I saw a commercial on TV the other night that was advertising one or another of Toyota’s little roller skate cars.  It annoyed me, so I decided to share…

The commercial opens with a woman driving and a man in the passenger seat.  He mentions to the driver that the fuel gauge is nearly on ‘E’ and that maybe they should stop for gas.  He says this several times as the woman driving blithely ignores both the stations and him.  Finally, she turns on the radio to drown him out.

Maybe I’m just more paranoid than most, but I tend to drive on the top half of my tank.  When it gets much below 1/2 I start looking to fill up. 

It’s people like her that cause traffic tie ups and price spikes at gas stations whenever something happens, like we saw on 9/11.  Heck, she’s probably the type that would yell to the politicians that those nasty station owners were gouging her.

The whole head-in-the-sand come-what-may bliss ninny attitude just frosts my cookies.  And not only is she a silly bliss ninny, she’s a rude one.  If this has been a real relationship, not just a commercial, I’d probably reserve some blame for the guy, too.  If it’d been me, the first time she did that smug ignore routine and then turned on the radio I’d have told her to frak off.  I have absolutely no patience for that sort of B.S.

If you’re the type that chronically drives around on ‘E,’ I’m going to drive by and smile and wave at all of your happy asses while you’re stuck in line at the gas pump the next time something bad happens.

That last post on the convenience store killing reminded me of this:

Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

That may seem a bit paranoid, but if you’re working in a dangerous environment, it’s good advice.

Oh… and don’t forget this bit of advice:

Remember the first rule of gunfighting… ‘have a gun.’

I happened to notice a new news “promo” clip during today’s noon news on Fox 4.  These things are on all the time, and I usually tune them out, but this one caught my attention because it actually had the audacity to show some of the station’s viewers in a rather unflattering light.

One of the things that I like about Fox 4 news is their viewer’s voice segment, mainly because they’re not afraid to let their viewers have enough rope to hang themselves.  Almost invariably after a severe weather outbreak Fox 4 will get irate callers berating them for interrupting their favorite show to cover the weather.  The best (and most irate) callers are usually those who are fairly distant from the weather event.

The promo starts with video of various severe weather events: ominous clouds, lightening, rain, winds, and tornadoes.  The voice-overs, though, are audio from the aforementioned irate callers.  I especially liked the juxtaposition of the picture of a tornado and a house with a missing roof and an angry woman screaming that they need to stop covering the weather.  Then the spot flashes to text that states (as best as I can remember it): “When severe weather strikes…  we will always break in.”  Right about this time they cut back to more severe weather video, but they audio is now from people who called to thank Fox 4 for covering the weather.

I tend to agree with Fox 4 on this one.  I know that more than once I’ve tuned to them after my weather radio has gone off to see exactly where the storm is right now and where it’s headed so I can determine if I need to go cower in the bathroom   or if I can relax. 

Granted, the sun may be shining in your neighborhood right now, but since a TV station is something of a blunt instrument, their warnings aren’t always going to apply to everyone.  In the grand scheme of things American Idol or House is but a passing bit of trivia as compared to imminent death from above (whether your own or that of someone on the other side of the metroplex).

This site, as well as my email access, will be down early on Sunday morning for approximately 5 hours:

Due to space and power constraints in our primary datacenter we are moving the entire shared cluster “looney” to our LAX facility at 12:01AM PDT, Sunday morning, May 13th 2007. You are receiving this e-mail because your account is hosted on the looney cluster. All webservers, mail servers, file servers, and MySQL servers in the looney cluster will be unreachable during the move, which we expect to take approximately 5 hours.

I was glad to see this email notification, since it had appeared at one point that they had stopped giving direct notification and were instead relying on people to check the Dreamhost Status site (or its RSS feed).  I thought that having to monitor their blog was a crappy way to do business, and perhaps that message got through, since the above is exactly what I wanted to see (specific notification to the affected users about the exact nature of the event, rather than a non-specific message on a blog that required you to sift through a long list of server names to determine if you were affected).

Anyhow, I certainly don’t plan to be accessing the site or my email during this time period, as I plan to be asleep.  But then I’m not so much of a night owl anymore. 

I’ve been wrestling with whether to declare “adios, mofos” on this weblog or not.  In some cases I’m just not sure what to say anymore, since I can usually go back into the archives and find I’ve said something about that topic before.  And it gets tiresome pointing out the same stupidity over and over. 

I’ve also been wrestling with how to say certain things so as to avoid getting visited by various and sundry Federal and local law enforcement folks.  This usually occurs when I hear or read something said by those treasonous Democrat bastards in Congress (Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, for example).  Let’s just say that I’m less than charitable towards those who give aid and comfort to the enemy. 

Anyway, there still appears to be an ample supply of stupidity out there, so I suppose I will just seek out and mine different veins of it for variety. 

Illegitimi Non Carborundum.

It’s not often that you hear such candor from a corporate executive:

“I don’t want to be too sophisticated here, but 2007 is going to suck, all 12 months of the calendar year,” D.R. Horton Chief Executive Officer Donald Tomnitz said at a Citigroup conference in New York on Wednesday. “Our future is not as bright as what we would like it to be.”

It seems that some are slagging him for making such a statement, but I find it refreshingly honest after all the mealy-mouthed corp-speak that we usually get in these situations.

My work involves working with people in a variety of places, so I don’t go a single day without spending at least an hour on the phone, and some days it approaches six or seven.  So a good headset is a must for my work.  For the past six years I’ve been using a combination of a Plantronics H61N and an M12 amplifier.

It’s been a good system, and I especially like the binaural model because it helps me block out most of the sounds around me.  But I’ve found that working from a home office has some unique distractions that I wouldn’t have faced back in the office, like a whiny dog wanting to go out or someone at my front door.  I’ve been contemplating some sort of wireless headset, but what I was seeing just didn’t seem to fit my requirements.  There seemed to be only two approaches:  Bluetooth ear dongles and 2.4GHz phone systems.  I’ve never had much luck with over-the-ear/on-the-ear types of headsets.  With my oddly shaped head they just end up falling off or knocking my glasses askew.  Or should I manage to get one to stay on, eventually it feels like it’s going to bend my ear into some odd new shape:

So, that put Bluetooth out of the running.  The 2.4GHz systems were also out of the running because I’ve banned all non-802.11 2.4GHz devices from the house.  And aside from the frequency, I didn’t want a whole other phone system, I just wanted a headset (all the 2.4GHz devices were complete phone units).

Every so often I take another look around to see what’s out there and that’s when I stumbled across the Plantronics CS361N:

It’s binaural, noise-cancelling, and it operates at 1.9GHz.  It’s a little too futuristic-looking for my tastes (I like the old-style simpler look of the H61N), but it’s not as bad as the Bluetooth models.

Now the list price on this headset is a bit steep ($349.95), but I’ve found that Plantronics is bad about that.  There are tons of resellers that sell their stuff for significantly less than buying direct.  I have to wonder if anyone actually uses Plantronics’ web store at those prices.

I managed to find it for $261.81 at Amazon.com and it included the HL10 lifter (which is another $79.99 on the Plantronics site).

Most Plantronics headsets work by plugging into the phone and taking the place of the handset.  The handset plugs into the Plantronics adapter so you can still use it if you’re not using the headset.  This setup allows them to make headsets to work with just about any kind of phone.  The downside is that it means you have to life the handset off the hook before using the headset.  The HL10 is a little device that sticks to the phone and sits under the handset.  When you press a button on the headset it sends a signal and the HL10 lifts the handset so as to take the phone off the hook.  My phone, unfortunately, has a hanging hook that’s molded into the base and that fits into a slot on the handset (the phone is designed for desk or wall mounting).  So I had to do some fiddling to make it all work right.  At first the HL10 nearly threw the handset across my desk before I found the right spot where it would lift the handset about 1/2-inch without it falling down.  Now I can take the headset with me and answer calls just by pressing the button on the side.  The base unit will activate the lifter which will take the handset off the hook and then put it back when I’m done.

Anyhow, for the amount of time I spend on the phone, it’ll be worth it if this model works as well as the old H61 I have.  I suppose time will tell.  It’s got rechargeable batteries, which are the bane of my existence, but as long as they don’t have problems with memory I think I’ll be OK.  The few calls I’ve made with it so far seem to sound OK as well (sound quality is decent, although not quite as good as the corded model, but that’s to be expected).  And the HL10 is a nice addition.  Maybe the headset is a little dorky looking, but I find as I get older that my dorkiness quotient has increased so I’m not as bothered by it as I used to be.

Have you seen those new Office Depot commercials?  The one with the hand in the box?

It seems to me that Office Depot had Staples envy over the “Easy Button.”  The Easy Button is kind of cheesy in a way, but I suppose many of us have wished for one at one time or another (along with a “Smite Mine Enemies Button”).  The Office Depot hand, on the other hand, is just creepy.  If I ever see a disembodied hand pop out of a box while I’m at an office supply store, I’m going out to my truck for an axe (while keeping an eye peeled for zombies) to whomp the bejeebus out of it.

Instead of conjuring images of a helpful office supply store, I keep flashing to The Hand.  It lives. It crawls. And suddenly, it kills.

I had a bit of a relapse of the Avian-SARS-Monkey-Flu (or whatever it was) and I’m just now getting out from under it.  I tried to keep working this past week, though, although I wasn’t too productive. 

So now I’m a bit behind from all the sick time and I’m trying to scramble to catch up.  Unfortunately, while I’m most productive in the mornings, I’ve got meetings all morning (until noon).  Worse, my presence on most of these calls is really only needed for about five minutes on each, except for monitoring (which is what breaks my concentration).

Of course, the monitoring is important, too.  The problem is that it’s hard to predict when you’re needed.  The reason I bring up monitoring is that it’s imperative to get ahead of any misconceptions or wrong information that people try to disseminate about your projects.  I’ve seen projects burn up many hours trying to fight misconceptions after the fact, so you have to stay in meetings and pay at least passing attention so as to immediately nip it in the bud (just nip it, nip it in the bud    ).

A couple of examples of the types of things that you have to be alert for:
The deflector:  This person, seeking to justify their own project’s shortcomings, will attempt to use your project as the reason.  They’ll say something like, “Project X (their project) is behind schedule because Project Y (your project) has not yet provided Item Z.”  This requires a quick response (provided, of course, that you haven’t been derelict in providing “Z”) along the lines of, “Project Y is working to the agreed-to schedule and Item Z was provided on Date A to Person B on your team.”  I especially love giving this sort of answer because it quickly deflates the deflector.

The upset techie:  This person (often on your own team!) either has a disagreement with a design decision or is an adherent of some pet technology or methodology that isn’t being followed.  This person is so convinced that he or she is right that they’ll announce to the world that your project is doomed to failure, inefficient, inflexible, and riddled with bugs.  Fortunately, I haven’t had to deal with that too often.  But I do recall one case where I got dragged into it as an outside auditor.  One disgruntled programmer had told a director-level executive that the project’s code was sloppy, unorganized, and riddled with bugs.  I had to examine the code and report on its correctness.  Ultimately, I didn’t find very much wrong with it, but I had to spend a lot of time getting to that point (the project was composed of thousands of source files, as anyone who has ever had to review a large Java project will understand).

Interestingly, unless I’m doing a lot of research and writing something complicated, this blog stuff doesn’t require nearly the amount of concentration as real work.  Those of you who have done programming work may understand when I reference the trance.  I’ve found that design work requires the same kind of concentration levels (or at least it does for me).  Constant interruptions or being in meetings isn’t conducive to reaching the trance.  I’ve tried writing design docs while on conference calls in the past and found that I had to significantly rework those sections afterwards.  When I was still working in the office, and doing programming work, I used to reserve mornings for coding and I’d put a stuffed penguin on my cubicle wall as an indicator to people that I wasn’t to be bothered.  Usually around noon the penguin would come down and I’d spend the afternoon dealing with email and support issues.

The only problem with this is that there are people out there who just don’t get it when it comes to the trance and think that it’s just a silly anti-social geek/programmer thing.  Usually, these are not people who have done coding work (of, if they have, they weren’t any good at it).  But even if they don’t truly understand, I’ve always wondered why someone would hire a person to do a particular job and then not give the person time to do it.  That’s effectively what they’re doing if they’re constantly interrupting their programmers.

I recently received a package containing a fragile item that had been carefully ensconced in bubble wrap.  After freeing the item from its plastic tomb, I did what every normal human would do.  I set about popping the bubble wrap.

But this was no normal bubble wrap.  It was some kind of fiendish facsimile where the bubbles were interconnected somehow, equalizing the pressure and preventing any one of them from popping.

What evil bastard thought this up?  Is there someone out there who thought it’d be a good idea to make unpoppable bubble wrap?  Must be a frustrated sadist or something.