Author Archives: bluedepth

Fitting Punishments

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Last night I couldn’t get the idea of punishing my Blackberry out of my mind. I was running over scenarios of destruction in my mind. How could I best bring my emotional needs to bear on this repugnant and abominable device? I thought of many things:

  • Taking the Blackberry out to the dock with our office sledgehammer and dashing it in a flurry of epithets and cussing. Screaming while I extracted a primal retribution for all the ways the device let me down and angered me.
  • Building a little bonfire and setting the piece of crap on fire. Watching it burn, drinking a very fine bottle of wine and when it’s all burned down to ash, putting it out manually.
  • Giving it a Viking Funeral, putting it on a little wooden boat and setting that on fire and pushing it off to float in a lake or pond.
  • Violent but paced deconstruction. Getting out my tools and pulling the device apart and unscrewing everything and when it’s in a neat pile, beating it with a hammer.

Then I thought about maybe having my assistant video me turning my Blackberry into a pile of slag in some of the less-personal-approaches to destroying it. Then as I laid there last night thinking about it, a part of me piped up about how if there was a video, first it would be hilarious, very Office Space of me, but it would also be rather incriminating as I would be technically destroying a workplace device.

As I continued to play scenarios through my head I started thinking about truly sadistic things I could do to this obnoxious horrible device and it hit me. It gives me a different non-destructive path to take that actually is more spiritually torturous. I have resolved to consign my Blackberry to a Velveteen Rabbit Hell. I will remove it’s battery and I will put it in a dirty disused cardboard box and I will lock it away in a locker nobody ever uses and I will forget all about it. It will stay in the box, inert, forgotten, and effectively gone from my life. Everyone wins. No video of me destroying it, no crime, nothing to upset anyone and I still get to punish it, long-term. When I do remember it I will relish its silent cardboard grave.

It’s no fun being sick

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The past two days have been a literal blur for me. I started feeling the chills and off-feeling early on and as time went on, it just grew worse. Eventually I started having severe GI issues, pretty regular headaches, a fever, hot-flashes and chills, profuse sweating – all in all very not fun. I skipped out on pretty much all food the first day, I just couldn’t risk anything. I then realized that I needed some calories to keep going so I opened a can of Coca Cola, which usually either clears my system or ultimately resolves my problems one way or another. After holding down several bouts of severe nausea I found a place to lay down that felt good. For some reason the big blue couch in my living room, some throw pillows, and a big blue comforter was EXACTLY what I needed. I pounded down at least 4 hours of solid dead-to-the-world sleep and felt far better when I awoke. After I got over whatever hit me, I figure the likely suspects are either e. coli or cryptosporidium, I felt better. I started with a glass of milk, then moved up to toast. This morning I hazarded cooked oatmeal and that wasn’t a problem.

Tomorrow I will return to work after two days of being sick. I bust on Western for a lot, mostly petty internal bickering and annoyances, but when it comes to being really sick and needing time to recover, its worth it’s weight in gold, to have over 480 accumulated hours of Sick Leave available to use, it’s just one possible stressor that is nowhere to be found.

Everything is better now. My stomach feels fine, my system feels fine, and everything is working as nature intended. I don’t know where I caught the bacteria but I know it was a bacteria. Something that survived stomach acid and set off an attempted coup in my system. With lots of rest and a really quite on-top-of-things immune system I bounced back handily.

I missed my post-a-day yesterday, but there was just no way, I wasn’t able to type let alone flop off the couch. I don’t like being sick, it makes me incredibly emotional, unbelievably needy, and a giant mush in pretty much every regard – assuming I have enough energy available for any of it. Scott was wonderful, as well as all our friends who came to visit and enjoy Glee Night with us, but my two boys, Owien and Griffin were very cute. The minute I would flop down they’d leap on wherever I was and curl up and sleep with me, as if to protect me. So unbearably cute.

With luck I can avoid the matrix of things I did two days ago that got me sick, I have some suspicions and I can do things to avoid having to run into those things again. I hate having to feel that way. I don’t ever want to do it again.

Mr. Handyman Finished

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It took an hour, $20 worth of materials and $148.00 later I no longer have a hole in my wall. I have to say that I’m very happy with ServiceMagic.com and Mr. Handyman. I left a glowing review on ServiceMagic.com. You can notice the color difference in the repaired spot, but other than that, you can’t tell at all there was any damage. I gave them five out of five stars and that’s a very rare thing from me. I only wish they could have processed a credit card transaction, but I had enough in my rainy-day fund to cover the expense with cash. This sucker would have taken me days to complete and I would have screwed it up if I was all on my own. Considering what was done, I made out like Flint.

Mr. Handyman

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A few nights ago I discovered to my chagrin a grapefruit sized hole in the wall right underneath Scott’s desk. I don’t know how it got there and nobody is claiming responsibility so the only party that is non-verbal and might be responsible are the cats. Anyways, there is a hole in my drywall, about the size of a grapefruit.

Last week I contacted ServiceMagic.com and they recommended a local franchise service by the name of Mr. Handyman. So, today at 1pm a Mr. Handyman drywall specialist will visit, carve out the damaged section, put in a patch, tape, mud, and sand.

They are bonded, insured, and they gave me the rates up-front. It’s time and materials, $84 an hour, $44 dispatch fee and the rest is the cost of materials. I could have done this repair on my own, but I would have needed a lot more tools and a lot more knowledge of drywall than I have. I could have bought a book and followed it and made a real mess of things and probably spent in time and trouble the same amount I’m about to spend with Mr. Handyman. The fellow will arrive at 1pm, we’ll see how quickly and how well he does his job. I’ll post another update afterwards, so for those who might be considering hiring this company, watch this space. I have a good feeling that they’ll do it correctly.

Superbowl XLV

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Anyone who knows me knows full well that my attitude to organized sports is careless at best and massively abusive at worst. I take a lot of my cues from my personal hero, George Carlin, especially for his points that good sportsmanship and competition isn’t where it’s at, it’s loss of property, loss of limb, and loss of life where the real drive is. Anyways, since I care not a whit for the players, their teams, or the entire endeavor really it came down to the commercials. After all, the game is just a sweaty grunty window-dressing for the real game – that is, drawing the millions of people who watch to the advertisers. The ad men spend millions to put their very best spots on TV. So after a while, the game becomes a foolish excuse and people look for whats in-between, they look for the ads.

What did Superbowl XLV Ads have in common? Ultra-violence. We’re talking Clockwork Orange level of abuse and mistreatment. The Pepsi Ad where a woman throws a full can of soda at ANOTHER PERSONS HEAD, the Doritos Ad where one man licks the fingers of another, then tears the pants off yet another and fetishistically goes Japanese-businessman on them, all the way out to the extremis, which would be Bridgestone’s ad where a cube-drone attempts to head a Reply-All Email off at the pass by hurting a great number of people, Wow.

After watching the ads I was filled with a kind of cheerful violence, if I had watched ‘Taken’ right afterwards I would have likely been trembling with the urge to pull people’s heads off and scream at the corpses.

So, what do we learn from Superbowl XLV? That when we are at the market buying Pepsi we should have helmets. When we are buying Doritos we should have gloves and secure pants and a rape-whistle, and when dealing with Bridgestone perhaps a taser, a handgun, or an aluminum baseball bat. The central theme is “buy our products and something horrible will happen to you at random”. So… avoid Pepsi, Doritos, and Bridgestone.

Save yourselves. 🙂

West Hills Snark

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I just got a big beautiful 12 page paper mailer from West Hills Athletic Facility. It’s an athletic club that the University bought that nobody I know actually goes to because it’s too expensive. It’s like any other athletic club, looks good on the outside, smells awful on the inside, it’s overpriced and I’ve got no interest in it at all. It’s good to know they have cash to burn on these big mailers. What would be more convenient for everyone and save them lots of money is if they’d just ship out PDF files in email, save the paper costs, the printing costs, and enable me to place the from address into my junk mail list and have it sent to the great bit-bucket in the sky. A win for West Hills’ advertising budget and a win for me and everyone else who doesn’t want to have to find something like this in their campus mailbox just to immediately toss it in the recycling bin.

I suppose I could just clearly print on a sticky-note on our campus mailbox a list of all the spammy bits of debris that we elect to not get. That’s an idea! 😉

My Must-Sing-Aloud Songs

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Krampus: Happy Christmas?

Nearly any song gets a sing-along if I know them well enough. It isn’t a question of which song, but it is a question of how horrible I am to the song. I care not a jot for stupid original lyrics. I like putting in my own abusive, abrasive, and wholly inappropriate lyrics – kind of a sing-song’y cuss-fest. The FCC censor would just walk up to me with a length of duct tape and slap it right over my mouth. I wouldn’t stop though, I’d be humming and giggling right along, and I’d switch from horrible words to really outrageous gestures.

Songs need livening up. Love songs deserve a measure of cannibalism. Metal songs need to be about Santa. Hopeless maudlin crooning deserves some spectacular and bombastic four-letter adjustments. It’s like a filthy Monty Python animation department in my head, always running, coming up with stuff that would make the original lyricist blush so hard their head would explode from the blood pressure alone.

So it’s not about sing-alongs. It’s about sing-abusing. Nobody actually pays attention to the lyrics, they are almost always whiney protestations about how unfair life is or how someone lost something precious. Yadda yadda yadda. Lets have a 40 foot tall cannibalistic Santa-based tooth fairy singing about oil changes and hunting down GE executives with sling-blades. Now that would be something.

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Why I'm Thankful for Caller ID

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peace dove

Of all the people who could call me, I am avoiding none of them. I am dreading none of them. I remember a great quote that speaks to this. Worry is a lot like a rocking chair, you move a lot but you don’t get anywhere.

There is a little part of me that laughs, of all the people who could call me, few of them I think would get through. Remember, my Google Voice number pretty much routes to my good-for-nothing Blackberry device. Once I get rid of that albatross around my neck, and switch to an iPhone, things will get much better. Even still, once they are better, I still don’t have anyone I am avoiding.

I suppose another part of it is that many people in my life aren’t using voice traffic much anymore. Text and other messaging methods take the cake because either they are 100% signal or not, there isn’t any garbled noise and the worst thing that can happen is a hilarious auto-correction. With voice, on Sprint, I usually end up sounding like I’m a welshman trying to scream for my life through toilet pipes. It’s that bad.

I used to dread. Calls from car repair, those big expensive calls, those I used to dread but then I realized that it’s all part of the color of life. The excitement. Even ruin and disaster are teachers and there is no point to worrying, even though anxiety is pretty much a guaranteed thing. The only calls I dread anymore are ones about the health of loved ones. But so far everyone is healthy, that I know of, so yeah, no worries.

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Waiting is the hardest part

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Waiting for Verizon. It’s the hardest part of my February so far. For those who have been keeping track, the IRS came and tried to strangle our wireless infrastructure to death, but apparently failed. I’ve been on-again-off-again with Verizon but now we’re firmly on-again. I’ve sent neatly wrapped missives to management but have yet to hear any response.

All of this would be maddening if Verizon was ready. Thankfully it isn’t maddening because Verizon isn’t ready. In fact, from what I’ve seen from my local Verizon sales rep, they don’t even have a vocabulary yet, let alone any plans or packages for sale. So while I struggle with this nominal Blackberry, I watch the time tick away waiting for Verizon to get off their duff and give us details on plans. Then I can take that information to management and maybe goose them into action.

Last night was a problem because I couldn’t make an outbound call with my minimally acceptable Sprint service on my Blackberry. I had to turn off Automatic Roaming, go up to the upper level of my house where I could get the weakest of signals and make a call to order pizza for dinner. Sprint’s network is wretchedly bad, and it almost never was the case before.

I haven’t the heart to call Sprint and tell them what I’m planning. So far all they know is that the IRS is likely going to be the reason why we close our contract. It’s a total straw-man, and as far as today, a rather nifty fabrication. The last time I told them I was contemplating leaving Sprint for Verizon they sent my sales rep, a VP of sales, and a third fellow who had the word “synergy” in his title, or something to that effect. Truth to be told, I don’t have a problem with my Sprint sales rep, or the VP of sales that came to visit, but that third guy was aggressive, abrasive, and thoroughly an unpleasant human being. If Sprint ever gets around to thinking about why they lost my business they can look no further than this third-man they brought with them. Leaving him in his cubicle may be the best move for their future business, if they have any after Verizon poaches every single one of their customers.

I couldn’t properly express to Sprint exactly why the iPhone on Verizon was so compelling. They kept on pushing Android on their network — Are you serious? Verizon is a double-dunk. The device has pretty much already sold me. The Verizon network is the other half of the power-shot and the fact that Verizon is willing to drop the pretense and become a commodity wireless service vendor means the biggest fear I had about the iPhone on Verizon went up in smoke. They aren’t going to nail it down, cover it with obnoxious Verizon “VZ” bullshit, they are going to simply put the device on their network and let the chips fall where they may.

This is like a hat-trick from heaven. Sprint pre-occupied with an IRS straw-man, iPhone on Verizon, and Verizon keeping their ugly branding out of the pot. Bam Bam BAM! If anyone wants to know why, that’s why. A hat-trick.

Now if only Verizon would get back to me… tick tock tick tock gentlemen!

4G

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I’ve caught myself in one of my first fuddy-duddy moments. It has to do with 4G. Mobile phones have taken on this moniker to help people understand that lower values of G are slower than higher ones. So far 3G is pretty snappy, and 4G is on the horizon.

This has me wondering what exactly would one use 4G speeds for. I start to think about the nature of the devices, what people are likely to do with them. I would say that for most people, voice still dominates the use of these devices but data use is nipping at voice’s heels. People are starting to request more data through their mobile devices and I think that the majority of the data is internet services followed up by the packetized SMS data traffic on the back-end. People are getting their emails, sending and receiving pictures as well as video over these data links and this use will only grow. I can see 3G filling the need for these services quite well, but I start to wonder about 4G, and what it could be useful for. Certainly 4G is overkill for most data traffic, as most of it is designed to flow neatly over current 3G signals. While shopping for new phones at our local Verizon store they started to push 4G on one of my friends. First of all, 4G isn’t in our market yet and I dare say it won’t be for two or three more years. Even if you did have 4G, what would you do with it?

The only applications I can think of are data tethering other devices or a group of devices to that signal, but that would only work well if the data was unlimited. As it is, I seriously doubt any provider will ever offer such service where the data cap isn’t 2 to 5 gigabytes per month, with more money due after you blow by that limit. So, what is the use of 4G? If I was using it, I’d say video calling would probably be the first use, but with a 2-5 GB cap, how many of these calls could you make before you started digging into your limit? If you artificially put a limit on a thing, people are going to use it and fill up their lives with that thing until they hit that limit. Much like how a goldfish will grow to fit the tank it lives in, if it’s a small tank, it’s a small goldfish, if it’s a giant tank, it turns into a carp. With the speed that 4G is pushing, the only other use that springs to mind immediately is BitTorrent. Now what would you be BitTorrent’ing over your mobile phone? Chances are pretty good that it isn’t a legal use of that protocol, chances are it’ll be porn or some pirated data.

I think what I’m getting at is, the nature of these devices may have all the speed they need to do what they do. That any more speed is a solution in search of a problem, and that almost never works well in the end. Is it speed people should be clamoring for or is it network coverage they should be clamoring for? I think that I’d be hotter for a well-fleshed out network than a network that is super speedy. It comes down to the question, what could I do with that speed, and when I hit my data cap, what then? What good is 4G speeds when you’ve burnt through your 2GB cap? In order to not accrue more charges you’d turn off 4G and float around with 3G or 2G. What use is that? And if there weren’t caps, what legal uses of 4G traffic are left? Video calling, yes, but beyond that? I’m not so sure.

A good portion of this argument comes to mind when I see TV spots for AT&T pushing their network speed over their shitty network coverage. Verizon makes the opposite argument, that network coverage is more important than speed. I personally agree with Verizon and am critical of AT&T. Yes your network may be very fast, maybe even 4G fast, but unless you live in a megalopolis and happen to catch the network when a minimum of people are using it all at the same time, then yes, I can see the benefit. But how many of us live in a megalopolis *and* can count on nobody in said Burg from trying to hit the network all at the same time? I call bullshit on 4G data currently. Those companies pushing 4G have an intended-use mismatch and they should probably get in touch with their legal and compliance teams to see if their customers will use 4G traffic for purely innocent and legal means. I am full of doubt.

So, why not just embrace 3G, call it a wash and concentrate on expanding network coverage? That’s an idea worth pursuing.

One thing did strike me at the end, if the really compelling use of 4G is video calling, who wants that? Do you really want to have to shave and look presentable, wearing the right (if any) clothing to make a call? It seems neat and does have some very limited use, but after all, who really needs it? Oh that’s right… Pornographers do. And that’s what will sell 4G. Mark my words. 4G will be powered by pornography, and you know deep in your heart that men will order up 4G porn while back-benching it at church on Sunday with their naive wifeypoo and accidental children. Mark my words.