I’m pretty ticked at my bank right now. I won’t tell you which one it is I’ve been using, but since I’m switching to pretty much any other bank I will hint at their name: despite their name, they did not pursue me as a customer. Instead of treat me like a valued customer they treated me like a faceless number with the needs of a used radish.
Good-bye crappy bank, I’m going to go find anywhere else to bank – preferably one with staff that think I’m human.
I just want to let you know that you don’t have to trust the government. My browser told me I shouldn’t trust the IRS. They’re hosting their secure site on Akamai, but their SSL certificates are not properly setup so the browser (Firefox) told me to leave the IRS website because it wasn’t necessarily trustworthy.
I don’t trust the IRS anyway 😉
This nerdy bit brought to you by the letters J, Q and the number -1.
I had a conversation with my friend Jon in Texas and he stated something that I’ve held for some time, but it reminded me of it, so I’m going to recycle it here: if girls dads treat them poorly then they will tend to go out with guys that also treat them poorly. In other words dads are setting standards for their daughters boyfriends and husbands even when their daughters are little girls. Moms, your influence is similar: your sons are going to tend to find a woman that is as lady-like (or not) and as respectful as you are to them and their fathers. If you’re dishing dirt, lying, sleezing, creeping and generally abusing your children don’t be surprised when they go out and find Mr. or Mrs. Wrong.
Also, it is possible to break this cycle. Also, also: it’s a principle and not a rule, there are plenty of exceptions.
I realized today that Facebook was not really my problem, but as a symptom I needed to move on. We had a good fling, me and Facebook. I realized I was not blogging in part because of Twitter & Facebook. For various reasons I’m keeping Twitter active (most of them professional). I also realized I was heavily distracted throughout my time as a dad, a husband, and as a brother-in-law (since my Sister-in-law has lived with us).
I was writing comments or responses to various folks, but then deleting them so as to not offend people who I had ‘friended.’ Therein lies the rub: if someone is your friend you want to care about them, but some folks were not friends, but acquaintances and I still didn’t want their facebook experience to be marred by my interjections on the site. Here on my blog I can be forthright, opinionated, and even make mistakes, but it is in my sandbox.
I should be blogging more now and I should be my usual spouting self, but I’m going to warn folks: I may reign all of my blogs into one central blog and quit the split personalities. That’ll mean religion, beer, food, programming and so forth in one place. I may even switch away from WordPress to experiment with other platforms.
I quit facebook so I could start relating with a few people more, rather than more people just a little. I’m back and I’m going to make an effort to spin things up to crazy, silly, funny, and personal. I don’t think anyone else should leave Facebook because I did, I’m just doing this for my own focus and purposes.
Did you know that about 3.5 million people die every year from dirty drinking water related diseases [source,sanitation, etc]? World Vision digs wells for communities in need at a cost of about $13,700.00 per well. Those wells will help get clean water for 300 or so people a day. Children who used to go collect water may be able to go to school at that point in time or do other essential tasks for their households. They’re also much less likely to die from water related diseases.
The US federal government has earmarked about $1,000,000,000.00 dollars a year for the TSA to help save people from dying from terrorism. I know I’ve been on a tear about the TSA in the last few months, but I was beginning to wonder what would happen if we started to think about really saving lives in a very effective, provable way. What if we stopped funding the TSA with $1 billion and instead moved to a different, less expensive system (that could be more effective)? What if we used half of that money to dig wells?
That would be about 36,496 wells (possibly too many). What if we saved the lives for sure? Those wells (in just one year’s budget) would provide jobs for the well diggers, provide water for people, and help feed through agriculture in some cases, too. That could be water for up to 10,948,800 people. This Christmas consider donating to World Vision at the link above to help support water rights. Also, if you don’t mind me asking, contact your political officials to let them know that the TSA’s invasive scanners are expensive and don’t save enough lives. Then be thankful for your glass of water.
I’ve helped execute a few job interviews for work this last week and I wanted to pass along a few tips for my readers here who for some reason may not have heard these tips:
What are your tips, readers?
The election results speak for themselves: the American people have spoken and they chose a massive, chaotic amount of wishy-washy political gunk just to make sure that no party blows it as bad as the previously majority-owning Democrats did in D.C.. And to make sure that our government is bi-partison, but pro-lobbyist. Rock the vote indeed.
This skeptical message was brought to you by the committee to elect no-one.
“I’m Randy Peterman and I do not approve this message.”
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like a vote for the Texas Rangers.
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like a vote for Pamela Anderson for Sunday School teacher.
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like a vote for the terrorists.
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like a vote for my beard to grow out to the point where I actually look like a mountain man.
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like a vote for eating a sewage shake.
If you don’t vote on Tuesday then it’s like you don’t count. Make your Tuesday November the 2nd count.
The new Apple iPod Nano is missing an internal gyroscope (or 3) to know which way is up. Never fear: it’s a feature. Steve Jobs demoed the device this week and was saying how cool it was you could use your hands to rotate the display. They should have used the ‘3D’ technology from the Nintendo 3DS to make the display render in all 4 directions.
Today we went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I’d show you pictures, but for some reason they don’t allow them there. It is as though I would take them and pass the artwork off as my own. That being said, you should go there if you find yourself in Indianapolis. It is free entry, and it is right next to a beautiful garden that you can also tour (which is worth seeing, free). I’m not what you would call an art ‘fan’, but I also figure that art is important to explore and learn about (in the context of non-naked art). We had a great time looking at various bits, but at present there were two installations that I really thought were interesting.
The first exhibit we looked at that I enjoyed a lot was a fashion exhibit. While I’m a t-shirt and jeans guy the exhibit showed styles and dresses from the last 100 years and what blew me away was that many of them could have been worn by people today. It made me think that maybe the newness of those things we see on reality TV is really just recycling and re-hashing. I also enjoyed that one designer took a man’s suite, tore it apart and turned it into a woman’s dress and in so doing made a creative expression, but also mocked the designers of the time (or so said my wife, who knows about these things and is a regular commentator on all things fashion). There was also an interesting display that showed dress patterns over several hundred years, but all of the patterns were done in the same white material so you could observe the gradual changes in the patterns and not be distracted by the materials and prints/weaves that they would have had. My engineer/nerd self was quite pleased with this display.
Secondly they had the most awesome marble-on-a-track fixture. It was large and went through no less than 4 rooms. It took about 5 minutes to complete (possibly longer) and the girls and I ran after the marble. Except that the marble was a volleyball sized plastic ball and the track was huge. If you miss the Indy 500 (and I would), this is another race to see, and the crashes never happen so you don’t have to worry about the plastic marbles dying.
One other thing I thought was cool was a 360/mobeus strip sort of model sailing ship. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it was a perfect example of the sort of thing that was at once creative and abnormal as well as very detailed and precise.
If you find yourself in Indy, go there, you won’t be sad you did.