Archive for the ‘Why?’ Category

RIP Boy Scouts

Monday, January 30th, 2017

They’re going to allow girls who identify as boys to join. That’s going to go over really well when they have to share a tent on a camp-out. Then again, do the Boy Scouts still do that? Or is it too retro and manly?

Will the Girl Scouts allow boys who identify as girls to join? If not, why not?

Is there a reason for this?

Wednesday, January 18th, 2017

I’ve been looking for productivity apps for my phone and tablet lately, because I’ve been wanting to improve my productivity. However, I’m also somewhat concerned about my privacy, so I’d prefer to use applications that don’t require me to obtain an account in order to use them. Most of the Kanban apps require accounts on their service, but I’ve found two that don’t, and I’m checking them out.

I understand that certain applications really do need access to a server in order to implement the full set of capabilities. But riddle me this, Batman … why the hell does an editor require me to sign up for an account? What capabilities does the server provide in this case? I mean, I was able to do search and replace, automatic word wrap and hyphenation, and other such functions back when I was using an Apple II. Is my smartphone less capable? If they’re going to keep my files on their server, no thanks. That’s why I make backups, and that’s why Apple provides iCloud. What’s their value-added here?

I’ve deleted the application, because it doesn’t just have limited capabilities without having an account – it won’t let you use it at all until you sign up for an account. You can’t even find out whether the available help information tells you why the account is needed. I really wish the app store required developers to state whether their app was usable without an account; it would make my selection process easier.

It’s too early

Sunday, October 2nd, 2016

Wednesday evening, I had occasion to visit a nearby mall. I expected to see Halloween decorations in the stores. What I didn’t expect to see was one store that had Halloween decorations and items on sale that was in the process of putting out Christmas decorations and items.

When I was a child, I don’t remember seeing Christmas decorations going up before Thanksgiving. It’s possible that I just didn’t notice, but I doubt that, because I remember the arrival of the Sears and Montgomery Wards Christmas Catalogs being A Big Thing. We’d go page-by-page through the catalogs, trying to put together our wish lists.

A web search tells me that it is popularly known as Christmas Creep, and I had no idea it was getting quite so bad. I knew that one of the forces driving it is the fact that many retailers do most of their business in the lead to Christmas, but how long will it be before Christmas shopping season is a year-round phenomenon?

DirecTV has just lost a customer

Monday, September 12th, 2016

I’ve always had occasional reception problems with DirecTV, in this house, anyway. Their website claims that on rare occasions, extremely bad weather can cause very short losses of reception. My experience is that anything more than a light drizzle will knock out reception completely, often for hours.

Back at the end of July, I started seeing my video go blocky on all channels, with accompanying audio garbling. It’s the sort of thing you see when you lose sync in decoding a video file. My initial suspicion was that the antenna had become misaligned, and the receiver wasn’t getting a full data stream. I called their support line, and we went through various fixes for about an hour. I had to cut the call after an hour because I had to get to a class, but the last thing they recommended was doing a local reset of the receiver (they’d already done a remote reset). That apparently cleared things up for about a month, but it could have been coincidental, because the problem came back about a week ago.

It started with messages stating that the receiver was looking for a satellite signal, but that would go away after a few seconds, and nothing was affected, anyway. After a day or two of that, my video became blocky, with garbled audio, just as before. Tonight was the first time I had a long-enough block of time to call for support, because if your problem isn’t addressed by the FAQs on their website, you have to call them on the telephone.

After explaining the situation to the person who answered, I was told that I had to provide my cellphone number so that I could receive AT&T texts and other notifications. I didn’t realize that I had AT&T services, because I don’t, but they’ve apparently bought DirecTV, and you can’t get help without giving AT&T your cellphone number.

She did a remote reset of my receiver, which didn’t help, and I didn’t expect it to. While that was in process, she tried to upsell me on NFL Sunday Ticket and an $8/month warranty to save $50 if a service call needed to be made. I declined both. I like football, but I’ve been watching it less in recent years, and the last service call I required was when I had DirecTV installed when I moved here almost a decade ago. It’s also pretty tacky to try to sell me premium services when I’m asking for help because basic services aren’t working.

She then asked me to disconnect and reconnect all of the cables, which I had done back in July, and which had no effect. Next, she told me that I needed to get a technician from my television’s manufacturer to make a service call and determine what the television’s problem was. I told her that it was not a television problem, because shows that I’d recorded on the DVR prior to the problem’s recurrence could be watched without problem, the over-the-air antenna did not show the problem, and watching DVDs did not show the problem.

She reiterated that the required next step in troubleshooting was to have a technician from the manufacturer examine the television.

I hung up. I’ve been contemplating getting rid of DirecTV for a while, and the fact that I can expect neither reception nor service has tipped the balance for me. I’ll drop by the local office tomorrow after work and let them know – I’m not going to sign up for a new account on their website just to cancel service. Probably can’t do it online, anyway.

Well, that was fun (not)

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2016

Today has not been the best day. It started when I got up – my normal practice is to weight myself and take my pulse and blood pressure right after waking. Today, my sphygmomanometer died. I pumped it up several times, and it displayed the falling pressure and the pulse indication, but it gave me an error each time, instead of the final results.

Driving to work, there’s a major intersection about 1/2 mile from the office, and the cross street is the major one, so I always have to wait for the light. This morning, just as I was braking to join the line of cars at the light, some idiot (I’m using an innocuous description to avoid the profanity that I used when this happened) zoomed past me and jinked into my lane to avoid having to wait behind a gravel truck. I had to brake so hard to avoid hitting him that everything loose in the car went flying. I’m just relieved that I hadn’t stopped to pick up coffee and burritos for the office this morning. When the light turned green, the idiot kept pace with the gravel truck, so that the light turned red before I was through the intersection. He remained ten miles per hour below the speed limit to the next light, calmly sailing through just after it had turned red, thus forcing me to wait for the next cycle.

Nothing much happened at work, apart from a BSOD at the end of the day, just as I was about to save a file I’d been working on.

Driving home, I noticed a heavy brake smell just after I got onto the highway. I didn’t think it was my car, because my on-ramp going home is just after the highway finishes a 7% downgrade that is several miles in length, but I have had some brake trouble recently, so I wasn’t certain. I got off at the next exit, and saw that a semi trailer several vehicles ahead of me had a smoking wheel, so that relieved me. However, just past the next intersection, the pickup in front of me got into the “right turn only” lane to go into the shopping center there. Then, he decided not to, but I had drawn almost even with him. Another flying interior braking event, and I’d avoided him. He got back into the traffic lane, then turned into the second entrance to the shopping center.

Later, and closer to home, I managed to avoid (without any trouble) driving behind a van with precariously-packed back section, and which also had back doors that were open and swinging. I did have a little trouble with a vehicle that decided to cut abruptly from behind it to in front of me, though.

No problems with dinner, but my bad knee has been acting up since then. Blargh.

War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength. Shit is Shinola.

Thursday, June 25th, 2015

And words no longer have meaning. Pardon the strong language, but, as we no longer live in a country under the rule of law, I feel like expressing myself strongly.

I expected King v. Burwell to go the other way, because the evidence was so strong. I felt that way about Eldred and Kelo, too, so I should have expected this.

If dreams have meaning …

Thursday, May 14th, 2015

I’m not certain I want to know what this one means.

It was a strange and disjointed one. What I remember is walking through a city, then being in the dark, industrial-looking basement of a hotel with a couple friends. We wanted to go to the top floor, and I took the first elevator, while they decided to wait for the express elevator.

Since I was not on the express, my elevator car quickly got very crowded. A very short man who looked something like Pharrell Williams batted his eyes at me and tried to convince me that my t-shirt and jeans were actually women’s clothes, so I must therefore be a woman who was open to his advances. As if.

When I got off the elevator, it opened up on a large park. Hula music was coming from some unseen source, and a group of nuns were performing a hula dance. Nearby, a bunch of tourists in Hawaiian shirts were doing something like a Maori haka in time with the music. I moved over to some ruins, where I told a young boy clambering over them that he was about to step on some snakes, which had frilly growths on their heads that put me in mind of the seahorse that evolved to blend in with seaweed.

After that, I somehow acquired a ukulele, and tried to lead another group of tourists in performing Donovan’s song, “Happiness Runs,” as a round.

Then the alarm went off.

From the “more money than sense” files

Monday, December 15th, 2014

Two stories out of the Daily Mail:

1) A Swiss belt buckle that costs more than half a million dollars. White gold, titanium, 387 diamonds, 167 pieces. Does not include a belt. I wonder if you need a manual to operate it?

2) A Rolls-Royce Phantom coupe (about $470K) with black velvet in lieu of a paint job. I wonder if there’s a business opportunity for a dry-cleaner car wash?

One of my neighbors is an asshole

Sunday, June 15th, 2014

Our trash pickup normally comes on Friday mornings, so you usually see trash cans appearing outside garages on Thursday evening. The only time it changes occurs when we have a holiday during the week, which causes pickup to happen Saturday.

I put my trash out this past week like I usually do. Friday, when I got home, my trashcan was still full, so I thought they hadn’t picked it up. I left it out, even though I couldn’t think of a holiday that would have caused the delay. Saturday evening, it was still full. This morning I realized that the trash in my trashcan wasn’t mine. Someone had come by after trash was picked up and dumped their trash into my can.

I understand that they didn’t want their trash stinking up their garage for the next week, but I’m pissed they felt justified in stinking up mine.

I have no idea where this came from

Thursday, May 15th, 2014

Dreams are strange things.

I woke up this morning convinced that it would be a worthwhile effort to produce a story, or comic, or animation, in which Kenny G delivered a PSA concerning the zombie apocalypse, in which he described how to tell his fans from zombies.