Is every book, movie, and composition out there a gem, or do you get to pick the ones you want and ignore the ones that you don’t like? Or are you so busy in your life that you don’t have time for entertainment? If so, you have my sympathies, but you’re not living, you’re just existing. (And what are you doing reading this?)

So, in summary, I like to watch certain television shows that I really like and enjoy. Only now, I can’t watch some shows and events that I like due to circumstances that are completely beyond my control. And it’s really starting to get on my nerves.

In our part of Los Angeles, the cable TV monopoly has been granted to Time Warner Cable. As you may have heard, TWC and the CBS network are at war over how much TWC pays to CBS to re-transmit CBS shows to customers like me. As this has escalated, TWC has taken CBS (and all of its affiliated networks such as Showtime and the Smithsonian Channel) off of its cable systems in New York City, Dallas, and Los Angeles.

TWC, of course, is blaming CBS. “CBS is making outrageous demands for the right to continue carrying their channels.” We just got our TWC bill this month. With our full package of programming and internet access our bill is over $200 a month. TWC gave us a $3.67 credit for having Showtime pulled. WOWSERS! (And by “wowsers” what I mean is “What A Crock!!”)

CBS, of course, is blaming TWC. “Time Warner Cable has dropped CBS, you’re at risk of missing the NFL, US Open, and the new TV season on CBS.” I can’t even watch the shows online since my internet access is through TWC and CBS has “retaliated” by cutting off access to customers who access the internet through TWC. “Time Warner Cable Customers: Content Not Available”

The FCC and other regulatory agencies, of course, are doing absolutely nothing. Anyone who expected our “leaders” to “lead” should put on their dunce caps, go sit in the corner, and think about that for a while.

As someone who simply wants to watch football or the morning news or a favorite TV show, I DON’T CARE. I’m blaming EVERYONE. I don’t believe that CBS is trying to save me, the customer, from the big, bad, monopolistic cable oligarchy. I don’t believe that TWC is trying to protect my interest and keep my bill down.

(For one thing, if either CBS or TWC gave even the slightest sliver of a rat’s ass about me as a consumer, they would offer a la carte options so that I don’t have to pay for fifty-seven different shopping channels that I’ve never watched for a single second, or eighty-three Spanish channels when I don’t speak a word of Spanish. Does anyone see that happening any time in the next thousand years? Yeah, me neither.)

I’m really getting fed up with being a pawn, caught in the middle of a pissing contest between two multi-billion dollar multi-national conglomerates. I’m even more fed up with the constant smarmy, self-serving, “we’re doing it for you” bullshit from both sides. I don’t believe it, they don’t believe it, and no one else believes it. It’s worse than the propaganda spit out by political campaigns these days.

It would be such a relief if one of the CEO’s would get up to the podium and just say, “Yeah, we’re screwing you over. Tough shit, we don’t care. We know that you’ll come back and throw money at us when it’s over. This whole thing is nothing but an infantile contest to see who has the biggest dick and make a lot of lawyers rich. Please drop your pants, grab your ankles, and smile.”

Freakin’ idiots!

I just wish that we weren’t the bigger freakin’ idiots when we do exactly what the expect us to do. I wish there were another option other than using the “off” switch.

I wish there was a way to stop being a pawn.

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Filed under Death Of Common Sense, Entertainment, Freakin' Idiots!

August 23, 2013 · 20:00

Odds & Sods For Friday, August 23rd

Item The First: Is there some corollary of Murphy’s Law that says that you will see typos and stupid mistakes in emails and blog posts in the first ten seconds after you hit the “Send” or “Publish” buttons? Twice in the last month I’ve told WordPress to send out the emails to everyone to let them know there’s a new post here and a heartbeat later yelled “SHAZBATT!” (or something much like that) and looked for an “Undo” button. (There isn’t one.)

Even worse, I’ve also sent out two email cover letters on job applications with simple, stupid typos in them. This happened after I had read them, re-read them, walked away from them for a while, checked them for a third time, blessed it, and hit “Send”. Of course, doing so instantly labels me as an idiot and is incredibly frustrating. The first rule of job hunting is to avoid typos and look professional at all costs. There are a hundred people battling for each job and it doesn’t take much to kick your resume out of the “review” pile and into the trash. Making your first impression one where the potential employer thinks you’re not big on details and can’t communicate well puts at least two strikes against you immediately.

I like ranting about freakin’ idiots much more than I like being a freakin’ idiot.

On the other hand:

Every Time You Make A Typo

Item The Second: I wrote about Kickstarter and mentioned that in the near future there will be an opportunity for actual equity investment by crowdfunding as opposed to “contributions”. Here’s an article from the Hollywood Reporter talking about how this will effect how television shows and movies are capitalized. It indicates that the new rules for “equity crowdfunding” will be going into effect near the end of September for “accredited investors” (those individuals with a net worth of over $1M and over $200K per year income) and sometime in 2014 for “unaccredited investors” (those with a net worth of less than $1M but more than $100K) with limitations on how much one can invest.

Item The Third: Speaking of errors I’ve made, on August 18th I posted some pictures of what I thought was the California state capitol in Sacramento. I was posting quickly (on the road in Virginia) and looking at tiny thumbnails, not the best of conditions. Even at the time I had little alarm bells going off in my head, but didn’t listen to them because I was in a rush and working with more limited resources than I usually have. About ten minutes after posting I saw the full-sized pictures and realized that it wasn’t Sacramento.

No one has yet guessed correctly, so it’s time to just say that it’s the Colorado state capitol building in Denver.

Under the category of “Not Really An Error, More Of An Update”, on August 17th I posted a bunch of pictures I took from the plane travelling from LAX to DFW. The caption for the tenth image down says, “I think this one might be St Johns, but I would have to check a sectional to be sure.” Well, I checked the sectional and Google Earth (34°24’56.45″ N 103°13’09.42″ W) to be sure and it’s not St Johns Industrial Airpark in Arizona, but Cannon AFB in New Mexico, just to the west of Clovis, NM.

Item The Fourth: That spider web that so fascinated me is still there, and growing. Not only is that original, fishing-line-like thread there, but a much bigger web is being anchored to it, all intact despite days and days of the breezes whipping around the branches from the two trees that it’s strung between. I haven’t seen the spider yet, but if it’s sized like its web, I expect it to be the size of a squirrel. Anyone know where someone can get a fifty-gallon drum of DDT? (Asking for a friend.)

Item The Fifth: Peter Piper picked a peck of pretty little purple pink polka dotted people pepper upper pills. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pretty little purple pink polka dotted people pepper upper pills, how many pecks of pretty little purple pink polka dotted people pepper upper pills did Peter Piper pick?

My friend Kevin McNamara taught me that in high school. Forty years later it rolls off the tongue, but to save my life I can’t remember where I left my iPad an hour ago.

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Filed under Crowdfunding, Flying, Freakin' Idiots!, Odds & Sods, Photography, Travel

August 5, 2013 · 21:24

Stuck In The Middle Blues

A few items from the current headlines and from our personal life:

  • Fourteen baseball players got huge suspensions and penalties for getting caught again using illegal performance enhancing drugs – the record books mean just about nothing these days since many of the current records were set by players who were or were suspected to be “juiced”.
  • At our grocery store we’re now forced to either check out our own groceries (a process which fails more often than it succeeds and they only have one person to assist a dozen terminals as things go FUBAR) or wait in increasingly long lines caused by only having one or two of the eight regular checkout aisles open. Yet every couple of years we have to endure even worse service and even less selection when the union goes on strike, sometimes for months and months. Oh, and we now get a choice of either bagging our own groceries or taking even longer at checkout to wait for the groceries to be properly crushed by the union employees.
  • We’ve got a dozen or more channels on our cable television that are now showing propaganda from Time Warner Cable – no CBS or Showtime or KCAL. They’re predicting that this particular little pissing contest might drag on for weeks, until the return of the NFL games gets consumers really, Really, REALLY pissed off instead of just really pissed off.
  • At least we have the NFL this year. Last year we didn’t have the referees and it was a joke. A few years ago we didn’t have players and it was a bigger joke. The NHL season last year was cut to about half its normal length by a strike/lockout, and a few years ago those yahoos managed to cancel an entire season.
  • In San Francisco, BART went on strike last month for several days, completely snarling the city. They went back to work for a month-long “cooling off period”, but that’s expired now and the only reason they weren’t on strike again this morning and again shutting down the city was because the governor stepped in. That will only buy a few days and then we’re right back to our brinksmanship.
  • Congress. The White House. The state legislature. (Any state.) The city council. Does any one have any level of government that isn’t totally a partisan collection of completely incompetent buffoons? Doesn’t matter the party, doesn’t matter your affiliation. It’s the blind leading the blind, six of one and half a dozen of the other.

The common thread in all of these stories (and dozens more just like it every day) is that the common people, you and I, get the short end of the stick every single time.

Do CBS and Time Warner Cable lose anything significant in their dispute? Not really, and eventually they’ll come to an agreement that will be identical to the agreement they could have come to last week. But the little guy that just wants to watch television at night gets screwed.

Do any of the millionaire athletes or billionaire owners lose anything when they go toe to toe for months? You know better. But the devoted fans who live for the games turn bitter and disillusioned, while tens of thousands of minimum wage employees and small businesses who provide parking and tickets and food and security and cleaning and a thousand other things at the games all get to go unemployed. They’re missing meals, they’re losing their homes, they’re going broke – how many athletes or owners missed meals or lost their homes?

Same thing about the unions and the stores and the unions and the transit managers and the unions and the hospitals and… After months of angst, suffering, and sometimes violence, they’ll come to the exact same agreement that they could have done earlier to avoid the problem. Then they’ll both “declare victory” and claim that they did it “for us”.

That’s the salt in the wound.

Look at what CBS and TWC are telling the press, putting on billboards, and putting on full-page newspaper ads. Each side claims that they’re doing what they’re doing in order to help you and me, to protect you and me from the big, bad other guy.

BULLSHIT.

Maybe they’re so delusional and drowning in the corporate koolaid that they truly believe that. Maybe they’re truly so full of their own stupidity to even realize how blind and ignorant they are, something that’s only too clear to us.

Or more likely, they’re fully aware of what BS they’re spreading, and they’re fully aware that we know that they’re raining BS down on us – THEY JUST DON’T CARE.

We’re cannon fodder to them, the little guys stuck in the middle, and they can continue to redefine the limits of arrogance and ignorance. It’s just a game to them.

Politicians, labor leaders, civic leaders, owners, athletes, captains of industry – none of them care. It’s guaranteed that none of them are “leaders” by any definition of the term that I grew up with. If they were, they would solve the problems before they became crises. They would work their butts off to make it better instead of deliberately making it worse.

Yeah. Let’s wait for that to happen. Can anyone name the last time that one of these “leaders” did his or her job and actually “led”, actually solved problems, actually got their job done and earned their millions and billions?

Maybe if 500,000 cable subscribers this month didn’t pay their bill and turned in their cable boxes, would that get their attention? If a couple million voters signed recall petitions and demanded there be a “None of the Above” option on the ballot, would Congress notice? If the baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and soccer stadiums were 99% empty for a year or two and no one bought jerseys or memorabilia to put millions in the athlete’s pockets, would they wise up?

It’ll never happen. We don’t have any leaders who are supposed to be leaders, and we most certainly don’t have any leaders to lead the masses in the middle out of that rut and out of harm’s way.

I wish that I were wrong.

Freakin’ idiots.

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August 2, 2013 · 13:28

Political Robocalls

This morning I got my first “robo-call” from a local politician wanting my vote in the upcoming September special election for state assembly. We have a special election coming up in September? Who knew?

And so it begins again. I hate robocalls, with a passion like the fiery burning of a thousand white-hot suns.

On the one hand, one of the few things that Congress has done that I’m a big fan of is the “Do Not Call List“. We signed up instantly when it went live a few years ago.

On the other hand, every spammer, scammer, and troll out there pretty much blatantly ignores the DNCL. There is really no way to enforce the DNCL laws since it’s so trivially easy for the scum telemarketers to spoof their caller IDs. When you get one of these calls for “credit card repairs” or “carpet cleaning” or “home improvements” or whatever, there’s no way to know the actual name, address, or phone number of the slimeball company calling you. They don’t care if you hang up, it’s just a computer. It’s already gone on to the next automated call.

If you click past the computer robocall and get a human to ask for any of that information, demand that they stop calling, threaten them with an FTC complaint, or simply cuss them out and vent your frustrations at them, they simply hang up on you. Even when you do manage to find out the information needed to file a complaint, there is so little enforcement that it’s a complete joke.

You and your anger and frustration mean absolutely zero to anyone involved, either those inflicting the robocall interruptions on us or those who are supposed to be stopping them.

The best part of all is that the politicians, upstanding leaders of our society that they are, wrote the DNCL laws and exempted themselves from it. Politicians and political campaigns can robocall you until your ears bleed and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Their justification was that it was necessary in order to insure we had open and free elections and campaigning. (Can you say “bullshit”? Sure. I knew you could!)

Do companies actually get any business out of these robocalls? Have you or anyone you know ever done business or paid good money based on a robocall or telemarketer? EVER?

Do politicians actually get any votes out of these robocalls? Have you or anyone you know ever voted for someone or something based on a robocall or telemarketer? EVER?

It’s a mystery to me. I don’t know of a single person who could answer either of these questions with a “yes”. (If you can, please, please, PLEASE let me know in the comments!) Yet there must be some return on the money spent to do this kind of “advertising” or “marketing”. If there wasn’t, simple economics says that they would stop. Yet it keeps getting worse. Ergo, it must pay off. Who are the people who aren’t as annoyed by these calls as everyone I know?

Sometimes we go for weeks at a time with our phone off the hook or unplugged, simply in order to avoid getting called a dozen times a day by some idiot machine or another. At the moment, due to a couple of other things going on in life, that’s not a good option. Ditto for simply ignoring the ringing unless it’s someone we recognize. There are a couple of potential calls we can get at any moment that we really, really need to get and we won’t recognize those numbers. We’re a captive target audience.

The only small control we can have over this problem lies with the politicians. They have to let us know exactly who or what they’re pushing or it’s truly a waste of their time and money. But in doing so, they also make sure that we know exactly who’s bothering us and pissing us off.

I had never heard of the guy who had the political robocall from this morning. I have now, which I guess satisfies part of his campaign’s goal. But I also went to his website, hit the “contact us” button, and fired off a capsule summary of my feelings on robocalls and pointed out that I now vote for the guy who robocalls me the least.

I have no clue who he’s running against, but I know that he has called. Like the old joke says, “That’s one!” He’s now in last place in this race as far as I’m concerned.

Any political campaign consultants out there listening?

(P.S. – in the half hour or so that it’s taken to write this rant, I’ve had two more robocalls, one on duct cleaning and one on credit cards.)

(P.P.S. – there should be a software patch in WordPress so that when I flag a post with the “Politics” category, the “Freakin’ Idiots!” category automatically gets flagged as well!)

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July 24, 2013 · 09:55

Odds & Sods For Wednesday, July 24th

Item The First: Today’s APOD (Astronomy Picture Of the Day – what, you’re NOT looking at it every day? I’ll wait while you fix that…) is freakin’ brilliant. It’s a simple idea carried to an extreme and used to create something beautiful. Ken Murphy pointed a camera at the sky and had it record a picture every ten seconds. For an entire year. He then took all of those pictures and put them into a HD composite image.

Capture

Image credit & copyright Ken Murphy (MurphLab)

Looks cool? Yeah, but it’s not just a still picture, it’s a video.

He synched up the time so that each frame shows the time-lapse video for that day starting and ending at the same time, then has them run simultaneously. And because he starts before sunrise and ends after sunset, and because he’s in San Francisco and not at the equator, at the beginning and end you can see how the days lengthen and shorten with the seasons. You see pink sunrise clouds, orange sunset clouds, rainy days, sunny days, an entire year in one short video.

Item The Second: This is another truly amazing video, showing all of the Space Shuttle flights (well, at least snippets from every one of them) in 8:01. Do yourself a favor and watch it full screen, HD, and turned up LOUD. Repeat as necessary to regain your sanity after dealing with freakin’ idiots. Except of course it made me think of the freakin’ idiots who mothballed the Shuttles… Breathe. Breathe. Om, om, om, om…

Item The Third: I knew that when telephone area codes were assigned in the late 1940’s we had only rotary phones, so New York City got “212”, Los Angeles got “213”, Dallas-Fort Worth got “214”, Chicago got “312”, Detroit got “313”, and so on so that the users in the big cities could dial long distance faster.

What I didn’t know is that in 1999 a relatively “low” area code was given to a less densely populated area of Florida instead of to densely populated suburban Chicago. A behind the scenes campaign by Florida lobbyists convinced the numbering agency to change their mind and thus Florida’s “Space Coast” got the “3-2-1” area code. (That whimsical bit of trivia just about made my day!)

Item The Fourth: Pop Quiz!! What is it you never, EVER do when taking simple astrophotos of the sun with your $1 “Solar Viewer” card? Your answers will be graded on creativeness as well as on accuracy.

Item The Fifth: The gremlin body count is slowly rising, which is a good thing. It was getting pretty frustrating there for a couple of weeks.

The cable television problem finally got fixed by a great repair guy from Time-Warner, but only after some serious frustrations with their service department before I could get him out. I had already done a fair amount of troubleshooting on the problem and had eliminated the first several dozen things they wanted me to try. (“Reboot your cable box and wait three days – if that doesn’t work, get a new cable box.” “Really? Have you listened to a single word I’ve said to describe the problem?”) I was about 99% sure I knew what the problem was and where, but I can’t access that equipment and I don’t have the parts to replace it. Once the cable guy got here, confused by the notes the service department had left him, I quickly showed him what I already knew, he came to the same conclusion I did, found the fried parts, replaced them, and we’re all happy now.

The computer that died is really dead. It wasn’t the power supply, probably the mother board or CPU, but on an eight-year-old computer it’s not possible or worth it to repair. The hard disks were all fine (no data lost) as were the video card, sound card, RAM, and so on, so a new motherboard & CPU got the system back up and going. Of course, Windows 7, MS Office, and a number of other programs are freaking out and wanting to re-authenticate since they’re seeing a “new” system, but so far that’s been an inconvenience, not a killer.

The iShower bluetooth speaker is back up and running with some new batteries. The first one I had died after three and a half months but they were great about giving me a full replacement anyway – kudos to their customer service department! But when that first one ran low on batteries I got warnings for about a week before the batteries were completely dead. This second one has given me no warnings at all, it just died. But replacing the batteries seems to have been the only problem. It was about time for new batteries, based on my experience with the first one, I just wonder why I didn’t get warnings this time. Whatever, it seems to be working again now and I really like having it in the shower to play tunes in the morning.

Best of all, I also again tackled the problems with The Long-Suffering Daughter #2’s car. I’ll tell you some time about how this whole mess started (short version – a four-day lost holiday weekend in Coalinga) but for now I’ve just got her car sitting in the driveway gathering cobwebs. (She’s in China – or Europe, it depends.) I don’t want to let the car sit too long without being driven, and the added incentive was that her car needed a smog check to get registered for the year. I was able to get it started, got it smogged, ran some errands, and put it back into the driveway. We’ll get a permanent fix when one of us can afford $2,000 to replace a $20 part, but that’s another story.

First world problems, all. But like I said, I live here in the first world. You take your little victories where you can.

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