House of the rising Moonglum

A Public Relations department. They are the FREAKING GOVERNMENT! All they do is relate to the public! Maybe instead of spending that money on his childhood friend, Stroger would be better off spending that money on actually doing the work of the government. Hard work + good results = Happy public = reelection. That’s how I thought it worked. Apparently here you get: right name + incompetence + clout (machine backing) = reelection. I guess Stroger is afraid that that old equation won’t work, so he needs to multiply the power of his name with a PR campaign. He doesn’t have any military force at his disposal, right? That is just the governor? Because this is really starting to sound like we are headed to a dictatorship. We the people apparently just don’t understand the great leader, and need to be reeducated.

Now this interactive ebb and flow of movie chart from the NYT is totally not something that I needed to see today. I totally should have been hired to write that. Oh the awesome.

I don’t normally talk about work on this blog. But there are some things that require announcement to the world.

1) Product is three weeks behind schedule.
2) Code freeze (no, really, this time.) is tomorrow.
3) It is 5:30 PM at the work site.
4) Email from the designers requesting a major code change.

Ugh. How late is Starbuck’s open again? At least the manager in charge was apologetic.

ob Irony: I have been dealing with a flaw in the design process that caused me to create a part of code on this project in a manner that lacked what I felt was the necessary abstraction for this piece of code. Upon further examination of the code requiring change, had it been built with the proper abstraction in the first place, it would be minimal work to implement the design change. As it is… *sigh* Fortunately I don’t need to change any of the unit tests. (The change removes negative cases, but doesn’t get rid of any positive ones.)

I’ve only heard the faintest murmurs of people talking about the possibility that Obama is in danger because he is poised to become an agent of change. He has the secret service backing him now though and appears completely unconcerned himself. Which is as it should be, because he has plenty of other things to be getting on with thankyouverymuch. I have to say though, I find the idea of him becoming friends with his security detail, inviting them over for the superbowl and playing basketball with them, just awesome. How someone treats those who work for him tells you something about that person[1]. And… renegade? *snarf*

[1] – Ed note: Crap! I was just wondering where I got that quote about telling a lot about a person by how they treat their workers (inferiors was the original quote), so I googled it, and it comes from Harry Potter! I was afraid of that. I’ve read it so many times now (the entire series 3x, twice within the past two years!) that it is permanently in there now.

… or, How I Didn’t Go Jogging Today.

So, I went to go jogging in the nearly balmy 45 degrees that it is outside today. This may have been a little premature as there was a pile of ice still in front of the house that didn’t shovel, but not to worry, just jog on the street for a bit. Except that at the end of the street there was a massive pit bull staring at me. I didn’t really know what to do in that situation, since I didn’t have my cell phone, or really anything useful with me, and was going to keep going, except for the fact that the dog seemed really nervous. That is when I noticed that he had some weight hanging off of his neck (the base of a blender!?!). Well, that wasn’t a good sign.

Suffice it to say this was not a dog that I particularly wanted to mess with. (Having grown up with dogs myself, one would think that I am comfortable around dogs. One would be wrong. I knew a pit bull rescue worker once, and that didn’t help in this case.) Fortunately there was a concerned citizen who pulled over and called 911. After making sure that she had in fact called, we noticed that the dog was wandering into the street with oblivious drivers whipping by. After a small moment of panic where some girls from the local school darted after the dog, it came back to the side walk.

It seemed to like the girls more than me. After that it was just a matter of keeping the dog calm, and the girls out of the street. (I never really noticed that kids have a tendency to wander, oblivious to danger, when gathered in a group.) One of the smaller girls held on to the dog for a while (clearly she had a big dog at home!), but whenever I tried to hold on to it, it would become upset and try to get away. The woman who stopped offered to keep it out of the street while I ran back to my place to get some food, water, and a leash from a neighbor who I knew had a dog. Once the dog had some food, he was much calmer, and basically sat around until the police showed up.

Even on a leash (leash for a 2 pound dog hooked up to this 100 pound dog! Wish I had a picture.) the dog still didn’t like men, so the police had as much trouble coaxing it into the car as I did. I offered to run back home and get some more food to tempt it into the car with, and with that they were able to get it into the back seat of their car. (Gotta say, those back seats don’t look comfortable!) And they took it back to the kennels. And brought me back my neighbor’s leash. Now that is service!

Pretty exciting story, but seeing what clearly would have been an extremely friendly dog, so nervous and so excitable really brought me down. It never once growled or snapped, or even made a menacing gesture. It sat down for the girls, and after about 20 minutes was willing to sit for me. It was just scared and confused. When the police brought the leash back they said that it was even playful. They claimed that they are treating it as “lost property”, but I’m not entirely sure that I believe that given what it was being trained for. (Weights on dog’s necks trains them for fighting I learned today.) I just hope that if they really don’t just put it down, that it can find a home where it will receive the care that it needs.

Final comments: awesome job by the police (I don’t remember the badge number, but they were from 24th district). Reasonably quick response, and very patient with both humans and animal. Funniest moment: concerned citizen’s 1/2 the weight of the dog daughter, “mom, we might have to take it home with us!” Mom thought their two kittens might disagree. Saddest moment: I’m afraid the daughter and dog bonded, and the daughter simply wasn’t believing mom’s platitudes about how they don’t kill dogs at the pound any more.

All in all, my affection for humanity dropped a little seeing the dog, but now that I think about all the people who stopped to help, it makes me feel a little better.

The mortgage crisis explained in 45 steps by stick figures.

As the price of oil continues to rise, there are a number of solutions that are slowly being put in place. In my humble opinion, corn based ethanol is not the solution. If we are going to have an ethanol solution it will have to be a cellulosic one. I do not want my energy supply competing with my food supply. Especially not with the farmers can make much more selling corn as ethanol than as food. Plus corn is a terrible crop for other reasons.

Odd dissonance. I use a “friendslist” to read Live Journal posts. The first two posts were of my friends talking about about dreams they had last night. The third one was a feed from Dork Tower which also talks about blogging your dreams. I’ll be chuckling for the rest of the day if you don’t mind. And not blogging my dreams. That is EXACLY what reading a dream journal of mine would be like.

War profiteering and war go hand in hand. When there is money to be made at the expense of others it will be made. I have to say though, this inflation of price makes $60 million for a satellite shoot down not look so bad. And speaking of that, my favorite explanation of why we did it: so that we could show China that you can test anti satellite weapons without reigning debris all over low earth orbit.

So, I love the song “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. I’m not afraid to admit it. My sister in law showed me a funny video that uses that tune to make fun of Anesthesiologists. It is pretty funny, but I wondered if they had the original as well. Sure enough they do. OK, I have clearly never seen this before. Can someone please explain. I think the internets just broke my brain.

Seriously people: whirling dervishes, mansions, fencers, beefy dudes, angels and glowing eyes boy school choirs. Seriously.

So, these guys came to my door about two months ago. They kinda freaked me out since, well, I don’t like people coming to my door. It was just before I went on vacation so I was nervous about them casing the joint, as it were. In any case, they announced themselves as representatives from ComEd. They had uniforms and badges and clipboards (Fletch anyone?). But I locked myself out just in case.

Suffice it to say, they gave the real hard sell. Interestingly they gave enough information to realize that as a company they couldn’t possibly make money in the long run. If you took the time to sit down and run the numbers that they were pitching that is. Those numbers were quite different from the numbers that their literature actually gives. The funny thing is, since I believe in the long term increase of the price of oil, even with their inflated rates, I think they would still have lost money in the long term. Still not worth it to buy in though because they will go out of business long before you actually get your money out of them.

So to cut this boring story short, RPB reports that they actually are scam artists. Lisa Madigan is taking them to court. And here when I was starting to lose my faith in her. The press release is pretty good, and clearly points out the flaws in their offer. The thing it doesn’t point out is that if the energy prices really did spike, US Energy Savings Corp would most likely have gone out of business paying off the more expensive gas prices having blown all the extra cash from when their prices were higher. That is if they just didn’t all run off to Aruba long before then.

Looks like Toshiba calls it quits. I guess I can go out and buy a new (digital) TV and a PS 3 to watch movies off of.

Interesting item in the PCWorld article, the “$24 million DVD market”?? If DVDs tend to cost about $20, they only sell a million a year? That would be 1/3rd of the US buys one DVD a year and no one else in the entire world does. That must be a typo, it has to be $24 billion market.

I am not looking at this until I have finished my big push that I am doing for one of my clients right now.

You, however, may feel free to enjoy the mapstavaganza.

I got a fever, and the only prescription, is more Christopher Walken.

So, how long have you had your AT&T or Verizon phone? Turns out just like with TV next year, the cell network is going all digital on Monday. They claim that only 1% of their customers still cling to the analog network, however there is a pretty large secondary market that it analog. Plus 1% is 600,000 customers. That would suck to discover that your phone you never use doesn’t work any more when you have fallen and can’t get up. I wonder if I’ve ever even had an analog phone? Maybe that Nokia I had with AT&T way back when?

I hope that they do stick to unclassified evidence in the upcoming trial of the suspected 9/11 conspirators. I imagine it would be tempting to have a show trial to have some people executed just in time for the presidential elections. I don’t think that will actually happen though, given that these tribunals have many of the same protections that standard US trials do, I bet if they are convicted it will be appealed all the way to the supreme court.

Unless of course they are unrepentant in the face of the jury.

A good look at one reason Clinton won’t have good transparency. Also: Obama’s shady land deals are much less shady than her’s and he lives in his shady land deal, it’s not like it was some crazy investment scheme.

I’ve been trying to be much more regular about going to the gym in the morning lately, with moderate success. In particular my 30 minute run is becoming somewhat bearable now, to the point where I have been doing things to make it more interesting, like increasing the speed or incline at times. One thing I have started doing that I have never done before, is turning on the TV. Someone had it on American Gladiator a couple weeks ago, and that was just awesome running TV. So I decided to try different channels and see what works for me. Most station it turns out are suck running TV. American Gladiator isn’t normally on when I run, and the only other thing I could find that really did it for me are mexican gameshows. But just the other day I discovered WISE TV.

It is the Chicago public television station. (I didn’t even know they did that!) But they have the awesome science and history items that completely distract me from the fact that I am running. Just this weekend they had a show on observations of the sky, and today they had one on the dawn of American power projection. It was a very interesting program because while I have read a lot about the history of Hawaii, I have read next to nothing about the history of the Spanish American. Interestingly is was intimately tied to the history of Hawaii and the US, though that might have to wait for another blog post. The thing that stunned me as I was watching the show was that I felt like I was watching current news casts.

The parallels between the Spanish American war and the Iraq war are stunning. There was a humanitarian crisis in Cuba and Iraq caused by the current tyrannical power. There were valuable commercial assets in Cuba and Iraq which US companies wanted to exploit. There had been a massive terrorist attack which was used to drum up support across the nation (the Main and 9/11). The leaders of both wars had missed out on fighting in the previous ‘good’ war (Civil War and WWII). And of course we would be greeted as liberators when we rolled into town. There are of course many differences as well, in particular Spain had a number of colonies that we fought over, not just Cuba, and we had the Vietnam war in between WWII and now to remind the leaders that war actually wasn’t a good thing. And in that war McKinley actually was a Civil War vet and wasn’t too keen on joining the war, in fact his hesitance gave Hawaii a reprieve of a number of years. But in the end Teddy and the Rough Riders got their “splendid little war”. He missed out on the Civil War himself you see, and needed to test his manhood. “Any war would do”. Wow.

But the spookiest similarity of all? The local insurrection in the Philippines against the US presence ended up taking more than 5 years and costing 4,000 american lives. Which is almost exactly where we are now in Iraq. I guess we were doomed to repeat it.

I love a good conspiracy as much as the next person. And I have always thought that the undersea cable network was a major chokepoint that could be easily tampered with. But it seems HIGHLY unlikely that the US is behind the recent cable breaks in the mideast. From the article:

The conspiracy theory explanation, while just slightly more plausible than “OMGPONIES,” has absolutely no independent evidence to back it up. Whatever else the Trilateral Commission, Illuminati, Big Pharma, Al Qaeda, vaccination campaigns, and the Easter Bunny might be plotting at this moment, they just don’t seem to be planning a major assault on the Middle East’s ability to watch illicit American Idol broadcasts, conduct business, or surf the Arabic equivalent of YouTube. Reuters reporting that repairs will be completed this weekend.

I don’t know why I find this so funny, but a backup application that I use regularly, called SuperDuper! finally released the latest version today. They have been working on this update for months and months now, but I have to believe that once they realized the release would be near the end of January they must have timed it to be on Super Duper Tuesday. I hate that name for the big primary date, but it does make a great pun for software releases.