Conan O’Brien Says He Won’t Host ‘Tonight Show’ Following Leno. I can’t think on anything more screwed up than the position NBC has put itself in, and I fail to understand how they haven’t fired their head of programming. To screw around with the traditional Late Night timeslot in order to accommodate Leno is sort of like chopping off your own foot because you think your knee might walk better; you’re never recovering from that. What a bunch of retards.
“Delivery” means you get your lazy ass out of the truck, walk the package up to the door, and ring the bell as a courtesy. It does not mean “leave the package leaning up against the car in the driveway where it can be taken by anyone walking down the street.” I shoveled the walk clean three days ago; there’s no ice on the cement.
Merry Fucking Christmas.
Jen’s been wading through the process of filing for an MBE over the last few weeks, and asked me to take a look at some of the paperwork to help her make sense of some of it. We sat down on Sunday to review the state’s directions, which are about as helpful as a wetsuit in the Sahara. Looking for further clarification, I did some google searching and found a page of directions that were supposedly for the same set of applications we were holding, but were just different enough to cause a splitting headache.
What really made me laugh, though, was the online MBE application. I thought it might offer some more clues as to how she should fill out the paperwork. Once I’d selected one of the six inscrutable options offered (guessing it might possibly be the right choice), I landed on an .ASP page loading a Java applet, and from there things got even worse. I was presented with screen after screen of forms that looked just like this:
Seriously, what is that shit? I’ve seen better forms written by first-week HTML students. Even if I knew what I was supposed to be filling out, I wouldn’t know where to put it because half of the field descriptions are behind the field boxes.
For the uninitiated, the whole point of Java is to be able architecture neutral: that is, to “write once, run anywhere.” Therefore, the fact that I’m looking at this on Safari on a Mac should have no bearing whatsoever. The fact that it’s absolutely unintelligible, and that my tax dollars paid some hack to “develop” this fucked-up system makes me especially angry, as both a citizen of this state and as a web developer. This is the kind of crap work that gives my profession a bad reputation, and it’s also the reason small businesses like my wife’s get a shit deal instead of the tax breaks and coddling large corporations enjoy.
That’s just fucking embarassing.
Anybody trying to call the Lockardugan Central Switchboard over the next couple of days will be greeted with the sound of ringing and ringing and ringing. It seems someone across town asked Verizon to forward their calls to a new number, and they decided to randomly pick ours instead. So our DSL is knocked out and we’re getting calls from people we don’t know (including the owner of the original number, who is understandably upset).
And now, the punchline: Verizon says we have to wait until Wednesday to get service back. If Comcast wasn’t teh suck, I’d really consider switching over to cable…
About the only good thing from my morning commute was this tableaux I spied while trying to merge back off I-95 within sight of the city: an puke-brown late 70’s AMC Matador (“Barcelona” edition) sharing space on a rollback with a shiny black Ferrari 360. If ever there were two opposites in sharper contrast, I’ve never seen them.
Say what you like about Barney Frank; while he may share more than a little blame for our current economic crisis, he’s also hilarious. I only wish our president could speak this freely.
The idea that someone would seriously equate comprehensive health care reform with Nazi Germany is incomprehensible. I don’t understand how political debate in my country has gotten so spectacularly insipid; it’s pretty clear to me that none of these people have actually studied history or actually understand what they’re talking about.
I guess I should just admit that I don’t have much hope for the healthcare reform bill. I think there are too many organizations with too much money invested in the existing system, who will continue to pay ignorant, frightened people to make outrageous claims and spread blatantly false rumors in order to kill the legislation and keep their profit margins high. Frankly, I don’t think our country deserves the type of inexpensive, guaranteed, quality healthcare the rest of the developed world seems to enjoy.
That’s WBAL Channel 11, Kids.
I did a little research last week about the Cash for Clunkers program to see if our Jeep qualified under their rules. After some digging, I found the list:
Be in driveable condition – check
Have been continuously insured consistent with State laws and registered to you for at least one year immediately prior to trade-in – check
Be manufactured less than 25 years before the date of the trade-in – check
Have a combined MPG of 18 or less – check
According to the Fed’s official site, our Cherokee gets a combined MPG of 16 miles per gallon, which would put it firmly in the qualifying category.
The next step was to check the Kelly Blue Book value for a trade-in price. According to their calculations, it’s worth a little over a grand in excellent condition and half of that in poor condition. Their private party value is still only half of the maximum CFC value, which makes it a prime candidate for the program.
I was torn, though, thinking about the Jeep being scrapped when it still has running and driving value left. It’s been a great vehicle for us in the five years we’ve had it, and the idea that somebody would chemically destroy the engine and then scrap the carcass filled me with sadness.
In the meantime, we’ve been watching the government seesaw back and forth over funding it with an additional $2 billion, as the original cash was depleted in a week’s time. Sadly, I think this may be yet another instance where timing will not be with us.
The National Weather Service claims we will be inundated with heavy rain, thunderstorms, the possibility of hail, and other unspecified biblical plagues. On the basis of their advice, I left the Scout home for the second full week and played it safe. However, my morning commute was full of sunshine.
We’d better get some category 5 hurricane shit up in this mutha by lunchtime, or I’m going to be pissed.
Early Afternoon Update: I’m officially pissed.
4:30: We got showered upon, and now the skies are sunny. Radar shows the worst of it is off to the east and there’s nothing on the horizon. Still pissed.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
After about four months of suffering through a faulty email setup, I got tired of manually marking and deleting junk mail every half an hour. So today at lunch I finally nuked my main account and set it up from scratch. The way mail.app handles IMAP accounts is confusing, to say the least, and Apple’s explanation of how it interacts is pretty thin on details. (Most searches, predictably, focus on setting up Gmail for IMAP on mail.app). I’m still having some hiccups here and there but all seems to be better in my email world now.
Finding a decent video encoding scheme for Flickr has been a huge nightmare. I’ve found that the default encoding from our Canon SD900 (AVI format) works flawlessly, while almost every encoding schema for Flip video footage processed through Quicktime Pro looks like garbage. I’ve got a ton of footage that gets pixellated and blocky as soon as it hits Flickr (or, alternately, bonks out with a yellow “This video cannot be processed” message). I’m going to keep working on this and hopefully find a solution I like.
The heat has returned to Baltimore, and with it, our peculiar pattern of hot, muggy sunshine in the morning, cloudy afternoons, short, violent thunderstorms towards the evening commute, and unbearably humid evenings. I may have to put the full soft top back on the Scout in order to drive it to work once a week; nothing sucks more than driving home in the rain.
This next clip is sheer genius. I was confused, at first; I hadn’t realized Sarah Palin’s “Speech” was so disjointed and illogical until I read the actual transcript.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.