They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Sure sounds insane, doesn’t it? The problem is, however, that sometimes insanity in this vein is justified.

My job at Mindstorm primarily has me working with prototype hardware. On one hand, we complain that nothing works remotely like it should. On the other hand, if it worked like it should then it wouldn’t be on our desks. They would be testing it further down the line. Oh, and we’d be out of the job. So we complain, but we have the dual joy of substantial territory of justified complaint and that the existence of said territory justifying our salary.

The thing about prototypes is that they usually do work. They have to work at least somewhat for them to leave the desk of the designer and manufacturing. Just as a better working device would be on someone’s desk a little further down the line, a completely inoperable device would be on someone’s desk before it gets to us. However, while the devices we’re testing work, they don’t work well. Or, if they work well, they don’t work consistently.

Which brings me back to insanity. Our job, we’ve come to discover, encourages insanity. It justifies it. Why? Because doing the same thing over and over again almost always yields different results. I can sit there for three days trying to get something to work. I know that it can work in at least some environment because it found its way onto my bench. I don’t know, however, if there is any way for it to work in my environment. There’s no telling why it would work somewhere else but not where I am, but stranger things have happened. So I can be spending all of this time trying to get something to work, declare it dead (or dead in my environment), fire it up for my coworkers or supervisors and have it work. Perfectly. We’ve all been through this enough times that it’s not even embarrassing when it happens. While it doesn’t embarrass, though, it does affirm insanity. Never stop doing the same thing over and over and over again. If it fails 9 times out of ten but works the tenth, you can file a report saying that it only sometimes work. file a report after having only gone through the first nine failures and you have to say that it never works, in which case the report will get sent back to you caterogized under “NUH-UH!” because it does, presumably, work somewhere.

Ideally speaking, after filing a report saying that it does not work on your bench, you would get some assistance in locating the problem. Assistance by the people that know enough about it to get it working. And sometimes you get it, which presents something of a catch-22. Either they notice what you did wrong very quickly and you appear to be stupid, or more frequently they can’t see it either, in which case you are vindicated but nonetheless sitting there with a $5,000 paperweight on your desk and a growing backlog of things that need to get done.

Generally speaking, we prefer the vindication. Our pride, it would seem, is frequently more important to us than our productivity.

There was a planned power outage on the block yesterday. I forgot to turn all the computers off and have apparently paid a pretty hefty price. Namely, it seems that my USB ports have gone all screwy. On all three of my desktops.

On one computer, the simply plugging in of a USB device causes the device to reboot.

On the second computer, USB devices don’t work. It thinks that there are USB devices that are not plugged in. It sends a message every few minutes telling me that a device’s drivers did not install correctly and that I may have difficulty using my device. Further, it registers a third ROM device that is not actually present. I don’t know if that’s a USB problem, but it strikes me as being possibly related (if it thinks that the non-existent USB drive is a CD-ROM).

On the third computer, plugging in a USB device disables the mouse and keyboard.

Which actually brings me to a fourth point. Not all USB is dysfunctional, cause the KVM switch is USB and I’ve not had any problems there (except on the third computer when I plug in an external drive. And a fifth point, a USB device that was plugged into a laptop has stopped working altogether.

I suspect that this would have been avoided if I’d remembered to turn my computers off or if I’d had a better surge protector or a UPS. Taking all of those mistakes as a given, does anyone else know how I can right these wrongs? Are the USB ports permanently damaged on all three computers? Holy cow would that generate a figurative obnoxious odor.

I’m wondering if either the city of Soundview or state of Cascadia passed a law requiring fast food places to post their calories on their menu. I stopped by Jack in the Box on Saturday morning and they’d put stickers with the calorie count all over their drive-through menu. I’m thinking that Jack did not do this as a gesture of good will because it was pretty shocking. That fast food is unhealthy is hardly news, but I figured that Jack was about like the rest of them. Turns out that they stack up pretty poorly with McDonald’s, which is the general point-of-comparison that I make.

The biscuit sandwich I was going to get is 740 calories, compared to 570 for McDonalds. At McDonalds, you can get a sausage McMuffin with egg and cheese for 465 calories. No such tasty sandwich exists at Jack for under 500 calories except a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese biscuit (which is comparable in health content to McD’s). Roughly half of Jack’s breakfast menu is over 500 calories compared to about a third for McDonald’s.

The dinner menu is little better. McDonald’s only has one burger over 600 calories (Double Quarter Pounder, 740) and Jack in the Box had at least a dozen with half of those being over 1,000.

I’ve gotten into debates in the past over whether restaurants should be forced to put up nutritional content. Some say that the motivation behind doing so is to shame fat people and that anybody eating at fast food restaurants is obviously not worried about health content. To some extent they’re right on the latter part, but I’m not sure if that’s sufficient. Some people aren’t overly worried about counting calories, but I think that it is in general a really good idea to remind people how many calories that they’re consuming. One of the most successful dieting maneuvers in existence is simply keeping track of how much you consume in a day. People are notoriously forgetful when it comes to everything that they’ve eaten in a day but they remember better when each thing has a number value assigned to it. Even if you don’t set yourself up with limits and even if you don’t have a calculator with you, it still helps you realize where exactly your greatest dietary sins are and almost always provides easier ways to cut back.

By eating at McDonald’s rather than Jack in the Box, for instance.

It makes the really unhealthy stuff much less enjoyable. It’ll be a while before I eat another Ultimate Cheeseburger, for sure.

Do any of y’all own one?

My post yesterday involved two incidents which I chalked up to “coaching myopia”. Interestingly, everybody focused on the second article about the 100-0 blowout in Texas rather than the dead kid in Kentucky. The story has spread to a lot of other blogs, which inspired me to do a little more looking into the matter. And I’m going to need to eat at least a little bit of crow.

Former Covenant Coach Micah Grimes says that his team never ran up the score and that the 100-0 score was despite conservative play for almost the entire game. I was, to say the least, a bit skeptical. So I decided to do a little investigating. What I was hoping to find were cases where the two teams played common opponents and derive from there whether the teams were so mismatched that a conservative team could run such a total.

The answer is maybe, though the results were inconclusive. To date, I could only find one common opponent: Waxahatchie Prep.

• Covenant beat Waxahatchie 77-27.
• Waxahatchie beat The Dallas Academy 66-4.

Also backing Grimes up is this rather stunning nugger: The Dallas Academy scored fewer than ten points in four of their five games.

So one thing I retract is the culpability of The Dallas Academy in all of this. This goes beyond “never winning a game*”. I don’t know how they manage to field the team. Regardless of the small talent-pool and dyslexic players, I have difficulty imagining that they can’t field a team better than this or, if they really can’t, finding some other arrangement to get these girls whatever it is that they’re getting from intermural basketball. I wonder if this ruckus wasn’t caused by the losing coach trying to explain away a lot more than a ruthless opponent.

100 points is a 2-point basket every 24 seconds of play. To be fair, according to Grimes they scored 25 points in the first three minutes prior to going conservative. So toss out the last quarter (which I’ll get to in a minute) and the first three minutes, you still have 63 points over 27 minutes, or a basket every 25 seconds.

If against a truly inept opponent like TDA, that doesn’t strike me as being particularly difficult to do. Indeed, if the first three minutes are any indication, they could have scored a lot more than that. So in that vein, I am no longer convinced that there was a full-press the entire game.

That being said, I am still not convinced that the score represents a team remotely concerned with anything but winning. Here are my areas of concern:

• Grimes suggests that there is nothing wrong with blowouts. He describes one that his team suffered and seems to look at it as a learning experience. I respectfully disagree with him on that point, but I believe that it is something that he truly believes. Coaching myopia and all that.
• He states that the Covenant athletic directors were present at the game. They apparently did not see the game as he saw it. Unlike a TDA coach trying not to get fired, they have no motivation to come out as strongly and forcefully as they did (too forcefully, I believed even before these discoveries, which I’ll get to in a minute).
• He says that he ran the clock. However much more they might have scored if they’d gone full-throttle, the score does not indicate a run clock. There is no shot clock in high school basketball.
• There was a significant drop-off in the last quarter (which is why I threw out the last quarter in my earlier tally), once they got their 100 points. Whatever they did after that point, they could have done prior to that point.

So what do I think happened? My guess is that Grimes did not actively run up the score. The Dallas Academy’s ineptitude made it seem like they did. I also believe that Grimes did not call the dogs back as he implies. I don’t think that he sees any reason for doing so (ever).

I also think I may have been wrong in blame allocation within Covenant. Though I didn’t say so in my post yesterday, I thought that it was a shame that the girls were being tarred (by their own school, no less!) for what I believe to be the coach’s aggressiveness. I percieved the girls doing what the coach said and the coach saying what they always say: Try your heart out.

Instead, what seems likely to me is that it was the girls that were itching to get to 100 and that’s why there was a drop-off after that point. The coach did not call off the hunt like he should have, but he wasn’t pressing the run-up. None of this is to suggest that the girls themselves should be excoriated. They’re high schoolers, after all. I still believe that sort of thing is the coach’s responsibility. When my father was a coach, I have no doubt that he would have demanded it of us. My father, of course, being the gold standard of all that is good and right.

All of this brings me to a separate point, which is that I never really advocated Grimes being fired. I don’t blame Covenant for doing it and I felt like it had to be done. Not so much for the boxscore, but because this episode made it apparent that his worldview did not match theirs and because when push came to shove, he did not fall into line as he should have from a purely practical standpoint. Prior to hearing his response, I did not think a firing was in order.

I still don’t believe that the forfeiture and the administration’s loud condemnation of their students was in order. That is the type of thing that you handle privately. The forceful language of the press release struck me as moral grandstanding. They were scheduled to play one another later in the year and it probably would have been a better idea to cancel and forfeit that game. Especially since it’s unlikely to be played anyway.

On to the league. I previously advocated a Slaughter Rule as a solution to this mess. I still think that such a rule is necessary. It’s worth noting, however, that such a rule likely would have resulted in early cancellations of a significant portion of TDA games.

While I was wading through scores, one thing that jumped out at me was just how lopsided a lot of games were. 100-0 was relatively unique (I found only one game where the winning team scored over 80 points and only a handful over 65), but there is a greater degree of variance in scores than I would be even remotely comfortable with. To wit:

• Terrell beat Covenant 77-33.
• Covenant beat North Hills 71-19.
• Melissa beat North Hills 93-7.
• North Hills beat Hampton Prep 47-2.
• Hampton Prep beat nobody.
• But since they did score more than 10 points in three of their ten games, Hampton Prep could probably beat The Dallas Academy.

Hampton Prep apparently needs a coach. Micah Grimes needs a job. Apparently prior to Grimes taking the job at Covenant, their program was in pretty awful shape. He is apparently good at breathing life into struggling programs. I have, as my father would say pointing his finger into the air, an idea.

Grimes for Hampton Prep!

Or, for that matter, for The Dallas Academy!

Kentucky High School Football Coach Charged With Reckless Homicide in Player’s Death (AP)

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A Kentucky high school football coach was charged Thursday with reckless homicide in the death of a player who collapsed during a sweltering practice in a rare criminal case against a coach in a heat death.

A grand jury indicted David Jason Stinson in the death of Pleasure Ridge Park offensive lineman Max Gilpin. Stinson, in his first year as head coach at the Louisville school, was directing practice on Aug. 20 when the heat index reached 94 degrees and the 15-year-old sophomore collapsed and had trouble breathing.

The player had a temperature of 107 degrees when he arrived at the hospital, authorities said, and died three days later. No autopsy was performed, but it appeared Gilpin died from complications from heat stroke, according to the coroner’s office.

There was a scorching summer in Delosa where six football players died of heat-stroke or something similar. That happened to be the year before I started my first and only year in scholastic football. The legislature passed a law, which was pretty much ignored by the coaches. The sports mentality often runs contrary to modern medicine and common sense. Coaches believe, not wrongly, that students are not aware of what they are capable of until they are told to buck up and just do it. Kids make excuses all the time about being hot and uncomfortable and the coach’s solution is to plow forward. There is some real value in this ethos. Unfortunately, sometimes things that seem to be excuses aren’t excuses at all and bad things happen that shouldn’t happen. Whether a high school student is capable of working for three-and-a-half hours in football equipment in the sun is quite well beside the point. They shouldn’t have to. There are other places that they can learn the power of perseverance.

Dallas school apologizes for 100-0 win, will seek to forfeit victory (Sports Illustrated)

DALLAS (AP) — A Texas high school girls basketball team on the winning end of a 100-0 game has a case of blowout remorse.

Now officials from the winning school say they are trying to do the right thing by seeking a forfeit and apologizing for the margin of victory.

In a statement Thursday on The Covenant School’s Web site, the head of school said, “It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened.” He went on to say that Covenant has made “a formal request to forfeit the game recognizing that a victory without honor is a great loss.”

Last week Covenant, a private Christian school in Dallas, defeated Dallas Academy 100-0. Covenant was up 59-0 at halftime.

A parent who attended the game told The Associated Press that Covenant continued to make 3-pointers — even in the fourth quarter. She praised the Covenant players but said spectators and an assistant coach were cheering wildly as their team edged closer to 100 points.

The Dallas Academy is wanting to pull out of the league for at least the rest of the season and the Covenant school fired the coach (who expressed no regret over the margin of victory). The Dallas Academy is comparable in size to Covenant, but only has 20 girls with 8 of them on the basketball team. They haven’t won a game in four years and by most accounts Covenant knew before the opening buzzer that they were going to win. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban invited the Dallas Academy girls to watch a Mavericks game from the luxury boxes, which is an incredibly nice gesture. Some are suggesting that it’s the Academy’s fault for fielding a team that is seemingly incapable of winning. That’s true only insofar as winning should be considered the only point. I’m astonished that they’re capable of getting 40% of their female student population to sign up to play. It speaks well of their atmosphere that they can.

This again strikes me as an issue of coaching mentality which is that you never, ever teach student athletes not to try their best. That’s the stuff that bad habits are made of. So even in a game you know you’re going to win, you set some other goal so that they have something to shoot for. In this case, 100 points it would seem. It’s not surprising that the fans and coaches were excited. Winning by that much is an exciting event. I am personally not as opposed to “running up the score” as some people are. I think that when you’re ahead by a certain amount you take your starters out and let the backups have some fun. The problem is that in school sporting events at that level, there are always teams that are inherently disadvantaged.

I think in this case, as with the football case above, the solution has to involve non-coaches getting involved. Coaches are, generally speaking, “small-picture” people. A former Southern Tech football coach made some news when he was complaining about the school forcing him to move practices for the next football game upstate. He was quite literally unaware that they were forcing this because a hurricane was scheduled to hit Colosse. I suspect that the basketball league involved in the second story are about to institute a Slaughter Rule and Kentucky should probably look into having the same sort of practice-limitation that Delosa does (with the difference of actually enforcing said limitation).

In Abel Keogh’s book, it was apparent that Abel was mentally and emotionally ready to start dating again before his family was ready for him to be. It reminded me of the case of my ex-girlfriend Julie’s grandfather, Earl, and his first wive Eliza and second Beth.

Eliza was Julie’s grandmother and, despite having met her off-and-on for a year or so, I never really got to know her. Her mind was almost entirely gone by the time that I entered the picture. Early onset Alzheimer. Alzheimer is a tragic enough disease whenever it strikes, but particularly so when it strikes somebody as early as their fifties, as it did with Eliza. I remember the first time I met her, Julie hadn’t actually warned me about her condition, and since her age made dimentia seem unlikely our first conversation included her talking nonsene and my trying to figure out why I couldn’t understand her.

It was extremely painful from the perspective of Julie and her brother Mack, to whom their grandmother was a daily babysitter as they grew up and both of their parents worked. It was also, of course, very difficult on Julie’s mother and her siblings, watching the woman that raised them mentally fall apart. Their relationship with their father Earl had never been spectactular. Earl wasn’t the easiest person to get along with. Eliza was often left to play peacemaker.

Eliza died a couple years into my relationship with Julie. It’s sometimes the case when someone goes after such a gradual degradation that the family is relieved as much as anything else. Sad to see the loved one go, of course, but happier about them being in a better place or not suffering anymore. That was the case with my grandmother, who died at 91 after having lost her senses a couple of years before. That wasn’t how Julie’s family felt about it. Probably in part because she wasn’t in much physical pain as nearly as they could tell. She was just frustrated, confused, and largely unaware. She also wasn’t 91, so there wasn’t the feeling of a full life well lived, She was cut down before her time. It was one of the saddest funerals I had ever gone to.

Controversy ensued six months later when Earl started dating again. Julie and her family were outraged. They hadn’t finished grieving yet so how could be possibly be? Accusations about him desecrating her memory ensued. Earl didn’t help matters by being Earl and trying to ram his new girlfriend down everyone’s throat without an ounce of delicacy. Things were further strained by the over-all strained relationships that existed to begin with. There was also the matter that Beth, the new girlfriend, looked vaguely similar to Eliza and had the same formal first name. Accusations ran the gamut from concern that he was trying to replace her (by finding someone so similar) to anger that he was trying to forget her (by getting together with someone new so quickly).

I privately stood back and didn’t say much. I listened as Julie ranted. I wasn’t going to stand up for him, but I thought that the family was bring rather unfair. Or maybe too narrow in how they were looking at it. They were looking at it from the perspective of grieving children and grandchildren. They felt that they had lost something very important to them and I think that some of their anger towards Earl was on the basis of what he was doing to them. Not liking Earl much myself and of course loving Julie and with her family being like a second to me, I had every incentive to agree with their perspective, but ultimately I couldn’t.

There were two main things.

First is that however hard it is to lose a parent or grandparent, I don’t think that it really compares to losing a spouse. Particularly when you’ve been with them for decades. They were more than someone you loved, but were the partner with whom you built an entire life. Before the kids were there and after they left the house, it was the two of them together. He was going home to her every day when the kids were visiting on holidays and periodic weekends. It’s impossible to compare grief, but I do have to think that the comparative loss of losing the partner is worse than losing the parent. Even when the latter is lost before their time.

The second issue was the protracted nature of her illness left him a lot of time to deal with what had happened. He’d had a lot of time to come to terms with it. Bit by bit, he watched the darkness swallow her mind. The kids saw it whenever they visited her, but he saw it whenever he went home. Or was home. Since he was retired, that was a lot. Given the peculiar nature of her illness, that she was mentally gone before physically so, he had probably already let go of her before she had died. And I honestly couldn’t even blame him for that. He didn’t get over her in the course of six months. He got over her in the course of five years.

When Earl and Beth married, the family attended but wore an article on their clothing in memory of Earl’s first wife. I would have been more understanding if it had been directed towards their deceased relative as a sort of “We love you and haven’t forgetten you” manner, but in reality it was directed at Earl as a sort of “Well, we love her and haven’t forgotten her.”

In the intervening years since Julie and I parted ways, that side of her family has more-or-less fallen apart. Julie has stopped even visiting them for Thanksgiving and Christmas, even going so far as starting her own tradition with her brother and some cousins. I don’t think that Earl’s remarriage is the reason for any of that. If that were the case the dissolution would have happened much sooner. Unfortunately, Eliza was the glue that held the family together and when she departed and when the departure harbored some controversy, things just naturally fell apart.

Do any of you watch the show “Without A Trace”? I’ve seen a few episodes and they almost all seem to boil down to two points:

1. OMG KIDS ARE HAVING SEX! LOTS OF SEX! YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT KIND OF DECREPID {redacted} YOUR KIDS ARE INTO!!!!

2. AND THEY”RE ALL INTO IT! IF YOU DON’T KNOW THIS YOU ARE A NAIVE IDIOT!!!!

3. OMG KIDS ARE BEING MISSING AND EXPLOITED!!!!!

4. AND IT PROBABLY HAS TO DO WITH SEX!!!!!!

It seems like the entire tilt of the show is in the direction of providing justification and ammunition for every ounce of parental paranoia in existence. Seriously, it seems like the moral to the story, to the extent that there is one, is “Never, ever take your eyes off your child for a single instant!”

It makes me think a bit of Adam Walsh, the anti-crime crusader made famous by America’s Most Wanted whose own case has recently been closed. On the surface, no doubt Walsh’s crusade is a righteous one. Going after the bad guys, after all, is something that we can all support.

Of course, in his own way, Walsh represents more than that.

A while back, a blog was trying to make the point that as bad as things are right now, they’re not nearly as bad as are times that they are compared to. The Great Depression. The 60’s. So on. The author asked if anybody, given the choice, would return to the 1960’s. More than one person said that they would in fact go back in time because the world in general has become a darker place than it was when they could walk freely in the neighborhood without fear of getting kidnapped or molested.

Certainly there are places that are a lot more dangerous than they used to be. But how much more dangerous is it in places where residents spend their time surfing the internet and commenting on political blogs? How much more dangerous is it for the types of crimes that haunted the Walsh’s for so long?

I’m not convinced very. If at all.

Walsh’s program (from the best that I can recall) focused primarily on wanted fugitives, but Walsh himself represented the dangers of the modern world. Perhaps a program that better represents that today is To Catch a Predator, which sets up pedophiles. The program has come under some scrutiny lately for glamorizing tragedy and even in some quarters for being too hard on suspects that haven’t been given a fair trial.

Part of me likes the program. I like the notion that pedophiles would live in fear of being exposed not just to the long arm of the law but on national television. High-profile stuff like that may actually make some people think twice. The effect on potential perpetrators is positive. The effect on parents and children, though, is more worthy of concern.

In my later high school years I spent significant amounts of time online talking to people. My parents didn’t know the dangers that it presented. This was, on the whole, a good thing. Otherwise they would have curtailed my activities. That would have prevented me from getting much of the socialization that I desperately needed. But to listen to critics, the room that they gave me made my parents somewhere between negligent and grossly reckless.

I’ve mentioned before that I favor a more laid back approach on the part of parents and I guess some of my trepidation with the Harbingers is that they get in the way of that. Not with calm, necessary warnings about potential dangers but with scaremongering. I’m not sure that these types of warnings do a whole lot of good. They seem more likely to create parents that alternate between frantic and exhausted. Fighting all of the little battles so that they’re too spent to keep their eye on the big ones.

Often, they seem to set parents up to set unreasonable limitations. Limitations that, when unsuccessful, leave kids unprepared to deal with the dangers that they weren’t supposed to be explosed to. It’s analogous to preaching abstinence in cases where a more level-headed discussion of the potential dangers of sex would be more appropriate. Or setting up an unreasonable curfew that leaves kids sneaking out completely unaccounted for and afraid to turn to their parents when they need help getting out of whatever situation they weren’t supposed to be in.
I can’t help but wonder if the result is an erosion of trust. Parents believing that their kids are engaging in all the worst behavior they hear about kids engaging in and kids fearing that their parents will assume the worst if they open up about even remotely problematic behavior. Not that I think everything would be perfect otherwise, but I think that the widespread anxiety caused by all of this attitudes may be more damaging than the things that this paranoia prevents.

Note that I’m not talking about all the terrible things out there that happen, but specifically the ones that would happen but don’t because their parents are scared and are instilling that fear on their kids. It’s not that bad things never happen. Of course they do. Terrible things. I’m less sure about what the appropriate level of fear is and how the reasonableness of this fear has been distorted by media sensationalism.

A couple months ago I got an email from Simon’s girlfriend telling me that they weren’t going to be visiting us in Cascadia this year as had previously been planned on account of Simon being laid off from Falstaff. Longtime readers of Hit Coffee will recognize Falstaff as being the company I used to work for that inspired a lot of this site’s early material. I was sad to hear the news about the layoffs. Partially for Simon’s sake, but also because if Falstaff laid Simon (and Martin, I discovered) off, they must be close to a skeleton crew.

Before I elaborate on that, I’m going to rewind to something that I didn’t write a couple years ago.

About a year after I left Falstaff and we relocated to Estacado, my ex-boss Willard sent me an email informing me that Falstaff had a pretty big round of layoffs. That wasn’t particularly surprising because Falstaff is in a sector of the economy that’s been hurting for the last few years now. I had mixed feelings about that. I of course felt bad for Melvin and the others that were laid off, but a part of me felt relieved. Why? Because it was right about the point where I began really enjoying my job. With the exception of some of the friends I made up there (many of which at work), that job was the hardest thing to leave.

The good thing I could take out of the layoffs, though, was that the job I hated leaving was probably no longer there. I don’t know if Willard would have cut me loose like he did with a lot of others or not, but it’s almost certain that I would have been back to the monotonous, hands-on work that I started at. Whether that would have been better or worse than the monotonous work I was doing in Estacado I do not know, but it was at least a closer call and because I was making so much more money in Estacado, probably an improvement where I was.

Whether I had survived that first cut or not, I definitely would not have survived the most recent one. Deseret is not an easy place to find work in, even in a relatively good economy. Both Simon and Martin ended up working at Kimball Group, which is the place that they left to start working at Deseret. Ironically, leaving Kimball for the better paying work (with better advancement opportunities) at Falstaff ended up hurting them.

After getting the original email, I emailed Willard to find out how bad the damage was. He played a rather cruel trick on me by pretending that the email had been delayed or bounced back before responding. They really have become a skeleton crew that’s mostly a knowledge base for the company’s eventual resurgence. I’ve had malicious fantasies that Wildcat closed down and its owner Calvin went bankrupt, but now that one of the places I’ve worked for has all but disappeared (at least for the time being) it really has a spooky sort of feeling. And a sad one.

“Mark my words — if we let them take away our God-given right to pickle small children in a nicotine haze, they won’t stop there. Don’t come crying to me if somebody eventually questions whether it’s wise to let children watch fourteen uninterrupted hours of television, or if tossing a baby into the air repeatedly until he throws up is harmful for his development.” -Tony Woodlief

A while back I wrote a post that never actually made it on to Hit Coffee asking about a particular program to perform particular tasks much more adeptly than the default product that Mindstorm puts on its products. I also got on my high horse about Mindstorm and how their product ought to be able to perform these tasks without third party assistance and how that’s one of Mindstorm’s problems and blah, blah, blah. But before I posted it, two things happened: First, I found a couple third-party program that did enough of what I wanted to do. Secondly, I started working at Mindstorm.

One thing that I have discovered is that, for all of my frustration with Mindstorm for not having the aforementioned product, is that they have an application that does exactly that. It does everything that I was looking for and more. It does it remarkably faster than any of the third-party products I use. It is, around the lab, considered one of the most powerful tools we have.

The thing is, Mindstorm never released this product. Not in the company’s flagship product, not packaged with any of the company’s other product, not downloadable from mindstorm.corp, and not for sale as its own product. In fact, it used to be the only way that you could get a hold of this application was to smuggle it out of Mindstorm HQ. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way Mindstorm discovered that people were smuggling it out and so they added a safeguard that made it so that it would never work outside of Mindstorm’s own network.

Why Mindstorm is so concerned about such a helpful application that they do not offer for sale (and, as far as I know, never plan to) I am not sure. I sort of know why they never released it, I guess. It’s a little rough around the edges and it’s actually so powerful that it can gobble up a lot of CPU while it’s going. Maybe Mindstorm wouldn’t want such an unstable product bearing the corporate name and better not to offer it than have people cursing yet another product that Mindstorm does offer. Nevermind, of course, that I have been cursing Mindstorm for years for not offering a product like this.

In any event, I use that application a lot in my day-to-day work. It’s somewhat necessary. And since my computers at work are always on the network, there’s no problem. Or at least there wasn’t until the other day when we had an Internet outage. I had access to all of the local servers, but didn’t have the Internet. I didn’t think that this was actually much of a problem because little of my job requires getting on the net, but it turned out to be quite a big problem: For some reason, the authenticity check on the application did not check internal servers but instead checked externally somehow. I got a message informing me that I needed to either get the computer back on the network or, if I needed to take it off the network, I needed to talk about it to IT.

Then, even when the Internet came back, the application still didn’t work. Once off the “network”, always off the network. It was easy enough to uninstall and reinstall. Even so, the degree to which my legitimate use of a Mindstorm product for Mindstorm was hobbled by piracy protection on a product that nobody can buy struck be as a little bit humorous.

I hate the very existence of inaugural poetry. Despite all the pomp and preening involved with inaugurations, it’s that which I find over-indulgent. Maybe I just can’t consider poetry beyond proto-goths dressed all in black sitting in the back of a classroom feeling so tortuously misunderstood. Obviously on some level I know that poetry is used for other things, but I swear I have difficulty ever reading poetry that doesn’t say “Hey, look at me!” or “Hey, look at me look {nature/life/God/Mother Earth/whatever}!”

I didn’t get to watch the inauguration as I was stuck in traffic when it happened, though I will shortly have the whole thing downloaded.

Mindstorm made a pretty big to-do about it. Employees (in our building, at least) were invited to watch the swearing in and speech on the TVs in the cafeteria.

I thought that it was interesting that John Paul Stevens swore in the Vice President. I figured that the VP was sworn in by the Chief Justice, too. Apparently there’s quite a bit of discretion and that they don’t even have to be sworn in by a judge (Mondale and Cheney were sworn in by the Speaker of the House, Gore and George H. Bush by associate justices). I learned something new today!

It’s rather unfortunate that the special occasions was flubbed by the Chief Justice during the oath, which caught the now-president off-guard. Took them a minute or two to get their act together, but I suppose it’s forgivable since not only is it both of their first time, but as recently as five years ago it was exceptionally unlikely that either of them would be holding the positions that they now do.

The conspiracy-mongering among liberals that Roberts screwed up on purpose so that conservatives will be able to delegitimize Obama’s presidency (”He never took the oath!”) are kind of funny. As are murmurs on the right that it is somehow “revealing” that Obama took the oath with his middle name (”Such things are unheard of if you look back at and only at Jimmy Carter!”).

It took me quite a bit of time to find a picture of Obama taking the oath that didn’t prominantly feature Roberts’s bald crown but had no luck. Roberts needs to take some Rogaine. He’s the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. It’s not like anybody can badmouth him for it. Of course, perhaps being Chief Justice means that you don’t have to worry about Rogaine in the same way that being old means that you can wear your pants however darn high you please.

Obama’s speech contained what I’m pretty sure is an inaccuracy less than five sentences in. Forty-three men have taken the oath, not forty-four. But surely Obama’s speechwriters and handlers would catch a mistake before I did, wouldn’t they? Did someone take the oath but never the office? I don’t see how that’s possible. Then again, they did claim to be directing the non-existent “Office of President-Elect” when no such office exists and Obama wasn’t technically even the president-elect, so maybe such details were considered unimportant.

Bush is apparently back in Texas. The whole concept of going from the most powerful man in the world to having to move out in one day seems kind of weird to me. I’m not sure how that works. Were they living out of suitcases that last week? I like to imagine that there was luggage in the back of that helicopter.

I’m sure that Half Sigma considers it suspicious that Bristol Palin’s newborn baby wasn’t at the inauguration (almost as though she doesn’t exist! Hmmmmmm…).

ADDENDUM: Roberts and Obama decided to take another shot at it, just to be cautious. No doubt Lincoln’s Bible had been put away, but odd that they wouldn’t go to the slight inconvenience of finding another one. Did the Bushes not leave behind any? Why have the Gideons let us down? Now we get four years of some people saying “See! He didn’t take the oath on the Bible after all! Just like we said he wouldn’t!”

-{Note that while this is about a political event, I tried not to take sides. Leave comments with care.}-

Newsome is blogging again! Actually, as near as I can tell he started blogging almost immediately after I put his blog in the “Dead Blogs” category. Interesting, in November he touched on an issue familiar to HC readers while trying to procure a Blackberry Storm*:

Much to my surprise, my quoted price was not $200, as widely advertised, but $500. I called customer service and was told that my contract was too recent to permit an upgrade and that I would, in fact, have to pay $500 if I wanted a Storm. I didn’t like this, but contracts are contracts, so I asked how much it would cost to terminate my contract early (by about a year and a half). $125 was the answer. So, I asked, “you’ll sell this phone to a stranger for $200, but an existing customer has to pay $500?” I was told that was the case. Again, not good news, but I understand the math so far. I had one more question: “But if I wanted to, I could pay $125 to terminate my contract today, come back tomorrow and pay $200, thereby achieving an actual price of $325?” I could tell the phone rep was uncomfortable, but ultimately she agreed that I could do that. “But you won’t sell me the phone for $325 without having to go through all of that?” She said she couldn’t. The cost was understandable, even if a little frustrating, but the unnecessary hoops were more than I could handle. So a wonderful thing happened.

I canceled my Verizon account, drove to the local ATT store, bought a 16G 3G iPhone and had my number ported over. At the end of the day, I have a much better phone at a lower cost. $125 is a lot of money, but amortized over the remaining 18 or so months of my Verizon contract, I’m more than happy to pay an extra $7 a month for the iPhone experience.

This is a much better example than the $60 I was talking about saving with AT&T and the Fuze! While I can’t… ahem… endorse getting an iPhone… I’m glad that Newsome is happy with his and I think Verizon got their just deserts.

On the other hand, AT&T apparently has a trick up their sleeve and now I can even better see why they are so excited about selling the phone as part of a plan! If you read the fine print, the offer is good only if you make every payment in full and on time. In other words, if you’re a day late or a dollar short, you’ll get billed for the balance of your savings on the phone (minus the initial rebate). In this case, $310. Further, I wouldn’t be at all surprised that if you were late or short and they pulled the trigger on this that you wouldn’t be let out of the two year commitment. If it’s legal for them to hold you up to your end of the bargain even when they’ve abrogated theirs, I have no doubt in my mind that’s exactly what they would do. My faith in AT&T (and its competitors) is such that my heart skipped a beat when I logged on to the account manager and discovered that they knew exactly what kind of phone I had even though I never told them. I mean, I guess abstractly I knew that they could figure such things out, but it’s still a bit disconcerting. Fortunately, there’s not much they can actually do with this information other than try to sell me unlimited data transfer.

A great reminder of why I purchased my phone independent of my provider. They’re not the boss of me, no.

* - Not to be confused with my employer’s product, the Stormphone.

I have a higher-quality copy of this video on my computer. When I have difficulty getting up in the morning, I actually play this video and it seems to actually help get me moving. I guess it’s no big surprise that a video about trying to make it to the freedom that comes at the end of the day helps me face the prospect of going to work!

Back when I was in my late teens, I knew a kid named Gavin Redding. Though we had a fair amount in common, Gavin and I never really got along. He tended to think that he was smarter than everybody, I was a member of “everybody”, and I didn’t like being talked down to by a kid two years younger and over a foot shorter. Even so, he was regularly invited to our outings because… well, because unless you tried to hire a hitman with comic books or were in excess of 150lb overweight (interesting stories both), we weren’t really the excluding type. Besides, he had his fans. Kyle Quindlen, for reasons we couldn’t really fathom, liked him a lot.

Gavin was short even when you accounted for his age. He was skinny with thick glasses that exaggerated his eyes. When he got a little older, he let some peach fuzz grow on his chin, which he referred to as a “goatee”. Like I said, we weren’t really the excluding sort and there were stranger looking people that we tolerated and liked much more than he. If it had been a decade later, I would assume that his problem was that he read on the Internet that girls liked confidence and so he would be forever confident in the face of all the evidence that suggested that he had a lot to learn about people and everything. He was the one that taught me how obnoxious proselytizing atheists can be.

When he graduated, he went off to the University of Delosa in Ephesus and I figured that he was pretty much out of my life. He almost was except that he had somehow wormed his way into a friendship with Sally, a girl that I had long been smitten with and had kept in contact with even after she had left for Ephesus as well. Even there, though, I didn’t see him as much and in smaller doses he was much more tolerable. It’s also possible that he had learned something along the way because he had started talking a lot less. Whatever the case, we found ourselves actually IMing one another periodically. Most of our contact was through Kyle and Sally, though. We would go somewhere and he would come along.

One night, a group of us (Gavin, Kyle, Kelly, Kelly’s hot friend, Sally, Willie, Bert, Bert’s girlfriend, and maybe another person or two) went out bar-hopping along the main drag in Ephesus. We ended up at a bar called Solaris that was a bit out of the way and, other than a crowd in the corner, a lot less crowded. Then, suddenly, two guys came up and asked to have their picture taken with Gavin. Gavin asked why and they avoided answering, but everybody figured “What the hell?” and took the picture. Then a couple more guys came up with the same request. He was about to say “no”, but behind them were two super-hot girls that were obviously going to ask the same thing. There was no way that he wasn’t going to do that. Though it was bizarre at first, we all became rather accustomed to it in pretty short order. Gavin was enjoying his mysterious celebrity status to the point of becoming downright cocky, even though none had any idea of what this was all about.

It was only when we were about to leave that what must have been the last person from the large group not to have taken their picture with Gavin yelled back to his group. “Wait… which one is the Sherminator?!”

“The short red head, you numbnut.”

At once, everyone at the table got it. You could see our minds say “Oh… my… god” all at once. With his relatively new contacts, he completely looked like Chuck Sherman - The Sherminator - from American Pie. For those of you that never saw the movie, Sherman was a rather icky guy who had no success with women but that you didn’t even feel sorry for because the arrogant persona he took with the ladies made him so repulsive. All of us knew that we would never be able to look at Gavin Redding again without seeing The Sherminator, last seen in AP wetting himself in the middle of Senior Prom after having been exposed for having lied about having sex, being a virgin, and trying (and failing) to fornicate with a grapefruit. Gavin himself did not wet himself, but he slumped through the rest of the evening, obviously deflated and embarrassed in front of Sally, which had a level of importance that I wouldn’t fully learn until later but even then was obvious as she was the one he kept looking at to see how she was responding to this humiliation. It was impossible not to feel sorry for him.

Everything started coming to a head shortly after that when Sally broke up with her boyfriend. She and I were suddenly both single at the same time, which was a first. Then, of course, there was Gavin. I had vaguely known that he was interested in her, but according to Kyle he had been waiting for the opportunity to woe her for years. He had previously been thwarted by her failing to inform him when she was re-singled in the past, so throughout her entire 18-month long relationship with Tommy he had been circling like a vulture making sure that he would be aware the very second that she was single again. Granted, I’d been carrying a minor torch for years, too, but the big difference is that I spent the intervening years dating Julie, Evangeline, and others. Gavin, never having had a girlfriend to my knowledge, spent most of that time idolizing her.

I honestly felt bad at the prospect of successfully woeing Sally. It was so apparent that he was in deeper for her than I had ever been. I was excited at the possibility of putting my seven-year dance with Sally to rest with an up or down vote, but his happiness seemed to truly depend on winning her over. He had convinced himself that the main reason that he hadn’t done so was that she was always with someone else and that he had never tried. If he tried and I succeeded, it would hurt him a lot. It would be one thing if both of us failed and she ended up with another outlaw biker, but he and I were similar enough that he would know that it wasn’t because chicks dig stupid jerks. A part of me… a small part of me… felt that it would be better for everybody if he won this little struggle. That didn’t, of course, mean that I wasn’t going to try.

I was planning a trip out to Ephesus in order to talk to Sally and finally have a conversation that had been put off for far too long. Unfortunately, she and Tommy weren’t quite as done as previously surmised. Rather, only one of the two of them was acknowledging at that point that things were done. So while I was staying with her that weekend and she was in the backroom in screaming matches with him, I met her friend Abby and asked Abby out instead. Abby accepted. With that, the prospect of Sally and I were done. It was Gavin’s turn.

It would turn out that Gavin, after all his talk about what he was going to do if he ever got the opportunity, was chickenspit. I mean… “cautious”. He saw an even greater opening down the line because Sally was looking for a place to live. Knowing that she would probably not consent to live with him alone, he organized a group of people to rent a house. He made sure that it would be most logical for their rooms to be next to one another. There was even a door in between them. His massive intelligence was suddenly turning out to be something of an asset. He was sure that once she got to know him - really know him, she would see that they were meant to be together. He was certain that she would be impressed with how he engineered everything to come together. It would be something that they would tell their grandchildren.

So they, along with three others - none of whom were straight and male - moved in together. She got to know him. Turned out that she absolutely hated him. He was arrogant and bossy and he couldn’t turn it off for her. He had been that person for the past 21 years of his life and he couldn’t change that overnight. He yelled at her for failing to organize the fridge properly, called her stupid when she left the garage door open, and locked himself in his room for an entire weekend when he was upset that she had had the audacity to bring a date home for an hour that Friday night.

The housing situation didn’t last. Sally was something of an engineer, too. She engineered the situation so that Gavin’s for roommates would get a house together and Gavin wouldn’t even know where it was. With our connection through Sally severed, I never really talked to him again after that. I really don’t know what became of him.

Will makes an interesting point on the economics of buying a new cell phone, but there’s also the ever-popular question of joining up in the first place.

A few months back, I finally got a cell phone. It wasn’t the first cell phone I’d had (my first involved an incredibly bad foray into certain “all-in-one” devicedness by my former boss and Nextel’s perfect example of how service should NOT be conducted), but it was the first one I’d arranged for my own.

I’m okay with the idea of a contract term. I got my phone free, and it does what I want it to do. However, I did find my own brand of silliness.

Southern Tech University offers an employee discount on cell phones, to encourage worker connectedness. To do this initially, you need to sign up through a special “SoTech Employees” website rather than the standard one. First problem: the phone I wanted isn’t available through that web site.

So I call up… get all the info… get it processed, get the phone, pay a tidbit more for the “signup” which they promise will be refunded once the employee discount goes through. And it does go through, and I get my discount. Props to them there.

Second up… I test out how many minutes I need. The difference between “No Texting” and “500 texts/month” is $10. The difference between “500 texts/month” and “unlimited texts” is… $10. I opt for the “unlimited texts” setup. Too many friends like to text. I start out with the initial 600 minutes/month plan, to see how much I use. Through judicious measurement (and honest self-limiting) I come in 20 minutes under 600. Given that I’m using this thing at work, I opt to bump up to the 900 minute plan, to have plenty of overhead.

This is where all falls apart. I was specifically told by the monkey working their sales department that, as I requested, I was being upgraded to the 900-minute version of my calling plan. To wit: Free long distance, Free call ID, Free calls to all users in the same phone network, etc.

What they put on my account, meanwhile, was the “business” version of the plan. Costs precisely the same amount, but mysteriously omits the “Free calls to all users in the same network” portion.

So, the next month, I discovered that I had gone about 90 minutes over my new 900-minute plan. And the month after, I came in a mere 15 minutes under. The first month had involved a lot of emergency calls, so I figured the overage was legit. It was only after the second month that I went back into my bills, call by call, and realized that all the calls I had been making to a certain very beautiful woman were not being properly billed as “in-network.”.

Two very clear and informative discussions later, their customer service made a serious concession: twice as much recompense for what I was overbilled, 2000 “rollover” minutes for me to have to compensate for the lost minutes, and immediate fixing of their sales agent’s mistake to get me into the proper plan.

I haven’t had a problem since, either.

The company in question? AT&T.

-{Previously Installment}-

-{2:00am}-

Awake.

-{2:25am}-

On our way to the bus stop.

-{2:45am}-

Arrive at the bus stop and find the parking garage nearly empty. We wish that we had thought of the bus yesterday. The thought had actually crossed my mind after my successful adventure on the bus on the way home from the airport on Tuesday, but I figured that the chances that I could convince Clancy to haul our heavy luggage from one place of transport to another were pretty slim. On my way back from Shaston, I didn’t have the heavy luggage. She would have said that taking the bus would be completely unnecessary and really I couldn’t have disagreed with that. Neither of us saw the parking thing coming. If I had thought about parking I would almost certainly would have thought that maybe the main garage would be full, but it wouldn’t even occur to me that all of the private lots would as well. The bus was completely unnecessary.

-{2:50am}-

We discover that the parking lot I parked in was only for commuters and the private lot next door was by-day only. I know that there is parking around here somewhere, but at this point I figure that the safest place to park is actually the Amtrak lot down the road. There are signs that it’s for Amtrak people only, but my experience on the Shaston trip was that they really didn’t seem to keep track of it. So I set Clancy up at the stop, drove down the road, and walked back. The bus was arriving as I was driving away. We’d catch the next one.

-{3:20am}-

The next bus arrives on schedule. We lug our stuff aboard.

-{4:00am}-

This time we’re three hours early, but that works out because we have a connecting flight in Los Puertos, California, that’s through a different airline. This gives us the opportunity to wait in the Transcontinental Airlines line after getting our bags set up at our primary airline, Northern Airways. Unfortunately, Trancontinental won’t give us our seat numbers. Both the Trancontinental and Northern Airways reps say that there should be someone from Transcontinental waiting at our gate to take care of us. That seemed unlikely, though. At first this is a mild irritation, but as the morning would wear on it would become fear-inducing as the reality of the situation set in: They overbooked.

-{6:45am}-

Airborne.

-{9:05am}-

We arrive in Los Puertos and there is nobody waiting at our gate for us. When we got to the Transcontinental Airlines ticket counter, Clancy is curtly told that they were taking passengers on the late-running 9am flight and not our 12:05 one. They’d be concerning themselves with that at 10:00 or so, they tell us.

-{10:30am}-

Nobody is at the kiosk. We know that there are absolutely no more flights out of Los Puertos today and that if we miss this one, we’re either going to have to connect somewhere else (with more risks) or we’re spending Christmas night in California. Clancy decides that she’s just going to stand at the counter until someone shows up and she takes her book with her.

-{11:05am}-

A woman shows up and Clancy tries to flag her down, but she shrugs it off saying vaguely that the flight is overbooked but that she is sure that it will all work out. At this point, I expect nothing to work out. She’s gone as fast as she arrives. Things are not looking good. If they can’t get us on this flight, I decide that I am going to put my foot down and we are going back to Cascadia.

-{11:15am}-

The curt guy from before makes a reappearance. Perhaps sensing Clancy’s anxiety, he helps her out immediately. We’ve got seats. All is right with the world.

-{12:40pm}-

Airborne.

-{7:35pm}-

Land. Get our luggage. My father is waiting for us at the airport. That’s one form of transportation that we have no reason whatsoever to doubt. That’s a really nice feeling.

-{8:45pm}-

We’re eating Christmas dinner.

-{The End}-

I have lost eleven straight auctions on eBay. That’s over twice as many as I’ve lost in my life, though as an irregular eBay user that’s not too remarkable. What is remarkable is that of those eleven auctions, in nine I was the runner-up. I bid $75.01 and the item went for $77.51. It doesn’t matter if I bid the item up from $25 or $69. The item had gone for as low as $54 dollars before, though I have to wonder if I had bid on that one if it, too, would have sold for $77.51. I can’t help but think that my one bid is putting me outside my own price range. I would, in all honestly, gladly pay $77.51, though I suspect that if I bid that much, it would sell for $80.01 (there’s no way of knowing what their cap was). And on and on.

There isn’t a whole lot of backstory here. Basically, there is an item I want and there are a whopping three outlets selling said item. Auctions have been streaming for three days now with this particular product. I want the product though I don’t need it. Shipping is $24.99 and I refuse to pay more than $100. Really, it’s worth more than that. Two weeks ago, if asked, I would have probably expressed a willingness to pay $150 or maybe even $200. Hypothetically, anyway. But as I watch one after another go for a little over or a little under $100, I don’t want to pay any more than I have to. The curse of capitalism is the fear of getting ripped off. Pay no more than you have to.

That got me wondering… is there some guy out there collecting as many of this thing as he can, wondering why it is that this guy - every time! - keeps pushing units up to $77.51 when he could otherwise get it for less. The answer is no. All eleven were, it turned out, purchased by different people. Each outbidding me by the cost of a hamburger. Sometimes at the last second sometimes a couple minutes before the last second.

I kept wondering each time if this was the unit that was going to be different. In one case, it was the first order of the morning. Would that one go for more or for less? It could go for more because it’s the first (of the day, at any rate). Or it could go for less because they figure “Why bid on this one when that next one down is so much cheaper?” Then I’ll run across two items that expire minutes from one another. Should I bid on the first because there might be a last minute rush on the second by everyone that didn’t win on the first? Or should I bid on the second because there isn’t enough time for everybody to scramble? How does that equation change if it’s half an hour between them? If they’re the exact same time, should I go for the one that’s priced a bit higher because the last minute rush is going to gravitate towards the lower one… or is the lower one better because there’s less a chance that whoever bid on that one has a max bid higher than my bid?

Turns out that all of this gaming does not matter in this ruthless market.

$77.51.

Every time.

AT&T apparently really does not want to sell you a cell phone without a contact. (See this image if you want to try to figure out what I’m talking about)

The price with a 24-month contract for an HTC Fuze Black phone is $175 after rebates. If you want to buy the phone for your existing account, it’s $510. Activation fee is $36. Early termination fee of a contract is $175. The contact that you have to get with the phone is $60.

So if you go out, purchase a cell phone with a new contract ($175), activate it (175+36=$211), pay for the first month ($212+60=271), then cancel service ($271+175=$447), you still come out ahead of where you would if you just bought the phone without a contact extension. Of course, there are some sales taxes involved, but not $60 I don’t think. Plus you’d get an extra 900 minutes and an extra phone for a month!

I figured that AT&T was just jacking up the retail price to pressure you into signing a contract, but their $510 is actually less than the cost of the same phone on Newegg (except the Newegg phone you can take to another cell phone company). The main reason for that likely being that Newegg’s is unlocked but with AT&Ts you can only use it with AT&T unless you unlock it yourself. Even so, though, it suggests that the AT&T full no-contract price is not wholly unreasonable but that they’re willing to cut it that much if you’re some combination of (a) willing to stick around for two years, (b) don’t know how to unlock a phone, and/or (c) are unable to perform the arithmetic

I’m perfectly happy with my Smartphone, but since B and C don’t apply to me, I know what I’m going to do when I want a Fuze (unless I go with eBay again).

It seems like half of my little corner of Blogland has been falling apart. Bobvis went dark after the New Year, which was definitely a blow. I’ll need to retrieve my posts from there and put them up… somewhere. Maybe here (with closed comments).

Also, Half Sigma has become a shell of its former self. HS has turned on comment moderation. At first I thought that this might not be such a bad thing since my previous problem with going there was the comment section that managed to turn any and every subject into a referendum on Non-Asian Minorities. The result, though, has been that conversation becomes stilted by lag-times of hours or more and subject-drift is as bad as ever.

Case-and-point, in the comment section of a post about the ethics of pirating eBooks, a comment makes an indirect reference to “those ‘poor’ people that live in the city” (being unable to read) gets through. Then, to make sure that we know who exactly he is referring to, he comes back to mention that calculus textbooks are NAM (Non-Asian Minority) repellent, which in his view makes carrying such books “a great idea”. If those are the comments getting through, what kinds of comments is he not letting through?

To anyone that wonders why I restrict subject-matter of comments around here, that’s why.

On the upshot, if I’m not in Half Sigma’s corner of things anymore, maybe I won’t have to worry about his readers causing subject-drift to the inferiority of minorities and can make a clean break*. Anyone have any suggestions of new blogs that I can read?

* - None of this is to suggest that I do not want HS readers here. Bleedover from HS (and from HS by way of Bobvis) has contributed significantly to Hit Coffee. For that I will always be grateful. Especially since those that have come over have, for the most part, respected my wishes.