I just watched that video of Kramer flipping out after being heckled by some black audience members.  I know it’s week-old news but I’ll comment anyway.  So I guess these guys had been getting on his nerves the whole evening and he wanted to make fun of them in a shocking way, but he clearly went a little far.  In the subsequent apology on Letterman, a lot of the audience was laughing at first—understandably, they probably thought it was a bit, since most of Dave’s audience is probably people on vacation.  I find it ironic that the apology happened there because Jerry Seinfeld was on that night, so he was again riding Jerry’s coattails.

What is funny (to me, anyway) is that there was an episode of Seinfeld that was actually about hecklers, where Jerry went to where a heckler worked and started heckling him while he was doing his job.  Maybe that’s what Kramer should have done.

Well I thought I’d have more to say about this topic when I started typing this, but I’m realizing that I really don’t care what someone I’ve never met says to someone I’ve never met in a city I’ve never been to.  So I’ll just leave you with a funny parody of the event to watch.

Just a word of caution for the world:  if your installation of Windows XP is, shall we say, less than legal, and you get a popup while using Windows Media Player that says there is a security update to be installed... DO NOT INSTALL IT.  Although they don’t tell you this, the “security update” is actually Windows Media Player 11.  After you have installed WMP11, you will have to verify your Windows installation to use it (sure, they could have just as easily checked this beforehand, but that would be nice).  And if you have System Restore turned off (and what self-respecting geek doesn’t?), you won’t be able to go back to version 10.

I understand that a person who is using the software illegally has little room to claim that Microsoft is wronging him by doing this.  However, the method is pretty underhanded—they claim there is a security update, which is the one thing that Microsoft has said they won’t require Windows validation for, and something that they’ve been trying for the last six years to teach everyone to do automatically.  Not cool, Microsoft.  Not cool.

A little over two years ago (over Thanksgiving of 2004 I think), I began reading The Baroque Cycle, a series of three novels by Neal Stephenson.  In all, they total out at around three thousand pages.  Last night I finally finished the third and final book.  I’m not sure if I’m just a slow reader or if the books needed to have a lot of useless information taken out or if I just don’t allocate enough of my time to the task of reading.  Probably all of the above.

Part of the slowness is a result of the reading level, which is on par with The Lord Of The Rings, which I spent about a year and a half on (I think I spent a semester or summer on each book, including The Hobbit).  Both were filled with long, descriptive passages where you read five or six pages before anything actually happens.  Which isn’t to say that I disliked either set of books.  But sometimes I would get tired of them and put them down for a month before picking them back up.  Now I’m just looking forward to being able to read other things that are hopefully a little faster in pace.  Next up is The Chronic[what!]cles of Narnia, which shouldn’t take me nearly so long.  We got a single-volume copy of the whole set for Christmas last year, but I haven’t had a chance to read it.

That metals consisted partly of water was obvious from the fact that, when you heated them up, they became fluids.  But some other substance must be combined with water in order to create a metal.  The missing ingredient was supplied by invisible rays from the planets, which penetrated the ground and combined with the water that was there in the earth.  The rays from that dimmest and most sluggish of planets, Saturn, created the basest of all metals, lead.  Jupiter was responsible for tin and Mars for iron.  Venus did copper, the moon silver, Mercury, obviously, accounted for mercury, and the Sun made gold.  This was why the gold-hungry Spaniards, in their explorations and conquests, had never strayed far from the Equator, for that was where the Sun beat down most directly, and produced the richest posits of its precious Element.

Two days ago some creeps broke into Stephanie’s car while she was at work.  All they took was her purse, which was in her trunk, and only contained her cell phone, her keys to my car, and some makeup things.  Apparently three other cars were also broken into before someone happened to come outside to use a cell phone and saw someone jump into the back of a car while the driver sped away.

So we had the cell phone deactivated immediately, and fortunately they had made no calls (at all).  After Stephanie was on hold with the Charlotte police department for over half an hour, she decided to submit the crime report online.  We had already decided that we probably were not going to see anything from the purse again, so our biggest concern was that they had the keys to my car and they could have written down our address from our car registration that was in the glove compartment (which was open when Stephanie first went to her car).  So we took my car to my office (which has 24-hour surveillance) and they said it’d be okay to leave it there for the night.  At about 10:45 I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize, that only showed up as “Pineville, NC” in the caller ID.  On the other end was someone claiming to be a police officer, who said someone had been brought into custody for breaking into cars and he was trying to find out whose cell phone this was.  Now, I am familiar with social engineering, so my first thought was that this guy had a set of keys and wanted to find the car it went to.  So I decided that if he asked for my address I was going to tell him I’d call him back at the number listed in the phone book for the police department.

Well anyway he never asked for our address, but he asked us if we could come down to the Pineville police department, so we did (after checking Google to make sure the directions he gave really go to the police department).  Of course, this was a forty-minute drive, even at 11:30 on a weeknight with no traffic.

When we got there, they took us to a room where another couple was sitting, filling out a police report.  He said his car was broken into while he was at the gym, and they took his credit cards.  When he called to cancel the card, the lady said it had been used two minutes earlier to charge $800 worth of stuff at Macy’s.  So they called the police who called mall security and had the guys on tape, and they went and arrested them.  We told the officer we had filed a report with the Charlotte police, but after he spent a while on the phone with them, they couldn’t find any record of it.  Later we found out why: a report submitted online does not go right into the system, it needs to be processed and basically reentered by some human being who apparently works nine-to-five.  They said this could take 48-72 hours.  So we filled out a police report in Pineville and got our stuff back and got back home at like 1:15.

The other couple was there when the guys were brought in, the told us that they were three kids that were about 16 or 17 years old, and apparently go to high school in Huntersville.  Also, their mom came in and started saying how there was “no way that they could have done this.”  I’m sure they hear that a lot at the police station...

All things considered, it was pretty fortunate that they found the guys and that they still had our stuff, since most of the time that just isn’t the case.  All it will cost us is a $10 fee to reactivate the cell phone, and whatever it will cost to fix the keyhole that was severely violated.

In the month since the Wii was released, you’ve probably heard about problems with the wrist strap breaking, causing considerable damage.  I personally find it difficult to comprehend a scenario in which this would actually be a problem (and I’m not alone).  This past week our Wii moved out from under an evergreen and was placed beneath a television, and since then we have put in a lot of time on Wii Sports.  My two brothers especially enjoyed it, putting in nearly six hours of play time on Sunday alone.  In all of this time, there was no wrist strap present at all.  It only took about ten minutes for us to realize that the wrist strap did little besides get in the way.  I’ve yet to see a Wiimote even get dropped, much less thrown, even though we are all using full-force baseball swings and bowling ball tosses.

Is anyone else actually using the wrist strap?  If so, is it actually preventing anything?

Update:  My Wii friend code: 1974 6315 2837 8279.  Let me know your code if you want our Mii’s to mingle.