If you own a Wii, Nintendo just made your holiday fifty dollars cheaper by delaying Super Smash Bros. Brawl until 2008 (they claim February, but we’ll see).

In an act of unprecedented cruelty, they announced that Sonic will be playable just before telling us we can’t have the game yet.  I fully expect an apology in the form of a playable Mega Man in the final release.

That is all.

As someone who works in an office environment, I run into a lot of people with Dilbert comic strips tacked or taped to various cubicle surfaces.  After deciding that there must be something to Dilbert, I started reading the strips (posted online daily).  After trying for about two months to figure out why people find Dilbert entertaining, I’ve given up.  In fact I’ve come to the simple conclusion that Dilbert is not funny.  At best, it is highly overrated.  I guess if you draw 365.25 strips per year you are bound to hit on something funny sooner or later, but I’m not sitting through crap like this to get there.

you heard me

This has been a crazy week for me.  It started last Saturday with the move and the craziness we encountered from both Budget and Time Warner.

Then on Sunday afternoon, thirteen days after buying our house and one day after we moved in, our air conditioner broke.  I called some of the people in the yellow pages that advertised 24-hour service, to see what it would cost to send someone out at 10:00 pm.  That ranged from $129 to $199, just to send someone out (not counting any work they would have to do).  We opted to wait until the morning.

Side note: I had two phone calls that went something like this:

“Our air conditioner is broken and I was wondering how much it would cost to send someone out tonight and how soon they could get here”
“You want someone to come out now?”
“Well.. I mean, your ad says 24-hour service...”

That was a miserable night, it was at least 85 degrees, and very humid, inside our house, preventing anything that resembled sleep.  First thing in the morning we called someone out to fix it.  It turned out to be a problem with the tube that drains condensation being clogged, causing the unit to shut off (so that water does not overflow).  We may have a warranty that will cover the cost of the repairs, but we have to find that paper among the five hundred or so pieces of papers we signed.

So then Tuesday afternoon, on my way home from work, I got into a car accident.  Fortunately it was not serious, and I was hit from behind so it is not my fault, but we’re down to one car for a few days at least.  I’ll describe the accident with the aid of this diagram from the police report (what you see is this intersection):

So I’m car 2, and the guy who hit me is car 1.  Not shown is that there was a car in the eastbound lane of Poplar Tent Rd, waiting for an opportunity to turn left onto I-85.  I saw that this car would have to wait a while to make a left turn, so I started to make my turn.  But then another car heading east drove around the car turning left, in the shoulder, so I had to stop.  But the guy behind me thought I had gone and was looking left to see when he would get an opportunity to go as he moved forward, unaware that I had stopped.  He at least was cooperative, and didn’t raise a fuss when I said I wanted to get a police report (a police officer I know said to always do that, no matter how minor the incident, so that the other guy can’t change his story later).  We did have to wait about thirty minutes for the police officer to show up, and it was very hot while we waited.

You may not know this if you’re reading this from another part of the country, but we have had extremely hot and humid weather this week.  In fact, as I type this, it is 100°F, making this the third day in a row to hit 100.  And that’s not a heat index; that’s the actual temperature.  Yesterday it was 103, and it may get that hot again later this afternoon.

Something else I learned: lawyers and chiropractors are very quick to send you things in the mail after you get in an accident.  Our police report was made available at 9:00 AM on Wednesday, and we got things in the mail from two lawyers and one Chiropractor on Thursday, wanting to make sure they can cash in on our misfortune.  I anticipate many more such letters.

Lastly, if you’re feeling adventurous, view the Concord Police Department’s web page with Firefox.  Fantastic!  I’m guessing this is the result of a developmestuction environment.

All in all, quite a crazy week.

I have recently had two very annoying experiences with the online fronts of two different businesses.  First up is Budget truck rentals.  On Tuesday of this week I reserved a moving truck from Budget, using their website.  I picked the closest center to our house as the pickup/dropoff location, and they reserved a truck that I could pick up at 8:30 this morning.

So Stephanie and I headed over there this morning, getting there about 8:00.  We walked up to the office, because we saw a guy getting there and unlocking the gate.  “Are you guys here to pick up a truck?” “Yeah, for Robinson.”  “They were supposed to call you, this location is no longer open.”  “Come again?”  “This location is closed, last Saturday was our last day... what was the name?”  “Robinson.”  He went inside and looked at the four names he had, and said Robinson wasn’t even one of the names he had on his list.  After some discussion, I mention that I made the reservation on Tuesday, after this location had been closed.  He said they were supposed to have blocked that location from the website.  The guy was nice at least, and called around to other Budget locations nearby to see if anyone had a truck that wasn’t reserved, and after about fifteen minutes he found one not too very far away, so we rushed over there to get it.  So it turned out okay, but it was incredibly scary for a minute, because we had to get moved into the house today, and some people from our church were showing up at 9:30 to help with moving and we needed to be there with a truck.  Plus I’m probably going to have to deal with a $50 no-show fee, which will require some kind of hour long phone call to try to explain what happened.

The second situation is with Time Warner.  I called them about two weeks ago to arrange for our cable to be cut off at the apartment and turned on at the house, and they set up an appointment for 1-5 on Friday (yesterday) to turn on the cable at the house (they didn’t have to come out to disconnect at the apartment).  Yesterday morning I wanted to see if the technician could give us a call-ahead before showing up, since 1-5 is a pretty big time window.  I went to the website to find a number, and decided I would go to the “chat with a customer service representative” option.  I wouldn’t have to be on hold forever, and chatting would be easier to do while I was working.  The lady on the chat window told me that a technician didn’t even need to come out, since the last people had never canceled their service, so they would just change the account over to our name.  I was a little miffed at this, because had I not called, someone would have been at the house from 1-5 with no technician showing up.

So this morning, when we were moving into the house, we saw that we had a message.  It was Time Warner, saying that the technician had showed up at 1:50 and no one was home.  When we got a TV unpacked we discovered that the cable had been disconnected and the internet didn’t work.  I called Time Warner and they sent someone out, and when the guy got here and connected everything he said “I’m sorry we have idiots working for us.”

Both of these situations were really annoying, because the people at the website aren’t communicating with the actual people on the ground.  This whole world wide web thing is not new, and its primary purpose is, after all, to be a communication tool.  Both of the situations shouldn’t have happened.

No, and I don’t care.

You’ve seen it way too many times.  Two people who are clearly wrong for each other are supposed to get married.  An elaborate wedding ceremony has been planned, family has come in from out of town, and everyone is excited to wish the new couple well.  Everyone, that is, except one of the two people getting married.  Ten minutes later still no bride.  Or maybe the bride shows up, and as the couple exchanges vows, one of them gets the shocking realization that maybe this isn’t right.  And in response to “do you take this man/woman to be your lawfully wedded husband/wife?” there is a long pause.  The minister will repeat himself, as if somehow he was misunderstood.  Then the bride/groom responds “...no... no, I can’t do this, it’s just not right.”  Suddenly everyone in the church gasps in awe because they didn’t see this coming and honestly they were just there for the free booze.  At this point, either the bride runs out of the church in tears, or the groom scrambles off.  Or sometimes one of them will confess their true feelings for someone else present in the church.

I’m sure you’ve seen a scene very similar to what I’ve just described in countless movies and TV shows.  You may have even read such a tale in a book or two.  It is super cliché, but it must be the first thing they teach you in screen writing school.  Just before they teach you that one bullet is enough to make a Ford Explorer explode.  But does this ever actually happen in real life to real human beings?  I’d say it’s pretty rare.  I’ve never known anyone who’s encountered such a situation.  I’ve never even heard a third-hand tale of someone being left at the altar.  Given how much people like to gossip about the misfortunes of others, you’d think word would spread fast and linger for years.  But the only incident I know of is the runaway bride from two years ago that got far too much media attention.  So I ask all of the writers who read my blog: please don’t write a scene involving someone getting left at the altar.  We are all pretty tired of it.

by now you should’ve somehow realized what you’ve got to do

About a year or so ago I came across a link to this paper (warning: PDF file) in the comments to a blog.  I found it very interesting, and since reading it I’ve been able to recognize this phenomenon “in the wild” so often that I figured I should share.  I’ll warn you that the paper is a 14-page academic paper from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology... and it reads like one.  After the first page or so it gets pretty tedious to read.

Even so, here’s the gist of it:  Often times, someone who is unskilled at something is unaware that they are unskilled, because they don’t have enough skill to evaluate their own skill.  If you ask students how they think they did on a math test after taking it, for example, the students who performed poorly will grossly overestimate their performance.  They usually have some idea that they didn’t perform well, but they aren’t good enough at math to realize just how badly they did.

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a surprising number of times.  Like someone a few years ago that claimed to have a “heavy graphics background”, then showed me something he made in Flash that was a bumpy model of 3D text, with a glaring shading error on one edge.  I remember someone I went to high school with, who would typically say “I didn’t miss any questions on that test” after taking a test, which would have me worried because I thought I might have missed one or two.  Then we’d get the test back and he’d get a seventy-something.  But he never quite caught on that maybe he was judging his own performance poorly.

Long before reading about this behavior, I learned to distrust confident people.  Upon reading this paper, I realized why most advice you receive is bad:  most people who feel entitled to give advice are not at all qualified to do so.  The great irony is that for most people confidence is a desirable quality in a leader, misinterpreted as an indicator of competence.  You needn’t look far into the world of politics to find dozens of examples of this principle at work.

So to conclude, I ask that my readers (all ten of you) watch for examples of this in your life.  It happens way more often than you might expect.

maybe if we’re loud we’ll stay alive

I just read this article over at the site formerly known as The Daily WTF.  It is about someone who worked for a government agency and couldn’t send e-mails to a client named Mr. Gookin, because the filtering system was flagging this as a racist e-mail.  Apparently “gookin” is a racial slur (I’ve certainly never heard it used).

This story doesn’t really surprise me, but what does surprise me is when I read some of the comments to the post, how many people have had the same thing happen.  And some of them are just completely ridiculous, like an e-mail containing the phrase “one group” because (if you remove the spaces) you can see the word “negro” in there (which I guess makes the United Negro College Fund a racist organization).  Or filtering out an e-mail containing the word “Saturday” (because of the “turd,” of course).  Or people with the name “Dick” that run into this problem all the time.  Or someone with the name “Callahan,” since that contains “Allah.”  Or the person who was involved with forensics, and frequently had e-mails to and from police departments filtered out (I guess it’s kind of hard to discuss a rape investigation without using offensive words like “rape” or “sex”).

What’s even worse than the stupidity of the filters is the refusal of many IT administrators to remove these words from the banned word list, even when it presents a problem to the employees.  And even when it prevents them from conducting business!

Fortunately I don’t have this problem at my office, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be able to exchange e-mails with Rakshit (that’s really the name of someone I work with).  But this kind of thing happens often enough that there is even a name for it: The Scunthorpe Problem, named after an incident in which AOL blocked mail from people living in Scunthorpe, England.  Follow the link if you’re not sure why..

I wonder is Spam Assassin blocks e-mails about Spam Assassin...

There is an annoying thing that happens this time of year.  Over the weekend I washed my car, and within a few hours it was covered in plant sperm:

I recently was asked to come into work on a Saturday at my place of employ.  I have no problem with coming in to work on a Saturday if my work requires that I come in to finish something that has not fully been completed during normal business hours.  However, this day was a mandatory work day for the entire company, and the area in which I work had nothing pressing to accomplish that day.  Instead, the upstairs lab came in to work solely to clean the lab from top to bottom.  True, it needed this scrub down terribly, but still not badly enough to make us come in on a Saturday.  And that isn’t even the worst of the situation.  We were required to come into work at 5:30 am!!!  On a normal day I don’t go into work until 7:30 am, but on mandatory Saturday workdays, we have to go in two hours earlier, to clean.  We were also in no way compensated for coming into work that day.  Normally I would expect to receive time off back in place for this extra time we were putting in, but no that didn’t happen.  Also, if I decided not to come in on Saturday, they would take a day of vacation from me, even though I already put forty full hours that week.

There were about three other problems I had with coming to work this particular Saturday.  Shall I tell you about them??   I think I will even if you don’t like it.  The first being that I acquired a small chemical burn from the chemical cleaner that we were using to clean the lab.  I accidentally sprayed some of the cleaner on my forearm and about thirty minutes later, I had four or five nickel sized whelps on my arm.  They are now just a few red spots on my arm, but it has been over a week since it happened.  The second thing I had a problem with was that one of the other people I work with somehow managed to do practically no cleaning at all in a full eight hours.  He spent most of the day sitting at his desk chatting with everyone else in the lab while they cleaned around him.  When our bosses came back up to the lab, he continues to simply talk to them instead of clean while the rest of us cleaned our little tooshies off.  Well, needless to say, we cleaned and cleaned and he got the credit for it.  He has made procrastination a true art form.

I know this wasn’t exactly a fun or exciting post, but hey, at least I finally got around to making one!!!  Have a great day!!