Category: rants

OK, it is a blog, so yeah… I occasionally rant.

Damn Lawyers…

Our house has a 2-car garage built-in, but one parking bay is much larger than the other. The wife laid claim to the larger of the two long ago, which doesn’t bother me as my car(s) are small. Unfortunately the opener on the larger side has always been a source of problems. The one that came with our house never had a remote and it died about a year after we bought the house. So we resorted to manually opening it all the time. Sue chose to move her car to the short side and I have been the one to manually deal with my own door rain or shine, night or day for the past several years. Sue frequently expressed her desire to swap spaces again, so I replaced the opener with one I found free on craigslist in the spring… but it was always flakey. The remote would fire once, and then never work again for a while. I replaced and programed another remote, but it did the same thing. Even when it did work, you had to be practically right under the unit for the remote to function. I guess I now know why this one was “free” on craigslist.

I parked the E-type in the garage for the winter as our damn lazy worthless cats (anybody need three pets?) have utterly FAILED at keeping the barn mouse-free and last winter I found evidence of them making cozy rodent condos inside the Jaguar… whose wire harness apparently is a rare delicacy to small members of the clan rodentia. The wife drew the line on this. If the Jaguar was coming into the garage then it had to go on the short side, and the long side had to have a working opener.

I thought about swapping them, but given the different sizes I figured the hassle wasn’t worth it. The one on the short side was an early 80’s vintage Sears model and will likely work until the next millennia, but the track mechanism and whatnot did not appear to be interchangeable with the unit on the long side of the garage.

I scoured froogle (Google’s price comparison site, very handy!) for the best deal on an opener. Ironically it was Sears, who offer one at $129. It looks like a slightly updated version of the one that has always worked. I order it and it arrived earlier this week. Upon examination the drive mechanism appears to be interchangeable with the chain and track from the old one, so I plan on just swapping the unit itself. I spend yesterday standing on a ladder struggling with getting the unit swapped out. I get everything sorted (I think) and it works… right up to the point where it doesn’t. The first time I open the garage it works fine, but subsequent operations all fail. Time to RTFM.

This unit is THE CHEAPEST one you can buy. It has ZERO ‘bells & whistles” … no programmable multi-button remote, no code-key outside opener, no biometric scanner, no voice command, nothing fancy. Even the wall-mounted button is so basic that it looks like a doorbell. This thing is El Cheapo.

But what does it have that that MUST be installed in order for it to work?

Believe it or not, sensors that cover the doorway. Should some toddler or drunken uncle (I have neither by the way) wander under it while in operation they won’t be not crushed by the lightweight and well-sprung door which likely would not kill a slug were it sliming along under it when closing.

I tried wiring up a loop to fool the opener into thinking the sensors were in place. That didn’t work. I got so pissed off that I left the garage for the night. The last thing I want to have to futz with is some tort lawyer’s wet dream. A bottle of nice Chilean Carmenere with dinner calmed me down, and I steeled myself for the battle coming on Sunday.

It went better than I thought today. I considered bolting the sensors to the ceiling of the garage a foot away from each other just out of spite. Then I figured that it might come back to haunt me some day in the distant future when I’ve sold the house and some idiot sues me. I went ahead and mounted them up properly. The damn thing now works, which I’m sure will make my wife very happy and lead to months (or at least a few minutes) of domestic bliss. But it chaps my hide to HAVE to install some goofy gadget strictly in the name of “safety” just because some idiot killed his cat and sued the living daylights out of some company. This “feature” added a day of labor, some extra dollars at purchase time, and a heaping helping of frustration to my life – all because some attorney retired on a fat contingency check. A garage door opener is a LUXURY, not some sort of necessity for living. The fact that safety features are regulated onto them, either by the courts or the government is absurd. I have no problem with them being available on higher-priced models, along with all those other features. I’ve survived for 45 years without killing myself with a garage door thankyouverymuch. If somebody does manage to kill themselves with a garage door then that is THEIR problem. Don’t inflict your stupidity on the rest of us by lowering the common denominator so far that we’re all strangled by this crap.

grrr.. damn lawyers.

Mini Movie Review: Religulous

I saw this movie a few weeks ago. I had an evening free, and a coupon for a free movie, so for the price of expensive popcorn, I had some entertainment for about 100 minutes.

(Note: I love movies and as a person with a lot of visual training I appreciate films and filmmaking. I have a continuous NetFlix queue and watch about 5 movies a week. I could probably post as many movie reviews here as I do car photos. Who knows, perhaps I will.)

This movie is not really an artistic expression, or an example of the filmmakers art however. It is a shaky-cam documentary with Bill Maher questioning religious believers about the bizarre and illogical portions of their religions. He takes great joy in revealing the ironies, hypocrisies, and logical fallacies of organized religion. Organized western religions that is, as those of us in the western world have very little knowledge or context to analyze eastern religious belief, so he left those out.

It was of course thought provoking, and entertaining. The relentless knife of Occam’s Razor leaves very little left of religious belief, since so much of it appears to be stuff people made up as they had no other mechanism to answer questions of the unknown. As mankind gains knowledge, mythology is revealed for the nonsense of which it is, mostly. When intellect and empiricism is applied to mythology, very little survives. For example Thomas Jefferson, a man of considerable intellect, endeavored to condense the New Testament into logical statements, devoid of supernaturalism, and it ended up being less than 20 pages long. In large print. Go ahead, it is a quick read.

Or, you can flip it 180° to JUST the mythology and get it down to one small image file.

Of course Judiasm and Islam get equitable treatment in Religulous. Maher is an equal opportunity offender. Even Scientology and pot smokers gets skewered. It was good fun though everyone he interviewed became defensive and hostile when confronted with absurdities they held dear, whether it be virgin birth, talking snakes, expending effort on a particular day of the week, or eating one food but not another. Ironically the exceptions were two Catholic Priests, representing the Vatican no less, who seemed to take it all with a great sense of humor… It only took them about 400 years to come around to accept a heliocentric understanding. Perhaps there is hope after all?

The very fact that every religion continually subdivides into factions, big and small, is sufficient proof to me that nobody has a monopoly on truth. Every religion has at its kernel the golden rule, but wrapped around it are layers and layers of bullshit, mythology and irrelevant minutiae, and wrapped around that is an a hard shell ethic that says “everyone else is wrong.” “Others” are doomed to eternal punishment, or deserving of death, or whatever – and that certitude is in direct opposition to the core belief itself.

Unfortunately humans cling hardest to beliefs that are unknown, and refuse to subject them to serious inquiry and questioning. Instead they accept words written a millennia or more ago, and handed down through time as the divine word.

Then they fight over them. Usually to the point of violating commandments.

Where Religulous fell apart was the ending. Literally the final few minutes. It attempted to draw a conclusion to the previous 98 minutes of lighthearted inquiry. It fell into the same logical trap that religion does: “All those other people are crazy, so we are doomed.” In other words “They are wrong.” This was accompanied by a barrage of disturbing images delivered in a propagandistic style that would make Leni Riefenstahl proud. For me it literally ruined my night. C’mon Bill, you can do better.

One of the founding principles of this country is religious freedom. People can believe in whatever they wish, and so long as they don’t harm, or steal in the process, they’re welcome to be here. The Constitution says that Government has to butt out, and not try to impose any one belief system on its citizens (unfortunately something it fails at in innumerable small ways however.) Roughly one-fifth of all Americans are non-believers, or have chosen to not follow any specific faith, a fact that the believers often forget or ignore. But you can not legislate thought, or belief. Nor can you deny others their freedoms to speak, think, worship, and believe. I have no problem with fundamentalists building museums showing people and dinosaurs living together. Just don’t use government funding to build it, expect tax breaks because of it, or attempt to push it into the public school curriculum. I’ll defend to the death your right to believe batshit crazy stuff. Just don’t expect me to buy into your beliefs.

Bill Maher should have left his doom-filled conclusion on the cutting room floor and left us to draw our own conclusions… but hey, he’s entitled to his own opinions. 😉

An old habit dies… hard.

I have a confession to make: I’ve been using the same email user agent for about eighteen years. Yes… EIGHTEEN years. How many software products from 1990 do you still use?

In 1990 I was using a Macintosh IIsi, System 6.0.7, and Eudora 1. If I recall correctly it was version 1.3 or 1.5. I used my wife’s student account at the University of Washington to get online at first. A shell account on a UNIX host, a newsfeed (Newswatcher!) and trusty old Eudora for reading mail. I had a Hayes 2400baud modem at first, then I joined the 90s eventually with a Prometheus 14.4k modem, with built-in fax AND voicemail. (I was doing full-blown telephony in 1991!)

But trusty old Eudora was my mailer. It stayed my mailer.

I went through many machines (MacII, Centris 650, PowerBook 170, Duos, the infamous green 2400c subnotebook, iMacs, G4s, a TiBook that wheezed itself to death eventually, and now my current, though aging aluminum G4 PowerBook.) But Eudora remained my mailer.

I upgraded operating systems (System 7, OS8, did my best to skip OS9, jumped to X when it finally stabilized, through all the iterations of OSX up to 10.4) and Eudora kept on chugging. I managed to keep just about every bit of mail I had sent or received from about 1994 through 1998… when the great Jaz drive failure hit me as I was moving machines in the UK. Did I give up? Nope, I just started again.

Now I have just about every mail I have sent or received since 1998… all carried around in a pair of “Eudora Folders” on my hard drive (and backed up here, there, and everywhere!)

I have adapted to Eudora and it has adapted to me.

I have two distinct mail modes: work and non-work. I don’t read non-work email at work (except around lunchtime) and I TRY not to read work-related email when I am not at work, at least not on my laptop (that is what my Blackberry is for!) I have YEARS of well-tuned mail filters built (I should screen-shot them… they would astound you! Want to see them? Ask in the comments) and a signature file that is very long (it is how I have packed the “random quotes” here on my site.)

Unfortunately Qualcomm announced Eudora’s demise a while back and I knew this day would come. I test drove several other mail clients, but to be honest… all of them sucked. I know people think Eudora sucked, but it worked for me and I liked it. Hell, I stuck with it for EIGHTEEN YEARS!

I thought about Entourage. Yuck. Way too MS Office-ish. That big honking monolithic mail database terrifies me. Eudora has always stored mail is unix mbox format – plain old text files. Dealing with a corruption was just a matter of firing up BBEdit or vi. Clickty-click. I think that has happened to me three times in 18 years. I have known way too many folks who have had one form or another of Microsoft mail database files go tango uniform on them at inopportune moments. Frequently. No thanks.

I tried Mail.app. I really did. Inertia almost drove me there. It was the one I have test driven the longest. But the rules/filtering is just abysmal compared to Eudora. The mailbox handling lame. And I noted that it becomes a complete pig when you try to deal with large volumes of mail like I do. Searching through my multi-gig mailing list archives for some string of words? Seconds in Eudora! Minutes or a system crash in Mail.app. Yuck.

I’m planning a jump to OSX 10.5, mostly so I can support my family members who all use it. There have been issues reported for the last version of Eudora (6.2) on the latest OS from Apple. I figured now is the time to make the leap away from my old friend.

I thought about Odysseus, as it is billed as a modern replacement for Eudora. However it seems to be in perpetual beta, that seems more like alpha from the users I’ve talked to.

I looked at Thunderbird. No thanks. The UI is just … well… bleagh.

I stumbled across a likely little application that seems to fit the bill: Gyazmail. It has a very flexible UI that allows me to make it behave very Eudora-like when I want it to. It has very good search, rules, and filters. It can import all my old mail(!)

I’m test driving it at the moment and liking it so far. Switched my work mail to it late last week, and my personal mail is still coming over one account at a time. So far so good. If you regularly contact me via email be patient while I work through this transition period.

Good-bye Eudora… it has been a good 18 years.

Apologies to my readers…

I have not done a very good job of keeping this site updated during the past week on the Going To The Sun Rally. Not up to my usual standards. I managed to get the JagCam movies posted almost every day, but really haven’t been able to keep up with writing and photo editing. I will admit to having some serious challenges with JagCam footage editing… mostly to do with my now 4 year old laptop and cranky editing software. Import & Rendering times usually stretched to many hours and iMovie frequently crashed. It got to the point where I could not insert any titles or effects for fear of ruining the output, or just having hours of work vanish in a blink of an eye.

So… often I would just give up and go have a drink.

I’m back at home now and have a pile of work to do, most of it lots of finish work involving the deck and painting, plus some BioDiesel processing… but I promise I’ll set aside some time (and the bottle) and plow through the writing and photo editing backlog as fast as I can. Thanks for your patience!

–chuck

Goofy Online Petitions

I never participate in these things, but this one was just too goofy to pass up: “Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister”

Apparently the Prime Minister’s office in the UK has an website where the Queen’s subjects can request favors and allow others to vote for it. Somebody wanted Jezza as PM, and they actually ran it. Mind you just to prove how lame the system is it allowed me to vote – using nothing but my old address in Wiltshire as “proof of eligibility”… hell I was merely a resident alien and that was a decade ago!

Well, yesterday I received an email from the PM’s office stating:

From: “10 Downing Street”
To: “e-petition signatories”
Subject: Government response to petition ‘PMClarkson’
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:10:11 +0000

You signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to “Make Jeremy Clarkson
Prime Minister.”

The Prime Minister’s Office has responded to that petition and you can view
it here:

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page16590

Prime Minister’s Office

The page they reference points to a YouTube Video:

Unlike our government, at least the brits have one with a sense of humor, or humour, as the case may be.