Archives for 2009

The primary influences on my basic approach to life tended to view society and the systems that make it up as a big puzzle. Every external challenge you face, from how to get the car repaired to paying your bills while maximizing your take-home pay, is an element in a system and every system has rules. In some systems, those rules must be followed to the letter or the penalties are steep but in most systems the rules can be bent, circumvented, or outright ignored largely with no fear of reprisal (some of this is due to lax enforcement on the part of the keepers of a given system but that’s for another time). The chief things you need to realize to get what you want out of a system are that you have to know what your goal is, that you have to figure out what the rules are, and figure out what tools you have to get what you want.

All of this may sound nefarious, like I’m advocating setting up a multi-billion dollar ponzi scheme but I’m not. Take, for example, a decision you might have to make about reducing your monthly bills and how much you spend on phone service. The goal is to keep both phone and internet service but to spend less money every month. The rules are that you have to pay for phone service; Internet service…well…if you’re willing to settle for a crappy, insecure connection and your neighbors are dumb enough to have unsecured wireless, and you don’t mind stealing, you may not have to pay for. But let’s look at the tools.

It used to be that your choice was Ma Bell or Ma Bell. Then deregulation happened in the 1980s. Then cell phones and the Internet happened. Now you have choices. If you have a cable modem, for example, and you are happy with your cell phone service and what it costs, you can dump your land line phone altogether. Or, if you’ve got a non-phone company provided Internet connection you can keep your same phone number but get all over calls using the magic of Voice Over IP. In this decision, your primary tool is math because it is a given that you aren’t going to be able to circumvent the rule that says you must pay for phone service so, you use the tools available, alternate providers and your ability to add and subtract, to figure out how to get the most service for the least amount of money.

My cable company of more than 10 years recently made a major change to their channel lineup. Like all cable television providers, they offer tiered subscriptions. With basic service you get all the broadcast channels plus a few others (’cause in this economy more people need access to the Home Shopping Network). With the “signature” tier you get what is commonly referred to as “basic cable” – all the broadcast channels plus things like Comedy Central, the Sci-Fi Channel, TNT, TBS, and on and on. The “premiere” tier gets you everything the two lower tiers get you plus things like Sundance and the National Geographic channel. And, of course, you can at any time add “premium channels,” HBO, Showtime, SkinCinemax, to any subscription. The smart marketing change they made was to mix all of these channels together. It used to be that if you paid for “signature” – the middle tier – you didn’t get any channels numbered over 99. Pretty easy to ignore the things you weren’t paying for. But now to entice you to buy up to the higher priced tier, they’ve mixed them all together so as you’re scrolling through that handy on-screen program guide you’re more likely to see something you might want to watch on a channel you don’t get. Frustrating as all hell sometimes and I resent its transparency as a marketing ploy.

All of this became relevant when I sat down to clear some things I’d recorded off the DVR on very gray, cold Sunday. Lurking there on the DVR’s hard drive were several episodes of a show called Dogtown.

Dogtown is a co-production of the National Geographic Channel and an organization I wholeheartedly support, Best Friends Animal Society. Best Friends is the largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States boasting 30,000+ acres in Utah and dogtown will take in any troubled dog or even dogs that just need to find a home.

This first episode focused for two hours on the rehabilitation of some of the dogs seized from Michael Vick‘s dog fighting operation in central Virginia. Heartbreaking stories about dogs that had never known love or affection, never gotten to play, only train and fight and live in fear. The trainers at dogtown worked with each animal to figure out what he or she needed to become a social, happy, and hopefully adoptable dog (full disclosure: some of the Vick dogs will by court order spend the rest of their lives at Best Friends having been deemed by the court too dangerous to live in a family setting).

But as I discovered that gray Sunday, I only had four episodes of Dogtown which I knew was about to go into its second season. What happened to the others?

Well, at some point we made some reductions in our bills and dropped the tier that includes the National Geographic Channel. But wait, said I to myself, isn’t NatGeo one of the HD channels that is offered free in the tier I do subscribe to? Free HD channels, of course, being one of the features on which cable companies have chosen to pretend they compete.

Lo and behold, yes, I get the National Geographic Channel in HD form right there on my regular 4:3 non-digital, non-flat screen, 15 year-old TV. How, you might inquire? Because that lovely DVR that we rent from the cable company is HD capable. Which means, yes, boys and girls, I’m getting channels for free that I would otherwise be paying an extra $15/month for the privilege of watching. So this DVR that I am renting anyway allows me to circumvent legally the rules of the system that say that I must pay extra to watch certain channels.

Every system has rules. Some rules can be bent, others can be broken. Still others can be ignored altogether. Sometimes the tools you have – the ability to research and read – can get you things you want by allowing you to figure out which rules are which.

Google’s gone batshit.

Apparently they’ve decided to add a feature to the search engine that identifies sites that might be harmful. Apparently they also didn’t read the config file when they set it up and released it to the public. At least, that’s the only thing I can determine since they’re labeling themselves and all their products as “This site may harm your computer.” Check it out.

What’s even better is when you follow any of the links to get more explanation you get a server error.

I had a boss once who said he was a little afraid to seat me next to one of our department’s other staff members; he didn’t want to create a vortex of cynicism that might suck the entire organization into another dimension. His remarks amused at the time but the further I get away from them and the more I’m proven right when everyone else says I’m being cynical the less funny his observation becomes.

The thing is, I was starting to kind of like Barack Obama. No, he wasn’t my candidate of choice but so far he’s done the things that I thought needed to be done: he froze all of the Bush administration’s pending regulations, he reversed the “gag rule” that prohibited family planning organizations from talking about abortion, he’s made the moves to start closing down the abomination that is the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and he urged Congress to pass and then signed the Equal Pay Act but that all changed in the middle of the week.

Earlier this week DC got some of what meteorologists euphemistically refer to as “wintery mix.” Snow followed by sleet followed by sub-freezing temperatures overnight all combined to create a landscape coated in about 2 inches of solid ice. Given that we have actual terrain here unlike say, oh, Chicago where the landscape is totally freaking flat and they don’t have to worry about school buses (not known for their traction anyway) sliding backwards down ice-covered hills, several school systems closed on Wednesday and several more opened on a two hour delay. And it was on Wednesday that Barack Obama proved that he’s simply a politician. It wasn’t until Thursday that Obama, or President Jesus as we’ve taken to referring to him here (well, everyone is treating the man like he can walk on water) proved that he is the worst of all things: a hypocrite.

Wednesday morning during a cabinet meeting which, I hasten to point out takes place in the White House you know, where Obama lives so he didn’t even have to leave the building to get there, he made a special point of mocking Washington’s response to the weather going to far as to say “”When it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don’t seem to be able to handle things.” Politico captured it on video (see below)

Yeah, OK, we get it: Washington has a tendency to overreact to winter weather. As a native I would point out that 90% of the people who live here aren’t originally from here and all of those folks who are from colder climes who complain about how no one in DC knows how to drive in the snow are the same ones who are bitching up a storm and turning their AC down to “hang meat” when DC is a swamp during the summer. Can’t have it both ways folks; either you can handle the weather, all the weather, and complain all you like or you can handle some of our weather badly in which case you have no right to bitch about how other people deal with the weather they don’t like.

And what bothered me was not that he holds the opinion; a lot of people hold the same opinion and are entitled to hold it (you can think whatever you’d like). What bothered me was that he went out of his way to mention it. What, tabletalk about the Superbowl would have been too sexist or something? The whole thing shows that Mr. Aloha Zen, Mr. Open to New People and Ideas has a distinct lack of empathy for anyone else’s circumstances. After all, some people actually have to get their kids to school rather than having them walk out of the East Portico into a motorcade that takes them there under siren running red lights all the way.

But then Thursday The New York Times published a puff piece on Obama’s “style” in the White House which is markedly more casual than Bush’s was. The press corps is so used to seeing POTUS in a suit jacket that to see Obama in the Oval Office without one was a shock. And according to David Axelrod the reason Obama is able to sit around in a just a shirt and tie isn’t just due to the fact that his personal style is less formal than Bush’s. No, there’s a more logical explanation for it:

Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

“He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”

– “White House Unbuttons Formal Dress Code”, The New York Times, January 28, 2009

So, I’m a wimp for not wanting to walk half a mile over glare ice to the subway but this guy is tough even though he’s got the thermostat cranked up to what sounds like 80degF or 85degF because he “hates the cold?”

I guess Mr. Obama needs some of that flinty Chicago toughness himself…or maybe it’s the DC-native toughness that lets me keep my thermostat at 68degF during the day and 64degF at night.

Or maybe it’s all just an extremely clever political ploy to get us concentrating on his bullshit attitude and away from the fact the the stimulus bill he helped craft in the House, the one that gave so much away to the Republican party, didn’t get a single Republican vote.