Tag: Ranting

Road Rage

I know being pissed off about traffic conditions and idiot drivers is JayG’s field of expertise but damn it sometimes you just have to vent.

Let us pretend of a second that you’re at an intersection. This intersection is an on and off ramp to a highway intersected with a city street. Let us say down the street the stop light has went from it’s normal red, yellow, green operation to the flashing red that notes stop sign functionality. Due to this traffic on said road is backed up to the intersection. Now let’s say you’re one of the people who took the off ramp and are turning onto the city road. If the cars are backed up all the way to the intersection do you (a) stay at the end of the off ramp and wait for the line of traffic to shorten or (b) drive into the intersection and prevent anybody going the opposite way from using the on ramp?

If you answered (b) you’re a majority of the fuckwits who drive through my on/off ramp intersection and cause me to wait for 20 minutes before being able to take said on ramp. So FUCK YOU and go die in a fire!

Since It’s No Longer Shiny and New

I generally refuse to do any reviews on devices until I’ve had them at least a month. Sure it means I don’t get to be the first out with reviews but it does mean the initial, “Oooohhh shiny” phase has worn off. Well I’m finally at that stage with my Evo 4G and although I love many things about the phone I have a list of major bugs that don’t seem to be getting fixed anytime soon.

As I’m mentioned the biggest bug that bites me in the ass is after installing the Android 2.2 update I can no longer automatically synchronize multiple GMail accounts. It seems I’m not alone. My phone is setup with two GMail accounts. The primary account automatically syncs correctly but the second account only syncs when I go into the GMail app and manually refresh. That’s a pretty big annoyance considering this is supposed to be Sprints flagship 4G phone.

The second problem I have deals with my work calendar. Some time back my work calendar got mucked up on my phone and it refused to continue automatically syncing. Figuring this was a simple sync issue I removed the account and attempted to re-add it. Well it seems that’s no longer an issue as when I tried to re-add the account it was unable to authenticate with our Exchange server. Luckily I had a backup of everything and restored the entire phone which brought Exchange e-mail syncing back at least. Of course there is a new hitch, if I tried to edit my Exchange account’s settings the account settings activity automatically drops me into the add account activity. I can’t add an account because it will fail to authenticate and I can’t edit the current account because the phone wants me to add an account before being able to edit it. Rock meet the hard wall.

What else is wrong? VPN, that’s what. I have a VPN server setup at home which I use to tunnel back when I’m out and about. Even though all my computers can successfully VPN home and even my Palm T|X from yesteryear can connect, my fancy Android phone can not. Looking into the matter it seems practically nobody can get VPN working on their Android phone and haven’t been able to for at least a year. This needs to be fixed.

We aren’t done yet. There is also a rather nasty calendar bug that overwrites the contents of the description field with the contents of the location field. As you can guess that’s pretty fucking annoying as well.

Did I mention that the new Android 2.2 update rendered the Last.fm client useless? I’m not sure what Google exactly changed in their audio APIs but it prevents Last.fm from buffering songs that are being downloaded. The app developer has been releasing updates like mad but has been unable to correct this issue. What happens is a song will play on Last.fm unless a data connection drops. At this point since the song can not be streamed and there is nothing buffered the song stops playing and when the connection reestablishes the next song automatically beings playing. I rather enjoyed driving around streaming my Last.fm client via Bluetooth into my Bluetooth FM transmitter. That’s no longer possible. Why not use Pandora instead you ask? Because ever since the 2.2 update Pandora’s audio quality sounds like shit. That’s saying something as I can’t tell the difference between a CD or an MP3 but I can tell the Pandora app sounds like complete shit over my Bluetooth transmitter.

And I have one last annoyance. Before the 2.2 update the on screen keyboard had a nice microphone button. When pressed you could speak and the phone would write what you said. The voice recognition was actually pretty decent although it left out punctuation. That button was replaced with a language selection button which is useless to me as I only know English. You can’t restore this functionality either.

The obvious solution would be to return to Android 2.1 right? Well yes but then many new applications won’t work on my phone as Google has been pushing out a lot of 2.2 only apps. Nice catch 22 isn’t it?

The last update for this phone was the upgrade to Android 2.2 which occurred around August 3rd. Since then nothing has been released to fix any of the above mentioned issues nor has any statement been made by Sprint, HTC, or Google. This is a throw back to my days used PDAs where companies would release a new device, support it for roughly six months, and then abandon the device entirely regardless of the bugs still giving users headaches. Frankly I’m rather pissed off. I love so much about the phone but the latest update (which is practically mandatory if you want to use any new applications) has hosed the phone and no fixes appear to be coming in. I’m really starting to think Google’s policy of letting phone manufacturers customize Android was a bad idea.

Terminology

I’m by nature a meat eater. If it wasn’t for the fact that I often have something along with my steak, burger, pork chop, bacon, or other form of dead animal I’d be a complete carnivore.

The other side of the camp are vegans who eat no product derived from animals (which means milk for instance) and vegetarians who simply don’t eat meat. I have no problem with either of these groups what you eat is your choice just don’t try to force it upon me. Of course not I’ve noticed new terms popping up; flexatarian and inflexatarian.

Who are these groups? Apparently they’re people who don’t have the will to be vegetarians but want to hipster creds of not eating meat. Well because of these people I’ve decided to write a little mini-rant on terminology.

I have news for those who label themselves as flexatarians and inflexatarians, you’re omnivores. As an example an inflexatarian will say they’ll only eat meat three times a week. You know what that means? I means you’re still eating fucking meat. That makes you a carnivore. Being you also eat plant material that makes you an omnivore. You shouldn’t feel bad about that fact though since our species has evolved to be exactly that. Some our our teeth are made for grinding down plant material while other teeth are made for ripping into tasty animals.

Here’s the thing, your desire to make up new terminology to gain hipster creds is pointless. Hell I’ll go a step further, it’s fucking stupid. Vegans have a reason for a new term as they are distinctly different from vegetarians. Vegetarians have a reason for a new term as they are distinctly different from us meat eaters. But you little twits on the fence are not distinctly different than us meat eaters you just eat less meat. But hey in the spirit of things I’m making up a new term, fucking awesome!

What is the fucking awesome group? Well we are the group that ensures we eat more dead animal than plant material. We only eat plant material three times a week, tops. Beyond that everything we eat must be derived from a formerly living creature. At least two of those meals each week must come from a disgustingly cute animal to boot.

Las Vegas Airport and the Laws of Gravity

I believe I mentioned that my trip to Defcon and my time out there were pretty good but my flight back was shit. So here’s my rant on the Las Vegas Airport.

I was flying Sun Country (big mistake, never fly them) which meant I got to stand in the baggage check line for three quarters of an hour. Although I’m at a loss as to why, Sun Country only has two baggage check lanes at Las Vegas meaning you get to stand there for a while. To stop this amazing revelation off the gaggle of women in front of me must not have understood how checked baggage works because it took them 20 minutes of that three quarters of an hour to check their bags. Alas this is not a story about them but about me and my trip through the airport.

I arrived at the airport two hours before my boarding time. Usually when I arrive this early it means I’ll have a good hour and a half to kill. Thankfully I did arrive early though as I got to my gate only 10 minutes before boarding. When I finally got to the baggage check counter I did the usual hoopla and say I have firearms in my locked case to declare. This apparently activated the lady’s moron mode. It took her a good 20 minutes to find a manager because she had no clue what she was supposed to do. In the meantime I filled out the little declaration of firearms form that also stated the firearms were unloaded. When the manager arrived she told the lady working the counter what needed to be done and walked off.

At this point I’m asked to open my case which I do. I point out there are four handguns in separate cloth cases and point to the cases. This is where I got to wait for another 10 or so minutes while she called her manager to check if four handguns was too many (it’s not, I checked their website and Sun Country allows up to five in a case but she wouldn’t listen to me). Finally I get to close and lock my case up and this is where my confusion begins.

You have to understand I get really upset when things that I thought I knew my entire life are no longer true. Take the laws of gravity for instance. Your weight is a measure of the force exerted by gravity. The formula for which is W = mg where m is mass and g is gravitational acceleration. The value for g is approximately constant no matter where you stand on the planet. This means an object that weighs 43 pounds in Minneapolis should weigh 43 pounds in Las Vegas so long as the mass is constant. Likewise according to this formula if the mass is reduced the weight should be less.

Apparently the laws of physics don’t work the same in Las Vegas. My case with guns and ammunition weighed 43 pounds when I left Minneapolis. After the Defcon shoot there was far less ammunition in my case and I didn’t put any additional items in it so the mass was reduced. The above mentioned formula would seem to indicate the weight of the case should be less. When the baggage check lady weighed my case is somehow came up weighing 63 pounds. This not only confused me but qualified me for the overweight charge of $75.00. A no they refused to weigh it on another scale or even entertain the fact that something was up. They simply said Minneapolis’s scale must be incorrect. This is a cheap way of saying they wanted to charge me additional money to fly because they knew I had no other options.

With my understanding of physics shattered I’ve become quite upset and irritable. And the fun and excitement only continues from there. The case was sent on the conveyor belt down the line which I thought was odd because Minneapolis had me walk down to the TSA baggage check line in case they needed to open the case. When flying with firearms only you are allowed to have the key that opens your case, TSA approved locks are a no-go. In fact according to the TSA’s website:

The container must be locked. A locked container is defined as one that completely secures the firearm from access by anyone other than you. Cases that can be pulled open with little effort do not meet this criterion.

This means you need to stick around until your checked baggage is checked. The lady working the counter told me to walk all the way to the end of the airport and wait for a TSA agent. I looked down the long line of baggage check-in desks and asked her if she meant the end of the counter or the end to the wall and she verified to the wall. So I make my journey there and sit around for five minutes only to be paged back to the check-in desk. I’m sure you already guessed why I was paged, the dumb bitch sent me to the wrong location. I storm back up there and she’s looks at me and asks where I went trying to hold back her laughter (which she was failing to do). Words were exchanged about how she told me to head down there and she claimed she did no such thing. I asked for a manager whom sided with her and pretty much called me an idiot without stating it directly (I may have said something with the words fuck and you but I’m not sure what words came before, between, and after).

The TSA agent comes out and asks for me key. Now part of the reason people fly with firearms is so they case can only be opened with their key. I explained to the TSA agent that I was told at Minneapolis that I must be physically present at watch the entire time a TSA agent opens and checks the case. Las Vegas isn’t setup to accommodate that but I must say this TSA agent was a damn good man as he brought my case out, opened it, and checked it there. He also mentioned a couple of good shooting ranges in Las Vegas. If anybody from TSA is reading this site please note you need more people like him (sadly I didn’t get his name).

So roughly an hour and fifteen minutes after arriving my bag is checked and I can finally go through the rights elimination zone known as the security checkpoint. I make it through that no problem and proceed to my gate. Due to the long walk between the baggage check-in counter and the gate I needed to be at I arrived at the departure gate with only 10 minutes to spare. During boarding I hand my declaration of firearms to the check-in person who rips off a copy and send me on my way. If you though the story was annoying so far you’ll love the conclusion.

The check-in guy comes back towards me now that the plane is full and the aisle is cleared. He asked me form my form to which I inquire what form. I’m not sure if this guy is a complete fucking moron or just simply lacks an understanding of the meaning of certain words in the English language but he said, “The form that says you’re carrying a firearm on board.” Yup… really good wording. The dumb ass grabbed the wrong copy of the firearm declaration form. You can imagine peoples’ reaction at this point which is why I brought up the fact that he should ask for the form that declares I have firearms in checked baggage which is securely stored underneath the plane in an inaccessible compartment. Judging by the smile on his face he chose the words he wanted to use carefully and knew the reaction it would get. I hand him the form, he walks away, and the two people next to me tell a stewardess they want to move to a different seat. Apparently if you believe there is a guy with a gun on a plane moving to a further seat will make you safer. Ultimately that benefited me as I had all three seats to myself which allowed me to prop my feet up during the trip.

So yeah the moral of the story is don’t fly Sun Country out of fucking Las Vegas with firearms. Seriously fuck that airport and fuck that airline. Hell fuck everybody who works there with the exception of that one really awesome TSA agent.

The Apple Airport Extreme Sucks

How often do you read rants about wireless access points? Probably not too dreadfully often as they are usually pretty straight forward. It’s a pretty mature technology and everybody usually has a decent setup. Sure there are problems with various models but most of those are at least hardware related.

Well here is my official rant dealing with the Airport Extreme Base Station. The thing seriously sucks all kinds of monkey balls.

First of all the problems I experienced with the Airport Extreme are not hardware related. I’ve had this access point for a couple of years now and it’s always worked well enough on the hardware side of things. This problem is a software related issue. Namely Apple made some really boneheaded mistakes.

The main problem here is there are so many stupid fuck ups with this product I’m not sure where to begin. I guess I’ll start with the access point’s complete inability to route any traffic to an external network that doesn’t have an IP address that falls into the access point’s DHCP range. Let’s say you setup the Airport Extreme to dole out DHCP addressed between the ranges of 10.0.1.2 and 10.0.1.200, the default settings when using a 10.x.x.x address scheme for your network. Now let’s say you give a server the IP address of 10.1.0.1. You have effectively cut that server off from the Internet because the Airport Extreme won’t route any traffic to an external network unless said traffic originates from an IP address between 10.0.1.2 and 10.0.1.200. Yup it just flat out refuses to do it. This effectively means you must layout your network’s address scheme to fit what the access point wants instead of what you want. Brilliant! This little undocumented (as far as I could find) issue cost me a couple of hours when I was trying to get my VPN server running.

Did I mention you can’t change the second quad in the DHCP address range? Yup if you want a 10.x.x.x address it has to be 10.0.x.x and only 10.0.x.x. I wanted all computers that received a DHCP address to be in the range of 10.253.0.0. Well you can’t do that if you’re using an Airport Extreme to dole out DHCP addresses.

Well a simple enough solution would be to simple disable the DHCP functionality on the access point and setup a DHCP server on a computer, perhaps one that’s acting as a VPN server already. Good luck doing that if you still want to have NAT capabilities. Yes I actually want to use NAT for my network even though I despise NAT. Why? Because it allows me to forward different traffic to different computers without needing more static IP addresses (which I pay extra for). See the Airport Extreme has three operating modes; one that has DHCP enabled with NAT, one with only DHCP mode, and bridged mode which disabled DHCP. There is no way that I found to have DHCP disabled with NAT running. It’s a pretty simple concept and Apple doesn’t seem to be able to grasp it.

Seriously what the fuck? A cheap Linksys can do that! The rule of thumb should be if a cheap Linksys access point can do something your more expensive product should be able to do the exact same fucking thing and more.

If you’re looking for a nice wireless access point steer clear of the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. The only positive thing I have to say about it is… well my Wii, which is finicky as all Hell, actually connects to the Airport Extreme. But that’s really it.

How Much is Too Much

As I checked my Facebook feed I found a story being posted quite a bit with some interesting comments. The story is the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Board of Trustees awarded their Chancellor a $40,000 bonus. This is pretty inflammatory news to many of my friends who are still going to college in a MNSCU school.

The Chancellor makes $360,000 a year which people are screaming is too much. So that raises the question how much is too much? For most people it’s roughly $1.00 more than they themselves make. I personally hate the phrase, “He/She gets paid too much.” Why do I hate it? Because what right does somebody have to say another is making too much unless they are that person’s boss? Yes if I’m your boss and don’t believe your doing a good enough job to earn your salary then I have some reason to claim you’re making too much money and thus can fire you or lower your pay. But I’ve not heard a single person come up with an exact formula that determines if somebody makes “too much.” Last I heard businesses have a right to determine how much they pay their employees. Now complexity can be entered into this since MNSCU receives public funding but I’m unsure if the Chancellor’s pay comes for tax payer money received by the state or a different source. Either way even lowering his wages to $50,000 wouldn’t cut the tuition of each student by any noticeable amount.

The other thing that nobody seems to bring up is the fact $40,000 isn’t a whole lot of money for MNSCU. According to their website they have 32 public colleges and universities. $40,000 divided by 32 mean if that money were evenly distributed throughout MNSCU each college would get a whopping $1,250 each. In layman’s terms that means each school would get just about absolutely nothing.

Looked at another way they have 54 campuses so each campus would get about $740.74 which is less than some students pay for books in a semester.

A Slight Change

Yeah I made a slight change on the side of the page here. I removed the link to join Gun Owners of America and replaced it with a link to the donations page of the Second Amendment Foundation. After the two previously mentioned fiascos involving the NRA there has been a lot of calling for people to abandon the NRA and join Gun Owners of America. It was this that reminded me that I still had the link for joining Gun Owners of America (GOA) on the side of my page. I’ve been meaning to replace it for a while now but haven’t gotten around to it due to sheer laziness and a memory that doesn’t really remember things.

So why the replacement? Because after being a member of GOA for two years I’ve determined something, they don’t do anything. Well that’s not entirely true they do whine a lot. But in the two years I’ve held a membership I’ve not seen them actually work much for the right to keep and bear arms. Sometimes they send out envelopes with postcards pre-addressed to my representatives that they want me to sign and send. It’s an interesting gesture but I’ve already sent letters to those same representatives about the issue labeled on the postcard. Furthermore those postcards are far and few between. Their RSS feed for alerts almost never updates while the NRA-ILA feed has a rough average of 10 news items a day. The only decent thing GOA has is their rating page for representatives but that’s even tainted by non-gun related issues.

The bottom line is they claim they are the only no compromise group in Washington but don’t actually do anything. This is where people usually tell me GOA can’t accomplish much because they don’t have a whole lot of money. Bullocks. The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) doesn’t have nearly the same number of members as the NRA, nor nearly the same amount of money, but they manage to bring up lawsuits against entities who infringe on the right to keep and bear arms. Heller vs. D.C. and McDonald vs. Chicago were both SAF initiatives. They also hold a Gun Rights Policy Conference every year (where they work with other gun rights organizations like the NRA which GOA seems unwilling to do).

Another gun rights group is the Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership (JPFO). Once again even though they don’t have the membership numbers of money of the NRA JPFO manages to do something. They produce literature and videos dealing with the right to keep and bear arms. They did an English translation of the Nazi’s gun laws and compared them to the Gun Control Act finding them to be very similar. They produced several videos relating to the right of self defense and the roots of gun control, racism (real racism not what the “progressive” liberals accuse pro-rights people of being). Like SAF JPFO is able to do something with less money than the NRA. Also you don’t have to be Jewish in order to join, just thought I’d toss that out there.

So really my point is this, if you don’t want to be a member of the NRA at least put your money somewhere useful. Join SAF or JPFO for instance. Join a local gun rights organization that’s doing something. But please don’t join GOA and then claim your money is being used to fight for your right to keep and bear arms. Unless I’ve missed something in my two years of membership I haven’t seem them do a whole Hell of a lot.

Maybe I’m wrong and my rage is misguided. I would love to be proven wrong on this so if you believe GOA is doing something please comment on what it is. I love being wrong on these kinds of issues. I do believe their hearts are in the right place but their lack of action depresses me.

Bloggers the Modern Pamphleteer

There has been a lot of talk about how we have to come up with a plan to save “journalism” in this country. I use the word “journalism” in the most loose of forms since anybody who reads most non-major media associated news sites (which includes blogs) know we really don’t have journalism in this country anymore. Most “news” produced by places like the New York Times is just regurgitated information they received from the Associated Press. They usually also add in more bias while they’re at it.

Steve Jobs recently spoke at D: All Things Digital where he said he doesn’t want to use us descend into a world of bloggers implying that blogs aren’t a legitimate source of news. The fact of the matter is blogs are a relevant source of news. How many stories do you read on this site alone that are never covered in any detail in major news media sources? Does the Star Tribune ever fairly cover upcoming Minnesota gun legislation? Nope. If you relied on them all you know about the “gun show loophole” is that it allows criminals to buy any gun at a gun show without a background check. Thankfully due to us gun bloggers you know that’s not true and that the “loophole” isn’t a loophole at all.

I was talking with somebody else about this subject and we came up with a rather interesting notion. Today’s bloggers are akin to Pamphleers in the days gone by. Back in the day news was spread often by people handing out pamphlets that they printed off. These pamphlets contained whatever information the printer wanted to portray to the public. You were free to take of leave them as you wanted. Of course it was up to you to determine the legitimacy of the information as it is with blogs, newspapers, and television news sources (the latter two seem to lie more from what I’ve found).

The bottom line is the concept of “accreditation and trusted” news sources hasn’t always been around. I don’t know exactly when it happened by at some point in our history we stopped doing our own research and just assumed whatever the major news outlets told us was fact. This is not how it’s always been.

So yes bloggers are legitimate news sources. We are not parasites preying off of the major media outlets. Many local stories originate from blogs. But as with popular news sources you have to determine what information is legitimate and what information is now.

Inexperience and Government

Yesterday I posted a good article that related to Minnesota’s own “gun show loophole” that isn’t a loophole. Something has been eating at me about that article, namely this:

Paymar has never fired a handgun, nor has he ever attended a gun show. He was moved to act, he says, after seeing a YouTube clip. In it, Colin Goddard, a Virginia Tech massacre survivor who was shot four times, attends gun shows and successfully buys firearms without undergoing a background check or even being asked to show identification.

I touched on it briefly in yesterday’s post but it’s something that has bugged me about government forever. Why do we find it acceptable to allow people with no knowledge or experience in a field to legislate that field? Paymar isn’t the only example. Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens we put in charge of Internet regulation even though he obviously had no knowledge in the field.

This seems to be a common thing with government. We find the most incompetent people and let them be in charge of something. This kind of incompetence doesn’t fly anywhere else but government (normally). Generally if you’re put in charge of something at a company it’s because you portrayed some kind of competence in the area of concern. If you’re not competent you are eventually fired.

But here Paymar has never been to a gun show in his life yet he feels justified in creating legislation that would affect gun shows. Now his bill was shot down in committee thankfully but he’s vowed to reintroduce the bill at a later time. This raises the question, what the Hell is he thinking? He can’t claim it’s to get voter favor since the bill doesn’t seem to have much traction here in Minnesota. The only people who really seem to care are us pro-gunners and the anti-gunners who generally don’t know what they’re talking about.

We shouldn’t stand for this. Instead we should demand that in order to legislate something the person writing the law much either have direct experience with the topic or have hired independent consultants who have said experience.

Hey News Outlets We Need to Talk

Right now you’re reading a blog. You’re probably doing this for one of two reasons: mass media sucks and they don’t report 90% of the important details in a story or you just like your news delivered with an appropriate amount of sarcasm and foul language. On this site I try to correct the first problem by providing links to important details (for instance the actual bill if I’m talking about a law) while also ensure you get your file of foul language.

Sometimes the first item isn’t very easy. It’s not easy because most media outlets leave our very important details (which is why the first item I listed exists). Because of this I have a couple of simple demands to make.

First when a story is talking about a bill I want to know the name of the bill along with the senate and house bill number so I can go read the bloody thing. Simple enough isn’t it? I want to see what’s actually in the damned bill instead of taking some “journalists” word for it. This would help eliminate a majority of the hysteria that floats around with currently pending legislation. Yes I know it’s all written in legalese and I’m not a lawyer but I’m a pretty smart guy and can gleam most of the information I need out of it.

Second when a story is talking about a court case give the named of the fucking court case. This is also pretty simple. For instance is John Q. Public is suing Jane Q. Private please make a reference to the case John Q. Public v. Jane Q. Private. I want to see what’s going on with the court case from multiple sources and having the actual name of the case would be beneficial.

That’s it those are my only demands. Why are either of these things so hard to do? At most it will add a few extra bytes to the size of the story and honestly bandwidth, even for people on dial-up, isn’t going to be negatively impacted by a few bytes.