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Archive for the ‘Rant(s)’ Category

Source: Amber Alert
Source: chron

Houston Police Department homicide investigators ordered an Amber Alert after a man claimed his 6-year-old cousin visiting from New York was asleep in the back seat of the man’s 2000 red Lincoln Navigator when it was carjacked by two Hispanic males. It wasn’t until detectives noticed his lack of concern for the cousin that he admitted he fabricated the story.

Police have learned that man invented the child in hopes of speeding up the recovery of his 2000 red Navigator.

He has since been charged with felony false alarm response.

Personally, I hope they never find the Navigator or the carjackers. I hope that the carjackers would find a better line of work, but in regards to their last score, take advantage of the victim’s selfishness and tear that SUV down to its last bolt.

I mentioned a short time ago that I was planning to utilize social networking sites more. It began with Last.fm through the enjoyment of the music I listen to periodically. I had some misgivings about the other major sites due to privacy and security concerns, but there was too much intrigue to pass them up completely.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just when we started seeing the light at the end of the dark tunnel known as SCO vs. Novell, Cyngus Systems, Inc. seems hellbent to enforce a newly granted patent against three of the computer industry’s biggest corporations.

From an article posted at Mac World by Robert McMillan:

A small Indiana company has sued tech heavyweights Microsoft, Apple, and Google, claiming that it holds the patent on a common file preview feature used by browsers and operating systems to show users small snapshots of the files before they are opened.

Cygnus Systems sued the three companies on Wednesday saying that they infringed on its patent with products such as Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome, which allow users to view preview images of documents on the computer. Mac OS X, the iPhone and Safari also infringe, the company said in court filings. Apple uses this technology in its Finder and Cover Flow Mac OS X features, the filings state.

A quick look at Cygnus Systems’ website shows at least a strong relationship with one of those named defendants:

I guess I don’t quite understand the politics behind it, but suing a vendor which you’ve been named a partner of and for which a large part of your business is based on doesn’t sound very logical. Given the nature of the patent which the lawsuit is based on, other companies could be considered future defendants.

A more in-depth article now exists at Ars Technica.

According to an article by the Associated Press published at International Business Times:

Vietnam has approved new regulations banning bloggers from discussing subjects the government deems sensitive or inappropriate and requiring them to limit their writings to personal issues.

The rules ban any posts that undermine national security, incite violence or crime, disclose state secrets, or include inaccurate information that could damage the reputation of individuals and organizations, according to a copy of the regulations obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

Isn’t the banishment of a free press a personal issue to every Vietnamese citizen?

A while back, I barely missed becoming involved in an auto accident. It was one that could have certainly been avoided had a driver not yielded their right-of-way to another. I came within inches of smashing into the minivan of elderly couple who hadn’t realized the need to yield themselves to another lane of traffic. Bygones.

But it was as if it were foretold when the occurrence repeated itself. This time it came with consequences. Luckily for me, I was not involved. I was a witness, however.

A fellow co-worker was travelling in the left lane while passing cars to his immediate right. Upon reaching the front of these stopped cars, an older gentleman drove out from a gas station driveway and tagged the co-worker’s car. The woman at the front of the line was trying to be nice by allowing the older gentleman to enter the road on the assumption that he was going to turn right. She mentioned that she didn’t see a turn signal showing an intent to turn left which led her to the assumption of a right turn. The area, known for its heavy traffic, prompted the older gentleman to hasten his entry to the street, ignoring the fact that he had two lanes to cross, not just one.

The end result is exactly what I would like to avoid by getting this point across: Follow the rules of the road as they are written. If someone is wanting to enter the road in which you are a part of, the burden is not on you to create a clear lane of traffic. The burden is on them to find one. I understand the dogmatic idea of doing unto others as you would them to do unto you. However, to quote a line from S.W.A.T., “Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t doing the right thing.” Below is what happened when someone tried to do the right thing.

I ranted a few days ago about the actions of a so-called good samaritan that almost led to a serious vehicle accident involving myself and at least one other party. Looking back, I can’t lay the blame entirely on the good samaritan. The road in question is notorious for being difficult to enter. Numerous businesses line both sides of the street for almost its entire length, and it’s long and heavily traveled. That wasn’t the first time someone tried to enter traffic from that driveway and try to turn left at the same time. They certainly won’t be the last.

I just think that had the good samaritan retained control of his right of way as he was legally allowed to do, the other party would not have felt obligated to take the opening provided to him and put himself into a dangerous position. I could not see the other party entering traffic. My first observation was watching all of the cars in front of the good samaritan traveling away while he didn’t move. As I was about a car length and a half away, I noticed the other party venturing out. They weren’t looking in my direction and never yielded until they heard screeching tires. By then, the other party was completely blocking my lane of traffic.

I was traveling about 30 miles per hour and had to lock up the tires in order to stop. The following day, I drove by the same area and could see my tire tracks on the pavement. I ended up pointing towards the traffic coming in the opposite direction and my left tire had stopped halfway between the double-yellow lines. There was an SUV approaching from the other direction that had to stop just as fast and was slightly past my front bumper when it did. I was on the phone with my brother at the time (more about that a little later) and could very well have not paid attention as closely as I had. The end result could have been catastrophic.

At work, we call these kinds of events “Near Misses”. It’s an accident that had the potential of being much worse than it actually was. Investigations are conducted, reports are made, rules are updated and mandated. The end result is having company-wide meetings where everyone is made aware of the changes in the rules including the possible reprimands should they be broken in the future.

It would certainly be nice to shut down that driveway.

Let me paint the scene. There’s a small shopping strip that has two driveways. The first driveway exits to a four lane road. The second driveway exits to a side street that intersects with said four land road which is controlled by a traffic signal. Often times, there are people wanting to make a left turn from this shopping strip and opt for the first driveway to the four lane road. This presents a problem of accessibility as the aforementioned traffic signal is only a short distance away and causes stopped traffic to block this driveway. The more efficient route would be to exit to the side road and utilize the traffic signal to stop traffic and allow a clear intersection in which to make the left turn.

Understood? Great. Now enters the good samaritan.

Along comes the good samaritan that will wave an exiting driver out on to the main road while they retain further blocking traffic behind them. They understand how difficult it can be to enter traffic on such a busy road and feel obligated to do the Christian thing and yield their own right of way, and consequently everyone else’s behind them, to the other driver. While this may work well in instances where the main road only has two lanes, one in each direction, it creates a great potential for injury and/or death when presented with multi-lane roads.

Today, I was subjected to such a yielding, unbeknownst to me at the time. I was one of those unfortunate souls that was traveling down that extra lane with no knowledge that a minivan was about to appear from nowhere directly in front of me and stop. Imagine my heart rate when I finally came to a stop a mere three inches from impacting the minivan AND the SUV traveling in the opposite direction that I was angling towards from trying to maneuver out of the minivan’s way.

The occupants of the minivan were an elderly couple, which I quickly estimated to be in their late 70s or early 80s, enjoying the fruits of their retirement by going shopping in the afternoon. Now imagine if I hadn’t been paying as close attention as I had and plowed right into them. Given my speed and the potential angle of impact, it’s quite reasonable to assume that one or both of them would have gone to the hospital, or the morgue. Thankfully, there was no one behind me. If I had been bumped from the rear, even in the slightest amount, I would’ve made contact with the minivan.

In the end, we’re possibly looking at severe damage to my car, the minivan, serious injury or death to a number of parties, collateral damage to surrounding vehicles, and all because someone wanted to be a good samaritan. You really want to be a good samaritan? Follow the rules of the road without deviation. If everyone did as is expected of them, we wouldn’t be paying higher insurance premiums.

I’ve been part of three vehicular accidents during my 18 years of driving. All three were not my fault. The first was because an elderly couple decided to stop in the middle of a bridge on the freeway because they took the wrong lane and were trying to figure out how to get back into the right lane. The second was on my way to a concert during a rain storm in which a van didn’t maintain its lane, entered mine and stopped. This was precipitated by another car that began to spin-out after hydroplaning on the wet pavement from excessive speed. The third was a woman in a van when she backed out of her drive without looking. Today, I narrowly missed a fourth.

Now if the cute redhead I met today wasn’t married, this post would’ve been about a different subject altogether.

Some punk in Thailand decided he wanted to a rob a taxi driver. His reasoning was that he wanted to see if it was as easy to do in real life as it is in the Grand Theft Auto IV video game. Eventually, the punk stabbed the taxi driver to death when the driver fought back. Now, stores in Thailand are pulling the game off of the shelves.

Supposedly, this comes as a “wake-up call” to the Thailand government to enforce some regulation on the gaming industry in their country. Proposed solutions include imposing a rating system on games, and implementing a curfew for kids playing these kinds of games in arcades. News agencies are reporting on the crime and making parallel comparisons to issues in other countries. If we were to believe the hype, we would think that kids all over the world are robbing, killing, and raping all because of video games. We would believe that we could live in a calm and serene world were it not for the negative influence of violent video games.

And why should we stop at video games. Music has been blamed for decades of robbing our kids of their innocence, turning them to drugs and sex, and making them kill others or themselves. And then when we finish with music, we can turn our attention back to the horrors of books and set piles of them burning into the night as we send them and their evil messages back to the devil himself. We could fuel the fires with the alcohol we would end up banning. Everyone would be so enlightened by this time that no one would need a drink in order to get through the day. And then all the evil and its murderous ways would disappear from the Earth and we would live in paradise, a heaven on Earth.

The truth of the matter is that humans will kill, maim, and destroy with no outside encouragement from games, videos, music, alcohol, drugs, or otherwise. What was Jack The Ripper’s influence? Did he see the recently published Gray’s Anatomy and wonder if the insides of women were just like they were in the book? It’s a good thing he hadn’t said so in his letter to the London Central News Agency or else our progress in the medical world might have been delayed. Was there a version of Stratego in the 1930s that might have influenced Hitler and his appetite for world domination? If so, it was never mentioned. And thankfully not or else millions all over the world might not enjoy that game today. Did Napoleon see a play? Did Attila listen to a story?

My point, which mirrors that of a large majority, is that you cannot blame things, video games or otherwise for why people do what they do. The kid in Thailand might have found another reason to do what he did. The fact that GTA4 brought out a desire to rob a taxi cab is not the fault of the game, even though it may have influenced him in some way. Millions of kids and adults play GTA4. There aren’t millions of acts of murder taking place at this very moment because of it. I’ve been listening to heavy metal music and playing violent video games for most of my life. If the hype was true, I’d be either chasing crack highs with beer binges, sitting on death row, or dead in a ditch already.

I don’t, and the millions playing GTA4 don’t, because we have a sense of what’s right and wrong. This kid in Thailand should have known that robbing and killing a man is wrong. But humans will do what they do for any reason. Kids have burned themselves from fire because no matter how many times they were told that the fire would do that, they didn’t fully realize it until they got burned. It happens. There is nothing you can do to fully stop it. Ban all the violent video games and someone else will get killed because they saw it happen in a movie. Ban all the violent movies and someone else gets killed because they read it in a book. It isn’t the media that’s provoking people to kill.

And while those in the gaming community are beginning to reel at the knee jerk reaction of New Era Interactive Media to pull the games from store shelves in Thailand, or the news media’s overactive attention to this one event, keep in mind that it will pass. Video games are big business. The fan base is huge. And the gaming industry knows that they don’t turn people into murderers.

I can always grab a racket, or a golf club, or rent a race car at the track. But there are no zombies in real life that need killing. There are no special powers that help me scale tall buildings or fly through the air. And I can’t rightly walk through the streets of any major city and go on a killing spree. For all those reasons, I turn to the joy of video games.

Vacation plans are going smooth and slow. My license plates are renewed for another year. My car was due for an emissions check (E-Check) since I’m lucky enough to live in one of the few special counties of Ohio (Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage, and Summit). Luckily, the E-Check is free for those vehicles required to get one. Unfortunately, you need to hand your car over to strange people while you sit in a little booth and wait for them to perform all the little tests required for your particular vehicle. Mine, they just plug in a computer to tell whether or not my car’s computer is doing its job. Older cars, like ones I’ve previously owned, get operated on a dyno machine. That calls for some alcohol to calm the nerves while you watch some teenager trying to keep your car from jumping off the dyno.

This vacation has given me the time to catch up on website work. RebelZero.com is slowly coming around as I learn the Drupal CMS. I began another site called SungInBlood.com which is a tribute site to my favorite author, Glen Cook. It, too, is based on Drupal and, since I haven’t officially released it, I’ve been able to take my time adding content to it while experimenting with how Drupal works. I’d like to concentrate more on customizing the theme. Of the available ones that I’ve found, only a small handful seem to fit and only to a certain degree.

Insert catchy segue here… (that’s segue, not segway)

The teacher notes on the back of my report cards always mentioned that I rarely applied myself. I could never understand what they were referring to and, if possible, how to change that. After a while, I thought it was one of those rubber-stamp phrases they had for certain students in which they didn’t have the patience to teach. I see now that my problem was never a lack of applying of myself but rather the opposite. Concentrating on one task until its completion before moving on to another is the problem I see before me today and must be what my teacher’s were referring to. I always apply myself to the task, but my interest wanders from task to task until I have so many tasks going on at once that I don’t seem to complete any of them.

At work, I can manage priorities based on the needs of the day. If need be, I can micro-manage tasks off to others instead of assuming them for myself. This comes in handy when my boss is too busy to see how unbalanced the workload has gotten throughout the day. But at home, there are rarely no real reasons for tasks to become prioritized. Just looking around the room, I can see nine tasks that need completion. I can also see that my beer is empty. And with that, the distractions continue.

Milo the Duck represents the Million Dollar Duck Race that takes place every year in New York City in order to support Special Olympics New York. Being a sponsor, you adopt one of up to 25,000 rubber duckies that get released into the East River that race from the Brooklyn Bridge to South Street Seaport.

This year it takes place on August 6 and Milo the Duck wanted everyone to know. So much so that I ended up with 23 emails from him this Saturday telling me so. Unfortunately for Milo, Yahoo’s Spam Filter jumped all over it after about the tenth message like a rabid wolverine and started filtering them to the Spam folder. I didn’t want the family of emails to be split up, so I sent what was left in the Inbox over to the Spam folder.

I responded to them in a “passive-aggressive note” kind of way in hopes of evoking a response. I was curious if this special event would be swept under the carpet to save face or if some kind of formal announcement and apology would come forth.

I received a response from an Elizabeth Forrest stating “there was a malfunction at the company which hosts our Web site.” After apologizing for the numerous emails, she reassured me that “these email deliveries were unintentional and that we take the privacy of your contact information very seriously.” As much as I appreciate the personal response, I would think that I wasn’t the only one that was affected and that some kind of formal announcement on the website would be beneficial for those not inclined to respond as I did.

In any effect, aside from the small glitch in their host’s software, the Million Dollar Duck Race is just one of the events that take place throughout the year to help raise awareness and funds for the athletes of Special Olympics New York. Each of the ducks cost just $5.00, with a “Quacker’s Dozen” of 13 going for just $50, and prizes are given out for leading teams, not to mention the chance for the winning duck to net $1,000,000 for the owner if it happens to be one of the “Golden Ducks”.