If I wasn’t biased before – I am more biased now. Microsoft has patented an adware framework. They want to patent the concept and lets pray that they don’t use it. You can read more about it here. I’m a Mac & Linux fanboy, and I know that many of you know that, but please, for all that is good let Microsoft know this is unacceptable.
Category Archives: Opinion
A Customer Service Story & A Joke
Today on my lunch break Jessica and I went to go close a bank account at a bank we don’t want to use any longer. Upon going into the bank the two gals that were closest to one another behind the counter were bandying back and forth about getting married to a millionaire – together. They argued who would get access to the money and who would have to sleep with the guy (they were definitely interested in the money and not the man who had accrued it). Its the kind of customer service you dream of from a bank. It reminded me of this joke:
A man is in a bar and finds a woman down the bar from him attractive. He picks up his drink and slides on down next to her. He looks her in the eye and says, “Would you sleep with me for $1,000,000.00?”
She sizes him up, thinks for a moment and then says, “Yes.”
The man looks back at her and says, “Would you sleep with me for $100.00?”
“What kind of woman do you take me for,” she asks.
“We’ve already established you’re a whore, now we’re just haggling over the price!”
Sears Borkbucks: The Borkination Continues
So this morning was finally the day that the repairman from Sears was supposed to come out and unbork our fridge. That is until this morning when some poor soul had to call our house and tell us that they had scheduled a repair when there wasn’t a repairman available. She kindly asked us if we could wait another 8 days. You know, because walking out into our garage to get any item that needs to be refrigerated is a good thing. Not really, but surely they must appreciate putting customers on hold for weeks.
Jessica was nearly screaming at the automated voice system when she called back to try to speak to someone with actual authority. The automatic voice recognition system isn’t designed to handle angry people, which makes the angry people more angry, and it makes the system more not work, which means when the person gets a hold of a manager they’re ready to rip off the heads of live chickens in an Ozzy Osbourne type show trying to demonstrate their anger and communicate to the manager that the situation is grim.
I just hope that Sears deals with us soon and quickly because I’d have to have to write a third post about borking – its starting to make me feel kind of mad-scientist like with all of this evil laughter.
Update: Jessica got through to a live person, who promptly hung up on her, then she called back, got another live person who transferred her to a manager who got an appointment scheduled for Friday. Not exactly now, but definitely better than next week some time.
Fridge Borked – Sears More Borked than the Swedish Chef
So this weekend our fridge (which is just slightly older than two years) just totally stopped fridging and turned into a room-temperature-ator. Fortunately we have a special service warranty on our fridge. That way Sears can come out and service and take care of it. So I called up and attempted to get service quickly. Ha ha! Silly me. Why would I want cold foods? Room temperature is the way to go. Sears can’t schedule anyone to come out to my house until Tuesday late in the evening. So I scheduled for Wednesday morning which was a more convenient time for me. Not really, but since I’m going to have to go out to my garage fridge to get anything that I need to keep cold, I might as well do it an extra day so that the repairman can come when I’m home.
The other upside with my Sears call was that the guy on the other end of the phone barely spoke legible English. I have no idea what his name was, but his thick Spanish accent made ‘Greg’ a little bit hard to believe as his name. At least it wasn’t Peter Parker.
Funniest Cruise Story Ever!
My old boss (and sort of boss now that I’m a contractor for the same company) wrote about his latest cruise – he’s still on it – but its been painfully stupid. You can read about it here.
I would encourage you to leave a comment of your own cruise experience if you’ve been on one because it’ll surely be read by others who find this post amusing!
Jonesing for Indy
Today I saw my first photo of the Indiana star Harrison Ford in his getup for the next movie to be released next year. I loved the Indiana Jones movies growing up. Harrison Ford was such a super-hero without the actual baggage of having super powers. In other words he was so real life that I actually thought I could grow up to be a computer programmer. Wait, no, I actually thought I could grow up to fight Nazis and bad guys in general while being concerned with archeology. As it turns out I’m concerned with Archeology for Biblical reasons, but not for Nazi-fighting or actual digging.
Oh, and I’m glad I’m not a professor, but I’m glad I get to teach a Bible Study and sometimes Sunday School. Those are teaching of a type I can handle. I’m really, really glad that the ladies in those classes don’t write, “I love you,” on their eye lids. Ha!
Creators Syndicate: An Old Model Shows Off Its Old Assets
I just got an email from Creators Syndicate this morning. Some woman (I’m assuming its a woman) by the name of Andrea Fryrear (which is an unfortunate last name if you break it up as a compound word) sent me an email (with a from name of only ‘Andrea’ which is a good way to get tagged as spam Ms. Fryrear) asking me to take down a farside cartoon that I had posted on my website. A single cartoon that I had found on the internet and copied onto my site. I immediately complied because I want to be a law abiding citizen. However, I had some questions for her: 1) How could I legally re-use the cartoon (could I pay a license fee) 2) Could I link to a Far Side book on Amazon.com and then the cartoon could potentially be a revenue generating advertisement for them? I haven’t gotten a reply yet, but the whole thing bugged me.
Gary Larson apparently has written about the subject and you can read about it on the syndicate website. It strikes me as a problematic solution to the real issue: the interwebs is a new model for publishing businesses and they must deal with the change. There are tons of ways they could go about making the new model work for them:
1) Require all comics that are republished by independent publishers (like bloggers) link to their site where they sell the books, mugs, shirts, cell phone wrappers, bumper stickers and collectible enema boxes to people who link through
2) Require the images to be linking to amazon.com with their associates ID so that they get to make money on Amazon.com selling their stuff
3) Give it away realizing that the more exposure they have the more likely people will seek out the funny/good content in sources that pay them (such as newspapers, paying websites, and again, Amazon.com)
4) Give it away and just say, “Gee, this interweb thing will hopefully be a passing fad.”
But sitting around hiring people like Andrea (who I am sure is really nice and probably makes a killer vegetarian salad when you come over to her house because she wouldn’t even hurt dead meat) to send out emails and seek out places where their old model is leaking and stick her finges in them is not an ideal method.
A New Story Wherein Randy Smells Like Burning Wood for Days
So about two (2) weeks ago I saw an episode of Good Eats called ‘Q’. It was about smoking pork butt (which is actually the pig’s shoulder). I lost site of any other Fathers Day Weekend (FDW) goals and determined to burn wood at such a slow rate that no flames were detectable, yet smoke would emit from the wood and make the meat and everything within a 15 mile radius smell of smoke. It worked. Too well. The smoked pork with an espresso barbecue sauce was finger-licking-good (without the geriatric chicken guy), but everything still smells smokey. I was at church, rubbed my nose and “poof!” smoke smell on my skin, in my nostrils and causing me to want to try smoking meat again in the middle of the street with a space suit on. Then the smokiness of the meat would be less smoked Randy and more smoked flavor on the meat when we bring it in from the smoker.
Good meats 🙂
Happy Father’s Day Dads in My Life!
Happy Fathers Day to my real/biological Dad! Happy Father’s Day to my Father in Laws John & Clair! Happy Father’s Day to the surrogate (can men be surrogate) dads that I had in Texas and in other situations! Y’all have taught me much in my first thirty years and I’m looking forward to the rest of what I get to learn from you.
I’m Bringing Sexy Backup
Sorry for the Justin Timberlake reference. I’ll confess to not actually having heard his ‘hit’ single, so if that reference makes you want to throw up in your mouth, I’m even more apologetic. That being said, please backup your hard drive today. If you don’t have an external hard drive that gets backed up to on a regular basis, please stop what you’re doing, even at the risk of getting fired, and get one. Get the external hard drive, copy your files from your internal hard drive onto the external hard drive. Do it now. Do it today, or if you must put it off, do it this weekend, but don’t put it off or else you could lose critical things like those blackmail pictures you have of your [insert being/entity/person/senator reference here] in their [insert some awkward piece of clothing here] while [insert embarrassing or illegal activity here]. Or you could just lose important documents like papers for school, papers for work, papers for church, or even worse, papers for the government.
If you’re running Windows XP you can tell it to backup all of your files automatically! Just go to Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Backup. Then follow the wizard. Figure out if all of your valuable files are in your My Documents folders or if you want to backup the whole system and then set up a schedule. Have it backup once a week or daily, but have it backup your computer or valuable files regularly. Once that’s done you can rest knowing that unless your external hard drive fails you’ve at least got things preserved.
I setup a network wide backup at my house this week using an Airport Extreme USB connected external hard drive so that all computers backup onto one drive every night. If I were more clever once a week/month I’d take a second external drive to my parents or some other ‘safe’ place and keep one there, too. Just in case.
Sure, backing up data isn’t sexy, but its smart. So listen to Justin Timberlake and backup at the same time, then you can be both.