Are you bonehead corporate types over at Y!ahoo so f-ing clueless? Its not delicious.com, as the new "Delicious 2.0" now sends us to. Its del.icio.us. Why? Why ruin such a perfect domain name and branding with this .com crap?! Forward the .com to the .us fer chrissakes, not the other way around!!!

This is just lame corporate bullshit at work. "Gee, uh, shouldn't we be a dot-com, Bob?" "Um, Yeah, I think you're right, Bob!" "We should just change it, nobody's going to notice." (together) "Hahahaha!"

Geez, what a bonehead move.

And the schedules they acquire. I set up my MythTV box Saturday night to record 'Dial M For Murder.' I'd not seen it before, but have been waiting for the opportunity. Great! I set it up, and let it run.

I go to watch it and notice that the movie didn't start until about 5-6 minutes after it was supposed to. Hm, I thought. This could be bad at the end, but maybe its close enough it won't matter.

WRONG!!

Hitchcock's ghost comes back from the grave, and just as the inspector is about to tell the lovely Margot how he's figured out she's innocent and the conniving Tony is guilty, in a moment of sheer spiteful irony.... Right at that moment....

END. FIN. The recording stops!! ARGH. If ever there was a moment I wanted to put a brick through that TV, that was it!

So I figure, since I've got this blog with (counts on fingers) four domains pointing at it (I will dominate the ripp-dots someday!!) I should start doing something with it. Yeah sure I post some garbage (french pronunciation, if you don't mind) from time to time, usually when I realize, "Oh, sh*t, I have a website!" or something really ticks me off. Usually I forget about it. How messed up is that? Or I try to pimp some latest project or other to get some of that much-coveted google link-juice.

To wit, The 4th of July was just 3 days ago (counts on fingers again to confirm) yeah three. Independence Day. For those of you not in the US, lets just say it involves waving the flag around, setting off explosives and celebrating our insurgency, er I mean, rebellion from the British oppressors some two-hundred-and-thirty odd years ago.

I was sitting in the living room, and started hearing this rumbling sound. Now, a bit of background is necessary. I live somewhere between civilization and BFE (look it up) in Oklahoma. I say between because the main highway is just a quarter-mile down the road, and any unusual rumblings can usually be attributed to some truck driver air-braking on his way into the truck stop at the corner.

Not so tonight. The sound didn't stop. I went out the front door and was treated to a most peculiar display of sound and light. It seems that this year, everyone within five miles of my front door was setting off fireworks. A full 180-degree view of random airbursts could be seen, and the flashes from the ones that didn't make it over the trees.

But the sound. Normally, the wind is blowing a constant 20 mph. All. The time. With gusts to thirty. Its a rare occasion to have no wind, and tonight was one of those. The sound of these fireworks was only as I'd imagine it would sound like in a war zone. The low, distant, thumpthump concussions that you can feel in the ground, and in the air, posing as artillery or air-dropped ordnance. Random rat-a-tat-tats of firecrackers posing as machine gun fire. Medium-sized shells making a solid bang sounding like light mortars.

The flashes just over the trees became villages just over the horizon, being annihilated by squadrons of B-17s somewhere in Germany sixty years ago. It was surreal in the sheer amount of it. I sat there for a solid hour-and-a-half, listening and watching the battle unfold.

Then I realized I was being assaulted in my own by the local mosquito contigent. Back inside. Ten years I've been in this house, and this is the first time I've ever witnessed an apocalypse of that magnitude. In years past I've either been somewhere else, or a combination of high winds and dry, ultra-flammable prairie grassland have kept the missions at bay.

It was one of those "moments of clarity" that you get on a rare occasion.

It's funny because its true. You know it. I always wish things were more like they were then. People just got shit done. Christ we went to war in '42 and were done in two separate theatres in three and a half years. Stuff just got done, dammit. And it was because this kind of stuff didn't go on.

David "Everything is Miscellaneous" Weinberger sez, "Here's a PDF of a 1944 'Simple Sabotage Field Manual' from the US Strategic Services, explaining how to train people to sabotage their workplace. Full of useful suggestions, from the practical to the, um, less so (e.g., bring a bag of mo[n]ths into a theater showing propaganda films). It also recommends doing things through channels, making speeches, and referring matters to committee as techniques of sabotage (cf. page 28). I got this link from a presentation by two CIA folks at the Enterprise 2.0 conference."

(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of per­sonal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic”
comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and considera­tion.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of com­munications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reason­able” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the juris­diction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

PDF Link

Link: Sabotage manual from 1944 advises acting like an average 2008 manager - Boing Boing

I especially like the bit about the moths. Bob and Doug McKenzie's playbook, eh?

Well, Let's see....

We finally ditched DISH Network.  Now we're on OTA channels (HD of course) and good old NetFlix!  Why'd we do this?

It just wasn't worth it anymore.  Sure the news channels would come in handy from time to time.  I will miss TCM and the occasional SciFi Channel show.

But honestly apart from those few things, it just wasn't worth the $50/mo. anymore.  Most of the channels no longer have any relevance to what they started off as.  Dish also screwed me when they moved HDNet Movies from the base HD-Pack to a new "tier" that cost twice as much.  No longer worth it.

I mean, look at some of the channels out there, and look at what's actually on them.  Crap like "Ice Road Truckers" on the History Channel, WRESTLING on the SciFi Channel, TLC is now the crappy makeover network, A&E? No longer Arts and Entertainment, Bravo? Used to be somewhat interesting.  Now I can't remember the last time I turned there.  Even AMC went downhill, first adding ads, then dropping letterboxing, now even they've got crappy "original series" on there.

And most of it is all re-runs of the same crappy shows.  I'll use Law and Order as an example.  TNT especially.  I just started calling it the "L&O" channel, because that's about all thats on there during prime-time anymore.  It's on USA, its on other channels.  Get it away from me!

So, much as I hate to admit it, the internet will have to provide me with my dose of BSG, SG-A, and a couple of others....

And now we've got two NetFlix accounts at 3 movies out a piece, and its still cheaper than the satellite.  That's about all we've got time for in a given week anyway, so I think its for the best.

Oh, and check out part II for the other time-eating device we've acquired.