Archive for the 'Annoyances' Category

A local drugstore recently installed two self-checkout terminals. Last night was the first time I had been there since they were installed. The terminals were each being used as Krissy and I walked up to one of the checkers. In a loud voice that could be heard from the back of the otherwise quiet store the pre-recorded female voice coolly, but resolutely, announced, “Card not accepted.” The woman at the first station kept canceling and retrying her checkout. After numerous rejections she pressed the help button.

“Would you like assistance?”
*BEEP*
“Help is on the way.”

Then she waited. While she was waiting the man at the second terminal finally gave up and pressed the help button.

“Would you like assistance?”
*BEEP*
“Help is on the way.”

It was at about this time that the woman in front of us had her card rejected. The cashier called for a manager to void the transaction. The visibly flustered manager eventually made his way over to void the transaction. Then he went to help the man who was having trouble with the self-checkout. He tried pressing all sorts of things and even used his key, but even though he failed the machine announced, “Please take your receipt. Please take your change. Thank you for shopping.” The manager gave up and pulled out the man’s single purchase from the bag that had concealed it. He then placed it forcefully on the conveyor belt behind our purchases. It was a box of home pregnancy tests. The man didn’t look like he was too excited about having this item on public display. Most of the customers in the store were now watching the manager and the other woman at the self-checkout. While this was happening the woman’s self-checkout station beeped again.

“Would you like to keep waiting?”
*BEEP*
“Help is on the way.”

This made her sigh. It was not a sigh of relief, but an aggravated sigh of frustration. The manager was busy helping the other customer and by this time our cashier was ringing up our selections. While scanning our items she got the woman’s attention and asked, “Do you want to cancel your purchase?” The woman then turned around and exclaimed, “No! I’m Canadian and this machine won’t accept my postal code!” A cashier at the other end of the row of checkout lanes raised her hand and indicated she could help the next person in line. It was at about this time that our credit card was declined. Krissy tried it again a different way… still declined. I think they must have been having problems getting cards processed. As we walked out without our purchase I heard our cashier call her manager to void the transaction. He was exasperated, but I didn’t see what happened because we were out the door.

As a child I remember returning home from long trips to Utah and getting excited seeing the dragons on hole 19 off to the right of the freeway heading into town. They always let me know that we were almost home. The Family Fun Center in Escondido is no more. A secondary casualty was the Chuck E. Cheese’s next door. Both of these locations provided me hours of entertainment and enjoyment including a few birthday parties.

I can’t exactly say that I’m surprised to see them go. This part of town has been steadily going downhill for years. Part of this demolition project included what used to be a K-Mart. It was the worst K-Mart in the country though when it finally closed. Twenty years ago it was a much nicer place. There was a restaurant inside and you could buy ice cream cones and Slush Puppies and all sorts of things, but over time it grew worse and worse. I went in there once looking for an obscure toy and the aisles were strewn with discarded merchandise. I am assuming that this was the building that was slated for demolition, but that the new occupants wanted more space so they bought up the Family Fun Center next door for the extra space.

No more bumper boats, no more “maze craze,” and no more miniature golf. Family Fun Center, you will be missed.

When I looked at this picture after getting home I thought it kind of looked like they might be replacing the Family Fun Center with a miniature version of Disneyland with the Matterhorn being constructed first, but alas, I must deal with the sad truth that a Lowe’s Home Improvement store is building there instead.

I’m taking an Algebra class this summer. Six weeks ends up being a really short period of time when a math class is involved. I took Physical Anthropology in 12 days, and that was no problem, but math is a different story.

Today I had this jock sit right next to me. I had noticed this because the previous class periods he had always sat two rows in front of me, right next to a group of people that look like they might be pretty good at this math stuff. A couple days ago I heard him comment that he had expected me to challenge the instructor’s teaching style rather than the girl who ended up challenging the teacher. His motives were soon made clear when he told me that he had cheated on the math placement test so he could get into this college level algebra class. He made it obvious that he was only in college to play baseball. During the quiz the teacher left the room for a few minutes and he tried to see what was written on my paper. After the quiz he said that he thought we had the same kind of calculator. I doubted him because almost no one has the TI-85 in college algebra classes. I asked to see his calculator to check the model number. Even though we all knew that it would be needed on the quiz, he said he had left his calculator in the car and that it didn’t matter because he didn’t know how to use it anyway.

Later on it seemed that he had realized that I wouldn’t prove to be the exceptional math student (and source of correct test answers) he had suspected I would be. He started looking around and asking people who the really smart people in the class were. We have our first big test in class tomorrow and he’s just trying to figure out who might let him cheat!

Cheaters never prosper, or so I’ve heard. I can’t help but wonder what this guy is like on the baseball diamond. If he cheats this wantonly on tests and in class I can’t imagine him having anything against such dishonesty in other matters in his life including baseball. I don’t know why, but something tells me that he’s not going to learn much in this class. If he passes and I don’t, I’m going to be really upset.

Today, after we got back our quizzes in my six-week long algebra class, one student raised her hand and asked if it were okay to not have used a graphing calculator on one of the questions that asked that one be used and then consulted to draw an estimate of what the graph of a particular function should look like since she did not have one yet because the instructor said on the first day of class that one would not be required until the second week of class. The instructor paused for a moment and said that it was indeed not acceptable and that she needed to have used one for full credit. The whole class seemed quite taken aback. Most instructors would have realized their mistake and awarded credit for requiring something she had previously stated was not required. I took a four-week class that ended just last week and the professor would go through the tests while the students were taking it and tell us the answers to the questions that were not addressed in lectures or our reading materials. Why, after all, should students suffer for the mistakes of their professors?

The rest of the class period was rather tense and uncomfortable. I could feel the loss of respect in the classroom. We all had this feeling like we weren’t being dealt with fairly. Each of us had become that poor girl in the front row. Now, as it turns out, that “poor girl” turned out to be rather bold and obnoxious, but none of us could really blame her. After all, we didn’t respect the teacher anymore. The wronged girl raised her hand a number of times questioning the teacher’s judgment and she did so with an indignant accusatory tone that made each of us in the class feel even more uncomfortable as the teacher then fought for her ideas openly. One such idea was that we should be using the calculator so much for what the girl thought were trivially easy tasks.

I propose the following as the first Article of Fairness in Academics:

Students will be marked down for their own mistakes and not for their teachers’ negligence.

Last week we received a letter from the power company that there would be a scheduled power outage tonight starting at 11:00pm. Well, I put it on my calendar and promptly forgot about it. Krissy was already asleep when it happened, but I was listening to the FLOSS Weekly podcast when all the lights went out as far as I could see out the window. The electric company had brought their own lights to see what they were working on, and that was the only light around. Shortly after the lights went out I went on the balcony with a flashlight. I was not the only one who had this idea, however.

When I started flashing the flashlight onto the field across the way I saw another beam of light originating from another balcony in my building. When I moved my light, the other light followed. No matter where I went the other light tried to “catch” mine. I tried all sorts of silly little things. I spun the flashlight over my head like I was a lighthouse. That really seemed to confuse them. Just when they thought they knew what to expect, I started going the other direction. It all sounds so silly now, but when everyone in a neighborhood all experiences boredom simultaneously it’s like everyone’s a kid again.

You aren’t having fun? Make up a game!

I’m sitting in the computer lab at Palomar College. I just witnessed something so ridiculous that I could hardly believe my eyes. Everyone already knows that 95.7% of computer lab usage is checking MySpace. Although that’s ridiculous, that’s not news. While I was reading digg doing my homework I was interrupted, as is so often the case, by the rapid mouse clicking associated with playing a stupid flash game. Rapid keyboard activity can indicate work (or blogging), but mouse clicks can only be one thing. Usually when this happens to me the person doing the clicking is in a position that doesn’t allow me to see what they are doing. This time was different.

The girl behind me was clicking furiously for about 15 seconds followed by hushed rejoicing in her rapid-fire mousing abilities. It was so annoying that I had to see what all the noise was about. When I turned around to look I was astonished. She wasn’t playing a game. She was on MySpace! For those of us with the AdBlock firefox extension installed: MySpace is covered with little flash ads that you can’t see. These ads promise things like free ringtones as rewards for winning virtual tug of war contests. You “win” by clicking a red button on the screen fast enough that the rope puller starts overtakes his opponent. I say “win” because your reward for participating in this game is a popup ad. That’s right, a popup. People are playing games where you click forever just to get to an advertisement. But it doesn’t end there.

It soon became apparent that this girl knew what she was doing. She was having so much fun that she would click until her reward came. She would then immediately click the close box on the popup, reload the page, and play the next “game.” Apparently there are multiple “click here a thousand times and get a popup” games. The gameplay is identical, but the animations are different.

This takes me back to my original question. I always assumed that no one ever fell for the old “get a free NAME_OF_PRODUCT by (swatting_the_fly | shooting_the_prairie_dog | mashing_the_mouse_button)” routine. By the looks of things, those games are so fun that people will endure the ads just to keep playing them.

What has the internet come to?

I have had my share of problems with companies and institutions calling multiple times in a day trying to get ahold of either me or my wife, but this voting season has been the worst yet. Tomorrow is the primary election in California and I have received nearly eight telephone calls so far today with pre-recorded messages from well-known supporters of candidates and candidates themselves urging me to vote for one or the other or this way or that on a proposition.

Will it ever stop?

Of course it will stop. Sometime around June 7th when the election is over. The best part of all this is that I’m registered as a permanent absentee voter, and I’ve already mailed in my ballot. Of course, I dislike the volume of messages I’ve received so much that I wish I could have my ballot back just so I could vote against these old-school spammers.

The National Do Not Call Registry has been a success for me and my family. We have received almost no unsolicited calls since then except for the political advertisements preceding this election. You see, the politicians that drafted this bill made a nice exception for themselves making it impossible to penalize them for telemarketing. “It’s not covered because it’s not a sales call” they say. How is it not a sales call? All they are doing is trying to sell themselves and their friends.

I did a little research and found that they are most likely calling all the numbers that are registered with their political party. I am going to have to re-register and put some bogus number on there if I’m ever going to get this to stop. I can try to track down all the organizations that are using that number to boost their candidates’ numbers and ask them to please stop calling, but they are in no way obligated to do so and there are just so many that it’s not worth it.

We need a new law against this behavior. I would love to just vote against everyone who is doing this, but that is often impractical. The best candidate in most important regards is rarely the one who is not advertised through telephone solicitations. In some categories I have received calls backing all of the candidates that are running. Then what am I supposed to do? Not voting is out of the question. I have no obvious recourse available.

I can only hope that they don’t get ahold of my email address.

To the spammer who spoofed my email address as the from address in countless spam emails that he sent, I would just like to say, “Thank You!” I now have the pleasure of receiving hundreds of returned mail messages in my inbox daily. I also get to hear from some mail systems that your message was “Considered UNSOLICITED BULK EMAIL” and that “Delivery of the email was stopped!” I have learned that my new name will be Jaime Jones, and that I apparently have some sort of presentations that outline a deal that only has 24 hours left in which to respond.

I also learned that Henry Hill only accepts messages from senders he approves. This is sad to see. I wonder how many other spammers have this guy’s address. He decided to implement this simply because there was too much spam coming in his inbox. Now my good email address (but not really my good name) is on those spam messages.

I gather that this was retaliation for my participation in Blue Security’s Blue Frog undertaking to fight spam. Blue Frog was designed to automatically send requests to companies whose products were being promoted in spam asking that they stop. Many spammers complied and stopped spamming members of Blue Frog. Then one spammer got mad and decided to fight back. He knocked out a large portion of the internet in the process. He also started sending spam to suspected Blue Frog users in droves. As a final attack upon some of us there was an attack on our good names by making it look like we were sending spam ourselves. Blue Security was forced to shut down but they opened up their source code as a final hope of one day overcoming this scourge.

Work is underway in planning an open source distributed network built upon the foundation Blue Security laid. But until that time arrives I apologize to anyone who may receive an offer they never asked for with my email address attached.

Krissy has not been able to access the Primary manuals on the Church’s webpage for the last couple of weeks, so I thought I ought to look into the problem and see if there might be a solution. What follows is the email I sent to lds.org.

There seems to be a problem with at least some versions of Firefox. I haven’t had time to extensively test it in anything but Linux. Anyhow, the backslash in the this URL is not parsed correctly and returns an error page. If I remove the backslash or the %5C (that’s the ascii character code for the backslash that Firefox translates the “\” into) then the page loads normally. I don’t have access to MSIE at present, so I can’t test if it works there as well.

It works in Opera no matter whether it’s a backslash, a forward slash, or completely omitted. But it only works in Firfox if I replace that %5C with a “/” or nothing at all. I don’t know what the standard says is the right way to handle backslashed in URLs, so I don’t know if this is a bug that should be filed against Firefox or if it’s a problem on your end.

Good luck getting it ironed out. Keep up the good work!

I usually pick up Krissy from work at about the same time every day. I try to get there a good fifteen minutes before she gets off work officially in case she gets out early. Today was no exception.

The sun was shining and it was even a little too warm in the car when the rain started to fall. There is a relatively new law in the State of California requiring all motorists to turn their lights on when driving in rain. This I did, as I usually do when it starts to sprinkle. When I got to Krissy’s workplace I turned off the engine and slid over into the passenger seat and laid back while listening to the radio. It was taking a little longer than usual for Krissy to leave the building and walk out to the car, so I reclined the chair. While I was thus reclined the radio went dead. I thought there might be an emergency alert that was preempting the program I was listening to, but it stayed dead for more than ten seconds. It was at this point that I realized exactly what had happened.

I scrambled to turn off any and all electricity sapping accouterments, including the headlights and then tried to start the car. The engine pretended for a moment that it was going to start, but the starter ran out of juice in the attempt. The sunshine had made me forget the lights were on, and I hadn’t opened the door when I arrived and never got the annoying whine telling me to switch the headlights off.

Dejected, I popped the trunk and removed the jumper cables. Another ten minutes passed in abject silence. When Krissy finally emerged I leaped from the car holding the cables over my head so she could see there was a problem. This turned out to be just another frustration in a long, difficult work day. We asked Marlon, one of her coworkers, to assist us in jump starting the car. Neither of us were really too experienced, but between the both of us we got the cars properly linked and started. Ready to congratulate ourselves on a job well done we started toward the cars to remove the cables from the batteries. That’s when Krissy saw it.

“What’s that!?” Krissy cried curiously. We both looked but saw nothing. She kept verbally nudging us until we both saw what she had seen. There was a little brown furry puffball in a little space wedged between the hinge of the hood and the body of the car. “I think I saw it move,” Krissy said, a little more cautiously than at first. As I looked more closely at this thing, I began to see what appeared to be little sprawling feet attatched to stumpy legs. I began to feel ill as I realized what I was looking at.

“Is it alive?” I questioned. “Are you sure that you saw it moving? I think it’s dead.” What’s worse than a dead rat, you ask? Krissy broke a branch off of a tree in the parking lot and tried to get Marlon to take it. Grasping for any reason not to go near the car again he came up with some lame excuse, and the branch was handed to me instead. I chose to approach from behind and to the side. I hit the side of the car, and the rat quvered, but maintained its supposed safe position. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I gave the branch to Krissy, and she came at it from the fron of the car.

When Krissy touched the little guy, he didn’t run out of the car as was hoped for, but rather, he burrowed in deeper and deeper until it was presumed that he was stuck. We could no longer see him and it appeared the he had dropped down behind the wheel well in front of the passenger door. Now I didn’t know what to do. Krissy was not happy about this development. All I could imagine was the rat getting stuck in there until it died and began to stink up the car. We wanted him out, so we called the best car expert we know, Randy. He didn’t sound too keen on dismantling the panels on the car, but he agreed to take a look.

When we got to Randy’s he came out and I lifted the hood. Randy poked his head around a whole lot closer that I ever would have, but didn’t see anything. He was convinced we should just wait it out and that the rat would leave our car after he ralized that there was nothing there for him. Just then, Randy spotted the rat behind the engine touching something called the firewall. The rat was obviously not trapped, and had proven that he could get out of the car any time he wanted to.

When we went back inside, Randy’s wife, Joanna, decided she would give the rat a name. After trying a bunch of different ones the name Firewall seemed to stick. As far as we know Firewall the rat is still perched happily in the engine cavity of the car enjoying its warmth and dryness.

Incidentally, while we were outside it began to rain a little bit, and there was an amazing rainbow over Randy’s apartment building. I didn’t have my camera for any of this, which upset me almost as much as foolishly letting the battery die. I asked Randy if he had a digital camera in the apartment. I ran back outside and quickly snapped a few shots in the rain.