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Archive for the ‘Rant(s)’ Category

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”.

“Well, me, it’s nice talking to myself,
A credit to dementia…”
- Megadeth, Sweating Bullets

I find myself in unfamiliar territory. See, my credit has been far from perfect for many years. But recently, it seems to have taken a turn for the better, or worse given your point of view.

I get most of my computer hardware from Newegg.com. If you compared computers to cocaine, then Newegg would be the supplier of my habit. If I didn’t have Newegg, I’d have to brave the high school peons with the spiffy blue shirts at Best Buy who can’t understand why I don’t want an extended service policy and constantly remind me that they don’t work on commissions so I can feel free to find anyone lest I need assistance. Thanks. I think I’ll venture through the aisles just fine on my own.

But I digress.

Anytime I am need of hardware, or just to check out current prices, I click on my bookmark for Newegg and feed the habit. I constantly add items to my shopping cart just to remove them later. I run through the checkout process all the way to the last step just to chicken out and surf off to another corner of the internet.

But every now and then, I would pause at the BillMeLater advert. Sometimes I would click on the application process just to verify that they don’t need my money badly enough to extend any credit to me. At least that was the case up until about a week ago. It took me a few minutes of re-reading to realize that somehow the planets and their moons aligned in the correct orientation long enough to be approved for a Newegg Preferred Account. Quickly, before they came to their senses, I placed an order for some hardware I had been putting off until the time was right. I didn’t see a reason to argue with myself any longer.

Not quite feeling lucky enough, I remember seeing the good old BillMeLater icons elsewhere. Most notably at Lenovo, laptop/notebook maker of my dreams. They always turned me down. But, I figured what would it hurt to try? As in the past, I built a laptop, placed in the cart, and went through the checkout process awaiting the usual denial page. Well let this be a reminder to you all: There is no step between application and purchase. I was congratulated for becoming the proud owner of a brand new Lenovo laptop. Yipee!!

By the way, at this moment it’s being held by the broker in Kentucky after being stuck in China for an extra day because of mechanical problems with the plane and somehow disappearing for three days in Alaska. 

Now that I’m sure my credit has been extended beyond its limits, there’s no possible way this streak could continue. Then comes my regular email from Old Navy. They’re announcing the ability to shop at Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, and Piperlime at the same time. So, after bouncing around their site for a half hour, I notice the link for the Old Navy Credit Card. Sticking another round in the chamber, I fire off an application. Lo and behold, I should have my card in the mail within a few days.

Then there’s that system beep that tells me I just got some new email. About the Old Navy card? Nope. Amazon.com wants to remind me of a new book being published soon, one that I’ve been waiting for. And guess what Amazon has? That’s right, an Amazon Card managed by the very same people that just approved me for the Old Navy card. There’s no possible way they would approve me twice in the same hour. But in the end, I was proven wrong. I’ll probably get the Amazon and the Old Navy cards on the same day.

My wallet is going to be so thick that I won’t be able to fit in my pocket, and all because of these little plastic cards with my name on them. But my experiment is not over. Let’s push the envelope. This has been for small time store cards. What about a major credit card. Just as I was writing this, I hopped over to Barnes & Noble and saw that they have a MasterCard. It took all of about 60 seconds. Approved.

Feeling cocky, I head over to the American Express website. I can’t go to bed without knowing. One more bullet in the chamber. One more application to fill out. I need to know. And then it happens. Denial. Yes! Finally! Someone has seen the light! The weight has been lifted. The stress and tension subsides. It wasn’t a dream, after all. The word must have gotten out to the creditors. Economic Stimulus checks are being mailed out and they must get their grubby little hands on them.

Goodnight.

It’s been longer than I can recall. While looking at a calendar, I couldn’t point to a date when I last used it. It’s roughly the same amount of time that’s passed since I lasted played a game off of the Steam client. I can now officially proclaim that I have kicked the Microsoft habit.

I was going to go into a whole MS vs. Linux debate with witty metaphors and sarcasm, but it was getting too long-winded. To keep it short…

I guess you need to cut through the marketing campaigns and the legal mumbo-jumbo to see that there are other alternatives out there. They might not always be better. But I can no longer justify paying big bucks for Vista, which has it’s own broken areas, when I can I use Linux everywhere for just about everything for zero dollars.

Dear Google coders,

As it seems almost impossible to reach anyone directly at the behemoth known as Google, Inc., I hope this has an iota of a possibility that someone in the know will read it.

This is in regards to the new “Sorry” page that results from certain search queries. No, it is not from any virus or spyware. No, deleting cookies obviously does not fix the problem. No, my query originates from the actual Google search pages.

I’m not sure what the issue is, but there’s certainly a major failure taking place. Considering how I use Google for many reasons (search, mail, rss reader, analytics), I would be hard pressed to move my usage some place else. However, I need access to a search engine that is not prone to failure. Tonight, I haven’t been able to make more than two queries before having to prove my humanity with a captcha, or a flat out denial of service.

I can’t be the only one having this issue.

Source … WIRED
Source … The Independent

A young Afghan journalist, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, has been sentenced to death for “downloading a report from a Farsi website that criticized Islamic fundamentalists who misrepresent statements in the Koran to justify the oppression of women.” He was tried in a sharia court, which is responsible for maintaining Islamic law, and without any legal representation.

The most disturbing part is that the Afghan Senate is actually supporting the death sentence. The Afghan parliament, which was elected in 2005, consists of 28% women. Are those 28% merely eye-candy for the remaining 72% men? That means that 70 women allowed it’s House Of The People to pass a motion supporting the death sentence of man accused of supporting their rights as human beings.

If you feel motivated to help this young man out, The Independent is campaigning the UK Foreign Office to intervene. They have an online petition to collect names to help increase the pressure.