I applied for the position at Wildcat on Monster.com. I was relatively certain that I wasn’t going to get it, but at three in the morning I sent off an email that was probably barely coherent saying something to the effect of “Hey, yeah, I got experience with Microsoft Access and I could probably look over an office fleet of computers. If you’re interested, give me a call.”

The next day I turned in some fifteen job applications to Southern Tech University for various tech positions and a couple clerk ones. I had also interviewed twice for a position with Worldtower, a well-respected company in the area that a couple years later would live in infamy, but at the time was was known for extraordinary pay and being an interesting and challenging place to work.

Between the Southern Tech, which would have been a great place to work because I liked the university, and Worldtower, which would have paid me very well and was always hiring entry level people, I didn’t really give Wildcat another thought. In fact, by the next evening when they called, I’d forgotten applying at all. In fact, I was so sure that they were UH that I wasn’t really paying attention when the nice woman started giving me directions and had to ask her to repeat them. I briefly wondered why Sotech had an office on the outskirts of town.

I had night class at the time and my cell phone went off during class. I’d forgotten to turn it off because no one ever really called me at night and the only person who might have was spending the evening with her father, so I was relatively certain she wouldn’t. It being past seven o’clock, it didn’t even occur to me that a potential employer might call.

When Nancy first began speaking to me for some reason I assumed that she was with Southern Tech. It wasn’t until she gave me the address that I realized that there was some strange company with an odd name that for some reason wanted to hire me. My self-esteem on the job hunt was not so high. I’d been unemployed for eight months and nobody was particularly interested in me. It was the equivalent of the wallflower being invited to the senior prom.

I got to the Wildcat offices about fifteen minutes early and was greeted by a very pleasant and nice woman named Edith. Edith gave me the application which I furiously began filling out. When I finished, I was directed to a computer in the back corner office where I took a DOS-based psychological profile program on a 486/25MHz Packard Bell computer that they still use to this day for various tasks.

As soon as I finished it began printing out. After about ten minutes or so of waiting, I was introduced to Calvin and brought into his office for the interview.

“I was looking at your psych profile, and I want you to know that ordinarily I wouldn’t even consider hiring you. It says here that you would spend all day as a social butterfly keeping people from working. It also says that even though you could be detail-oriented, you don’t believe that detail-oriented is a good thing to be. Why don’t you believe that, Mr. Truman?”

I went into self-sale mode. “I think being detail-oriented is important. You have to be able to take your abstract ideas and app-”

“It says here that you don’t think that being detail-oriented is important. Explain to me why.”

“I don’t know why it says I feel that way but I don’t rea-”

“Why would you spend all your time in my office chattering away and not allowing other people to work?”

“I don’t think I would do that at all. I’m really not that social of a per-”

“That’s not what the test says. The test says that all you are going to do is talk and ignore details.”

“I don’t think that test is right…”

“This test was designed by people with PhD’s in psychology. Do you have a PhD is psychology?”

“Well no.”

“Did you lie on the answers? Because if this was designed by experts and the results are wrong, you must have lied.”

“I… uh… well….”

“It says on your job application that you’re willing to work for $10 an hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Some idiot came in last week wanted $60,000 a year and you’re willing to work for $10 an hour?”

I didn’t mention that the job had advertised for $50,000 a year (which was why I didn’t believe I’d get the job and a reason that I forgot about it promptly after applying because nobody was going to hire me for $50,000 a year). Instead, I just said “I want to work. I’m tired of not working.” I was trying to fake having a work ethic.

“So you’ll take this job for a couple of months until something better comes along and then you’ll leave it and I’ll have to go through all of the trouble of finding someone new?”

“Sir, if I like the job I’ll take less pay to do so. I’ve passed higher paying opportunities before because I liked where I was working.”

“No, the economy is going to pick back up and you’re going to get a better job offer and I’m going to have to find someone else.”

“I really don’t think-”

“Can I be frank with you?”

“Uhhhh, sure.”

“You want to work here so that you can gab away and distract everybody and ignore details so you can just pad your resume and leave. Is there a single reason why I should hire you?”

By this point I was about ready to just walk out the door. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to hire me, so what was the point?

“Do you do drugs?”

“What?”

“You don’t do drugs, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Come with me,” he requested as he took me into the Nancy’s office. He then, with me standing right there, told Nancy to inform me that I got the job and to start Monday at 8am.That’s how I found out that I got the job. When Nancy asked about whether or not I had to take the drug test first, he explained that they were in a crunch and “Mr. Truman has assured me that he does not do drugs. We’ll take his word for it. Set up a test for sometime next week.”

“In the Spring of 1999, the Family Learning Channel commissioned animator Don Hertzfeldt to produce promotional segments for their network. The cartoons were copleted in five weeks. The Family Learning Channel rejected all of them upon review, and they were never aired…”

I previously showed off a Hertzfeldt animation, L’amour, here. This one is a little more wacky and a lot more graphic. If you don’t like blood or weird, I can’t recommend it. However, if you make it five minutes into it and you have been reading my below-the-fold comments, you will see exactly why I’ve been thinking about this animation.

I was talking to my father-in-law the other day about Clancy’s youngest sister, Zoey. Zoey is presently abroad doing good deeds in a third-world part of the country. When she gets back, she’s probably going to graduate school. At no point does she plan on marrying or having children. Which is a shame, not only because she has the genes for it, but moreso than a lot of people she has an outstanding temperament for it.

When Clancy and her sisters were young, the Himmelreich parents decided that they would make sure that the education and preparation the girls got would be enough so that they would take care of themselves. Unlike with her cousins, they would not take the path of endlessly higher education and the debt that comes with it, nor would they need to marry a man to support him.

The drawback to this approach is, of course, that it makes one far less likely to become grandparents. Not that none of them couldn’t manage to have kids if that’s what they wanted, but the emphasis on self-sufficiency early on can make it harder later on in life to then turn around and surrender a portion of your fate to someone else.

In a sense, when you become a mother, that’s partly what you’re doing in the middle-to-upper classes. Some women stay at home and some continue to work, but even those that continue to work have to take patches of time off and usually end up putting their career second. When there are kids involved, it’s hard for their to be two careers. Even in two-income households, it’s usually one career and one job. Clancy and I don’t even have kids and I have had to make the sorts of sacrifices generally reserved for mothers. It’s fortunate for all involved that I am not remarkably career-oriented as the more career-oriented someone is (and the Himmelreich girls were certainly taught to be career-oriented), the less likely they’re going to make those sacrifices.

For all of the complaints about child support and alimony, they can serve the useful purpose of encouraging the sort of trust that people need to make in order to have and raise kids. It becomes much, much harder to convince the Himmelreich girls of the world to stay at home or make career sacrifices when it becomes “each person for him/herself” in the event of a divorce.

The scale can certainly tilt too far in the other direction, as some suggest it already has, but it’s important to recognize that there are competing values here. Helping the partner that sacrificed during the marriage in the event of a divorce encourages sacrifice. The biggest problem with alimony is that it is not very compatible with no-fault divorce. The guarantee of child support is not only important in support for the child, but also in this vein.

As for raising kids (and girls in particular), I’m not sure there is a solution to this dilemma. We will probably raise any daughters we have with similar aims than Clancy and her sisters were. They will be able to take care of themselves. It is my hope that our marriage and family life will be a better inspiration for the joys of family life than is the Himmelreich marriage and the problems that occurred earlier in it.

As you may know, I have a moderately anti-Apple bias. I spent my nights dreaming of sugarplumbs, fairies, and the iPhone being knocked off its blasted perch. However, though Apple engages in a lot of technical practices that I don’t like and I get endlessly frustrated with the computer people that give them a pass on things that they would excoriate Microsoft and others for, I do not doubt Apple’s design and marketing prowess. If I had any doubts prior to the iPhone, the iPhone relieved me of most of them. I figured the iPhone would be successful, but I didn’t think that it would suck all of the air out of the growing smartphone market. My bad.

So what to make of the iPad? For those of you that don’t pay attention to such things, the iPad is Apple’s entry into the nascent tablet market. They’re hoping to fill a gap that does not really exist (or at least has not been exploited) in the market yet: the area in between smartphones and notebook computers. Natural questions arise as to what, precisely, this means. With today’s announcement, Apple gave their answer to that question: a bigger and more expensive phoneless iPhone (also known as the iPod Touch).

Up until today, as more details have been leaked, I was extremely skeptical of Apple’s chances on this one. For instance, the rumors that it would include the Operating System of the iPhone instead of a lighter variation of the OSX left me underwhelmed. There are a lot of things that people will put up with a cell phone that they will not put up with on a computer-ish device that costs the rumored $1000.

The biggest example is the iPhone’s refusal to support Adobe Flash. I don’t have Flash installed on my smartphone. It’s really not that big of a deal. There are alternate applications for much of what I would use Flash for. YouTube has its own application on Windows Mobile (my phone’s OS) and I think that Rhapsody does, too. If I want to watch a video off the web, I’m more likely to use a laptop anyway. The iPhone has better Flash-circumvention support than Windows Mobile, so it’s even less of a deal for that device. If they want to use something that isn’t supported, such as Hulu, they can just go to their laptop.

I am not sure how well this attitude will carry over to something with the screen space afforded by the iPad. The screen on that sucker begs to watch videos on it and its inability to watch videos that don’t circumvent Flash will likely prove to be a lot more frustrating. And unlike YouTube, Hulu doesn’t necessarily have a whole lot of motivation to make it easier for people to watch shows from more places. For one thing, the networks feeding the content don’t want it to be too convenient lest people start declining to buy the DVDs, watch it on regular TV with all of the extra commercials, or subscribe to cable to get access to the programs. Maybe that will change once Hulu goes to the subscription model, but maybe it won’t. I also know that while I can watch Netflix on a laptop, I don’t know if that would be true for the iPad.

There are other issues along these lines. People are already complaining about the ability of the iPhone to multitask. But it’s a phone, so a lot of people give it a pass. Would they be similarly be willing to give a pass to something with screen space more similar to that of a netbook (where multitasking is possible, albeit not optimal)? There are reasons to believe that it won’t.

What Apple needs to do, then, is to let people know up front that this is not a laptop. this is not a skimmed down laptop. This is not a netbook. This is something different, much more similar to the iPod Touch, and people that want a laptop should buy a laptop. Apple seems to realize this because they’ve been playing up its relationship with the phoneless phone and downplaying it as the middle step to a laptop.

The biggest problem with all of this was poised to be the price. Apple’s control over perception may be impressive, but it is not without limitation. People that pay more for an iPad than they could pay for a laptop are going to expect it to do laptop things. There’s just no getting around it. So when rumors were that the iPad was going to cost $1000 or so, I just couldn’t see it being embraced. Yesterday, however, they announced that while people that want to spend a grand can (Apple never likes to displease that brand of customer) the starting price is actually $500. That actually opens up some possibilities.

Granted, $500 won’t get you a whole lot. People that think that they’re getting a neato netbook are going to be just as disappointed as the people I was suspecting were thinking would get a laptop. But people that think that they’re getting a more muscular, more versatile, and more expensive Kindle should be relatively satisfied with the low-end iPad. Right now Kindle sales themselves have not been very good and that’s an important point. However, Apple does manage to address some of the bigger reasons that I myself would not buy a Kindle. Among other things, it appears as though I will be able to read digital comic books on it in color. It appears as though there will not be the PDF limitations that the Kindle has. That’s even leaving aside the sorts of things that nobody would ever ask a Kindle to do such as play music and video. Which brings me to the other potential buy that could come out of it relatively satisfied: the potential iPod Touch buyer. It addresses some of the reasons that I have not bought an iPad touch: Namely, it answers the question “What can this thing do that my cell phone can’t and is it worth buying a separate device for?” The answer to that was previously “It can run iPhone applications!” That answer was insufficient. “It has a more usable keyboard” and “it has a larger screen” on the other hand, do provide a sort of answer to that question.

Does that provide a $500 answer? Right now, it doesn’t. At least, not for me. It’s something I’ll keep an eye on. The multitude of applications that are available on the iPhone/iPT but not on its competitors is a seductive army. Despite Apple’s unconscionable app-blocking policy, there is simply no other smartphone platform that can really compete if I simply pretend that the applications blocked simply never existed. Advanced users will jailbreak their iPads the same way they jailbreak their iPhones. Non-advanced users like my sister-in-law will simply go on as though the programs don’t exist. The counterquestion is, though, how useful are these little apps on a device that’s not as portable as an iPhone? A lot of the value of iPhone applications are that they are on a device that you have with you nearly at all times.

But the biggest question to whether or not the iPad will succeed or fail has less to do with Apple and more to do with us. Contrary to what Appleheads say, the iPhone did not invent an industry. It belatedly joined a burgeoning one and then dominated it. The distinction is important. Had the iPhone never been invented, there may be less smartphones out there than there are today, but there would still be a whole lot more of them than there were just a few years ago. The current market for tablet devices just does not have the same sense of destiny as did smartphones three years ago. They won’t be able to rely on the “I was thinking of buying this sort of product anyway, so I should buy Apple’s variation.”

How big of the iPhone’s market segment is this? I think it’s a lot more than most techheads realize. I like to use my sister-in-law as an example. She’s happy with her iPhone, but she chose the iPhone after she decided that she wanted a more muscular phone. The likelihood that she will buy a tablet of any sort is remote. That leaves the market mostly relegated to techheads. Techheads are probably most likely to be take notice of the things that the iPad is not capable of doing. There are many that will give Apple a pass because it is Apple, but those that are not Apple partisans are less likely to join the bandwagon this time around. In other words, I see the iPad running into the same sorts of problems as the Kindle, except moreso.

At the same time, though, I am really reluctant to actively bet against Apple. The success of the iPhone, which I understand completely on one level, completely elludes me on another. I’ve always been a little surprised at what Apple fans are willing to pay for when a product is made by Apple, but the iPhone demonstrated pretty clearly that they know something even about non-Apple customers that I don’t. As a computer guy, I tend to be more understanding of the average user than a lot of other computer guys, but apparently even I have my blind spots. So I really don’t know whether the iPad will succeed or not.

Jon Last makes the following astute observation:

With nothing more than the iPhone OS, it’s a super-slick smart-phone/Kindle/netbook hybrid. Only it lacks a smartphone’s portability, the Kindle’s readability, and the netbook’s power.

That could be a bad thing, although it could be a good one. If someone doesn’t need it to be quite as readable as the Kindle because they’re so used to reading off screens, doesn’t need it to be as portable as a smartphone because they’ve got the phone thing squared away and don’t need a or have with it a PDA, and doesn’t need a netbook’s power because they have a notebook or netbook… it’s a great way to have something that’s not as restricted as the Kindle, more portable than the netbook, and not attached to a phone plan like a cell phone is. He asks if we really need a third device. No, but the same could be said for a second device and people have been predicting the death of the desktop since forever and yet people still buy them.

So… it looks like it could be a pretty neat toy. But who will want to pay for it? Apple can often get away with lower sales numbers because they have such high margins, but they seem to be taking a different tact with this one. At $1000 a pop, they could get away with only the enthusiasts buying it, but does $500 provide that kind of margin? It seems to me that they’re actually banking on more widespread adoption for this to be considered something less than a failure. Apple has succeeded in the past largely by not playing that game. Now the question is… do they have the constitution to play and win it?

In addition to know knowing whether or not the iPad will succeed, I also don’t know whether I hope it succeeds or not. The more I think about it, the more attractive I find the notion of tablets. The more I like the idea of an iPad, even if I am unlikely to purchase one myself. If Apple is successful, I have no doubt that competitors will come out with their own products and I suspect that what the competitors come up with I will be more likely to buy myself. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if the smartphone market has been actively damaged by the iPhone by this point. It was previously beneficial to the industry and could remain so if it gets knocked off its perch and more open-minded competitors take over. But if iPhone’s (relative) domination does not stop, we’re going to be stuck with a standard where the hardware, software, and user is largely controlled by a single entity. Everything computer people accuse Microsoft of doing… except this time far more real.

Addendum: The Atlantic has a couple pieces on the iPad that are worth reading, one pro and one con. David Indiviglio makes a point that had occurred to me that I didn’t really explore, which is that this is a better device for good economic times when people are looking for cool things to spend their money on. It’s a luxury device in non-luxirious times. That could prove to be a problem. Derek Thompson takes a more positive view.

On our drive out here, Clancy was getting paranoid that the hotel wouldn’t honor our reservations, so she had me call the hotel. I called Best Western, confirmed the reservation, and was perfectly fine with the fact that we wouldn’t be getting there until 2am. When we rolled in to Callie, I found out that we were never staying at the Best Western. Our reservations were at the Super 8. So the BW confirmed reservations that never were. Then again, why not. No doubt they had a lot of vacancies and figured our confusion could land them an occupant.

We brought three laptops with us to Arapaho, which seems kind of excessive. However, one of my laptops has a 3-prong plug and hotels are spotty about outlet availability. So I brought my Linux laptop, too. That laptop has a 2-prong plug, but the computer crashes about once a day (not Linux’s fault). So I wasn’t sure which would be more useful. Besides, when you’re driving, it’s easier to be excessive in regards to the luggage.

I had a last-minute emergency for a job interview here. First there was a question about whether I should wear a suit that was notably too large or a shirt and tie that was only a little too large. Once I got that settled, I realized that I did not bring with me a black belt so I had to scramble around town to find one. There is no Walmart in Callie and indeed none of the chains that I would ordinarily beeline to exist out here. You forget how much you appreciate those everywhere places when you realize that you’re outside of everywhere. I figure that once I get accustomed to the area, it will matter less because I will know where to go. Just as I know where to get belts now.

When we were driving around Callie last time, we had a rented Subaru Forester with all-wheel drive. It was great, though ultimately unnecessary. In the intervening week, it snowed. So now we’re in the Camry when having an AWD car would be much more useful.

Colosse has multiple area codes. The State of Arapaho has only one. The City of Callie has only one exchange (the middle three numbers) for non-cell phones. So when people give their phone number, they only give four numbers. It’s kind of trippy.

Everyone out here keeps bragging on how sunny this place is. But I don’t want sunny. I want the nice, cool, wet Zaulem Sound weather.

I almost never watch Law & Order at our house in Cascadia, but frequently do at my folks’ house in Colosse and the inlaws’ in Beyreuth. I find that any time I’m out-of-pocket, it’s what I want to watch. Even now, when I have more worthwhile programs on my new pocket drive.

Anyone else have a pocket drive? These things are great. My father-in-law introduced me to the concept and I didn’t “get it” because I could just as easily use a regular external drive for the big things and a thumb drive for the small things. But really, there’s a really good middle-ground for something with the space of a big drive but the increased portability by the fact that you don’t have to plug it in independently.

The rest is placed under the fold because it pertains to the medical condition I talked about previously. (more…)

District 9 came out to the theaters shortly after I lost my job, so I decided that I would treat myself and see it in the theater. This turned out to be a good move because it was a really good movie visually and something would have been lost seeing it at home on TV or even in the low-rent theater where I see most of my theaters.

The movie was entertaining throughout, which I guess is mostly what you’re looking for. It was also well-paced. That’s about all I can really say about it. Beyond that, it was pretty disappointing. Not because the movie wasn’t good, but rather because it wasn’t the movie that I wanted to see. I can’t put the blame entirely on myself for this, because it either made the claim (or had the claim made on its behalf) that it was the kind of movie that I wanted to see: something thought-provoking, allegorical, and even insightful.

Instead, it was mostly just a movie about a guy being hunted by an evil, multi-national corporation. It was sort of like how I felt after watching X-Men. A movie that was supposed to transcend the superhero genre turned out instead to be a movie about a deathray (of sorts) emanating from the Statue of Liberty. The joke Wolverine made about wearing a yellow costume rang hollow because, given the plot of the movie, he might as well have been wearing a yellow costume. Or at least a costume of some sort that draws it in tighter with the comic book. The problem is that X-Men couldn’t decide which sort of movie it wanted to be, tried to be both, and had me coming out feeling disappointed.

Likewise for District 9. The aliens as apartheid South Africans was a fascinating concept, but it was almost entirely relegated to the backdrop. The movie did not tell us anything interesting about the Apartheid. The villains were so dastardly that we really could not see ourselves in them, which is one of the things you want to do if you’re wanting us to question our allegiance to social justice and liberty and all that. For instance, it doesn’t really challenge our government’s previous support of the white South African leadership because, for all their faults, weren’t doing what the MNU folks were doing. There was only one side to this story and when it’s absolutely clear that one side is good and one side is evil, you do get the audience to side with the good guys, but not in any way that’s applicable to the world around them.

I spent a portion of the movie figuring out what I might have done differently. Making the villains a little less villainous would have been a start. I might have gone a step further and said that they should have made it morally murky. Instead of trying to take the prawns’ technology for eeeevil weapons, I would have made it about a form of alternative energy. So on one hand you have people that are trying to save the world by creating a form of energy that will save the environment… but they’re having to do unconscionable things to get there. That would have been a far more interesting movie, in my book.

But it would have made it a far less compelling action movie. Being hunted by evil corporations, on the other hand, makes for a nice, simplistic action movie. And a good portion of the audience likes to know right off the bat who to root for or against.

After I watched GI Joe, before I watched D9, there were a couple of people were talking about the movie as being fascinating and thought-provoking. Maybe if I’d never heard that conversation, I would have liked the movie a lot more than I did. Or at least if I hadn’t heard the buzz surrounding it. Not unlike my view of X-Men being somewhat dinged by my roommate’s constant talk about how it was going to be a different sort of superhero movie. The thing is, though, were it not for the potential of it being more than an action movie, I never would have seen it to begin with.

After facing a huge setback, I put together the second version of the famous Trumanvese map. I’ll write more later when the map is complete, but as I introduce Arapaho, I wanted people to become familiar with its location and the surrounding states. Fortunately, while there are still some states to be named later, I’m pretty solid on the regions that I’ve lived and talked about. States that I am still working on naming are left blank.

Map 1: Trumanverse
Map 2: Trumanverse overlaid on the regular states. Some of the midwestern states are a touch off-kilter. Long story.

If you think any of the state names are way off-base or think I may have overlooked a much more obvious name, now is a pretty good time to chime in.

Update: The second map had the same link as the first. It’s been corrected to show the second map.

It’s official. Clancy has signed the contract and we will be relocating to Arapaho (pronounced Ah-RAWP-ah-hoe) within the next couple of months. We’re officially going to be on there for a short-term contract, but at this point there’s no reason to believe we won’t sign on for a full multi-year tour. Will it be where we end up permanently? Time will tell. Unlike the last three places we’ve lived, though, this is a place where we would actually have the option of settling down.

Callie is a town of several thousand and is pretty far from being the biggest city in a state without much in the way of cities. It will be, by far, the most rural place I have ever lived. The nearest town of any significant size, Tupelo, is an hour away with and you have to go about two hours out before you get to places with such illustrious amenities as airports. The high school graduates classes about the size of my classes in elementary school. The local college is a third the size of my high school. My job prospects there are not particularly good since there are only two employers of any size. There is a two-screen movie theater in town (that understandably seems to stick to family movies) and only a six-screen in Tupelo.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Callie is, for a rural town, a very pleasant sort of place. Because there’s a college there, there’s more to do than there are in other towns of similar size. Instead of being surrounded by other towns, it’s surrounded by the great outdoors with beautiful mountains, natural parks, and so on. For a generally agricultural area, it’s also pretty well-off. Poverty rates are less than half that of the state as a whole. It also has a strikingly educated population for its city profile — above the national average, in fact. The schools are supposed to be pretty good with little crime that even manages to avoid the meth problems that plague the region.

But perhaps most promisingly, the people that live there really like it there. It’s one of the few places I’ve been where the residents don’t want it to be somewhere else. They don’t think in terms of “Well, of course I would rather be living somewhere more expensive, but this is where I got the job (and/or can afford to live).” They actually seemed to underplay this during our first interview. It was only when we announced our intention to take the position that they started really gushing over the town. So they weren’t just trying to sell us on it. And while I speak of Callie in particular, the same is has long been true of the people I’ve known in the State of Arapaho.

For a town of its type, it’s about the best that I can ask for. The question I’m going to be facing while I’m there is whether or not I can adapt to a lifestyle so far removed from everything? I go back and forth on this. Part of me worries about whether or not I will be able to fit in there. One of the things I like about cities is that it’s much easier to find your social niche and I generally have more in common with people that live in cities than in small towns. Further, I’m not an outdoors person, generally speaking, so I’m not sure where that leaves me.

On the other hand, I’m highly adaptable. I’ve never lived anywhere I haven’t adjusted to and I would have thought crazy anyone that said I would have adjusted to living in Deseret. So maybe I will take up golf. It’s not far from some good snowmobiling places. There are also a lot of community-involvement opportunities. The town also takes great pride in its high school football team, which is a relatively familiar concept. The good news is that I’m going to have a couple of years to figure it out. When I visited my ex-roommate Hubert and his twin girls, the thought occurred to me that when we have little ones running around, there’s not going to be as much time to be out and about. So even if Callie is a bust, the opportunity costs won’t be as high because it’ll be a couple household-centered years.

For now, it’s the perfect opportunity for Clancy. She was willing to shelve a number of things she wanted to do for me when we were interviewing at Gemini Falls and the good news about Callie is that she won’t have to. Honestly, this entire process struck us very much about how it’s supposed to be. There was never (well, almost never) that vague sense that something wasn’t quite right or that we had something to prove. When we had concerns about the initial contract, they were happy to work with us on it. She is a perfect fit for this position and the position is a perfect fit for her, at least on paper. Besides which, there may be some opportunities at the hospital for me down the line as they seek to expand and digitize their operations.

I ran across this image attached to a rather vitriolic post (the thrust of which was, in essence, “only stupid inbred hicks oppose gay marriage and this map proves it”), but it struck something of a thought process. Here goes.

First of all, the map’s not entirely accurate with respect to what the author was trying to say. Five states, at least, shouldn’t be listed as “allowing” cousin marriage, since their restrictions make it so that an impossibly small portion of their population will realistically participate. There’s a considerable overlap with gay and cousin marriage allowability in the northeastern section of the US. And of course the Granola State on the west coast, a place which carries almost entirely the opposite of the “inbred hick” stereotype, allows cousin marriage and has gone back and forth on the issue of gay marriage for a few years now.

Secondly, the science against cousin marriage is muddled. The usual argument put against it is that it encourages genetic diseases. In certain populations, specifically populations where cousin marriage is encouraged and founder effects come into play, this is true. Small, isolated rural villages of current/past ages, the inbred lines of European royalty, and the lines of fundamentalist Mormonism come to mind here. Another example is the Dutch settlers to South Africa (the “Afrikaners”), who carry magnified risk of Huntington’s Disease because an abnormal percentage of the original settlers were carriers.

On the other hand, research into larger, more diverse genetic populations indicates that “once in a while” cousin marriage carries relatively small risk - about the same risk as a woman having kids at the age of 40 rather than 30. The further argument is that laws against it in the US were motivated not by risk of genetic disease, but by a desire to force immigrants to intermarry into the population (and thus assimilate) in a quicker manner.

Oddly enough, the argument about “inbred hicks” falls apart when comparing the map of European gay marriage laws. I’d put a map up comparing it to European laws about cousin marriage, but there’s no real point to it: cousin marriage is legal in 100% of Europe. Two countries have recently begun discussing the option of banning it, and oddly enough, it’s not even the condition of their oddly buckteethed/colorblind/hemophiliac (that last being the origin of the term “blue-blood” as a reference to royalty) royal lines that did it, but rather the high rate of genetic diseases in recent immigrant populations from the rural sectors of Islamic countries, who perpetuate societal cousin marriage rates of 55% or above in a population where it’s not uncommon to be the child of a chain of 8-10 cousin marriages (including “double cousin” marriages, wherein the kids are not simply cousins but where mother/aunt and father/uncle, or mother/uncle and father/aunt, constitute sibling pairs as well making the kids almost genetic siblings) in a row.

The trouble with this is discussion that it’s a perfect example of a “where do we draw the line” sort of argument. On the one hand, in a (mostly healthy) genetic population where cousin marriage would be rare and genetic diversity a given, arguers against cousin marriage would quickly expire upon the line of “well why do we let 40-year-old women have kids then?” On the other hand, we have definitive proof of the genetic risks of allowing multigenerational cousin marriage. There even comes the risk that at some point, society could start stopping non-sibling people from marrying because they both carried a recessive gene for some debilitating genetic disease like Huntington’s or Tay-Sachs, or even something as merely inconvenient as Celiac. It’s not that farfetched; some states to this day still require a blood test, a holdover from times when they were screening for sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis. Another justification (now that the technology exists) for genetic testing as a marriage requirement could be to ensure that they aren’t unknowingly marrying their half-sibling or even full sibling, due to the high percentage of absentee/unknown fathers or potential for siblings to be separated too early in life to remember each other in certain populations.

Since this post discusses anatomy and bodily functions that some people are uncomfortable discussing, I’m going to put it below the fold. (more…)

This looks pretty sweet:

It also brings to mind one of the common sentiments I’ve had towards video games, which probably shows my age as much as anything else. Namely, this game looks fun and easy to play. As video games have become more and more complex, they’ve really moved away from that. There seems to still be a good market for it. The Nintendo Wii capitalizes on it somewhat. But so does the iPhone. Seven years or so ago, it seemed to be all about combos. Nowhere was this more evident than with the fighting games, which eventually became more about remember specific keystrokes than about dexterity and creativity. I’m not an avid gamer, but it seems that the focus has shifted at least a little away from that. I wonder if it’s because back in the day they could sell magazines with the keystrokes whereas now everything is out there for free on the Internet. But it probably has more to do with the facts that fighting games themselves have receded as game-designers have not had to choose between intricate fighting and storyline.

A while back, Web and I got into it over tasers. One of the items of contention was this video:

Web and I both agree that the pastor is question is a jackass (even if we are not in precise agreement as to why). One of the difference seems to be, however, that when it comes to the enforcement of some crimes, including drugs, he is inclined to give police a greater amount of leeway in enforcing the law compared to, say, traffic stops, which represent infractions much less significant to public safety:

When it comes to dealing with violent criminals, illegal drug/personage smuggling, gang violence, or other things of that nature, though, we’re getting into a different area of law enforcement.

I hear him on that point. For better or worse, we call it a “war on drugs” for a reason. And unlike a lot of my contemporaries, I am not in favor of mass decriminalization. And while I believe that civil rights are important in the abstract, there’s no point in denying that I am less concerned with the crossed T’s, dotted I’s, and so on when it comes to a certain criminal element. At the same time, the spillover that occurs in attempting to identify those individuals from regular citizens represents a significant problem in cases when police officers are acting in good faith. Web has a good deal of skepticism towards Pastor Anderson. I share some skepticism, though I don’t believe nearly to the degree that he does. However, I do have a general skepticism of Arizona law enforcement. A skepticism, I should add, that pre-dates my learning of this incident.

Maybe my skepticism is warranted and maybe it is not. But there are a lot of reasons to have a degree of skepticism of law enforcement in general. I don’t believe that we should mistrust everything they say or do or automatically lend faith to people that make accusations against law enforcement. On the whole, I consider myself to be pro-cop. When a suspect says A and the cops say B, I am more inclined to believe B.

On two occasions I have actually let officers search my car. Once I did it because I was young and the notion that a cop wouldn’t be on the up-and-up hadn’t fully occurred to me. More recently because I got the sense that the cops were looking for someone in particular who was not me and I made the determination that the faster they realized that it was not me the better off everyone was going to be. Sure enough, they determined that I wasn’t the guy they were looking for and once they got over their curiosity of some brown powder in the back of my car, I was released thereafter.

However, there are parts of the country, including pockets of the south, Arizona, and Odessa, where I would not be so obliging. And there are some circumstances in which I wouldn’t trust cops anywhere because I might be worried that they were more concerned about finding something than whether or not I am actually somebody up to no good. Particularly in the age where highway departments can impound a car that they find drugs or a weapon in and the treasure goes to the department or their retirement fund. Even if you have faith in the court system to find you not guilty, they can still keep your car. I have to think that the vast majority of cops are above planting something, but I am to say the least unenthusiastic at wagering my livelihood that the cop I am dealing with isn’t an exception to the rule.

That brings me back to the Arizona checkpoint. On the whole, I am probably less inclined to assume the best at checkpoints. The motive and opportunity are there. They have to justify their existence, which means that if they don’t find people with drugs they could lose their funding. Further, if it’s a state that raises revenue off of forfeitures, that provides an additional motive. I believe (and want to believe) that the vast majority of cops have better motives than that. But if an officer was not above that sort of thing, checkpoints would provide the perfect opportunity to be below it. Catch a legitimate drug trafficker, put a little of the evidence off to the side, and plant it on the stud driving the Camaro that would bring in some serious cash at an auction. Or on the guy that just really looks suspicious. Or on the guy that’s way too cocky and disrespectful. Maybe I am just being way too paranoid here, but again, I’m not comfortable betting my livelihood that I am.

I act as though I have a choice. Sometimes I do, but sometimes I don’t. If the cops say that the dog smelled something, either I get out of the car voluntarily or they force me out. In the event that they “find” something, I am going to be dealing with jurors like myself who is going to believe cops over some drug-carrying miscreant.

That’s why, despite sharing with Web a real distaste for Pastor Anderson, what happened to him makes me extremely uncomfortable. Maybe he had put some traces of drugs solely so he could make a movie. Maybe the dog smelled a ham sandwich. Maybe if he hadn’t been holding a camera or hadn’t been a jackass they would have let him through. But while any of these things could be the case, they really don’t have to be. It’s a corrupt cop’s dream. And there is very little recourse if you happen to be the chump that they’re going to make an example of.

Of course, at the same time we have to have at least some faith in the cops for the system to work. If the cop says he saw A and the suspect says B happened and we always believe B and there is no hard evidence either way, the result could be making their jobs nearly impossible. Cops would be the only people in front of whom it would be safe to commit a crime.

I’m not sure what the solution to this dilemma is. One of the things that law enforcement has been doing more and more of is taping their interactions. This has the potential to be a win-win because when people make bogus claims against the cops they can immediately show them to be bogus. Likewise, in cases where there is actual abuse, we’re not left giving all benefit of the doubt to the officers if there is video tape. And just by knowing that they’re being taped, it makes abuse less likely to begin with. Another thing that would make me more comfortable is if there was an independent witness that I was allowed to call. Someone that could watch the cops searching my car and make sure that everything is on the up-and-up and if everything is not could testify to that effect. But having something to avoid being railroaded by corrupt cops would make me a lot less uncomfortable with what happened to Anderson and make me identify less with people that charge police misconduct during drug searches.

Over the last few months, it’s felt like we’ve been homeless. Not “sleeping on the street” homeless, of course, but more on the “man without a country” sense. Or “man and woman without a state”, to be more precise.

It all started with our round of interviews to Gemini Falls and Arapaho. It was followed a week or so later with another trip to Gemini Falls. Then we had our trip back to Delosa for Thanksgiving, a couple weeks back in Cascadia, then another couple weeks in Delosa for Christmas. Coming later this week is another trip to Arapaho. If all goes well, we’ll be back here for a month or two packing to move. Otherwise, expect another spate of interviews.

Don’t get me wrong. I love visiting my family and have greatly enjoyed my time back in Delosa. I’ve also enjoyed our trips for the interviews and am looking forward to giving Dent County, Arapaho, a longer, harder look. And even the impending move, painful though it will be in terms of stress and headaches, will land us in our next and perhaps permanent destination.

But it’s all extraordinarily exhausting. Trips to the airport, multi-hour drives across the interior northwest and across Delosa. In cars without MP3 players, in some cases! I know, cry my a river, but you get used to certain things. I barely have time to get settled in anywhere before we’re about to go somewhere else. Even during our two-and-a-half week trip to Delosa, we split our time between Colosse, Beyreuth (where her family lives, on the other side of the state), Genesis (her ancestral home), and Ephesus.

It’s also created some logistical problems. I can’t really order things because I don’t know if we’ll be in Soundview when the package arrives. Further, anything I order may just have to be boxed up in a couple of weeks and so I’m disinclined to replace the faulty wireless keyboard, get new batteries for the laptops, and so on. Two of the really nice things about being unemployed was that it was easy to stay well-rested and that I could receive packages.

Assuming that Arapaho works out, it’ll be the case that Soundview will never be “home” again and that it will retroactively ceased having been so about four months ago. In the meantime, I got back from Arapaho earlier this week. Next week or the week after, it’s off to Arapaho.

A recent Facebook meme (where you’re supposed to cut and paste something and put it on your status) was about autism. Anyone else notice a variation in the message?

Some people said they prayed (or hoped) for a cure. I could get behind that. Others said people with autism don’t want a cure, they want acceptance.

The latter were either parents of autistic children, or people who were clearly close to the parent of an autistic child (clear because the person was thanking them in the comments and providing this information). So I felt disinclined to do any questioning.

Acceptance is better than rejection. But really, we’re not supposed to want a cure? Has autism become something we’re supposed to embrace? Just another lovely little variation under the umbrella of human diversity? Please, no.

This stirs up the same disturbance I got from a lengthy questionnaire from Cedars-Sinai . It was market research to gauge how a parent would feel about them using leftover samples (stuff that would otherwise get thrown away) to perform research to cure various theoretical (I think) hereditary diseases. I answered yes, yes, yes, for pages and pages. I’d let you keep whatever you wanted; I’d let you do whatever you wanted with it; yes it would be nice if you told me your results but even if you don’t, I won’t hold it against you. Of course, do whatever you can to find a cure it or at least screen.

The disturbance was because they even feel they need to ask. Apparently there are people who don’t want diseases cured; who don’t want an in utero screening method developed so that even if they don’t want to know, others who want to know, can.

Thanks to modern technology, I know a lot about the child I’m carrying: his gender, his chromosomes, his skeletal structure. One thing I can’t find out is whether he will have autism. I am unequivocally certain that I don’t want him to. And if he does, I am just as certain that I want the world to crawl uphill over broken glass if needed to find a way to fix it.

And if he does — my god, am I expected to find a way to feel like it’s a good thing? Please, no. It’s bad enough that women with breast cancer are told to believe the disease improves them. It’s bad enough there are best-selling books telling us if we wish for things hard enough we get them. We can’t give one inch more ground to the insanity of magical thinking.

Will’s post on his recent virus issues reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write a longer post on the oddities of viruses, scamming, and “social engineering” as of late.

Computer viruses have had an interesting trajectory. In the original days of electronic computing, there really wasn’t such a thing. Hacking into a machine and taking control, or doing something the likes of which was seen in movies like Tron or Wargames, or even the bizarre Weird Science, was actually a pipe dream. The first computer viruses were actually pretty damn benign, as well, because they were coded as experiments rather than malicious or pernicious attacks. The first “in the wild” virus was Creeper, which simply displayed a silly message and spread over ARPANET to PDP-10 computers running the TENEX operating system. Then there was Rother J, the first “spreads via floppy” virus, which attacked APPLE DOS (the OS that ran on Apple II computers prior to ProDOS); its payload was merely that every 50th time the computer was booted from that particular floppy, it would display the silly Elk Cloner poem.

It wasn’t until 1986 that IBM-type computers running MS-DOS had their own virus to contend with, and ironically enough it was a virus by accident: Brain was a variant of the (not released to the wild) Ashar virus, and the purpose was to copyright-protect some medical heart monitor software that two Pakistani programmers had developed by infecting and rendering unusable illegitimately copied discs. Unfortunately, it tended to slow down drives and destroy legitimate discs as well.

Over time, the virus-writing culture involved. The first few were unintentional or experimental. Then came the pranks, malicious and benign; programs like Stoned and Michelangelo.

Over time, the tools of virus programmers adapted. When home computers began getting regularly connected to the internet, it got worse. For a long time, the “trojan horse”, or a program masquerading as something legitimate, was the way to go. The more savvy users get, the more devious the virus writers need to be.

By modern standards, the “I love you” virus seems a joke. Yet, when it first appeared, millions of people fell for it. Other rounds of “you’ve got to be kidding” items which millions of people fell for have included fluffy dogs, cute kittens, and of course offers of pictures of the naked bodies of famous celebrities.

Over time, however, the other problem is that the payloads have gotten worse. The major benefit of many of the viruses, up until a certain point, was that they made themselves known. They were pranks, or they were attacks, but they were inevitably out-and-out malicious in the sense that they would try to destroy files or otherwise render a system inoperable. The fatal flaw came when organized crime got into the picture. Once the goal was to harvest information (identities, credit cards, bank records) or to take over the function of a computer for remote control and usage, it got rough. What Will got hit with is most likely yet another variant of Vundo, a pernicious little bugger that just won’t stay dead and keeps getting improved. Other viruses and worms, of the self-spreading varieties especially, try to assemble vast networks of computer resources for such nefarious interests as sending spam emails, harvesting data, or instituting swarm attacks on other computers (usually with a ransom demand sent first).

Where does it end? I’m not sure. As “enough” users get savvy enough to leave the darker corners of the web alone, the virus writers have gotten more canny about making their attacks. For a while, the attack of choice was email, or compromised HTML email. Then it was faked programs, or piggybacking on legitimate programs. The latest, the faked popups, have gone from annoying to sinister for two reasons: they’ve learned how to make their whole popup a giant “ok button”, so that people “accept” it by clicking what they think is a no or a “big red x” to close the window, and in the latest sense, they’ve begun mimicing legitimate ads.

Where it ends? I can’t really say. I know the legitimate advertisers won’t be too happy about their ads being copied. I’m sure that there are still plenty of users out there stupid enough to click on any “click here to clean your computer” button they may see, legitimate or not. As Dr. Carl Sagan once said, “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” Working at SoTech, I see the impact of giving technologically inept people a lot of technology to work with every day, and it can be disheartening at times. The most open hole in security is still the users.

Clancy and I are both very fortunate in that we really like our in-laws and our in-laws like us and one another. For Thanksgiving, two years in a row our parents came up to Estacado to visit us for the holiday. Her father has no sons and no American sons-in-law and little in the way of nephews, so I occupy more of a sonly position than is commonly the case with fathers-in-law. My mother, upon meeting Clancy, pulled me aside and said “Hold on to that girl, hold on to that girl, hold on to that girl!” (an enthusiasm she never had for Julie or Evangeline). Even our extended families get along quite well.

A lot of it can be traced to our similarities of values. The upper-middle class sort of values Sheila would say make us decided un-prole. Further, despite coming from well-off families we also come from parents that did not grow up nearly as well off so there’s not the sense of invulnerability that a lot of well-off people have.

So I enjoy spending time with her family and she enjoys spending time with mine. What we’ve sort of discovered over the last couple weeks is that this goodwill has limits. We each tire of our own parents, but we tire of one another’s a little bit faster.

I think as much as anything it comes down to shared history. I can spend a lot of time with my family because it takes a lot longer to run out of things to talk about. We can reminisce about old times. Mom can fill me in on how various people I know are doing. Our stories about how things are going are made that much funnier and more interesting by intricacies of our personalities that our spouses and in-laws may know but haven’t fully experiences and can’t fully appreciate.

And when the conversation stops, the awkwardness can begin. There’s nothing explicit about the awkwardness. No one is made to feel bad about about anything. There is the odd sense, though, of knowing that you’re fortunate to be able to get to spend time with these people that you don’t get to see often. So you feel the need to try to make the most of it.

I don’t get nearly as much time around my father-in-law as I would prefer. There are all sorts of times where I want to ask him questions or tell him about something extraordinary that happened at work that I know he will be able to appreciate, but I don’t get the chance to. Neither he nor I are really phone people and we haven’t found the calling-up-father-in-law dynamic like the weekly jam session I have with my parents.

Then this week came around and I plum ran out of things to talk about. There were various things that I could tell him, but the pressure to be entertaining is different if you’re sharing something that happened last week and something else that happened last month. I saw him twice in recent months and may see him again if he comes up to Cascadia to help us move. I am going to have to reload my conversational rifle in preparation.

Clancy’s Toyota Camry has a bit of a leak on the passenger side rearview tail light. It’s a small crack up top. Not even a damage crack… it’s just a bit displaced. Just displaced enough to let water in and short out the tail light. It seems likely that I can tape over the little crack, but I don’t know what kind of tape to use.

Duct tape seems kind of harsh.

Packing tape does not seem harsh enough.

Electrical tape seems like it could work, but I’m not sure it’s wide enough to get a really good hold on both sides.

Clancy mentions seeing some sort of tape that people put over their tail lights that’s translucent but also (apparently) strong enough to withstand the outdoors. Does anyone know what kind of tape that might be? Is there a particular kind of tape that I can buy for this sort of thing? Maybe at an auto parts store?

A few noteworthy tidbits about Haiti right now.

The canned outrage demonstrated in the comment section here and elsewhere is really aggravating. About the worst thing that can happen to Haiti right now is to lose their tourism industry. Their capital is in ruins, but there is a whole rest of the nation to think of. It’s easy for people in Britain and the US to talk about how the people on those boats should roll up their sleeves and volunteer or just give away the money that they were going to spend vacationing, but just because they’re on a boat near Haiti (or going there) does not make them obligated in a way that the rest of us are not. What they need most right now is money and if you’re spending money on anything except bare sustenance, by the logic applied to the tourists, you’re hating on Haiti.

It reminds me a bit of an old Hugo Schwyzer post where he basically apologizes for hiring a maid because the notion of paying someone else to do the housework you’re too “good” to do has moral implications. Being the capitalist drone that I am, my initial response is “better that they be unemployed?” Well no, better by their thinking that you do the housework yourself and pay the (would-be) maid so that she can lay the foundation for more gratifying work. It was hard to read through the comments and the self-lashing “I am a sinner!” tone by those that employ housekeepers and the smug superiority of those that clean their own filthy sheets. At some point it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that the thrill of moral condemnation itself is part of the motivation.

The other part of the motivation is the frustration about the gulf between the haves and have-nots. The imagery of cruise folks maxin’ and relaxin’ on a beach while a bunch of poor people scramble for their very lives understandably doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. However, if you live in Britain or the US and you are living comfortably enough to have a computer and Internet connection to comment on the Guardian’s website and/or some blog, you have a whole lot more in common with the cruise folks than you do with the people rolling up their sleeves and helping the Haitians. If you’re going to get right down to it, there’s no excuse for living a lie of any comfort save for a belief that the ways of the world are not fair and your being miserable or indignant over it doesn’t change that. Easy for me to say that from the comfort of my apartment on my nice laptop.

My sister-in-law did some work in Haiti recently, but thankfully is not there now. Talk about how this could be the best thing to happen to Haiti because of the money they’re getting is, according to her, poppycock. Haiti doesn’t have the infrastructure to rebuild the same way that New Orleans is being rebuilt. The only way to rebuilt it is for entities to take the same sort of control over Haiti that the federal government has the latitude to take over New Orleans. In other words, we would need to try to rebuild it the same way that we’ve tried to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if the former is actually better off now than they were under Hussein’s rule, I don’t believe that we have the stomach or the resources to take that kind of control. New Orleans was also helped out by the diaspora and that’s not quite so much an option for Haiti, either, since adjacent states had to accept Katricians and there is no such obligation for Haitians.

It’s hard not to get a kick out of the second letter here. The gist is that the devil is writing to Pat Robertson saying that Pat is giving the Devil a bad name. The Devil takes his toll in the next life but pays out in the current one. Haiti, of course, has never had any outworldly entity (good or evil) looking out for it effectively. I’m not sure that’s right, though. While the Devil takes his due in the next life, he would only pay out as much as he had to in this one. The best deal for the Devil is to be able to give out some fake reward in this life, comparable to giving someone who wants a million bucks a million deer. According to the Robertson, the deal with the Devil was comparable to that: they asked for deliverance from French rule and got it. That it materially left them worse off is no skin of the Devil’s nose.

None of this is to say that Robertson isn’t deserving of every bit of ridicule he has received, and more.

I wrote a bit about the immigration repercussions of what’s going on, thinking of carving out an exception when talking about immigrants from Haiti and Cuba instead of those from (more potentially contentious) Mexico, but ultimately decided against it. So wherever we go with this conversation, let’s not go there. For that matter, let’s not go the typical areas where I ask us not to go, including badmouthing Katrician immigrants into other US cities.

Since getting home from Arapaho, I’ve been fighting a trojan that has affected my primary data server. My Microsoft-hating friend Tony said that he didn’t even have to worry about it when he had Windows because he didn’t use Microsoft products like IE and Office, which have been known to invite virii.

Actually, it looks like in this case, Firefox itself was to blame. Or rather, the Trojan that nailed me (and has attempted to nail me twice since) was aimed specifically at the non-MS browser.

So if you use Firefox, be aware of this: Firefox crashes. When Firefox comes back up, it asks you if you want to restore the Windows as it has since FF 3.5. However, if you look carefully, you’ll notice that the yes/no button is itself a unilink. Meaning that even if you don’t have the cursor over a button, it shows the hand as though you’re clicking on a link. That’s because the entire thing is an image, and clicking on it will install the malicious software. The other giveaway is that the pop-up shows up as a different Firefox Window. So if you see two Firefox windows on your taskbar, the second could be inviting bad things into your computer.

The nature of the infection is that it will act as though Windows has discovered one security breach after another and will ask you if you want to run a scan. Notably, the screen it shows you copies the Windows Vista Security screen to the letter. This is a bit more conspicuous if you’re running XP, which I am, and fortunately that’s one of the ways I was able to prevent the situation from getting worse. I’ve read up on the pusher of this software, called “Malware Defense”, and apparently what it will do is pretend to scan your hard drive, find a bazillion breaches, and then ask you for money to “fix” them.

Removing it was a hassle-and-a-half. Malware Defense apparently knows what most of the tools are for rooting it out and it will prevent them from running. Or it will make it seem like something has gone horribly wrong. One tool that I used rkill.com, would result in Windows locking up, the computer rebooting, or the taskbar disappearing. The latter is the ineffective one because you can bring it back by going into Task Manager. Run it enough times (it took me six) and eventually rkill.com will temporarily kill the file.

The next step is to run an application to kill the trojan while it’s down. My friend recommendend Malwarebytes anti-malware program, downloadable for free. However, Malware Defense fights back against this, too. It blocks you from running any application with the name of this one downloads as (mbam-setup.exe). I discovered this inadvertantly when I downloaded the program twice and it worked on the second one (which Firefox had renamed mbam-setup(2).exe). However, even once the application is installed, it does the same thing again. So you have to rename mbam.exe to some other filename (anything without the four letter “mbam” should work) and you have to take it out of Program Files and run it from somewhere else.

Once I did that, it took care of most of the problem. I still get IE popping up every couple hours with some site on it. I’m not sure what I can do about that. It’s probably past time I formatted and restored the computer in question.

I should add that I am not the only one that has been experiencing problems lately. The friend who recommended rkill.com said that he’d been nailed once or twice recently, as well. I’ve also been hit three times with the Firefox “crashes”. I’m guessing that some site I’m visiting has a bad advertiser. I’m going to monitor the situation closely. In every instance, it’s been a Firefox crash. In all instances but one it was a window asking me if I wanted to restore my tabs. In the last instance, it was a window asking me if I wanted to make Firefox my default browser.

Until recently, I’ve not had to worry too much about infections. I mostly do this by not downloading and running software that I am unfamiliar with or that I haven’t checked out. I also avoid a lot of the scams that other people fall for. Clancy is unadventurous with the computer and that helps, too. This time I simply overlooked the slight symptoms that something was wrong. It was late, I was tired, and Firefox has been cracking up on me so it’s crash did not cock my eyebrow. I almost got burned by the question of whether or not I wanted to make Firefox my default browser because the intermittent IE pop-ups hijack the file association and so I’m asked that question legitimately every time I open Firefox.

So with some due diligence, this can be avoided. Tony would point out that this can also be avoided by running Linux.

When I was a kid, my favorite kind of pizza was pepperoni. Gawd, I loved the stuff. Now I like it okay, but it’s far from my favorite. Oddly, I’ve been talking to a couple other people that say that they loved pepperoni as a kid but now don’t like it as much. Is that the case for any of you? Is there something about pepperoni that makes kids like it and adults not like it?

—

Forty-five pounds ago, four pieces of pizza wasn’t nuthin. Twenty-five pounds ago it was a challenge. Now it’s pointless, unless the pieces are small.

—-

Clancy and I were driving from the airport when we decided to get a bite to eat. A pizza place was recommended to us by the rental car guy, but it was closed. We decided to eat at Subway instead. We were not particularly enthusiastic. In fact, we had really gotten our hearts set on pizza. At about the same time we saw a Pizza Hut and a local place. Having eaten at Pizza Hut 100 times, we decided to try out the local place.

The first words out of my mouth when we got in my car afterwards was “We should have eaten at Pizza Hut.” The bread sticks were cold and tough. The pizza itself was about the quality you expect from the spinner at a truck stop. It wasn’t terrible, but it was audaciously bland. When we got to Dent County (about two hours away from the airport) and got settled, we decided that we didn’t want to go out again. So we ordered pizza. When you have a craving for pizza, mediocre pizza doesn’t cut it. We tried a local place recommended to us. It was pretty good. Unfortunately, they don’t have a Pesto option. We’ve gotten spoiled the last couple places that we’ve lived with pesto pizza. Looks like there is no pesto option in Dent County. Boo.

—-

As many of you have heard, Domino’s Pizza has kinda-sorta apologized for the quality of their product and promises to do better.

I am just old enough to remember when Domino’s came out of nowhere to dominate the industry. They never succeeded based on the taste of the pizza. They didn’t have to because of their delivery system. Plus, as with a lot of chains, you can get by on not being good just so long as you are not bad. And I maintain that they weren’t bad. I remember places that were worse. I remember Pizza Hut bring roughly as good. So I don’t think the issue is so much the terrible taste of Domino’s Pizza but rather how much better the competition has gotten. Papa John’s entered the scene with a really good product. Then Pizza Hut stepped up their game. Domino’s, meanwhile, was living off the name it made based on its ability to deliver. One step above Little Caesar’s in quality and three steps above on price.