substitute

This was an ad on OKCupid urging me to install their Facebook app:

The MacBook developed one of those great Permanent Vertical Lines on its display this evening. It's a shimmering kind of emerald green a fifth of the way over from the right.

This means that I will have to spit 'n' shine up the laptop and remove the memory I put in it so I can go into the Apple Store and play "don't ask don't tell" about the fact that I actually use the thing, because the "geniuses" are instructed to deny service by any means necessary including mockery and insinuations of sabotage. If I have any luck, they'll agree to fix it instead of declaring that I must have thrown it off the back of a horse because my wrist sweat corroded the unobtainium finish.

I'm tired of broken stuff. Especially when it's stuff I need to survive, like wheels on my car or the only tool of my trade, and especially when it's still in its prime and way before any problems are "expected."

Grump!

Succulent spice-rubbed steak, sugar cured bacon, crispy onions, Roma tomatoes and yellow onionsi with our delicious, smooth creamy garlic sauce.

What dish is being described by the advertiser?

( click here to find out! )

Today I had to submit a financial form to the office. I work remotely, so I couldn't just fill it out and drop it by the finance person's office. The question was: how to get it there?

The form was an Acrobat PDF. Nowadays, many of these can be filled out as forms onscreen and then printed or emailed or faxed, making them easy to fill out and easy to read. Not this one. So the problem was: how to get it to the office without driving 50 miles in heavy traffic?

As I realized what was necessary, a tear rolled down my cheek.

I printed out the document and filled out both pages in black pen. Then I took them to the scanner/printer device at the other computer. I scanned each one in, which had to be done separately. The first go scanning them in greyscale produced an illegible grey smudge like a 1980s drugstore copy machine. I redid it at 48-bit RGB color and the greyscale document came out right. What the...?

Now I had two scanned-in .PDF documents, each one half of the previous .PDF document. I used Adobe Acrobat Pro to combine these into one document so that I could send it as one fax.

Now it was time to fax. This involved connecting to the other computer and using its modem as a fax printer. It should be simple, but it rarely works the first time. It's never clear how to find the modem/fax/printer in the first place. Decisions about long-distance prefixes and area codes have to made by trial and error. Feedback from the computer sending the fax is almost nonexistent. To make the whole thing perfect, I was doing all of this over a wireless network.

Because of these things, the promise of faxing over the network with ease is a cruel lie. I walked back and forth at a ratio of five times per page trying to see the status of my fax, hear the fax modem dialing, figure out if it had been sent, etc. The first go was a failure because I'd been given the wrong fax number. The second try vanished ambiguously from my computer, but showed as "sent, okay" on the machine actually attached to the fax modem.

I decided that it had been sent, and fired off an email to the recipient, because of course anything can and will go wrong with the fax on the other end: paper jam, paper loss, toner failure, and inexplicable failure to receive a document or notify anyone that a problem has occurred.

Finally I sat down with relief to do some actual work. This was not to be. From the other room, I could hear an insistent beeping. Perhaps the fax modem hadn't hung up? Sometimes they decide to stay on the line and one has to manually kill the connection.

I went into the other room to find the fax modem trying manfully to send the first fax, the one with the wrong number. I called up the dialog window to see fax jobs and deleted it. I went back to my desk. Three minutes later the beeping started. I marched into the other room and once again deleted the job. This time I stayed and watched. The same thing happened three more times.

Looking at other system preferences in desperation, I had to unlock one with my administrator password. A light suddenly shone upon me, and I saw the problem. Administrator privileges were required to remove a fax job. Sure enough, after I'd proved I was entitled, the fax job stayed removed. The system never told me that I wasn't permitted to kill the bad fax without admin privileges: it just cheerfully removed and reinstated the bad fax job, forever.

Now I'm back at my desk, waiting for the email saying the fax was never received.

If anyone has extra peacock plume pens and pots of India ink, I'd be grateful for a loan. I have parchment and papyrus already.

(former head of the Humane Society, Michael Fox, once said in a conversation with Caroline:) We humans have far more in common socially with wolves than we do with apes, and that wolves don’t determine leadership based on dominance, but on charisma. And in wolf culture, charisma is measured by who initiates play best. Not just play, initiates “let’s go hunting,” etc. as well, but “play” is at the top of the list. And we can tell the wolf leader within ten days of birth, because it’s the pup with the lowest resting heart-beat. The calmest and the most imaginatively dynamic (what late ally Kurt Vonnegut would have called “the wampeter,”) – now, that’s a leadership criterion for which I could root. Especially if we syncretize it with goose leadership: the lead goose always rotates. The charismatic wise wolf part of ourselves passes the baton to teammates, as we all circulate between back-stage and on-stage.

http://www.coyotenetworknews.com/

It's... full of dumb...

The best newspaper in the world, the Weekly World News, is inexplicably shutting down both its print and Web publications.

It's probably just about money, but I wonder if they uncovered the real truth about the aliens?

The security "expert" who ran amok on the O'Reilly show about lesbian gangs forcing children into the "homosexual lifestyle" was forced to issue a retraction on his site, which is called rod007.com and sounds like a gay porn flick. His response manages to retain the crazy (lesbian gangs? what the...) but weasels out of the extreme crazy. He also of course links to a nutcase racist hate mail he received in order to show how unpleasant his enemies are and of course reveals the guy's email address so everyone can dogpile on him. Smooth. The text is here since he will no doubt remove it from his site as soon as he can:

Contact Rod Wheeler: Info@Rod007.com

Clarification and apology:

First of all, let me thank you for your feedback surrounding the O'Reilly Factor discussion on Lesbian Gangs. I received several e-mails from viewers, some positive and some negative, offering comments and constructive criticisms. Some of the e-mails I received were threatening and simply hostile. Click here for a sample e-mail I received from one viewer.

During the O’Reilly Factor segment on June 21st, while engaged in a discussion on Lesbian gangs, I inadvertently stated that gang members carry pistols that are painted pink and call themselves the "Pink Pistol Packing Group." I was not referring to the gay rights group "Pink Pistols" who advocates for the lawful rights of gays to carry weapons for protection. Further, I mentioned that there are "over 150 of these gangs" in the greater Washington DC area. What I actually meant is that there are over 150 gangs in the Washington DC area, some of which are in fact lesbian gangs. Lastly, I mentioned in the segment that there is this "national epidemic" of lesbian gangs. A better choice of words would have been to say that there is a growing concern nationally, and especially in major urban areas, of increased gang activity, which includes some lesbian gang activity.

I apologize for any misunderstanding this may have caused.

Sincerely,

Rod Wheeler

Matt Davis, in the online car mag Winding Road, re: the new Audi S5:

"Audi is impetuously tearing open its sensible shirt and flashing its formidable man breasts."

But the good news is that "Allergan is processing your injection."

It's a sad old world when that chunk of doublespeak is good news, I gotta say.