Rare is the news item these days that makes me happy. But here's one (found via plastic.com) about California proposing to implement a three strikes law for corporate criminals. After 3 felony convictions, a company may no longer do business in the state of California. After the first two convictions, the company must purchase an ad in California's largest newspaper listing their convictions. This hasn't passed yet, but it's passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, and is on it's way to the Senate. I don't have high hopes that it will be passed, but it will be an amazing triumph for the consumer if it does.
There's a law I've formulated about ISP's. It says that every two years, your ISP will get bought by a more incompetent company than you currently are with. So your internet service will get worse and worse. Eventually, we'll probably all end up using AOL or something.
Last year, Comcast bought ATT Broadband. I think ATT Broadband had previously bought the ISP I had before that, but I can't remember which company that was. So a week ago I noticed that I could no longer connect to ATT's usenet server. Yesterday, I decided to do something about it. So I searched the web, and discovered that the IP block I am on is somehow corrupt. There was instructions on how to fix it. I tried those instructions, but it did not work.
So I also learned that Comcast uses Giganews for it's usenet server. There's a download cap, which I didn't have before, but that doesn't bother me. I don't download that much stuff. So I signed up for Giganews, and it said it will send me mail, and I can use it after 24 hours. Evidently it requires a waiting period, like a gun. And it said it would send me mail to my Comcast e-mail address.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to log onto Comcast. My ATT username and password don't work. Well, this sounds like a job for Customer Support! I know modern ISP's can give this sort of thing through chat sessions. It's quite routine. So I go to Comcast's chat server, which says:
In order to chat with a Comcast representative, you must download ComcastSUPPORT Lite. You will only need to this once. Upon your next visit, you will be taken directly to chat.Great. This sounds like an application that I'm betting doesn't run on Mac OS X. Why can't they use Java? And the name is "ComcastSUPPORT Lite". "Lite"? What, do I have an option of buying the full version of "ComcastSUPPORT" for only $29.99? But I cross my fingers and click on the "download" button. Nothing is downloaded. Well, maybe it's because I'm using Safari. I try again with Internet Explorer. Same thing. This sucks.
So I can't log into Comcast. But, does it matter? Maybe my mail will go to my ATT account. I'm not patient enough to wait 24 hours, and plus, I sort of doubt Giganews will be mailing to ATT accounts. But I want to be sure. I know, I'll go to Comcast, and it might have some help for ATT customers. Lo and behold, there is a merger page for ATT broadband customers. And lo and behold, it sucks! It has virtually no useful information. It's FAQ consists of a few questions almost all of which are about bill payment. However, it does tell me that I should call ATT for my customer service. This is, I know an annoying experience. To make many long stories short, they don't know what they are doing, and the way their support works, there are some kinds of fixable problems that they can never, ever, fix due to the way they work.
Now, according to the FAQ, my call to ATT broadband support will go to Comcast. Yay. I eagerly await finding out the new levels of incompetence that tech support can fall.
As previously noted in a previous entry, I have become fairly interested in making good capuccinos. As part of that, I decided to go to local San Mateo coffee houses and see who makes a good cappucino. So far, I've hit three stores in two months. Not a good rate, but it's tough to get out when you have kids. I would like to go twice to see if the cappucinos are made consistenly, but I just don't have the time. Anyway, here are the cafe's and short review of their cappucinos.
So, I'd say Draeger's was the best, followed by Bean Street Coffee, then Walsh's. Of all of them, I'd probably only drink Draeger's cappucino again. But I'm still searching for a truly good cup. It's ridiculous that I could make better froth in the office. Doesn't anyone try anymore?
The USA today has an article on something I've been saying for years: suburbs are bad for your health. It's quite obvious, really. The nature of suburbs is that they are spread out, therefore it's almost impossible to walk anywhere. Since no one can walk anywhere to accomplish a daily activity, walking gets relegated to something that people really should do, as opposed to an integral part of everyday life. Therefore, almost no one walks.
There are things suburbs can do to alleviate it, but probably the best you can do is to lessen it somewhat. I doubt the suburbs can ever be transformed into walkable areas. The blocks are too long, the roads are too wide, and the surroundings are dreadfully boring. And to increase the walkability is fundamentally at odds with what people want from the suburbs. As the article states:
Also, the main component of walkable neighborhoods is density, or the number of people per mile square but density is what many homebuyers are trying to get away from. "It's just our own definition of what the good life includes, which is a couple of cars and a house on the cul-de-sac," says Kraft of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "The good life means you can be a couch potato."I think this is starting to change. After all, most people don't think the good life includes an hour and a half commute each way, but that's what it takes in many places to get an affordable house in a typical quiet suburban neighborhood. Of course, many die hard suburbanites would still rather have the nice affordable suburban house even if it means wasting 3 hours a day in traffic. But other people are realizing that the urban experience can be very rewarding, and that a 5 bedroom 3000 square foot house is not truly necessary. It's not only more interesting, it's frequently more convenient, and it's more healthy.
A mysterious religious group called "The Fellowship", deeply involved in politics, yet whose workings are shrouded in secrecy. Yes, that's the plot of Origin's Ultima VII (one of the greatest RPG's of all time), and it looks like it's also actually happening (found via Metafilter). However, unlike the RPG, this Fellowship is a Christian fellowship. It's a typical modern day religious-political organization, who, like all political Christian, follow the tenents of "blessed are the rich and powerful". It's one of those weird Christian organizations where the answer to every question is Jesus. But the truly scary thing is how much power they have. Six congressmen live there, and world leaders regularly visit, and they run the "White House Prayer Breakfast". It's only a matter of time before they start hearing voices in their heads from someone who calls himself "The Guardian". OK, maybe that only happened in Ultima VII, but I wouldn't rule that sort of thing out.
The Memory Hole has an interesting article exposing a doctored photo about the famous toppling of the statue of Saddam that appeared in the London Evening Standard (found via Plastic.com). It seems they manipulated the photo to increase the size of the crowd. I don't anything about that paper, if it is considered important, or reputable, or whatever. A blog entry in the World of Badger blog has this additional information:
Now the Standard's picture desk is apparently claiming it was only altered to remove the BBC logo, but to me this seems like the thin end of the wedge.But unless the BBC logo took up quite a large portion of the picture, I find that hard to believe.
From a Metafilter story, I found the quite amusing homepage of Michael Kelly. I have no idea who he is, but he's funny as hell. My favorites so far include an essay on why he hates search engines, a competition to win his hand in marriage, a bit about biblical commandments, and of course the article that Metafilter linked to, Ulli's Roy Orbison in Cling-Wrap Website.
Hey, Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python now has a blog. Just one entry now, but hopefully we'll see more soon.
Caltrain has been pissing me off recently. First of all, they have a new fare structure, a typical Caltrain sort of thing to do. That is to say, it's typically the sort of brain-dead logic you expect to hear from them. First of all, they want to move to proof-of-payment based ticketing, meaning passengers buy their tickets from machines before boarding. I agree with this, it makes sense. However, they want to simplify the fare structure by reducing the number of zones, and that is what I have a problem with.
As far as I can tell, the theory behind zones is simple. The more you have, the more the fares are logical. The less you have, the more arbitrary the fares are. Caltrain's new seven zone system certainly seems less than idea. Your monthly ticket for your 10 mile trip may cost almost $40 a month more than someone else's, if you cross a zone and he doesn't. Not only that, the reasoning behind it was to simplify the zone system. This is stupid, because now all the zone calculations can be handled by a machine, since Caltrain is going to a proof-of-payment system. A quote from the article:
The zone system is a 19th-century arrangement, said Richard Silver, executive director of the Rail Passenger Association of California. The system was devised so conductors would not have to memorize so many different fares.My ticket will be $20 a month more expensive. And I'm getting substantially less service now, since they've stopped with the weekend trains. This sucks.
Caltrain's service is pissing me off as well. I ride home everyday on an express train, which zips me straight to my destination with no stops in between. But yesterday was a game day, so on game days Caltrain just pokes along at what feels like 20 mph. It's very frustrating to be on a very slow express train.
You know, BART doesn't have these problems. BART is expensive, sure, but it's good. It always is fast. It doesn't have to wait on other trains to leave the station like Caltrain often does. There's no problem like bad signaling or broken down crossing gates. No one (to my knowledge) gets killed by BART. It runs late, and trains come often. You don't have to wait in the cold blowing wind for a train, like I have to wait in South San Francisco. You don't have to cover your ears when the train pulls into the station. The ride isn't bumpy. Noisy, yes, but not bumpy. The interesting thing is, Caltrain supporters agree with all this, but still prefer Caltrain because it is cheap. Yes, I'd have to agree. It is cheap. And it feels that way too.
I just finished reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods, as well as the next four Sandman series, through A Game of You. Some of those Sandman comics I remember, but I think the ones I really remember well are probably the next few books.
American Gods was a very good book. It was imaginative and clever, and very well written. Plus it had a lot of things that reminded me of the midwest. I remember that Sam said her father opened a Taco Bell rip-off called "Taco Bill". The funny thing is, I remember seeing a Taco Bill restuarant somewhere in Missouri. Possibly Union City. There's other tidbits that reminded me of things I read or saw. Last year my wife borrowed a book from the library about Anansi, the Spider Man, who is featured in the book (she read these tales growing up in Trinidad). I read it; it was a short and enjoyable bunch of tales about the wily Anansi outsmarting various jungle creatures. A few years ago I read a book on cons that had the "I know it crooked, but it's the only game in town" story. I remember seeing the signs for "Lookout Mountain" and "Rock City", or whatever it was all around Georgia. So a lot of the book was very familiar to me. I think that's part of the reason I enjoyed it so much. Plus, I always enjoy myths and those stories, and so this book was just a natural match. Anyway, I recommend it.
I like to go through this site's logs to find out if anyone is linking to me. Last month I noticed that Howard Zinn's website somehow links to me. I was unable to find out where, or what they were linking to. I didn't immediately recognize who Howard Zinn is, but it turns out I know his work. He wrote the well-known book A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present. I haven't actually read that book yet, but I probably will someday. In this graph that I've already written about, his book would probably be to the far left.
Anyway, yesterday I noticed a very peculiar phenomenon. A site called kellyclarkson.ca was linking to a picture of my feet. What the hell? So I go to the site and figure out that Kelly Clarkson is the person who won American Idol. Well, now I know. The link came from the Kelly Clarkson Message Board, which you have to register for to read. So I swallowed my pride, and registered. Let me say that the quality of discourse on the board is not very high. And I don't think there's a male to be found there. But the picture of my feet was evidently illustrating a joke about big feet, on a topic devoted to short women. I'm not sure I even understood the joke. I don't know where that poster found my feet from, but I looked at her profile and found out she and I are the same age. Perhaps it's someone I know. But, I'm not about to start a conversation with someone based on a picture of my feet. It's just too weird.
I saw the excellent documentary Daughter from Danang yesterday on PBS. It was the story of a half Vietnamese, half American girl whose Vietnamese mother gave her up out of fear during the Vietnam war. She is adopted and raised in the South. The story centered around her trip to Danang to meet her mother and the rest of her family. However, the cultural differences are too great for her to cope with, and the happy reunion she expected goes sour. It reminded me of my trip to China, and the things I've noticed about Chinese culture from my experiences with my wife's family. I recommend this documentary highly, it really was both interesting and tragic.
The Commonspace is a hip little monthly regional St. Louis magazine. Every month it has a section where people who have moved out of St. Louis talk about other places. This makes sense if you've lived in St. Louis, which, as a city, has a big inferiority complex. I was asked to write this month's "expatriates" article. Enjoy.
A man in Burlingame, which is one city north of me, has objected to people tying yellow ribbons around street poles. The yellow ribbons are against city ordinace, but the mayor said that if no one complaind, then it's OK. Burlingame resident Seth Yatovitz had the courage to complain about it. Not that I think he's right, but it was quite a brave act to challenge people supporting the war. He has now received death threats. There's a hearing on this on Monday, and someone told him that if he showed up, he'd be shot in the face.
It shows how seriously some people take this notion of supporting the troops. When you think about it, what does it really mean, anyway? The government isn't asking me to make any particular sacrafices for them. I don't talk to them, or even know anyone in the military. So what does "supporting the troops" really mean for me? As far as I can tell, it means "stop criticizing the government." And some people have the notion that criticizing the government lends support to Saddam, giving him the will to fight on. Or something like that.
I think there is some truth to that, and protest does create problems for America, from overtime to policemen watching over protests around the nation, and to a perceived weaking of America. However, there's a word for regimes that are very efficient: totalitarianism. When everyone is forced to act a certain predictable way, you can be assured of a strong and efficient nation. But I don't think that's what we want for the U.S.
Perhaps protests like Seth's will actually help Americans, because it gives outsiders the view that Americans are not always in agreement to their government. And the U.S government is becoming more and more hated throughout the world. The protests can only help Americans who travel abroad.
Well, good luck Seth. Ah, yellow ribbons, and death threats, as American as apple pie.
