This afternoon I did a little shopping for the holiday feast tomorrow, and I got to observe some prime high quality behavior.
First, how hard is it to put your damn shopping cart in one of the little corrals that they provide? Seriously, there are at least three per row of cars, but alas, it is too damn far for most people to put them where they are out of the way of other shoppers. There must have been 40 carts strewn all over the parking lot, not in the pens provided.
Second, I don’t care if your significant other is just running in for a minute, but it is NOT cool to park and idle your big assed truck or SUV in the firelane in front of the store. There were 4 of them today.
Third, there is plenty of steak. You don’t have to push and shove to get ahead of people at the meat counter. There is plenty of Mayonnaise, so you don’t have to block the condiments with your cart while you are trying to choose between the full fat, the canola oil version (yuck) or the reduced fat version.
I am sure I will have a few more posts about the insanity that grocery shopping brings out in people.
I posted this AM about our neighbors’ new nasty habit of having loud parties on Tuesday nights. This is most annoying for a variety of reasons, but the main negative is that I get to lose three hours of sleep.
This leads to a domino effect of me being logy and off my game all day. I hate this. Tonight, I will fall asleep early, and hopefully will not be disturbed.
(Warning: I am going to use some harsh language below)
We live in a nice subdivision in Chandler, in SE Phoenix. It is a clean, well kept, and in general a very friendly neighborhood. But there always seems to be someone who has to stand out as a twat-waffle.
One of the best phrases I learnt on Facebook
Our neighbors to the north are one such “family”*. They have a Son who just graduated high school, and he was a baseball player (you can see the batting cage they built in their backyard without even needing to snoop). The father is away a lot. Sales? The mother works nights and long shifts. I think you can see where this is going…
The “son” (Called Sonny-Boy) is unsupervised, and takes advantage. Last year there were some loud parties on the weekends that went until 4:00 or 5:00 AM. Really obnoxious, but I pulled the covers over my head and bore it. But now that he has graduated, Tuesday nights are the designated pool party nights. Stating about 9:00 and running until 1:00AM, they have been at it on Tuesdays for a month.
We have taken to calling the police to complain, and it appears that this group has a lookout, for they get really quiet when the police car comes by. They see and hear nothing, and leave a door hanger. 10 minutes later, the hooting and hollering are back up to amusement park rollercoaster level.
Last night we called the police again, and told them to check around the back. That did seem to bring a lasting peace but they still partied until 1:00AM or so.
There are other downsides. After one of the soirees we have to go picking up cigarette butts that the kids toss over the fence, sometimes having to fish them out of the pool. Often in the front yard, there will be beer bottles (whole or broken, and why do kids drink Bud Light? Sheesh, I had better taste at that age.) And, the inevitable barf pile will be around somewhere that our dogs get super interested in.
So, we live with it until the kid goes to college, or otherwise moves on.
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*Family might be a loose definition. They behave like it is three roommates sharing a flat. Hell, Sonny-boy had his very tramp-y girlfriend spending the night every night. It was a joy to have to dodge her as she peeled out leaving while my dogs and I walk in the AM. Truly makes you wonder..
As I have posted before, I have been grooving on watching TV series from my youth. (well, ok, not really my youth) I have come to a realization. Regardless of what show it is, it seems that in the 5th or 6th season, the shark is invariably jumped.
X-Files, in the 5th season, they kill off all the conspirators, and in the 6th season it gets mega campy. Sigh, because I still groove on Gillian Anderson.
Family Guy – I was a big early fan, but I have been dropping in on episodes, and season 7 is where it falls completely apart.
I propose a new rule. From now on, TV series should only have 5 seasons. All shows should be put out of there misery in a reasonable fashion.
I freely admit that I am a Mac user. OS-X just works better for me, and my workflow. But I will grant that Windows 7 is pretty good, and usable.
Of course, since I work in the corporate world, I am forced to use Windows (well, in the past I have been a rebel and was a Mac in a PC world, but I stopped beating my head against that wall). For the most part, Windows is fine. I even like Office 2010 and the ribbon interface that was introduced in Office 2007.
But, for some strange reason, I have glitches in my email. We use Exchange and Outlook for email and calendaring, and it seems about once a week the OST file (where outlook keeps local data) borks. This leads to not being able to send or receive emails until I repair the OST. Which requires me to quit any applications that access the Outlook API and the OST file. Which means that I really have to reboot to scan and fix the errors. And since I have a PGP Whole Disk Encryption, it takes about 30 minutes for the services that hit the disk to be done after a reboot.
Sigh, so go through all this, and run the tool (3 x until I no longer get errors in the scan), and then I can get back to work.
Lost hour of productivity, because Outlook decides to freak out.
Tobe fair, I have had some data issues on my mac, and keep much larger stores of email locally but they are fewer, and recovery doesn’t require running a program that looks like Windows NT3.51 vintage UI (the scanpst.exe program) to recover.
Nothing screams the 1990’s like every time you install a piece of software that it puts an icon with a shortcut on your desktop. I know that most software asks you if you want one placed on the desktop, and I ALWAYS uncheck that box. But all too often, the software installs it anyway, or it doesn’t ask and just drops one there.
I know this is a minor rant, and I also know people (more than one) who manages their workflow via piles of files on their desktop, and for them, it makes perfect sense to put shortcuts on their desktop (although, for me it is always faster to tap the Windows key and type the name of the program I want to load). Fine, ask them first, and then drop the shortcut.
But many times, the program doesn’t ask, and just places it. Or, it asks, you can unselect it, and it will STILL drop it on the desktop.
This is one reason why I prefer the Mac. Beyond the fact that installing applications is usually no more complicated than copying it into the “Applications” folder, there isn’t a paradigm of putting shortcuts on the desktop to foster quick launching.
Needless to say, I have over 30 shortcut icons on my desktop, none that I put there intentionally, and most of them placed even though I selected to not have one copied there on install. About 2x a year, I go and delete all the useless desktop icons.
One thing I miss about Tucson is the solitude we had. We lived on the edge of town, at the end of a street with a fair amount of open space around us. Behind us was county property, SR zoned, 5 acre minimum lots. Not much noise at night.
Here in Chandler, we live in a nice sub-division (Dobson Place), with (mostly) good neighbors. But on one side of us, there is a college aged kid who lives with his parents. About every 3 weeks, he has a “gathering” of his friends. They drink, smoke (and toss their butts and empty beer bottles in our yard), talk loudly, and in general are annoying as hell. Last night, starting about 9:00PM, getting going good at 11:00, they were really obnoxious. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well.
About 1:15AM, another neighbor came and read them the riot act. They quickly and quietly cleaned up and cleared out. Finally.
Next time, at 11:00PM, I am calling the police.
FWIW, the kid’s parents were home, and they seem to be fine with this. Da fuq is up with that?
As someone who for a long time rode motorcycles on his commute, and who now drives a convertible, I can say that there are some smokers who should be fined and incarcerated.
Note, while I am not a smoker (never been one), I don’t think it should be banned.
But, people who flick their ashes out the window of their moving car, and then who inevitably toss the butt out the window as well, those people need a special ring of hell to inhabit. YOu have an ashtray, use it. And for those who will pile on and say that most cars don’t come with them today, I respond thusly: All of them have a smoker’s kit as an option that includes the lighter, and an ashtray. Besides there are a large number of ashtrays that are designed to fit in a standard cup holder. If you can afford $6 a pack cigarettes, you can afford these as well.
Why do I hate it? I live in Arizona, where it get hotter than hades. So I ride in the summer with a ventilated jacket. But sometimes that is too hot, so I will partially unzip the main zipper. At 50mph or so, some jackass tosses a butt out the window and it strikes me mid chest. Then I have a burning cigarette butt in my jacket. Fuck.
Every state and municipality has laws against littering, and penalties that escalate if the litter is burning, but from the number of butts on the side of the road, it apparently is even less observed than speed limits. Sigh.
One day, I pulled up to one of these people (who had just tossed a butt out), and asked her why she doesn’t use the ashtray. Her response: I don’t want to dirty it, a used and dirty ashtray lowers resale value (this was in a $50K BMW). Uh, hello, just by smoking in your car, you lower the resale value. That is no excuse.
At work, I am blessed with a HP Elitebook 8460p (15 inch wide screen, core i5) laptop. It has OK specs, and I pimped it out to 16 G of ram.
But it is dog slow. We probably have 2 – 3 updates a week pushed to us that require a reboot. I have to save all my work, and reboot, and then wait. I have learned to open up the resource monitor and watch the disk get hammered. For about 15 minutes after boot.
I know that Windows 7 is a lot snappier on similar hardware, but working for a fortune 500 company, with an eye on security, there is a metric shit-ton of stuff that is running including a full disk encryption package.
I am tempted to drop in a blank drive, install a fresh Win7 install, and see if that performs better. Probably, but it will be for naught, as I will have to go back to the original drive, image and configuration.
