BillSaysThis

Apparently my ‘temporary new home’ loaner laptop will be less temporary than I’d ever expected. Just got a call from Fry’s to find out that because my poor, broken down Toshiba is still under the manufacturer’s warranty the store is required to send it to Toshiba for repair. And the average (meaning it could easily be longer) turnaround time is eight weeks. EIGHT WEEKS?!?!?! Have you ever heard of a consumer business that can take so long to do a repair?

I was informed that this is not Fry’s or Toshiba’s number but an industry average across manufacturers and big retailers so my experience would be the same wherever I’d bought it. Of course if the hard drive had managed to live out another three weeks I’d be past the one year mark and then the Fry’s extended warranty would kick in, and I’d get back Little Steven in under a week.

What a freaking joke.

Even though it wasn’t a get rich quick scheme, the US Men’s team pulled out a draw with a late goal off a header by Carlos Bocanegra, crossed in on a corner by Landon Donovan. The Polish goal midway through the second half came off a sweet cross through the box that Tim Howard, getting a rare start in goal, tipped when he should have let it pass. At least we kept a six game streak without a loss alive. Landon was all over the field all game and Brian Ching had several really nice touches after coming on in the 66th minute. Next up is the group round of World Cup qualifying, August 18.

marcelo wrote to let me know that I missed an option to tell it which browser to use for displaying web pages and that he has even more Mozilla-specific plans post-general availability of v4.0. Cool.

The hard drive on Little Steven, my less than year old Toshiba Satellite laptop, was whining like a buzzsaw and finally the machine was constantly crashing. The Big Guy tried his best and with Knoppix we were at least able to boot into that Linux and save some files but it was clear to both of us that surgery was required. Fortunately for me I’d bought the extended warranty for the first time in a long time and so off to Fry’s with Little Steven.

Though they made a fuss about waiting 24 hours for a loaner, I asked politely (I did, ask TS1!) to waive that and let me take one home. Give the oft-maligned store credit because the manager did say okay, and here I am typing on a very snazzy ultra-new Toshiba Satellite A75. Very sharp, bright screen, wireless networking built-in that connected to my network no problem. One little fuss: the right button doesn’t work and I can’t seem to change that, but since I should only have this box for two or three days, no big deal. And I can get my BillSaysThis email through a web interface too, so no problem there either. Nice!

w.bloggar is moving towards v4, this is composed with the beta version. Looks nice, not sure it’s enough to get me to use it as the main tool. One nit is immediately visible: Clicking menu options that go to web pages automatically open in Internet Explorer, not the system default browser and given all the foofaraw around IE lately this will probably not be making many people happy. Good to see non-US (and non-European) software developers though!

Get out your rose colored glasses

Put on your long red dress

Don’t worry about the grey swirling clouds

Passing under your feet, through your legs

Honey those glasses make everything alright

As if Snow White and Cinderella both came

Visiting and stayed to tea and crumpets

Just take my word and put them on

Hold your arms out straight as long as you can

Let them fall back against your waist

Bow your head forward without lifting them

Tell me how the clouds make you feel

Look up again at the sky, even straight

Into the Sun, listen for the birds, the cars,

The planes passing overhead and carrying

So many people who never pay you mind

No, Sweetie, you can’t sit just yet

You have no sons to care for you, no savings

To tide you until your day has come

Just put those glasses on and turn around

Your work is here in front of you and

It will never go away no matter how old,

How tired you get, if your beauty stays

All well and good, goes better with those glasses

When I was a child I had a magic decryptor ring

That gave me secret messages from the comics

But now I can’t find that ring to give you

Can your rose colored glasses save you?

There’s a man to your right, a woman to your left

Look at their children coming to visit

Inviting them home to stay, to rest

But your glasses cannot decrypt that puzzle

Just finished watching FSW’s replay of Sunday’s Euro2004 championship match which ended, of course, with Greece lifting on the only goal of the game on a sweet header from their scoring leader Charisteas. Or maybe not so sweet, looked perhaps like another Greek player was holding back Portugal’s keeper so he couldn’t get to the ball first though no one made a big fuss during or after the game.

Did Greece deserve the win? I thought the hosts played a much more aggressive match and had most of the offense. But the visitors’ defense was rock-like and the few shots Portugal had were either off-target or not difficult, I don’t recall a single really tough save by Nikopilidis. And Greece, bottom line, scored the only goal. Congratulations!

16 days: They should have left him alone

New short story from Vernor Vinge: Synthetic Serendipity. Part of a larger tale that will be his next novel (Rainbows End), set in 2020, that features a society running on augmented reality. Vinge’s Peace War and Realtime series were both favorites so I’ll be looking for this (can’t find a release date just yet). [via /.]

I finally know how much happiness the right woman (or partner of appropriate gender) can bring–thanks TS1!–so I’m real glad for my Canadian buddy to have the same joy.

And, okay Grum, I hear you, though that was just one example and fair enough for me since I am not a fanboy like some people.

Also, you might want to add status.blogger.com to your RSS subscriptions to track the irregular flakiness.

Over the weekend, Tori Spelling got married while Viveca Fox broke up with 50 Cent. Coincidence?

David Kelley’s spin-off from The Practice, starring everyone’s favorite Star Trek captain, was supposed to be called The Practice: Fleet Street but now will have the oddish moniker Boston Legal. Oddish because Kelley just had a series on Fox called Boston Public (starring, in the second and last season, the hottest Star Trek female) and also because he had his big break as a producer with L.A. Law. I know Boston thinks of itself as a more formal and elegant city than Los Angeles but still…

Was looking forward to Spider-Man 2 since walking out of the theater two years ago. Was I satisfied? Not as much as many others were to judge from the newspapers and blogs though it was okay. I still have a bit of trouble with Tobey Maguire as an action hero (can’t wait for a buff, goateed Ryan Reynolds) and at 29 he’s getting a bit old to play a 20 year old anyway.

My biggest complaint is that the picture overall lacks coherence, that director Sam Raimi wasn’t able to ride herd on the posse of producers, cast and studio execs with their endless notes and suggestions. The bits and pieces seem jammed together, not seamless as they ought to. Example: after the subway fight, Spidey is laying flat on the floor and the camera dives into the insignia on his chest to transition to the next scene, a common enough device but to be effective it needs to be used throughout the movie not just the one time. And couldn’t someone have sent Alfred Molina a personal trainer so he wouldn’t look flabby during his shirtless scenes?

recommended, good but not great

What a frustrating match!!! Yes, any loss is a problem but tonight we went down because of better acting from Los Angeles, poor passing especially in the midfield, below normal goalkeeping and a job from the officials. Props to Carlos Ruiz for the two Galaxy goals, both were legitimate.

The Sweet One adds her perspective on my viewing habits.

Landon had some sweet moves but in the end couldn’t connect strongly enough with Derosario and Ching, though Dwayne did get the first goal of the match. Onstadt faced far too many chances, especially the first LA goal off a pointless corner in first half injury time; still, his clearances were poor most of the night.

Referee Kevin Stott was pitiful though one can’t simply pin the loss on him in whole. But even at the very end he couldn’t control the field and I hope the MLS gives this performance of his a very careful review. The second yellow, and attendent dismissal, to Brian Mullan was more than sad because the card resulted from a terrific acting job from Ruiz–there wan’t even any contact though the Guatemalan international spent two minutes writhing in pain to cinch the deal.

Worse, it came just after Brian Ching was brought down in the box by Ryan Suarez and Stott let it go without so much as a nod. All told the ref gave at least six yellows to the Quake players, one at the end of the first half to Derosario that never got explained, while allowing far too many fouls by LA to go unmarked.

Better luck Wednesday night as they host the Dallas Burn, who also lost this weekend, at Spartan Stadium for Hawaiian Night. Next Saturday they travel to Jersey to meet the MetroStars but will be without Landon, Ching and Mullan who are heading to Chicago as part of the US squad for a Sunday friendly against Poland; MetroStars’ midfielder Eddie Gaven and defender Eddie Pope will also play for the US.

Access Denied explores the growing trend among religious doctors and pharmacists to refuse to write or fill prescriptions for birth control pills because these people believe that in some small number of situations, a fertilized egg will fail to attach to the woman’s uterine lining. These religious nuts, if I can use that term with semi-politeness, state that life begins at fertizilization, even though generally accepted medical practice finds that pregnancy begins ony when the fertilized egg attachs to the uterine lining, and hence the pill causes a chemical abortion and since they believe that abortion is murder, they cannot help women with the drugs.

This is, to me, one of those interesting questions about where reasonable lines can be drawn between good and bad. My intitial reaction on following Joe’s link was the same as his–what do these people think they’re doing, don’t they have an obligation as medical professionals to serve all people equally without inputting their personal beliefs? But as the morning wears on, my certainty is fading at least a bit.

We all live in a universe of uncertainty and lack of control over our own cricumstances, subject to personal limitations and imperfections and, in the end, victims of culturalization–brainwashed by the environment in which we’re born and live. So some of us, in Alabama or Fallujah, make decisions based on the personal understanding of religious doctrine and try to live by what appears internally to be righteousness. And then others disagree with that personal understanding.

Should such people be harshly criticized for making professional decisions on this basis? I wonder, especially since I’ve always believed that we work to live, not live to work, that the personal comes ahead of the professional. Having said this, I would add that individuals who make professional choices based on personal preferences ought to do so based on facts; in this instance, whether or not birth control pills actually do cause an abortion, which the linked article casts into doubt. Then again, what is a fact? People like me who believe that science is the answer to that question will almost always find agreement impossible with the previously-mentioned medical professionals since they look to the Bible for truth.

America is the land of the free, the focal point of today’s celebrations, and how can we argue with another American’s freedom to base behavior on such core beliefs? While that sentence might read as rhetoric, I actually mean it. The patients surely have other doctors and pharmacies to patronize and if there are no doctors or pharmacists in a given area willing then perhaps some true believers of the opposite stripe need to get the necessary education and relocate. So in the end I guess my position is completely opposite to where I began.

[Access Denied via Jennett.Radio and Wake Up]

Why Jackie Chan agreed to make this movie is confusing. I know that deals often take a long time to come together but he must have been aware of Chow Yun Fat’s Bulletproof Monk. Both films are so much the same that it’s not funny, except that Chan tries to put a humorous spin with the use of Brit comic Lee Evans as his partner/foil.

Plenty of eye candy: Claire Forlani is properly luscious as the third member of their Interpol team, Christy Chung has a short bit as Evans’ lethal wife and Nicola Berwick is the bad bitch. Julian Sands doesn’t go far enough over the top playing the bad guy. Alex Bao is nearly not there as the child monk who brings forth the power of the medallion.

Somehow this took five writers to put together! And the direction seemed to be on the order of: Put the camera here, step to your marks here, come on Jackie, enunciate!

not recommended

Spent the day fecking around with music, finding that iTunes for Windows is not the devil’s spawn even though goddam says it’s the dark side–and she should know. Plus watching soccer, always doing that on the weekends these days. Feck baseball.

Surprising how fast three and a half months can go by, but my contract as product manager at Intransa has finished. For better or worse, our new-ish VP of Marketing decided he would rather use the budget on someone significantly senior to me so no renewal or conversion to perm. Definitely been a cool time, though, with many assignments thrown my way that I’d never met before but the response in every occasion was very positive.

So, for the short term at least, I’m moving into the Sales team. Talk about new challenges! But I’ve been interested in putting myself to this test for awhile now and the sink or swim will be up to me. The specific project is to drive qualified leads out of trade show booth visitor lists, meaning lots of phone calls. I’ll be working together with one of my good friends at the firm who is very optimistic and positive about our success. I’m doing finger-strengthening exercises for the long weekend!

College CS projects have gotten more sophisticated than were even imaginable when I completely avoided the subject back in the day. [via the Grinder]

Reading through a recent feature request thread in the UltraEdit forums, I saw repeated requests for Ian to add code folding. Guess my amateurness is showing but I couldn’t understand what this is. Although I was getting an idea towards the end, I googled the phrase and found Matt Stephens’ anti-folding rant as the first result. Perhaps my coding efforts are not that complex but I agree with Matt–and I know at least one of my super coder buddies would too, especially:

If you’re staring at your program and can’t see the wood for the trees, code folding is the wrong answer. The answer is to structure your program better; encapsulate the details into different classes, use interfaces, small methods, and so on.

(Oh yeah, what is code folding then? The ability to designate a region–the MSFT term–of code and have the editor show or hide it as desired.)