Mom and I were talking earlier this afternoon about the interview that my grandmother did this week with researchers from The Weather Channel regarding the 1974 Super Outbreak, which leveled her hometown of Guin, Alabama. [It's really the only thing Guin's known for.] In the five minutes or so that it’s taken me to write this entry [and watch the TV and call Misty to make sure she knows that the weather's going to crap], the sky outside my house has gone from post-sunset dusk to dark. The nasty center of this storm—which is headed due east—is still 15 to 20 minutes of here, but … man, I was dead on when I spoke the title of this post to Mom on the phone.

This promises to be an ugly night.

Last week, a Googler found one of my del.icio.us linkdumps and saw that I’d downloaded a particular Wilco show. He asked if I’d be able to provide him a copy of the bootleg. Now, normally I’d turn aside such a request out of hand—honestly, I spent the resources on BitTorrent grabbing the boot, and you can do the same. But it’s Wilco, and I’ll share Wilco love anytime I can.

Unfortunately for this individual, whom I’ll call J, I was in Detroit. I was clearly in no position to do anything about it right then, because, well, I was in Michigan and my bootleg client was in Alabama. I explained the situation to J and urged him to persist and see if he could get an account on DIME. He replied back the next day that he’d been unable to do so. [In all fairness, I should have started to get suspicious here---others have told me that persistence pays off here.] Fair enough, I told him—I’d work on it when I got back.

Well, I think you just have to see from the dearth of posting here this week that, well, I’ve been busy and/or tired since I got back. It just hasn’t happened. Turns out that J was on a bit of a deadline—he had to get these bootlegs to a friend coming back [or maybe leaving?] for Spring Break on Friday. Fine. Tonight, I offered to upload the bootlegs via FTP to my server here, where he could grab them via FTP and do the transcoding on his own. Honestly, there was no way my bootlegs, even if I made them tonight or before I left for work in the morning, were going to get to Chicago by tomorrow, right?

J’s reply: “i don’t know what u r suggesting”

Mental reply: “I’m suggesting that I hand you the work and let you do the heavy lifting yourself. I’d just be sacrificing the bandwidth, but … fuck it, I pay for it.” Instead, I told him that it just wasn’t going to happen, and that I was sorry that I hadn’t been able to come through for him. No harm, right? Dude asked a random Internet person for help.

J’s reply: “r u kidding me u dont have time to burn 2 cds?”

My reply, verbatim, which I handed to Misty before I sent it:

Look. I am not a college student with a ton of time. I’m a professional engineer working 40+ hours a week. I just got off travel Monday where I was gone from my job for three days. I was travel-lagged. I have lots of hobbies that, honestly, came ahead of your request.

You asked me to do this while I was gone. Had I been home, I could have done this easily, no problem. But given that it’s already Thursday night and you needed these, well, tomorrow, the chances of me getting a CD-R burned and to you tomorrow are, well, nil.

When you’re the one asking me for a favor, you have no right to dictate how I spend my time.

Please do not waste your time sending further emails to me; your attitude has earned you a place in my server’s killfile. Any incoming email from you will be deleted immediately.

Thanks, and have a nice day somewhere else.

Dickweed.

Oh, and J, if you come on to here under the guise of defending yourself:

1. I will confirm to everyone that it’s you.
2. You won’t find sympathetic ears here.

Fuck you, and good night. [Why yes, my week has sucked eggs. And yours?]

[Oh, at least my crown is finally done. Yay for that.]

Scroll back one week to me, at my desk, preparing for a week that was soon to kick my ass …

[Cell phone rings.]

“This is Geof.”

“Hi, is this Goffrey Morris?”

“It’s Geoffrey, but … yes. With whom am I speaking?”

“This is [mindless CSR] from Knology. You had an install scheduled today, and the technician is at your house, but you’re not home.”

“I had no such thing scheduled.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, ma’am, I assure you that I did not. I recently downgraded my digital cable service back to extended basic. I’ve already taken the receivers into the office.”

“Well, Mr. Morris, the technician needs to install a high-pass filter on your connection. Is there anyone at home who can authorize the technician to enter, or can you go to your home to let him in?”

“No.”

[pause]

“Ma’am, this is horrible customer service.”

“Did you say, ‘horrible customer service’?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did. Now, it’s not your fault that your people can’t communicate, but I was told nothing about this, either when I made the original phone call to downgrade service or when I took the units back in to the local office. You’d think that if this was so all-fired important, someone would have told me in one of those two interactions—especially when I ended both of them asking if there was anything else to do.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Morris. Can I reschedule sometime later this week?”

“No, ma’am. My week is absolutely full, and honestly, you’re wasting my time right now.”

“Will next Monday morning work? We’ll have the technician out first thing.”

“That will be fine.”

I started writing this at 0900 with the intention of leaving as soon as I’d finished and dealing with the inevitable phone call later. Clearly, having the technician come out first thing didn’t really happen. In fact, I saw a Knology truck go by my house at 0812 and got a false hope. Ended up that this wasn’t my technician; the guy I had was competent, quick, and pleasant.

But here’s what really pisses me off: there was no need for the technician to even enter my house. The guy hadn’t even so much as rung my doorbell when I noticed that his truck was blocking my driveway; I went outside, and he was already swapping out the filters. What did they have me stay home for almost two hours of my workday this morning [it'll be close to 1000 by the time I get to the office]? To sign my name to the work order.

That’s it.

Suffice it to say that I’m done putting off installing the DSL modem [I've already paid for this month's service on the cable modem, and I've got a discount coming on the return of the cable boxes for that service, so I could keep the cable modem for over another month without charges]. It goes up tonight.

Fuck Knology.

Don’t tell me to RTFM when I’ve already RTFM to get the email I contacted you with and provide the data you asked for. Furthermore, if you wanted me to sort the data out before I sent it to you, how about sticking that in TFM.

Now I will STFU and try not to break out my LART.

Y’know, I think I’m about tired of folks complaining about gas prices. Increased prices are simply an aftereffect of increased wages. We all like increased wages, but few of us like increased prices [unless we're selling something].

Do I like paying more for gas? No, not really. I’d like to spend my money on other things. But my demand for gasoline is pretty inelastic—I drive to get to work, and I drive to stay sane. It’s pretty inelastic for other folks, too, I’m sure. But, at the end of the day, the market generally finds a solution.

Now, do really poor folks have a beef here? Sure. Folks trying to hack it on minimum wage—don’t derail into a discussion of whether a minimum wage is a good idea; it’s the law of the land, so for now, let’s limit the scope of this discussion to the magnitude and not the existence—do get screwed out of this, because the artificial floor of the market hasn’t been indexed to inflation. [Mind you, there aren't a plethora of jobs around here right at that minimum wage, but they exist.] But Jesus was right … you’ll always have the poor with you.

But the next SUV driver I see in Madison complaining about gas prices on the local news … well, pardon me if I feel like punching ‘em in the face.

All these years, I’d hoped that WordPress would start versioning like Mozilla did: point releases, with major milestones getting a first-digit change. Instead, WP went from 0.72 to [I believe] 1.0, then to 1.2 [with a couple minor revs], then to 1.5 [with all the silly revs since then].

Now, Mozilla will version like WordPress. Why not just generate version numbers with a random number generator, and only accept the random result if it’s higher than the last number you had? John Wilson could code up such a script in 35 seconds, and Gareth Watts could have a version outputting for all SourceForge projects in a half-day, tops.

Le sigh.

Dear readers of the .net persuasion:

“For A Friend” wasn’t about anyone you know. Stop speculating. Now, dammit.

Yeesh. Y’all act like you have a right to my business, rampantly running through to people you think I might be talking about before they’ve even had a chance to read what I’ve had to say. I’d like the cluefucked among you to write this on your hand and then slap yourself in the forehead: I have friends outside of our little group.

For the record, no, I don’t know who among you went off half-cocked. I don’t want to know, either. But you need to get out of my business. Thanks.

Dear Crestron Electronics: Esquire had a nice little blurb in their latest issue about your equipment. I was jazzed, so I decided that I’d check it out.

Blah.

I might be an engineer by trade, but you just missed a huge opportunity to sell me on your stuff. Do I really need CAD drawings [via PDF ... ?] of your stuff if I’m just a mildly interested consumer? Why does your residential products page make me guess as to what I might want? Dude. I just saw something cool in a magazine, and thirty seconds later, I felt like I was back at work. I don’t care if you have a La-Z-Boy integrated with a touchscreen that will do everything from control my TiVo and stereo to make coffee and wipe my ass … you just lost any interest I had in you by having a craptastic site design.

Suckers.

Am I the only one who looks at how some people Weblog and say, “Man, I wish that I could offer up a re-write of their links?” An example of bad linking practices for you from the business2blog (hereinafter called “the B2blog”):

There’s a strong discussion going on over at PVRBlog on what’s wrong with TiVo. Such discussions go on all the time, but this one is better than most because several of the commentators get right down to specifics.

That quote is exact as of the time of this writing, down to the fact that the link encompasses the spaces surrounding “PVRBlog”.

Here’s my two big beefs:

1. The text to give the permalink to the discussion shouldn’t be PVRBlog but “strong discussion”. Why? I look at it this way: I want the link to be self-descriptive. Notice in my first paragraph in this entry that the phrase “example of bad linking practices” is pointed at the permalink of the entry I’m bitching about. That points the bitchiness directly at the entry that sucks, and doesn’t point it at the B2blog itself. Now, mind you, my Christian ethos of “Hate the sin, love the sinner,” may have some overlap here, but I look at it like this: maybe the B2blog will get better at this kind of stuff. I don’t want to point “example of bad linking practices” at B2blog’s home page if, three months from now, they’re using good linking practices.
2. I like to link the title of sites. Again, if you’ll look back to my first paragraph, I use a secondary link in there to point to the B2blog. Why? That link is self-descriptive: it’s a link to the B2blog, pointing at their homepage.

Now, mind you, you can probably find examples of bad linking practices back in my history. I’ve only improved because I’ve had this kind of things shown to me as a problem in the past.

And I rail about this stuff because bitching about it relaxes me. I heart Business 2.0; I was a charter subscriber and held a subscription for the first few years of the publication. Nowadays, I’m not wanting to do entrepreneurship, so I dropped it. But their Weblog still points me to good stuff, so I read it.

[On the chance that Damon Darlin, the guy who wrote this entry, reads this ... it's intended as constructive criticism, chief. Much love.]

Wow, I can’t begin to tell you how much I despise superlatives.

The rush to declare stuff “the best!” or “the most $x” or whatever has completely made our language devoid of non-superlative comparisons. If I tell you that you’re a good student, or a good person, society has trained you to ask yourself, “Why did Geof use good and not great? Why am I not great?! My mom thinks I’m great!” Anytime that we limit ourselves to acey-deucey, onesie-twosie comparisons, we make binary choices in what is quite clearly a greater-than-binary decision set.

GAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

[This is what I get for running a Web forum. Every other discussion seems to be, "What's the best $X?" "What's the coolest $y?" AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!]

I’m glad that people enjoy community resources. Community resources are to be enjoyed and treasured, because they’re community-oriented.

However, barging in the front door of the community house and screaming, “I’ve seen that you people have cool stuff—GIMME!” is not the way to make the guy who oversees the community resources smile warmly and hand you stuff.

I fear that this is another manifestation of our desire to have what we want right now … and Lord knows I’m as guilty of that as anyone else.

Heard just now from my lips: “I hate it when TV people do that! Don’t go from the singer’s microphone as your sole audio source, then halfway through the song add in the crowd mics to give you a sense of being at the park with all the reverb—it’s distracting! It’s disrespectful to the singer, too. No reverb or reverb, pick one at the start and f**king stick with it, will you?!”

I’m in a ranting mood today.

There’s a trend around today: if I disagree with you, you’re stupid.

I frequently see partisans on both sides of American politics call the other party’s Presidential candidate, or his policies, stupid. This is ingratiating.

I’m one of those annoying motherf**kers that thinks that you can disagree with someone and still respect them. I also think that you can disagree with someone’s position and still understand the basis of their argument.

Examplia gratis: taxation. Liberals generally argue that taxes should be higher so that social programs and infrastructure can be fully funded, increasing the overall well-being of the country. Conservatives generally argue that taxes should be lower so that more funds can be spent consuming and investing, increasing the overall well-being of the country.

Both sides reject the other’s approach, and they usually do it as saying that “it’s stupid”. You know what’s stupid? What’s stupid is not spending a little time looking into how the other person’s framed their arguments, what their presuppositions are, and getting down to an evaluation of the assumptions that fundamentally drive the argument.

A wise man—I know not who—once said, “The level of a man’s intelligence is proportional to the degree with which he agrees with me.” While that’s generally true, I’d rather work from the assumption that we’re all reasonably intelligent and can disagree.

Again, that makes me an annoying motherf**ker. Of course, hearing people call people they don’t like stupid annoys me. It’s the circle of life.

The Twelfth Commandment should be: “Thou shalt not send referral spam.”

Yeah … I had a Christian sermon site become a damn dirty referral spammer.

God doesn’t like referral spammers!

[The Eleventh Commandment? Don't ask.]

I told you that I needed to be here today. I think I need a LART, though.

I mean, when I send someone a schedule, and they reply back asking, “Is this correct?”—how would you respond? Me, I flipped my monitor two birds before sweetly replying.

:bangs head on desk: