Category: Rants

Damn You, Fox

As I mentioned before, we were given the gift of Netflix. One of the things we wanted to do was catch some of the old TV shows that we never saw all the way through from the beginning. We only saw one episode of Wonderfalls back when it was on Fox and unjustly cancelled (like pretty much every good Fox television show — Arrested Development, anyone?), so we decided to get the complete series from there (three disks). The show is absolutely hilarious and is one of the best shows I’ve seen (we just finished watching the last disc). I honestly feel sorry for shows that go to Fox Network, as it basically where good shows go to die.

Now we need to get through Firefly and Dead Like Me at some point. Both of those shows were cancelled to early as well — the former another Fox disaster, the latter on Showtime (we got hooked on Dead Like Me when we saw it now and again on Sci Fi Channel). Firefly I’ve never actually seen, but people who know my taste in TV tell me I’d love it.

So tell me, what are your favorite shows that didn’t make it?

January 21, 2008

Why Does Oregon Even Bother To Have Primary Elections?

I agree with Burton here: Why does Oregon even bother having primary elections? By the time the election happens in May, most of the candidates will have dropped out of the race, making Oregon’s influence on the Presidential election pretty much nil.

Is there any reason for this, other than tradition? Am I missing something obvious? I’d like to think our votes actually mean something (not like they do in a Presidential election anyway — damn that Electoral College).

January 17, 2008

It’s Time For My Own Personal Hell

As I’ve mentioned many, many, many, many times before, I pretty much hate the 4th of July. I’m all for celebrating our independence, but since I live where I can see the annual Burning Of The Butte (aka our local fireworks show) from my living room, our neighborhood becomes a war zone for the week before, the day of, and the week after the Fourth. Since fireworks went on sale last week, it’s been non-stop booming and banging with flaming projectiles flying through the sky (most of which are illegal in Oregon). I even saw one guy down the street who had set fire to a stump in his front yard and was lighting fireworks with it.

As I type this (and it’s 11:40 right now), I can still hear bottle rockets flying over my house. And today’s only the third of the month — it’s only going to get worse tomorrow.

Now just so folks who don’t live here understand, I live in a desert. A dry, hot, mostly moisture-free, high altitude, mountainous desert. We get snow in the winter, but our actual annual precipitation is very low. Which means we have a lot of dry wood and trees that will cause fires to burn of control quite rapidly. We’ve already had one fire destroyed this week because of illegal fireworks, and I worry that mine might be next because of some drunken moron down the street who decided it’d be a great idea to shoot projectiles out of their mouth, right at my house (yes, that has happened, and no, unfortunately Darwin didn’t win that battle). I’m thinking I might just keep my sprinklers on all night.

So enjoy the Fourth safely, everybody (I’ll be at work, so you’ll undoubtedly hear from me on the holiday). And if anybody has to deal with me on Thursday, I apologize in advance as I’ll be tired as hell.

July 3, 2007

I really didn’t want to comment on this…

…but now that it’s hit the Bulletin, I’d better at least comment on the whole Baltazar’s mess.

A bit of background: Last week, the local Mom2Mom group posted an entry on their site, blasting Baltazar’s, a mexican seafood place in West Bend as being not-so-kid-friendly with Baltazar Chavez (the owner) being really rude. Both Jon and BOR had good reviews of the place back in the day, but they didn’t bring their kids. Just the same, I was then sent versions of the e-mail (and other stories) posted on the Mom2Mom site, all slamming Chavez (14 different emails in all, all basically quoting the same source). The stories of the rudeness showed up on other local blogs, on Craigslist, and then now into the Bulletin.

But I generally avoided this whole thing for a few reasons (and you’ll see a bit of my journalist background here):

  1. I’ve been totally slammed. The last week for me has been crazy busy, both professionally and personally, and I haven’t really had the time to look at this like I’d like to. I have a job and I doubt my employer would want me spending time looking into this.
  2. I didn’t know any of the people involved. While I’ve heard stories about the guy being a jerk over the years, everything I was reading in these blog posts and e-mails was hearsay. I didn’t know the people, nor did any of the people forwarding me the emails. It was all “I got this from a friend-of-a-friend.” Sorry, but don’t give “friend-of-friend” stuff that much credibility, especially when I have very little time on my hands to verify claims. I have a day-job, folks.
  3. I didn’t know Baltazar at all. I’ve never met the guy (though I have seen him in the area), so I didn’t want to start spreading something around that I didn’t know to be true. While I had heard stories, they hadn’t happened to me, nor had I the time to verify the various stories I’d heard or even compile them all. A**hole he may totally be, I have no idea. But again, I have a day job.
  4. The point has already been made. The mess has already gotten a ton of coverage — did I really need to contribute? I would’ve felt like I was just following the bandwagon and doing something that all the cool kids were doing.
  5. I didn’t want to give the guy more publicity. The reality is that all this whole mess is done is given a fairly new restaurant more publicity (good, bad, or otherwise). I didn’t want to contribute to that. Bad publicity it may be, but he just got his picture blown up in the Bulletin’s business section, a newspaper that’s read by 52,000 folks every day. Many people are going to just read the photo caption which says “He wants to make his restaurant different from other Mexican restaurants by creating an intimate and high-end setting.” That’ll be read by a lot of the childless folks on the West side of Bend who now know that they can go there and not be annoyed by kids. I know at least three childless couples who, even if the guy is a jerk, would probably still eat there because they like not eating with kids around. This will give them even more reason.
  6. A boycott/protest/whatever won’t hurt him. I had heard a few folks say they should boycott the restaurant. And what would that accomplish? It’s like when PETA sends an e-mail to all its members, asking them to boycott KFC. Do PETA members actually eat at KFC? No. So does KFC care if PETA boycotts? No. Will it hurt KFC’s bottom line? No. Same deal here. My guess is that most of the people that read these posts/e-mails either a) had never been there or b) were never planning on going there or c) could never afford to go there anyway (I fall into the latter category). So you’re going to boycott someplace you’d never go. All you did was make sure that kids say out of his place, which, reading the story, is exactly what he wants.

Last time the local blog world started talking about bad dining, it was about Kanpai, the sushi/sake place over on Newport. Folks were predicting the place’s demise, and last I checked, they’re still here over two years after that original post and debate (the Kanpai mess was another reason I avoided this one).

So long story short, I don’t think this whole mess is going to really hurt him. A total jerk the guy may be, but he’s probably laughing this all up right now. He’s gotten a ton of PR, will be frequented by the local childless who hate kids, and will still be around for a while. All he had to do was call somebody a horrible name.

Discuss below or over at Bend Forums. I’ve wasted enough time on this already, so I’ll probably be sitting this out.

April 26, 2007

“No, your episodes of ‘Prison Break’ can not be stored on the file server.”

This has been a long few days. First, I had the folks who were getting all miffed at me because I couldn’t help them with their web-based application, and now things have gotten more annoying.

I had a co-worker complain that the tape-backup drive in our small file server upstairs wasn’t actually backing anything up. After tweaking the tape settings, the job setting and finally watching through the logs as the thing ran, I come to find out that the DDS-3 tapes were full and that’s why the backup wasn’t finiishing completely — there was too much data on the server and not enough tape. I thought to myself “How could that be? This server is barely used and the 18GB SCSI drives have never been more than half full.” Open up “My Computer”, sure enough, the C:\ drive only has about 300 megs free. So something on the server was taking up a ton of space. Time to find out what it was.

I downloaded and installed a copy of WinDirStat which gives you a pretty graphical representation of the files on your machine. After I let it scan all the files, I noticed a crapload of *.m4v files, which are MPEG4 video files. After opening up the folder containing the files, and plugging the names into Google (as I couldn’t play them on the file server as it obviously doesn’t have a media player), I come to realize that the files are the first 16 episodes of season two of Prison Break. At about 600 megs a piece, it was taken up 9GB of space on the server. I deleted them, and, magically, the back up was able to run just fine. While there is hardware compression that will theoretically compress the tape’s data so it can fit 24GB of data, m4v files are already compressed, so there was no way it would all fit in the tape’s native 12GB capacity.

The staff has gotten a stern warning about this from the boss, so hopefully it shall not happen again.

April 24, 2007

Web Application != Desktop Application

Just another thing to add to the pet-peeve list in my life as a tech-support guy: Folks who think that stuff they do within their Web browser is wholly my responsibility.

The reality is that more and more applications that used have a desktop program that interfaced with remote servers are now just strictly going Web based (mostly MSIE-only, but that’s another rant for another time). I work part-time for a real estate office in the area, and the good majority of what they do is Web-based: MLS, e-mail, Crest, various marketing Web site updates, contact management, etc… . Being all Web-based is nice as it makes it so I don’t have to support a bunch of desktop applications and just have to keep the browser functional. The problem is that people still think with a desktop application mindset, so when they get a server error or an ASP error of some sort (many of these apps are ASP or some ASP-variant like ASP.net), they freak out, and think that it’s my fault and that I can magically fix it. I’ll get panicky folks running into my office, saying they need me right away, and then I walk over, notice it’s in the browser, and tell them to a) try it again, and b) if it doesn’t work, call their support hotline. That’s why you pay these companies all that money so that you can call and yell at them, but I can’t fix a problem that I have absolutely no control over (especially on an application I’ve never used on a server I don’t have access to). Just read them the error on screen, and they’ll be able to help you far quicker than I ever could.

And as these applications become more and more like applications and less like Web pages, it’s going to be harder and harder for people to be able to tell the difference between a desktop and Web application (especially in web apps that hide the address bar). I just keep telling people: If you see the MSIE blue “e” icon in the upper corner of the Window, it’s probably not something I can help you with.

</rant>

April 22, 2007

Why Does The Government Have To Make Things So Difficult?

Why does claiming unemployment have to be such a royal pain it the tuckus? The government just seems hell-bent on making it a royal pain, especially if you have unconventional circumstances (read on for full story).

(more…)

April 2, 2007

Is Volvo Trying To Make Drivers Dumber?

Has anybody else seen the Volvo S80 commercials that tout their new fancy safety features? In reality, they are just making it easier for people to drive like morons.

I can’t find a link to these videos anywhere, but there are a couple commercials that strike me as off. One has a woman driving the Volvo with a pile of file folders on her passenger seat. Something causes a couple of the folders to come off the seat onto the floor. So instead of waiting until she’s stopped to get the folders off the floor, she continues driving and leans down to pick her folders. Her head is below her windshield so she obviously can’t see or isn’t even remotely watching the road in front of her. Thankfully the car is smarter than she is, and its collision detection system kicks it, makes an awful noise to warn her and gets the car ready to brake, saving her (and her files) just in time.

The second commercial shows a guy driving down a freeway. In the commercial, the guy nearly changes lanes right into the motorcycle in the lane next to him, something he could’ve avoided if a) he’d been paying attention to traffic as he’s going down the freeway), b) actually turned his head before changing lanes, like you’re supposed to do (everybody remembers that part of driver’s ed., right?) or c) he had his mirrors adjusted so blind spots weren’t as big of an issue. But he avoids the accident because of the “Blind Spot Information System” (which, for all I can tell, is a little red light on the mirror that lights up when you’re about to clobber somebody).

Now don’t get me wrong — these are all great safety features, and these are nice cars (I’d drive one if someone gave me one), but my worry is that this is going to teach drivers to rely on these features instead of just flat-out paying attention while they’re driving. They should be a supplement for a driver, not a replacement for common sense.

(Edited: Fixed a couple of stupid typos.)

March 26, 2007

I Better Quit Letting My Daughter Play With My Nintendo DS…

…because she could get molested. EVERYBODY PANIC!!11!!

I’m with Ken on this one: Parents need to be more involved in their children’s lives and quit blaming technology for all of society’s wrongs. And the boneheaded media who uses scare tactics to pummel fear into already paranoid parents need to be slapped as well and quit doing stories like this.

The story is about the Nintendo DS’s PictoChat program, which is a simple little way to send simple message between systems. But it has a range of about 70 feet in ideal conditions. If a child molester is within 70 feet of your child, your kid’s Nintendo DS should be the least of your worries.

The US Postal Service probably carries letters from molestors every day. But would we shut down the postal service? Not in a million years. Just because something can be used for nefarious deeds doesn’t mean it always is and if you live life in fear of this kind of stuff instead of just getting involved in your child’s life, than you are the problem, not a entertaining little game system. If you’re going to buy a toy for your kids of this type, do yourself a favor and read the instruction manual, and talk things over with your child. Earn their trust, otherwise that 70 feet will be closer than you think.

</rant>

Link via Digg which has a bunch of great comments, too.

Speaking of my Nintendo DS, however, I am having a fun time playing it. I don’t get to play with it much (my wife enjoys it as much as I do), but I’m slowly progressing along in Super Mario Brothers. I also plan on hacking into the thing sometime.

February 11, 2007

American Idol Is Evil

Sorry, just had to post this really quick (which I posted about this same time last year). Yes, I know American Idol is stupidly popular and a ratings dreams for Fox, but I always get miffed when i have to wait three weeks for new episodes of my favorite show.

That is all.

January 10, 2007