Category: Stream of Consciousness

Turkeyfuckers

2012-11-22, 11:37 am
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness

Christmas Creep has bothered me since I was old enough to really notice it. Christmas starts earlier and earlier every year, and there's ever more pressure to consume! To buy shit, to go places, to be with family even if all it's going to do is stress you all the fuck out and make for a less-than-appealing family memory. Too much stress, plus too much traffic making for miserable driving, breathing, and shopping.

For a number of years I'd spend the week before Christmas out of town, out of the city, off at my mom and stepdad's quiet little home in Chino Valley. Unplug for a few days, though I don't think that expression was vogue yet.

Haven't done that these past few years but man it's tempting.

It should come as no surprise that I am not a huge fan of this "Let's have Black Friday -- on Thursday!" trend.

I don't shop on Black Friday. I sure as hell don't intend to shop on Black Not-Friday. I hold any company that tries to lure people away from Thanksgiving for holiday savings! in the same contempt they so clearly hold me. And their employees. And their customers.

I heard on the radio that last year showed a sizable dip in early-December shopping, theorized as "shopping fatigue". I hope that keeps happening. I hope it keeps happening until they learn. But unfortunately I don't think they'll ever learn -- any more than the airlines will learn that their business is dipping because they have made flying a fucking miserable experience.

I also heard there are folks saying people should support local businesses on Saturday. If that helps local businesses, hey, that's great -- but I don't really put much stock in "Everybody do X on Such-and-Such-a-Day to send a message!" as a strategy. You know all those "Don't buy gas on Saturday; that'll really show Exxon-Mobil!" forwards your idiot slacktivist friends constantly send you on Facebook? Do you recall any of them ever really showing Exxon-Mobil? No? Well that's because it doesn't hurt Exxon-Mobil's business when everyone just fucking waits until Sunday to buy the same amount of gas.

So while I wholeheartedly endorse supporting local businesses, I really think you should probably be doing it more than one day a year.

Fuck, the whole idea that people should only be encouraged to shop on a single specific day is the problem here.

So support your local business. Saturday, Sunday, whenever the fuck you feel like it. Friday, if you must, though I don't intend to leave the house that day myself.

But if you actually go out and support those turkeyfuckers at Wal-Mart and Target in making their employees knock off Thanksgiving dinner early to come in and sell you shit? Well, look, I know the economy's rough and beggars can't be choosers. But I don't think you need that new TV that damn badly.

On a more cheerful note: there's a whole lot in this life I'm thankful for (for example: not being a retail employee on Thanksgiving), and I hope there's a lot you're thankful for too. I hope you keep that in mind today and enjoy your turkey and gravy and cranberry sauce and what-have-you.

But that's just one more thing that shouldn't be confined to one day a year. Stay upbeat. Keep things in perspective. Remember the good things each and every day.

Now, cooking an entire turkey dinner, on the other hand? That's probably okay to confine to one day a year. That is a whole lot of work.

Mostly Painless

2012-11-21, 11:02 am
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech, Work

Well, can't say that meeting was any more helpful than I anticipated, but at least it was short -- I was out within half an hour.

They want me to sign up for some website or another (currently down), upload my resume, and sign up for updates. I also got the paperwork to switch my unemployment over to deposit directly in my regular account instead of the Chase one they opened for me. I've been meaning to do that since day one but am much more keen on getting around to it since discovering Chase started charging me a fee for not using my unemployment account during the months I was employed.

Just so we're clear: I am the sort of guy who will close his bank account over six dollars in fees.

Because I fucking-well need that six dollars more than Chase does. As evidenced by the fact that it's the account where my unemployment checks go.

On the whole, though, it was a good reminder that, even unemployed, I'm not so badly off. I've got a family that supports me, emotionally and, when occasionally necessary, financially. I'm in better shape than a lot of the folks I saw who went in to DES just to use their computers to apply for jobs.

Anyhow, on the way home I found gas for $3.39 a gallon. I was pretty excited about filling up my tank for about $30. Up until a mile later when I saw it for $3.35. And then when I saw it for $3.38 a mile away from my house. Oh well; $3.39's still pretty good.

Hoops

2012-11-20, 9:27 pm
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness, Work

Tomorrow I need to refer to Reemployment Orientation, or, as I marked it on my calendar, Reeducation Camp.

It's another of those things, like the ill-conceived "look for work on four separate days each week" standard, that is a good idea in principle but which I'm not so sure is going to work out in real life.

I'm pretty confident I was selected at random, from a pool of everybody who's been unemployed for the past month.

There may have been other factors -- like how this is the second time I've been on unemployment in as many years -- I don't know.

But I'd be pretty surprised if my degree and work experience were considered in my selection. And there's the rub.

I've got a BS degree in a field that's not doing a lot of full-time hiring, and about a decade's experience in a related field that's doing more full-time hiring but still not nearly as much as it was a few years ago. My needs are kind of different from somebody who hasn't finished college. Which isn't to cast aspersions on anyone without a degree -- to the contrary, there are lots of very smart people looking for work who just need some training.

And hell, maybe I will end up meeting with somebody who knows who's hiring programmers -- or at least migration techs. Maybe they'll have some good tips on punching up my resume, or hook me up with another temp agency, or have a site that gives me a better ROI for my search hours than CareerBuilder. I'd be grateful for any of those things.

But I can't help thinking that anybody who knows all that stuff is probably not going to be working for DES telling a random sampling of the unemployed how to look for a job.

But I'll go in with a smile and say please and thank you and be grateful for my unemployment check. Anything else on top of that is just Thanksgiving gravy.

I'll let you know how it goes. Probably.

Also To Do

2012-11-19, 11:01 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

Hammer out car insurance (whose website is broken), hammer out health insurance (whose database is broken), decide where furniture's going in new house, hit up everybody I know for addresses to send "Save the Date" announcements to.

All with mother-in-law visiting and trying to wrangle 18-month-old nephew. Mostly successfully, I should say; she was a whole lot more tired by the end of the day than I was. But I was still plenty tired.

Strange Bedfellows

2012-11-17, 5:21 pm
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness

I can't say I agree with the Republican Study Committee on many things -- among other things, their leadership is responsible for holding the budget hostage to pursue more tax cuts for the 1%. (At least they're willing to discuss cutting the budget for the military.)

But, per Cory Doctorow and Mike Masnick, they've put out a paper called Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix It, and while so far I've only skimmed it, it looks pretty fantastic.

There is a strong conservative case to be made against modern American copyright law: it's a big-government handout to Hollywood that grants artificial monopolies, interferes with the free market, stifles innovation, and is clearly not what the Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution.

I'm not optimistic about the Republican leadership, or the Democratic, picking up the baton on this one. But I think it's a pretty big deal that people are actually talking about it -- and that some Republicans still remember that what "conservative" actually means isn't just "tax cuts for the rich".

All the major copyright landgrabs of the past couple of decades, from the DMCA to TPP, have been bipartisan efforts by lobbyist-owned politicians, with as little input from the voters as possible. SOPA/PIPA showed that while their support among politicians may be bipartisan, their opposition from an informed public is nonpartisan.

Even if nothing comes of this right away, I'm sure we haven't heard the last of it. Kudos to any politician willing to speak truth to power on this subject, regardless of party and regardless of disagreements we may have on other issues.

Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet

2012-11-16, 9:33 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, TV

I am very tired, so here's another old Doctor Who review. Originally posted Brontoforumus, 2008-11-18.

The Pirate Planet is not what you expect either from the title or for the writer (Douglas Adams). The pirates are not of the traditional variety (though the leader has robot parts), are never referred to as pirates, and it is unclear until halfway through or more why the serial is called "The Pirate Planet".

But all that's part of a series of mysteries in the serial that are quite cleverly revealed. Some are obvious, others (why do gems fall from the sky right before the stars change?) are not.

Adams crafts a story with far fewer laughs than you would expect, but it's quite clever and plays out at a good pace, and features an interesting cast of characters (particularly the villains). As usual, he wears his environmentalist cred on his sleeve, but uses it in a way that makes the story interesting.

For $11, it's on the "worth owning" list.

That said, I have zero interest in watching the rest of the Key to Time Series. I've already watched 200 minutes of a collection quest; I don't really see following the remaining 450. Frankly, as much as I love Baker I think I'll take a break from him, maybe watch some more Pertwee or Davison.

Samuel Adams Boston Lager

2012-11-15, 9:08 pm
Categories: Comics, Stream of Consciousness

So far this week I have closed a house, looked for work, shopped for cars, and picked the spot where I'm getting married.

Now that I am home, about the only damn major decision I intend to make is what beer to get out of the refrigerator.

And some shirts from Threadless I guess, since I need new T-shirts and Groupon's got a deal.

I'm thinking 8-Bit Blues and Halfling and Wizard. (I'm sorely tempted by the Mike Allred Monkey Around shirt -- and it's only $10! -- but it looks like it would be goddamn hot in the summer.)

Hosiery: The Re-Brokening

2012-11-14, 11:26 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

Welp, broke my computer again, sort of.

See, I've confirmed that the instability I've been experiencing with the ol' OSX boot is definitely due to booting it from GRUB; it works fine from EFI.

So I decided I'd give Chameleon another shot -- maybe another bootloader would be more stable? Worth a try, right?

'Cept I can't get Chameleon to work this time, and it fucked GRUB up so it won't boot anymore either. (Edit to add: Apparently an MBR disk can't have more than one bootable partition? Guess it's been awhile since I took that A+ test. So okay, it's easy enough to get GRUB working again, but it doesn't help me get Chameleon working.)

The good news is that Chameleon boots just fine from CD, so I can still boot OpenSUSE that way.

The bad news is that, for some damn reason, holding down "C" to boot from CD doesn't work anymore on my Mac, so I've had to stick the damn helper card back in to access the boot menu by holding down Option when I power up.

(The other bad news is that AVG Free decided to flag fucking rundll32.exe as a virus and delete it, but Win8 must have restored it automatically because it worked okay on a reboot. But that's all the Win8 I did today.)

Anyway. Hoping I can get this damn mess fixed tomorrow. Because I've got better shit to do than keep fucking around with bootloaders.

Pants

2012-11-13, 3:58 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

So I bought a house.

Which you generally don't do right after being laid off, but I worked out an arrangement with my family.

Anyway. Among other things, it's an incentive to start getting rid of my crap.

I haven't unloaded any of my 1990's X-Men or Spider-Man comics yet, and I still need to mail those surplus Thundercats toys I said I'd give away a year ago. But today, it's pants.

I've mentioned before that I've lost a lot of weight over the past couple of years. I've had a 36" waist since junior high and I've recently dropped to 32. I've continued to wear comically oversized clown pants, partly out of concern that I'd gain the weight back and need them again, and partly because I hate shopping for clothes and have only gotten around to buying new pants a few at a time here and there.

Well, I've finally amassed enough pants that actually fit me to get rid of most of the 36's, so I spent this afternoon doing my best impression of Jared from the Subway commercials and determining which pants fall right off my waist and throwing them in some bags to donate.

Made plenty of space in my closet. Which is good, because my new closet is going to be much much smaller.

Buggy Messes

2012-11-12, 7:37 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

I had some harsh words yesterday for the EaseUS software for Mac. Mainly, it constantly locked up and didn't do much of anything.

I'm not quite ready to let EaseUS off the hook just yet, but I'm seeing that same behavior in a lot of programs now. At this point I'm pretty confident that, in setting my Mac up to run like a Hackintosh, I have wound up with a system that has all the stability and reliability of a Hackintosh.

Regrettably, I'm having much the same problem with MIUI, which I installed on my phone the other day (as something to do while I waited for diags to run on my Windows 8 drive). It's slow and it crashes like a motherfucker. I really think the monthly release cycle is a pretty poor idea; what we've got is bleeding-edge code (in this case Jelly Bean running on a phone that was never meant to support it) instead of stable code.

Which is a pity because there's really a lot to love about MIUI. For starters, it's the most paranoid OS I've ever seen -- its security settings are granular as hell; it doesn't just tell you what data your program is going to have access to at install time, it defaults to warning you at access time, too -- and giving you the opportunity to refuse.

Trust the Chinese to be thorough about who's listening in on them.

It also comes with a lot of mostly-pretty-useful programs out of the box.

Except that weather program. The one that thinks I live in some place called Temperanceville (and that's not autocomplete on me typing in "Tempe", that's the location it automatically set itself to), consistently tells me I have no network connection even though I have a network connection, and can't be uninstalled. I don't like that one very much.

So I don't think I'll be sticking with MIUI. I guess the question is whether I should just restore CyanogenMod 7 from backup, or try some other ROM.

Decisions, decisions...