Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe the Lake Erie Monsters will rise up in the AHL and bring Cleveland it’s first hockey championship since the 1963-1964 Cleveland Barons won the Calder Cup for the ninth time by defeating the top ranked Quebec Aces.

So I can sympathize with LeBron James who finds himself in a critical decision between staying in Cleveland, where championships are rare but fan loyalty is strong, or leaving for a better chance at the trophy ring at the sake of alienating the people who carry him on their shoulders.

As I stare at the clock, now one hour before the big announcement program begins on ESPN, I have to admit that despite what I and the rest of the city wants, LeBron should do what’s best for LeBron. It pains me to see such a talented, team-oriented player stuck in a cursed city which hasn’t seen a championship team since the 1964 Cleveland Browns stuck it to the Baltimore Colts 27-0, or the Cleveland Indians who last won a World Series title in 1948 taking the Boston Braves to game six. The Cleveland Cavaliers, who have never won a championship, neither have the lengthy history of the Indians, nor the legend of the Browns. It has only been recently that they’ve been making a name for themselves and you’d be called a fool if you said it was for any other reason besides LeBron.

I know that the team to contend with will be the one who has LeBron on their roster. I’d like it to be Cleveland because I think the city deserves to have a great player believe in it for a change. If it’s not, unlike the others in the past, I won’t hold it against LeBron. Good luck and goodnight.

Here’s what I was expecting:

Automated attendant: “Please enter the last four digits of your account number.”
Me: *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*
AA: “Please enter your five digit zip-code”
Me: *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*
AA: “Thank-you. Your new card is now activated. Have a nice day!”

Some variations have them automatically identifying you by your phone number which makes the process even quicker. However, today I’m presented with the following:

AA: “Please enter your entire account number.”
Me: “Really? OK.” *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*
AA: “While you’re waiting, you can choose to set up your pin now. This will give you access to cash at any time from many ATMs when you need it most. Press 1 to continue or 2 to decline.”
Me: “No thank-you.” *2*
AA: *insert five-minute sales pitch for the always exciting credit protection plan that goes on and on and on with no sign of stopping while I watch precious anytime minutes tick away one by one*
Me: “What the hell!? Just activate the friggin’ card!”
AA: “Press 1 for yes or 2 for…”
Me: *2* !!!!!!!!!
AA: “Congratulations your card is now…”
Me: *click*!!!!!!!

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 had originally an account with Myspace [notice I'm not linking to it] that was only used for obtaining pictures of my favorite bands. I never took full advantage of the site by making friends with everyone. I was happy using it for my own needs. After receiving many emails regarding friend requests that nearly all involved some scam to send traffic to either sex or pharmaceutical sites, I had enough. Feeling empowered during Simon Owen’s International Delete Your Myspace Account Day, I mad my request to close the account and life was good.

My membership to Last.fm was in part due to experimenting with the many features that Banshee had to offer. Banshee is to Linux what iTunes is to the Mac, minus the iTunes store. One of the features it had was a plugin to “scrobble” your tunes to an account at Last.fm. This gives you the ability to keep track of music you’ve just played, share them with others, and learn about bands that might appeal to you that you may not have known to exist. You can also join groups and be-friend other users, but with an apparently better class of people than you’d find at Myspace. This you gives other sources of music you can have streamed to your player and enjoy what others are listening to. All around, a win-win scenario.

From there, I joined Twitter. Twitter was founded on the idea of supplying a personal feed to users to share what they were doing through the course of the day. Posting “tweets” throughout the day, your friends could follow your experiences while “tweeting” back to you about what they were doing. The infrastructure has found other uses by coordinating people’s experiences during major events like the recent rampage through the city of Mumbai.

Personally, it was fun for about a week. It’s a novel idea and it has certainly found a niche that many people find useful. I can’t find a need for it that anything else I already use couldn’t perform the same functions. I also don’t need to know what others are doing in real time. If I’m not there to share the experience with them, then they can tell me about it the next time we visit.

Then came Facebook. Oh a whim I gave it a go. I was immediately surprised to find family members that also had accounts there and be-friended them quickly. They introduced me to some of the activities, applications as Facebook calls them, which helped to immerse myself into the Facebook world. However, it weren’t for the applications, I would probably have gotten bored with it soon after joining.

The part of Facebook I find most troubling is how advertisement driven it is. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it’s great to see a company supplying an entertaining social environment for free and having it fully funded through advertisements. But, a lot of those advertisements are the same annoying ones I find elsewhere. They’ve also engineered a few adverts to seem as though they’re another Facebook application. There was IQ challenge that was making it seem as though a friend had initiated it. After the fifth page of bypassing special offers just for me so I could see my IQ score, I finally gave up leaving the test a bit wiser than before.

So with that, I learned to discern and ignore the advertisements, or at the very least make sure I don’t visit with a browser that doesn’t utilize an ad blocker and/or script blocker. With the said sad ads now blocked, Facebook is much more enjoyable and easier to navigate now that there’s less load on the browser.

So in the end, I still use Last.fm. I’ll find a use for Twitter some day, just not anytime soon. And Facebook has some addictive games to play with friends. I found a lot of other great online games to play, but I’ll save those for another day.

And with that, I place the final nail in this coffin and live on.

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.

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?

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 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.

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.