Taradino C.

wordcrap.com can be yours!

2008-05-03T03:46:05Z

I registered the domain wordcrap.com last year. It's expiring at the end of this month, and I've forgotten why I thought it was so funny. I'd rather not let some squatter snatch it up, so if you'd like to take it over, let me know.

Public Service Announcement

2008-04-18T23:48:12Z

Never use FedEx Home Delivery to send a package. If you want ground shipping, use UPS.

Another tube

2008-04-17T00:33:42Z

The Happiest Monster

2008-04-16T01:55:46Z

Endless war, six months at a time

2008-04-11T03:16:31Z

Guncho fever: catch it!

2008-04-04T15:41:13Z

So, for the past two months or so I was working on a secret project. The launch was on April 1st: here was the announcement, and here is its homepage.

Someone gets it

2008-02-07T02:50:09Z

You’re 16, You’re Beautiful and You’re a Voter

Similarly, 16-year-olds who want to start voting should be able to obtain an “early voting permit” from their high schools upon passing a simple civics course similar to the citizenship test. Besides increasing voter registration, this system would reinforce the notion of voting as a privilege and duty as well as a right — without imposing any across-the-board literacy tests for those over 18.

And why stop at voting? Sixteen is a good starting point for phasing in adult rights and responsibilities, from voting to drinking to marriage. In reality, this is already when most people have their first jobs, their first drinks and their sexual initiations. The law ought to empower young people to negotiate these transitions openly, not furtively.

These ideas are nothing new to those in the youth rights movement, but it's not often you see them expressed on the New York Times op-ed page.

Snowed in

2008-01-30T00:11:55Z

Couldn't make it to work yesterday or today, despite hours of digging, sweating, and swearing.

I hate snow.

Zana and I have been joking about moving to California. At least, it started as a joke. Every day it gets more serious. Rents are a hell of a lot higher there, but presumably the job market is a lot better too (at least for me).

I Wouldn't Steal...

2008-01-23T02:21:07Z

Sick of those commercials before movies that try to convince you downloading is like stealing? Here's someone's answer:

Must-see tubes!

2008-01-21T05:26:04Z

Dancing man wearing a horse mask cooks wild mushrooms.

This cat hates Mondays but loves lasagna!

Adventures in Outsourcing

2008-01-01T11:24:47Z

So, I called 1-800-COMCAST tonight because I accidentally ordered an episode of The Office on my mom's On Demand without noticing that it cost 99 cents.

The lady who picked up was, shall we say, not good at listening. Here's how it went down:

Her: "Are you calling about the account for <my cell phone number>?"
Me: "No."
Her: "Give me the number on the account, please."
Me: "831--"
Her: "Area code first."
Me: "OK. Area code 831, 555--"
Her: "831."
Me: "Yes. 831, 555... <pause>"
Her: <pause>
Me: "... 123--"
Her: "555."

Just shut the hell up while I give you the phone number! How hard is that?

And then, once she got the phone number, she couldn't find the account.

Her: "I tried it twice, sir."
Me: "OK, well, that's the number on the account. It's not my account at home, I'm in California."
Her: "Then you'll have to call the California office."
Me: "What's their number?"
Her: "I don't have it. If you call 1-800-COMCAST and enter the California zip code, it will transfer you to the California office."
Me: "I did call 1-800-COMCAST and it didn't ask me for a zip code."
Her: "Try calling back again."

So eventually my mom found a cable bill and there was a different 800 number on it. It still didn't ask for a zip code, but it did ask for a phone number and I got to speak to someone with access to the account.

What's strange is that Comcast's phone support is usually pretty good. I guess all the smart people have New Year's Eve off.

Cake!

2007-12-31T13:26:51Z

I saw Cake at The Catalyst tonight, and they were excellent as always. TMBG has plenty of variety and energy, yeah, but Cake is just solid gold smoothness.

Here's the set list, as best I can remember it (not in exact order):

Jolene (audience participation: chorus of oohs near the end)
Frank Sinatra
Arco Arena
Wheels
Ruby Sees All ("Here's a song from back before we were so ironic. Yeah, right. Do you know how serious we are? This is no joke.")
Comfort Eagle ("Here's another ironic song, just a big fucking joke. If we're filled with any frivolous emotion, it's not irony. It's hatred. But I'm not sure that we are.")
War Pigs
Guitar (audience participation: "Imagine that it's about your flat screen TV, someone you used to love, your job that you hate but can't quit because you need health insurance, or whatever. If I threw my _____ out the window... Just let it go. Not so bad, is it?")
Sheep Go To Heaven (audience participation: "Sheep go to heaven / goats go to hell" chorus at the end)
Mexico
Never There
Love You Madly
Shadow Stabbing
Friend Is A Four Letter Word
Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town ("the saddest anti-war song")
Comanche
Short Skirt/Long Jacket (audience participation: "na-na na-na na-na / na-na na-na NA na" battle between left and right sides, with John telling each side how much the other one hates them)
Sad Songs And Waltzes
The Distance

Do you know what those songs have in common? They're all great.

Other tidbits:

The Lovemakers opened.
Cake didn't introduce themselves until an hour into their set.
They gave away two saplings to audience members who answered trivia questions and promised to (1) plant the trees in a permanent place, (2) send in a picture of themselves next to the planted tree, and (3) send in another picture in a few years. The first question was "What kind of tree is this?" (redwood, a.k.a. sequoia). The second was "What special instrument is used in the song Guitar?" (musical saw).
Xan said hi to my mom before the show as she was picking up the tickets at will call.

taradinoc @ 2007-12-27T23:54:00

2007-12-28T07:52:40Z

Top Ten Myths About Iraq 2007

Halliburton/KBR in rape coverup

2007-12-12T01:53:36Z

Sickening.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

No one wants my money

2007-11-08T22:54:17Z

Zana and I have a jar full of American money, but none of the banks around here seem interested in accepting this US currency for deposit or exchanging it for bills (a.k.a. "foldin' money") without jumping through ridiculous hoops. They want us to spend hours sorting and counting and separating this legal tender into rolls, or they want to charge fees ranging from 8.9% to 15% for the privilege of having our treasure dumped into a machine that will count it for us. WTF?!

Wells Fargo and Bank of America don't count coins, period. They demand rolled coins. The dude at Wells Fargo actually told me to use Coinstar instead, which charges an unconscionable 9 cents on the dollar. STCU charges non-members a whopping 15% to use their counter, and even members have to pay a (lower) fee.

I know counting machines exist. I know banks want to hold onto my money. I'm pretty sure Wells Fargo doesn't just trust everyone to put the right coins in the rolls; they must count them somehow. Is there no place in Spokane that will count coins for free?

taradinoc @ 2007-10-17T10:43:00

2007-10-17T17:56:31Z

I've slept for about six hours in the past few days, due to having to be home 9:00-5:00 two days in a row for a visit from the owner of my apartment (she was supposed to come on Monday and never did, but she was there at precisely 9:00 Tuesday and the last contractor was there till 5:00) and then working and then driving out to the valley and back in a zombie-like state because someone locked her keys in her car for the second time in a week.

Now after I've been in bed for two hours I get a call from work complaining indirectly (the work is for another company) about something I fixed and verified to be working last night. Ten bucks says the problem isn't in my code. I should start billing them for every time they make my phone ring before noon.

Update: It seems that the installer got built with an older version of the program. That is, the code is right and the executable that gets run when I hit F5 in Visual Studio is right, but somehow an older executable actually got put into the installer package, even after I deleted the deployment project output directories and rebuilt.

Apple must think we're retarded.

2007-10-08T05:22:50Z

I just saw an iPhone ad with some idiot saying that before he got an iPhone, he had to carry an iPod, a camera, a "regular phone", and a "phone I used for text messaging and emails and stuff".

Does he live in some magical fairy kingdom where you can buy two cell phones and neither one will have a camera or a music player built into it? And if he's carrying the second phone around, why would he still need the first one?

Maybe it's a sign that the hype has died down and they're having trouble selling these things.

Mercer for President

2007-10-03T00:36:19Z

Meet Lee L. Mercer, Jr., a candidate with something to prove. Or about 70 things to prove. Finally, a candidate introduces a sensible plan for dealing with religion:

There is some concern about the U.S. Government Religions enforcements. I will enforce the U.S. Government Religions enforcement regulating its enforcements itself with its regulations pertaining to itself and according to its enforcements.

9th Circuit OKs strip-searching 13 year olds for Advil

2007-10-02T03:19:24Z

Four years ago, school officials forced a 13 year old girl to remove her clothes because she was suspected of possessing ibuprofen. Now, the Ninth Circuit says they acted appropriately. More over on my fancy blog.

Update: See also this NYRA blog post, which sums it up thusly:

Those in charge think they can get away with treating teenagers so carelessly because, really, they don’t consider them their equals. They believe them to be lesser beings over whom they must dominate. They use the excuse that it’s for their own good, but who was this benefiting? If the girl had the ibuprofen, who is she harming? Theoretically, she could have taken the whole bottle if she wanted to kill herself, but that’s a stupid excuse, since there are so many other ways to kill yourself. Could she have given some to a student who was allergic or otherwise could not have it? Well, it’s up to that student to know better. That isn’t a terribly hard concept for a 13-year-old to grasp. Then again, it does seem a hard concept for their adult overlords to grasp.

TMBG

2007-09-29T01:31:12Z

Go here to read Zana's writeup of the concert, with pictures.

Back...

2007-09-27T22:29:36Z

geminiwench and I went to Seattle to see They Might Be Giants. More on that subject later, but here are some notes about the trip:

There's a country called America where refills on soda are free, but apparently the Zip's in Ritzville is on Greedypricksylvania's sovereign land, because they expect their customers to stand in line to pay 49 cents for a few pennies' worth of Pepsi - after having already paid a couple bucks for the original fill-up. I refilled my cup and laid two quarters on the counter as I walked out, while the drone glared at me from behind it. They can have my damn change, but they're not getting my time. (They also have signs declaring "Cups for ice or water: 15 cents" and "Fry sauce and ketchup are for eat-in customers only". Somehow they neglected to put a coin-operated lock on the bathroom door, but I'm sure they'll take care of that soon.)
The right lane of I-90 (in both directions) has some weird dents in it, almost nonstop from about mile 20 to mile 90. Not the rumble strips - these are actually in the lane, with three evenly spaced trails of dents under each wheel. WTF?
Some people say you should drive slower to save gas, but if I can set my cruise control at 80, drive 300 miles, and arrive with my gas gauge just barely below the halfway mark, I'm not gonna sweat it. That's nearly 40 MPG, even accounting for the fact that the gauge isn't linear.

First they came for the gay-bashers...

2007-09-26T06:18:45Z

It seems some nefarious organization is trying to push the gay agenda on our impressionable kids.

Sure, they say they just want to stop bullying... that's how it starts. Pretty soon we'll have to go out of our way to be nice to The Gays, with quotas for handshakes and high-fives. Then, before you know it, we'll be rounded up into sensitivity training camps and forced into mandatory gay marriages. Thanks for bringing this dangerous new development to our attention, KREM 2 News Team!

Update: Here's the video.

WTF?

2007-09-06T23:44:02Z

marryourdaughter.com

When I first saw that URL, I thought it said "marry your daughter", but the actual site is only slightly less creepy.

Go Roomba!

2007-09-03T01:59:04Z

Cable trouble!

2007-08-27T17:24:42Z

We've stumped the technician and his supervisor.

Problem: when the cable modem is transferring data (mainly seems to be during uploads), we get static on almost every channel. Channel 3 is unwatchable during a speed test. If we hit standby on the modem, the problem goes away. He switched out our RCA modem for a Motorola and the problem persisted.

Update: He replaced the fittings on the living room and bedroom outlets, and the splitter which was hidden inside the bedroom outlet, and the problem is almost entirely gone. There's still some faint static, but barely noticeable. And we got the line in the computer room working for the cable modem, which completely solved the problem.

This seems good enough for now, but we could also get a new outlet put in if we get written permission from the owner of the house. If they want to raise our rent, it's about time we asked them for some stuff, like fixing the bedroom window that cranks open but doesn't crank shut.