Our time in Colosse was spent with Clancy getting her baby fix.

Our time in Beyreuth has been spent with me getting my doggie fix.

It’s possible the crime shows have never been more popular. With the market for cable-original shows popping up, it’s exploded. Paradoxically, though, with the exception of Law & Order, there are extremely few of what I would call “cop shows”. When L&O eventually goes off the air, it’s possible that there will be one on regular TV and a few on cable.

The distinction I make between a crime show and a cop show is that the latter is about cops while the former is about people that are solving crimes. Almost all cop shows are crime shows but not the other way around. Matlock, for instance, is a crime show but falls in a different category (”legal drama”). NYPD Blue was a cop show. In between the two are what I would call pseudocop shows. They’re shows that are technically about law enforcement, but are actually about some super-specialized group of cops.

For example, I don’t really consider CSI to be a cop show. It’s a show about forensics pretending to be cops. Crossing Jordan also fell into this category except about MEs. NCIS is and JAG was about military police, which is similar but not the same. Castle is a show about a crime novelist joining forces with the cops, so it doesn’t count any more than Murder She Wrote did. Monk is about a former cop who is a “private consultant”, as are the protagonists in The Mentalist and Lie to Me and The Forgotten. Others are about special units of dubious realism. Cold Case is about a special unit investigated old homicides and Without a Trace is about a non-existent FBI missing persons unit. So while these are shows that are ostensibly about cops and police departments, they’re still not what I would call “cop shows” in the same way that NYPD Blue, Homicide, The Shield, and to a lesser extent even The Wire were.

There are some exceptions. New TNT series Dark Blue as well as Criminal Minds sort of count insofar as they are about groups that exist, but they’re still special units of cops solving very special crimes. Saving Grace and The Closer more-or-less count and may actually shed light on the recent shift towards pseudocop shows. Life mostly counted, though they had the special hook of an ex-convict detective trying to find out who framed him. Southland counted, but was unceremoniously dumped (though it appears TNT will be bringing it back).

The question is, why is it that at a time when crime shows have never been more popular. Here are some possible explanations:
(a) Cop shows have gotten old and therefore, the only way to get people interested in them is to have some unique twist. This could be true. It could be that if you take the pseudocop shows off the air that they will be replaced with more reality shows.
(b) Law & Order sucked the oxygen out of the room. This strikes me as quite possible. L&O is not one show but three. Therefore, fans of cop shows get their fix out of the way and there’s not much room for any other standard procedural and so the networks have to find original twists. It’s possible that when L&O goes off the air, it will create a void that will bring in more regular cop shows.
(c) There are just as many cop shows as there have always been, it’s just that they’re of more segmented interest and therefore are more likely to be on cable and less conspicuous. It isn’t so much that L&O has taken over but rather that the new cop shows that would be network shows are now debuting on cable. Mathematically, it is probably true.
(d) It’s Jay Leno’s fault. His show can’t fail fast enough for my taste. Taking away 5 1-hour timeslots killed Life and Southland (albeit temporarily). This makes network TV real estate more scarce and makes cable a more natural venue.
(e) It’s women’s fault.

I mention (e) because it seems that of all of the cop shows, there are a surprising number of them that feature women prominently. Blond women in particular. These things are sometimes a coincidence, but in this case I’m not so sure. One of the interesting factoids about Law & Order is that it is extremely popular among women. I really wonder if one of the issues is that the demographics behind cop shows have changed from a primarily male to a primarily female audience. That would explain cables creating shows around women and crime-y shows in particular. In addition to Saving Grace and The Closer, the most prominent character in Cold Case is female and In Plain Sight features a woman (all blond women, actually). Further, one longstanding tradition of cop shows is to have very uncoplike women as cops. I’ve Facebooked before “male or female, cops should never look dainty”. Watching some long-haird 5′4″, size-0 woman try to be intimidating in an interrogation room is amusing but not very real-seeming.

And it also helps explain why there are so many more shows about crime but not more about cops. I think that women watch these shows primarily because they’re interested in crime and not very much interested in the testosterone-fueled atmosphere of police departments. So these cop shows either center around a woman that bucks the norms or about cops that aren’t really cops. “Cops” that use their intellect rather than brute force. Cops that are really scientists or medical examiners or psychologists or pet-mindreaders or whatever. Hence, more and more of the Special Unit stuff. That way they can make it about crime, but also have more in the way of romantic plots between dainty women agents and their hunky underwear model turn actor coworkers.

This song is a classic. The first time I heard it, I was hanging out with Kelvin and he had it on a mix CD. I was so impressed with the song that it reversed my previous disinterest in seeing The Hedwig & The Angry Inch. It’s essentially a retelling of the Aristophanes fable put to music. A very captivating song, in my opinion. The imagery running during the song’s segment on the movie also add to it nicely.

-{Note: Possibly NSFW. Contains drawn nudity of an non-erotic nature.}-

There was a steadfast rule in the Truman and Himmelreich houses preventing Clancy and I from sleeping together when we visited our respective parents. I don’t think anybody held any illusions about anything, but there are appearances and respect and all that jazz. Which was perfectly fine with us.

I’ve been sleeping on the couch since we arrived at my parents house. Not because of any parental dictate, but because the bed that they would have us sleeping on is one of those t-something beds (trundle?) and when it’s “out” it’s actually two beds up against one another. So when we’re sleeping in the same room, we might as well be in different beds.

Also, I find that as part of my TV watching tradition, falling asleep while watching TV is also something that I like to do. We don’t have a bonafide TV in our bedroom in Cascadia. I have a Pocket PC that I watch stuff on, but it’s not quite the same. I have to turn it off when Clancy goes to bed because she doesn’t like noise when she sleeps. And honestly, I don’t want to lose my place in whatever it is that I’m watching. Since the point of watching stuff down here is to be more careless and free, it’s less an issue. If I fall asleep, I fall asleep. I can easily find where I was on the DVR if I want.

So the result is that I fall asleep on the couch. When my folks get up at six in the morning, I then move to the bedroom and finish my sleeping there. Right now it works in a blast-from-the-past sort of way since I did this so often when I was younger, but I’m looking forward to making our way to her folks’ place in Beyreuth where we will have a single bed to sleep in.

No. 1: Lengthy in-law visits.

We’re in the middle of a week-and-a-half visit from Mr. Tone’s bio dad, Grandpa Leghorn. Grandpa Leghorn considers that a very short visit. He thinks visits should last about a month. It wouldn’t be so bad if my usual coping method, drinking, were available.

If he could babysit or take Toddler Tone to the potty, it’d be different. But he limits his toddler interaction to occasional pats on the head. If you ask Grandma nee Leghorn, this was a contributing factor to his first divorce. Anyway, when he visits, we have to hustle about our stressful workaday lives with a passive observer parked in our midst.

He’s one of those Southern Democrats, meaning: Don’t think because he’s liberal and anti-rich-people, he’s not sexist. But he’s subtle about it. Here’s a sample exchange from last night. I made dinner for the group, as always. I dished myself up a plate and set it down near the couch. Upon observing this, Grandpa Leghorn asked: “Oh, should I just serve myself?”

Sheila: “Yes, go ahead. There are some tongs for the spaghetti right there.”

Grandpa Leghorn: “Oh, OK! You just sit right down and rest up.”

Yes, I’d planned to. Did I need permission? See, though, it’s subtle. I probably wouldn’t have bristled at that in the absence of many prior comments, for example: “Oh, well, so THIS is how lady lawyers dress!” At a previous visit, upon viewing me in a suit. (In the Leghorn accent, it’s pronounced “liar.”) Keeping in mind, his son is a “liar” too so he’s had plenty of exposure to the breed.

At least he’s made no negative comments about my pregnant coffee drinking, the way he did during my first pregnancy.

Grandma nee Leghorn and her husband don’t even stay at our house when they visit, they book a hotel, which I think is kind of weird in the other direction.

2. My total lack of standing to complain to Mr. Tone about in-law relatives.

Yes, Mr. Tone was very kind about it yesterday when I interrupted his workday to tell him he had to call our bank immediately and arrange to wire money for the purpose of getting my brother’s car out of repossession. Ever know anyone who had a car repo’d? I bet you don’t. I didn’t even know they did that anymore. I also didn’t know that once they took it, you could redeem it.

My father, on the other hand, was furious. He will probably still be mad today at dinner. He was so mad he compared my brother to our bad uncle who stayed with us in high school when he was unemployed and hiding out from child support collection from his first of three wives and borrowed a bunch of money from Dad for unsuccessful business schemes that he never paid back. Dad said there was an Uncle Mike gene. I don’t believe my brother has this gene, because when he is employed he makes more than I do and is responsible, helpful and generous. But I spent time pondering whether if there were such a gene, if it is perhaps carried on the X chromosome, and if I carry it recessively from my father, in which case I could pass it down to one or both of my sons, and since they are boys there will be no competing X to cancel it out.

3. Feelings of inevitable proleness.

I worry more about the fact that apparently my brother isn’t the only relative my father is “helping out,” and the other relative isn’t in nearly as sympathetic a situation. Remember, this is the dad who couldn’t afford to buy a home in SoCal and couldn’t afford to send me to a real college. Now he’s the guy who gets the tap?

I ended yesterday with the feeling that there are two types of people: Those whose parents could afford to send them away to college, and those who can’t. That’s what it comes down to. If you’re Category II, you can act how you want but you will remain connected to and affected mostly by other Category IIs, and you will have a Category II life whether you carry the Uncle Mike gene or not. I mean, think of all the other sporadically employed programmers we know, like Trumwill and Half Sigma, who nevertheless manage not to get their cars repo’d and probably don’t know anyone personally who does. They fall into Category I.

I guess there’s also a Category III, with people who go to jail if they’re men and have welfare-dependent children with the jail guys if they’re women. But the problems they cause mostly create pain for others, rather than themselves.

When I was living with my folks, I spent a lot of time watching television. Enough so that, despite my periodic defenses of television on Hit Coffee and elsewhere, there is no way that I will permit any children of mine to watch as much television as I did. When I went off to college, though, my television-watching tapered off. Some of this was attributable to the high-speed internet in the Southern Tech University dorms. Some of it, though, is that when there are other things to do, television watching is less natural. I had a girlfriend to spend time with, friends to hang out with, and later a full-time job and full-time courseload. Much of the television I watched in college I simply watched because my roommates had it on.

After college, I continued to watch mostly roommate-generated television. I set up a TV and cable in my room, but the apartment’s cable provider had pretty limited selection. Other than periodically watching reruns, broadcast TV, or GAC, I mostly stuck to the computer. When Dennis (the real TV-watcher among us) left the picture and Karl and I got our own apartment, I didn’t even bother hooking up the VCR until I had to scramble to do so for a lady friend coming over. It wasn’t until I got the exercise bike that I started really watching TV again and even then it was pretty limited. I would never even bother to set up the antannae.

The big exception to all of this is when I visit the folks. When I’m at Colosse-home in the suburbs of Colosse with the satellite TV my parents have, I end up channel-surfing a lot, usually finding Law & Order showing somewhere. I watch TV voractiously. I have been reminded of this quirk over Thanksgiving when I visited them. Not only have I watched a lot of L&O and other crime dramas (which in most circumstances isn’t a primary preference), but I even learned how to program the parents’ DVR so that I could have a never-ending stream of the stuff. It’s not quite as bad as it sounds, though. The DVR frees me to watch only when I want to instead of watching something specifically because it’s on. The DVR means that it will be on later.

There is very little that I’ve DVRed that I wouldn’t have access to at Soundview-home. In some cases, I’m watching things less engrossing than I otherwise would be. I even have some of the very L&O episodes I’m watching queued up in Soundview and it’s never, ever been a priority to watch it. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy it. I do. But I enjoy it in part because I am watching it at the parents’ house. It’s become something I do when I’m here. A tradition all my own.

Despite the frequent portrayals to the contrary, watching television does not have to be an isolating activity. People often portray it as a trance that we enter that causes us to growl at anyone that disturbs us. Too often this is true, but not always. Clancy is generally uncomfortable with television and one of the ways I have sought to allay those fears is by (almost never) letting it get in the way of talking to her. At Soundview-home, I am constantly pausing it to mention some thought that occurs to me. And when she talks to me when it’s on, I pause it immediately and don’t get irritated at the interruption. It’s made easier by the fact that almost everything I am watching up there can be paused. It’s one of the big, big reasons that I rarely watch television live.

The DVR allows me to do that here, too. Mom starts running some kitchen gadget that makes noise, I can pause it rather than getting irritated at missing what’s going on. And so my behavior from Soundview carries over here as well. And to some extent, it’s always been that way in the Colosse-Truman household except when Mom’s watching Jeopardy.

When staying with the parents for an extended period of time, all conversation eventually exhausts. that’s not to say that all of the visiting can be done in a day or two, but rather you run out of things to talk about until they come to you. watching TV or looking at the paper or just sitting around and thinking helps bring these things back up. But what to do in the meantime? That seems to be where L&O comes in.

It’s also a form of vacation for me. Since I don’t watch exceptional amounts of television at home in Soundview, it’s sort of a special treat to be able to do so here. I prevent myself from watching TV too much under normal circumstances by making all of my watching deliberate (as opposed to channel surfing). Here I don’t have to do that. Why? Because I know that in a week or two I will be going home and the normal rules will apply. Which I’m perfectly find with because I don’t want to live my regular life the way I live it here. A part of me doesn’t want to get cable or satellite whenever we settle down because I don’t want this all to be a part of my normal routine. But I also think that because I don’t want this to be a part of my normal routine that I have far less to worry about. As long as when I get home I am relieved to be able to do more, it’s all good.

The same applies to food. I allow myself to eat more when I’m here because I know it won’t last and I don’t go crazy when I get home because I don’t like the constant feeling of being stuffed. It’s possible, though, that when I step on the scale when I get back to Soundview I will have to develop more rules for when I’m visiting the parents. Mom’s cooking makes that very, very difficult.

I don’t get to fly home to Colosse as often as I would like. It’s usually due to time considerations, though now that we’re unemployed and have the time there are financial constraints. I wanted to see as many of my friends as I could while I was down here. There seemed to be a special emphasis on Little Ones. An increasing number of my friends have had kids in the last couple of years.

One of the first people I contacted was my friend Tony. That was complicated somewhat by the impending dissolution of his marriage (more on that another time). I had hoped that Clancy and I would get together with Tony and Lara and little Anthony. Something vague in Tony’s response and the sudden rememberence of some cryptic Facebook posts came together and I figured out that they were separated. Though Tony was positive that he would be able to arrange some time with Anthony, it seemed like a lot to ask. Instead, we ended up going to a Tony Thomason music show with Tony (m0re on that another time, too).

The next stop was with my ex-roommate Hubert, the recent father of identical twin girls. Hugh was absolutely elated to hear from me and not the slightest bit bothered at my short notice (which he often would be in other circumstances, passive-aggressively joking about it). I think that he and Laurie were just glad to have some adult company (beyond Uncle Web). Hugh’s twins are the very definition of adorable. They have smiles that can light up a room and are just at that age (9 months) where they are fascinated and excited by just about everything. I chased one of them around crawling (they’re also at the age where they long to crawl under things, including me).

Hugh has matched up their behavior with all of the charts and conclusively proved that his little girls are utterly brilliant. Since it’s his job as a father to brag on them, that’s at least a bit of bragging that I will let him get away with. They’re identical twins, but Hugh and Laurie are already declaring which takes after which parent the most. Hugh says that it’ll be interesting to see how they diverge as they get older. I quite agree. It was certainly fascinating with the Weatherby Twins.

The next day was a visit with Al Cavanaugh, who has three kids aged 5 years to 5 months or so. The oldest was at school most of the time. The middle one was very bright and cheery. The littlest was more quiet and independent. He seemed happiest when on a blanket sort of away from everyone else. But he played along with the doting family friends. It was actually my first opportunity to really meet Al’s wife and the four of us got along quite well. Since couples-friends are not something that Clancy and I have proven to be very good at, it was really refreshing.

The Cavanaugh kids are not twins and it was interesting to get Al and Suzie’s perspective on how little ones just come out different from the start. They made the comment that non-parents (and many parents) put far too much faith in how malleable kids are. Clancy’s father said that the very finite malleability was his biggest surprise as a parent. They start going their own way before you ever have a chance to even try molding them. Clancy was a more difficult baby and I was apparently pretty easy-going. We’re hoping our kids take a little more after me when it comes to that. On the other hand, when it comes to head-size, we’re pulling for them not to have heads so large that they will eventually need to special order hats. Or else we’re headed to C-Section City!

(Of course, if we’re lucky enough to be able to have kids when the time comes, we will be happy with whatever we get.)

From there we went to see Web, which was to be our only childless visit on the trip. Web just bought a new house and we got the grand tour (I envy his back yard!). Then, much to our surprise, we were all visited by Hugh, Laurie, and the twins. They weren’t quite in as good a mood this time around, though. We were undeterred.

I’ve never gotten much time around babies before. I’ve had some cousins-1, but I was too young at the time to really be able to hold them or do anything with them. Still haven’t gotten the hang of holding them or what to do with them. But it’s fun to share their excitement at the world but to be free of having to do something to fix whatever it is that they get upset with.

An update on the Mini vs Micro USB post from before.

Mom and Dad got a new phone that is apparently equipped with MicroUSB ports. The cables they got with them look a lot sturdier than the ones that used to break off at work, which is great to hear. On the other hand, their GPS has MiniUSB ports. They used my cell phone charger to charge it.

All of this confirms my initial point that having two standards is okay. Dad got his MiniUSB cables for a dollar a piece on eBay, which is just outstanding. And so long as these cables work with a number of devices, it’s money well spent. Heck, at a dollar, it’s worth it anyway. Same goes for Micro. It’s all working itself out.

Peter is getting momentary fame over at Half Sigma with the Peter Principal Rule, which states: Non-athletic activities which only men participate in, yet are not viewed as traditionally masculine, are the nerdiest activities.

There’s a back-and-forth over at Half Sigma where Engineer makes the strong counterargument that it’s not that the nerdiness of the activities define the nerd but rather that the nerdiness of the actors determines the nerdiness of the activity.

Kevin K, on the other hand, suggests that it’s the difference between doing and simulating. If you’re actually hunting, then booyah, but if you’re simulating it on a computer, then that’s nerdy. By this standard, fixing a car is doing… but so is fixing a computer. Are they received the same way? Probably not so much.

All of this is a long way around to wondering how nerdy the following video is. I mean, creating comic books superpowers? Engineer would say nerdy because it’s not the sort of thing that popular people would be into. But the dude’s creating fire, which would meet with Kevin’s approval of masculinity.

Personally, if that’s being a nerd, then I wouldn’t ever wanna be cool.

Right now my workstation has three computers: Ryoko, Ayeka, and Washu. Ryoko, the most powerful desktop I have, has been sick lately. It started with some random USB problems that afflicted the other two but that PCI-USB cards resolved for the other two. The problem with Ryoko is that plugging in something to one port causes another port to stop working. The PCI-USB card simply added more ports to be incompatible. Then, about two months ago, Ryoko started (rarely) rebooting during periods of high usage. In the last week or so, it’s started rebooting regardless of what I am doing.

I thought that I had figured out the problem when one of the hard drives on the machine started misbehaving. I had run into similar problems with Ayeka and Washu and the problem was generally insufficient power. Given that it had previously been disinclined to work during times of high usage, it made sense. Further, I’d been adding hard drives to this machine and never upgraded the (600W) power supply to match the other two (850W and 1000W) even though it’s now carrying about the same number of drives (both by adding to Ryoko’s load and relieving the other by swapping more smaller drives for fewer larger ones). So I was preparing to buy a new power supply when Ryoko started acting more erratically. The aforementioned drive wasn’t just getting dropped, it had become full-blown problematic. Windows did it’s little thing where it says “Hey, there’s a problem with some sectors on this drive, so we’re going to take care of that” and then promptly erases the entire partition. Not a big deal in the case of this specific drive, but still disconcerting. I tried reformatting the drive twice and it rebooted each time.

This could still be power supply related. The dropping of the drive damaged some sectors or somesuch. Insufficient power supplies are the root of much evil, I’ve discovered. But it could also be something else. The best thing to do is to start swapping out parts to see what works. But since Ayeka and Washu are working so wonderfully, I don’t want to touch them. The most likely culprits are the power supply, the problematic hard drive, the RAM, or the processor. I can test around a lot of things (test the power supply by lightening the hardware load, the hard drive by taking it out, the processor by process of elimination). The biggest concern is RAM. I need some RAM to test out with, but I don’t have any spare DDR2 RAM laying around.

What’s really frustrating about all of this is two weeks ago I did! If this had happened two weeks ago, it would have been perfect. I ordered some laptop RAM and they sent me some DDR2 desktop RAM. It took us a week to get it all straightened out and in the meantime I had the RAM just sitting there. They even offered to sell me that RAM at a discount and I told them I would but I simply had no use for it. Now, of course I do. Possibly just for testing, but possibly for replacing. Fortunately, Linux LiveCDs often come with memory testing so I can probably isolate the problem there.

I am hoping that it’s the hard drive, which is one of the least important that I own. If it’s the computer, it’s going to get tricky. There are a number of IDE drives invested in that machine and IDE has apparently gone the way of the do-do. And, of course, DDR2 RAM is itself reaching obsolescence. And I would probably not feel secure unless I had a new power supply anyway, so that’s another hundred or two. So instead of looking at buying a cheap CPU/mobo combo for a couple hundred bucks, I’m looking at a near-complete replacement of $500.

Somebody, somewhere is saying “That’s why I own a Mac! So I don’t have that problem.”

Indeed. With a Mac, you would already be resigned to buying a completely new machine. And it would cost way more than $500. And it wouldn’t have the hard drive capacity Ryoko has anyway.

To celebrate my temporary return to the Delosa, I thought I would put the spotlight on Toby Keith for this weekend’s Hit Coffee Weekend.

This first video is for the song that introduced me to Toby Keith and one of his earliest hits. I first heard this song on a cruise of all place. It’s not that surprising in one way because I never listened to country music at the time and so it had to be forced on me. But I liked this song. When I got back, I asked my friends on Camelot that liked country music about this song and everybody said it was by Doug Supernaw. I would later become a fan of Toby Keith and only after becoming a fan did I learn that one of my earliest favorite country music songs was one of his.

What I like about this song is that it’s light and deliberate on details. You don’t know where the singer has been or how he screwed up the relationship. Because the song isn’t about him. It’s about her and the life he should be leading with her and his having to come to terms that there is someone else where he should be.

This next one is the one that took him to the next level. Even if you’re not a country music fan, it’s one that you’re almost certainly familiar with. I like the song itself, but the music video is a load of fun even apart from the song. So even if you’re not a fan of “How Do You Like Me Now”, you might want to give the video a glance.

The third video is an example of a song that I don’t like, but the music video makes it palatable though its earnest hokiness.

UPDATE: A couple more Toby Keith videos below the fold, recommended by Web and Dave. (more…)

In this post, Sheila evinces her pain at being called at by random people in the courthouse who think they can get her attention.

Working IT at Southern Tech University is a similar experience. We are given, oftentimes, a set of contradictory “instructions” from the clueless types on-high. To wit: “Be out there” and “Be visible.” If a help ticket is filed, my boss “prefers” that we go meet the person face to face (even when the issue is to be responded to with simple, sometimes yes-or-no, answer or is something that we need to resolve on the server end).

The problem with this is that we have a help ticket system for a reason. We need, REALLY need, for the users to, well, use it. We need to train them to use it. And so we are caught between a rock and a hard place. If we send an email back on the issues, we run the risk of being seen as “distant” or “unapproachable.” If we go out to their offices for every little thing, on the other hand, we can be almost certain that at least 3 people in the same office will pop their heads up, or worse yet hear “Oh the IT guy is here, great I’ll run out and bug him”, and all of a sudden while dealing with one issue we are being told about 5-6 other things that the users are sure “will just take a minute.”

The downside to this is: the performance of the low-level guys is tracked using the help system. If it’s not in the system, our boss doesn’t know about it. If it’s not in the system, they don’t get credit for it. If we tell the people “well we’re busy and working on things in sequence, so you’ll need to put it into the system” we get whiny and/or accusatory emails instead from them to their department chairs about how we are “uncooperative”, “unhelpful”, “not doing their jobs” for insisting they adhere to policy and actually put their requests into the system.

Also, the low-level guys are usually busy enough as it is. The “just take a minute” things never really take just a minute, and then they get some screaming nincompoop elsewhere in the building sending off an email about how they “took way too long” to respond because they were… wait for it… dealing with all the “just a minute” crap that wasn’t in the system.

So on the one hand, if we deal with what we can “remotely” (via email or server side) before going face-to-face, we can actually get our damn jobs done, but we’re not “visible.” If, on the other hand, we go out there for every single little thing, then we spend far too much time dealing with unscheduled crap AND the users learn that they can get away with not holding up their end of the bargain on using the help system. Then, when we are really backed up or dealing with something serious, they start bugging us when we’ve got our fingers inside something and really need to concentrate on the task at hand.

We have policies for a reason. My experiences with this crap make me feel for Sheila, truly.

Once upon a time, there was a post here. This post was written a year ago, when it was standard procedure to forward-date posts. Unfortunately, the post was forgotten about and one year later, up it went while I was out watching a movie. Oops. It was never supposed to go up. Sorry for the confusion.

In a previous discussion, commenter John made the following observation which got me thinking about things.

I’ve heard plenty of “social justice” types talk about the police as an “occupying army” in minority neighborhoods. Those kinds of people are destructive and dangerous.

An interesting thing about this. The neighborhood where Clancy and I currently live and the neighborhood where we lived in Estacado were both heavily minority neighborhoods with histories of crime.

With the Santomas Police Department, there really was the feeling like they didn’t belong whenever they poked their head in the neighborhood, which wasn’t often. Not being a real law-breaker myself, it was an odd feeling for me to have.

Meanwhile, my neighborhood in Soundview has turned itself around. The Soundview Police Department is around all the time. It feels a lot less unsafe. Unlike in Santomas, I don’t know where drug dealers live. If I knew of some, I’d be much more likely to talk to the police. It has that sort of atmosphere.

What’s strange, though, is that I don’t really know why the difference in atmospheres exist. Is in that the SvPD officers come around even when they’re not looking for something in particular? Was there some big movement among the city’s community organization leadership making their peace with the cops? Or does Santomas’s higher minority population make things more contentious with civic leadership? Soundview is less of a swipple hub than is Santomas (or the notoriously swipple Zaulem), so maybe that plays a factor. I really don’t know.

But it’s certainly a nicer atmosphere. The situation of our living quarters is slightly less favorable in Soundview than Santomas. In Santomas, we were above a garage and kind of out of the way. In Soundview we’re in a house. The locks, however, are better in Soundview. But while all of that is probably a wash, I worry considerably less about our place being intact when I go away for a few days. I worry less about walking around the neighborhood at night. Though I did get burned with packages left on my doorstep, that appears to have been an aberation.

Of course, community rejuvenation has its downsides. For instance, on most Saturday there’s some live music show that drives Clancy and I bonkers. It’s not our taste in music. They’re often run by the church, though, and though I have no proof I suspect that the local churches are playing a driving role in cleaning our neighborhood up. Even Clancy, much more skeptical of organized religion than I, can appreciate the impact that it seems to be having on the community.

We hope to stay in our next place, wherever in the country it is, for a while. Since kids will be involved, it’s unlikely that it will be in the same sort of neighborhood that we currently live in. For one thing, Clancy’s job will practically necessitate that it will be in a far more rural area.

We had initially thought that when we move that we will get a larger tract of land and build a house on it. We like our privacy. As we were on a tour of Gemini Falls, though, we really liked the neighborhoods. They don’t have the aggressive HOAs that dominate the suburbs of Colosse. The houses aren’t huge, but the neighborhood doesn’t raise eyebrows the same way that the last couple neighborhoods we’ve lived in do. Without being too tacky, they’re neighbors in a community to which we could feel much more a part.

I would prefer not get into the racial implications of this other than to say that there are various white-dominated neighborhoods that we would feel a similar desire not to settle into. And another significant factor is education level. One of the things we like about Gemini Falls is that it is one of the most educated places that we’ve found.

By and large, we’ve had few unpleasant experiences with our neighbors in either Santomas or Soundview. But we’ve also had little in common with them. So I’m coming around to the notion that neighbors themselves are not a bad thing. It’s just the neighbors I’ve always had…

-{Note: I realize that I am opening the door on race here. Don’t make me regret it. Please be respectful. Fake it if you have to. If you can’t even fake respect for your political opponents or people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds than you, don’t comment.}-

UPDATE: Problem solved! Phew. We’re waiting in anticipation on a possible job offer from Gemini Falls. I think I’ve been much more stressed out. Everybody wish us luck!

—-

For those of you that have never had to use COBRA, it’s a pretty good thing. Basically, the government told employers that they cannot tax-deduct health insurance unless they supply a plan that allows 18 months of coverage after a person loses their job (for any reason except malfeasance). So employers in turn lean on insurance companies and insurance companies reluctantly comply.

The problem with this sort of government-enforced transaction is that if a company does not want to do business, they can be pretty resourceful about finding ways not to. They delay sending out the paperwork by a month or more, hoping that you’ll make other arrangements. You get 60 days to sign up and if you miss that deadline then they absolutely, positively will not continue your coverage. All claims until the paperwork goes through are denied and you’ll have to recoup the money later. Then, when everything gets settled, you have 30 days to back pay everything you owe, so you have to have three months’ worth of premiums on hand. If you weren’t saving for that like you should have been, tough luck.

I knew all this when I signed up for COBRA, so I expedited things by signing up on their website. I didn’t want there to be any chance of my check “getting lost in the mail”. I also made darn sure that I paid all of my premiums over a month in advance so that they couldn’t make any claims about when the check did or did not arrive. But apparently, even doing everything right is not necessarily enough.

We’ve been simultaneously lucky and unlucky here in the Truman household. Rather, our luck has managed to mitigate the damage of our extraordinary unluck. Although I don’t know if you can call it unluck if it’s dependent on the bad-faith actions of others. In this case, the culprits are former employers and insurance companies.

We came back home from our Great North by Northwest Jobs tour a little bit earlier than expected. It actually wasn’t a welcome development because we were hoping to swing back by Gemini Falls and sign some papers. But home we came and it was a darn good thing we did. In the main was a letter from the health insurance administrator informing her that her COBRA enrollment period had lapsed and she is not only uninsured, but has been uninsured for the all-important 60+ days.

This was crazy because we knew for a fact that she sent in the money. We also know that the mail was taken that day because another letter sent that day was received a couple weeks prior. So she called her health insurance administrator* (HHIA) and they said that they had in fact received the check but that ARRA** had been denied so they sent it back with a letter explaining that she needed to write another check (for more money).

So suddenly her insurance went up from $200 a month to $600 a month because the federal government wasn’t going to kick in. Why wasn’t the federal government going to kick in? Because her former employer declared her termination “voluntary”. Given that she was on a one-year contract just like I was and that (immediate) renewal of said contract was not an option, that just didn’t seem right to us. Either her employers were being jackholes or my employers were being unexpectedly generous. I’m disinclined to believe the latter. But whatever.

We had 14 days from the date of the letter to get them the contract and full amount of the policy back to them. This was on a Friday. Day 14 was Monday. We could fax them the signed contract, but not the money. Further, that Monday we were going to be driving back to Gemini Falls for a second interview. Long story short, their corporate headquarters was in Zaulem and I woke up at an ungawdly hour of the morning to go out there and hand-deliver the check. It turned out that the 14 days was 14 days inclusive and ran out on that Sunday. Fortunately, they’d put a flag on the account and so they were going to give us an extra couple of days. That was the only good turn we got from just about everyone we’ve dealt with.

About the same time that we got the letter from HHIA, I got a letter from my New Health Insurance Administrator (NewHIA) saying that FIREA, my former employer, had signed a contract with them and that they would be taking over starting on 12/1. They also sent me an Open Enrollment letter to. Notably, it would be cheaper for her on my insurance than it was on hers***.

It was cheaper with or without ARRA assistance and the wording was vague as to whether or not I could get ARRA assistance even though it had been denied for her. My guess is that we cannot. But even then it’s cheaper and I feel better paying one health insurance administrator rather than two. But I thought I would call NewHIA and see if ARRA might be covered and what the bill would be.

That was when the anvil fell. NewHIA informed me that my policy had been canceled. I had to sign up within 60 days of eligibility and I became eligible at the beginning of August. I should have received a letter. But the only two letters I had from NewHIA were the one informing me that they were taking over (and that I had a bill to pay before 12/1) and another about Open Enrollment. Long story short, as far as they knew, I’d never signed up with OldHIA. Except that I had and I was actually a month ahead on my dues because I paid a couple months ahead. A whole lot of good that did me.

NewHIA told me to contact OldHIA and have them forward my information. OldHIA said that they really couldn’t do that, but at the end of my policy they could send proof that I had been insured. That was not acceptable because that would create a gawdforsaken gap that could give NewHIA cover to cut my COBRA coverage completely (again). I asked them if they could send me a copy of the document. She put me on hold, came back, and said she could. But it would take two weeks. In two weeks, my coverage lapses.

I called NewHIA again and got a very unhelpful woman who said that there was nothing she could do without something from OldHIA proving that I had been insured. She suggested I call FIREA. So I called FIREA and they said that they would look into it. Perhaps she was just a good actress, but I got the feeling from her that she actually will.

So that’s where things stand right now. I actually run a not-insignificant risk of having my insurance cut off due to no fault of my own. I signed up within 14 of the 60 days alotted to me to sign up for COBRA. I have not only paid every bill on time but I am actually a month ahead. But none of that matters because NewHIA and OldHIA can’t talk to one another and I’m relying on FIREA, a company that has not been a friend to me and that could care less if my insurance is cut off. NewHIA will not accept an enrollment form or a check as long as my account is listed as “canceled”. Further, I’m going to be out of town for the remainder of the month starting on Friday and I won’t be back until after the lapse date, so I can’t have anything mailed to me. I’m not sure that matter because everything seems to take 5-10 business days to get mailed anyway.

And even if this does straighten out, there is virtually no way that I can get Clancy on my plan. That’s due on Friday and they’ve made it clear that there are absolutely no exceptions. The likelihood that this will all be straightened out Friday is pretty small. If ARRA doesn’t cover it, and I don’t believe it does, it may not be worth the effort anyway.

—-

* - Health insurance administrators appear to be all the rage. Basically, instead of dealing with your employer or the insurance company for your health insurance, you deal through a third party that coordinates it all. Somehow, this adding of another layer of organization is supposed to save people money. Maybe by creating miscommunications like this.

** - ARRA is the part of Obama’s stimulus wherein the government helps unemployed people by paying 65% of their insurance cost.

*** - This is sort of topical. Republicans are trying to allow for insurance companies to “shop across state lines”. As it happens, I am insured by Blue Talon of Estacado, the same insurance company that I had when I was in Estacado. Since my employer is based out of Estacado, they can get away with that I guess. I doubt it’s a coincidence that insurance in less-regulated Estacado is cheaper than insurance in more-regulated Cascadia. I’m probably not as protected, though.

I work in an environment where if I’m nice to everyone who wants something from me, I won’t get my job done. It’s gotten worse the past few months, where budget cuts and a few crazy news stories about kids getting their heads cut off have pushed us into an even deeper layer of hell. The scarcity of court time and resources is making everyone nastier, but I’m not complaining about that. I’d settle for my equal share of the nastiness.

But for some reason, any person in the court hallway who is unsatisfied or confused seems to believe I’m the one obligated to drop what I’m doing and solve his problem. I’m pretty sure it’s my age and gender, because the other attorneys tell me it’s not nearly as big a problem for them. The question is what to do about it. I’m used to being a mark for panhandlers and solicitors, but I can tell them to go to hell. Since I got married, gave birth and got boring, I haven’t had to worry much about being a mark for would-be players with a chip on their shoulder. But I can’t avoid that hallway, and somehow I’m a mark there too.

I’m not talking about my own clients. I mean people who know nothing about me except that I’m one of the many attorneys running around that hallway. They pick me to stop. Often they know I’m not their attorney, and often they even know who their attorney is. And I’m not talking about the occasional plaintive plea. I’m talking about people stepping between me and the courtroom door — sometimes as I’m escorted by an armed bailiff — while they fire questions at me about a case I’m not on, or interrupting my conversations with my own clients in the belligerent, entitled tone people use with inattentive waiters.

“Minnie Jones,” I’ll bark down the hallway. I’ve got maybe 3 minutes to talk to poor Minnie Jones before her case gets called. Minnie walks toward me down the packed hallway. I probably start talking to her on 78 RPM before she even reaches me. It should be clear we’re in a big hurry. Meanwhile, some dude will saunter up to me, like Minnie’s not even there. ” ‘Scuze me,” he interrupts. He’s not my client. I’ve never met him.

“Are you Minnie Jones?” I’ll snap. He says no, and launches into his questions anyway!

“Did you hear me call for MINNIE JONES? If you’re not MINNIE JONES, I’m not talking to you!” Every second I give Stranger Dude is a precious second away from desperate Minnie. He probably stops talking then, but he stands his ground, hovering nearby, clearly intending to accost me the second my conversation is done. I’m not nice about it. I tell him to go sit down, that I’m absolutely not going to deal with him before I walk back into that courtroom and will he please give me and MY CLIENT a little privacy.

You’d think an audience who witnessed that would give me a wide berth. Stay away from her, she’s mean! But somehow it doesn’t work like that. And worse, n0w Stranger Dude or Stranger Chick has his or her pride engaged, and has become determined to force me to deal with him or her. They mutter, they complain to others in the hallway about how rude that blonde attorney is — and yet they try to stop me again next time I come out of the courtroom. “Scy-UUUze me! Hey! HEY!” as I walk past them. And sometimes, “What is YOUR NAME? I want YOUR BUSINESS CARD,” in a threatening tone, like I’m supposed to worry the state bar is going to pounce on me for not promptly speaking with my non-client.

If I had time, I’d feel sorry for them. Everyone’s in the dark and probably scared. They’re often mentally ill, in withdrawal, or at least highly dysfunctional, and they don’t know what the hell’s going on or how to find out. We’ve all had some experience having to seek help from a random person. We’ve all had a random person ask us for help. When it happens once in a blue moon, it reminds us we’re human. We can afford not to analyze it. But when you’re dealing with constant triage, it’s glaring and irritating how predictable people are in choosing whom they hassle to meet their needs. It’s not random. People feel they’re entitled to demand more from certain types of people.

I had a guy doing it all day today. He was there for the first time and didn’t know who his attorney was — except that it wasn’t me, because I told him. But he was determined that I personally take ownership of his problem. He got very angry when I ignored him. He got even angrier when I told him he was rude in front of all his hall buddies. Here’s the irony: The guy who was his appointed attorney, a middle-aged white guy, who let him sit there until 3:45 pm. before introducing himself, walked past him in that hallway just as many times as I did. Rude Dude didn’t try to stop HIM one single time.

Back to the neverending topic of weight loss and exercise, the NYT spotlights research that seems to come from the “well, duh” department: the secret to weight loss is to burn more calories than you consume.

The main problem today is, people have no idea what they’re consuming. As the article points out:

“The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”

Most people I know go through 4-5 cans of soda per day. I personally have felt a lot better, and noticed myself getting trimmer (and wanting to exercise more regularly thereby!) when I gave myself one simple rule: don’t stock soda cans in the house. I have juice, I have milk, and that’s it. Generally, after a glass of juice or milk, I don’t feel the need for more than water afterwards; if I drink soda, I find myself thinking “hey, I want another soda.”

I switched to using smaller bowls and smaller plates, and doling out smaller portions (I have “soup bowls” that are wide but shallow but have a circular imprint in the center, so I only fill the imprint and use some whole-grain bread to sop up the gravy from whatever I cooked).

This is not to say that these are easy things. Sticking your giant-sized bowls and glasses “out of the way” and replacing them is an expense, though not that expensive ($20 at Ikea replaced pretty much what I needed for daily use). Cutting how much you eat may require “feeling hungry” for a while as your body adjusts. But the research is clear; “inability to lose weight even though exercising” is much less likely to indicate that you have some hormonal/metabolic issue, and much more likely to indicate that you’re finding some hidden source of calories and not accurately measuring your caloric input or how many calories you’re burning.

The last time you were at an airport, you may have seen a device-charger station. It’s a kiosk with a good two-dozen or so cables so that you can charge just about whatever cell phone, portable music player, or Pocket PC you have. Seems kind of like a waste, doesn’t it? Surely these companies could get together and figure out some sort of universal charger.

Well, the UN is on the case! It has approved a “universal power charger” for cell phones:

The GSMA also estimates that they will reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 13.6m tonnes.

“This is a significant step in reducing the environmental impact of mobile charging,” said Malcolm Johnson, director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau.

“Universal chargers are a common-sense solution that I look forward to seeing in other areas.”

For the technologically uninitiated or for those unfamiliar with the latest cell phone technology, this may sound like quite the achievement. But it’s actually likely to confuse things further and it is embracing a more problematic standard. And at best, it is an unnecessary intervention into an area that was already in the process of sorting itself out.

Anyone that has had cell phones for a while knows of the frustration that comes with differing chargers. You get a cell phone, buy a car charger and an extra wall charger or two, but then when you need to replace your cell phone all of the power adapters are suddenly useless. I avoided this for a while by getting Nokias that held true to the same charger for a while, but then I got a Motorola (courtesy of an inane cell phone insurance policy) and I was out in the cold. By the time I got back to Nokia, they’d switched standards. And, of course, my digital camera and Pocket PC each had proprietary chargers. It’s no wonder that the UN wanted to get involved!

But in recent years, that’s started changing. In my last job, I worked on a dozen or so cell phones from four different manufacturers. Add to that mix a different brand I use at home and two other brands I’ve looked at recently. Between these seven manufacturers (and if I wasn’t so lazy I could rack up a lot more brands, I’m positive), they used all of two different chargers: All but two of the brands used a single standard: Mini-USB. The remaining two used Micro-USB.

This is a great thing for the consumer. Not only do you not have to worry about chargers becoming useless when you buy a new phone, but it becomes a lot easier to replace a charger on the fly when you need to. I lost my digital camera USB-to-device cable years ago and it cost $25 to get a new one. A Mini-USB cable you can get for less than $5. You had to order the digital camera cable from Minolta or an online retailer that got them from Minolta. You can get a Mini-USB cable at Best Buy (though you lose most of the price advantage). On the Micro-USB side, you see similar advantages. On most Plantronics headsets, they come with a Plantronics-proprietary charger. The good news is that Plantronics chargers are universal so if you use a lot of Plantronics earpieces or headsets, you have a lot of chargers. But they can cost $20 or so to replace and a new earpiece costs $25! Meanwhile, some Plantronics earpieces use Micro-USB and you can replace those for under $10 (though not, alas, at Best Buy).

The Mini-USB is becoming the standard. It’s not only used on a lot of cell phones, but also on PC-to-device connections for a load of other devices. For instance, Motorola Bluetooth headsets also use Mini-USB, as do portable card readers. It’s extremely handy to be able to buy a Mini-USB cable and know that it can be used for a bunch of devices. And they’re still cheaper. Widely adopted. And cheaper. Happy day!

The UN, in its ultimate wisdom, has endorsed the Micro-USB. The Micro-USB does have its advantages. The connection is smaller and so it can go not only on smaller cell phones, but also to devices like bluetooth earpieces. Motorola used the Mini, but Motorola’s was a full-on headset. I have a Plantronics earpiece that uses a Micro. The article implies that the Micro is being used on digital cameras. That may be true since my digital camera is pretty old, though digital cameras are generally large enough that the Mini would work just as well.

The bigger problem I have with the Micro is that it is weaker. I had three devices (out of over 100) that had the USB connection ports break and all three were Micro-USB connections. This despite the majority of devices I used using Mini connections. While it could be the particular model is itself problematic and not the Micro-USB in general, I think has more to do with the fact that the Micro-USB port is smaller and therefore more prone to break if tugged in the wrong direction. The Mini-USB just feels sturdier. If it were just the chargers that would break, that wouldn’t be such a big deal, but when something went awry, it was the device (which cost my putative employer thousands of dollars and will cost the consumer hundreds). That’s problematic. They’re also a little bit more expensive, though that may simply be because they’re not as widely used.

The article suggests that Micro-USB chargers have particularly good power conservation and movement and though I did not notice that it may well be true. Or they could be comparing Micro-USB to other proprietary standards. It’s also possible that, as devices continue to get smaller, the Micro-USB will make more sense than the Mini-USB. However, since smartphones have become graphic-oriented, there is only so small that they can make these things. On the third hand, the main device that I tested that used the Micro-USB was wicked-thin and a Mini-USB would have had trouble fitting on it. And maybe as technology progresses, they will figure out a way to make the Micro-USB less prone to break. So it’s a tough call.

Ultimately, though, I don’t view two distinct standards as being a real problem. I think that this is one of those cases where it’s best to let the market decide. If you have a Mini-USB and you buy a Micro-USB phone, somebody somewhere can use your current cables or you will probably need them in the future so you don’t need to throw them out. Ditto the other way.

The real problem is the use of proprietary technology, which is diminishing and not going to be pushed all that much further by the UN. Two holdouts include Apple and Hewlett Packard. In the latter case, they are coming from a position of weakness but they do have a somewhat loyal following so maybe they can get away with not switching. However, HP has notably stuck with the same standard for as long as I can remember, so loyal HP customers are free to accumulate chargers without fear that they will go to waste. As for Apple… well, they like doing things their own way and the UN isn’t going to change that. From what I understand, Apple itself is standardizing its chargers between the iPod and iPhone, so loyal Appleheads will need to worry about that less in the future.

I’m sure that there are other holdouts, but as more and more people get used to universal chargers, they’re going to have to make tough decisions. Maybe they will adopt Mini-USB or Micro-USB standards or maybe they won’t. But at the very least, people will have a choice as to what to do. For my part, with the exception of HP (which I already have numerous chargers for), I am going to be pretty reluctant to get a product that I would have to buy a whole new set of chargers for.

Update: I’ve learned a couple new things since writing this. First, HP now uses mini-USB, so their proprietary standard is gone. Second, I talked to the guy at Verizon to get a feel for their offerings and he says that Verizon is applying pressure on cell phone makers to adopt Micro-USB. Also, Blackberry, which I had believed to use Mini-USB, actually uses Micro. I still believe that Mini is the superior standard, but it looks like it’s a closer race than I thought and may have already been shifting towards Micro.

My head hurts from the first two and my gut hurts from laughing at the last one.