My Windows Media Center PC pulled a nice April Fool’s Joke: All shows scheduled to record today disappeared, and I couldn’t restore scheduled recordings. So, my daughter missed her favorite Fox and WB kids shows. […]
Category: Stupidity
You’ve Got Be Kidding
I am glad it’s an election year. Conservative legislators held a news conference today, where they lambasted Senate lawmakers for passing an immigration amnesty bill. The House wants to tighten immigration rules.
According to CNN, Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.) said, “I say let the prisoners pick the fruits”. From Rep. Steve King of Iowa: “Anybody that votes for an amnesty bill deserves to be branded with a scarlet letter A”. The brand should be on these representatives and their colleagues making these outrageous statements.
Microsoft’s Coal in the Stocking
My week went to hell, no thanks to Microsoft. The Windows Vista delay, then Microsoft platform group reorganization, then Office 2007 delay made for one nutty week. Reporters, clients, everyone have called looking for comment, explanation or speculation. One reporter told me she smashed her cell phone in frustration.
How Rude!
I get so steamed sometimes by some people’s rude behavior. My daughter and I stopped into the local 7-Eleven this morning for a quick burrito. While we were standing in line, this lady jabbering Spanish over a cell phone made a huge mess at the cappuccino machine (I use lower-case “c” because 7-Eleven Cappuccino isn’t).
She used the wrong size cup, which overflowed all over the machine and made a huge puddle of milky gunk on the floor. And she didn’t care! She continued talking on the cell phone!
Secretaries Don’t E-Mail
In March 2004, I appeared on PBS Newshour to discuss the European Union’s antitrust case against Microsoft. But I was by no means star of the night. The news show featured an interview face-off between Jim Lehrer and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. I sat in another area of the same studio watching the Secretary answer Jim’s questions—well, sidestep many of them. The Defense Secretary struck me as out of touch, a sense I got more seeing him live than I ever have on television.
But even I underestimated just how out of touch is Donald Rumsfeld. Today, Newsweek columnist Mark Hosenball writes about the Karina hearings: “Congressional investigations of government responses to Hurricane Katrina have revealed that two of the nation’s key crisis managers, the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, do not use e-mail”.
Uh, yeah.
Throttle Me, I Throttle You
Uh-oh. Netflix throttling is in the news this week, and I’m steamed about the tactic. I am so mad that service cancellation is one option. More likely, I will, eh, throttle down my number of rentals.
Throttling is a strategy whereby heavy users are penalized for using the service. Netflix reasons it loses money on these customers, so they get lower shipping priority.
This is Your Brain on Politics
Last night I fumed on about closed-minded evolutionists and creationists, neither of which is probably right but both think their position is absolute truth. Maybe science has an explanation for them in their good friends the politicians.
LiveScience.com today reports on a new study to be released about how politicians think. Researchers from Emory University MRI-scanned politicians’ brains while presenting them information about the “their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election”. The results were surprising, or maybe not, depending on pre-conceptions about politicians.
Stone Trek
My wife never thought much of William Shatner’s acting. Me, I’ve had a soft spot for the original “Star Trek“, regardless of acting skills. But I must say that Shatner’s most recent act, of selling […]
Who Really Did Steal Christmas from Lonaconing?
I’ve got some advice for Idea Grove, make your weblog more usable. It’s unclear when posts are made, other than the month, and the only RSS feeds I can see are for services. Hello! Earth to Idea Grove, if your goal is through your Media Orchard weblog “to cultivate fresh thinking about the media, marketing and public relations”, a little easier communications would go along way. I did get the feed, but I should have been able to easily subscribe without signing up for a RSS service.
OK, griping aside, now is the real topic of this post. Media Orchard has a great take on Lonaconing, Md.’s lightless Christmas. Local power company and Verizon pulled the plug on the town’s Christmas lights, which, in the past, strung from the companies’ polls. Townspeople responded by putting a giant Grinch nearby the local Verizon office with sign, ”Who really did steal Christmas from Lonaconing?”
No One is Safe
I am increasingly troubled by the implications of the Sony rootkit DRM, uncovered on Halloween by renown Windows expert Mark Russinovich. Essentially, Sony used a cloaking mechanism, typically the tool of malicious hackers, to hide digital rights management software installed on PCs from copy-protected music CDs. Like malware, the rootkit occasionally sends out information (to Sony), is nearly impossible to remove and when removed usually damages Windows.
I’ll skip over all the ways that Sony has turned its copy-protection mechanism into the worst kind of public relations disaster. I couldn’t imagine how any company could create more negative perception about DRM, but I’ll skip that, too.
The Geography Lesson
I spent a good chunk of my twenties traveling, for reasons better explained some other time. One day—oh, winter 1985—I walked into a west Texas fast food place looking for cheap Mexican eats.
I’ve got to digress and talk about Texas towns and food, or what they were then. Pretty much any Texas town big enough to have a gas station has a Diary Queen. Rule goes: Every town in the Longhorn state has a Dairy Queen (It’s not true, I found one in southern Texas near the New Mexico border without a DQ. Of course, my last visit was years ago, and there might be one now). Restaurants are a good measure of just how many people live in a Texas town. First there’s the DQ (about 25 to 3,000-4,000 people) and next up is the Sonic (4,000-5,000 range or so). Pizza place means more people, etc. etc.
The Stake Knife
Last night, while washing supper dishes, I saw that someone had left a steak knife point-side up in the strainer. I saw it more as stake knife, as I would never let the point standup like that.
See, when I was a third (maybe fourth) grader, a knife accident left an indelible mark on my psyche and on the body of my youngest sister.