Personal Musings category archive

It is difficult to type with a cat on your lap.

I commend the Telemarketing Firm whose CallerID says “Telemarketer.”

I’m still not answering the call, but I appreciate the honesty.

Somehow, “Willis Tower” just doesn’t have any ring to it.

Having worked in a complaint department, I have nothing against using standard replies to common complaints. There really are only so many ways to say that “We’re sorry that the train was [late, broken, crowded, going north instead of south–it was awfully hard not to send the “why didn’t you listen to the announcements bozo?” letter to those folks].”

The form letter, though, should match the letter to which it responds. Don’t send the broken air conditioning letter to the I-didn’t-like-the-mustard guy.

So when I notify eBay of a phishing attempt with the subject line, “phishing attempt,” they should respond with something more on point than this:

Thanks for forwarding the suspicious message you received. The email you reported did not come from PayPal or eBay. It was a fake, often called a “spoof” or “phishing” email. (That’s “phishing,” as in “fishing” for personal information.) Our security teams are working to disable any websites it links to.

I knew it was a phishing attempt, for Pete’s sake. That’s why I sent it to you. A simple “thanks for your report” would have been fine. Actually, nothing would have been fine. But a tutorial in elementary how-to-spot-a-phishing-attempt was a bit–er–under the top.

(Ebay’s lame automated responses to the contrary, it’s a good idea to forward such stuff to them at spoof@ebay.com. They do compile the reports and try to get the sources shut down.)

The dogs bark to go out.

I open the door.

I say, “Don’t come back.”

They go out and they always come back.

What am I doing wrong?

I love numbers that end in three zeroes.

I hope that this is merely the first cohort.

The hotel I’m at, in a small town in the country, has 52 rooms. And six rooms rented. I have a wing to myself.

Granting that it’s the off season (most of their business are vacation travellers breaking their trips to Myrtle Beach and points south) and a competitor (Holiday Inn Express, yecchh) has opened down the street, making two hotels in a one-half-hotel town, but even so . . . .

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How can I watch my Law and Order reruns when the location of the network port in this hotel makes it almost impossible to see the tee vee?

This means that historians and journalists will have to do work the old fashioned way: by actually talking to carbon-based life forms, going to archives and libraries, and looking at stuff that they can touch and feel and hold. Because there is a world outside of Google:

The problem, researchers discovered, was that Google has had trouble reformatting the newspaper images and gaining rights to display some of the older publications. It has, at least, temporarily removed some of the archives from public view.

There is an idealized view of the Web that sees it as a storehouse of human knowledge, and in the sense of the breadth of what I can find with a random Google search, this is true.

But for all its openness, the Web has proven to be a leaky vessel for historical preservation, with much of its treasure trove lost in a maze of altered Web pages, broken links and deleted sites.

As much as I appreciate and enjoy the richness of the inner tubes, from email to Usenet to the World Wide Web, and as much fun as I have had messing about in that world, I try to remember that there once was and still is a world that exists outside of an ethernet cable.

Anyone whose horizon stops at the edge of a screen lives a small life indeed.

Movies that aren’t worth watching aren’t worth renting.

Blockbuster Inc., the world’s largest movie-rental chain, hired the law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP to explore a possible bankruptcy filing, a person familiar with the situation said. Blockbuster fell as much as 86 percent yesterday before trading was halted.

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I want think that this explains my problems.

But, naaaaaah.

The Leftie Blogoshere, though it is a relatively small self-contained place overlapping the left side of the main stream, has made it okay to be a “liberal” again through its aggressive willingness to describe itself as, well, “liberal.”

The spectacular crash-and-burn failure of Republicanism has, no doubt, helped.

There is really no point to cleaning the house until the snow melts, now, is there?

Why you shouldn’t talk politics at a family dinner.

One becomes certain that the Department of Homeland Security’s (which should never have been created and was one, maybe the only, thing Bush was right about and Democrats were wrong about–and should have been named the Department of Domestic Security if it had to be) stupid color-coded terror alert system, which was always directed more to promoting the fear that Bushism thrived on than at providing useful information, is on the way out when it becomes the subject of a poll at Parade dot com.

R. I. P. Paul Harvey.

In the olden days, I used to listen to him on WAMU-AM, which used to be one of the best radio stations in the country. (Now it’s just another wingnut talker).

He never let a fact stand in the way of a good story in his Rest of the Story feature.

Addendum:

Harry Shearer has an appreciation, starting about 30 minutes into the show.

I am completely and thoroughly convinced that all the Barack Obama birth certificate kerfuffle wouldn’t be going on if the man were pink like me.

Field Negro lays it out.

If my insurance was with an incompetent, bankrupt company, I’d look elsewhere also.

(The good news is that none of my insurance companies are in the news.)

When I was 13, I was conservative too, like this young ‘un.

All the white folks around me considered themselves conservative, and, ultimately, Goldwater swept the county.

Why? They were horribly afraid that the evil Democrats were going to end Our Way of Life: Jim Crow segregation. There was other reasons also, but that was the the main one. And, remember, this was in a part of the South where the outward trappings of segregation were nowhere near as brutal as they were in parts of the Deep South.

What happened?

Answer below the Fold