Revenge is sweet...

If you're going to sell bad merchandise on ebay, you should really take more care to clean up after yourself...

How do you spell "irony?" "I-N-D-I-A..."

Indian workers are protesting against a so-called injustice I and many of my fellow IT-ers (current and former) are quite familiar with: outsourcing.  Reading the article it appears they are concerned at the moment about plans for India's national reserve bank to outsource IT needs to a private company, not necessarily out of the country, but its also clear from rising salaries across the board in India that moving IT work out of the country to somewhere that still wears the title for "crappy third-world country."

I've been predicting this ever since the outsourcing trend started taking hold here.  Its a fad, mainly; many companies outsourcing IT and development work are finding the quality of the work produced to be less than adequate, poorly documented, hard to maintain, and that managing teams on opposite sides of the world--and the clock--is a dicey proposition at best.  More than a few companies are finding it to be a workable solution at least in part to a tight budget, but just as many are bringing work back home from what they consider to be a failed experiment.

For those companies that do find it to be a workable proposition, a new problem is arising.  India's software economy has been undergoing the same sort of rapid growth and change that the US economy did during the dot-com boom of the 90's.  So many companies are looking for new talent that salaries have risen far out of proportion to the rest of the economy.  As a result, the economic benefits of moving operations to India is rapidly dwindling, and companies are looking for new ground to take over India's spot. 

I have to confess I read about new developments in this area with a certain degree of glee, not unlike a high school geek who's watched his mousy girlfriend blossom into a supermodel only to be left holding the bag while she runs off with the high school quarterback before prom and shows up at the reunion ten years later forty pounds overweight with a passel of kids in tow, married to an unemployed Al Bundy-wannabe whose greatest accomplishment was the Hail Mary pass that won the regional championships his senior year.  I never lost a job directly to outsourcing, though I did have enough trouble finding work because of it that I switched careers altogether, returning to school to finish the bachelor's I abandoned during the dot-com years with the intent to go into medicine. (Its hard to outsource sticking a needle in someone.)  The jury's still out on that move--nobody drags a four-year degree out like I do--but in the meantime there's enough work coming back stateside that I'm considering a full-time return to the workforce to pay the bills in the meantime.

Take heart, my Indian brothers.  This too shall pass.

Old school PDA: freakin' genius

Everyone who knows me knows I'm a geek.  I don't pretend otherwise anymore; back when I had steady income I put "early adopter" as my religious status.  I've tried half a dozen PDA's and the only one that's stuck was my current cell phone, running windows mobile 4.0 and sync'ing to outlook.  Having spent the better part of the last few years broke, though, I've started using my father's version of a PDA: pen and paper.  I started carrying around a little memo book, which has thus far been far more effective than an electronic PDA costing a few hundred dollars and destined to end up an expensive paperweight.

Finally someone has come up with a PDA for people like me.  PocketMod is a website that lets you mix and match several templates into a disposable (i.e., loseable) organizer that you print out and fold.  It has a couple dozen page styles available, ranging from blanks to various sized grids to blank music scores to sudoku pages. you've got 8 pages in a booklet to work with, although I don't really see anything preventing you from getting creative and stapling several together into a larger organizer. 

I was telling steph earlier that the greatest ideas in mankind's history were the simplest ones, those that were so simple that they were simply overlooked.  These guys should really patent the idea before franklin covey or dayplanner gets ahold of it.

Sometimes a cell phone is just a cell phone...

So I lost my cell phone this afternoon. I realized this as I was driving back over to Steph's place from mine after I went over there to give gus a bath and grab a few things for this weekend in Dallas. I went back to the last place I could remember having it--my apartment, of course--but after looking for the better part of an hour, I still couldn't find it. No big surprise as most small items, animals, and children that find their way into my apartment are never heard from again, lost in a tempestuous conglomeration of unopened junk mail, junk that needs to be mailed, closets overflowing with junk and clothes that should be junked, sprinkled with junk food.

Finally I resigned myself to the idea that I had lost it, and would be without a phone for the entire weekend, since it'll be monday before I can get up to austin to do anything about it (since I still have an austin number and want to keep it, I have to deal with Cingular up there instead of down here because they like to make my life a pain in the ass.)

I get back over to steph's, look her work number up in outlook (thank god i have a phone that syncs to outlook automatically) and called her to tell her about it, when I decided, as guys sometimes do when we're
alone, that it was time to scratch my balls. As I was sticking my hand down my shorts I felt a small rectangular object kind of on the side of my underwear. Bet you can't guess what that was, can you?

I really only have two explanations for this. One is that I meant to put it into my pocket and was preoccupied at the moment and accidentally put it inside the waistband of my jeans, and thus in my underwear instead of my pocket. The other is more freudian in that subconsciously I hate my cell phone--or rather, what it represents, which is being at the beck and call of the entire world 24/7--and want to drive myself crazy with it so I get rid of it all together before it sleeps with my mother. I tend to go with the latter. (Except for the
sleeping with my mother part. Sometimes a cell phone is just a cell phone.)

I was all done blogging for the day

I was about to put away my blogging window when I saw this story from the DailyKos via Pharyngula.

Appalling.

The link is about a Christianist rally called Battlecry, complete with unabashedly militant symbolism that borders on Nazi propaganda. When former Special Forces servicemen are posing as trigger-happy Navy SEALs and this is considered positive PR for the extremist Christians, complete with a letter of approval from our Fearless Leader (keeping Alabama's skies free of Commies since 1972), is there any doubt about the ultimate goal of the evangelical movement in America today?

So much for the land of the free...

[Update: An excellent first-person account of BattleCry can be found at truthdig. Be sure and check out some of the comments too.]

Science scores dropping--is anyone surprised?

The NYTimes is running a story on a "distressing" drop in science scores by 12th graders nationwide.  The article offers a couple of explanations.

Assistant Secretary of Education Tom Luce said they reflected a
national shortage of fully qualified science teachers, especially in
regions of poverty, where physics and chemistry classes are often
taught by teachers untrained in those subjects.

"We lack
enough teachers with content knowledge in math and science," Mr. Luce
said. "We have too few teachers with majors or minors in math and
science. That clearly is a problem."

Some teachers cited the decreasing amount of time devoted to science in
schools, which they attributed in part to the annual tests in reading
and math required by the No Child Left Behind law.

Honestly though, regardless of the above explanations, did anyone really think students in America today were getting anywhere near an adequate grounding in science?  We're living under a presidential administration that is actively hostile towards science in favor of religion, and that takes its advice on matters like global warming from its favorite fiction writer.  Stem cell research has all but ground to a halt in this country, and school boards all over the country are being overrun by evangelical Christians making strong legislative and PR efforts to have creationism treated with parity alongside evolution as an adequate explanation for natural phenomena.

The Christianist movement loves to pretend they're Jewish and have been hated and oppressed ever since Christians were fed to the lions in the Colosseum.  Newsflash: the real attack in this country is directed at rational thought. 

The Anatomy of Power

A friend of mine works for the Texas Freedom Network, a non-profit group whose goal is to ensure religious freedom and individual liberties over the agenda of the religious right in Texas.  The group has just released a new report detailing the merging of the religious right with the leadership of the Republican Party in Texas.  TFN isn't anti-religion (unlike yours truly) and in fact, they work closely with a non-partisan network of mainstream clergy and other people of faith through the Texas Faith Network, 

The report details the rise of the religious right in Texas as well as the influence of a few key groups and players, along with their tactics for portraying religious Americans as a people under constant attack.  From the Executive Summary:

A report such as this is likely to be portrayed by leaders on the religious right as further evidence of a “war on Christianity” and “people of faith” in America today. Indeed, this charge has become the stock in trade for cynical far-right leaders who are adept at using religion to further divide Americans in the raging culture wars. Yet it is hard to reconcile this “language of persecution” with the reality in America today.

The vast majority of Americans proclaim a belief in God and attend church freely and regularly. Religious organizations own and operate radio, television and cable stations across the country, freely promoting religious messages to large audiences. Bible and prayer clubs meet in countless public schools. Decorations and public displays celebrating religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter can be found on almost any street in communities across the country. The truth is that faith and religious freedom are flourishing in America.

Given the current national political landscape, especially the dominance of Texas politicians such as George W. Bush and Tom Delay and the influence of leaders of the far right like the ever-asinine James Dobson on both political circles and the evangelical movement, this report is as much a look at the rise of the religious right nationally as well as in Texas.  Its well worth a read, regardless of your feelings on the matter.

There's hope for women all over the world now

Toyota is bringing to market a car that can park itself... Finally, women all over the world can feel free to parallel park.

[Thank god i've already got a girlfriend or I'm betting this post would cramp my dating life for awhile!]

Buy an SUV and get a free year of irresponsibility

GM is demonstrating an even greater disregard (or perhaps its merely lack of understanding) of market forces at  work by offering new SUV buyers a 1,99 cap on the price of gas for one year.  I can't begin to fathom what GM executives are thinking, unless they've got their minds set on going out with a bang.

First there's the economic cost to GM.  Leaving aside the fact that many buyers of these vehicles (including the incredibly fuel-inefficient H2 & H3 series of Hummers) don't care about the price of gas, by limiting their cost during a time when gas is likely to hit $4/gal GM is basically saying, "We'll match whatever you spend on gas."  On the vehicles in their production lines that are going to maximize that proposition.  If I were one of GM's investors, I'd be pretty f'ing pissed.

Secondly, there's the blatant disregard for the role American auto manufacturer's have played in the current gasoline crisis.  For years now they've been virtually assaulting American consumers with a barrage of ads and incentives to convince consumers to buy these fuel monsters.  Not to downplay the personal responsibility consumers have for making rational decisions, but anyone who reads this blog regularly is aware of the disregard I have for the ability of the average American to grasp the idea of "rational."  What GM is doing here is telling consumers, "Hey, we know what a pain in the ass it is to be responsible.  Hell, we've based our entire business model around that!  So why don't you just do what you want, as long as you want to buy one of our monster trucks, and we'll take that pesky responsibility thing and just sweep it under the covers for you."  GM is well-aware of the inability of your average consumer to see past the BS, and is taking advantage of that.

So my question to GM is this:  if you're so fired up about making gas prices cheap, why don't you offer this deal for only your most EFFICIENT vehicles, or your flex-fuel vehicles?  In doing so you'd save your investors a ton of money by limiting the cost of your asinine little idea, and you'd encourage consumers to buy more energy-efficient vehicles, helping to offset the increase in demand you'd be causing by setting a price ceiling.  I mean, bloody hell, how much more powerful a marketing message can you offer than "This car's so efficient we'll pay for all of your gas for the first year."  Might have something to do with the fact that there aren't any American cars that are highly efficient, of course...

The answer, of course, is because GM, like other American manufacturers, has always focused on the profit margin, looking to drive up sales of their bigger, high-margin vehicles instead of focusing on creating solid, reliable, energy efficient smaller cars and trucks.  Foreign manufacturers like Toyota, meanwhile, have been bitch-slapping GM in the marketplace precisely because they took the more intelligent strategy of decreasing their costs of production instead of taking the low road of higher vehicle margins.

Call me a Commie, tell me I hate America or that I'm a terrorist sympathizer.  Call me what you want--my next vehicle is going to be foreign.  I simply can't support American manufacturers when they pull boneheaded moves like this.

I just found my next cell phone

I have a beef with motorola. Many, actually. Mostly I just hate their phones. I've always found them to be overhyped pieces of crap no self-respecting e-dung beetle would stoop to ingest.

They might have a phone to change my mind now.

The "Q," as its called (think James bond's Q) is a slim-factor phone slightly thicker than the SLVR, about the same size as the RAZR. Runs the latest version of Windows Mobile (5.0) Smartphone, which is the killer feature of my current cell (the Audiovox SMT-5600.) Except the Q addresses my biggest problem with the SMT, the lack of a qwerty-style keyboard. short text messages aren't a problem, but for sending emails, chatting, web surfing... its a Major Complication. Most Smartphone apps take this into account, taking care to make applications menu-driven instead of text-driven, but there are a few good ones (in terms of filling a gap) that not only don't follow this convention, but don't take advantage of the predictive text available.

The Q will initially be available only from Verizon, but I'm hoping Cingular gets it soon, since I'm stuck with them for the next couple of years unless I suddenly come into a large sum of money to pay an early termination penalty. Although I'm not really inclined to change providers--I don't like Cingular's customer service or business practices, but the service itself is usable.

"I'm so complicated"

You come over unannounced
Dressed up like you're somethin else
Where you are and where it's at you see
You're makin me Laugh out
When you strike a pose
Take off All your preppy clothes
You know You're not foolin anyone
When you become Somebody else
Round everyone else
Watchin your back
Like you can't relax
You tryin to be cool
You look like a fool to me
    --Avril Lavigne, "Complicated"

I guess she got over being "complicated"... 

How do you know a doomed startup?

When its more about ego than product.

Seriously, every startup I've ever seen that puts headshots of its management team has ended up as a crapshoot.  That should be the #1 tip to potential investors that their money is going to be put to use fueling egos and sports cars rather than spent on hiring developers and designers, ads, or just about anything else that might be useful in a company.

Also, the fact that this "social network" is anything but social might also be a clue.  Here's a tip, guys: snobby people don't go online to be snobby.  They prefer to do it in person so that they have other rich people to pat them on the back for being rich, and peons to exclude in order to brush away those pesky insecurities about their self-worth.  What's the point of a gated community if no one can see you driving through the gates every day?

So this is the face of senility...

Pat Robertson, ever mindful of his complete and utter irrelevance in world affairs, has apparently been having tea and crumpets with God again.

Longtime readers of the political pages will remember his previous conversations with God, which included "Kill Chavez now!" and the classic episode in which Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke as divine retribution for attempting to bring peace to the holy land.

I had a friend once who was convinced her grandmother (a very nice lady, by all accounts) received messages from God.  Not in the "dove perched by an open window" kind of way, but in a verbal, "Tell so-and-so to turn left instead of right at 12:03pm today."  I was never able to convince her that her grandmother was probably a lifelong schizophrenic of some sort, but she spoke in tongues herself, so I had my work cut out for me there.  [as a side note, how convenient is it that some people are given the gift of speaking in gibberish, and other's the gift of interpreting it?  Let's hear it for accountability!]

What boggles my mind is how people can be so convinced of such a preposterous idea merely because once or twice in a blue moon the recipient of such messages manages to be right.  I mean, you fling enough crap at a wall and something's bound to stick sooner or later.  Which is, of course, exactly what Roberts is doing here.  He's predicting a lot of storms on the coastlines (Imagine that... a storm on the coast.  whodathunkit.)  during a period in which everyone from the meteorologist at the local news to government climatologists to academic geologists has shown that global warming is a) a reality and b) creating conditions for highly active hurricane seasons with stronger-than-normal storms.  Sorry, Pat, you don't get credit for a divine prediction when everyone already knows it.  As for the tsunami prediction, he's clearly using heightened public awareness and fear of tsunamis to get everyone's attention, knowing full well that if a tsunami doesn't show up everyone will forget his little prediction and if it does (unlikely in the extreme) he got lucky.

"I think maybe I kinda like you..."

Not a line that's going to end up on the top ten of all time, but it worked for this guy.

Here's what I've figured out about women in the last few years.

1.) Nice guys finish last.  Its not because nobody likes the nice guy--its just that nobody wants to sleep with him.  Don't get me wrong.  Being a jerk doesn't get you laid much either (although marginally moreso than being a nice guy.)  Its because a nice guy has no backbone, no spine.  He'll let a girl walk all over him--or anyone else, for that matter--so that he can retain his internal picture of himself as a "nice guy."  When girls do go for the nice guy, its for a very specific, very temporary purpose: rebound.  This is a nice guy's bread and butter.  If there's one thing he's good at, its picking up the pieces of a girl's broken heart, putting them back together again, and restoring her sense of self and self-esteem.  Oh, and he's pretty good at getting left behind for the badass on a motorcycle too.  There are few hard-and-fast rules in dating, but I'm pretty sure this is one.

2.) Nobody likes a jackass.  These guys tend to get laid more than the nice guys do.  That's because there's no dearth of women who seek out trouble like a moth to a flame.  They're unable to have or maintain a normal, functional relationship with another adult human being because they have no real identity of their own, so they look for what they see as a strong personality to whom they can attach themselves in order to have some sense of identity.  Unfortunately they're also really poor judges of character, not having any of their own to use as a reference.  (Women like this, incidentally, are almost always unsalvageable--stay away.  They may learn one day, but they'll learn of their own accord.  No one will ever be able to show them.  Especially not the Nice Guys of the world.)  At the end of the day, though a relationship with the Jackass may last awhile, it will be rocky and fraught with peril.  Her friends will hate him, mostly because at least twice a week she will call them with yet another story about what a jerk he is and how she should just leave him for good--and then she will return to him as soon as he calls.  Its annoying, really.

3.) The rules for Getting Laid and the rules for Being Happy are vastly different. Getting Laid, unfortunately, usually involves a little bit of being a jackass.  You will never find a relationship that makes you happy this way, because the pretext under which you start it is not who you are (hopefully.) 

Suppose you're the Nice Guy in your group of friends, and by some miracle, or perhaps through the machinations of your friends, you manage to do the exact opposite of whatever your instinct is: instead of complimenting her hair, you tell her what a big ass she has; instead of reading her poetry, you make her buy you a drink.  Whatever the case may be, you find yourself the next morning laying next to the only semi-attractive wench that's voluntarily dropped her panties for you in months. [before women reading this get their panties in a wad and start complaining that no woman would respond to that, shut up.  Yes, you do.  Maybe not all of you--those with a little self-respect tend to fall into this category--but most of you do.  Now go bring me some cheesy poofs and shut your pie hole.] 

So now, sober and back to your old self, you proceed to do all the things your instincts tell you to do: make her breakfast in bed, buy her flowers, call her just to say hi, leave her sweet little have-a-great-day notes on her car while she's at work... all those little romantic things you'd love to be able to do for your presumptive girlfriend.  Except guess what, douchebag... She didn't respond to that in hopping in the sack with you.  She responded to you treating her like crap.  Anybody want to take a guess at what comes next?

The disconnect in our hypothetical NG's behavior is this: he went out to Get Laid, but once he'd fulfilled that need, he was trying to convert the product of those efforts into a Relationship--into Being Happy.  That's a no-no.  Its like going to a sex shop and buying a big bottle of sensual massage oil, then trying to cook with it or put it in your car.  You can try it, but its not going to produce good results.

So how exactly are you supposed to be happy and get laid at the same time?  Personally, I see it as a pretty simple technique:

Just Be Happy.  [Its not just a song lyric anymore, people.]

Be satisfied with your own life.  Do the things that make you happy, whether its riding a bike, hiking, being a Beer Snob, whatever... If you want to meet people, then find things that make you happy and are somewhat social, like art openings, or political organizations, or something like that.  Be the person you want to be, and be satisfied and content.  The thing is, other people gravitate towards that peace, and like drops of oil on the surface of water people who share that quality tend to find each other and stick together.  Sooner or later  you and one of those other drops of oil will find that your lives complement each other, and if you don't cock it up by pretending to be something you're not, she (or he) will sleep with you.   Maybe even more than once.

If you focus on that first though, you're introducing a need into your life, and artificial needs are antithetical to being happy.  Needs have to be fulfilled.  That's why they're called needs.  Everyone has needs of course: you need to eat, sleep, shit, and breathe.  If your need doesn't fall into one of those four categories, its artificial--you're creating it for yourself.  That doesn't make it a bad need, necessarily, but you have to decide what needs you want to let control your life.  In a relationship, for instance, I need to be with someone who's intelligent and shares some or all of the ideals that are important to me.  That's a need I'm willing to allow to have some control over my life.  I'm not, however, willing to let my desire to get laid become a need that overrides that more primary need. Its a matter of prioritizing your needs.

Maybe later I'll take a break and write more about my philosophy of needs.  Right now I need to take a crap.

Hosting change

Update: Transition complete.

I just changed my hosting setup, so KJ may be hosed for a few days... if you get a 404, or some weird front page, bear with me, I'll be back to my usual annoying self shortly.

mental diarrhea

I'm just kind of going to link a bunch of stories/links/etc that I'm finding today that I'm too lazy to blog about individually today.

I'm not exactly a big fan of the cowboy diplomacy that will likely be the most noteworthy aspect of Bush's presidency, but I've really got to wonder what the hell Iran is thinking here.  They've been offered time and again alternative paths to a nuclear power program that don't also give them the ability to produce nuclear weapons, something the international community can all agree is practically the worst idea since filming Tammy Faye Baker living in a house with Vanilla Ice and Ron Jeremy for a month.  Russia's offered to do the enrichment for them.  The EU is all but offering blowjobs for everyone if they'll give up the idea of uranium enrichment.  I think there's even been an offer at one time for them to do their own enrichment under close supervision.  Instead, we get Halocaust denials and railings against Israel's right to exist from the Iranian president.  Honestly, sir: do you really think if you push the situation far enough we won't kick your ass?  I'm no fan of Bush, but even I will acknowledge that the US has the firepower and manpower to eliminate your ability to function as a nation in the 21st century, even if we can't control your nation as a whole.  The Republicans will likely lose control of Congress later this year, and lose the presidency in '08, but rest assured, whoever comes in behind them will still put on a pair of shitkickers and beat you senseless if you force us to.

Google's release a new version of Desktop.  I've been a big fan of this ever since they added the feature to detach applets from the sidebar to be positioned on your desktop and the ability to show or hide these applets with a double-tap of the shift key.  Now they've kicked it up another notch, with the ability to write said applets (called Gadgets now) in javascript and/or C++.  I think C# or any other .Net language might work as well, if you write and compile it as a COM component.  I'll have to investigate that more--one of my projects this summer is going to be to write a project tracker/timer with subtasks.  Hopefully I'll be able to do that completely in Javascript; I'll do a write-up on the success of the venture when I'm done.

Pavlina's got a great article for college students, along the lines of keeping you focused and motivated.  I sure could have used that one back in '96 when I started college.  Hard to believe its been 10 years... never thought of myself as "that guy".

And lastly... Kuro5hin demonstrates that there is no end to the lengths a whackjob will go to prove his whackjob street cred.

It really takes a lot for me to bitch about the "nanny state"

...but this did it:  lawmakers have proposed a bill in the House that would ban access in federally funded schools and libraries to any site that "allows users to create Web pages or profiles that provide information about themselves and are available to other users and offer a mechanism of communication with other users."

In case you missed it, that's a shot across the bow of myspace, facebook, and essentially any non-static page on the internet.  From the article:

The legislation is aimed at "protecting children from
terrible individuals who would aim to use Facebook and MySpace to harm
young children," says Michael Conallen, chief of staff to Congressman
Michael Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), who sponsored the bill.

Where, oh where, do I begin?

First of all, facebook is for college kids, not young children.  Myspace doesn't allow young children on it--you have to be at least 14, by which is a nice segue into point #2:

how about you teach your kids a little common sense, and while you're at it, maybe take a shot at raising them yourself instead of letting the internet or television do it? 

Whatever happened to the whole "Never talk to strangers" bit that was so prevalent when I was a kid? When I grew up, my father had me convinced that everyone he didn't personally introduce to me was an axe murderer he had put in jail himself (Dad was a prosecutor.)  I was 12 years old before I learned that garbage men weren't always convicts.  Once I even attempted to spread the word about the dangers of garbage men to every kid in the neighborhood (which, in my neighborhood, meant the little girl whose backyard bordered mine, and a kid who lived three blocks over.  The rest of my neighborhood was basically a retirement community.)

Sometimes I really hate election years.  This is obviously a stunt to get the soccer-mom vote.

I guess they were all out of shrimp on the barbie...

Somebody the kiwis up for sale.  Not the fruit--the country.

more fatcats come out swinging against digital music

This time its Real's CEO, Rob Glaser:

About half the music on iPods is music obtained illegitimately either from an illegal peer-to-peer networks or from ripping friends' CDs, which is illegal.... If you want interoperable music today, there is a very easy solution:
it's called stealing... it's the only way to get non-copy protected,
portable, interoperable music.

Ok, Item The First: if only half the music is "stolen", then that must mean half the music is bought, right?  That's a pretty big f'ing deal for iTMS--five years ago, you could pretty much count on all the music being downloaded from peer-to-peer networks or ripped off CD's, which leads us to...

Item The Second:  Ripping your CD's OR your friends CD's isn't illegal.  Sharing for personal use among your friends is now and always has been fair use, despite what the RIAA wants you to believe.  Uploading it to a server for all the world to grab... not so much. 

What Glaser is really pissed about is that nobody's playing music from Real's music store on iPods.  Sour grapes.

What is it about CEO's that makes them such asshats?

This is why I left Mississippi (*not* that Texas is much better)

Disgraceful.  First they convict an innocent man--a hardworking farmer and a fucking war hero--on trumped up charges of theft because he's black, its 1960, and he was stirring up trouble by trying to integrate Southern Miss.  Then he dies because of poor health acquired in the prison.  And now, even though he was clearly innocent and ought to be given a posthumous award for trying to advance civil rights, they won't pardon his name because he's dead.

Don't ever let anyone try to tell you attitudes in MS are any different than they used to be.

SBC finally good for something...

Something you might not know if you're an SBC/AT&T DSL subscriber...

Barnes & Noble's wireless is admin'd by SBC.  Normally, you have to either become a member at 19.95/mo with a 1 year committment, or buy a prepaid connection card, which comes to about 8.00/day for connection, or pay 3.95 for a two hour connection.  Not bad, if you really need connectivity, but not great either, if you use it a lot.

I was looking at their options, and noticed that if you're a DSL subscriber, you can subscribe to wireless connectivity as well for an extra 1.99/month.  $2 a month.  That's it.  Month to month.  Gets you connections at BNN, McDonald's (!), UPS stores, Caribou coffee houses(don't have those around here) and a few other assorted places.  possibly in airports as well.  now THAT's a deal.

That's the first thing SBC's done that didn't piss me off in years.

AWOL

I haven't been in a very bloggy mood the last month or so... School's intense this time of year, I got into a relationship (finally! a good one!) Some of my Faithful Readers will understand how big a deal that is, considering what a committed bachelor I've been the last few years (interrupted by a year or so of on-again,  off-again with someone).  Its probably going to last awhile longer... I've had a lot of sad news the last few days, won't be done with finals until the end of the week, and I've got some other stuff going on I can't talk about for awhile.  not bad stuff, just stuff.

Yeah, this post is kind of a waste of your time, dear reader.  sorry about that.

Maybe Katie isn't as dumb as I thought...

Check it out--Katie Holmes, going back on the open market... (3rd story down)

Welcome to the Bank of Exxon...

I think this approach is likely to take off in the near future as a way to beat gas prices.  A high-capacity gas station in Minnesota sells gasoline in any amount to consumers at current prices, then allows them to withdraw the gas at any point in the future.  They actually have customers who paid less than $1/gal who are still driving on that "deposit."  I know I'd probably put easily a thousand dollars on an account if i could get the gas at anything approaching $2/gal, which would probably keep me driving for at least a year, maybe two or three with my current usage.  It would also allow me to better budget my fuel needs.  I don't really see any downside--the gas station buys petroleum futures on the Merc for large orders to ensure they can provide the gasoline when needed, and they've got 50,000 gallon tanks for the short-term orders.

Another win for the free market approach...

The latest on Delay (or, "What, you mean that's illegal???")...

Quote from the article:

Prosecutors have e-mails showing Rep. Tom
DeLay's office knew lobbyist Jack Abramoff had arranged the financing
for the GOP leader's controversial European golfing trip in 2000 and
was concerned "if someone starts asking questions."

Consider the questions asked, Tom...

Next on al`Qaeda's Funniest Home Videos: Zarqawi

Apparently he's got a blooper reel... 

And this is the terrorist mastermind keeping American forces occupied in Iraq?  Bush et al's degree of incompetence just became a whole lot clearer.

Working at Dunder-Mifflin...

Ok, I don't actually work at Dunder-Mifflin.  But I'm on their mailing list all the same.  A bit from last months newsletter:

Mad ups to our very own accountant Oscar Martinez, who thwarted an attempted mugging last Friday!  The incident occurred around nine pm near the woods on the outskirts of Crowley Park.  Oscar was parked in his car with an unidentified male companion when a female jogger was accosted.  With the same eagle eyes he uses to spot clerical errors in our expense reports, Oscar saw what was happening, bolted from his car and scared the would-be assailant off.

In typical hero fashion, Oscar didn’t even want to discuss his bravery.  Said Oscar, “What I do on the weekends is nobody’s business.”  He’s Mr. Modest, and hey -- that’s why we love him!

It should be noted that this only came to light because volunteer sheriff Dwight Schrute had been astutely monitoring his police scanner at the time.  Mr. Schrute also placed sixth out of fifteen in the Lackawanna County Volunteer Sheriff Pistol Target Competition last weekend, so congratulations to him as well.

Oh yeah, and Dwight's got a blog...