Uncategorized – Page 58

My Country Tis of Corn

So, the large, scary government agency that indirectly pays my salary is celebrating America Recycles Day today. That’s a good thing. Raising recycling awareness is nearly always a positive thing. It’s probably always positive, but I’m just being cautious here.

Anyway, to celebrate this, they “will be handing out biobased corn products and informational brochures”.

I won’t discuss the grammar of the sentence beyond being glad that I don’t work for the public school system. Wait, I will. Do you think the informational brochures are biobased? I think they are. But do you think they are also corn products? The sentence construction leaves it open to interpretation. I love interpretation! It lets me berate you for disagreeing with me even if we’re both right.

What I will discuss, however, is the use of corn. We eat corn. We eat corn in almost everything. Next time you’re at the grocery store. Check the ingredients on everything you’ve purchased. You will likely be shocked at how many of the items contain corn in some form or another. A disturbingly high percentage will contain high fructose corn syrup. Most loaves of bread do (Not the good bread at Whole Foods and, to a lesser extent, Harris Teeter. And probably other stores, too, but those are the ones I usually go to. Anyway.).

We should just replace the stars on the flag with corn kernels. We could replace the stripes with ears. The ‘Ol Corn and Corn, we could say. The Yellow, Yellow, and Yellow. It would be great.

In fact, let’s replace everything with corn. Stop raising cattle and chickens! They just eat all our corn! We can grind corn into a pulp, add artificial flavors and colors, and voila! We have steak! Stop buying imported products! We can make everything we need out of corn! It’s BIOBASED! That must be good because it has “bio” in the name!

Thanks, Akismet

So, some time this afternoon, Akismet stopped the 10,000th spam comment here at Complaint Hub. I think we should all take a moment and applaud Akismet’s efforts. Way to go, Akismet!

levitra, from IP Address 202.105.182.15, decided to ask, “How add your to reds?”. That was the comment. The link to “levitra’s” blog or website was some Ukrainian top level domain name. I’m sure the site is wonderful and informative. I imagine they sell cheap pharmaceuticals.

I often wonder why they think that someone will take a comment like that seriously and click on “levitra’s” website to find out more. And then, once there, do they really expect that people will think, “Oh, while I’m here, I should buy prescription medicine from a foreign country without the advice of my doctor!”

Seriously. At least I didn’t have to censor the comment for language.

I dont hold grudges. Sometimes.

Complaint Hub » Blog Archive » Miro needs your help to not suck

I really do hope the Miro project succeeds and gives us another model for distributing quality video content. But I’m not giving them money when they beg. Provide me with a service that I want, that works the way it should, and I’ll pay for it. But try to get me to donate money to a bloated piece of software that I’m not entirely sure fulfills the needs of anyone, and I’m just not interested.

Just to show that I’m not holding a grudge, I just installed Miro 1.0 on my laptop. I’m going to wait until I at least hit 1,667 words for the day before I play with it, but I’m going to try it out. I’ll post my thoughts when I get a chance to see how it works.

Letters are easier, anyway

Due process too much hassle for DC dept. of motor vehicles – Boing Boing

Washington DC’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) will no longer allow citizens to protest parking tickets in person, reports Thenewspaper.com. Instead, they’ll offer mail-in and e-mail adjudication.

What kind of crazy person would go to the DMV to protest a ticket in person, anyway? As many of you have found via Google, I have a bit of experience protesting tickets via the mail. It actually works. They really do look at your letter, and they really do respond. It sometimes takes a letter to your councilmember to get it all worked out, but the statement in the article to which Boing Boing has linked:

Under the DMV’s plan, motorists will only be able to object to a ticket by email or letter where city employees can ignore or reject letters in bulk without affected motorists having any realistic recourse.

Just isn’t true. Does DC give out too many ridiculous parking tickets? Probably. Is the city too financially dependent on this revenue source? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Should it be easier to contest an erroneous ticket? Sure, but we have to weigh the cost/benefit analysis here. The reason you can’t contest a ticket in person anymore is probably NOT so the DMV can deny you due process (Does the DMV even owe you due process? I’m not sure. Maybe some lawyer can answer.). It is probably to save the DMV some money. If they don’t have to employ someone to sit and listen to how you know it said no parking, but you only had to run in for a minute, and it’s not your fault that your manicurist had a line and you had to wait and the kids were running around and it’s really not fair and you normally park in a regular spot and take the other car that you can usually park but this time you had the big car and gosh don’t you have kids then you understand, right? Then maybe they could put some of that saved money to use for education or increased police patrols or any of the million other things the city could be spending its money on.

Anyway, I know I only link to BoingBoing when they piss me off, so I want to state here that I read and enjoy the site every day. And I really don’t just read it waiting for them to say something that bugs me. I really recommend the site. They usually have smart, interesting things to say. Sometimes they say ridiculous things, but don’t we all?

Nano Update – Day 13

I’m getting myself all caught up. I wrote a new record 620 words on the Metro this morning, bringing my total to 19,566. That leaves me needing 2,105 words tonight to catch up to the pace. I think I can do at least a good chunk of that.

I think I’m getting over the dreaded Week Two Slump. It was particularly bad this year, but the story is starting to pick up, and some characters are really stepping up and asserting themselves.

It’s amazing what a 3,700 word day will do for you. This time on Sunday, I was almost ready to throw in the towel, not just on this year, but on Nanowrimo altogether. But now I’m plunging ahead into the heart of the novel and wondering what I’m going to do with all of these sub-plots.

Nano Update – Day 12

Whew, am I behind. I got a little behind on Thursday because we had a friend come into town. Then I got a little more behind on Friday. Then on Saturday I woke up at 4:30AM puking, I have no idea why, and didn’t stop until around noon. After that, it was all I could do to just stay awake, much less write. Then the wife of the friend joined him (she’s a friend, too, but it’s easier to say it this way), and we hung out on Sunday, so as of this morning, I was nearly 5,000 words behind the pace. I’ve never been that far behind, unless you count 2004 when I only wrote 448 words on day one.

On the bright side, I’ve written 3,058 words today, and am only about to break for dinner. The Monday Night Football game is going to be disgracefully bad, so I should be able to write through that. And I’m only 1,741 words behind schedule now. I can make that up this week.

Nano Update – Day 9

I’m getting a little behind. All the writing I did yesterday was on the Metro. I got 309 words on the way home, and then 345 this morning. That means I need 2546 more words today to keep on the 1667-a-day pace.

However, I’m rapidly approaching some action scenes, so that should be good. And I think soon I will introduce a couple of chatty homeless guys that should help the word count along. I’m just a little behind. I can catch up this weekend.

This is why were killing the planet

I work on computers all day. So do my coworkers. This morning, I came into work and found someone had left some papers on my chair, which seems to be universal for “You should look at these”. I, naturally, assumed it was something reasonably important. Perhaps some security form I needed to fill out.

It turns out it was a printout of a sixteen page SQL stored procedure which my coworker printed just so he could highlight the 8th and 9th lines of the first page and write a little note informing me of something I did not ask to know, need to know, or want to know.

He had a bunch of options here. The first one, and my preference, would have been to just not tell me at all. The world would have continued to turn.

Second, he could have emailed me the stored procedure with a note in the email. That would have been fine. He could have come by my desk this morning and said, “Hey, open up that stored procedure. See this line? I changed it. It works better now.” I would have even been sort of okay if he’d printed out the first page only and made his notes there. An unnecessary use of paper, but not egregious.

Anyway, now I have to recycle this stack of papers. All so he could notify me of something I never needed to know.

Nano Update – Day 8

438 on the ride in this morning. I had a seat the whole time. I don’t know if that helped my word count or not.

Unfortunately, with the idiotic waste of time meeting I had to go to before I left work and then the aforementioned trivia, I only got about 1,100 words yesterday. So this morning’s word count is just getting me back to about on track.

It’s okay, though. The wife is going out of town for a day or two, and I can spend the entire time writing. Wives can be really distracting. I mean, they’re great and all, and mine is particularly great. But they tend to not like it if you ignore them all the time and don’t help with cooking or cleaning or anything.

Which reminds me, I won a little bet with the wife last night at trivia. Had I lost, I would have had to cook dinner three nights in a row. Unfortunately, I never thought of what she would have to do if I won. It was one of the trivia questions. It said that Columbia Heights, our wonderful transitional neighborhood, was named for Columbia College. Columbia College has a new name. What is it?

Well, the wife was sure it was Howard, because Howard is more or less in Columbia Heights (Or Shaw, whatever, they’re right next door). While that is certainly a reasonable guess, I was pretty sure it was GW. Turns out I was right.

OMG TomKat!

Flickr has let me down – apparently no one who was outside the Uptown Theater last night taking pictures of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes has posted their stuff yet. But here is a little gallery that I won’t hotlink, although maybe I could.

Anyway, I post this not because I’m obsessed with two crazy, rich Hollywood people, but because I totally saw them. We went to trivia night at a bar just down the street from the Uptown, and as I was walking down Connecticut Avenue from the bus stop, there was a huge crowd in front of the theater. I looked in the center of the crowd, and there was a short man with a really bad haircut (Come on, Tom, now that you’re married, you’re letting yourself go?) and his wife towering over him.

It was kind of cool. I didn’t get a picture, because pulling out my camera phone would have just pissed me off because it takes such awful pictures. I had thought they had the baby with them, because I couldn’t see either of them (especially Tom) below the shoulders. Tom’s body language suggested he was holding a baby. Or maybe that was my imagination. Anyway, the kid doesn’t seem to be in the pictures that I’ve seen of the event, so I guess I was wrong.