Category: Rants

Somewhere deep in my heart, I actually have sympathy for the folks at the Department of Homeland Security. I mean… imagine if the president of the United States came to you and said “Hey [you]… you’re now in charge of preventing terrorist attacks in the United States”. Jesus! Where would you even begin to do that job? And once you start looking for terrorist scenarios, you can find them almost anywhere. A terrorist could get a job at an airport and plant a bomb on a plane. He could rent a tanker truck and blow it up on the Golden Gate Bridge. He could fire an RPG at the New York Stock Exchange. He could blow up an electric substation here in Charlotte and bring Bank of America to its knees. He could even do something as simple as dump a bucket of LSD into a reservoir. Lord knows that chemistry students in college have been whipping up batches for years… a dedicated team of terrorists could easily cook up enough acid to plunge Los Angeles or Boston into chaos.

Up until now, I’ve been pretty quiet about us losing our liberties to the jackboots at DHS. After all, most of the hassles ordinary Americans have to deal with come at the airport, and if recent reports are any indication, people are becoming so fed up with air travel that something will have to change in the next couple of years, or else the airline industry will collapse. And I’m confident that that “something” will, in fact, happen.

But I have now officially “had it” with DHS and the whole “War on Terror”. What caused this change of heart? The recent news that agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may now seize laptop computers and other electronic devices from travelers entering the United States. It’s important to understand that the people that own these devices need not be suspected of anything, much less actually charged with a crime. Not only that, they can hold the items for any amount of time that they wish, and they can share the private data on those laptops with other government agencies, and even non-government agencies contracted to do government work. And no, this doesn’t apply to just foreign nationals entering the United States… it applies to anyone entering the country – even American citizens! And although the government swears that any copies made of your personal data will be destroyed, the agencies are actually empowered to keep any notes they make whilst examining your laptop, pager, cellphone, iPod, or any other device.

Fuck that… and fuck you, Michael Chertoff. Do you honestly think that anything productive could ever come of this policy? Please, Mr. Jerkoff, show me one example of where this policy has stopped a terrorist attack. Just one.

In an op-ed piece in the USA Today last month, Herr Himmler Mr. Chertoff assured us that “”the most dangerous contraband is often contained in laptop computers or other electronic devices” and that DHS searches have uncovered “violent jihadist materials as well as images of child pornography”.

Kiddie porn? Really? Really? Look, I hate child pornographers as much as the next person. Hell, if I were Emperor of the United States, I’d order every person convicted of child pornography to be hanged by their balls until they fall off, then lock the bastards in a sewer until they die of gangrene from their infected wounds. But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna trample all over the Constitution of the United States just to lock up the occasional idealistic Muslim college kid with a “Fuck America” essay on his laptop or some damn pervert with kiddie porn.

I mean, does Mr Jerkoff really think that the next Mohamed Atta is going to try and enter the United States with his complete “Plans of Destruction” on his laptop? And why the hell would he? In case Mr Jerkoff hasn’t heard, there’s this newfangled thing out there called the Internet, and terabytes worth of data moves through it every day. And there are so many techniques for hiding data (not to mention billions of places to hide it) that it makes the very idea of the need for this policy laughable.

Continue reading “I’ve Officially HAD IT!”

OK, so this is a pretty weak (not to mention short) rant, but here goes:

Am I the only American that’s just fed up with people that use the word “ironic” all the time without knowing what it really means? Irony is defined as:

[a]n intentional contradiction between what something appears to mean and what it really means. Irony is normally conveyed through contradictions between either what is said and what is meant or appearance and reality.

In casual usage, irony generally means “an outcome that is the opposite of what was intended or expected”. If someone spent their entire adult life working in a fire extinguisher factory and died when their house burned down (due to a lack of extinguisher)… that’s ironic. Someone’s house burning down on the day they make their last mortgage payment? Not ironic.

In other words, if porn star Ron Jeremy were to move to Virgin, North Carolina, that would be ironic, since Ron Jeremy is pretty much the opposite of a virgin. If, however, he moved to Infected Cock, North Carolina, that would not be ironic. It would be a coincidence (and a funny one at that)… but it wouldn’t be irony.

I guess my main rant here is that far too many people call something “ironic” when the proper word they should use is either “coincidence” or sheer “bad luck”.

Speak the Queen’s English, people!

Looks like I wasn’t the only person who complained about the weather coverage on WCNC the other night…

So… last night I was hanging out here at the house, waiting for My Name Is Earl, The Office and 30 Rock to come on. Since the missus and I have a DVR, we often wait until a show is over before watching it, so we can skip the commercials; since we were out of town most of this week, we had a backlog of stuff to watch. So instead of watching The Office live at 9:00PM, we watched Hell’s Kitchen from Tuesday while waiting for The Office to finish recording.

But no. There were some storms in the Charlotte area last night, and our lovely NBC affiliate, WCNC, decided to run 2 hours of “Storm Updates” instead of showing their regular programming. Let me repeat that… instead of showing Thursday night’s programming (which included the season finales of Scrubs and 30 Rock), they chose to show their weatherman giving us viewers “second by second” updates on the storms… which, by the way, were in the extreme northeastern corner of WCNC’s viewing area. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky in Belmont during all this, and in fact the weather for most of the Charlotte area was just fine… a light rain in some parts, but mostly cloudy skies in the rest of the area.

But no. Instead of my favorite comedies, I get some jerkass weatherman breathlessly wanking about the storm for two freakin’ hours! In case the program directors at WCNC hadn’t noticed… it’s 2008, folks. WCNC broadcasts SD programming on channel 36 (cable channel 6), HDTV programming on channel 36.1 (cable channel 220) and… 24 hour weather information on channel 36.2 (cable channel 221). They could have chosen to run their normal programming and simply added a crawler that said “for storm news, please tune to channel 36.2” on the screen… but they didn’t. Since many folks don’t have digital TVs yet, they could have even flip-flopped their programming, and run weather information on their SD\HD channels and their normal programming on 36.2 for the 97% of us that were unaffected by the storm.

And to add insult to injury, they did run a crawler that said that “… My Name Is Earl, Scrubs, The Office and 30 Rock will be broadcast tomorrow on NBC.COM…”. Why yes, that’s a perfectly acceptable substitute: a 320×240 streaming Internet video looks exactly as good as the 1080i version WCNC would have broadcast!

Bastards!

Check out my updated review of Navigator here!

Recently, my Time Warner cable DVR was “upgraded” from Passport to “Navigator”, Time Warner’s in-house DVR application. Can I just say one thing? It sucks.

Unlike many others, I actually like the newer, high-res menus, although I can see where the “blue on blue” might be off-putting for some:

Sadly, “better graphics” is about the only nice thing I can say about the Navigator software. Oh, there are a few nice touches here and there – you can now sort your recorded programs by name as well as date, and if you initiate playback of a program that had been stopped previously (if I, for example, watched the first 10 minutes of The Office, then clicked “play” to watch it in full a few days later), you can now press SEL + Restart to begin playback from the beginning (on Passport, you had to select “Save” or “Delete” and then go back to the main menu and press SEL + “Restart playback from beginning”).

Although the new software looks much better and has a few nice upgrades, it fails miserably as a DVR. On Friday night, the DVR was set to record The Soup and Battlestar Galactica at the same time (10pm). Although I was there, sitting in front of the TV, I got up to help Lisa with some aspect of the home improvement stuff, then decided to have a smoke. “No problem”, I figured… “I’ll just wait 10-15 minutes into the show, so I can watch it ‘live’ but skip the commerials”. But no – the DVR didn’t record the episode… at all! Man, I was pissed! So I went into the guide and told it to manually record the 12:30am replay of the episode… and when I checked the settings, the DVR wanted to record the 5:00am repeat of an episode from season 2 – and there was no trace 12:30 episode I had just then set to manually record! I manually deleted the 5:00am episode, then told it to record the 12:30 episode again! (to Navigator’s credit, It did end up recording the episode).

Then there’s the issue of “New” programs. I have most of my series set up to record only “new” episodes of most series. A show like The Tudors broadcasts several times a week on the several Showtime channels, so recording only the first episode of the week saves a lot of hassle and disk space. Between local syndication, TBS, TNT and Cartoon Network, shows like Family Guy and The Simpsons come on several times a day, and deleting unwanted episodes is a chore. The Navigator software has an annoying tendency to mark every episode of these shows as new, so it ends up recording episodes you don’t want. But what’s even more annoying is that you can scan the “Scheduled Recordings” menu and fine no trace of these shows! If I were to press the “Scheduled Recordings” button right now (Monday afternoon), I’d see nothing but stuff I actually want to see – tonight’s new episode of Bones (which I actually haven’t watched in a year – I don’t know why I even have it on the DVR anymore), Tuesday night’s new episodes of The Riches and Hell’s Kitchen, then nothing on Wednesday, then a busy Thursday of My Name is Earl, 30 Rock, The Office, and Lost. There will be no trace of The Tudors in the “Scheduled Recordings” menu. Yet, somehow, tomorrow morning, there will be a “new” episode recorded on the DVR. That’s simply unacceptable.

Also, as previously reported, missing from the search feature is “keyword search”. With Passport, you could search the program guide for KATE WINSLET or LONDON or TAR HEELS or any phrase you fancied. Passport would return not only movies with Kate Winslet, but also appearances on Leno or Letterman, or Inside the Actor’s Studio. You can’t do that any more. You can only search by the name of the show. Which bites, especially since the “keyboard search” doesn’t seem to work half the time. I typed in “Deadliest Catch” the other day… and there was no trace of the show in the program list… even though I had just seen it in the guide. Nice work, Time Warner!

Navigator also has a nice feature where you can opt to have your Favorite Channels listed in the guide at the beginning of the list, or the traditional “embedded within other channels” way. The problem is that Navigator moves the Favorites to the beginning of the program guide – it doesn’t copy them. Which doesn’t work well with the music channels. If I tune in to the Alternative channel (514), then I can’t simply press the down arrow to get to the Retro-Active channel (515). This is because channel 515 has been listed at a favorite, and is now near the beginning of the guide. So the only way you can navigate to 515 is to open the guide and press the PAGE UP button all the way to the beginning of the guide (which can cause Navigator to crash) or enter the channel numbers manually: 5+1+5+SEL. What a pain!

Lastly (for now), the FF and REW buttons are… odd. If you rewind a recording, it rewinds but then skips ahead a few seconds. Passport did this too, but did it well. Navigator, on the other hand, seems to wait a variable amount of time to skip ahead after rewinding, so it’s almost impossible to get to exactly the point where the show is coming back from commercial. After futzing with it for the past few days, I usually just watch the last 8 seconds of the commercial and stew about how crappy Navigator is.

I could go on, but I won’t. I’ll just say that I long for the days of Passport. It didn’t have a lot of fancy features, but it was rock-solid at being a basic DVR. I know I seem to be the minority when I say that, but for me it’s been true. Sure, the SA8300HD could act up sometimes, but it was, for me, a pretty solid machine. I guess my local TWC head-end is just well run, ‘cos I really hadn’t had that much trouble with Passport. Navigator has crashed three times on me so far, and that’s 2 more times than Passport crashed on me all of last year. Scrolling quickly through many menu can crash Naviagtor, and rebooting the box will take up to six minutes! (No, that is not a misprint). Word is that TWC is testing some brand new Samsung DVR boxes to appear to work much better with the Navigator software. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, ‘cos the current situation sucks!

In the interest of fairness, I’d like to add a tip and dispell some myths about the Navigator software:

– To get into the “configuration screens”, press the SEL key on the remote until the “Mail” LED lights up on the front of the cable box. Then press the DOWN arrow. You will see at least 28 configuration pages – you can’t edit any of these pages, but you can get important information like the version of the software you are using, the hardware in your box, and how much free RAM\disk space you have.

– When Navigator debuted, many complained that TWC had “killed” the 15-minute skip feature that Passport had. This rumor was either not true, the feature was not documented, or perhaps it was added to the software later on, because you can easily skip in 15 minute increments by pressing and HOLDING the REW\FF keys on the remote.

– Passport had the option to change the screen resolution (Normal, Zoom, Stretch) by pressing the VIDEO SOURCE button on the remote; you could also press the pound key (#) to do the same. Navigator has killed the VIDEO SOURCE button, but you can change the resolution in Navigator by pressing the # key.

It’s been a while since I’ve “gone here” with you, but I won’t waste time with fancy introductions:

The KFC restaurant at 6813 E. Wilkinson Blvd. in Belmont, NC is the WORST FAST FOOD RESTAURANT I’VE EVER BEEN TO! And I’ve been to 3 continents and a communist country!! Yes, this KFC is worse than the Burger King on North Avenue in Atlanta. Worse than the Long John Silver’s in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Worse even than the McDonalds on the Getreidegasse in Salzburg, Austria. Whyfor, do you ask?

Well, for starters the staff simply cannot get even the simplest orders correct. As you probably know, I moved to Belmont in January of 2003. Since then I have visited this store approximately six times. And not once has our order been filled correctly. Lisa and I typically get some kind of “meal”, which is a bucket of chicken, a few sides and a quantity of biscuits. But even on this level it’s not correct. The coupon says “6 biscuits” and we get 4 instead. The coupon says “3 large sides” and we get 2. And strangely enough, all the screw-ups are in their favor!

Continue reading “RANT: Court Martialing The Colonel”