Talk about lucky...

Almost like hitting the lottery....

Monday Night Cinema — special edition

This one just won’t wait for Friday night — it’s a jaw-dropper!

Turn up your sound and check out Chris Bliss: Must-See Finale

Oh hey...

I sold a photo this week! Or I should say, Mrs. Fetched sold it. It was a shot of Amicalola Falls that also appears in Fall at the Falls from November.

A local indie coffee shop bought it to screen onto their “Amicalola Blend” coffee. Not much money, but lots of free coffee coming out of this one....

Dad’s here!

Stopping by on the way back to Michigan. Updates will probably be slow (again) for the next couple of days.

Well, I’ve started...

The boss told us in the staff meeting that the word for the year is “automation.” I told him I could automate quite a bit of my work by going to a markup-based system, and he said go for it.

So I’ve stopped talking about dumping FrameMaker for groff and started doing it. Not a moment too soon — the new Intel-based Macs won’t run Classic applications, of which FrameMaker is one. I’m probably going to be getting a MacBook at work soon, and getting one for myself as well.

It helps that the latest version of groff adds support for links and bookmarks in PDFs, and the HTML output continues to improve, so I shouldn’t lose any functionality.

A Boy and his wheels

The Boy has had a Chevy Lumina sitting in the driveway for a couple of months now, waiting for the title to come in so he could get plates and insurance on it. The title arrived late last week, and Mrs. Fetched took him to get the paperwork done yesterday. He’s happy.

It’s kind of nice, not having to worry about taking him to work (or picking him up) now. At least until he runs out of gas....

Impressions from a bus ride

Busy week so far. Tuesday night, Daughter Dearest and her high school chorus got to go to downtown Atlanta to sing the national anthem at a Hawks game. I went along to videotape it, but they wouldn’t let me bring the camcorder in. Grr. But I got to see what turned out to be a pretty good game, and the home team won it for a change.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. We spent a pretty good while on a yellow school bus getting into town, and there were a few thoughts that impressed themselves on me during the ride (there and back).

I’ve always known there’s some kind of barrier between the freeway and the not-freeway, but perhaps since I was reading The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (good book if you haven’t read it — things haven’t changed much in 65 years) I saw that barrier in a different way. Instead of a safety measure, I saw a boundary between two worlds, mobile and fixed. In some places the boundary was little more than a token: a guard rail or “portable” concrete barrier, something easy to step over. In other places, the guard rail was backed by a high chain-link fence, sometimes topped with barbed wire; sometimes the fence stood alone without the guard rail. The most extreme cases were the metal or concrete sound barriers that loomed 10 feet or more above the roadside.

I still have the ability to read a book and shut out the hubbub around me. The tap on the shoulder I can’t ignore, and never was able to. Daughter Dearest was impressed that I could ignore the noise and read. The kids double-up on an iPod: one earbud in each head.

Bus seats aren’t nearly as comfortable as they were when I was 17 and weighed 140 pounds.

The height of school bus hijinks these days seems to be boys parading shirtless up the aisle. The “freeze-out” I remember from my high school days, and it was much more effective in a real winter.

The security people were very pleasant, in stark contrast to the job they’re doing. I had to ask the guy about his twisted locks; he said he’d been working on it for seven years. Amazing.

Trying to read email on a cell phone is a pain under any circumstance, and twice as much on a jouncy bus.

No-Good, Very Bad...

Warnings: Very long post, graphic

I have to say, I’ve lived a relatively sheltered — one could even say “whitebread” — existence. What I’ve called a “bad day” up to now usually involves interactions with in-laws these days: a shouting match, forgetting whatever plans I had for the weekend to take care of a die-off in the chicken houses, getting pushed into buying a house I didn’t want and can’t afford... the usual everyday stuff in a rural middle-class existence.

Yesterday redefined “bad day” for me and Mrs. Fetched. For The Boy, it was easily orders of magnitude worse. This gets a bit gross down below, You Have Been Warned.

The day started shortly after midnight. Lobster (who seemed to have got the attitude adjustment we’d hoped for, and got his repaired truck about the same time) had volunteered to pick up The Boy when the latter was done at work around 10 to 10:30p.m. But The Boy had called and told me he wanted to go to the apartment tonight because his roommate (we’ll call him “Jimi” here) was sick. “He was having trouble breathing this morning, and BJ (a mutual friend) called an ambulance but he wouldn’t go to the doctor. He has asthma and I was going to take him an inhaler.” The Boy had an inhaler from a bout of bronchitis (misdiagnosed as first-stage emphysema at the time) to give him. Having heard lies upon lies from The Boy, I was naturally skeptical about this — sounded like a massive load of fertilizer, in short.

“The agreement was, you could spend Mondays and Tuesdays (his days off from work) there. You’re supposed to be home tonight,” I reminded him. In one ear and out the other, and no explanation of what they had been doing for the previous two hours. Another friend was in Lobster’s truck (an extended cab Ranger), leaving one more open slot. M.A.E. came bouncing out to go along, and was disinvited by The Boy.

“We’re picking up another friend, so there won’t be room for you,” he told her.

Lobster, always one to take a dig at M.A.E., said “I’ll come back for you if you can give me gas money,” knowing that she didn’t.

M.A.E. came huffing back into the house and got on the phone, which is something she does a lot when she’s mad at The Boy. Since it was so late, we told her to get off the phone and she wound up talking to us until past 2 a.m. At this point, we were ready to tell The Boy to just stay at his apartment, get his GED whenever he felt like it, and find his own rides until he gets his car licensed (the title came in earlier this week).


All that went in the dumpster when the phone rang at 5:15a.m. Mrs. Fetched got it, because it’s on her side of the bed. The Boy was hysterical, barely coherent, but we got the gist of it: Jimi had died in the bathroom, with one of The Boy’s syringes sticking out of his arm, and he wanted to move out of the apartment and come home for good. Three hours of sleep or not; when you get a phone call like that from one of your kids, you get moving.

As it turned out, The Boy had actually been telling the truth about the health of his roommate for a change, even if some of the details were wrong. He was coughing up blood (never a sign of good health), and BJ called an ambulance for him and offered to pay for Jimi’s medical care if necessary. Jimi insisted that he was OK, although he certainly didn’t look OK, and refused to go to the hospital. The chronology, as best as I can piece it together so far, goes like this: about two weeks ago, he hooked up with somebody, which precipitated a relapse of his cocaine habit. When you’re diabetic, you’re the best buddy of every druggie out there, because you can buy syringes without raising suspicion... and The Boy never had to worry about securing his needles beyond the usual disposal issues. So all Jimi had to do to get a syringe was to grab one out of the bag on top of the refrigerator. I don’t know if shooting coke rips up your stomach, or he had some other issue, but it certainly wasn’t helping matters. Earlier in the week, The Boy gave Jimi his half of the rent money ($200) and told him to give it to the superintendent (two doors down). He then told the super that Jimi had the money and would bring it over when he got his half from his brother. Jimi, as far as I can tell, went and spent $100 of that on some coke.

Now we get to the events of early Saturday morning. They picked up the fourth friend, and went to The Boy’s apartment. Jimi looked horrible, but was in good spirits, walking around and talking with them. They decided to make a trek to McDonald’s (nearly an hour round trip) and grab some chow; Jimi begged off and said to go without him. So they went, and spent another hour hanging out at a gas station where another friend was working. At some point during this two hours, Jimi locked himself in the bathroom, shot up some coke, passed out immediately, vomited blood, and choked.

Having absolutely no clue as to what was going on, they dropped The Boy off at the apartment around 4:30 and drove off. He tried the bathroom door, knocked, got no answer, then started to worry after a few minutes. He knocked again, got no answer, then remembered there was a screwdriver on the dresser. He took the doorknob off, opened it up, and there was Jimi. He tried to wake him up, then called Lobster. Lobster came back, took The Boy to BJ’s (who lives nearby), then drove off. What a friend we have in Lobster, eh?

So BJ and The Boy went back up, tried to revive Jimi (here opinions diverge: I’m pretty sure he was dead before The Boy got back to the apartment; Mrs. Fetched is equally convinced The Boy saw him die), called 911 somewhere in the process. BJ left again, and The Boy called us some time after the cops arrived. We got there about 6 a.m., to find three cop cars (and a fourth soon blocked us in). We’re standing around in 28F, freezing away, The Boy barely maintaining. BJ returned, wearing a shirt from some security outfit, and talked to us and the cops. Eventually, they brought out Jimi. The Boy and Mrs. Fetched preferred not to watch this, but he was in a body bag with a sheet draped over that so there wasn’t much to see anyway. I offered a silent, clumsy benediction.

Shortly after, one of the cops asked The Boy to talk with him in the warm car. You can imagine my relief when they opened the front door for him. Presumably they got a statement, then let him out and drove off. The cops said they were done with the apartment, and the super said if the place was clean The Boy could get his security deposit back. OK, fine, we went home to regroup.

The Boy couldn’t get out of working, so after a catnap I took him up (11am to 7pm shift). Mrs. Fetched, her mom, and I gathered up cleaning supplies and went on back. The bathroom should have been declared a biohazard area; there was blood all over the floor and some on the carpet outside (The Boy and BJ dragged Jimi out partway, trying to revive him). Never one to dodge the nastiest part of any job, Mrs. Fetched donned rubber gloves and went in with the mop. I used a spot cleaner on the carpet outside, achieving partial success. Mother-in-law attacked the kitchen. After the spots, I started bagging up Jimi’s clothes, getting some help from Mrs. Fetched when some of The Boy’s got mixed in.

One surprise: even when cleaning up the effects and blood of a dead man you’ve never met, you get hungry. I ended up popping up to a nearby supermarket to get some apples, soft drinks, and the Girl Scouts were out front so I grabbed a couple boxes of cookies... and they had those roasted green peas I fell in love with a while back (wasabi flavor!). We broke for a quick snack, then finished up the job. BJ and his family came by while we were at it; Jimi’s relatives were looking for his diary and a picture of his parents (Jimi was raised by his aunt & uncle after his parents died when he was very young). BJ went through Jimi’s things, finding the diary and lots of The Boy’s syringes in the process, but never turned up the picture. There were lots of very good drawings, mostly in the heavy metal theme — he was quite talented.

Some time after BJ left, mother-in-law opened a kitchen drawer and found the picture. I called BJ, but got no answer, so I loaded Jimi’s things in the back seat of Barge Vader, The Boy’s stuff in the back, and the furniture went into the in-laws’ pickup truck. We left that place one heck of a lot cleaner than it was before The Boy moved in, I can tell you that. If there’s any money knocked off the security deposit, I’ll want to know why — in detail. We drove away, forever I hope, about 4 p.m.

After a day like that, we imposed a permanent 10:30 curfew (only exception is working late), and were in no mood to hear any arguments about it. People tend to get arrested or dead in the wee hours.

The creator-consumer dilemma: preservation

O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter blog recently ran a short article about the concerns over long-term preservation of today’s digital media.

It’s an interesting problem. In the olden days, before 1980 or so, the vast majority of “home” media came from a film camera. People typed (on a typewriter) or hand-wrote letters and stories and kept their paper copies in a desk drawer. A few years later, VHS camcorders started making inroads, but almost nobody edited their tapes — partly because it would require three decks, and partly because it would degrade the already mediocre video quality. Here in the 21^st Century, we have digital media coming out of our ears (actually going in our ears... think iPod) but I’m still waiting for the tours to Saturn.

But we face a very real issue of impermanence. A while back, I mentioned finding several short stories I wrote in college; some were typed (on an old “portable” Smith-Corona manual typewriter) and some were hand-written. I also have one and a half novels I wrote back then (longhand). All of them were on paper, and had survived over 20 years of storage. Whatever I wrote on a Commodore 64 in the mid-80s didn’t fare so well. Printed digital photos tend to fade over time, and exposure to sunlight hastens their demise — compare that to black&white film photos that have survived 100 years. Videotape can last several decades if stored properly, but dropouts accumulate over time and make the video that much harder to recover. That haircut video I burned to DVD, or those copies of stories and photos burned to CD, are good for a couple of decades if stored properly. On the other hand, check out what can happen to a CD that gets kicked around in a car for a little while:

Those spots are in the CD, not on it. You can’t polish that out. If you want your disks to last, keep them in a cool, dry, dark place.

There are a couple of bright spots: first, there’s just so dang much digital media being cranked out, by you and me and everyone else, that some of it is bound to make it to our grandchildren. Next, if you can solve the “bit-rot” problem (that’s a technical term), future generations could have access to perfect copies of our narratives — no faded photos, no text obscured by stains or yellowing, video as good (or bad) as the day it was taken.

Digital media is much easier to back up; for example, there are plenty of services dedicated to sharing digital photos — and those photos you share are also stored on a disk that isn’t in your house. There are analogous services for video and even text (you’re looking at one of the latter right now), and I even have a little program that lets me use my Gmail account to stash files in one of its folders (yes, my stories are backed up!). Someone truly fanatical about saving their text or photos could print them (even in black&white) on acid-free paper and have (physically) distant relatives keep a copy — if you lose your originals, you could at least OCR the text and scan the photos.

Backing up is easy, but most people don’t do it (or in my case, don’t do it as thoroughly as I should). If you need motivation, try this: you’re one hard drive crash away from losing all of your pictures, video, music, and writings.

Friday Night Cinema

When the wallet and the attention span just aren’t up for a night at the theater, Tales from FAR Manor scours the inboxes and search engines to bring you free short flicks.

Tonight’s feature is both funny and scary, and shows us what we’re in for if we don’t get serious about protecting our right to privacy.

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Lobster called from work, wondering if we were going to pick him up. Um... no. He really must think that nothing I say has any actual content. Mrs. Fetched got a bit squeamish the last couple of days about letting him fend for himself — I was half-expecting her to let him come back and to #3|| with what I wanted, at which point I would have packed up and left myself — and even The Boy, who is not exactly fond of Lobster these days, tried to talk me into letting him come back. I figured he could fend for himself at least one night, then see if he suddenly got enlightened about how one should treat people who let you stay in your house for months on end, etc. etc.

Well... shades of the Summer of Discontent. Guess who took him in? Yup, Big V. She picked him up from work, hitting a deer along the way (serves her right for poking her nose into things again, she can’t see at night anyway). Then she brought him here to get his clothes, and came in herself. Words were exchanged with Mrs. Fetched, as usual, with me (futilely) trying to get a word in edgewise, until Big V did one of her typical eight-cylinder-huff exits.

The way Lobster has been acting, he hasn’t learned a thing: he did zip/nada to find another place to stay, then tried to tell me a couple of nights ago that I had to give him 30 days’ notice (WRONG). Tonight, he whined about not being able to go back to school (the school policy is that you have to live at home; they bent it to let him stay with us)... although from what the principal told us, he hasn’t doing anything but warming a chair lately anyway. Hey, he said it himself: he’s 18, he doesn’t have to answer to anyone, he can do what he want and go where he wants and come back when he wants. Fine, he just can’t do it at FAR Manor.

Obviously, Big V hasn’t learned a thing from the previous episode either. Her and Lobster both think the universe was created solely for their benefit... so I expect things will blow sky-high before too long. I doubt it will even last the 2-½ weeks The Boy and M.A.E. stayed there. I give it 10 days.

This is one of those times when I would really like to have a second place far away from here. I’d be there, with everything valuable that I could carry with me, right now.

VoIP... coming to an office near me

One of the IT folks came by my cube this afternoon, with a brand-new toy: a Cisco VoIP phone. Ain’t it cute?



Unfortunately, they don’t quite have them enabled yet. It came up, told me it was downloading a software update, then showed me this plaintive whine. The IT guy told me their plan was to roll the phones out to everyone, make sure they were doing their job, then cut everyone over. Presumably they’ll come to pick up the old Nortel PBX phones.


After looking at these pictures, all I can say is: my cellphone camera really sucks.

Google-licious

Google is starting to take notice of Mac users, finally. They’ve released three DashBoard Widgets, of which I installed two: the Blogger widget (I’m using it for this post) and the Gmail widget. I had to rearrange my Dashboard a little — the Gmail widget in particular is pretty big, especially for the iBook’s 1024x768 display — but change is good.

What FAR Manor and a Dozebox have in common

Answer: neither one are very secure.

I’m working at home today. Before I was even able to grab some breakfast, Mrs. Fetched was telling me we had to go down to the old place because the renters couldn’t get the furnace started. Turns out they were trying to light the control box instead of the pilot (for which you have to open the hatch), and they had the gas turned off (instead of the pilot setting). I didn’t say much, but I sure thought a lot.

Of course, my own personal brain-fart had gone off and I hadn’t noticed yet. Mrs. Fetched was going to take Mrs. Renter to eat breakfast out, drop her off at her job, then pick up my BP prescription refill. I noticed when she locked the door going out to the garage when we left, but hadn’t thought about my house keys, sitting on top of the dresser. Of course, I thought about it as soon as they were gone... and sure enough, all the doors were locked. $#¡+!!!

Once in a while, the door from the porch (where the cats live) into the living room doesn’t latch, but no such luck this time. My first thought was to get the extension ladder and go in through one of the upstairs bedroom windows: The Boy often pulled that stunt when he was out tomcatting around or whatever last summer. Unfortunately, I put an end to that nonsense by locking the ladder under the house last week. What to do, what to do... stepping off the porch, I was right at eye level with the window to Mrs. Fetched’s video editing room.

Sure enough, the window slid open. I got the small stepladder out of the garage and raised the window. All the windows at FAR Manor are these once nice metal framed things. Every single one is broken in some way or another; there’s a spring-latch mechanism that’s supposed to hold them up, but they don’t stay up anymore. Fortunately, there was a piece of shelving within convenient reach inside the room, and I used that to prop up the window while I crawled in.

Mrs. Fetched is suddenly more amenable to my suggestion that we replace the windows one at a time, as we can afford it. I guess I need to buy some dowels in the meantime, to help keep closed windows closed. And always carry my keys.

The Boy’s Hot Time

Night before last, about 9:30, I caught The Boy checking his glucose — something I don’t often see him doing without prompting.

“What’s your level?” I asked him.

He looked. “212... I figured it would be high, I think I’m sick.”

Yipe. I did the usual parental feel the forehead thing; this time it was warm. “Yeah, you feel hot,” I said. “You might want to go to bed.” And that’s just what he did, confirming to me that he truly was sick... he would have just shook his head at me otherwise.

One thing about The Boy: when he gets a fever, it spikes up pretty quickly. By the time we got him some tylenol and found a thermometer, he was around 103. The tylenol didn’t seem to be helping, so we gave him some ibuprofen and it came down overnight. Mrs. Fetched and I swapped beds with Daughter Dearest, in the other upstairs bedroom, so she could check on him through the night.

Morning came, she took him to the doctor, who said he has strep throat. Seems like we get hit with that more often than the flu.

We had choir practice last night, so after work I spent a fruitless hour at a hobby store looking for bookbinding supplies then went straight to the church. Afterwards, I came home with DD to an empty FAR Manor — The Boy and M.A.E. were nowhere to be found. Whatever... I hadn’t eaten supper, and it was like 9:30, so I was in no frame of mind to give it much thought. Mrs. Fetched was chatterboxing with some of the other choir ladies, and got in about 10:30. She immediately called his smellphone, get the voicemail, and left him a message telling him to not come home (which pretty much completes Project Honey I’m Home without my help). When you stay up most of the night taking care of someone, it’s understandable if you get cheesed when that someone takes off instead of resting up.

I hope he doesn’t infect M.A.E. and all his friends. Running around loose when you’re sick doesn’t strike me as a very intelligent thing to do.

Project “Honey I’m Home!” continues

The Boy is next in line on the launching pad. After this morning’s rant, I went to get The Boy up to help me pick up the trimmings from the butterfly bushes. He rolled over, looked at the clock, and asked for 20 minutes (11 a.m.). OK, it wasn’t anything that needed to be done right away. I gave him 45 minutes (almost 11:30).

And of course, he didn’t want to get up at 11:30, either. He wanted to not have to do anything (even a half hour worth) until it was time to go to work (i.e. until it was time for me to take him to work). I finally told him that if all he wanted to do here was eat and sleep, giving us nothing but disrespect in return, he could follow Lobster right out the door. While I was picking up the trimmings, the girlies returned from the chicken houses and Mrs. Fetched helped me get the rest up while I let her know what was going on. Afterwards, she jumped in the shower and I did a couple of other things then woke M.A.E. up about 1 p.m. to vacuum the floors.

After Mrs. Fetched & Daughter Dearest got out of the shower, we decided to go out for lunch (we’d planned to do something since we had a day off, although I would have preferred more than just a lunch). The Boy had to find a ride to work: he can’t get up to help me, why should I be arsed to drive him around? We weren’t where we could drop everything and come back for him anyway. After lunch, we picked up Lobster then went in the store to grab some garbage bags. M.A.E. called Lobster and (according to Daughter Dearest) was complaining that I woke her up at 1 in the afternoon, the horror! When we got home, the two went outside (one at a time, but right after the other)... y’know, for two people who profess not to like each other, they sure do stick together. Wife sent me out to “putter around in the garage” while they were out there; they kept their voices too low to hear but I did manage to find a coax cable with F-connectors (I swear I looked in that box last week and didn’t see one!) and a soft-sided cooler. The former went to the outbuilding for future photography needs, the latter in the trunk of my car.

So Lobster gets to stay through the end of the month. I’d just as soon give him the $30 rent, pro-rated for the rest of the month, and tell him to hit the road... but whatever. As long as they’re out of here. Eight days, then they really can be independent. Eight more days.

All I can say to this is...

YUCK!

Throwing Back the Lobster

A while back, we made it pretty clear to Lobster — as well as The Boy and M.A.E. — what was expected from each of them individually and all of them as a group... and if they didn’t want to live up to those expectations, they knew where the door was.

Lobster is kind of a special case at the moment: he’s the only one actively in school. The Boy started flinging the “this school is stupid, I’ll be able to do better at the private school” (that he couldn’t wait to get away from last year) crap. Fine, whatever, as long as he finishes, right? So we started making the arrangements to get him back in the private school. We figured there wouldn’t be much of a problem — especially since the preacher at the church told Daughter Dearest that they would try to make some arrangements if they wanted to come back — and The Boy just jumps and expects the soft landing to be there anyway. The upshot is, he quit the public school and the principal at the private school said “I prayed about it and it’s not the best thing.” I’ll spare y’all the obligatory potshots at pentecostals.

So ever since, Lobster has been whining and complaining each morning that he has to get up while The Boy just lays there. We’re trying to arrange a home school program for The Boy so he can finish up (as if he’ll put any effort into it, but he won’t be able to say we didn’t give him the chance), but these things don’t happen overnight. None of them have any sense of responsibility, it seems... as if we didn’t know that already.

President’s Day weekend rolls around, under the unskilled aegis of the worst president ever. Daughter Dearest & even your humble correspondent get Monday off. But not Lobster (nor Mrs. Fetched, because chicken houses never rest, but anyway). That private school has some good points, but they’re seriously weird in others. The Boy and M.A.E. decide they want to go to a movie, along with Lobster. Since it was 8:30, I figured they could go, be home by 11, and I’d be able to get Lobster off to school. I fiddled around, did a little exercise (been slacking on that lately, bad FARfetched, bad!), and called Lobster’s smellphone around 11. No answer. I told him he needed to be home ASAP to get to school the next day.

Around midnight, still haven’t heard anything. I called his phone, he picked up & hung up. I tried it again, same result. The third attempt went straight to his voice mail, and I left him a rather pointed message. About five minutes later, I tried again, got the voice mail, and started leaving a real happy note when he called. “Oh, we decided to just come home around 6 and you can take me to school.” I told him at that point to not bother coming home, he could get a ride to school with whoever was carrying them around.

“But what about my bookbag and uniform?”

“Not my problem,” I told him. He whined about my trying to “control” him, and I told him it had nothing to do with control and everything to do with responsibility. After some more whining on his part, I just hung up, turned off the phone, and went to bed.

So of course they don’t show up at 6... it’s almost 8 a.m. sharp when The Boy calls and says, “we’re outside, can you unlock the door?” The three of them came in and all of them, including Lobster, got in their beds. Uh-uh, Lobster, you’ve got school. I said I’d take him there but not bring him back; he could find somewhere else to live and whoever takes him in can come get his stuff.

On the way to school, I told him I really do hope he succeeds at whatever he decides to do, but we obviously can’t help him take the next step. He wants to be his own person, it’s time for him to step out on his own, and The Boy and M.A.E. will be gone just as soon as he gets his car legal. He just grunted, as if I expected anything different. Now Mrs. Fetched starts criticizing me about how I shouldn’t have said anything about the others leaving, and Lobster has paid rent through the end of the month, and M.A.E. still owes us $270... and that, in a nutshell, is why I haven’t made much effort to play much role in what goes on around here: when everything you do and say gets criticized or negated, why bother? I told her as much, and she clammed up after a couple feeble attempts at self-justification. As far as M.A.E. is concerned, there’s such a thing as cutting your losses.

So that’s my day off. Now I need to get The Boy up to help pick up some brush trimmings....

Dude... you got a discount

We got a company-wide email a couple of days ago, announcing that we were now part of the Dell Employee Purchase Program (EPP). We can get up to 12% discounts on Smelly Dell consumer models, plus a free download of XP Home.

ooooooooooooooooohhhhh... ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

The funny thing is, we’re in a de-Dell-ification process at work; people needing new computers are getting IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads. I’ve suggested to those who are waiting for their Smelly Dells to finish flaking out to “accidentally” drop them on the way to a meeting or something so they can get to the front of the line. Just trying to be helpful....

From experience, when people ask me what kind of computer to get, I tell them two things: 1) Don’t get a Dozebox. 2) If you ignore #1, don’t get a Dell. Then they get a Dell, have all sorts of problems with it, and I get to say I told you so. :-P I’d take one if they gave it to me, but I’d install Linux on it and use it for a music/video jukebox.

Weekend Cinema

Having missed Friday Night Cinema due to playing catch-up and other distractions, we bring you a Saturday Night Special. Hat tip goes to VoodooMike, who serves up tonight’s double feature.

Feature #1 is a whimsical selection called Musical Roundabout.

Feature #2 is rated NSFW. It’s a rather interesting Deleted Scene from Star Wars.