February 21, 2007: Preparing for the Cricket World Cup

Today is a busy maintenance day around our apartment. The exterminators will be in to do their usual preventative stuff. But the big news is that the closet door guys are coming in to take a look at the hall closets that do not close. We have been putting up with that annoyance for six whole months now! And it isn’t just us. Apparently it is a lot of people and it was supposed to have been taken care of right as we moved in. Six months is way too long to have pushed off dealing with such a simple problem.

Winter broke today and it is very warm here. Very warm indeed. The Weather Channel says that it is currently over fifty degrees here! That is quite the change from the arctic temperatures and feet of snow piled up in Frankfort that we experienced all weekend.

Half a dozen of the guys from the office went out for some curry for lunch today.  While we were there we got to talking about the Cricket World Cup which everyone was really exciting about.  The cup competition begins very soon and is, for the US readers, an actual world cup played for by countries from all over the world and is not a fake international competition run by a company controlling each of the teams.  This is like the Football (aka Soccer) World Cup but the Cricket World Cup is skewed more towards countries that were still associated more closely with the British empire more recently than the United States and Canada who have been independent enough long enough to not really play the game.  Few Americans even know what cricket is.  Probably under one percent of the population if I was to guess.

All of the guys at work are very excited about the cup and several people are getting the satellite feeds of the matches which is extremely expensive.  It was brought up that I am a bit of a hi-fi and home theatre specialist and so everyone wanted to know what I thought should be done for a big powerful Cricket watching system.

A group of us left the office this afternoon to head down to Greenbrook to do some stereo shopping.  The person who is hosting the major “office” Cricket theatre ended up picking up a pair of B+W speakers and tomorrow is planning to get a new Marantz receiver to power them.  Next week I am going down to his house to help set up the theatre and to start painting the wall to get ready for a new projector.   So much of the afternoon was spent dealing with that.  By the time that everyone returned to the office it was almost time to head for home.

I was really tired when I got home tonight after barely sleeping at all last night.  I did a little work online and then headed to bed quite early.  Oreo was exhausted too and came right to bed with me and left Dominica in the living room watching the third series of Angel which I would like to see but have just been either too busy or too tired to watch very much of.

My schedule is changed this week and I am going into the office tomorrow but will be working from home on Friday instead.  That will be really handy for getting out of the office early and getting up to Geneseo as soon as Dominica is able to get home from work which will be extra early as she does not have to drive to Wallington to pick up Oreo.

Tim Hardaway – Reposted from The Dilbert Blog

This post was originally written (and still is) by Scott Adams over at The Dilbert Blog which everyone should read because it is thought provoking even if you don’t agree with Scott which is tough because no one is quite sure what his position is other than it is fun to get people to argue. He felt the need to pull this post after the slam of commenters getting really nasty about it but I didn’t want the post to be lost to the annals of history so I am reposting it here and hopefully he won’t mind since he won’t have to deal with the spam. I grabbed the post from the Google cache the moment he said that he had deleted the post. I wanted this post to continue to exist because I am rather against blanket hatred (specific hatred isn’t so hot either but at least it might have a purpose) and I am not so fond of the NBA so I like when its spokespeople do a bad job. So without further ado…

Are you following the story of ex-NBA player Tim Hardaway’s public statement that he hates gay people? This is good news for gays. When Tim Hardaway decides to hate you, it’s time to celebrate. I want Tim Hardaway to hate me too. This post should help.Years ago, I used to watch Tim Hardaway play for my local team, the Golden State Warriors. He single-handedly ruined my love of basketball. As a point guard, he had two noteworthy skills:

1. A great crossover dribble
2. The ability to do something stupid in the last 10 seconds to lose almost every close game.

Tim never seemed to notice that when he took the last shot in a tight game, his team almost always lost. Now, just to be clear – there’s nothing wrong with being a poor clutch shooter, unless you also happen to be the starting point guard, and it never occurs to you that passing to another player might work.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Hardaway ruined my love of basketball. That’s literally true. I didn’t mind rooting for a team with a bad record, but I couldn’t cheer for stupidity. I gave up on the Warriors and never regained my interest.So when Hardaway said on the radio that he hates gay people, I think he was surprised that it caused a problem. He’s not good at pattern recognition. I’ll bet he spent the first week of the shit storm just shaking his head and muttering, “I didn’t see THAT coming.”

And did I mention that Hardaway was scheduled to do some public appearances for the NBA during All-Star week in Las Vegas? Apparently it never occurred to him that announcing a deep hatred for a portion of your fan base and advertisers would be bad for business. More muttering, “I didn’t see THAT coming.”

But my favorite part of the story is that Hardaway apparently never noticed that he’s African-American. Or maybe he never realized that enthusiastically promoting bigotry isn’t a good idea if you’re a member of a persecuted minority. Either way, it’s not the sort of thing that gets you into Mensa.

The great irony of this story is that millions of people probably had the same first reaction to his announced hatred of gays: “He’s probably gay.” I doubt there’s any statistical validity to the notion that the biggest gay-haters in the world are closeted gays themselves. But lots of people believe it. So Tim Hardaway managed to insult gays while simultaneously planting the suggestion in millions of minds that he might be one.

Does he hate me yet? – Scott Adams of The Dilbert Blog

MPAA Movie Rating Scam

I have long been upset with the MPAA and their movie rating system (you know, G, PG, PG-13, R, etc.)  They are a private company set up to support the movie industry and they answer to no one.  They are unmonitored and very secretive.  I have never understood why movies are given a useless blanket rating and not rated in areas so that parents (or direct viewers) could make their own decisions of what they were concerned about seeing (some people don’t care if they see violence or suspense but don’t want to see nudity or someone might not be as concerned about language as someone else but might be concerned about drug use, etc.)  I have often felt that there are many PG movies that are very inappropriate for the majority of children and plenty of R movies with hardly anything wrong at all.

Take Evil Dead for example.  If I was a rater or a parent deciding if my kids could watch that movie I would have given it a PG rating.  Sure there is “blood” but it is SO fake and almost never human blood just “blood” like the house walls bleeding.  No amount of “wood and plaster blood”, in my opinion, should ever take a movie over PG.  What is wrong with red liquid running out of wood?  They didn’t even imply that it was human blood.  Nothing of the sort.  Just a haunted house with walls that bled.  Oh no, don’t let your kids see that!  I guess a hospital documentary would be NC-17 then.  Even if it was just shots of people using ketchup in the cafeteria.

Wil Wheaton has a review today of This Film is Not Yet Rated.  It is a good, short article and I think that anyone who ever uses the MPAA rating (I do not) should read it before relying on such a system.  If you really want to take a stand against the MPAA you can simply do what I do and never go to movie theatres.  The MPAA rating is mostly only used there and you can voice your opinion pretty strongly with your pocketbook.

February 20, 2007: Mardi Gras

Many of you know that autism, asperger syndrome and autism spectrum disorders tend to get followed rather closely around here. Today it was announced that scientist in New Jersey may have identified the metabolic processes that result in autism and are proposing a simple method of combating it. This is a long way from finding a “cure” and, I am sure, that many with autism spectrum disorder will be reluctant to be involved in anything that might remove the “disease.” For people with severe autism this is, we hope, a major breakthrough but the fear will be that it could be forcibly applied to anyone that falls outside of an arbitrary range of “normal” for fatty acid metabolic states. Many people that I know would be candidates for ASD testing as my industry has become famous for being a stomping ground of those with asperger syndrome. Asperger syndrome is often called “geek syndrome” and is generally associated with the types of mental behaviour that allow people to excel in highly technical careers such as IT, computer science, etc. where broad knowledge basis and the ability to draw conclusions from across many disciplines quickly is a major asset.

Today is the beginning of Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras is literally Fat Tuesday but in English the day is often called Shrove Tuesday. It is the final day of the Catholic Carnival.

Francesca, the Texan Guitar Hero, reports that she still plays Guitar Hero II every single day. She has completed the game on medium and is attempting hard now. She is getting really good value for that game even considering that it is about $80. That reminds me that I need to play some DDR when I get home.

The day just flew by today. It was almost time to head home before I even realized that I had been at work all day. Long weekends make the work days seem so much shorter. And this week is just a four day work week which is very cool after having a snow day last week. I only have a two day stretch in the office today and tomorrow and then work from home on Thursday. We will be driving to Geneseo this weekend to do more packing and moving and to celebrate my thirty-first birthday. I am getting old fast! How did this happen?

I got stuck at work rather late tonight and didn’t get to leave the office until after seven.  Much later than I had planned.  But I got a lot of work done.  I got home and spent the evening sitting a the computer getting more work done.  Then it was off to bed.

I ended up having insomnia and watched Lord of War which I really enjoyed.  That took me up to midnight.  I didn’t fall asleep until almost two in the morning!

February 19, 2007

Presidents Day.  One of the most conflicted holidays in America.  Today we celebrate one man who fought hard to maintain his right to maintain slaves and another man who stood up to the nation and freed the slaves.  Or we could look at it as a celebration of the man who fought for our nation and the man who made it worth having fought for in the first place.  Too bad they did it in the wrong order.  Had Lincoln been alive in 1770 for the Boston Massacre (and the right age, involved in politics, in the right place at the right time, etc.) maybe he would have made abolishing slavery a primary tenant for the war against England.  But we just had the Virginians fighting a silly war over taxes and tariffs.  We could have had one great war fighting for ethics and the good of mankind.  But instead we had a war over money and then, many years later, a massive internal war to fix the problems from the first one.  How sad.

Even if we disregard the cost to human life the economic impact of inefficient slave labour and the vacuum of the workforce created by forcing a significant portion of the population to work in the world’s least efficient system while needing a large number of slave drivers doing a completely economically worthless job to force the first group to work inefficiently while industry all over the country was hungry for labourers had a likely devastating effect on the financial power of our nation.  Had we not needed the Civil War imagine what five extra years of non-war would have done for our young nation!  And imagine what ninety years of a larger and more efficient work force would have done for us!  And imagine how much more powerful we would have been in the War of 1812!  As it was we almost lost.  We took a pretty big risk on that one.

Dominica and I hung around in Frankfort with Min’s mom until just after five in the afternoon.  She is still in a lot of pain and isn’t scheduled to have the surgery to have her left wrist reconstructed until Thursday of this week.  She is going to need multiple pins and a titanium plate to keep her wrist together.  Until then she just has her wrist in a wrap and in a sling to keep it as immobile as possible.  It is really hard for her to do anything including just watching television as nothing is comfortable.

Oreo and Dexter had a good time hanging out and playing together.  Boston Terriers are just so cute in groups!

The drive home went quickly and easily.  We hit almost no slowed traffic and were back into Newark around nine in the evening.  Dominica and I took it easy and just watched a little Are You Being Served? before going to bed.  Oreo was very glad to be home.