No-brainer

I think it's time to cut a deal in the interests of national security. To heck with the Middle East (and especially the Saudis).

What we ought to do is cut deals with the Russians. Become their largest customer, and supply most of our imported oil needs through them. Everyone wins. The Russians get the hard currency needed to continue modernizing their economy, we get a stable trading partner and the resources we need, and the Saudis get screwed.

Also worth noting in such a deal is that a close trading relationship with the Russians helps reduce conflict by binding our economies closer together. Tom Friedman had an interesting point in his book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" (a terrific read). He postulated that no country with a McDonald's had ever gone to war with another nation with a McDonald's (though this may have been broken in Kosovo, depending on if you count that as a war or not). Commerce binds nations together to a degree that politics cannot easily overcome.

Feeling good today!

mentioned previously how I'm a wrestling fan. Well, I also like real sports, too - I ran track in high school, raced bicycles (road, not BMX - you know, wearing the funny outfits), I used to go rock climbing and I played a little rugby at college when we started up a club team. I golf and bowl (candlepins - the little ones) nowadays, along with a little bike riding. A lot of tech people aren't much for sports - I really enjoy them.

With that in mind, I also enjoy watching football and baseball - I like to go to games and I like them on TV, too. I root for the Red Sox (though I grew up in New York, I hate the friggin' Yankees), and I'm a Pats fan. I think frustration appeals to me - I still cheer for one New York team - the Rangers (who went over 50 years between Stanley Cups).

Accordingly, I have one thing to say about last night's events - Woo-hoo!

Sports are not the most important thing in the world, they're a nice diversion from reality and they can be fun to participate in. But there's a certain nice feeling that a community shares when their team is a winner - it's a competition between cities on a large and non-violent level and it feels good to finally be the winner. In olden days these battles would be fought with knights and catapults, now they're fought by football players. Yay Pats!

Now if only the new Sox owners can fire that idiot Duquette...

Go figure

The other day I was talking with a couple of my co-workers about how the perfect name for a dot-com nowadays would be "e-vulture.com". I decided to look it up.

It's been registered and is being held by domaincollecions.com - for sale to the highest bidder. I think that says a lot.

Expounding on a recent poll comment I made

Yes, dang it - I am a wrestling fan. In it's own way, that's even geekier than being a sci-fi watcher (I'm 35 - for me, Trek ended with Classic, and I haven't seen a sci-fi film that was truly worthwhile since Buckaroo Banzai). I grew up watching Ric Flair, Superfly Jimmy Snuka, Andre the Giant, and Chief Jay Strongbow. Jesse Ventura. George (The Animal) Steele. I remember Rocky Johnson before his son out-famoused him (Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock). Wrestling was different back then. You had clear-cut villains, heroic babyfaces, no complex storylines beyond the personal feuds that each story was told by, and champions who held the belts for years.

I watched it on the New York independent stations (WWOR and WPIX) back when I was a kid, and I watched it some during high school. When I left for college in the mid-1980's, though, pro wrestling was one of the things I left behind me. I missed the "rock and wrestling" days, I only saw Captain Lou Albano when he cavorted with Cyndi Lauper on MTV (did she suck last year at the Boston Pops July 4th concert or what?), and I missed most of the whole Hulkamania phenomenon. I was also MIA (busy with trying to establish a career and with a relatively young marriage) when Ted Turner bought a promotion and transformed it into the WCW, then going out and buying all the WWF's biggest names away from them. I was on the sidelines when the "sport" started changing from the competition. I missed the debut of Stone Cold, "Attitude", and the rise of "tweeners" like Triple H.

In late 1999, I happened to channel-surf to Channel 38 (the local UPN affiliate) one Thursday night. Never could stand "Friends". By chance, this was just a few months after "SmackDown!" began airing on the network. I watched it, and it was fascinating. This wasn't the wrestling I remembered. The moves were a lot faster, the ringside pyro was brighter and louder, the soap-opera plots had gotten more histrionic, and battles were spilling out into the audience. The plot twist I tuned in for that first day was the "marriage" of the owner's daughter (Stephanie McMahon) to the aforementioned Triple H ("Hunter Hearst Helmsley", in real life a gym manager from Nashua named Paul Levesque), the biggest heel in the Federation. I kept watching through the relevation the next month that the marriage wasn't a trick by Hunter - it was actually an evil plot by Stephanie to wrest control of the WWF away from her dad, revealed when she turned on him at the pay-per-view that month. Okay, it was hokey trash, but I was hooked again.

Since then, I've seen the rise of new stars (Kurt Angle, a real 1996 Olympic gold medalist, is particularly amazing to watch), the return of old ones (Flair is back! Whooo!), storylines that have been fascinating, storylines that sucked (the whole WCW invasion), characters go from heel to face and back again at a dizzying clip, and I've even gone to their live show (a SmackDown! taping in Boston last July). My wife has become a fan. It turns out that some of my friends (all technology professionals of some sort or another) were closet wrestling fans, too - one even collects them on his Tivo so he doesn't have to miss a show.

Why do I, a upper-middle-class professional person in his mid 30's with a wife and a (soon to be) family watch this mindless trash? For exactly that reason. It's escapist fun, nothing that happens on the show means anything in real life, and the performers are out there pulling off amazing stunts and violent activities that would leave you and I in traction, but they are skilled enough performers to make it look far worse than the harm they actually do one another. I can turn off my brain, watch the show, and not worry about the logic behind any of it. In the world we live in today, it's especially nice to be able to have a world like this that I can spend a little time in - a place where the good guys eventually win, the bad guys generally get their comeuppance, and nobody gets hurt for real.

And what fault can one find with that?

Tech support ramblings...

Dell support sucks. Period. I've been trying to get a laptop at work fixed definitively for about two months now. We started with a laptop that had broken latches, a loose hinge, and PC Card slot doors that had fallen off. Our Top Gun Developer Guy is brilliant, but he abuses his machines horribly.

No problem - Dell is willing to fix things for free. Yay! So they send out a technician, after drop-shipping us a replacement screen (apparently it's not worth their while to just replace the latch. Whatever.). He shows up, replaces the screen, now the new screen doesn't work at all - all we see is backlighting.

This is not good. The tech calls Dell, and finds that now screen modules are backordered. So we go from a working, battered laptop to a dead laptop. Three weeks later, the replacement replacement arrives. The tech returns and installs it, all is now good. Right?

He forgot to take care of the PC Card doors, and he neglects to but the screwcovers on the new screen. It's also a little misaligned. So for the last three weeks I've been trying to get Dell back. So far no luck.

Dell's not the only company with issues, though. We have mainly bought Gateway systems over the last year or so (mainly because of Dell's ongoing support problems), and they were great until we bought a pair of Solo 9500 laptops. Both laptops have issues with random keyboard/mouse freezes when plugged into their docking stations. We bought these for Developer Guy and myself. When it happened to me, I could close the lid to sleep the laptop - I'd get the keyboard/mouse back when I then re-opened the lid to wake it.

Developer Guy can't do that - he uses Windows 2000 Server as the base OS on his laptop, which does not suspend. So we tried Gateway support with no success, tried the latest BIOS, brought the local SE in to help debug it, no luck. Finally, Developer Guy came up with a fix - he now uses a USB keyboard/mouse (with legacy support turned on in the BIOS), and that works for him. No PS/2 port splitting to deal with that way.

I, however, am determined to get this fixed right, so I spend oodles of time on the phone with the senior support folks. Finally, they make plans to have me send in the laptop/dock for testing. I grab a spare desktop PC, move my data over to the new one, and prepare for the promised contact for shipping materials and info...

Which never comes.

You know, it's real frustrating when tech support is this bad. Now I have to waste time chasing two vendors instead of one, and I'll be wasting more of the vendor's time trying to chase them than they would be wasting if they just did things Right to begin with.

Grumble.

OK, now what?

The new iMac. I have no use for one. I already own 1 Mac (I have a TiBook 667) myself, and my wife has an iMac DV-450, which is fine for her. My TiBook is almost as fast as the new iMacs, it has a bigger screen, and unlike the iMac, it runs on batteries. I have a CD burner I use with it (I bought mine before they made the Combo drive standard), so I can do anything they can do with the lower two models - I just can't write DVD discs. Big deal, right?

Unfortunately, Apple excels at the "gotta have" factor. They make computers that you look at and just want. Regardless of needs. Regardless of reason. You just want them. So I'll probably start trying to sell my wife soon on the idea. It'll take me about a year, and they'll come out with something even cooler the day after I buy it.

Rats.

What I'd really like to see, though, is what Apple comes up with over the next month or so. Obviously, they didn't unveil the new Pro Macs for a reason. What that reason was, I really wonder about - and it makes me think even more about where the Pro systems are headed. For their own sake, they'd better follow thru with something worthwhile, and soon.

Here's hoping next year's a better one...

At least for this nation, and for the world. Personally, it turned out to be a pretty good year, but my life is insignificant in the larger scheme of things. I am not a terribly religious person (I think most geeks share that trait, though not all), and it sickens me to see so many people, in this day and age, still willing to hurt and kill one another over what they think God wants them to do. Concentrate on living a good life in this life, folks - if you do that and there is an afterlife, you'll be taken care of. Really.

I think this classic Onion story sums it up neatly.

Try to do the Right Thing by people, and this world might not go to hell in a handbasket after all.

Peace out, yo.

And on a (spam) related note...

Today's messages waiting for me in my work mailbox:

No-Spam E-Mail Lead Generation trkiier
Re: ...something to think about?
Reach millions of potential buyers.. 3429
CALL NOW!!!
The Easiest Way to Make Money Online!
Is there pornography on your computer? - FREE system check!

Outlook's junk mail filter dealt with most of them (properly pre-placing them in the trash), but the annoying thing is that those rules take effect AFTER my Blackberry redirector grabs most of 'em. So the first four all went to my pager automatically (the last two were from somebody who calls themselves "hotdeals", and spams me about 20+ times daily - I wrote a specific Blackberry rule to blackhole anything that has "hotdeals" in the From: address). What a pain in the buttski.

I wish I could dump our e-mail system (Exchange 5.5) entirely, but as an MS Enterprise licensing shop, it's just not practical. Rats. My home server/client does a _much_ better job of nuking spam

You know, I just don't "get" internet advertising...

I never had a problem with good old banner ads, sponsorships, or even the newer Flash-based ads you see nowadays on a lot of news sites (the ones that the text wraps around). Serving up a website costs money. Duh. If ads help pay the bills, that's a Good Thing. I've even clicked on some and occasionally bought a product.

What I don't get, though, is how and why the ads are becoming even more and more annoying now. I will never buy anything from a pop-up or pop-under ad. Period. I might click on it, but only be accident when I'm trying to make it go away. And the new generation of Flash ads that wipe the screen and make you wait for them? I've started avoiding sites that use them as best as I can.

The thing is, among all my friends, acquaintances, co-workers, and family, I know nobody who thinks any different. Do advertisers even realize that they're just pissing people off? And when this latest wave of ads fails, will they go back to the old school, or will sites just fold?

Finally, does _anyone_ ever buy a product from a spam pitch? I didn't think so. I'm not exactly a net.celeb, but I have been around for a while, and on the web and usenet for a decade or so. So my e-mail address is out there, and well-harvested - I must get around 20 or so spams a day, and those are just the ones that aren't knocked out at the server by my spam recipes. Arrgh. It's even worse at work - I had to blackhole pm0.net completely because their users abuse it so much.

Grumble.

Leonids

OK, the Leonid shower rocked. My wife and I spent about 45 minutes at the beach in Marblehead, MA watching, and we saw bursts of as many as 5 at a time. It was also amazing how many people were there - the parking lot at the beach was more filled than it gets on some summer days!

However, with a southern exposure, we were getting a cold wind off the ocean right in our faces, so 45 minutes was all we could take. We left a little after 5 AM, went home, and slept until after 11. I'm still tired two days later. But it was worth it.