A couple interesting stories that are related in my mind as they pertain to IP and the level of control that IP owners exert over their product:

Verizon Plans Wider Options for Cellphone Users

Carriers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which is a joint venture between Verizon and Vodafone, have spent billions on cell towers and other infrastructure, and traditionally they have tightly controlled what happens on their networks.

They decide what phones subscribers can use and then steer them toward ring tones, television shows and other products they can buy.

I’m not sure that this will be better for the providers, but in the long term I think it’ll be good for the industry. There has been a lot of frustration at the unwillingness of consumers to spend a lot of money for things to put on their phone. They’ll pay $2.50 for a ringtone, sure, but when it comes to music and games sales have been anemic. The main reason for this, I think, is that these things are often not transferrable from one phone to the next and it further locks them into their provider. I know that’s one of the big reasons that I’ve stayed away from investing in my phone. Giving customers more confidence in this regard will be a good thing, saying nothing of the benefits of increased competition.

Report: EMI looking to slash funding for RIAA, IFPI

One of the Big Four labels is apparently unhappy with its return on investment when it comes to funding industry trade groups such as the IFPI and RIAA. British label EMI, which was recently purchased by a private equity fund, is reportedly considering a significant cut to the amount of money it provides the trade groups on an annual basis.

According to figures seen by Reuters, each of the Big Four contributes approximately $132.3 million to fund the operations of the IFPI, RIAA, and other national recording industry trade groups. That money is used in part to fund the industry’s antipiracy efforts—including the close to 30,000 file-sharing lawsuits filed by the record labels in the US alone.

I’m not as unsympathetic as many are when it comes to efforts on the part of the record labels to prevent wholesale piracy, but even if one grants the validity of their cause (a concession I don’t make) the RIAA has been wildly unsuccessful. The RIAA’s interests have been diverging from the labels’ interests themselves for some time now and I think it’s wise for labels to start looking at other options.

The adulturing neighbor that wasn’t getting robbed moved out a long while back. It appears that the house was actually being rented and the owner has been making some improvements on nights and weekends. He has a black boxer that I’ve come to call Garfunkel.

Despite the fact that the owner comes and goes, Garfunkel is a permanent resident. The owner placed a dog run in the back yard where the dog trots back and forth, plays with a basketball and tire, sleeps, barks at animals, and howls at the occasional siren. I feel really bad for Garfunkel, especially since the weather turned cold. The owner gave him a dog house, but it wasn’t well put together. When it collapsed a big giant trash can was placed to prop it up. The dog is supposed to sleep in the trash can, I think, but can’t seem to get comfortable in there. He also hangs out of it so he’s forced to sit up or lay down and have his face get wet. Last week with all the cold and rain he apparently bought a legitimate dog house, which makes me feel better.

Mostly, though, the dog seems lonely. I only see the owner rarely. Garf gets his food and water, but that’s about it.

Though I still have to sell Clancy on the idea, I’m of the two-dog mold. Particularly if the dog is left alone all day. One might think that having two dogs is twice the work of one, but in my (second-hand) experience that’s not necessarily the case (though two is typically twice as expensive as one). You feed them, take them out, and walk them all at once. Plus, they’re not quite as dependent on you for entertainment because when you don’t want to play they will often pounce on one another. This is particularly true if they are the same age and grow up together. It’s also helpful if they’re from the same litter.

Clancy’s father noted that siblings are a parent’s gift to their child. I think the same is true of pets.

I look forward to the day that I can get a dog or two. As long as Clancy and I are moving from one place to the next and as long as each job I take seems to be more than thirty miles away from where I’m living, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Once we’re settled down in a single place and assuming I can find nearby work, I definitely look forward to it. Clancy’s not as much of a dog person, but she recognizes that I am and for that I am quite grateful.

In the meantime, I get my “doggie fixes” whenever we are at a pet-owner’s house. Hopefully I can happily live off that for the next year or two.

One of the jobs of Quality Assurance is to find ways to make the software break. Then Project Management decides if it’s a likely or typical enough scenario to concern oneself with. If something ceases to work entirely because someone puts a letter where a number should be and there’s no chance for the user to re-input the correct value, that’s a serious problem. If something doesn’t work because because someone hits the pounds the button five thousand times, not so much a problem. Either way, it’s our job to find ways to make it not work.

At some places QA goes beyond that wherein you need to figure out not only when something doesn’t work, but why it doesn’t. Whether it’s QA’s or Development’s responsibility to figure out the Why’s rather than just the When’s when it comes to things not working varies from company to company. Most of the time that should fall on development since they have access to the code and we don’t, but a developer’s time is considerably more valuable than a QA tech’s time so we’re often expected to gather as much as we can before it gets back on their virtual desk.

An infrequent challenge, though, is when you have something that works but is not supposed to. I’ve spent two days trying to figure out why something is not breaking. It’s sort of like trying to prove a negative. But if it goes unaddressed it may start ceasing to work just as it had ceased to work up until a couple of days ago. If I can figure out why it’s working, then I can figure out why it wasn’t working, and presumably the problem can be fixed, worked around, or dismissed.

All of that is dependent, however, on my ability to figure out why the uncooperative system keeps doing what it is supposed to be doing.

There is a post on Prime Number on the general subject of maiden and married names:

I didn’t change my name when I got married. I did this for a variety of reasons, the most important being that I didn’t want to. Mr. Lollipop left it up to me from the beginning, and even more so when he realized that my first name with his last name would rhyme just like ‘Julia Guglia’ from the Wedding Singer. My in-laws and my parents have been supportive of this decision as they have been of all of our other decisions. (They rock!) Finally, we have a baby naming plan that satisfies all concerned parties. Really, I had the least controversial name non-change, ever.

My sister-in-law Brynne elected to take on the Truman family name. My mother of all people encouraged her not to. Mom is far more the traditional of the two and Brynne’s career made changing her name inconvenient. So neither took the position that you might expect them to… and both bucked that expectation for the same reason: Ethnicity.

Brynne’s last name is Salam and though she is an all-American girl her father immigrated from Palestine before she was born. She is noticeably Arab in her features, though her skin is more pale than is typical because her mother immigrated from France. When her parents married, her father actually volunteered to take her mother’s name, but her mother would have none of it and they became the Salams. It’s not a particularly good decade to have an Arab last name. Brynne, like her father, wanted to get rid of it. Mom, on the other hand, thought that she should keep it because it establishes her as a minority which helps with her job prospects.

In the end, Brynne legally took on the Truman name but works professionally under the name Brynne Salam.

Whether Clancy would keep her own name or take mine was something of a sore point in the otherwise blissful engagement. As it sometimes goes, I wanted her to change her name and she didn’t want to. The discussion was part of a larger disagreement that she and I have in the role of tradition in our lives. She believes that tradition needs to be supported with its own reasons in order to remain viable and I believe that tradition should remain in-tact unless there is a compelling reason to do away with it. I am willing to break tradition when it makes sense to me (ex. I will not be the breadwinner and may stay at home and raise future children) and she adheres to tradition when it makes sense to her (ex. we went through the whole wedding ceremony rather than getting married at a JP at 3 in the morning like her sister did), but in this case I did not see sufficient reason to break with custom and she did not see sufficient reason to adhere to it.

We tossed around several compromises, but this was one of the few issues that I was pretty uncompromising on. Not that I had to get things my way, necessarily, but that getting things 75% my way was closer to getting them 0% than 100% in my mind. If I wasn’t getting almost all of what I wanted, it made the most sense to just pick a different battle. She offered to hyphenate, but I told her not to bother.

Eventually, though, I did come up with a sort of compromise. She could legally keep her name Himmelreich or hyphenate or do whatever she wanted legally. She could go by her maiden name professionally (I was okay with the Brynne Salam Truman compromise). I asked that regardless of her legal name, she would go by Clancy Truman socially or in family situations. In parent-teacher conferences, social occasions, and things like that. Similarly, at an office party or something I wouldn’t say anything if someone were to introduce me as Will Himmelreich. For family matters, though, I wanted us to have the Truman Household rather than the Truman/Himmelreich Household.

That actually sidestepped one of the biggest concerns that I had about this particular break with tradition. I basically didn’t want to spend the entirety of our marriage explaining to anyone and everyone that called her “Clancy Truman” that she’d decided to keep her birth name when I didn’t particularly like that decision in the first place. I really didn’t like the idea of having to stand up against a tradition that I did not have strong feelings against. I felt enlisted in a crusade that I opposed. In short, I wanted to avoid being enlisted into situations like this:

Unfortunately, in the aftermath of our wedding it seems like only a few of our family members caught these name change clues. Our friends are young and savvy and only a few assumed that I kept my name, but we’ve been getting lots of checks, invitations, and letters to my non-existent married name, especially from my side of the family tree. Perhaps thank you cards and Christmas cards will be the best vehicle for a subtle reminder, with a polite phone call to some of the repeat offenders. It’s very tempting to add a little card with a graph explaining our whole naming system, but I’m afraid it might be seen as too blunt.

Though I told her to that she could keep Himmelreich, she wants to hyphenate anyway. She hasn’t yet and I suspect that the more medical licensure documentation she gets under her birth name the less likely it is that she will. But since I am no longer a part of her fight against tradition in this one particular matter, I am simply not worried about it.

When I was dating Julie, I spent a lot of time in the city of Phillippi. Phillippi {pronounced FILL-PEE} is a blue-collar city on the outskirts of Colosse and by far the city’s largest suburb. North Phillippi is mostly known for being a heavily industrial area where most of the inhabitants spend their days working in the chemical plants in eastern Colosse and spend their nights breathing in the fumes. Unfortunately the factories are technically in Colosse, so while they get the fumes, they don’t get the tax dollars. The south part of town is more middle class and upper middle class.

Julie’s father was a volunteer with the Phillippi Volunteer Fire Department and most of his friends were firemen and a lot of them were cops. Julie’s grandfather was a businessman and an aide to former Mayor Mack Kramer. Because of this, I happened to become rather knowledgeable about Phillippi politics despite not living in the city.

I noticed, shortly after dating Julie, that there seemed to be two different people asking to be re-elected mayor. There were “Return Mack Kramer” and “Re-elect Bill Rose” signs. When I finally thought about it, I was able to put the pieces together. Rose had deposed Kramer from office and they were running against one another. I asked Mrs. Bernard and got an earful because of her father’s work with Mayor Kramer.

The two apparently absolutely hated one another. Rose was Kramer’s nemesis while the former was on city council and the later mayor. When Kramer was term-limited out of office, Rose won and promptly took Kramer’s name off all of the things that Kramer had helped the city build (Kramer Fairgrounds because the Rose Fairgrounds, for instance). Then Rose was term-limited out, Kramer was elected, and we were back to the Kramer Fairgrounds. Rose ran against Kramer, knocked him out of office, and the city council finally settled on the Phillippi Fairgrounds. Rose was seeking re-election and Kramer was running against him by the time that I started becoming familiar with the area.

Rose won, and when he was term-limited out, Kramer ran for the post against a proxy from Rose’s camp and lost, the city finally had a new mayor. Kramer died a couple of years later and Rose ran for a City Commissioner post. All of Kramer’s families lined up behind Rose’s opponent, City Comptroller Marge Calvert, and all at once the war was renewed with Calvert running by proxy. It being a slightly Democratic district, the Calvert won and Rose, a Republican, went to work campaigning for his son who was running for Justice of the Peace and then went back to doing whatever he did when he wasn’t mayor.

In addition to ego, one of the differences between the two was style. Mack Kramer represented the industrial northside. He was an old-school conservative Democrat with a populist streak. Bill Rose, and his ascendency in local politics, represented the city’s shift from an industrial Flint-like town to a posh suburban enclave. Rose was a business-friendly Republican who seemed as uncomfortable around poor people as Kramer did around educated people. They really came by their dislike quite honestly. Kramer was fighting the Republicanization of Phillippi and lost that fight.

I was reminded of the battle as Clancy and I left for Beyreuth. The mayor that succeeded Rose resigned because (as he claimed) God told him that he was destined to run for Delosa Congressional District 6. Mayoral signs were everywhere: local businessman Pete Kramer vs. State Representative Buddy Rose.

Over guesting at Bobvis, Will offered up an interesting dilemma, which is why men who are not the father of a child may still be on the hook for child support. You can read on various cases in places like here and here and here. Perhaps best known is Manuel Navarro, a man who spent 8 years proving he was not the “Manuel Nava” listed as a child’s father.

There’s also a great article on the matter (from both sides) here. Interesting most of all is that very rarely are circumstances taken into account, and that in over 50% of cases, the man is never directly served the papers or ordered to take a paternity test to double-check before paternity is assumed.

Ok, I admit I’m late, but it took a while to read all the responses and boil them down. (more…)

I was in Delosa last week for the Thanksgiving holidays visiting family. Instead of flying I chose to drive because we’re going to get my car thoroughly inspected and decide whether or not I should keep it or will drive back in my parents car. That’s a separate story, though. It also helped because we spent part of the week in Colosse visiting my family and the other part in Beyreuth across the state visiting Clancy’s.

The inside of my car was messy as it so often is and I needed to clean it out because it’s more difficult for people that handle your car to take things from your car if anything missing would be conspicuous. I made the mistake of telling my father that I was going to clean out my car. I knew it was a mistake the minute I said, because I knew that he would say “I’ll help!”

Ordinarily such assistence would be graciously accepted. The problem is that my father believes that I have quit smoking and the pack of cigarettes I had on the drive had disappeared from my pocket, meaning that they were somewhere in my car. I desperately wanted to avoid a conversation on the matter. Cleaning out my car was one of the ways I was hoping to do that because in addition to cleaning it for the inspectors, I wanted to clean it for my father because I knew that if I didn’t, he would. But the second I said that I would clean it and he offered to help, I had inadvertently made the conversation more rather than less likely.

I told him not to worry about it and that I would take care of it. He said it was no worry at all. Then I said that I didn’t want to do it right away so I would do it later. He said that he wouldn’t mind at all getting started while I decompressed from the drive. I told him that I was a bit embarassed by the state of my car and wanted to take care of it myself and that seemed to be the magic rationale. The magic quickly faded. I wasn’t out there five minutes before he was saying that he was going to help me. I told him that he should go to bed since it was past his bedtime, but he was insistant.

I wasn’t really sure what to do. I couldn’t insist any more loudly than I already had without incurring real suspicion. Further, he was sitting in the driver’s seat near which the cigarette pack was most likely to be found. I quickly cleaned out the passenger’s side and then as inconspicuously as I could I moved on to the back seat behind him, hoping that the cigarette pack was underneath the seat. Thankfully, it was. Not wanting to put it in my pocket, I stuck it in the trash bag figuring that I could get it out later.

When we finished, Dad volunteered to take care of the garbage sack for me. Not wanting him to look inside to make sure that I didn’t throw away anything I shouldn’t have and seeing the cigarettes, I told him that I would take care of it. He insisted, I insisted. I then said that I needed to clean out the trunk of my car and I would put the garbage sack in the trash can myself when I finished. He offered to help with the trunk. He insisted, I insisted. He won and he helped me with the trunk. I figured at least the extra junk from the trunk would make it harder for him to find the cigarette pack and that I would do whatever I could to make sure that the garbage bag did not leave my hands.

As we finished, he said that I should leave the trash bag out because he wanted to look through it and make sure that I hadn’t thrown away anything that I shouldn’t. Before I could say anything, he said that he would take a look in the morning because he was getting tired. Thanks to the extra junk from the trunk meant to hinder Dad’s search through the trash bag, it took me more than half an hour to find the pack.

The next morning he said that he was going to take a look in the trash bag and seemed surprised when I didn’t object.

A UN “study group” has decided that Tasers are a form of torture with the capability to cause death.

Aside from illustrating some of the mind-numbing stupidity I’ve come to associate the UN with by default, it reopens a long debate on what tools and rights the police should have.

In the 1990s, many “civil rights” organizations were pushing for the police to be given (and presumably, forced to use) more ‘nonlethal’ methods of solving violent confrontations. Minority-rights groups especially contended that police were “too quick” to draw weapons and fire on members of their races, who may or may not have been bloodthirsty killers and axe murderers who attacked the cops. The Taser was the inevitable result; a weapon capable of incapacitating someone, quickly drawn and fired like a gun, and which would (at least in most cases) leave someone alive to be handcuffed and taken to jail rather than dead at the scene.

A brief side note - in Colosse, we have our own cop problems. Of the cops I’ve met, given that the city has a police force 1/2 the size of cities 1/4 its population, there seem to be precisely 2 types of cop: the overworked ones (let’s face it, if you’ve worked 16+ hour days for months on end with no vacation, you’re not at your best) and the corrupt ones. Still, I’d rather be tased by either than wind up in a grave.

The Taser is not completely nonlethal, nor should any weapon ever be considered to be; even handcuffs can be lethal. It is not un-painful, but again, the purpose of any weapon is to inflict enough pain to incapacitate someone. A quick look at a Youtube search will pull up plenty on it, including demonstrations of people being tasered and explanations of how it works. However, it is a far sight better than the alternative “nonlethal” means of sandbag shotguns, pepper spray, and the “old reliable” metal nightstick.

The Taser is better than the nightstick because it does not require the officer to enter melee with someone, quite probably someone either (a) armed with a gun or knife or other melee weapon, (b) physically capable of attempting to take a weapon from the officer, (c) troubled enough by drug abuse or some other illness that may or may not be physically capable of being transferred to the cop, or (d) some frightening combination of the previous.

The Taser is better than the pepper spray because it is less likely to affect nearby people as well; I’ve been in a room when a young girl mistakenly sat on (and cracked) the pepper spray cartridge on her keychain, and it was enough to clear out a room of 50 people with their eyes watering. It also has a better range than the pepper spray and can more easily be used while keeping the officer at a safe distance.

The Taser is better than the sandbag shotgun because, instead of inflicting physical bruising, it inflicts a shock that incapacitates muscles directly. If someone is mentally ill or on many forms of drugs, their pain response to the physical bruising will likely be minimal (heck, just an adrenaline rush can cause people to ignore all sorts of pain). The Taser bypasses this and goes directly to the neuromuscular level, at least knocking someone over (by causing convulsions of the leg muscles) even if they do get up again. The Taser also does not require such precise aim as the sandbag shotgun.

And yet, we are now barraged with various news stories of why cops are “abusing” Tasers, and how they should be taken away. My suspicion is that most of the groups responsible for these stories simply have an agenda of stopping the cops from doing their jobs. Yes, I recognize (living in Colosse, it’s hard not to as I noted above) that there are times cops will overreach their authority. But I’m also painfully aware that there is a sizable population that are quite willing to attempt to kill cops merely for being cops, or in an attempt to evade arrest, and that the cops need to have the tools necessary to take these people in and defend not only their own lives but the communities they are sworn to protect.

Prior to the issuance of tasers, the default cop option was not the sandbag shotgun, or the pepper spray, or the nightstick. Why not? For all the reasons previously stated - each of them opens up the cop to more risk of being physically assaulted or killed. The default option was to pull the gun and be prepared to shoot.

When a cop is forced by a situation to draw their gun, the likelihood is someone is going to get shot with a weapon intended to kill by someone who is trained to shoot to kill in self-defense. When a cop is forced by a situation to draw a taser, the likelihood is that someone is going to get hit by a weapon intended to leave them alive.

I think the tasers should remain, and I think the UN idiots who called them “torture” need to have their heads examined.

It’s always awkward to meet the parents of your girlfriend when you’re dating someone because you’re indicative of their daughter growing up and you’re likely doing things with their daughter that they’d prefer not think about and if you’re being upright and honorable you’re going to marry her and take her away from them.

The first time I really had to do that was when I met Julie’s parents in the late 1990’s. Julie’s father was, among other things, a fireman. I’d heard horror stories about firemen fathers. One such dad took his daughter’s suitor for a tour around the house and pointed to one of those firemen axes and suggested that it was his tool for dealing with dishonorable suitors. Julie had also described her dad as a big and muscular man.

I’ve always done well with older people, though, and it turned out not to be much of an issue. They liked me from the outset at least in part because I was so much better than her previous boyfriend. They accepted me as part of the family very quickly and let me sleep over on a regular basis. When things turned sour between Julie and her folks, they still liked me right up until I broke their daughter’s heart.

Despite the getting along, though, I was never really one of them. They were blue collar folks. When not a fireman Mr. Bernard was a pipe-fitter. Mrs. Bernard worked a white collar job, but in more of a secretarial capacity. Blue collar I’m not. I always thought about and talked about things that they found utterly uninteresting. They smiled and nodded, but they never really “got” me. Anything philosophical was lost on them (and was, to a lesser extent, lost on Julie as well). When she and I split up and I was replaced by Tony, he was much more up their alley.

Evangeline’s parents and I had the opposite disconnect. They were philosophical and airy, but they didn’t have their feet on the ground at all. Her father walked down Main Street dressed as Elvis from time to time and squandered his good living buying a theater for his improv group. Her mom was one step away from being insane.

Clancy and I met and became super-serious in double-quick time, so by the time her parents we were already a very serious things. In ordinary circumstances I wouldn’t have dreamed that there would be a problem. Unfortunately, I was an unemployed IT guy looking to marry their doctor of a daughter. Clancy and Professor Himmelreich had already discussed being on the lookout for men that might be interested in marrying her for money and I almost completely fit that profile to anyone that didn’t know me.

Looking back from her folks’ perspective, Clancy had always had very sound judgment. She wasn’t the type to get swept up by a charismatic would-be cabana boy. They figured that anyone their daughter liked would be a good guy and came into it ready and wanting to like me. It turned out to require little effort on either of our parts. Dr. H and I got along instantly despite my unemployed status. Having no sons of his own, he was quick to view me as such. His other son-in-law at the time was a Russian-Ukrainian immigrant with a spectacularly different background and they’re still close even after the divorce, but I fit into the “son” mold much more easily.

I was never the least bit worried about Clancy meeting my folks. They’d met Julie and liked her alright, though Mom was convinced that Julie was intimidated by them (she wasn’t, she was just really, really quiet around people she didn’t know). Mom never took a liking to Eva, which was fine, because Clancy was the anti-Eva. Dad even managed to seem to like my sister-in-law Brynne, which was more than most of us can manage. Clancy was a little worried about what my outspoken mother would think but was confident that she and my father would get along.

It turned out that she had a much easier time with Mom than with Dad. Dad is a quiet person with a hard shell to crack sometimes. You often really don’t know what he thinks of some people. Mom is one of the most outgoing people I know and we got good vibes there immediately.

The real hitch was, though, that she was going to be taking me away from them, across the country to Deseret. That’s a hard sell to any parent. The week after everyone met everyone, Mom came into my room and said, “We need to talk about Clancy.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Hold on to that girl, hold on to that girl, hold on to that girl!”

As far as Ghostland posts go, this is the most anti-climactic that I have ever written. Given the subject matter, that’s a really good thing.

Earlier this year I wrote about the University of Delaware’s refusal to schedule Delaware State, the state’s HBCU. As fate would have it the two were forced to face off in Division I-AA’s playoffs. Delaware won 44-7, so they got a good excuse to avoid playing Delaware State in the future.

Considering that it’s Thanksgiving and I’m with the folks, posting will not resume until next week.

In the meantime, if you have to have a trumwill fix, I’ve been meaning to mention that I have been assisting Bob Vis over at his blog while he’s been doing thesis work. The posts over there consist of issues that are more divisive in tone than I like to keep things at Hit Coffee. I’ve written three thus far:

Who Tha Daddy? (11/19/07): An open-ended look at how the law should handle paternity when the husband of the mother and assumed father of the child or children is not actually the father.

Free Speech & Nuisance (11/6/07): When does free speech become nuisance? Does free speech guarantee the right to be heard (or seen, in the cases mentioned) by people that don’t consent to it?

More of Less Human: The Abortion Divide (10/11/07): A post about abortion. I don’t make the case for the pro-life or pro-choice point of view but rather look at what I perceive to be the differences between how each side says they approach the issue and how each side actually seems to.

One of the differences between Clancy and myself is that she places a much, much higher premium on privacy. I have a blog where I talk about events in my life and my past and that’s the sort of thing that she would never do. It’s also a marked difference as it pertains to our parents. There are things that went on in my family that she considers outrageous.

The first time the issue arose pertained to my bank accounts. Most of my bank accounts are shared with my mother because it gets me a better interest rate (senior’s discount). She has access to it and will sometimes deposit checks and occasionally borrow money from me, but for the most part it doesn’t really matter. The worst I ever got was when money was tight, she would helpfully point out that money was tight. The entire notion of our relationship still being like this in my mid-to-late twenties baffled Clancy.

A similar issue arose with one of my credit cards. Though the credit card is only in my name, it is sent to my folks’ house. Why? Because that way I can have stuff sent there when I need to make sure that it won’t get left on my apartment doorstep and promptly stolen because some venders refuse to send any packages to any address that isn’t the billing address. It’s a matter of convenience that periodically becomes inconvenient whenever for one reason or another I forget to pay my Discover bill. Whenever I forget to do so, the letter goes to them and they inform me. Not a big deal most of the time, though it does make me look irresponsible sometimes and gives them a view into my life that it might be better off if they didn’t have. Definitely worth it for the convenience of allowing my packages to be sent there, though.

A third issue arose more recently. Dad has been pestering me to get my car registration up to date. I told him that I would take care of it, but I kept putting it off. First I was trying to get the time off work, then I was waiting until the beginning of the next month to see if I could buy another month’s worth of registration so taht I wouldn’t need to register it for the last month that we will be in Estacado next year. Dad does as Dad does and became increasingly concerned.

He a few months ago. He was going to arrive while I was out. I had the conspicuous DMV letter sitting on my desk, so I called and asked Clancy to get it out of site so that I could keep it out of Dad’s mind. She stuck it behind some letters on my desk. While talking to Clancy waiting for me to get home from work, he asked her whether or not I’d taken care of the registration. She evaded and said that she wasn’t sure. From there Dad went over to my desk and started sorting through the letters and found the registration form, not complete.

This completely threw Clancy off. She couldn’t believe that he would have the gall to do that. Just as she couldn’t believe that they would have the gall to open letters addressed to me from my credit card company. That was just absolutely, positively not how her family worked. She views it as infantizing and denoting a (well-intentioned) lack of respect. Privacy is a matter of respect to her, which I can understand.

I view it a little bit differently. That my parents worry about me, though annoying sometimes and usually unnecessary, is them showing that they care. They open the letters from the credit card company because they don’t want to see my credit hurt. They have their name on my savings account so that I can make more interest money. Dad really, really, really, really wants to see my car registered, so he checks up on me. And when I don’t have it registered, he drags me down to the DMV to get it taken care of immediately.

It’s the nature of our relationship. When it was time to stop taking care of my oldest brother, they turned to the middle brother, and when it was time to stop with him, they turned to me. Since I have no younger brothers, I don’t think that they’ll ever stop with me. I’m perfectly fine with that. It obviously makes them feel better to be able to do it. I don’t take advantage of them by expecting them to do things for me that I can easily take care of myself. I see it as providing something of a service… an excuse for them to do those parenting things that they like to do.

Clancy sees things very differently and I understand. Her independence is very important to her. She is the type of person that wants to be able to take care everything herself. She moved a few states away solely so that she could become more independent. I stuck around Colosse in part because I wanted to be nearby (albeit not living in the same house). So please don’t read any of this as a complaint about Clancy’s different perspective or a defense of my own in the face of her withering attacks. She doesn’t attack, she expressed her concern. It’s her way of showing that she cares.

One of the more curious developments in the burbs where I was raised is the proliferation of condos. The developers have made their way to East Oak, the little township where my folks live. There is an abandoned shopping center where they want to build two, 27-story condos. The neighbors are irate and there is a petition to stop it from happening. They’re citing concerns with traffic, mostly, but to be honest their concerns are pretty weak. It mostly strikes me as opposition to progress in a little township that values stability.

It’s not often that Mom, Dad, and I are all of the same opinion on anything, be we actually agree on this one: forget stability, bring in progress!

Whether it goes up in the shopping center or not, it’s going to go up somewhere. By going up in the shopping center, East Oak is going to reap ridiculous amounts of property taxes. Even in the down-market, the units are expected to go in prices ranging from 5 to 50-times that of the average home in the community. It’s going to go mostly to wealthier people that will own the property and presumably take care of it. Whether they build it there or across the street (in Larkhill, a different township), traffic is going to be a problem. The question is where, precisely, we want those tax dollars to go.

Several years ago a developer came in and wanted to build an apartment complex. East Oak was against that because it does not allow multi-family units MFUs and does not have any. Next to East Oak is West Oak. West Oak allows MFUs and for their open-mindedness they got a lot of cheap apartment complexes with great move-in rates that basically attract people that move in and then move out as soon as full-rent starts becoming due. East Oakers hoped to avoid that fate and sought to deny the developer’s variance (which is what they’re trying to do for the condo builders).

They ultimately succeeded in blocking the variance, so the developer moved two blocks over into a different municipality (Phillippi). Even then the East Oakers were able to stop it by threatening to deny them water. It all went to court and the developers won. The East Oakers then got the proposed development area declared a natural preserve and won the day. On that area now sits an elementary school, which is exempt from natural preservation.

They want to pull out all of the same bags of tricks for the condo developers. Right now they’re seeking to deny the variance. However, once that fails — if it does — the water pipes aren’t a possibility because they lost that court case and you can’t declare what is a slab of unused concrete is a nature preserve.

My folks actually ended up signing the petition to keep the condo out even while hoping the petition fails. Chalk it up to peer pressure and not wanting to make the wrong enemies within the neighborhood. That’s a subject for another time, though.

In any case, I wasn’t at all surprised at their efforts at keeping the poor people out of East Oak, but their trying to keep rich people out is a bit confusing. I suppose I should be heartened that the original objections weren’t the product of classism or racism (the West Oak apartments have a lot of minorities for the area), but rather the product of simple NIMBYism.

In place of my usual weekend bicycle ride (thanks to weather conditions on the appointed day) I took a ride a day early to the local movie theater, and caught Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. It’s the second film by Zach Helm, the first being the amazingly well-done Stranger than Fiction, which was so well written that it was able to make roommate John Fustle set aside his absolute hatred of Will Ferrel to appreciate that yes, when it comes time for it, the man can act and may simply have been typecast so far.

Magorium, alas, doesn’t match it.

Despite the fact that the title sounds an awful lot like an old Simpsons joke, the film is halfway decent, but only halfway decent. The basic premise is that Magorium, a somewhat “magical” toy-shop owner who’s lived for 243 years, has finally decided that it’s time to pass on and so he’s going to leave his toy shop to his young assistant. It is a rarity in that it is a film completely without a villain. While there are a few unsympathetic characters, nobody is actually out to “get” the toy shop, tear it down, attack it or its patrons.

The vast majority of the film focuses on four main characters (which means it was probably pretty cheap on casting). The first, the basic kid, is Zach Mills and he fills the role quite well - being a loner, the kid who neither other kids or the adults (save for Magorium) really understands, and trying to make friends but not knowing how to start.

Dustin Hoffman is charged with portraying a 243-year-old man who has managed to never stop being a kid, while paradoxically having a deep appreciation for epic literature and the meaning of life, and delivers one of the most stunning on-screen eulogies ever seen without missing a beat. Plus, despite affecting crazy hair and a bizarre lisp for the role, he’s able to deliver lines that would have a theater rolling in the aisles without missing a beat, true to form for a character for whom the magical is completely ordinary.

Jason Bateman gets to come in as the “outsider” who manages to miss, day after day, the magical happenings in the store. He’s very under-used; in fact, despite a singular scene in which he play-acts with the young child (an avid hat-collector), the potential of his character to “rediscover” the ability to have fun is completely wasted. Regrettably, the lack of growth in his character means that when it comes time for the “powerful” scene where he helps Portman ‘rediscover’ her inner magic, it comes pretty much out of left field.

Regrettably, the last of the main cast is Natalie “I can’t act” Portman; the directors wisely kept her unexpressive face out of camera-shot for most of the aforementioned eulogy scene. I can see only three possibilities regarding her; she didn’t understand the role, she didn’t care about this film, or she’s simply that godawful an actress.

The other issue I had with the film was how rushed the ending seemed; after Magorium actually passes on, it’s about 10 minutes until the film is completely resolved, with Portman doing an excessively stupid-looking dance as she “finds” her inner magic with which to bring the store back to life. One gets the feeling that perhaps, just perhaps, the film was somewhat rewritten to focus more on Hoffman after they realized how stunningly pathetic Portman really is.

Despite all these complaints, I really did enjoy the movie. Hoffman is strong enough to carry most of the film by himself, and even carry Portman through several key scenes; the story is engaging, and a darn strong way to show the inevitability of death even to the G-rated crowd it’s tailored to. There’s a ton of product placement, but also a ton of old, outdated, and amazing toys that get used in creative ways; I spotted several old things that I know have been out of production at least since I was 5, but that I’d love to see my own kids play with one day. Even when the writers are obviously just punning around, it works, such as when a statue of Abraham Lincoln is made out of Lincoln Logs. Plus, they managed to make a kids’ movie without a single flatulence joke. That has to be worth something.

One of the things that drives my lovely wife crazy is how lax I am about keeping my windshield view clear while driving. I finally got around to replacing my windshield wipers, which took a severe beating from the drive from Deseret to Estacado when we made the move down in the middle of last year. Also at issue is that I choose to wipe my windshield manually rather than use the wiper speeds (or even intermittent wiping) and I am not as diligent about wiping the windshield as she would like.

One would think that this issue would be of particular importance to me, because in 1982 it almost cost my father his life.

A house down the road from our was having its roof replaced. They kept a large, yellow bin on the road. Generally speaking there are almost no cars parked on our street because it’s banned from 2-6am due in part so that the police can more easily track down escapees from the juvie hall right down the way and due in part to a somewhat aggressive HOA. The roofers got a variance and thus parked their bin on the road.

Dad got up that June morning - we remember it to be June because that’s when the sun shines directly into a driver’s eyes on the way out of the neighborhood - and left for work as usual. The windshield was unusually dirty and with the glare from the sun made vision very difficult. As he was turning on the windshield sprays to clear his view, he got just enough vision to see that he was about to run straight into the large yellow bin. He swerved and narrowly averted near-certain death.

The roofers were very generous, considering that Dad never evaded responsibility. They paid the insurance deductible, paid Dad’s nominal health costs, and moved the bin off the street. Ahhh, the power of a feared lawsuit.

The company’s comptroller here at Soyokaze America has tendered her resignation, effective immediately. I’ve been working here for approximately a year and this is the third comptroller that we’ve had during this time. It’s not that they’ve lasted about five months a piece so much as they quit within a month and it takes a couple to find a new one. If we’ve had a comptroller for 5 of the last fifteen months, I’d be surprised.

One has to wonder what is prompting these highly qualified professionals, commanding one of the highest salaries at the company (we figure third, after the president and chief of sales) to leave their new post so quickly. The second comptroller moved down from Chicago to take the position, bought a house here, and quit within a month.

I don’t know that I’ve said this before, or if I have I’ve not said it often, but I really hope that it’s a matter of incompetence. Hopefully they take one look at the company books and decide that they want to see their children grow up rather than spend 100 hours a week sorting it out. The fact that we have had poor accounting is not really a secret.

I hope it’s incompetence because the alternative is that they’re leaving because they fear by taking ahold of their books they are opening themselves up for grand jury indictment. The nature of our business is quite odd. We are not generally expected to make money because we’re mostly a facilitator for other branches of the corporation to make their profit. As I’ve mentioned, last year when we only lost $15 million it was considered cause for celebration. This year we’ve made less than $70,000 profit on $75M of revenue and Japan is ecstatic about our progress. In other words, if Soyokaze America wanted to play around with some books by shifting profits and losses from one company to another, there’d be room to do it.

So… hopefully it’s incompetence. We’ve managed to survive incompetence this long. Criminal activity, on the other hand, is a tad more problematic. Give the track record of the company, I’d certainly bet on it being incompetence. I’m not sure we would have the accounting skill to cook any books.

Driving in to work today, I saw four trucks with the brand name “ATOYOT” on their front grilles.

It took me until I got to work 45 minutes later to work out that they were not an inexplicably popular new automotive brand that I’d somehow never heard of.

Best Buy Electronics, Blockbuster Video, and the health insurance industry. Three entities, one big thing in common: If they can find a way to screw you, they will.

Today the discussion is insurance. It’s been a couple months now since Clancy’s contract with the University of Estacado came to a close and she found herself without health insurance. We decided to put her on my plan. The only problem with that was that we had to demonstrate proof of an extenuating circumstance within 30 days of her loss of coverage. Since she got started late, all of the documentation we had was already past 30 days the day she left. That meant contacting her old insurance company and having them send something to my insurance company. The old insurance company has no motivation to do so since they aren’t going to make any money… so again and again after they promised they would they never did. Fortunately, my insurance company didn’t ask for it and she was covered.

Or at least we thought that she was. The thing is that we haven’t gotten a confirmation letter or an insurance card. All we’ve got is my paycheck being deducted $118 per paycheck rather than the $18 it was a few months ago. The paycheck swipes would suggest that she was covered, but you can never be really sure about that. All it would take is for one beancounter to note some missing documentation and suddenly they don’t have to pay us squat.

This week was open enrollment and I was debating whether or not we should just re-enroll her clean. The HR lady said that was entirely unnecessary because she was covered… but that reminded me of the aforementioned quality of insurance companies… if they can screw you, they will.

Turned out to be a non-issue. At the absolute last second they changed carriers, so everyone has to re-enroll. Tonight is the last night I have to bring everything home and have us fill it out, so I’m partially writing this post as a reminder to myself to remember to take the documentation home.

We had the meeting Monday afternoon. The new insurance company penalizes the living crap out of anyone that uses a name-brand drug when there is a generic available. So I asked a simple question… “What happens if the prescription specifically lists a brand-name drug, can the pharmacist switch it out for a generic?”

“Can you give me an example?”

The reason I asked was that I will probably start taking Welbutrin again at some point soon for smoking cessation. Welbutrin is going to go generic on 1/1/8, so I wanted to make sure that if I got a prescription before the new year that I wouldn’t pay a hefty price because it says “Welbutrin” rather than “Bupropion”. The thing is that I didn’t want to tell everyone which drug I was taking… so I said that Zoloft recently became a generic.

So now pretty much everyone is assuming that I take Zoloft for depression. I had a coworker come up to me and ask how long I had been taking it. I explained the whole Welbutrin thing and she asked how well Welbutrin does for smoking cessation… as we were talking about that a company bigwig walked up and asked if he was interrupting anything because he had a (work) question for me. Anyhow, we hedged what we were talking about (the guy doesn’t approve of smoking at all) and he said to me, “Oh, talking about your Zoloft prescription?”

As I do my final run-through on last year’s November Novel, I realized an unfortunate coincidence.

There is a political edge to my novel. It involves a character running for congress and the narrator’s differences with said character. The narrator is a pretty liberal guy. I actually intended him to be the voice of reason between the would-be congressman and another character. However, since the other character dies at the outset of the novel, it became difficult to air an opposing view.

However, since the narrator is liberal, I have to make an effort not to alienate conservative readers. I made an effort to provide both sides to the issues at hand (namely sexual morality and the role of morality and religion in politics), but since it’s told from the point of view of the narrator, he tends to get the last word.

Anyhow, there is a relatively minor character named Tom Haite, that is revealed to be a Republican. I really like the character Tom and wish that I had more room for him in the work. I just realized today that having a character whose name is most phonetically pronounced “hate” that is a Republican is probably not a good idea. Which is a shame, because I like the name and came up with it prior to realizing that he would have anything to say politically.

Ironically, the next named I came up with was Tom Hades. I pronounced it “haids”, but it’s spelled the same as the proto-satanistic Greek god. I can’t seem to win.

The other day I was talking to my coworker Pat as she fiddled through a bunch of photographs from the latest pet festival, wherein a bunch of pet owners get together and they have competitions for fastest dog and cutest doggie costume (as well as competitions for cats, but I can’t imagine what those might be… most snobby furball?). I noticed something as she was thumbing through them: 9 out of ever 10 pictures included a woman, very rarely a woman with a husband in tow.

I asked Pat how the gender disparity at these shows ran. She said that it was probably 30% families, 60% unaccompanied women, 10% unaccompanied guys. I asked how many of the women had husbands that decided to stay at home and watch the football game, she said relatively few. I asked how single men and single women stacked up at these things, pretty sure of the answer.

One of the great mysteries of life finally has an answer! Most of my life I have been in social situations where the number of single guys far, far outstrips the number of single women. If you go to an anime convention or anything involving computers, single women are at a premium. I’ve joked before that if my daughter has trouble finding a boyfriend I would point her the way to an anime convention or I would keep her as far away from the convention as possible, depending on my disposition. As I’ve mentioned before, if you’re a girl at an anime convention, the odds are good, but the goods are odd.

For much of my adult life, going back to when I was single and it mattered a great deal, I’ve wondered what the female equivalent to an anime convention is. Gender disparities run deep at things like PTA meetings and yoga doozits, but those are stuffed full of married women. Even churches are often almost as bereft of young, single women as they are of young, single men.

And now, years too late, I’ve finally found one! Pet shows! Pet festivals! Anything that involves dressing pets in costumes! I should have thought of this before. My ex-girlfriend Julie was a professional dog trainer and she had almost entirely female coworkers. I guess I didn’t know that these pet festivals existed. Then again, not having a pet of my own I probably wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of it anyway. That is, of course, the catch. Always a catch.

I suppose that had I been insistent I could have gotten a pet and gone to pet shows. In honesty one of the reasons I never got a pet was that I didn’t want to cut off any potential romantic opportunities. It paid off because taking one to Deseret and then here would have been a challenge. It could have opened more doors than it closed at least as far as that was concerned. But which doors?

The idea of getting romantically involved in a pet-fanatic is frankly a little off-putting. I don’t mean someone that has pets (I like dogs and can put up with cats), but the kind of person that dressed them up in silly costumes. There are a whole lot of negative stereotypes there and not all of them unearned. Julie was something of a pet fanatic, but I’m not sure if she is exactly the norm (and she had issues all her own).

The idea occurred to me that that’s surely one of the issues at play with anime conventions. I never got the sense that it bothered potential romantic partners that I watched anime from time to time, though I was careful not to mention the conventioneering aspect of it. If I was a young single woman, I could see having the same concerns for anime people that I seem to regarding pet fanatics. Even if the numbers run in your favor, there is a certain odd feeling about who would go to those shows.

According to Pat, most of the women that go to these things are in their late twenties and early thirties. There are many that guys should stay away from, but a lot that she figures would be good wife material. On a sidenote, chances are a little better than even that Pat is a lesbian, so she may have put more thought into these things than the average woman might. On the other hand, if she is a lesbian, her criteria are a bit different. I specially asked about lesbianism (the fact that half the men that show up are gay came up, so I had an opening) and she said very few were lesbians.

Then again, there’s something pretty desperate about getting a pet for the sake of going to these things and something unfair to the pet besides. Though for someone like me that always wanted a pet but didn’t get one, it might not have been the worst idea.

In any case, I can already hear the crows from the likes of Roissy and his followers about how the women that attend these things are rejects. The quotient of rejects likely is pretty high, but they are at least with-it enough to be able to take care of an animal and selfless enough to devote themselves to doing so. A little odd, maybe, but it at least provides a window into why women are ill-at-ease about a certain portion of the male community that is disproportionately stocked with rejects.