Well, a little clean-up and follow-through is in order before I begin with the main exposition.
First, I had to stop by the Aspen Hill Home Depot to pick up a few things. (At the Georgia Avenue entrance were 40 or so foreign day-laborers, an actual busload.)
I should mention that the elegantly clean-and-simple and inexpensive floor lamps were all sold out, but there should be an order coming in on Thursday. The "SKU" or stock number for those is 398-505. Also out of stock, SKU 401-900, the "A19 form factor" 13W LED light bulbs that emit the same amount of light as the 60-watt A19 (standard) incandescent light bulbs they are designed to replace. Getting the same amount of light for a bit less than a quarter of the energy costs is worth a lot to some people, so I don't mind paying nearly $25.00 for a lighting unit estimated to last 40,000 hours at that rate of consumption. It's very eco-friendly, good for the planet, fights Global Warming, and creates jobs.
Or, as someone has been overheard to say -- and evidently the opinion is widely shared since there's none of those in stock today but there were plenty before I last posted about Home Depot's LED lighting section -- "He may be batshit crazy, but he damn sure knows a good deal when he sees one."
It all depends on how you define "batshit crazy", I guess.
Moving right along, I guess I have some readers in the Spanish-language community. Some guy walking past said something to the effect of "that guy say he going to boicot todos la Raza", which isn't actually true. I'm only "en boicot" of the ones who read my writing, and pass along crappy translations or outright lies to their compadres, instigating them to violence. Oh, and the violent ones themselves I also boicot (boycott) and so should everyone else to the degree it's possible. Violence has no place in the workplace or business storefronts. But some people find this hard to understand.
I remember sitting around talking with my Tejano security-guard friend, back at a day-laborer center in Austin, Texas, back in maybe early 1994 or so. A "Tejano" is a native Texan, meaning that when the Spanish came and claimed all of that land for the Royal Court of Spain, the Tejanos were there listening to them, wondering what these weird pale people were going on about. They were there when Generalissimo Santa Ana got his ass kicked by the new Texas Republic and the were there when the Civil War raged and Texas was inducted into the Union. They're still there, living on the north side of the "Rio Bravo del Norte" as the Mexicans name the Rio Grande. Nobody has suffered more than the Tejanos, from the invasion of countless millions of illegal aliens who came with nothing and steal anything along the way that they can pry loose and carry away with them. My Tejano friend told me all of this, and more. Although they are ethnically the same people, lots of Tejanos despise actual Mexicans mostly because of cultural differences rooted in nationality and different political/legal systems.
One day, this ideologically seriously-affected "organizer" social worker woman was walking past us, and my Tejano friend -- who was very large and also had a gun and nightstick -- said, "you know, if you want a Mexican to try to fight you, all you have to do is to tell them that it is well known that they don't have any impulse control".
The woman heard this, as was intended, and she halted, turned and came over, and went off, totally furious. Her harangue lasted almost 5 minutes, in extremely rapid and outraged Espa~ol. Finally she ran out of breath and/or things to say. The Tejano security-guard said something to her in Spanish, calm and slow, very laconic in the Texas tradition. The woman actually turned pale, stood as still as a statue, trembling, for almost a minute, and then she turned and walked away. "What did you tell her, man?" I asked.
"Heh," he laughed, "I told her that if it weren't true she wouldn't have gone on and on like that, and also to stop trespassing here if she's going to be yelling at people. And additionally that if she had any sense of subtlety we wouldn't be at this impasse."
Moving right along again, with a segue nobody will think is too brief and lacking in subtlety (wouldn't want to challenge anyone's impulse control) I have to mention that while at Home Depot, I bought a product called a "Victor Flea Trap". Basically, it's a Roach Motel concept glue trap, with a small incandescent bulb to provide heat to attract fleas to glue.
So how did I wind up with a Flea Problem? Short answer, Squirrels.
This year, the trees produced almost no acorns or any of the other nuts that squirrels (and deer, and other animals) eat. So, if the squirrels aren't going to starve, I am going to have to feed them. Since I have a bird-feeder, the squirrels will be eating the bird-food anyway, so I have been buying peanuts to feed the squirrels. The birds are hungry enough -- and sufficiently like peanuts in addition to sunflower-seeds -- so as to come fairly close to beg for treats. The squirrels, most of them, are practically shameless in their begging.
Part of this is due to the fact that they are really quite intelligent, and if they can sit up pretty and have people throw food at them, they understand that this is easier than working hard to look for nuts when there aren't any nuts and won't be any nuts this year. Locally, if they aren't being fed by people, intentionally or unintentionally, this is Squirrel Famine Territory. These squirrels have incentive to change their behavior.
The squirrels have also figured out that the squirrel who is most close to the person with the peanuts is the squirrel who will probably get the peanuts, and so they jostle for position. Eventually, they figure out that if they are busy fighting and chasing each other, the squirrels who are calm and patient are the ones who get the nuts.
Now, I am not the only person who hand-feeds the squirrels, nor is this the first year that they've had to be hand-fed. I don't actually hand them the nuts, I just throw them on the ground, usually a few feet away.
It's important to remember, though, that even in deep midwinter -- and this is not a "deep" midwinter -- squirrels have fleas, and fleas can jump more than a few feet.
I am lucky in that I am not one of those people who is sensitized to flea-excrement, so I don't get these big welts and instant pain when they bite, shit, and jump away. I am unlucky in that I do not much notice fleas until quite a few of them have jumped from the squirrel to me, to have me bring them inside where it is nice and warm and the perfect place to reproduce by the hundreds of thousands... all of which seem to want to latch on to me when I try to sleep. I'm the only warm-blooded thing in this house, so where else can they go?
Fleas are easy enough to kill. Ortho Total Flea Killer is one of the best solutions, as it has some sort of hormone that doesn't just kill the adults, it causes the larvae to grow wrong, something to do with not growing a new skin before they molt out of the old ones. Now that's gotta hurt, but for fleas, I don't mind.
But in the meanwhile, you don't want to spray too much of this where you sleep or eat, so I'm using the flea-trap to clean up those areas while the poison and hormones work in other places.
Because of the fleas, I don't want the squirrels to come too close. I also don't want them far enough away to forget, that they need to behave as I wish, for them to be fed.
So, by tossing peanuts almost as far as I can throw them with an easy gesture, I can have five or six squirrels sitting in a semi-circle, each with a peanut landing right in front of them at just about the time they finish the last one. This keeps the squirrels from squabbling and it also keeps them in good order. Like rats, squirrels are easy to train, and like rats, they are too smart to stay out of trouble. They like to think themselves into a jam. (So call me a squirrel, you nuts.)
Some of the squirrels don't want to wait, or they haven't figured out that all they have to do is sit in one spot every few hours, to get fed. These troublesome squirrels will walk right past the attentive and well-behaved patient squirrels, and just swarm up the pole to the bird-feeder, as bold as you please.
I should mention that the patient and well-behaved squirrels are all quite fat, and the misbehaving ones have that lean and hungry look. I trust not such squirrels. Hence the name "Brutus".
Brutus has been chased off of the bird-feeder, had hacky-sack balls thrown (gently) at him, and is getting more bold by the day.
My intention is to see that those squirrels which are the best-behaved and most attentive will be the ones who have the most and healthiest squirrel pups. I am not sure what to do with Brutus, though. Smaller and thinner than the others, he may still be a juvenile, or very young adult, while the others are the veterans of several winters. One of them is certainly about 3-to-4 years old. Sadly, despite being very cautious around motor vehicles and being very polite as a beggar, she is inept at making nests and seems unlikely to successfully reproduce. Too bad. She could have been the ancestress of a whole new line of domesticated squirrel.
Why, one may rightly ask, would one want domesticated squirrels? This is a very good question, and not merely from the standpoint of wondering who would want a pet that has huge and very sharp teeth, is very fast, and is almost astonishingly strong for a mammal of that size? Well, don't have them as pets, then, if that bothers you. Perhaps they could be trained to carry small objects to hard-to-reach places. For example, pulling a small line or wire from one point to another, by going from tree to tree. Giving alarm at trespassers in the same way they give alarms at foxes and cats. Tormenting guard dogs. Who knows?
But first, I have to work out the bugs of getting them to understand that they only get paid (in peanuts) when they do as they are required to do. Stealing from the bird-feeder is not to be allowed. Interestingly, some of the older squirrels harass the younger squirrels when they start climbing up to the bird-feeder. It's like I am witnessing the Squirrelly Wrath of elders trying to convince the youngster to not be a trouble-maker.
One has to wonder if there are any additional lessons here.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Saturday, Sanity, and Lacks Thereof, Part Whatever
It's time once again to demonstrate that not only do I take the advice of the Washington Post printed horoscope, but I also am afflicted by Perseveration and Poverty of Thought. Maybe.
There's a really well-done article on Wikipedia about Thought Process, as a subset of their article on Mental Status Examination... which I should probably seek at the nearest accredited professional's office. However, that would cost money, and endlessly posting to Blogger about my trivial little problems, and relentless woolgathering and pointless ruminations, costs nothing at all. Besides, if I went to spill my guts to a psychiatrist, the local stalker cult would just break into the files room and steal all of the paperwork and pass out copies to anyone they thought to be in need of a good laugh. So, why not protect the sanctity of professional records facilities while giving up the cheese for free.
Today's Post horoscope suggests that I should enlighten the readership as to exactly what it is that is making me mad enough to suggest that it won't take much more harassment for me to make a final decision to unload my poor dead mother's house -- my home of 48 years where I was raised and have lived most of my life -- at a 20-percent discount. Well, the horoscope wasn't exactly that specific, it was in fact as vague as are most horoscopes. Like any horoscope, you're supposed to read into it what you will, and that's what I've done.
The Astute Reader will remember that long ago I was one of the first to predict both the scale and scope -- and even I was under-estimating by almost an order of magnitude -- of the global recession that would result when the global Housing Bubble collapsed. Hey, I saw Maria Bartiromo mentioning on CNBC talking about an "overhang" or backlog of unsold new housing, back in October 2007, and simply put the facts together and followed them to the inescapable conclusion.
I'm fairly good at putting facts together, and parsing out the chain of consequence to the bitter end. (And of course, I was at the time blissfully unaware of such things as "commoditized debt obligation" and "credit default swaps", hence the underestimation by a full order of magnitude, at least.)
Yet I can still wonder about the knock-on effects of me dumping a house at 80-percent of value. Let's see. Less recordation tax goes to the county, I guess, and less to the State as they can base their tax on assessment, but assessment bases on actual sale prices. Other nearby houses of comparable design and siting would also see a decline in value assessed, as the market would be thinking that "a thing is worth what a thing will bring in a sale" and that what one thing is worth, a nearly identical thing is worth the same. So that's decreases in County and State taxes not on just one property, but on a whole neighborhood as all nearby houses in that neighborhood are suddenly revalued by the market, marked down 20-percent in reasonable first asking price.
Look, there's no reason at all that this wouldn't happen. After all, this zip-code is the second highest in the County for foreclosures, houses are on distress sales everywhere, and almost everyone that bought or refinanced anytime since about 2003 -- when the bubble really began hereabouts mostly due to the local efforts of one Alma Preciado -- is going to be Deeply Underwater already and only the moreso if single-family detached residential homes all across Aspen Hill get devalued 20-percent.
Now, at the risk of seeming perhaps just a trifle mischievous -- if not quite an outright scheming evil bastard (more on those, later) -- allow me to ask a few questions regarding strategy in the face of such a possibility.
1. As hard as it is to sell a place here now, how hard would it be if suddenly assessments dropped by 20-percent? You'd have to drop your asking price by 20-percent for starters and so would everyone else. To remain even more competitive, you might have to drop your asking price by 25 or 35 percent. And to remain competitive, so would everyone else.
2. If you're going to have to drop your price by genuinely outrageous percentages, doesn't it make sense to do it first before everyone else does just so that you'll be ahead of the curve and not be lost in the pack? Seriously: whoever waits the longest loses worst. Don't ever forget that.
3. Shouldn't you contact your Realtor first thing Monday, and make sure you're ready to be on the winning side, first on your block? Or do you want to put it off and be a LOSER.
But you out there are all too smart for me, and you can see right through all of this. It's just that wackjob Thomas Hardman tying to pull a fast one. He's so crazy, you tell yourself, that we can instantly see through his deception! He wants us to run right out and sell in a panic, the assessments drop like a stone through water, he can stay where he is and pay 20-percent less taxes! And you're telling yourself you're not going to play that game.
Well, that's because you're so smart and see right through me.
Thus, you'll be the one left holding the bag when other people don't see right through me. They'll be putting their houses on the market as fast as they can, not wanting to get stuck out there, deeper underwater, lost in the pack, last to market in a shrinking game, LOSERS. And now that you think about it, you're too smart -- aren't you? -- to get stuck in that position.
But whether you're smarter than me (or not) and see through my deception (or not) or get lost on multiple layers of trying to think it all through or simply jump to the right conclusion (and how will you know until the game is all over?), both of those threads depend on Thomas Hardman being a crazy bullshitter. If I actually dump the house at 20-percent below market, all of your being smarter (or not) is obviated by you guessing wrong about the sincerity of my stated intentions.
In any case, I have two older sisters, who can afford much better lawyers than I can, and if my mom's final codicil of the will gets broken in Probate, the house has to be sold as fast as possible. Leaving out of the equation the fact that my sisters will want their shares as fast as possible, the lawyers will want their pounds of flesh, so to speak, and will insist on an even faster sale... which means even further reductions in price, way out past my proposed 20-percent reduction. The way that you, the concerned neighbors, can best assure that this last scenario dumps a half-price house into your neighborhood market is this: in any way give some evidence that either I am too mentally incompetent to own a house, or that my mother was too mentally incompetent to bequeath me one. Um, actually, two.
I should point out a few things here, and then be "moving right along".
First, it is Saturday night, and for about the 160th Saturday night in a row, I am sitting at home and not going anywhere. There are reasons for that other than being a live-in elder-care provider, or being in mourning because I no longer need to provide elder-care.
Secondly, Google has a motto: "Don't Be Evil".
Third, I don't work for Google.
I write.
Probably lots of other people that write, who know that I write, and have seen what has become of me because I write, have flat out abandoned all hope of writing because they don't want to wind up like me.
If you are reading this, you are probably the people that they rightly fear would see to it that they ended up like me.
Of course, they could just go the traditional route, writing in private and trying to publish to the old school press, but that market and industry is damn near dead, but not so dead as the idea of being able to write something that sells (or is widely read) and retain any sort of private life. Hell, look at what happened to JD Salinger.
I tried going that route. I wrote a novel. It was almost original in its day, though if I tried to write it now, people would just yawn and say "ho hum, yet-another tawdry interspecies romance between Mortals and a Supernatural". And so it is.
And how I have suffered for writing it. In the same way that there are lots of illiterate and uncultured people who name the fictional Creature in Ms Shelley's famous novel "Frankenstein" (Frankenstein is the name of the mad scientist who makes his Creature, not the name of the Creature itself), there are people who do not seem to understand that a person who writes a novel about Vampires is not a Vampire, but rather is an Author. Probably Bram Stoker suffered from this classic idiocy, with illiterates and boneheads calling him "Dracula". And probably he also suffered somewhat at the hands of mentally-ill people who couldn't distinguish between the reality of a writer, and his creation in fiction.
Once again I have to point people at one of my short works, Strangers In Town. Call it surrealism, if you will. Or call it me taking the approach that "the best self-therapy is a good self-parody".
My suffering began pretty much as soon as I started writing that first novel, in the late 1980s, and I am now enduring the third generation of abusers as they indoctrinate the fourth generation, as best I can tell.
And here's how it goes, still, to this very day. Much as in Strangers In Town...
I walk into a public place. It could be a grocery store, a department store, a dry-goods store, hell, I have heard it in the frackin' County building on Maryland Avenue in downtown Rockville.
From someone unseen, "hey, it's Count Dracula!" Heads turn. Eyes lock on me for an instant. In recent years, people grab for their txting cellphones.
And then the fun begins. Usually "the fun" is someone sneaking up behind me and "staking" me, jamming something sharp and painful into the back of my neck. Considering that this is almost always timed to occur at the exact instant that cash changes hands, I have been tempted on many occasions to just run screaming out of the door, call a cop, and try to press charges for armed robbery, as in, "I felt a knife prick the back of my neck, and I was afraid and ran away and left my money". I doubt anyone would actually go to jail over this, but I'd love to hear what the perpetrator would have to say to a judge about how and why they were carrying on in this way.
Or someone sneaks up behind me and pours some irritant powder down the back of my shirt collar, to the point where I now very rarely wear shirts with collars. Or someone flings a handful of dust in my face, which usually burns in about the same way salt water burns if you don't wash it off with clean water, down at the beach. But this isn't salt, though it does taste sort of salty. It's not garlic, because I put garlic or garlic salt on my steaks and eggs.
This reminds me of the sort of Fucking Assholes that you see in school or college, trickster bullies dontcha know, who will drive a person to the edge of madness with endless insults and pranks. On the one hand, they can tell people "look look you can do anything to him/her and he/she won't react much", or if the victim reacts violently, they can say "I told you they were violent crazy!"
Remember how that worked back in school, folks? It's the victim, not the harasser, who gets sent to the principal's office and gets detention.
But for me, it's worse. It's widespread to the point of, well, back in the mid-1980s I was harassed endlessly at the main campus of the University of Maryland, by a pretty large subset of the student body, but I tried to convince myself that it was just Hazing, which was totally out of hand at the time in any case.
Then it followed me to work when I was a Federal employee downtown. It followed me into nightclubs, into parks, etc etc. Finally I got the idea that it was going to be following me everywhere I went in this area (DC was pretty small-town in those days, still is in most ways) and I gave up. I bailed out of the region, and it followed me still.
You'd think I would have just killed myself or something -- pretty clearly this was the intention of the harassment, to drive me to suicide, presumably so that a lot of nasty sociopath young-adults could congratulate themselves on their superiority -- but there were rays of hope.
In 1995 or so -- in Austin Texas where I was living in a car parked near a day-laborer center in the hopes of getting some work -- I was woken by something going "thunk" on the roof of my car. A louder "thunk" followed, and then a huge "thump" hit the sidewalk next to the car, a voice said loudly "Stop that right now!" and I sat up wide awake. At about 5:00AM in the morning, some Fraternity Boy types were throwing rocks and a fairly large chunk of concrete off of a parking garage, trying to hit my car. The loud voice was a city cop. He told the frat boys to get the hell gone from there or he was going to run them in, what the hell did they think they were doing. And one of them said, "he thinks he's Count Dracula!"
And the cop said: "No shit. Well, okay then, I am Count Dracula. Now what you wanna do." The frat boys took off as requested.
It's been like that through the years. Yet it seems that a lot of the same frat-boy mentality has been circulating stories even in the locker rooms down at the county police academy, a laughing matter of such hilarity that if a cop shows up to take a complaint from me, they usually can barely keep their amusement (or anger) in check. On the other hand, although I have to shamefully admit to ongoing mental illness probably mostly PTSD/abuse-victim-reaction at this point, there are at least a few cops who may have come from educational backgrounds less hostile to mental-illness than the college football cirriculum. Or perhaps they have friends or relatives who are mentally-ill and wouldn't want their friends and relatives treated with open contempt or abusiveness, and are willing to grant to total strangers what they would want for their friends and relatives at the hands of others. In any case, all of these officers have the ability to examine my spotless arrest record and utter lack of convictions or hospitalizations.
Dealing with other county agencies (formerly with State agencies as well, until the County absorbed all of those functions) has been equally problematic. In perhaps 1996 or so, one agency demanded that I be enrolled in county-provided mental healthcare, including blood testing for proof of medication compliance, before they would let me take advantage of job-training or job-placement services. They then more or less told me to get lost and not come back until I did what they said. They then switched languages to Spanish and were extremely welcoming to the illegal alien who would be receiving taxpayer funded services that I as a citizen would continue to be denied.
If I have any of this much-alleged "racism", that might be where it started, and from which starting point it only ever got worse. My evident dismay and probably evident anger clearly were circulated within the foreign language community to the point where assaults at drive-through windows became so common that I abandoned even trying to eat at such places. Trying to eat at a higher class of restaurant, with comparably foreign staffing, only resulted in a strange new phenomenon: everytime I ate at such a place with such staff, on that night I would wake suddenly from very bad nightmares in a very deep sleep, in a puddle of urine. I stopped eating in such places, and the nightmares and enuresis stopped. Of course, shortly thereafter I developed the posterior-subcapsular cataracts typical of long-term thorazine overdose and wound up on a surgeon's table twice having a doctor cut into my eyes.
My point is, the incredibly annoying and undignified harassment of previous years was ramping up into the realm of potentially life-threatening and certainly debilitating physical damage.
I don't come out of the house much now; there is no reason to do so when my life is at risk. And of course, the scandalmongers, the defamers, the slanderers, all say "he thinks he's dracula so he is hiding from the light".
So, I guess this could keep on and I could dump the house onto the market at 20, 25, 30 or even 50 percent of assessed value... and still walk away with enough money to buy some land in some State where they take slander and defamation seriously, and if you shoot someone for trying to stalk you on your own land, the jury will acquit with the foreman's statement of "he needed killin'".
But is that a victory for the fine people hereabouts?
Wouldn't you rather ease up a little bit now, so you can keep me around longer so you can torment me more later? And, you know, experience the endless joy that is teaching your children to discriminate and hate and destroy people's lives?
There's a really well-done article on Wikipedia about Thought Process, as a subset of their article on Mental Status Examination... which I should probably seek at the nearest accredited professional's office. However, that would cost money, and endlessly posting to Blogger about my trivial little problems, and relentless woolgathering and pointless ruminations, costs nothing at all. Besides, if I went to spill my guts to a psychiatrist, the local stalker cult would just break into the files room and steal all of the paperwork and pass out copies to anyone they thought to be in need of a good laugh. So, why not protect the sanctity of professional records facilities while giving up the cheese for free.
Today's Post horoscope suggests that I should enlighten the readership as to exactly what it is that is making me mad enough to suggest that it won't take much more harassment for me to make a final decision to unload my poor dead mother's house -- my home of 48 years where I was raised and have lived most of my life -- at a 20-percent discount. Well, the horoscope wasn't exactly that specific, it was in fact as vague as are most horoscopes. Like any horoscope, you're supposed to read into it what you will, and that's what I've done.
The Astute Reader will remember that long ago I was one of the first to predict both the scale and scope -- and even I was under-estimating by almost an order of magnitude -- of the global recession that would result when the global Housing Bubble collapsed. Hey, I saw Maria Bartiromo mentioning on CNBC talking about an "overhang" or backlog of unsold new housing, back in October 2007, and simply put the facts together and followed them to the inescapable conclusion.
I'm fairly good at putting facts together, and parsing out the chain of consequence to the bitter end. (And of course, I was at the time blissfully unaware of such things as "commoditized debt obligation" and "credit default swaps", hence the underestimation by a full order of magnitude, at least.)
Yet I can still wonder about the knock-on effects of me dumping a house at 80-percent of value. Let's see. Less recordation tax goes to the county, I guess, and less to the State as they can base their tax on assessment, but assessment bases on actual sale prices. Other nearby houses of comparable design and siting would also see a decline in value assessed, as the market would be thinking that "a thing is worth what a thing will bring in a sale" and that what one thing is worth, a nearly identical thing is worth the same. So that's decreases in County and State taxes not on just one property, but on a whole neighborhood as all nearby houses in that neighborhood are suddenly revalued by the market, marked down 20-percent in reasonable first asking price.
Look, there's no reason at all that this wouldn't happen. After all, this zip-code is the second highest in the County for foreclosures, houses are on distress sales everywhere, and almost everyone that bought or refinanced anytime since about 2003 -- when the bubble really began hereabouts mostly due to the local efforts of one Alma Preciado -- is going to be Deeply Underwater already and only the moreso if single-family detached residential homes all across Aspen Hill get devalued 20-percent.
Now, at the risk of seeming perhaps just a trifle mischievous -- if not quite an outright scheming evil bastard (more on those, later) -- allow me to ask a few questions regarding strategy in the face of such a possibility.
1. As hard as it is to sell a place here now, how hard would it be if suddenly assessments dropped by 20-percent? You'd have to drop your asking price by 20-percent for starters and so would everyone else. To remain even more competitive, you might have to drop your asking price by 25 or 35 percent. And to remain competitive, so would everyone else.
2. If you're going to have to drop your price by genuinely outrageous percentages, doesn't it make sense to do it first before everyone else does just so that you'll be ahead of the curve and not be lost in the pack? Seriously: whoever waits the longest loses worst. Don't ever forget that.
3. Shouldn't you contact your Realtor first thing Monday, and make sure you're ready to be on the winning side, first on your block? Or do you want to put it off and be a LOSER.
But you out there are all too smart for me, and you can see right through all of this. It's just that wackjob Thomas Hardman tying to pull a fast one. He's so crazy, you tell yourself, that we can instantly see through his deception! He wants us to run right out and sell in a panic, the assessments drop like a stone through water, he can stay where he is and pay 20-percent less taxes! And you're telling yourself you're not going to play that game.
Well, that's because you're so smart and see right through me.
Thus, you'll be the one left holding the bag when other people don't see right through me. They'll be putting their houses on the market as fast as they can, not wanting to get stuck out there, deeper underwater, lost in the pack, last to market in a shrinking game, LOSERS. And now that you think about it, you're too smart -- aren't you? -- to get stuck in that position.
But whether you're smarter than me (or not) and see through my deception (or not) or get lost on multiple layers of trying to think it all through or simply jump to the right conclusion (and how will you know until the game is all over?), both of those threads depend on Thomas Hardman being a crazy bullshitter. If I actually dump the house at 20-percent below market, all of your being smarter (or not) is obviated by you guessing wrong about the sincerity of my stated intentions.
In any case, I have two older sisters, who can afford much better lawyers than I can, and if my mom's final codicil of the will gets broken in Probate, the house has to be sold as fast as possible. Leaving out of the equation the fact that my sisters will want their shares as fast as possible, the lawyers will want their pounds of flesh, so to speak, and will insist on an even faster sale... which means even further reductions in price, way out past my proposed 20-percent reduction. The way that you, the concerned neighbors, can best assure that this last scenario dumps a half-price house into your neighborhood market is this: in any way give some evidence that either I am too mentally incompetent to own a house, or that my mother was too mentally incompetent to bequeath me one. Um, actually, two.
I should point out a few things here, and then be "moving right along".
First, it is Saturday night, and for about the 160th Saturday night in a row, I am sitting at home and not going anywhere. There are reasons for that other than being a live-in elder-care provider, or being in mourning because I no longer need to provide elder-care.
Secondly, Google has a motto: "Don't Be Evil".
Third, I don't work for Google.
I write.
Probably lots of other people that write, who know that I write, and have seen what has become of me because I write, have flat out abandoned all hope of writing because they don't want to wind up like me.
If you are reading this, you are probably the people that they rightly fear would see to it that they ended up like me.
Of course, they could just go the traditional route, writing in private and trying to publish to the old school press, but that market and industry is damn near dead, but not so dead as the idea of being able to write something that sells (or is widely read) and retain any sort of private life. Hell, look at what happened to JD Salinger.
I tried going that route. I wrote a novel. It was almost original in its day, though if I tried to write it now, people would just yawn and say "ho hum, yet-another tawdry interspecies romance between Mortals and a Supernatural". And so it is.
And how I have suffered for writing it. In the same way that there are lots of illiterate and uncultured people who name the fictional Creature in Ms Shelley's famous novel "Frankenstein" (Frankenstein is the name of the mad scientist who makes his Creature, not the name of the Creature itself), there are people who do not seem to understand that a person who writes a novel about Vampires is not a Vampire, but rather is an Author. Probably Bram Stoker suffered from this classic idiocy, with illiterates and boneheads calling him "Dracula". And probably he also suffered somewhat at the hands of mentally-ill people who couldn't distinguish between the reality of a writer, and his creation in fiction.
Once again I have to point people at one of my short works, Strangers In Town. Call it surrealism, if you will. Or call it me taking the approach that "the best self-therapy is a good self-parody".
My suffering began pretty much as soon as I started writing that first novel, in the late 1980s, and I am now enduring the third generation of abusers as they indoctrinate the fourth generation, as best I can tell.
And here's how it goes, still, to this very day. Much as in Strangers In Town...
I walk into a public place. It could be a grocery store, a department store, a dry-goods store, hell, I have heard it in the frackin' County building on Maryland Avenue in downtown Rockville.
From someone unseen, "hey, it's Count Dracula!" Heads turn. Eyes lock on me for an instant. In recent years, people grab for their txting cellphones.
And then the fun begins. Usually "the fun" is someone sneaking up behind me and "staking" me, jamming something sharp and painful into the back of my neck. Considering that this is almost always timed to occur at the exact instant that cash changes hands, I have been tempted on many occasions to just run screaming out of the door, call a cop, and try to press charges for armed robbery, as in, "I felt a knife prick the back of my neck, and I was afraid and ran away and left my money". I doubt anyone would actually go to jail over this, but I'd love to hear what the perpetrator would have to say to a judge about how and why they were carrying on in this way.
Or someone sneaks up behind me and pours some irritant powder down the back of my shirt collar, to the point where I now very rarely wear shirts with collars. Or someone flings a handful of dust in my face, which usually burns in about the same way salt water burns if you don't wash it off with clean water, down at the beach. But this isn't salt, though it does taste sort of salty. It's not garlic, because I put garlic or garlic salt on my steaks and eggs.
This reminds me of the sort of Fucking Assholes that you see in school or college, trickster bullies dontcha know, who will drive a person to the edge of madness with endless insults and pranks. On the one hand, they can tell people "look look you can do anything to him/her and he/she won't react much", or if the victim reacts violently, they can say "I told you they were violent crazy!"
Remember how that worked back in school, folks? It's the victim, not the harasser, who gets sent to the principal's office and gets detention.
But for me, it's worse. It's widespread to the point of, well, back in the mid-1980s I was harassed endlessly at the main campus of the University of Maryland, by a pretty large subset of the student body, but I tried to convince myself that it was just Hazing, which was totally out of hand at the time in any case.
Then it followed me to work when I was a Federal employee downtown. It followed me into nightclubs, into parks, etc etc. Finally I got the idea that it was going to be following me everywhere I went in this area (DC was pretty small-town in those days, still is in most ways) and I gave up. I bailed out of the region, and it followed me still.
You'd think I would have just killed myself or something -- pretty clearly this was the intention of the harassment, to drive me to suicide, presumably so that a lot of nasty sociopath young-adults could congratulate themselves on their superiority -- but there were rays of hope.
In 1995 or so -- in Austin Texas where I was living in a car parked near a day-laborer center in the hopes of getting some work -- I was woken by something going "thunk" on the roof of my car. A louder "thunk" followed, and then a huge "thump" hit the sidewalk next to the car, a voice said loudly "Stop that right now!" and I sat up wide awake. At about 5:00AM in the morning, some Fraternity Boy types were throwing rocks and a fairly large chunk of concrete off of a parking garage, trying to hit my car. The loud voice was a city cop. He told the frat boys to get the hell gone from there or he was going to run them in, what the hell did they think they were doing. And one of them said, "he thinks he's Count Dracula!"
And the cop said: "No shit. Well, okay then, I am Count Dracula. Now what you wanna do." The frat boys took off as requested.
It's been like that through the years. Yet it seems that a lot of the same frat-boy mentality has been circulating stories even in the locker rooms down at the county police academy, a laughing matter of such hilarity that if a cop shows up to take a complaint from me, they usually can barely keep their amusement (or anger) in check. On the other hand, although I have to shamefully admit to ongoing mental illness probably mostly PTSD/abuse-victim-reaction at this point, there are at least a few cops who may have come from educational backgrounds less hostile to mental-illness than the college football cirriculum. Or perhaps they have friends or relatives who are mentally-ill and wouldn't want their friends and relatives treated with open contempt or abusiveness, and are willing to grant to total strangers what they would want for their friends and relatives at the hands of others. In any case, all of these officers have the ability to examine my spotless arrest record and utter lack of convictions or hospitalizations.
Dealing with other county agencies (formerly with State agencies as well, until the County absorbed all of those functions) has been equally problematic. In perhaps 1996 or so, one agency demanded that I be enrolled in county-provided mental healthcare, including blood testing for proof of medication compliance, before they would let me take advantage of job-training or job-placement services. They then more or less told me to get lost and not come back until I did what they said. They then switched languages to Spanish and were extremely welcoming to the illegal alien who would be receiving taxpayer funded services that I as a citizen would continue to be denied.
If I have any of this much-alleged "racism", that might be where it started, and from which starting point it only ever got worse. My evident dismay and probably evident anger clearly were circulated within the foreign language community to the point where assaults at drive-through windows became so common that I abandoned even trying to eat at such places. Trying to eat at a higher class of restaurant, with comparably foreign staffing, only resulted in a strange new phenomenon: everytime I ate at such a place with such staff, on that night I would wake suddenly from very bad nightmares in a very deep sleep, in a puddle of urine. I stopped eating in such places, and the nightmares and enuresis stopped. Of course, shortly thereafter I developed the posterior-subcapsular cataracts typical of long-term thorazine overdose and wound up on a surgeon's table twice having a doctor cut into my eyes.
My point is, the incredibly annoying and undignified harassment of previous years was ramping up into the realm of potentially life-threatening and certainly debilitating physical damage.
I don't come out of the house much now; there is no reason to do so when my life is at risk. And of course, the scandalmongers, the defamers, the slanderers, all say "he thinks he's dracula so he is hiding from the light".
So, I guess this could keep on and I could dump the house onto the market at 20, 25, 30 or even 50 percent of assessed value... and still walk away with enough money to buy some land in some State where they take slander and defamation seriously, and if you shoot someone for trying to stalk you on your own land, the jury will acquit with the foreman's statement of "he needed killin'".
But is that a victory for the fine people hereabouts?
Wouldn't you rather ease up a little bit now, so you can keep me around longer so you can torment me more later? And, you know, experience the endless joy that is teaching your children to discriminate and hate and destroy people's lives?
Friday, January 27, 2012
Robot Repair and L.E.D. Lighting; and, A Cautionary Tale
It's been almost four years since I was interviewed by US News and World Report on the subject of my Roomba Discovery.
Hence, it's probably long overdue for me to give a long-term customer review.
When first acquired, we were amazed not only by the novelty of the item, but by the fact that it worked as advertised. We quickly became somewhat dependent on it. For me, the fact that using it meant that my mother would bring in a maid service only once a month rather than once a week. Consider this: at $400, this unit seems expensive. But at $50.00 a visit for a quick once-over vacuuming by the maid service, by saving us from eight uses of the maid service, the robot paid for itself. It would only have to survive once-a-week usage for two months to reach "break even". It lasted for four years.
I never thought I'd live long enough to find myself complaining that my robot is obsolete, but "there you go" and I'm not the sort of person who likes to let things stay broken. Besides, when I was a kid, this was my favorite toy:
As it turns out, the Roomba unit is on its third battery. The original one lasted almost two years, the first mail-order replacement lasted about a month. Having taken a chance and having done some online research first, the second mail-order replacement has thus far lasted four months, under heavy usage. Yet having just bought this new battery, I discovered that the Roomba was not properly cleaning. The dust filter clogged as expected but the particle bin was not filling. This means that the brushes aren't working, and that means that either the motor is inoperative or the gears are worn down.
There are lots of helpful web pages on inspecting and repairing the Roomba. One of them gave me a clue on disassembling it to check the gears in the "brush deck". You have to pull the carapace half off and pop loose the brush deck to get to the gears, but once you've done that, it's only a few minutes work with a jeweler screwdriver to open the gearbox casing. In my case, it was a combination of dirt, grease, and wear that was the problem. The nylon plastic gears had worn down enough so that the motor couldn't transmit power to the brushes. I ordered replacement from the folks who had the best How-To guide, and for only about $50, RobotShop.com shipped me a set of replacement gears. While waiting for delivery, I cleaned out the interior of the Roomba. After assembly, it is now working about the same as it was when we first got it.
While waiting for delivery of the Roomba gears, I decided that it probably wasn't good to be so dependent on one little robot, especially as that little robot was nearly obsolete. Having realized this, in so many words that read like the beginning of some really ancient 1950s science-fiction novel by Lester Del Ray or some such author, I decided that I would like a new vacuum cleaner of the non-robotic kind.
The vacuum cleaner on hand here is an Electrolux canister, which works just about as well as when it was new. However, it was new perhaps 40 years ago, which is a testament to the Electrolux line. I decided to go shop for something more modern, and wound up selecting the Bissell "Rewind Powerhelix".
Sadly, Best Buy did not have one in stock other than the demo unit, and they wouldn't sell me that one. So, I prepaid and they said they'd call me for pickup when it came in. A week later, the call came.
Note: I had to trim out a rather overlong and very unhappy bit about something happening on my way out of the Best Buy in Rockville while picking up my vacuum cleaner. Let's just say "same old stuff" and mutter under our breath about far-reaching gangs of delusional cultists being just goddamn everywhere in this region. The only hint I'll leave right here is that far too many people's minds appear to have been rotted by all of this "Twilight" and "Vampire Diaries" and "Secret Circle" media.
Moving right along, as there are few reasons to leave the house and very many to remain inside, I might as well try and gild my cage, so to speak.
It's also good to be concerned about Global Warming and that sort of thing.
There will of course be an Estate Sale soon, and the majority of the furniture will be sold off. This means that if I want to be able to sit somewhere other than the floor, and see after nightfall, I need to get some things for the house. Right now I am working on lighting and lighting fixtures. Eco-friendly seems to me like the choice to make.
As it turns out, Home Depot carries a fairly large, if workaday, selection of lighting fixtures and lamps and lampstands. Additionally, they have recently expanded their selection of light bulb types and sizes.
As my mother was very frugal (for all of being "Fancy" Pennsylvania Dutch), we had long since mostly changed over from incandescent light bulbs to the compact-florescent bulbs. Yet despite the energy cost savings, these have their own drawbacks, notably the fact that they contain mercury, a hazardous material. Newer high-output light-emitting diode ("LED") bulbs are starting to come on the market, which are designed as swap-out replacements for standard 120 volt AC bulbs.
Home Depot carries their own "EcoSmart" (tm) brand of LED replacement bulbs as well as a few other brands. As I am slowly but surely changing over to LED I am becoming rather familiar with most or all of these products, and also I am seen with some frequency in the Home Depot in Aspen Hill.
I should note in passing that they don't seem to know quite what to make of me, though the folks in the electrical and lighting section are probably a bit annoyed by now with the odd requests I have been making in the recent past, usually for products they didn't carry. Yet perhaps those requests don't seem so odd to them now, as the products I asked about that they did not have then, they do have now. Doubtless they thought I was a wackjob. Now, if they are Astute, they will understand that I was just ahead of the curve, and knew whereof I spoke, however disjointedly might have been my speech. But I digress.
Now that Home Depot is aggressively trying to position itself at the forefront of high-efficiency and low-cost "alternative lighting", a lot of things are starting to pique my interest, for example they now carry track-lighting lamp fixtures with MR16/GU12 dual-post sockets as well as the more commonplace A or E series (screw-in) sockets. The MR16-compatible fixtures enable planning for 12-volt DC systems as well as 120-volt AC systems. Why am I interested in cutting-edge products in low-power lighting? I'm a Solar Energy enthusiast.
The EcoSmart (tm) 13-Watt (60W) A19 LED Light Bulb has about the same form-factor as a glass incandescent bulb, and in fact it's a little smaller in the bulb dimensions although the screw fitting is the same size (A19). I got one for $23.97.
Now consider the "Hampton Bay" torchiere floor lamp. I got one for $24.97. Easy to assemble, no tools required. A hint: when preparing to screw on the top section, if the assembly requires 10 twists clockwise, first twist it 10 times counterclockwise, push the wires into the staff, and then screw on the assembly. The wires will be untwisted once assembly is complete.
Put the two together? For right around $50.00, I get a very bright floor lamp, rather elegant in its severe simplicity, and a bulb that lights the whole room for only 13 watts, and that bulb may very well last as long as the lamp-stand.
Additional eco-friendly lighting is to be had at Home Depot, and for that matter it can be had at an increasingly wide selection of other hardware stores.
A note: these lights come in various sizes and form factors, as well as for a variety of functions. It's wise to choose carefully.
High-power LED lighting inherently excels as floodlights. Emissions from the semiconductor surface is highly directional. Both the Philips and EcoSmart brands offer a variety of extremely bright floodlights, with 17 watts producing as much light as a 90 watt incandescent. That's about five times more efficient!
Because of the directional nature of LED lighting, the manufacturers have had to get a little inventive to bring us omni-directional emission bulbs. Yet they've managed to offer various form-factors and lighting-temperatures (light color). For people who have large circular recessed lighting, there is a large "ambient" unit, putting out approximately the same light as a 100 watt incandescent, with about the same warm yellowish tone. It should be noted that it takes about a second to come on after the power is turned on, though most of these bright LED replacement bulbs don't have that problem. The smaller track-lighting bulbs (MR16 or GU10 socket) are generally floodlights.
As the time for the Estate Sale draws near, I'll have to buy more lighting fixtures and/or furnishings. For some reason, when this house was built, almost no lighting fixtures were installed, other than the porch lights, an entryway light, and lights in the bathrooms and dining room. For all other lighting needs, you have to buy a lamp and plug it in, although thankfully some of the wall sockets are switch controlled.
I'll also have to buy some furniture, one might think, as everything will be getting sold out from under me. Well, that's okay, I do have plastic lawn furniture, and I wouldn't be the first person in the world to make do with plastic lawn furniture in the house. Yet how much furniture do I really need?
I once traveled the country with no more belongings than could be crammed into a Volkswagen Superbeetle, and almost everything I could need was able to fit. Because I have a bad back, I sleep on the floor in any case. Any mattress much thicker or softer than a Tatami mat or futon will wreck my back, so no need to spend thousands of dollars on mattress sets.
Although I have a credenza suitable for knickknacks and tchotchkes, pretty much all of the knickknacks and tchotchkes are going in the Estate Sale, so I guess I can keep the credenza so I have some place to put the mail. A couch I will need, and a couch I have already got. It's not like I entertain guests at all, so for a chair I can make do with plastic lawn furniture.
In any case, it will be good to have the house relatively uncluttered. Minor damage from that earthquake last summer does need to be done. Minor cracks in the walls need patching, and the place is long overdue for interior painting in any case. Why live in a house that is over-full of things that I don't need or don't use?
In any case, what with all of the cultists hereabouts, I might want to move out in a hurry. I might even want to sell in a hurry, in which case I think I'd probably just dump the house on the market "priced to move" and if the cultists all have to deal with real-estate devaluation, well, they didn't have to get together to run me out of town, now did they. Yet even if I am going to be settled in for the long haul, there's something to be said for a certain Spartan simplicity, or a Japanese minimalism.
Hence, it's probably long overdue for me to give a long-term customer review.
When first acquired, we were amazed not only by the novelty of the item, but by the fact that it worked as advertised. We quickly became somewhat dependent on it. For me, the fact that using it meant that my mother would bring in a maid service only once a month rather than once a week. Consider this: at $400, this unit seems expensive. But at $50.00 a visit for a quick once-over vacuuming by the maid service, by saving us from eight uses of the maid service, the robot paid for itself. It would only have to survive once-a-week usage for two months to reach "break even". It lasted for four years.
I never thought I'd live long enough to find myself complaining that my robot is obsolete, but "there you go" and I'm not the sort of person who likes to let things stay broken. Besides, when I was a kid, this was my favorite toy:
As it turns out, the Roomba unit is on its third battery. The original one lasted almost two years, the first mail-order replacement lasted about a month. Having taken a chance and having done some online research first, the second mail-order replacement has thus far lasted four months, under heavy usage. Yet having just bought this new battery, I discovered that the Roomba was not properly cleaning. The dust filter clogged as expected but the particle bin was not filling. This means that the brushes aren't working, and that means that either the motor is inoperative or the gears are worn down.
There are lots of helpful web pages on inspecting and repairing the Roomba. One of them gave me a clue on disassembling it to check the gears in the "brush deck". You have to pull the carapace half off and pop loose the brush deck to get to the gears, but once you've done that, it's only a few minutes work with a jeweler screwdriver to open the gearbox casing. In my case, it was a combination of dirt, grease, and wear that was the problem. The nylon plastic gears had worn down enough so that the motor couldn't transmit power to the brushes. I ordered replacement from the folks who had the best How-To guide, and for only about $50, RobotShop.com shipped me a set of replacement gears. While waiting for delivery, I cleaned out the interior of the Roomba. After assembly, it is now working about the same as it was when we first got it.
While waiting for delivery of the Roomba gears, I decided that it probably wasn't good to be so dependent on one little robot, especially as that little robot was nearly obsolete. Having realized this, in so many words that read like the beginning of some really ancient 1950s science-fiction novel by Lester Del Ray or some such author, I decided that I would like a new vacuum cleaner of the non-robotic kind.
The vacuum cleaner on hand here is an Electrolux canister, which works just about as well as when it was new. However, it was new perhaps 40 years ago, which is a testament to the Electrolux line. I decided to go shop for something more modern, and wound up selecting the Bissell "Rewind Powerhelix".
Sadly, Best Buy did not have one in stock other than the demo unit, and they wouldn't sell me that one. So, I prepaid and they said they'd call me for pickup when it came in. A week later, the call came.
Note: I had to trim out a rather overlong and very unhappy bit about something happening on my way out of the Best Buy in Rockville while picking up my vacuum cleaner. Let's just say "same old stuff" and mutter under our breath about far-reaching gangs of delusional cultists being just goddamn everywhere in this region. The only hint I'll leave right here is that far too many people's minds appear to have been rotted by all of this "Twilight" and "Vampire Diaries" and "Secret Circle" media.
Moving right along, as there are few reasons to leave the house and very many to remain inside, I might as well try and gild my cage, so to speak.
It's also good to be concerned about Global Warming and that sort of thing.
There will of course be an Estate Sale soon, and the majority of the furniture will be sold off. This means that if I want to be able to sit somewhere other than the floor, and see after nightfall, I need to get some things for the house. Right now I am working on lighting and lighting fixtures. Eco-friendly seems to me like the choice to make.
As it turns out, Home Depot carries a fairly large, if workaday, selection of lighting fixtures and lamps and lampstands. Additionally, they have recently expanded their selection of light bulb types and sizes.
As my mother was very frugal (for all of being "Fancy" Pennsylvania Dutch), we had long since mostly changed over from incandescent light bulbs to the compact-florescent bulbs. Yet despite the energy cost savings, these have their own drawbacks, notably the fact that they contain mercury, a hazardous material. Newer high-output light-emitting diode ("LED") bulbs are starting to come on the market, which are designed as swap-out replacements for standard 120 volt AC bulbs.
Home Depot carries their own "EcoSmart" (tm) brand of LED replacement bulbs as well as a few other brands. As I am slowly but surely changing over to LED I am becoming rather familiar with most or all of these products, and also I am seen with some frequency in the Home Depot in Aspen Hill.
I should note in passing that they don't seem to know quite what to make of me, though the folks in the electrical and lighting section are probably a bit annoyed by now with the odd requests I have been making in the recent past, usually for products they didn't carry. Yet perhaps those requests don't seem so odd to them now, as the products I asked about that they did not have then, they do have now. Doubtless they thought I was a wackjob. Now, if they are Astute, they will understand that I was just ahead of the curve, and knew whereof I spoke, however disjointedly might have been my speech. But I digress.
Now that Home Depot is aggressively trying to position itself at the forefront of high-efficiency and low-cost "alternative lighting", a lot of things are starting to pique my interest, for example they now carry track-lighting lamp fixtures with MR16/GU12 dual-post sockets as well as the more commonplace A or E series (screw-in) sockets. The MR16-compatible fixtures enable planning for 12-volt DC systems as well as 120-volt AC systems. Why am I interested in cutting-edge products in low-power lighting? I'm a Solar Energy enthusiast.
The EcoSmart (tm) 13-Watt (60W) A19 LED Light Bulb has about the same form-factor as a glass incandescent bulb, and in fact it's a little smaller in the bulb dimensions although the screw fitting is the same size (A19). I got one for $23.97.
Now consider the "Hampton Bay" torchiere floor lamp. I got one for $24.97. Easy to assemble, no tools required. A hint: when preparing to screw on the top section, if the assembly requires 10 twists clockwise, first twist it 10 times counterclockwise, push the wires into the staff, and then screw on the assembly. The wires will be untwisted once assembly is complete.
Put the two together? For right around $50.00, I get a very bright floor lamp, rather elegant in its severe simplicity, and a bulb that lights the whole room for only 13 watts, and that bulb may very well last as long as the lamp-stand.
Additional eco-friendly lighting is to be had at Home Depot, and for that matter it can be had at an increasingly wide selection of other hardware stores.
A note: these lights come in various sizes and form factors, as well as for a variety of functions. It's wise to choose carefully.
High-power LED lighting inherently excels as floodlights. Emissions from the semiconductor surface is highly directional. Both the Philips and EcoSmart brands offer a variety of extremely bright floodlights, with 17 watts producing as much light as a 90 watt incandescent. That's about five times more efficient!
Because of the directional nature of LED lighting, the manufacturers have had to get a little inventive to bring us omni-directional emission bulbs. Yet they've managed to offer various form-factors and lighting-temperatures (light color). For people who have large circular recessed lighting, there is a large "ambient" unit, putting out approximately the same light as a 100 watt incandescent, with about the same warm yellowish tone. It should be noted that it takes about a second to come on after the power is turned on, though most of these bright LED replacement bulbs don't have that problem. The smaller track-lighting bulbs (MR16 or GU10 socket) are generally floodlights.
As the time for the Estate Sale draws near, I'll have to buy more lighting fixtures and/or furnishings. For some reason, when this house was built, almost no lighting fixtures were installed, other than the porch lights, an entryway light, and lights in the bathrooms and dining room. For all other lighting needs, you have to buy a lamp and plug it in, although thankfully some of the wall sockets are switch controlled.
I'll also have to buy some furniture, one might think, as everything will be getting sold out from under me. Well, that's okay, I do have plastic lawn furniture, and I wouldn't be the first person in the world to make do with plastic lawn furniture in the house. Yet how much furniture do I really need?
I once traveled the country with no more belongings than could be crammed into a Volkswagen Superbeetle, and almost everything I could need was able to fit. Because I have a bad back, I sleep on the floor in any case. Any mattress much thicker or softer than a Tatami mat or futon will wreck my back, so no need to spend thousands of dollars on mattress sets.
Although I have a credenza suitable for knickknacks and tchotchkes, pretty much all of the knickknacks and tchotchkes are going in the Estate Sale, so I guess I can keep the credenza so I have some place to put the mail. A couch I will need, and a couch I have already got. It's not like I entertain guests at all, so for a chair I can make do with plastic lawn furniture.
In any case, it will be good to have the house relatively uncluttered. Minor damage from that earthquake last summer does need to be done. Minor cracks in the walls need patching, and the place is long overdue for interior painting in any case. Why live in a house that is over-full of things that I don't need or don't use?
In any case, what with all of the cultists hereabouts, I might want to move out in a hurry. I might even want to sell in a hurry, in which case I think I'd probably just dump the house on the market "priced to move" and if the cultists all have to deal with real-estate devaluation, well, they didn't have to get together to run me out of town, now did they. Yet even if I am going to be settled in for the long haul, there's something to be said for a certain Spartan simplicity, or a Japanese minimalism.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
SCOTUS Bans Warrantless GPS; Maryland Won't Recall All Vehicle Tags
Monday, January 23 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States ("SCOTUS") ruled that law-enforcement may no longer attach GPS devices to cars without a warrant.
Despite longstanding rumors circulating within the Conspiracy Theorist Community, the State of Maryland will not be forced by this decision to recall all vehicle tags. (The Conspiracy Theory in question posits the notion that the Department of Motor Vehicles requires an extremely deep "vehicle safety inspection" not merely to assure vehicle safety but also to "lojack" every last vehicle that will be registered in the State.) The Conspiracy Theory Community needs to be advised that the SCOTUS ruling does not in any way restrict any parties other than governmental law-enforcement agencies:
Remember, folks, our politicians and bureaucrats here in Maryland are nothing if not supremely inventive in their rationalizations, so much so that they inspire comparisons alluding to Oscar Wilde's famous remark characterizing Fox Hunting as "the pursuit of the inedible, by the unspeakable". It would not be, they would quickly tell you, a "technical trespass" for them to embed a GPS and WiFi transponder in your vehicle tags, as, after all, "driving is not a right, but a privilege" and when you apply for vehicle tags and registration, you are actually soliciting the State to attach their property to yours. Invitation precludes the notion of trespassing.
(The Astute Reader will rightly, if cynically, note that with two brief sentences I have managed to express more bogus rationalization than usually comes out of Annapolis in an entire session of the Assembly. Maybe there really is a future for me in local politics.)
The only saving grace of this sort of thing would be -- and I use the Conditional tense because, as we all know, our esteemed legislators and LEO would never engage in such deviousness and thus this is firmly and rightly relegated to, and dismissed as, Conspiracy Theory -- that all tracking traces from such a universal monitoring system would become part of the public record. A diligent and curious public would of course exercise their rights to be informed. So, Delegate, your car was parked when and where next to who else's vehicle? Now that is going to raise questions during campaign season... No, clearly it is time for the State of Maryland to prohibit this sort of thing, never can tell when something like that will come back to bite you in the ass.
Moving right along, I should recommend to all and sundry who happen to be in the network-engineering or systems-administration fields, that if you haven't yet tried it, you should immediately take a look at BackTrack Linux.
I personally noticed this because I was looking for a decent "wardriving" system for my Windows-7 (tm) laptop, and while some of the packages came pretty close, none had the functionality of Kismet. The BackTrack Linux distribution had Kismet and more. Unlike the Windows(tm) software for wardriving, Kismet will find not only WiFi Access Points, but it will also find Wifi Clients (laptops which are connected to Access Points, etc.) and that can be extremely useful in professional endeavors such as penetration testing. If you're just looking for some free WiFi, the software packages available for Windows (tm) are all that you need. If you want to find out how many unauthorized client devices are probing your wireless networks trying to crack your wifi encryption, you'll need Kismet.
Of course, I personally have no need to check to see if there are unauthorized client devices probing my wireless network trying to crack the encryption; I don't rely on such weak stuff as WPA and instead use other means of securing the internet against attacks transiting my access point. The Astute Reader will of course recall that I do hold US Patent 7,464,403 which concerns itself with wireless security among other things.
Sadly, nobody seems to be the least bit interested in making use of my patent, so I have an unfortunately large amount of spare time on my hands. Hence, the wardriving as a hobby.
BackTrack Linux installed very nicely once I downloaded it from the distribution website and burnt it to an installation DVD. It even partitioned my Windows 7 drive for me, no muss and no fuss and everything works just fine. And of course, because it is Linux, I got an entire operating system and an astonishing software load for free. Combining that with a GlobalSat BU-353 USB GPS unit, I was ready to do some Wardriving.
Here's a Google Earth KML mapfile of the literal thousands of WiFi Access Points in "north Aspen Hill", Maryland. If you have Google Earth installed, this will show you all of the access-points. Some people have entertaining notions for naming their "AP", for example the folks who named their AP "FREE PORN HERE", or the folks who named their AP "Surveillance Car 3".
And the map also shows various "probe networks", assorted client machines, all that sort of stuff.
Given the context of the first section of this blog posting, I suppose I shouldn't much wonder why it seems that no matter where I was taking a reading, there was one client machine constantly signalling its attempts to join wireless ESSID named "<ANY>", with a constant MAC address. No matter where I was, the signal strength remained the same yet the geography constantly changed to match my position.
Well, I had heard that the best and most state-of-the-art GPS tracker bugs (also known as "bumper-beepers") have internal power supplies so that they cannot be detected through analysis of the vehicle's electrical system, monitoring for power drains that can't be explained by such things as the vehicle's nav/audio devices. I've also heard that the best ones also store their data and serve it up via WiFi. It couldn't reasonably do this as an AP, since the beacon signal would easily be detected even by software for Windows (tm). It would have to do it as a client. Just drive by the target with an AP in the car, the client locks on, data is exchanged, you know the drill. Kismet, of course, finds clients as well as APs.
I guess this might tend to explain why my ex-girlfriends always seem to know when and where to find me, along with explaining a lot of other things.
Well, SCOTUS says it's trespassing, so I guess I need to go clean someone else's trash off of my car.
And it seems as if even Nature agrees with SCOTUS: if your WiFi or GPS fail today, it's because our primary, Sol, is having a tantrum.
Despite longstanding rumors circulating within the Conspiracy Theorist Community, the State of Maryland will not be forced by this decision to recall all vehicle tags. (The Conspiracy Theory in question posits the notion that the Department of Motor Vehicles requires an extremely deep "vehicle safety inspection" not merely to assure vehicle safety but also to "lojack" every last vehicle that will be registered in the State.) The Conspiracy Theory Community needs to be advised that the SCOTUS ruling does not in any way restrict any parties other than governmental law-enforcement agencies:
"If long-term monitoring can be accomplished
without committing a technical trespass
-- suppose for example, that the federal government
required or persuaded auto manufacturers to include
a GPS tracking device in every car --
the court's theory would provide no protection,"
[Supreme Court Justice Samuel] Alito wrote.
Remember, folks, our politicians and bureaucrats here in Maryland are nothing if not supremely inventive in their rationalizations, so much so that they inspire comparisons alluding to Oscar Wilde's famous remark characterizing Fox Hunting as "the pursuit of the inedible, by the unspeakable". It would not be, they would quickly tell you, a "technical trespass" for them to embed a GPS and WiFi transponder in your vehicle tags, as, after all, "driving is not a right, but a privilege" and when you apply for vehicle tags and registration, you are actually soliciting the State to attach their property to yours. Invitation precludes the notion of trespassing.
(The Astute Reader will rightly, if cynically, note that with two brief sentences I have managed to express more bogus rationalization than usually comes out of Annapolis in an entire session of the Assembly. Maybe there really is a future for me in local politics.)
The only saving grace of this sort of thing would be -- and I use the Conditional tense because, as we all know, our esteemed legislators and LEO would never engage in such deviousness and thus this is firmly and rightly relegated to, and dismissed as, Conspiracy Theory -- that all tracking traces from such a universal monitoring system would become part of the public record. A diligent and curious public would of course exercise their rights to be informed. So, Delegate, your car was parked when and where next to who else's vehicle? Now that is going to raise questions during campaign season... No, clearly it is time for the State of Maryland to prohibit this sort of thing, never can tell when something like that will come back to bite you in the ass.
Moving right along, I should recommend to all and sundry who happen to be in the network-engineering or systems-administration fields, that if you haven't yet tried it, you should immediately take a look at BackTrack Linux.
I personally noticed this because I was looking for a decent "wardriving" system for my Windows-7 (tm) laptop, and while some of the packages came pretty close, none had the functionality of Kismet. The BackTrack Linux distribution had Kismet and more. Unlike the Windows(tm) software for wardriving, Kismet will find not only WiFi Access Points, but it will also find Wifi Clients (laptops which are connected to Access Points, etc.) and that can be extremely useful in professional endeavors such as penetration testing. If you're just looking for some free WiFi, the software packages available for Windows (tm) are all that you need. If you want to find out how many unauthorized client devices are probing your wireless networks trying to crack your wifi encryption, you'll need Kismet.
Of course, I personally have no need to check to see if there are unauthorized client devices probing my wireless network trying to crack the encryption; I don't rely on such weak stuff as WPA and instead use other means of securing the internet against attacks transiting my access point. The Astute Reader will of course recall that I do hold US Patent 7,464,403 which concerns itself with wireless security among other things.
Sadly, nobody seems to be the least bit interested in making use of my patent, so I have an unfortunately large amount of spare time on my hands. Hence, the wardriving as a hobby.
BackTrack Linux installed very nicely once I downloaded it from the distribution website and burnt it to an installation DVD. It even partitioned my Windows 7 drive for me, no muss and no fuss and everything works just fine. And of course, because it is Linux, I got an entire operating system and an astonishing software load for free. Combining that with a GlobalSat BU-353 USB GPS unit, I was ready to do some Wardriving.
Here's a Google Earth KML mapfile of the literal thousands of WiFi Access Points in "north Aspen Hill", Maryland. If you have Google Earth installed, this will show you all of the access-points. Some people have entertaining notions for naming their "AP", for example the folks who named their AP "FREE PORN HERE", or the folks who named their AP "Surveillance Car 3".
And the map also shows various "probe networks", assorted client machines, all that sort of stuff.
Given the context of the first section of this blog posting, I suppose I shouldn't much wonder why it seems that no matter where I was taking a reading, there was one client machine constantly signalling its attempts to join wireless ESSID named "<ANY>", with a constant MAC address. No matter where I was, the signal strength remained the same yet the geography constantly changed to match my position.
Well, I had heard that the best and most state-of-the-art GPS tracker bugs (also known as "bumper-beepers") have internal power supplies so that they cannot be detected through analysis of the vehicle's electrical system, monitoring for power drains that can't be explained by such things as the vehicle's nav/audio devices. I've also heard that the best ones also store their data and serve it up via WiFi. It couldn't reasonably do this as an AP, since the beacon signal would easily be detected even by software for Windows (tm). It would have to do it as a client. Just drive by the target with an AP in the car, the client locks on, data is exchanged, you know the drill. Kismet, of course, finds clients as well as APs.
I guess this might tend to explain why my ex-girlfriends always seem to know when and where to find me, along with explaining a lot of other things.
Well, SCOTUS says it's trespassing, so I guess I need to go clean someone else's trash off of my car.
And it seems as if even Nature agrees with SCOTUS: if your WiFi or GPS fail today, it's because our primary, Sol, is having a tantrum.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Existentialism for Idiots
(This entry is NOT SAFE FOR WORK.)
Once again, here it is Sunday morning, and once again I have to increment the count of "weekends where I didn't go anywhere and didn't do anything, especially didn't go out to a bar or club". The count's somewhere up around 150 or more. I think the last time I went out was sometime in maybe late 2009.
My "winter depression" or Seasonal Affective Disorder ("SAD") has just about gone, and the grieving process is pretty much in the background. I'm certainly not obsessing over it, though whenever my sister comes to visit to pick up mail related to the Estate or to try to dig through the records in search of something, the subject will likely come up and there's that awkward silence for a few moments and then we have to move the conversation along so as to not be picking at old wounds, so to speak. Though I am feeling better, I'm far from happy, but at least I am getting back to the level of far-from-happy to which I have been accustomed.
That's not all that positive, though. It's really pretty sad, to what levels of Anomie one can become accustomed.
Perhaps, though, it's not mere Anomie, nor even mere Accidie. Angst, maybe? Not quite, though I've certainly been there; this is something not quite so intense or pervasive. Maybe it's just Weltschmerz, a "... psychological pain caused by sadness that can occur when realizing that someone's own weaknesses are caused by the inappropriateness and cruelty of the world and (physical and social) circumstances".
One thing is for sure. I have settled into being what the Japanese call Hikikomori, basically young adults who retreat from society, generally hiding in their rooms at their parents' apartment. Maybe it's Avoidant Personality Disorder.
Or maybe, for me as for Sartre, "hell is other people".
Most people in the Greater Washington DC Metropolitan area -- or at least those who very frequently ride the Metrorail -- will completely understand that bit about "hell is other people", although they usually phrase it as "goddamn Tourists". That muttered imprecation is generally followed by the phrase "don't know nothin', and get in the way".
I personally have generally tried to fill my soul with a generous love of my fellow man, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, when riding down the escalator into a Metro station, only to find that a gaggle of tourists has disembarked said escalator, and then promptly have pooled up in a glob of humanity blocking the landing from said escalator. Frequently they do so with such effectiveness that you cannot get off of the escalator without pushing them out of the way. This is rude, and one shouldn't be rude if it can possibly be avoided yet when the alternative is having the soles of your shoes sanded off by the relentlessly grinding escalator steps, rudeness cannot possibly be avoided.
Yet the great pitfall of rudeness is that once one allows it in one's self, one becomes accustomed to it. Indeed, it can become a form of performance art. It might not seem that the word "elegance" could be applied to rudeness, yet during Tourist Season one may frequently witness harried commuters in open competition to see who can be the most elegantly rude to tourists. Thus, points are awarded to the clever commuter who can push through the tourists blocking the landings whispering "this way to the ticket machines" thus causing the tourists to move from their blocking point, rather than to the commuter who simply screeches "out of the frackin' way you provincial inbreds".
This too has its drawbacks... too much elegance and the level of abstraction increases. With abstraction comes incomprehensibility. It's one thing to tell a glob of tourists blocking the escalator landings "if you stand there long enough, someone will tie your laces together". It's quite another for someone to get stuck behind a glob of tourists taking up the whole width of the escalator, bend down and craftily untie shoelaces and leave them dangling over the escalator steps. Those shoelaces can get sucked into the machinery at the end of the escalator run, and that can suck people's feet into the machinery. And then the tourists will be really blocking the escalator landing.
In the same way that too much elegance and abstraction in messing with tourists can stop being a somewhat rude instruction on commuting etiquette and become little short of attempted murder, too much elegance and abstraction in other social interactions can change from helpful hints on how to get along, into outright abusiveness that has little hope of achieving the desired goal of promoting functional and polite public behavior.
Thus, it's good to be pretty straightforward and try to tell people exactly how they are offending. Simply refusing to do business with offenders quite evidently does little or nothing to cause them to see the error of their ways and work to do better. It's probably proper to try to inform people that they are being annoying.
Then again, some people enjoy being annoying, and there's nothing you can do about them but avoid them. Because if you inform them exactly why you think they are fucking assholes, they will redouble their efforts to be fucking assholes. This is due to the sad yet inarguable fact of life that only a fucking asshole thinks that it's good to be a fucking asshole, which single characteristic is in fact the ultimate basic definition of a fucking asshole.
Everyone on this earth has no doubt had the following unpleasant conversation...
YOU: Um, look, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but you're being a fucking asshole.
ASSHOLE: You betcha! Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha!
YOU: You know, that's even more asshole-ish!
ASSHOLE: Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha, PUSSY.
Most people leave at this point. However, sad and misguided individuals, such as myself, are either too stupid to leave or they may have some bizarre and demonstrably wrong notion about "perfectibility of humanity". They haven't yet learned that assholes enjoy being assholes and regard it as their main worthiness in life. By failing to leave, you're just giving an asshole even more opportunity to do what they most love to do.
At the risk of only giving even more fucking assholes even more insight into how better to be even bigger assholes, I must post a few basic rules on how not to offend. Most actually decent people know this already, or will quickly understand when told.
Don't Get in People's Way. Don't make yourself an obstruction to public use of public spaces and passages. This includes not taking up the whole damned sidewalk and thinking that such thoughtlessness makes you cool or something. It includes not walking out of the door of a store and then standing there with your whole extended family blocking the goddamn door while you make lengthy minor adjustments to your clothing and appearance. It includes not standing just inside the door with your whole extended family blocking the goddamn door while you zip your coats. If your whole extended family needs to stand as a group while zipping their coats, stand to the side so that you're not in the goddamn way of everyone else trying to come in or go out. Or, if you feel some bizarre culturally-based need to block the goddamn doors, at least have the common decency to say "excuse me". And then get out of the goddamn way.
Understand Personal Space. Your pet dogs may have no concept of personal space, as evidenced by the fact that they will walk right up and stick their nose in your crotch and drool down the inside of your pants leg if you allow it. They'll even do it to total strangers, because it's their way of being friendly. Yet people are not dogs, and lots of people really don't like strange dogs poking their noses in places where they are not invited. In the same way, lots of people don't like total strangers who walk up to them and stand more closely than would close family members. If you are in a line behind someone, and are close enough to pick their pockets, that's too close. If you are close enough behind them so that they can feel your breath on their neck, you are far too close. And please understand this if you understand nothing else. There is no excuse for standing too close behind someone in a line when you are the only two people in a very large store. The only thing worse is continually entering a person's Personal Space when there is a very large area allowing all people to have a lot of room.
All Public Areas Are Public to All. If a store is open to business for anyone, they are open for business to everyone. Even the Ugly Customer must be served. Even Fucking Assholes need to be served until and unless they behave in such a way as to be banned by the Management. Until they are officially banned and are banned by Management, they get the same service as everyone. Everyone should expect to get, and to give, the same as anyone else. The Parks are open to everyone, the sidewalks are open to everyone. There's no such thing as "our neighborhood" unless you live in a privately owned and privately maintained "gated community". There's no such thing as "our shopping center where we don't allow the Anglos/Blacks/Hispanics/Asians". This is one of the most basic concepts in the US and Canada. Trying to be exclusive of people in public spaces is one of the great hallmarks of Fucking Assholes.
Commentary and Criticism Are Rights. It is perfectly alright to call someone a Fucking Asshole. It is not alright at all to be a Fucking Asshole. A basic difference between someone who is a Fucking Asshole and someone who is not, is that a Fucking Asshole doesn't care if you call them a Fucking Asshole, and someone who is not a Fucking Asshole will care deeply enough to change their ways and not act like a Fucking Asshole. A Fucking Asshole, when correctly labeled, usually will escalate their behavior simply to prove they are correctly labeled, and also to prove that they can be even more so. A person who is incorrectly labeled as a Fucking Asshole will try to find out why they have that label, and any decent person will tell them. Having given the first offense of uttering the label, it is not compounded by any critique which can be addressed. Accusation becomes conversation and conversation becomes negotiation. The only person who will not follow this path is the Fucking Asshole. Just calling someone a name and then not being willing to discuss it with that someone, is infantile and idiotic. These are characteristics of the Fucking Asshole, and not of the Decent Person.
Now, I could go on and on, and in the future I doubtless shall. But that's enough for today.
At least, now some of the people out there have some idea why I don't like them, or don't like what they're doing. Generally, it's because they get in the way and stay in the way, or get too damned close when there's no reason at all for it, or do both of those things and insist on being Fucking Assholes about it.
Once again, here it is Sunday morning, and once again I have to increment the count of "weekends where I didn't go anywhere and didn't do anything, especially didn't go out to a bar or club". The count's somewhere up around 150 or more. I think the last time I went out was sometime in maybe late 2009.
My "winter depression" or Seasonal Affective Disorder ("SAD") has just about gone, and the grieving process is pretty much in the background. I'm certainly not obsessing over it, though whenever my sister comes to visit to pick up mail related to the Estate or to try to dig through the records in search of something, the subject will likely come up and there's that awkward silence for a few moments and then we have to move the conversation along so as to not be picking at old wounds, so to speak. Though I am feeling better, I'm far from happy, but at least I am getting back to the level of far-from-happy to which I have been accustomed.
That's not all that positive, though. It's really pretty sad, to what levels of Anomie one can become accustomed.
Perhaps, though, it's not mere Anomie, nor even mere Accidie. Angst, maybe? Not quite, though I've certainly been there; this is something not quite so intense or pervasive. Maybe it's just Weltschmerz, a "... psychological pain caused by sadness that can occur when realizing that someone's own weaknesses are caused by the inappropriateness and cruelty of the world and (physical and social) circumstances".
One thing is for sure. I have settled into being what the Japanese call Hikikomori, basically young adults who retreat from society, generally hiding in their rooms at their parents' apartment. Maybe it's Avoidant Personality Disorder.
Or maybe, for me as for Sartre, "hell is other people".
Most people in the Greater Washington DC Metropolitan area -- or at least those who very frequently ride the Metrorail -- will completely understand that bit about "hell is other people", although they usually phrase it as "goddamn Tourists". That muttered imprecation is generally followed by the phrase "don't know nothin', and get in the way".
I personally have generally tried to fill my soul with a generous love of my fellow man, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, when riding down the escalator into a Metro station, only to find that a gaggle of tourists has disembarked said escalator, and then promptly have pooled up in a glob of humanity blocking the landing from said escalator. Frequently they do so with such effectiveness that you cannot get off of the escalator without pushing them out of the way. This is rude, and one shouldn't be rude if it can possibly be avoided yet when the alternative is having the soles of your shoes sanded off by the relentlessly grinding escalator steps, rudeness cannot possibly be avoided.
Yet the great pitfall of rudeness is that once one allows it in one's self, one becomes accustomed to it. Indeed, it can become a form of performance art. It might not seem that the word "elegance" could be applied to rudeness, yet during Tourist Season one may frequently witness harried commuters in open competition to see who can be the most elegantly rude to tourists. Thus, points are awarded to the clever commuter who can push through the tourists blocking the landings whispering "this way to the ticket machines" thus causing the tourists to move from their blocking point, rather than to the commuter who simply screeches "out of the frackin' way you provincial inbreds".
This too has its drawbacks... too much elegance and the level of abstraction increases. With abstraction comes incomprehensibility. It's one thing to tell a glob of tourists blocking the escalator landings "if you stand there long enough, someone will tie your laces together". It's quite another for someone to get stuck behind a glob of tourists taking up the whole width of the escalator, bend down and craftily untie shoelaces and leave them dangling over the escalator steps. Those shoelaces can get sucked into the machinery at the end of the escalator run, and that can suck people's feet into the machinery. And then the tourists will be really blocking the escalator landing.
In the same way that too much elegance and abstraction in messing with tourists can stop being a somewhat rude instruction on commuting etiquette and become little short of attempted murder, too much elegance and abstraction in other social interactions can change from helpful hints on how to get along, into outright abusiveness that has little hope of achieving the desired goal of promoting functional and polite public behavior.
Thus, it's good to be pretty straightforward and try to tell people exactly how they are offending. Simply refusing to do business with offenders quite evidently does little or nothing to cause them to see the error of their ways and work to do better. It's probably proper to try to inform people that they are being annoying.
Then again, some people enjoy being annoying, and there's nothing you can do about them but avoid them. Because if you inform them exactly why you think they are fucking assholes, they will redouble their efforts to be fucking assholes. This is due to the sad yet inarguable fact of life that only a fucking asshole thinks that it's good to be a fucking asshole, which single characteristic is in fact the ultimate basic definition of a fucking asshole.
Everyone on this earth has no doubt had the following unpleasant conversation...
YOU: Um, look, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but you're being a fucking asshole.
ASSHOLE: You betcha! Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha!
YOU: You know, that's even more asshole-ish!
ASSHOLE: Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha, PUSSY.
Most people leave at this point. However, sad and misguided individuals, such as myself, are either too stupid to leave or they may have some bizarre and demonstrably wrong notion about "perfectibility of humanity". They haven't yet learned that assholes enjoy being assholes and regard it as their main worthiness in life. By failing to leave, you're just giving an asshole even more opportunity to do what they most love to do.
At the risk of only giving even more fucking assholes even more insight into how better to be even bigger assholes, I must post a few basic rules on how not to offend. Most actually decent people know this already, or will quickly understand when told.
Don't Get in People's Way. Don't make yourself an obstruction to public use of public spaces and passages. This includes not taking up the whole damned sidewalk and thinking that such thoughtlessness makes you cool or something. It includes not walking out of the door of a store and then standing there with your whole extended family blocking the goddamn door while you make lengthy minor adjustments to your clothing and appearance. It includes not standing just inside the door with your whole extended family blocking the goddamn door while you zip your coats. If your whole extended family needs to stand as a group while zipping their coats, stand to the side so that you're not in the goddamn way of everyone else trying to come in or go out. Or, if you feel some bizarre culturally-based need to block the goddamn doors, at least have the common decency to say "excuse me". And then get out of the goddamn way.
Understand Personal Space. Your pet dogs may have no concept of personal space, as evidenced by the fact that they will walk right up and stick their nose in your crotch and drool down the inside of your pants leg if you allow it. They'll even do it to total strangers, because it's their way of being friendly. Yet people are not dogs, and lots of people really don't like strange dogs poking their noses in places where they are not invited. In the same way, lots of people don't like total strangers who walk up to them and stand more closely than would close family members. If you are in a line behind someone, and are close enough to pick their pockets, that's too close. If you are close enough behind them so that they can feel your breath on their neck, you are far too close. And please understand this if you understand nothing else. There is no excuse for standing too close behind someone in a line when you are the only two people in a very large store. The only thing worse is continually entering a person's Personal Space when there is a very large area allowing all people to have a lot of room.
All Public Areas Are Public to All. If a store is open to business for anyone, they are open for business to everyone. Even the Ugly Customer must be served. Even Fucking Assholes need to be served until and unless they behave in such a way as to be banned by the Management. Until they are officially banned and are banned by Management, they get the same service as everyone. Everyone should expect to get, and to give, the same as anyone else. The Parks are open to everyone, the sidewalks are open to everyone. There's no such thing as "our neighborhood" unless you live in a privately owned and privately maintained "gated community". There's no such thing as "our shopping center where we don't allow the Anglos/Blacks/Hispanics/Asians". This is one of the most basic concepts in the US and Canada. Trying to be exclusive of people in public spaces is one of the great hallmarks of Fucking Assholes.
Commentary and Criticism Are Rights. It is perfectly alright to call someone a Fucking Asshole. It is not alright at all to be a Fucking Asshole. A basic difference between someone who is a Fucking Asshole and someone who is not, is that a Fucking Asshole doesn't care if you call them a Fucking Asshole, and someone who is not a Fucking Asshole will care deeply enough to change their ways and not act like a Fucking Asshole. A Fucking Asshole, when correctly labeled, usually will escalate their behavior simply to prove they are correctly labeled, and also to prove that they can be even more so. A person who is incorrectly labeled as a Fucking Asshole will try to find out why they have that label, and any decent person will tell them. Having given the first offense of uttering the label, it is not compounded by any critique which can be addressed. Accusation becomes conversation and conversation becomes negotiation. The only person who will not follow this path is the Fucking Asshole. Just calling someone a name and then not being willing to discuss it with that someone, is infantile and idiotic. These are characteristics of the Fucking Asshole, and not of the Decent Person.
Now, I could go on and on, and in the future I doubtless shall. But that's enough for today.
At least, now some of the people out there have some idea why I don't like them, or don't like what they're doing. Generally, it's because they get in the way and stay in the way, or get too damned close when there's no reason at all for it, or do both of those things and insist on being Fucking Assholes about it.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Wasted Weekend In Review
There's not much going on here other than me continuing to struggle with a pile of upgrading brought on by Firefox's "improved" 9.0.1 version release. It's not just me, there's breakage all over the InterNet because of this. Oh well. This is not going to gain you any more market share taken away from Microsoft Internet Explorer. Meanwhile, I am about 99 percent done with "shaving the yak" just so that a relatively small percentage of likely users can see what they're supposed to see on some of my websites.
Meanwhile, there's not much else to report other than that one of my cars was damaged as part of a collision wherein one vehicle ran into a parked car which was then flung into my own parked vehicle. I should mention here that if you own a Honda Civic, you do not want to get it caught between a Cadillac Escalade and a min-1980s Oldsmobile.
Due to a complete lack of anything interesting to do which doesn't involve going out and hanging around with total strangers in some bar I don't much like, I surfed a lot of YouTube and discovered the entertainment value of watching people "Shuffle Dance". Hey, I might even learn how to do this myself, as it's not too different from skipping and it's clearly good exercise.
Here, have some Shuffle lessons.
Meanwhile, there's not much else to report other than that one of my cars was damaged as part of a collision wherein one vehicle ran into a parked car which was then flung into my own parked vehicle. I should mention here that if you own a Honda Civic, you do not want to get it caught between a Cadillac Escalade and a min-1980s Oldsmobile.
Due to a complete lack of anything interesting to do which doesn't involve going out and hanging around with total strangers in some bar I don't much like, I surfed a lot of YouTube and discovered the entertainment value of watching people "Shuffle Dance". Hey, I might even learn how to do this myself, as it's not too different from skipping and it's clearly good exercise.
Here, have some Shuffle lessons.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Shaving A Yak While Dodging the Crazies...
Dodging the crazies has become something of a pastime of mine. I'd call it a hobby but hobbies are meant to provide enjoyable diversion. Want to see an example of an actual hobby? I'm "moving right along" with my solar charging system and shed-mounted utility and security lighting system. It's so fun that I made some video of it.
No, the crazies can be either of two things, two major classifications, each of which can certainly affect the other. First, "the crazies" is how I can get to thinking when excessive weirdness impinges on my life. Secondarily, "the crazies" is how I think of the sort of people who just can't stop trying to inflict excessive weirdness on my life, apparently just so that they can watch me suffer as they drive me mad with their own madness.
An example: Yesterday, Wednesday the 11th, at about 4:00Pm or so, I was out working on the final touches of the solar-system upgrade. I stepped out of the shed for a smoke, and there was a strange object which rather resembled a car-battery in my back yard, not far from the porch. I walked on over to take a look at it, and noticed it was beeping. Right about then, I noticed this one black man in workman's clothes approaching the strange object, coming from the street. Then I noticed he was holding some sort of a wand, some sort of detector, and then I noticed his vehicle parked across the street: Washington Gas. Major repairs are scheduled for my street, and this man was detecting the courses of the underground gas pipes. Perfectly reasonable.
Less reasonable... when I offered to point out where the line ran next to the house, he said "I already know where it turns", and I said "okay" and turned to go back to what I was doing. The thing is, that man's eyes about bugged out of his head at that point. I finished turning and went back to the shed. Yet still I heard another voice, not that of the man I had just seen, saying "I was ready for him".
This made no sense at the time, but as of this morning, much becomes more clear.
I saw some field-engineer types down the street and went to chat with them, to get more details on when the street and water-main repairs would start. I found out about all I needed to know, and was headed back home, when one of them was overheard saying something to the effect of having heard that I was a dangerous racist. (These two were both "white".) Now, if someone had said something like that to the crews headed out to work on my street, the actions of that Washington Gas fellow and his associate would make sense. If they had been told that, me approaching the one man might have seemed to him like that crazy racist man they warned him about was launching an attack. I guess that would explain why he actually had his eyes bugging out.
Now, of course, the question would be, who told him that, and why.
Kind of funny... I was driving on my usual schedule, off to take a walk in the park, on Monday. While at a four-way stop, I looked over and saw someone I have known for some years, but hadn't seen for several months, so I pulled over and tried to chat. He wasn't dressed for the slightly chilly weather, and said so after brief conversation, and he headed back inside and I headed off to take my walk. Part of the discussion, though, was about my "new" car, first time he had seen it. He took a nice look at it, no surprise as I was telling him how it came to me and reciting various specifications such as engine size and miles-per-gallon.
Now, for the last week or so, my life has been pretty trouble free, but the very next day, in every approaching car I saw faces looking shocked, dismayed, seriously weirded-out. I turned on the news channel, thinking that 9/11 had happened again, nothing on the news. Yet these guys are all checking out my car, and staring at me. Kind of odd, and definitely suspicious.
All of a sudden, I've got sketchy people pretty much stalking me everywhere I go shopping. It's like someone called up their cult leader and the cult leader said "let me take care of this" and then some e-alert system -- like "Amber Alert" or "Silver Alert" or "School Code Alert" -- text messaged about a hundred people to all be on the lookout for me and my car. Crap like this can make a person paranoid. Yet as I said above, "dodging the crazies" is a well-honed set of habits for me.
That doesn't mean that some appropriate ranking official in the local government should fail to look into the matter. Because if you've got cultists putting out the word to be on the lookout, and telling outrageous lies to get people to want to assist, that's not far at all from the legal element of "chain of command, overt or covert" as seen in the Maryland Anti-Gang Act of 2010. The first time one of these poor misled folks crosses the line into the basis "crimes of violence" for that Act, someone somewhere is potentially looking at 20 years... because frankly we don't need no stinking gangs in Aspen Hill (or anywhere) and just because the leadership and officer corps mostly look and act like church-goers and office ladies doesn't mean that they aren't clearly trained and practiced at raising a rabble to run wild in the streets looking for blasphemers and heretics.
There's also the little question about possible mis-use of County resources. After all, the County is about the only local entity that has such alert systems. Wouldn't it be shameful for local politicians to have to explain how any old Tom Dick or Harry can leverage the County emergency-alerts text system to launch unsuspecting and normally-decent subscribing citizens into the role of being a private army pursuing some obscure private vendetta?
"Shaving A Yak" is a phrase meaning that you've got stuck doing something which is both ridiculous and time-consuming, but which is also necessary to accomplish something that actually must be done.
For me, this problem originated with the release of the new Firefox web-browser version 9.0.1.
Many of the websites I host are based on the MediaWiki software suite, the same suite that runs WikiPedia. Firefox's new release abandons an old work-around which has become "deprecated". Thus, website features in older versions of Mediwiki which ought to appear in the left-side navigation and utility frame are now buried in the bottom of the page. It looks icky and it's hard to use.
I set out to fix this by going to the latest version of Mediawiki which doesn't have this exact problem, but discovered that first I had to upgrade my PHP (hypertext pre-processing language), which meant that I had to upgrade the MySQL database server, which meant that I had to rebuild the Apache HTTPD web-server, which didn't like the build-configuration specifications of the PHP, which had to be rebuilt and the the webserver has to be re-built and now various other things need to be dealt-with and one of those was a fairly simple library handling REGEX (Regular EXpressions) which meant that I had to break large parts of the entire server.
Fortunately, this is Debian Linux, which has the helpful apt-get Package Management System. Unfortunately, for apt-get to prevent brokenness from removing a fundamental library, it has to remove all of the things that would be broken. Then it removes the library. But don't fear, we can do a "dist-upgrade", which automagically migrates from the old base software version to the new base software version. In MicroSoft WIndows(tm) that would be like migrating from Windows Vista to Windows 7... you expect it to go smoothly, but this was not to be the case.
So once again, a rather full and large feature set is required by the new MediaWiki and those assorted features are spread across several applications and many more software libraries.
So, I've been shaving a yak, as the saying goes, but I think it's about denuded by now. Once I've got all of the yak-hair I need, I can...
Heh. Even more TL;DR.
But let's all get looking into what sort of unknown and under-the-table organization is operating in my neighborhood, which has to power to turn out at least a hundred observers and apparently even more actual stalkers and "tails" overnight, most of them apparently given whatever story will make them feed information back to their controller... even if that story puts the "subject" at mortal risk.
No, the crazies can be either of two things, two major classifications, each of which can certainly affect the other. First, "the crazies" is how I can get to thinking when excessive weirdness impinges on my life. Secondarily, "the crazies" is how I think of the sort of people who just can't stop trying to inflict excessive weirdness on my life, apparently just so that they can watch me suffer as they drive me mad with their own madness.
An example: Yesterday, Wednesday the 11th, at about 4:00Pm or so, I was out working on the final touches of the solar-system upgrade. I stepped out of the shed for a smoke, and there was a strange object which rather resembled a car-battery in my back yard, not far from the porch. I walked on over to take a look at it, and noticed it was beeping. Right about then, I noticed this one black man in workman's clothes approaching the strange object, coming from the street. Then I noticed he was holding some sort of a wand, some sort of detector, and then I noticed his vehicle parked across the street: Washington Gas. Major repairs are scheduled for my street, and this man was detecting the courses of the underground gas pipes. Perfectly reasonable.
Less reasonable... when I offered to point out where the line ran next to the house, he said "I already know where it turns", and I said "okay" and turned to go back to what I was doing. The thing is, that man's eyes about bugged out of his head at that point. I finished turning and went back to the shed. Yet still I heard another voice, not that of the man I had just seen, saying "I was ready for him".
This made no sense at the time, but as of this morning, much becomes more clear.
I saw some field-engineer types down the street and went to chat with them, to get more details on when the street and water-main repairs would start. I found out about all I needed to know, and was headed back home, when one of them was overheard saying something to the effect of having heard that I was a dangerous racist. (These two were both "white".) Now, if someone had said something like that to the crews headed out to work on my street, the actions of that Washington Gas fellow and his associate would make sense. If they had been told that, me approaching the one man might have seemed to him like that crazy racist man they warned him about was launching an attack. I guess that would explain why he actually had his eyes bugging out.
Now, of course, the question would be, who told him that, and why.
Kind of funny... I was driving on my usual schedule, off to take a walk in the park, on Monday. While at a four-way stop, I looked over and saw someone I have known for some years, but hadn't seen for several months, so I pulled over and tried to chat. He wasn't dressed for the slightly chilly weather, and said so after brief conversation, and he headed back inside and I headed off to take my walk. Part of the discussion, though, was about my "new" car, first time he had seen it. He took a nice look at it, no surprise as I was telling him how it came to me and reciting various specifications such as engine size and miles-per-gallon.
Now, for the last week or so, my life has been pretty trouble free, but the very next day, in every approaching car I saw faces looking shocked, dismayed, seriously weirded-out. I turned on the news channel, thinking that 9/11 had happened again, nothing on the news. Yet these guys are all checking out my car, and staring at me. Kind of odd, and definitely suspicious.
All of a sudden, I've got sketchy people pretty much stalking me everywhere I go shopping. It's like someone called up their cult leader and the cult leader said "let me take care of this" and then some e-alert system -- like "Amber Alert" or "Silver Alert" or "School Code Alert" -- text messaged about a hundred people to all be on the lookout for me and my car. Crap like this can make a person paranoid. Yet as I said above, "dodging the crazies" is a well-honed set of habits for me.
That doesn't mean that some appropriate ranking official in the local government should fail to look into the matter. Because if you've got cultists putting out the word to be on the lookout, and telling outrageous lies to get people to want to assist, that's not far at all from the legal element of "chain of command, overt or covert" as seen in the Maryland Anti-Gang Act of 2010. The first time one of these poor misled folks crosses the line into the basis "crimes of violence" for that Act, someone somewhere is potentially looking at 20 years... because frankly we don't need no stinking gangs in Aspen Hill (or anywhere) and just because the leadership and officer corps mostly look and act like church-goers and office ladies doesn't mean that they aren't clearly trained and practiced at raising a rabble to run wild in the streets looking for blasphemers and heretics.
There's also the little question about possible mis-use of County resources. After all, the County is about the only local entity that has such alert systems. Wouldn't it be shameful for local politicians to have to explain how any old Tom Dick or Harry can leverage the County emergency-alerts text system to launch unsuspecting and normally-decent subscribing citizens into the role of being a private army pursuing some obscure private vendetta?
"Shaving A Yak" is a phrase meaning that you've got stuck doing something which is both ridiculous and time-consuming, but which is also necessary to accomplish something that actually must be done.
For me, this problem originated with the release of the new Firefox web-browser version 9.0.1.
Many of the websites I host are based on the MediaWiki software suite, the same suite that runs WikiPedia. Firefox's new release abandons an old work-around which has become "deprecated". Thus, website features in older versions of Mediwiki which ought to appear in the left-side navigation and utility frame are now buried in the bottom of the page. It looks icky and it's hard to use.
I set out to fix this by going to the latest version of Mediawiki which doesn't have this exact problem, but discovered that first I had to upgrade my PHP (hypertext pre-processing language), which meant that I had to upgrade the MySQL database server, which meant that I had to rebuild the Apache HTTPD web-server, which didn't like the build-configuration specifications of the PHP, which had to be rebuilt and the the webserver has to be re-built and now various other things need to be dealt-with and one of those was a fairly simple library handling REGEX (Regular EXpressions) which meant that I had to break large parts of the entire server.
Fortunately, this is Debian Linux, which has the helpful apt-get Package Management System. Unfortunately, for apt-get to prevent brokenness from removing a fundamental library, it has to remove all of the things that would be broken. Then it removes the library. But don't fear, we can do a "dist-upgrade", which automagically migrates from the old base software version to the new base software version. In MicroSoft WIndows(tm) that would be like migrating from Windows Vista to Windows 7... you expect it to go smoothly, but this was not to be the case.
So once again, a rather full and large feature set is required by the new MediaWiki and those assorted features are spread across several applications and many more software libraries.
So, I've been shaving a yak, as the saying goes, but I think it's about denuded by now. Once I've got all of the yak-hair I need, I can...
Heh. Even more TL;DR.
But let's all get looking into what sort of unknown and under-the-table organization is operating in my neighborhood, which has to power to turn out at least a hundred observers and apparently even more actual stalkers and "tails" overnight, most of them apparently given whatever story will make them feed information back to their controller... even if that story puts the "subject" at mortal risk.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)