Have a Holly USB Christmas

Wow, USB gadgets are making a further descent into tackyville. You can now get a His ‘n’ Hers USB gift set.

Wanna know what’s in the men’s set? A mini vacuum cleaner with brush, why in hell you would wire a vacuum up to a computer I don’t know, a desk lamp, a cup warmer and a mood light pen holder whatever that is.

Now, for absolutely tacktastic, the women’s set has the vacuum and pen holder, but they get a fan and lighted mirror and it comes in, how did the author put it? “A feminine-apparently-shade of plastic pink?” Ooo! Sounds like a must have, doesn’t it? Not.

Ug, the inventor of the first USB gadget created a monster.

Blueberries!

Not far from where we live, there’s this little fruit stand. The guy sells all kinds of fresh fruit, and apparently Trixie loves going there, because when she sees the stand, she’s bound and determined that we go there. There’s no way I’ll pass there without her stopping and pointing her nose at it as if to say, “Are we going in?”

Anyway, I bought blueberries from him today, and man they’re addictive! I’ll open the door of the fridge to get something else, and my hand will be magnetically drawn to the basket of blueberries, and before I know it, I’ve stolen a handfull of them. Yummy!

Well, that was a pointless post, wasn’t it?

Big Brother is Failing Miserably.

Remember when Britain instituted CCTV’s to watch and listen to pedestrians, and then made it possible for police to yell at them? Remember what their reasoning was? It was so the streets would be safer. Well, mission far from accomplished.

On the street with over 100 cameras watching it, the crime rate is far from low. There have been 430 offenses committed on Big Brother Avenue, er, Holloway Road over the past six months including serious assaults, robberies and burglaries.

Having all those cameras actually makes things harder for police because they have to watch footage from every single camera. Duh.

Way to go, guys, way to make the streets safer for you and me.

Meet George Jetson

There are so many questions I have about this story. Where do I begin?

How in hell is something that is 1 foot tall weighing 200 pounds? I cannot imagine how you could pack so much weight into such a small space. No wonder when it is low on power, it returns to its dock to recharge. Who’s going to drag it there?

If it checks on your children to see if they’re doing their homework, how does it know if they are or aren’t? I assume you have to see what it’s seeing. And if you’re busy watching it, why don’t you just get up and check on them yourself? I’m sure you could be far more helpful with math than ten-ton one-foot Louie over there.

And how much does this one-foot wonder cost? They never mentioned that.

This is just weird. I’m having some serious IRobot visions. NS5’s anyone?

Please Read the Emergency Instructions in The Seat Pocket In Front Of You. No Really, You’re Going to Need Them.

This Brazilian plane crash belongs in an episode of Mayday. Let’s count the horrible happenings.

  1. The runway is dangerously short and nicknamed the aircraft carrier.

  2. It’s slippery when wet.

  3. It was newly-paved, but they didn’t bother to cut grooves in it to drain water.

  4. They never closed it, despite the lack of grooves being a, um, risk.

  5. Other planes have skidded off, but landed on grass without any injuries. Ya think that would have been a warning?

  6. It was raining pretty heavily when a plane tried to fly in.

  7. The plane missed the runway, crossed a busy highway and crashed into a gas station and a cargo depot.

  8. Everybody’s dead, and there’s no passenger list. Way to go, fellas.

Now, some director of engineering is claiming that this was not due to rain. Yep, whatever you say, chief. How much are they paying you to say that?

Wanna know something else scary? This is apparently the worst crash in their country’s history, only by a margin of about 35 deaths. They’ve had several other serious crashes this year.

And here’s the scary icing on the cake for me. I have friends who are going to Brazil in the near future! Let’s just hope they get home alive.

WWWWWWHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYY!?!?!?

Ok, why in the blue bloody christ is Peter Whitmore getting offered a plea deal? Why why why why why? Somebody tell me why! Please? Now!

Ok, now that I’ve got the incoherent brain-rattling rage down on paper, let me try and write like a rational human being. He kidnapped a kid from Manitoba, sexually assaulted him, caused another local kid to go missing, did who knows what to him, and before that, he had been convicted of sexually assaulting children. These convictions go back years! How many? Try going back 14 years, to 1993! He’s been busted, released, promptly re-busted, released, lather, rinse, repeat! Wanna see details of why this man should rot in jail forever? Read this timeline. If that’s not a dangerous offender, by christ I don’t know what is.

Dear old director of prosecution Murray Brown says he’s doing it for the good of these kids. I get that it’s hard to go on the stand about this, and defense lawyers can be assholes, but how is it benefitting greater society to give him a plea deal that is a life sentence allowing him to apply for parole in a measley 7 years? He’s already been jailed for 5 and that didn’t deter him. What’s another 2? I know it’s only the possibility of parole, but it’s still there! If you’re a dangerous offender, it’s a hell of a lot harder to get out.

The part that really burns me up is when Brown says he’s doing this plea deal thing to spare the kids from testifying. Then he says it would also short circuit a lengthy dangerous offender hearing. Uh-huh. That’s the real reason, isn’t it, Mr. Brown? Maybe the reason this bugs me so much is often times, when my dad wanted to do something, if he didn’t get his own way, he’d then say he was doing it for the sake of us kids. I know it’s a comparison to something much more trivial, but that kind of bullshit always bugged the hell out of me.

I’m finding myself without an ending for this post, except to say that if the families were promised that he would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and this is the fullest extent of the law, we have a sad justice system. But is this news to anyone? How much do you want to bet that when he is next paroled, he molests another kid? He’s only 36. He won’t be that old when he gets out.

Helping You Feel Better About Yourself

I’ve seen me some stupid people on Family Feud before, but I don’t remember anything that comes close to topping
these guys.

What I can’t figure out is how they made it to Fast Money. that means they had to have won, which seems impossible. And if they won, that means that the people they beat could very well have been worse, which also seems impossible.

Note for the blind people: The video won’t start playing automatically when you click the link. You have to go into the Flash movie and press the replay button a couple of times before anything will happen.

>Are You There God? It’s Me, The Law

>Back in October 2005, I posted a story about a Romanian prison inmate who
filed suit against God,
claiming that the lord took bribes, didn’t help him in his time of need, and was in many other ways pretty much a no good scumbag. Well, after almost 2 years, there’s finally an update.

Prosecutors in Timisoara, where the claim was filed, have decided to drop the case because
God doesn’t seem to have a home address and they can’t locate him.

And before anybody asks, no, I have no idea how or why it took 21 months to sort this out.

>Clearing the Backblog

>Hope you folks like these random posts, because with all that time I didn’t write, I’ve created quite a, well, thought backblog. I’m sure I’ll be able to write something more focused soon. But until then, have a pile of thoughts.

Remember back in another random post, I said I forgot something? Well, I remembered it, and keep forgetting to write it down, so I’m writing it down now. What was it again? Just kidding.

Has anyone else noticed that, among all the phone drones out there, the Swiss Chalet delivery phone drones are the most humourless of all? I could swear they turned their human trainees into cyborgs to be more efficient. When they pick up the phone, they greet you with something that sounds like “hellothankyouforcallingswisschaletcanihaveyourphonenumberstartingwiththeareacodeplease?” Huh? What? Where? who? I’m still stuck at Hello. Even if you make a joke, there is no laughter, there is only “nextitemplease?” Everywhere you go, you’re going to get someone who sounds like a zombie, but this is a consistent thing with Swiss Chalet. I think the lady who sold me Chalet soup when I had that brutal cold was the last of the humans.

Can I mention how much I hate hate hate writing big collaborative reports? I mustn’t be a team player or something, because I can’t stand having to come up with ideas that we both agree on, and then wrangling them into something resembling intelligible english. For the past 6 weeks, I’ve been working up at the university doing an audit of various areas of their website to tell them how well they work with JAWS. The way it works is I work in tandem with a guy with functioning eyes, and when I have a problem, he tries to tel me what he’s seeing in comparison to what I am. Then, we have to write a big report to explain it to the powers that be. Seems simple enough, right? I wish!

Every time he gets his hands on it to edit in his input, the input he adds is either riddled with errors and redundancies, cannot be called decent sentences, or all of the above. I spend more time editing the jabber than adding new input. I showed it to Steve, and after the third sentence, Steve was confused beyond belief, and he knew what I had been doing for the last six weeks. Fixing the report was so brain-sapping that I said to Steve that my brain felt like it needed to write blog posts for nourishment. Well, we know how many of those got created, don’t we? If only we always got what we wanted.

Note to anyone about to take a plane anywhere: Do not watch the show called Mayday before you go. You’ll wonder if flying is such a great idea. That show is fascinating, but lord you realize how much human error goes on, and then you wonder why there aren’t more crashes. Air traffic controlers that don’t seem to understand the gravity, ha ha, of “we are out of fuel,” engineers that are eyeballing up parts to see if they fit and they don’t, pilots punching the wrong entry points into their autopilot and, quelle surprise, getting lost. Ug. You wonder how good an idea it is to put your life in their hands. *Tries to remember* did I watch Mayday before I went to San Rafael? I know I thought about things in it through the whole plane trip. But maybe I’m just neurotic. But the show makes you realize how rare a true mechanical failure is. they’re most often caused by human error.

And because people love dog stuff, I figured I’d throw some more doggy tidbits in. I learned yesterday that Trixie is not a fan of being splashed by a truck driving through a puddle. She backed up, spun around and shook her whole body to get the water off. I just couldn’t stop laughing. Yep, I’m heartless.

Remember when we called her Visa? Well, now she’s upgraded to Visa Gold because she really goes out of her way to be, well, in ours. Holy crap. Silly girl moves and ends up more in the way than before.

Also, remember how, in the mornings, she’d get up and flop like a fish on the rug? Well, now she’ll do it on the bare floor! Trixter, doesn’t that hurt? But if you’re having fun, knock yourself out…well, don’t do that. That’s what I’m afraid will happen! She also will shake her whole body, but she’ll be right next to the couch, so she’ll wack right into it! One day, she decided to shake her head the way she does, and I heard a loud click! Dad said that was the sound of her head hitting his knee! Ouch!

I have learned to respect that thumpy tail and its distructive power. We had to more firmly attach the basket we have on the door to catch the mail because she had wagged into it so hard! That, combined with her womping her head off it made it all crooked.

I wish I could record the noises she makes when she dreams. Sometimes, she wags her tail in her sleep. Other times, she makes these itcy bitcy barks. I have to wonder if she’s having a good dream or a nightmare. If only I could speak Trixie.

Next week, the guy who does followups for the school, who is also the guy who interviewed me last year, is coming to see me and see how Trix and I are doing. He’s coming at 5 at night so we can walk through Friday rush hour. Really putting Trixie and I to the test, isn’t he? I’m a little nervous, a lot excited, and a little nervous all over again. I want to hear him say that we’re doing well, I pray I haven’t let some things slip, I want some pointers on some things, and I hope he doesn’t think those things are stupid. Hopefully I’ll have a story or two from that.

I think that’s about it. Holy crap that was a huge post. Hope it wasn’t too long and drawn out.