Rightfully So

(Lately, it seems that lists have been popular on the Rightfully So website, so I’ll add mine.)

The conventional wisdom says that we should use the arrival of a new year to resolve to make changes in our lives in order to better ourselves… you know the drill… lose weight, make nice with the ex-, floss teeth twice daily… and a bunch of other crap that you’ll never do.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s a bunch of crap that will fail to happen, and it will fail even before we celebrate the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

So, why set yourself up for that? Why make a bunch of resolutions that are destined to fail? Why not make a list of resolutions that you can keep?

In that spirit, here is my list of things I resolve for 2006:

• I will not smoke any cigars.
• I will not play any video games on any system whose name begins with X and the next three letters are BOX.
• I will not perform any human embryonic stem cell cloning.
• I will not watch any professional baseball, basketball, hockey or soccer games.
• I will not not install any “Vista” preview products from Microsoft.
• I will not fill a burlap sack with puppies and kittens and throw the sack over Niagara Falls.
• I will not watch any new episodes of The Simpsons.
• I will not get a large-screen, digital, HD-ready television to replace my 20-year-old, nine-inch Toshiba.
• I will not call in sick to work unless I truly am sick, or I just don’t feel like going in that day.
• I will not violate copyright laws by downloading illegal copies of Duran Duran songs from P2P networks.
• I will not plan for my retirement.

Have I missed anything?

Let’s try to work these into the popular vocabulary in 2006.

Well ain’t that just the Bishop’s jizz!

Sweet smegma stew!

Damn, that really chaps my Cheney!

Well I’ll be a Nazi barber!

Ex Crapula, Scientia! (From Drunkenness, Knowledge)

Edith Keeler must die! (Probably only works at Star Trek conventions)

Yesterday marked the end of good will for 2005. With the holiday season over people are now free to be rude and discourteous to one another. “Before Christmas, if I pushed someone out of my way, or cut them off in the parking lot they would play the ‘How can you act like that at Christmas?’ card. But now, they can’t say shit to me.” said local shopper Jake Dinglebox. It seems that every year nicety is forced upon the general public throughout the month of December. Studies show that after Christmas people cast off the shackles of politness and act extra bitchy to make up for the month they lost. Just ask Rex Spindle, who works in the returns department at a local Best Buy. “I thought I had seen the worst of humanity at the Thanksgiving sale, but that was a good day for these savages.” Science guys estimate that this heightened jerkness should level off about February, when the populace is forced to be nice to their significant others.

You know what I am really getting to like around the holidays? Bedtime. That’s right that magical time of the night when kids toddle off and I get about 2 seconds to gather up my thoughts and assess my day.

Who thought of making the magic of Christmas about the kids anyway. We adults are the ones with the money. Instead of the Tickle Me Elmo craze, why don’t we hear about the Car Floor Mat Craze. Instead of having all the fake Santas in the mall, why not have Hooters girls making the rounds to all the local hardware stores. I want to see Dungeons and Dragons exhibition games held at the local municipal buildings. I want to see the lighting of a traditional cigar instead of a tree.

These kids today just think of me, me, me. I think they should think about dad, dad, dad.

Need a last minute gift? These best-sellers are sure to please.

Bitter Old Dyke: The Mother Teresa Story

The Dogs Playing Poker Code

With the release of GoogleGulp on April 1st, Google is looking at a series of new products to better direct searches to the users:

GoogleCrapper - By analyzing a person’s waste product, Google will be able to direct advertisements to their favorite food sites. This will be a boon for the Anheuser-Busch Companies and Miller brewing company.
GoogleAuto - GPS equipped automobiles can help direct advertisements to the owners about the places they visit. Strip clubs and Gentlemen’s clubs will be able to mine this information for a better look into the politicians that patronize their establishments.

The federal government will be providing the financial backing into these services. Mention that you’re a terrorist and your car and toilet are free! Act now and get a free wireless phone and computer.

I got to thinking about the technologies that I shun. There are certain applications or environments that I won’t touch with a ten-foot computer-pole. They fall into two groups.

The first group is the released-before-it’s-ready category. These are technologies that, in an effort to generate hype (or “traction” as the sales weasels say), are born prematurely. Writer and software developer Joel Spolsky, over at the Joel On Software website calls this the Marimba Phenomenon:

The Marimba Phenomenon is what happens when you spend more on PR and marketing than on development. “Result: everybody checks out your code, and it’s not good yet. These people will be permanently convinced that your code is simple and inadequate, even if you improve it drastically later.”

(Go read Joel’s other stuff, too; it’s very good.)

While I am not personally acquainted with the particular Marimba package of which Joel speaks, I am have experience with other packages that have the same problem.
(more…)

When I heard Peter Jackson’s latest film had a midnight showing I was at the theater faster than white on rice. This is the fourth film in the Lord of the Rings series based on the books by JK Rowling. The movie takes place about 50 years after the last film in New York City during The Great Depression. At first I was disappointed that none of the cast returned for this movie, but the new actors they brought in were excellent. Jack Black plays a hobbit who is trying to make a movie on Skull Island. He has in his possession a treasure map that he got from One Eyed Willy. Adrian Brody plays a mentally challenged man who writes the script for the movie. Some hot girl and the guy who used to be on the short lived series Early Edition are the actors in the movie. Black has an assistant too who is a really good actor. He’s like a young Tom Hanks.

So this ragtag bunch of adventurers find Skull Island where the people are all decendents of Gollum. They sacrifice the hot girl to Kong (a giant Gorilla) who plays with her like an anatomically correct Barbie doll. Team Venture head in to save her but then discover that Skull Island is also the same island where Jurassic Park took place. An hour of CG later and they not only rescue the girl but they capture Kong with a little help from Chlorophyll (more like Bore-aphyll!)

Back in the states, Jack Black becomes a huge star. Apparently in the 40s animal trappers were treated like celebrities. On opening night Kong becomes the total Hollywood diva and throws a big hissy fit causing many offscreen casulities. I won’t give away the ending but I will say that Kong and hot girl don’t live happily ever after. (Did I mention that the hot girl and Kong are in love? Really, I didn’t? I should have mentioned it because Peter Jackson will beat you over the head with that fact like Professor Plum with the lead pipe in the conservatory.)

Overall I thought the movie was very good. It didn’t have any of the magic or epic battles of the previous movies but it did have dinosaurs. And in the end that’s all that really matters.

Are you about to have a seizure from watching all those old stop motion Rankin-Bass Christmas specials on ABC Family Channel? No? Well, check out these other shows anyway.

Extreme Makover: 13 Candlewood Edition (ABC)
Ty Pennington and his crew of homemakers travel back in time to 1991 to remodel the disheveled hovel of some drunken college losers. Viewer Discretion Advised.

No Glove, No Love (Fox)
Ahmish boy Lars sets out from his family’s Pennsylvania farm on a quest to find a condom so he can consummate his love for the virtuous holstein cow Betsy. On tonight’s episode, Lars loses his beard in a craps game in Pittsburgh and must delve into the town’s seedy underworld in order to win it back.

The Wasted Years (Lifetime)
Andy Richter stars as Ed, A socially inept, middle-aged midwesterner dealing with the consequences of having spent his college years in a state on constant inebrieation, squandering the most formative years of his life and forcing him to seek attention by posting witless entries on a friend’s website. On tonight’s episode, Ed stays up late drinking cooking sherry and emailing old girlfriends; after he is arrested for violating several cease and desist orders, he must plead with his well-to-do friends from the Computer Mafia to secure his release.

Stern Warnings (CBS)
A group of senior citizens confined to an old-folks home write dire letters to local media outlets predicting the downfall of society. Tonight, “Grandma” Esther Suggs writes the New York Times a rambling letter about “these kids today and their rock and roll music.”

Eat Your Spouse (NBC)
Dan Cortez hosts this extreme reality show where married couples compete to win fabulous prizes by seeing which pair can eat more of each other. Tonight, see if Jeff and Shiela Atweiler can recover the lead lost when Jeff barfed up Shiela’s duodenum.

Judge Bladderspackle (Syndicated)
The Honorable Navin Bladderspackle presides over small-claims cases in backwoods Nutscrum County, North Carolina. This week the wife and non-incarcerated children of deceased Finster Snert gather to fight for their inheritance: the rat-infested rear seat from Snert’s 1970 Dodge Dart.

When the members of the TV biz are out making fools of themselves at drunken Christmas parties, they broadcast these things called “reruns” to fill the time, following the theory that nobody is really watching anything anyways.

So, I too, shall do the same, with some writings from my earlier days.

(Note that this should not be interpreted to mean that I am out making a fool of myself at drunken office parties. The drunken office party is next weekend.)

So, without further ado, here is rerun #1, from Feb 17, ‘03:

Telecommuting Stinks
The techno-wonks drone on and on about the information revolution and how it will free us from the shackles of the office workplace. With paradigm-shifting technologies like the internet, video-conferencing, hand-held computing devices etc., we info-workers can execute our duties regardless of location or attire or hygiene.

At first glance, this sounds wonderful. And, in fact, it often is. Of the six years I’ve worked at my current job, about three of them I’ve worked from my home.

But, on days like today, telecommuting stinks. In Clinton County, Ohio, we’re in the midst of the winter storm of the decade. It has been precipitating since Friday in the form of rain, freezing rain, sleet and snow. In our back yard, we’ve got a foot of this ice-snow mix. The temperature is sufficiently cold that regular salt won’t treat the road surfaces adequately, so they’ve declared a “Level 3 Snow Emergency” which means no travel except for emergencies. In fact, you can get a traffic citation merely for being out on the roads.

But, sadly, none of this matters to me, since, being a fully-equipped telecommuter, I have no excuse for not being able to work today.

If only the wind had torn down our phone lines…….

Here’s rerun #2, from March 20, ‘03:

Streaming Text?
I’m digging further into this Darwin Streaming Server, and, according to the documentation, in addition to being able to stream out MP3s, MP4s, MPEGs, QuickTime, and AVIs, it can also stream text.

WTF?

Here’s #3, from May 15, ‘03

Old Fogey Alert
It is amazing the things one will do when one has children that one would absolutely never ever do without them.

To wit: I got a library card this week.

Yes, I am now spending more time with books and less time with TV. Sigh.

So, as the librarian was finishing up my paperwork, she asked if there was anything else she could help me with. Yes, there was, I thought to myself, but I couldn’t quite articulate it.

You see, I haven’t been in a library since my college days over a decade ago. Back in them olden days, the library system was very low-tech. It was the same system we had in high school and elementary school: the card catalog. A big box o’ drawers, with each book listed in the system thrice on 3×5 cards: one by author, one by title, and one by subject.

Now, I know technology has really progressed; a decade is an eternity for computer systems. I knew that somehow that this library’s card catalog, along with every other one in the country, is somehow computerized. But, I had never seen it.

I suppose that in all the time it took me to think these thoughts, I must have gotten some sort of confused look on my face, because she dug a little deeper.

“Is there something else, sir?”

I realized that there was no way for me to save face; I had to bite the bullet and, very sheepishly, I said, “Yes. What do you do for a card catalog nowadays?”

I can’t believe I had to ask. I hope nobody else saw me. What would my friends and neighbors think?

Of course, the librarian was very gracious, and she showed me to the computer stations where one can perform a search.

Fortunately, my child isn’t old enough to remember this situation. I’m sure it won’t be the last time his old man embarasses himself.