Category: Personal

‘Cuz why not?

Sydney is a two month old Dachshund/Terrier mix, about 8 lbs. so far, who we adopted yesterday at the Silicon Valley Humane Society. They have a beautiful facility in Milpitas and the staff are great. We’ve signed up for the Puppy 1 training and socialization class starting Tuesday. He’s already good about going outside and understands No.

So happy to have this new member of our family!

Sorry but I am just fed up. Mail.app, Outlook, Thunderbird, all of them are stuck in the past and the developers need to get their acts together before users collectively hunt them down for silly slapping.

The current Democratic-back health care legislation has induced more rhetoric, emotion and disinformation since the Swift Boat Campaign. A very apt comparison since there’s about as much truth in the opposition in both. “Death panels” please! Like a politician would do something so utterly guaranteed to lose votes.

Yesterday was a great day. When Clint Dempsey put in the first goal I was jumping and screaming, though I had to see the replay to believe it. When Landon drove home the second just past Julio Cesar’s leaping form I was laughing with joy and pounding the countertop.

For those of you who somehow managed to avoid seeing this result, how did you do it? LOL.

[Note: I sent this email to Safeway over a week ago and have not received so much as an automated response.]

I am very unhappy about the false promise made by Safeway regarding accumulation of 10 cent per gallon discounts. I live in Mountain View, CA, and shop at the store on Shoreline Blvd. Given that I’ve accumulated 6 or 7 and the discount expires next 10 days I tried to use it yesterday only to find out that I cannot, at least not in any reasonable way. $0.60 * 14 gallons to fill up is $8.40 (or $9.80 for 7), a meaningful amount in these days of rising gas prices.

I looked very carefully at the related pages on Safeway.com and find nothing that says the reward can only be redeemed at Safeways which sell gas, just “participating locations.” But nowhere are participating locations listed and the closest such Safeway is in Pleasonton, over 40 minutes drive from here! Past similar programs have been redeemable at the Arco next to the Safeway at which I shop.

Indeed the PowerPump Locator page lists three locations in Mountain View (when I enter zip code 94043). But instead of being places where one may redeem the reward these are the three stores you have in town and this distinction is not mentioned at all.

To me this is similar to false advertising since Safeway is creating the same false expectation that I’m getting a deal by shopping at the store. Either the company should arrange for location redemption locations or stop making the claim on every receipt I get.

[This is the letter I sent Fox Soccer Channel today in support of the Boycott Steven Cohen campaign]

To whom it may concern,

Steve Cohen has, and not for the first time, told lies about the deaths the 96 fans at Hillsborough, claiming that Liverpool fans were responsible for killing their own, amongst other lies. Is this the type of person you want representing your company? Steve Cohen has done this before, apologising when the outrage grew too large only to continue with his comments a short time later. Clearly, he will not stop, so our objective is to see him being put off air permanently.

Fox Football Phone-in used to be enjoyable and good for a laugh but now I cannot watch it at all. If there were another way for me to watch English football than FSC you can be sure I would.

I urge you to reconsider your use of Cohen.

I will be posting this message to my blog and elsewhere until your support for Steve Cohen and his lies ends.

Thank you,
Bill Lazar
http://billsaysthis.com

So the wizards at CBS have done it again. This is the network with the oldest demographic and having just turned 48 I shouldn’t be surprised that more of its shows are getting on my list. NCIS, for instance, who can resist Mark Harmon as a hardcase?

Two interesting GOP things today:

1. Arlen Spector will run for reelection as a Democrat: The senior senator from Pennsylvania recognized he has drifted too far to the center to win a sixth term as a Republican. Once Al Franken is freed of Norm Coleman’s death rattles this will give the Dems a filibuster-proof majority.
2. Cheney for President: A NYT OpEd column by Ross Douthat that jumps off from the idea that Dick Cheney ought, by his own lights, have been the Republican nominee against Obama. Not that Cheney ever said this nor is Douthat suggesting a different election outcome.

My opinion of the Republican party is no secret: I think they are, on the whole, sleazier and more hypocritical than Democratic politicians. To use less directly derogatory terms, GOP positions are based more on emotion than logic and are far less logically consistent; further they are far less open to true intellectual debate. How many officeholding Dems during the Bush years said, as Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) recently did, that his or her state should secede from the Union?

Chuck really has to come back next season. NBC Universal, please renew the show because I have to see what its like now that Bartowski will be able to hold his own in a fight!

This was hopefully a season finale and not a series finale but, if it was, then I think the writers did good. This year has seen the end, or possible end, of several shows I watch and the writers impressed me with quality finales. In this regard, compared to past seasons this has to be one of the best–though for the most part I’d have rather had more episodes.

Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, The Shield, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Life, MI-5, these are the ones I’m thinking about. The L Word was close but not quite at the same level; they did at least finally get back to the whole Jenny’s murder thing in the last episode. Life and Sarah Connor, at least as of this writing, are only on the bubble and not cancelled, though the latter seems sure to go.

There was plenty of criticism of the way Ron Moore brought the four year flight to an end. Almost everyone loved the first hour but the second not so much. I felt it was great that all the main character arcs and nearly all the questions were answered. I specifically wanted to know what the Six that only Baltar and the Baltar only Six could see were, and we got that answer. My main quibble was that the very last bit, with the two angels walking down a Manhattan street, was a ham-handed method of getting a point across.

The Wire, as I wrote a few months ago, gave us a “final season of an awesome show [of] 10 episodes that layered on the death of the American big city newspaper to a stack of stories that were already deeper than the aggregate total of the 500+ episodes of the three editions of CSI” and I like the CSIs. This was, quite possibly, the finest show produced by American television.

The Shield was another great one, very bleak (as were BSG and The Wire), but like them it ended and did so honestly within the framework created over its run. The sight of Vic Mackie forced to sit quietly at a cubicle desk for years to come was a terrific way to punish and reward the atrocious behavior we’d seen.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles finished at a point that let the creatives go forward if the show is renewed–try figuring out how they were going to explain John Connor’s trip forward and how and/or why he would come back to the present–or if not gave viewers a sense of one major part of his life coming to a close.

Let’s just hope the NBC execs have the good judgment to bring back Chuck and Life.

For a new programming project I decided to see what the whole CSS framework and grid design craze is about for myself, and to refresh my Ruby on Rails programming skills.

A little research turned up Chris Eppstein’s Compass gem. This is a very nice meta-framework, which can be used with Rails, Merb, Sinatra or other Ruby frameworks as well as pure Ruby, that combines Hampton Caitlin’s SASS gem with any of several CSS frameworks, including (at this writing) Blueprint, Yahoo! UI Grids and 960 Grid System. Blueprint seemed sufficient for my needs and the easiest choice so I went with it.

Author’s note: I tried publishing this with Blogger as a regular post but it just wasn’t working, so its available as a standalone page.

This posting is really just for my future recollection. Liverpool FC are going all guns now, following up the 4-0 win over Real Madrid with a 4-1 win at Old Trafford and yesterday’s 5-0 Anfield thrashing of Aston Villa. The latter, coupled with a second straight ManUtd loss and Chelsea’s surprising loss to Tottenham, means there are at least two teams who can win the Premier League and neither plays at Stamford Bridge… or the Emirates.

Villa were hoping to push into the top four but based on recent form this seems unlikely. Martin O’Neill is a pretty good manager but has overworked his shallow squad and its beginning to affect results. Lucky for him there’s an international break before they have to go to Manchester United.

With frontman Dimitar Berbatov likely to miss due to an ankle injury, no Wayne Rooney or Paul Scholes–both bad boys got reds on Saturday–and an off-kilter Cristiano Ronaldo, will O’Neill deploy an aggressive front line of Heskey, Carew and Agbonlahor in a 4-3-3 to try and extend Sir Alex’s misery?

The Reds go to Fulham the day before, and the Cottagers will be proud of their victory, but I think the traveling squad will be too much for Roy Hodgson’s backline, too eager to make up points dropped earlier this season that evaporated what was an eight point league table lead prior to Christmas.

Reds have won four straight, scoring 16 and conceding one–ONE!–goal since the wakeup call at Middlesboro. They’ve taken 13 of 15 possible points against the other three Top 4 teams.

Torres did not get any of the goals against Villa and that’s got to sting. Riera will want more of the plaudits he’s had the last few weeks. Reina is making the stops and setting up goals. Stevie G is being called the in-form player period, in any league.

Look out this week to see Gerrard and Benitez get player and manager of the month awards. Fulham, just look out 😉

The E Street Band Live in New York City video was blasting in HD this afternoon while I struggled with some web programming and then a song came on which is the perfect example of why Bruce and his band are for my money the greatest rock act to ever play the big stage.

Light of Day (Youtube Part 1, Youtube Part 2) isn’t one of his hits or even well-known–heck the original release was a version done by Joan Jett and Michael J. Fox in their obscure 1987 film of the same name. But the way the guys worked it up for this tour simply has everything a great rock performance needs.

• Bouncy, fast-paced basic chords with plenty of room for all the guitars, keyboards and Clarence’s sax to add color and style
• Lyrics that are fun and still actually make sense
• Improvisations that break from the expected (like counting up the miles, breaking into a dizzying, poetic listing of all the tour stops that ends with New York and moving on to the kind of teasing a Jersey guy will do to a crowd of New Yorkers)
• Bruce dancing around the mic stand, waving his arms to incite the crowd to even greater abandon, throwing in a gospel-inspired chant that ends with him fountaining water over his head like a rock and roll baptism

“I’ve seen people lost! In envy over the New Jersey Devils winning the Stanley Cup!” he sings, and then holds his hands up in surprise as the audience hisses. “…But that’s alright because I’m here tonight on an ambassadorial mission to unite these two great civilizations,” he finishes, and then the band jumps back in to rock out the house.

I can’t explain this better but this is what I love about rock and why, despite my recent misgivings over his, er, business judgment, I can always get a thrill listening to Springsteen and the E Street Band.

The iconic image is Bruce, hands over his head and the Telecaster hanging low down his back: