rant.

taking a break from interesting posts because no one's commenting anyway ;)

but holy shit, could fedex's website be any less useful for finding locations? i mean, seriously. their fedex/kinko's site is great, you can search by town, state, zip code or whatever. but in order to search for any dropoff point, you need to:
a) have an exact address (great for when you have a co-worker on the phone in Reno "yeah, i know you've never been there, but can you give me the exact street address for where you are? and what's the zip code?")
b) use internet explorer only
c) not trust the results anyway (funny how 100 W Main st turns into 212 N Walnut St when you click for directions).
and, even more helpful, they don't provide any option for feedback for their website! geez, i guess they know how much it sucks.

*sigh* i'll still use them over ups any day, though.

arghargharghargh.

deep breath. deep breath. ooo, tea. forget lapsang. golden yunnan is the single malt of the black tea world. smoky and leathery and not at all like drinking an infusion of bacon. on a completely different note, new favourite site.

sorry, adrenaline makes me a little (more) absentminded (than usual).

what the fuck? - UPDATED

blogger is entirely broken. i apologize for the reposts, but i can't even delete them.

2:48pm - their server seems to be playing nicely now. duplicate posts deleted.

An open letter to President Bush

Dear Mr. President and GOP Supporters,

It may not be the best idea to tout to a generation that watched Enron, Worldcom, the dot-coms, et al blow up (not to mention the mutual fund scandals), to a generation which is already disillusioned with and distrustful of government, to a generation that is going to have to deal with the massive deficit you're leaving, that the government cut the promised retirement safety line and instead, that it should trust Wall St.

Just a suggestion.

well, duh.

so, despite the fact that this winter has been cold and snowy and icy, it hasn't been anything near what a winter at the University of Hoth inflicted on me in the past. which has made me very puzzled as to why i appeared to be suffering the cold with quite a bit less stoicism this year. was it just that i was unused to the arctic chill knifing its way through my bones? i asked myself.

and then, last night, it hit me. i don't have a hood anymore. oh duh :P

when we packed up our stuff prior to getting married, naturally some of mine ended up at my in-laws' place. and my brother-in-law, finding my heavy winter coat, appropriated it without asking about its origins, because that's what their family is like (drives me nuts sometimes :) he subsequently decided that he didn't like the hood, which was removable. so he removed it and promptly lost it. and now i have nothing to protect my ears or my head anymore.

apparently, one should never underestimate the amount of heat one loses through one's head after all o.O

i need to buy a hat.

disclaimer.

with all the adverse publicity recently around people who blog from or about work, i just felt like pointing out that even though i do both (check out my timestamps ;) i have never mentioned my company by name, nor any real identifiable information about it. i have to wonder, i suppose, if i can do it, why can't anyone else?

i guess i just don't draw any sense of identity from my job.

sideways.

saw it saturday night. it had been on my list of movies to see since i read about it, and then it won the oscar for best adapted screenplay, so we figured, what the hell.

it was a good movie, definitely. probably the most mature movie i've seen in a very long time. i think, possibly, the only problem i had with it was that it didn't really explore thomas hayden church's character (jack) fully, and it's left me with a strangely unfulfilled feeling. he's set up as a playboy; he's getting married, but is insistent that he's going to get laid multiple times while on his one last week of bachelor freedom in california's wine country. alright, that's a fairly common occurance, no one is shocked.

then, he meets this woman who he claims he's falling in love with. he goes so far as to postulate that he call his fiancee and "postpone" the wedding. even after she discovers he's getting married, he picks up another chick and goes home with her.

then, suddenly, he breaks down in a very dramatic scene, insisting he can't lose his fiancee because she's all he has and without her, he's nothing. now, you understand this is supposed to be his facade tearing away. but it just seems so...so...out of place. it's not followed up by any indication he's going to be faithful to this woman once he marries her. it's not followed up by practically anything. the main character undergoes some further development, but after that one outburst, jack is just pretty much dropped. it's just very...strange. usually after a character has his walls broken down, some sort of change is usually intimated.

did anyone else see the movie? was there something incredibly subtle that i missed?

i am not a morning person.

but damn, this was an absolutely gorgeous late winter morning. a fresh snowpack (6 inches on monday, and it hasn't got above freezing yet), a bright sun shining in a cloudless, clear blue sky. and minimal wind.

the last third or so of my walk to work takes me on a path through a park along a wide creek. it's my favorite part of the walk, no contest. and in the clear morning sunshine, assuming my ears aren't about to freeze and fall off, it never fails to cheer me up.

then, of course, i get to my windowless office with buzzing flurescent lights and all that goes out the window. but what the hell, it's nice while it lasts. it's not nearly so effective in the afternoon, when i hit the park first and the streets after. and there's something different about the quality of the light when the sun is rising and when it's setting. although at least i get to see sunset now.

the equinox approacheth.

now here's a good idea.

why don't we do this?

probably because many of our industrial farms are significantly larger in size, we have more land and more people in general. i'm not sure how something like that would translate to a larger scale.

but i do think it's definitely something we ought to look at. and hey, if people keep guying organic and so forth food like they have been, maybe it'll happen naturally without the need for legislation.

or am i being too optimistic? ;)

oscar.

there was no oscar party this year, but we watched the show anyway. well, most of it. i missed the red carpet and morgan freeman. but we saw the rest.

i have to say, it was possibly a little silly of me to watch them this year, as i had seen even less of the nominated movies than usual. although i had read a fair bit about most of them. in fact, i think i saw...The Incredibles. oh, and Shrek 2. that may have been it. i wanted to see Finding Neverland and Sideways, but somehow i never got around to it. i have a terrible history of not seeing movies. i still haven't seen Titanic. although i'm not really sure i'm missing anything, best picture oscar notwithstanding. we all know the movie that wins the best picture oscar is not always the best movie (*cough*Gladiator*cough*).

i have to say, chris rock was a remarkably uncharismatic host. i'm agreeing with the reports that his routine was essentially neutered because ABC is afraid of the FCC. but still. he was just...i don't know. lacking stage presence, i think. the contrast was made even more glaring when they had a tribute to johnny carson. bring back billy crystal, please.

(speaking of tributes, russ meyer died last year? i missed that. bowever, i also noticed that when they credited him with 2 films, they left out his most famous Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill *grin*)

and where on everyone's list of fashion foul-ups is laura linney? sure, her dress was great, but honey, you need to fire your hair and makeup artist, please. blush was way too low on the cheeks, and the hair looked like a cross between a horse mane and the crest on a helmet. and her eye makeup made her look like she'd just come from the clockwork orange reconditioning.

also, note to gwynneth paltrow: when you have a kid, your breasts tend to swell. take that in mind next time you're fitting a dress.

and poor zhang ziyi. she still can't speak english, so why make her read 2 short, practically monosyllabic sentences from the teleprompter ("oscar" is 2 syllables) and then stand there looking uncomfortable the rest of the time? i mean, ok, the oscars are all about pretty people, but i guess the lining up and shooing away of "minor" awards losers wasn't enough humiliation for them.

it was nice to see people who long deserved oscars finally get them, though (morgan freeman, cate blanchett). too bad martin scorcese can't be added to that list. he's five for five, now. and poor johnny depp, snubbed twice in a row. they'll have to be added to the list of "probable honorary oscar winners."

all in all, a moderately unimpressive oscar show, i think. we shall have to see what happens this year.

unsettling signals.

this caught my eye. it's a very long article, so i may quote some stuff here. but it's set my mind running in several different directions at once, so this will probably be a disorganized post.

the first thing i see is, there's something of a distinction between being asked to present your id to travel within the country, and being asked to present a driver's license to rent a car. you see, cars are big, expensive, heavy objects that can kill people. so naturally, we like to be assured that anyone who drives a car has reached some expected standard of skill. therefore, if you run a car rental company, you want to be sure that someone you're giving one of your cars to has attained this skill level. in this circumstance, asking to see a driver's license does not to me seem unreasonable. it's not that you're demanding identification and stashing it in a government database as with airlines, you just want to make sure that this person is not going to a) wreck your expensive machinery b) kill someone c) kill themselves. the same applies for a police officer pulling you over at a traffic stop.

if she had been smart, the gate agent would have told him that the airline has to protect themselves against people suing them when someone steals their ticket. although that still wouldn't explain the database entry.

this is a major point, though:

"Privacy discourse ends up being at one end, 'What have you got to hide?' vs. 'Mind your own business,' " Tien said.

a favorite line is "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear." well, the problem is that human history proves that that's not true. and on the other side, why should the government have to know exactly where you are at all times? i mean, really. they have a mailing address for you. if you're not committing a crime, there's no reason for the government to know where you are. what should we grant them that right? one of his strongest arguments would be that we know that the sept 11 hijackers had driver's licenses. we know what seats they were sitting in on the plane, for fuck's sake.

that's the silliest part about the whole "9/11" thing. after it happened, the government rushed around attempting the CYA trick, and instead enacted a police state for themselves. i mean, what were the major changes to air travel? 1) no more curbside check-in. the hijackers parked in the parking garage. 2) you have to show id at check-in. the terrorists had driver's licenses. 3) you can no longer idle your car outside the terminal to pick up passengers. see 1)

so all that did is inconvenience a lot of legitimate travelers, and even if those restrictions had been in place prior to the attack, they wouldn't have done anything anyway.

the social security number is another thing. there are many times when i wish i could ask someone isn't there another form of identification they could use? but organizations are lazy, and the SSN is easy.

and, you know, i'm not a millionaire. i need to feed myself and pay my mortgage and have a cellphone (what did we do before cellphones? well, as i remember, we had a much less mobile society in general). i'm not in a position to demand that my cellphone company stop using my social as my PIN. and i'm certainly not in a position to point out how utterly ridiculous it is to use the SSN as your identification for your financial credit. or medical history, of all things. those of us caught in the system can't actually do a lot in the way of fighting it. so i guess i'm posting to my blog instead of insisting my cellphone company doesn't need a government issued id to give me service, as long as i'm paying them, dammit. however, i do encourage everyone to check out and support the EFF. and maybe at least think about it the next time someone demands id, think about exactly what they're going to do with it, why they want it, and who else could get a hold of it.

To some, Gilmore's argument is redolent of the conspiracy theories from the black helicopter crowd.

"That's the problem. How it sounds," Gilmore said. He waved his hands like some Cassandra: "They have all these secret laws! The UFOs are coming! They have guards at every airport!" Yes, he said, there is a certain odd flavor to the notion that someone shouldn't have to show ID to board a plane, but with magnetometers at the gates, guards with security wands, fortified cockpit doors and sky marshals abounding, Gilmore is asking just how much citizens are giving up when they hand their driver's licenses to a third party, in this case an airline, where it is put into a database they cannot see, to meet a law that, as it turns out, they are not allowed to read.