Unruly Behavior

Coming soon to a prostitot near you...

The Lindsey Lohan Barbie Doll!

Lindsay Lohan Barbie Doll

One of my favorite authors has apparently reached the end of the line. Guess we'll watch Where the Buffalo Roam or the much better Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas this weekend as a tribute.

Yahoo! News - Writer Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself

I read something somewhere last week where lawmakers were trying to curtail drug advertising on television on TV, especially for Erectile Dysfunction. The advertisers said that they only advertised where children were not likely to be watching. Bullshit.

First advertisement after the opening musical ceremoney on the Daytona 500 broadcast was for Levitra. Featuring a woman talking about how Levitra gives her husband, firmer, longer lasting erections. This is not appropriate for a show that is supposed to be for families. I'm fortunate that my kid is only 14 months old, and only interested in the pretty colored cars going by on the screen.

And yes, I'm aware that at least one car, Mark Martin's, is sponsored by Viagra, the sticker says Viagra, not much else. It's not refered to the "Firmer Erection Mobile", or the "Hard Charger". Nor does the advertising from Viagra use the word erection, fuller or firmer.

So, is NASCAR really family entertianment or is it just for old guys with limp dicks?

UPDATE:
Got a canned answer from the makers of Levitra when I sent them a complaint:

Thank you for your inquiry about Levitra® (vardenafil HCl), the co-marketed product from Schering-Plough Corporation and GlaxoSmithKline, manufactured by Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals.

Our Levitra advertisements are intended to provide men over the age of 40, who suffer from erectile dysfunction (ED) with the information and encouragement they need to talk with their doctors about Levitra. These ads will run on programs intended for this audience, including network news programs, sporting events, and certain prime time programming. ED is an important and sensitive health issue affecting more than 30 million American men. Our advertising policies are continually under review, as are all our business practices, to ensure they are filling a patient or business need and to ensure their propriety. We value hearing from individuals like yourself, and your views will be taken into consideration as we plan future advertising placements.

A copy of the prescribing information for this product is available at http://www.univgraph.com/bayer/inserts/levitra.pdf. It is available for review and discussion with an appropriate healthcare provider. Please note that the information provided in or with this correspondence is not intended as a substitute for the advice and counsel of a physician or other healthcare provider. Patient care is individualized and a physician or healthcare provider can best discuss concerns and answer any questions about symptoms, conditions, and treatment. We appreciate the opportunity to serve you. If you have further questions concerning GlaxoSmithKline or our products, please contact our Customer Response Center at 1-888-825-5249 during our normal business hours, Monday through Friday 8:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. (Eastern Time). Sincerely, Joel Customer Response Representative Customer Response Center

Nice to see they took them time to read and care aobut my message...

Watching the Daytona 500 Pre-race presentation. They had a musical presentation, featuring Brian Wilson. Sorry, Mr. Wilson, you can't sing any more. I've got at least two different versions of the song performed today, "Good Vibrations", by the Beach Boys. Today it was a different band, but it was the singing that was HORRIBLE. Off Key, out of sync, words were wrong. Some people should know when to quit performing in public. Brian Wilson seems to be one of them.

Greetings readers!

Today is NASCAR's biggest race, the Daytona 500. I'll be spending several hours on my sofa watching folks go fast and turn left. Watching Fox HD on my Mitsubishi 65" TV, using my HD Tivo to replay any accidents or incidents. Enjoying wonderful snacks such as Honey Mustard & Onion Pieces pretzles from Snyder's Of Hanover, microwave popcorn from Orville Reddenbacher, and summer sausage from Hickory Farms. Washing it all down will be some great beer from Rolling Rock. I'll probably wear some Levi's jeans, a Cedar Point t-shirt and Reebok tennis shoes, socks and underwear from Target. Of course, I'll be rooting for all the Ford drivers from Roush Racing. (After all, I drive a Ford SVT Contour with a Roush designed engine.) Finally, if anyone should ring the doorbell during the near religious event at my house, I'll be using my Square-D security camera at the front door, and Misubishi's Picture In Picture to see who is there and if it is worth pausing my Hughes HD Tivo to get up and go to the door. Watching the race with me will be my boy. He'll problaby have some Milk and Oscar Meyer Weiners while he watches the race. He'll be wearing a Pampers Cruiser, Nike shoes, and some clothes from Gymboree, while playing with tons of toys from Fisher Price. If my wife sticks around, she will probably eat something healthy, like some Doritos, while wearing Tommy Hilfiger, Victoria's Secret and New Balance shoes. When the race is over we will probably celebrate with a pizza from Pizza Hut, washed down with some Miller beer.

We haven't watched the episodes, but we have successfully downloaded and burned the DVDs of Star Trek: New Voyages, and just the previews look damn good. Got the case cover printed for the second one. It looks sharp. Going to have to invest in some labels, fresh ink for the printer and some glossy paper to get the whole thing looking professional.

If you are a fan of the original Star Trek, you should check it out, it is the "fourth" season of Star Trek. New cast, same crew, better special effects.

Star Trek New Voyages - Tsunami Aid

Ok, she ruined Compaq by merging it with Hewlett Packard. At the same time, she diluted the value of HP's stock and printer business. Now she's gone. But you can get a cool HP iPod.

Fiorina Forced Out As Hewlett-Packard CEO

Ok, separate from your wife, you both start cyber love search, fall in love online, meet in public and get divorced. Too funny.

Yahoo! News - Budding Jordan cyber love ends in divorce

Quoted from the story linked below, where a 13 year old stole a car, ran from police and then started ramming their car with the stolen car. He was shot and killed during this.

"Carmen Dorsey, who stopped by an impromptu memorial at the site where the teen died. "Why do they have to shoot to kill?'' "

Here is the honest truth. Police do not shoot to kill. They shoot for body mass. The first target is the upper torso. Second target is lower torso. They shoot to stop a suspect from doing what they are doing. The primary idea in shooting is to take down the target, not kill the target. Think of the killing as being a secondary thing that happens sometimes. They shoot to protect themselves from suspects that are trying to do them bodily harm. They shoot because they have wives, husbands, children, girlfriends, parents, brothers and sisters who they want to see later on in their lives.

Here is a better question. "Why did the 13 year olds mother or father not teach him that stealing cars is wrong?" Or, "Running from the police after you have been caught in a stolen car will only make things worse." Or, "Don't do things that threaten the people with the guns when you've screwed up, stolen a car and run from them, or you will possibly get shot and killed."

Instead of blaming the police for the kid being dead, blame the kid. He instigated the actions that directly led to his death. He made the choices, he paid the consequences. However, there will be lasting effects for the officer or officers that did the shooting. The activists never mention that. Even though they acted properly, the officers will know till their end that they had to kill a 13 year old boy that was not raised properly by his parents.

Hmm... Maybe the officers should sue the partents for emotional trauma.

LA Police News

If you've been Phished, then you'll want to get even. I'm now running the Mugu Marauder at home, hitting the scammers where it hurts, in the pocketbook.

In under 5 minutes I've already downloaded over 2MB of their images.

Ok folks, download and get downloading.

Artists Against 419 - Mugu Marauder

Ok, sure it's not the best series ever, but it is a good series, and Star Trek: Enterprise getting cancelled last week was really depressing news. Here are some fans that want to pay for it themselves. Here is another suggestion. Put it back into syndication like Next Gen and DS9 were. Voyager never did that well as a Prime Time Network series, and the first Star Trek was cancelled after three season. Yet each syndicated series had no problem making seven seasons.Why not stick with the formula that works?

TrekBBS: LET THE FANS PAY FOR SEASON 5!

One more better product from Google.

Google Maps

Picked this up over at Jakes. Seems some crazy old woman named Wanita Renea Young can be given an anxiety attack by getting free cookies from teenage girls. Suing kids for your mental disability is just plain wrong. She has to be the meanest woman in Colorado. Not to mention, La Plata County Court Judge Doug Walker, has to be the dumbest judge in Colorado. At least he is just a small claims judge and relegated to small potatoes court cases.

Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com: "Wanita Renea Young"

Ok, I've done plenty of griping about bad customer service here, so I have to list my good customer service experience as well. In 2002 I buit a new house with a lot of Schneider Electric / Square D Multi-Link products.

They have never worked quite right, and the company that sold them to me with the house, Texas Home Electronics, tried hard to make them work, but with no luck.

So in December, out of Frustration, I went to their web site and sent an e-mail request for someone competent to work on my system.

I ended up getting a call from the VP of product line. He has been working with me over the phone and e-mail since then, sending me parts, giving me lists. The system still is not fully up and running, but I've been making progress, and it has only cost me some time, not money.

That is how to do customer service. Hopefully in the next six weeks I will get the whole thing up and running.

Multilink Structured Wiring System - Home

Ok, I've been trying for about a month to arrange DSL for one of my customers in Baytown, TX. This is a Verizon served area that used to be GTE before the merger in 2000.

The link below takes you to a field where you enter the phone number to find out if DSL is available on that line. For the customer's main phone number, it says no, for their fax number, it says to call their 800 number to find out availability.

So I called. Got told yes, they can get DSL on that line. Handed it off to our tech that usually handles this type of ordering. He called Verizon and they told him that DSL was not available on that line. So it got handed back to me for more research. Another call to Verizon, and I spoke with a tech who told me that it was available on that line, but that there were coils on the line that would have to be removed, so it would take about six weeks to install, instead of the normal two weeks. Ok, so we sent the information back to the customer. Then yesterday I called and spoke to one of their ordering people who told me that there was no guarantee that DSL could be installed on this line, but that she could start the order process, and we would find out if they could get DSL for sure. So I sent this information, her phone number and extension to the customer because they wanted to order the DSL themselves.

Got a call this morning, the customer tried calling Verizon, and could not get to the rep who I listed for them, so would I please take care of this order?

Sure, so I'm on the phone with Verizon, I've gottten in touch with the same rep from yesterday, and now she is telling me that she is getting told that none of the lines are available for DLS today.

Yes, No, Yes, Maybe, No.

Hmmm.....

This would be funny if we were not billing the customer about $125 per hour for this service. Instead it just looks like we're ripping off the customer, and that Verizon DSL is completely incompetent.

At least it makes it easy to understand how our country is lagging so far behind the rest of the world in Broadband Internet Access.

Ok, I'm back from hold. Now none of the lines qualifies for DSL, but if they run a new replacement line, at the customer's expense, there is a chance that it might support DSL, chance it might not. So the Verizon rep is calling the customer to get approval to re-run the line.

The funny part is remembering that the incumbent phone companies have warned if there is competition instead of their monopolies in Texas that it would make service worse. Aside from going to Morse Code or Semiphore, I don't see it getting much worse than this.

Verizon Online Business DSL

Ok, on the news this morning, this was the big news. A Marine General who likes killing people, and says, "it's fun to shoot some people."

Well, duh.

Come on, this guys job is to kill people. What's wrong with loving your job? Has anyone ever watched some of the old World War II movies? Those guys are having fun shooting and bombing Japs, Krauts and all the other bad guys. Sure, war is hell, but even in one of the best, most realistic war movies ever, "Saving Private Ryan", you see the exuberance when someone kills the enemy.

America: Quit being a buch of fucking pansies. War is nasty. That's why we have an Army / Air Force / Marines / Navy / Coast Guard to do the fighting for us. If it was fun for everyone, we would do it ourselves. But it's not my cup of tea to head out and kill the enemy. People, both ours and theirs will die in the conflict. If our guys have fun killing their guys, that's ok. I'm sure the ones killing our guys did stop and think, "Wow, I'm wrong for enjoying this." Quite the contrary, I think they did their thing and celebrated as well.

And if you think this war is bad, that there are too many civilian casualties, or too many casualties on our side, try reading some stuff on the end of World War II where we rolled through Germany firebombing ever city we came across.

And feel a little happy every time we kill another enemy, they would have killed us given the chance.

ABC News: Marine General Says Shooting Some Is 'Fun'

Please, send help, I can't stop playing...


Ok, now I'm officially obsessed...
Posted by Hello

Ok, I got this in one of my e-mail boxes this morning, thought it must be SPAM at first. However, it looks legit. More Microsoft Propaganda. Oh, and evidently, you can now send e-mail to Bill Gates.

Building Software That Is Interoperable By Design

Every day, businesses face an ongoing challenge of making a wide variety of software from many different vendors work together. It's crucial to success in streamlining business processes, getting closer to customers and partners, or making mergers and acquisitions successful.

This email, which you are receiving as a subscriber to executive emails from Microsoft, outlines the company's work to make its products interoperate well in a diverse IT environment.

Whether you are connecting with partners' systems, accessing data from a mainframe, connecting applications written in different programming languages or trying to log on across multiple systems, bringing heterogeneous technologies together while reducing costs is today a challenge that touches every part of the organization.

Over the years, our industry has tried many approaches to come to grips with the heterogeneity of software. But the solution that has proven consistently effective - and the one that yields the greatest success for developers today - is a strong commitment to interoperability. That means letting different kinds of applications and systems do what they do best, while agreeing on a common "contract" for how disparate systems can communicate to exchange data with one another.

Interoperability is more pragmatic than other approaches, such as attempting to make all systems compatible at the code level, focusing solely on adding new layers of middleware that try to make all systems look and act the same, or seeking to make different systems interchangeable. With a common understanding of basic protocols, different software can interact smoothly with little or no specific knowledge of each other. The Internet is perhaps the most obvious example of this kind of interoperability, where any piece of software can connect and exchange data as long as it adheres to the key protocols.

Simply put, interoperability is a proven approach for dealing with the diversity and heterogeneity of the marketplace. Today I want to focus on two major thrusts of Microsoft's product interoperability strategy: First, we continue to support customers' needs for software that works well with what they have today. Second, we are working with the industry to define a new generation of software and Web services based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which enables software to efficiently share information and opens the door to a greater degree of "interoperability by design" across many different kinds of software. Our goal is to harness all the power inherent in modern (and not so modern) business software, and enable them to work together so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We want to further eliminate friction among heterogeneous architectures and applications without compromising their distinctive underlying capabilities.

This may seem like an obvious approach, but the desire for interoperability is sometimes mixed up with other issues. For example, interoperability is sometimes viewed merely as adherence to a published specification of some kind, either from one or more vendors or a standards organization. But simply publishing a specification may not be enough, because it overlooks much of the hard work it takes to successfully develop interoperable products - namely, ensuring that the "contract" defined by a specification is successfully implemented in software and tested in a production environment.

Sometimes interoperability is also confused with open source software. Interoperability is about how different software systems work together. Open source is a methodology for licensing and/or developing software - that may or may not be interoperable. Additionally, the open source development approach encourages the creation of many permutations of the same type of software application, which could add implementation and testing overhead to interoperability efforts.

Working With What You Have

Wholesale replacement of existing technologies is a tough sell for most organizations. They simply have too much invested in a variety of systems from any number of vendors. So, making new software work alongside existing systems is an ongoing customer need. Because of this, Microsoft has consistently invested in helping customers integrate our platform and applications with a broad array of popular (and even not so popular) hardware, software and networks.

As a result of these efforts, Microsoft offers a comprehensive portfolio of interoperability software capabilities, from the operating system to individual applications. Our software works with a vast array of technologies in the marketplace, whether they shipped last week or decades ago. Microsoft software can talk to mainframes and minicomputers from IBM and other manufacturers; other operating systems such as the Mac OS and various UNIXes including Linux; NetWare or AppleTalk networks and native Internet protocols; dozens of programming languages, ranging from COBOL and RPG, through C++ and Java, to the latest experimental languages; hundreds of databases including Oracle, Sybase and DB2; popular business applications like SAP or Siebel; vertical industry standards like SWIFT or HL7; email systems; and infrastructure products providing message queues, directory, management and security.

Many of Microsoft's products, such as Windows, Office, SQL Server, Exchange and Visual Studio, have significant functionality dedicated to interoperating with non-Microsoft products. Some of Microsoft's server products are focused squarely on interoperability, such as Host Integration Server for mainframe connectivity, BizTalk Server for heterogeneous integration across multiple applications, or Identity Integration Server, which helps simplify user authentication and management across diverse systems. These resulted from many years of working to understand customer needs and their existing environments.

While our investments in interoperability are mostly focused on the design of our software, we are also involved in work that contributes to interoperability across the industry. Microsoft participates in many formal and informal industry standards organizations to help define the specifications that are a prerequisite for interoperability. We publish APIs, protocols and software development kits, and license our underlying intellectual property associated with this technology, to help others deliver interoperable software. And we collaborate and share technology with a wide array of industry participants, some of them direct competitors, to deliver interoperability solutions that work well with our products.

In fact, in a recent survey by Jupiter Research, 72% of IT managers rated Microsoft technologies as the most interoperable within their existing environments. Similarly, for enhancing interoperability in the financial industry via Web services, Microsoft .NET was recently named by Waters magazine as the best business development environment. This successful approach to interoperability stems in large part from Microsoft's heritage as a personal computer company: we have always put a lot of emphasis on well-defined mechanisms for how different products from different companies interact, because of the incredible diversity of PC hardware and software. Without a commitment to interoperability, the industry, including Microsoft, would have been stopped in its tracks.

Using XML to Achieve "Interoperability by Design"

While Microsoft software supports an incredibly diverse array of interoperability mechanisms today, most of these are essentially unique efforts, each developed, tested and maintained individually to interoperate with a specific piece of hardware or software. The need to create individual solutions for each interoperability issue results in ever-increasing complexity. Customers and vendors - even companies of Microsoft's size - face resource limitations as they struggle to keep up with the documentation, testing and minute technical details required by this approach.

To address this issue, Microsoft has been working with the industry to advance a new generation of software that is interoperable by design, reducing the need for custom development and cumbersome testing and certification. These efforts are centered on using XML, which makes information self-describing - and thus more easily understood by different systems. For example, when two systems exchange a purchase order, the attributes of that purchase order are described in XML, so any receiving system can use that description to translate and use the enclosed information. This approach is also the foundation for XML-based Web services, which provide an Internet-based set of protocols for distributed computing. This new model for how software talks to other software has been embraced across the industry. It is the cornerstone of Microsoft .NET and the latest generation of our Visual Studio tools for software developers.

This approach is also evident in the use of XML as the data interoperability framework for Office 2003 and the Office System set of products. Office documents, spreadsheets and forms can be saved in an XML file format that is freely available for anyone to license and use. Office also supports customer-defined XML schema beyond the existing Office document types. This means two things: first, by supporting data in XML, customers can easily unlock information in existing systems and act upon it in familiar Office applications. Second, information created within Office can be easily used by other business applications.

The XML-based architecture for Web services, known as WS-* ("WS-Star"), is being developed in close collaboration with dozens of other companies in the industry including IBM, Sun, Oracle and BEA. This standard set of protocols significantly reduces the cost and complexity of connecting disparate systems, and it enables interoperability not just within the four walls of an organization, but also across the globe. In mid-2003, Forrester Research said that up to a "ten-fold improvement in integration costs will come from service-oriented architectures that use standard software plumbing." Forrester believes those improvements are realistic today. However, the definition of well-designed protocol architecture is just part of the challenge. As part of this collaborative effort, Microsoft and other companies have invested significant resources to ensure that Web services implementations from different companies really are interoperable. This has involved industry workshops, extensive testing, revision of specifications in the face of experience, and even setting up an industry body known as WS-I to help ensure interoperability.

Microsoft's interoperability investments to date have yielded significant benefits to customers and the industry. And we are well aware that we can do even more to help customers and partners achieve greater interoperability to meet their business needs. The foundation we are building with XML is already yielding significant reductions in the time, skill and cost required to integrate systems.

We also see a tremendous opportunity for developers and IT professionals to help usher in a new generation of software that is interoperable by design. We have launched a new Web site (http://www.microsoft.com/interop) that provides more details on the interoperability capabilities of our software. Please take a few moments to visit: you'll find technical information, Webcasts and events intended to help you get the most from your Microsoft products in a heterogeneous software environment.

Bill Gates

Microsoft Interoperability

I beat Jake at that game! HA!


I beat Jake!
Posted by Hello

Ok, so when I started this blog, it was mostly a place for me to blow off steam about my job. If you are a regular reader, you know I changed jobs back in December.

Just wanted to let folks know that this job has been great now for nearly two months. This is absolutely the most fun that I've had at any job since college. This group loves to party together. On my birthday they took me out for lunch, and brought donuts in in the morning. Yesterday was the owner's birthday, and he brougt in donuts and kolaches (pigs in the blanket), and someone else brought in breakfast tacos. Monday is one of the other guy's birthdays, so tomorrow we are all going out to Houston's Hard Rock Cafe for lunch to celebrate.

Today was the best, however. We had everyone in the shop, so the boss ordered in a bunch of pizza. We played Medal Of Honor for about an hour just killing each other with guns, grenades and RPGs. It just doesn't get better than this.

As far as workload, I'm learning the system here, and it is pretty easy. Just having to unlearn some old things that we did different at the last place. And I've managed to stay friends with my tech buddies at the old place. Think they only cuss me on the days they have to drive to one of my out of town clients. Not so bad.

Oh, and I'm sleeping at night. That has been the strangest thing. It just keeps getting better. Whoopie for me!

Jake posted this insanely addictive game over on his site, and I wasn't going to publish anything till I beat his score. Can't seem to beat it however, at least I tied him!


Tied Jake!
Posted by Hello

Ran a post back in December about getting a 30 Day Eval version of Visio 2003 from Microsoft, and the Visio 2003 Inside Out book that is usually $45. Got the book and software in the mail yesterday. Only had to asnwer a 5 minute phone call. Looks like the link is still good too, if you didn't take me up on this free offer the first time.

Unruly Behavior

I passed! I'm insane! I'm so happy!

Insanity Test