Nothing funny about feldspar

To all those people in Ohio who gave money to their respective parties to send out mailings and make phone calls to registered voters:

Your money has been wasted, because your campaigns don’t bother to check their lists very well. Plagioclase’s mother has not lived in Ohio for over two years. She has been a registered voter in our state for the entire time. Her address is in OUR STATE, not Ohio, and her phone number, which is our phone number has been in OUR STATE for 9 years.

Yet we get 2 or 3 calls a day about “Sick of Ohio’s elections?” or some such. And I’m getting to the point where I just set the phone down and come back later, so as to slow down the automated dialing system. And we get “Get out and Vote, Ohio!” leaflets at least 4 times a week, each with postage paid on it (always at the correct address, not a forwarded one), which go straight to the recycling.

Please, dear Ohioan politicker, please contact your campaign and ask them to clean up their lists. If their people can’t be bothered to make sure that the voters they’re soliciting actually live in Ohio, then what does that say about the party? It says to me that they aren’t good at details, and are willing to just throw money at a problem. Is that the kind of representation you want?

With best regards, and a wish for election day to be over,
Orthoclase

Here’s a fun game to play:

Go to a hotel some weekday morning. You might even go to the breakfast room (if it is different from the lobby). You want to sit where the businessfolk are congregating before their morning appointments. Now, take out your laptop, and pretend to work. Surf if you can, otherwise open up a text editor (which might be better).

Now, listen. Stare intently at your screen, and occasionally type stuff — like, maybe, what you’re hearing.

When the conversations have died down, but before everyone else has gone away, pack up and leave — you don’t want to draw too much attention to yourself.

When you next open your computer, score yourself:

1 point if you could figure out what company the people worked for
5 points if you could read their badges

1 point for every customer’s company you recorded
5 points if you got the customer’s name

1 point if you could tell the nature of the visit (sales call, technical support, fire-fighting)
5 points if you understood the details (ah, so XYZ Corp can’t make ABC Co.’s floorgs, and they want a variance…)
10 points if you know how to fix the problem
20 points if you are in a position to fix the problem
50 points if you work for a competitor to XYZ Corp
50 points if you work for XYZ Corp and know the blabbermouth’s boss, but the blabbermouth doesn’t know you

Deduct 5 points per password if you spend your time on the open Wifi network using ftp to download your web site’s log files, and an unencrypted email client to fetch your mail. If you do it after logging in on a Wifi network called Jack’s Laptop or equivalent, deduct 100 points.

For extra credit, if you can play this while your neighbor is conducting business on a cell phone, you get another 40 points. What is it about cell phones that makes people think they’re talking in private? People are really good at filling in details based on scanty information (whether those details or correct or not is irrelevant).

How’d you score?

Last night, while I was SUI (surfing under the influence) in bed (swim class was very difficult), Plagioclase’s mother came upstairs. Normally, she watches TV in the evening, but I didn’t hear it turn on, so I figured she was reading a book or something.

About an hour or two later, I popped my head in to see how she was doing, and she said “I can’t get the TV to work.”

Now, Plagioclase and I have both shown her numerous times how to work the remote, and numerous times we have fixed it when she somehow managed to get the TV and cable box out of sync (there’s an “all on” button, but it merely toggles state for everything that it’s pointed at). And we explain, yet again, how to fix it herself. She nods.

This time, the TV somehow had gotten to Channel 4. When she lived alone for a dozen years, she knew that the TV had to be on channel 3 to work properly, and she could make her cable box go and her tv work. But since she moved in here, it seems like she’s forgotten it. Is it a cognitive problem? I don’t know, but it’s frustrating to her and to us that she can’t manage the TV without help.

I went looking for a simple remote for her to use, but I really don’t think that that is going to help. These remotes are all about big buttons and pushing them to change the state of the controlled item. What she needs (and I’ve thought about this for oh, about 20 minutes as I was falling asleep) is an electro-mechanical remote, with switches and dials and stuff — controls like she might have had in the ’60s, say.

So here’s what I would have: a toggle switch that turns on and turns off the TV. A toggle switch that turns on and turns off the cable box. These toggle switches would have two positions: ON and OFF, clearly labeled (these could be dial selectors, too, just as long as they have an obvious ON and OFF). There would be a volume dial like old transistor radios, perhaps embedded in the side of the remote. And when you turned it all the way down, it would *click* and mute the sound. The channel selector is a little bit more complicated, should it be a push-button dial pad from an old office phone? That might be ok, and it would probably be easier than a radio-dial because with 800 channels it would take a long time to get back to the beginning. Though an infinite-click radio dial might work (instead of having a tuning wire or whatever those things are inside old clock radios), kind of like the iPod click wheel, only with physical movement and a knurled edge…

Hmm. I wonder who I know is an electronics geek?

The safety of the nation’s food supply is probably no different this month from last year at this time (or two years ago or even five years ago), but people talk more about it.

There’s the spinach problem of last month, and this month’s lettuce and hamburger E. Coli issues, which is leading to mutual jeering from the (a) people who think people who buy organic food are crazy, ’cause lookie there these are organic products and (b) the people who insist that factory farming is ruining our health, and it’s the fault of Big Business.

And I have to say that I agree with both camps… but I also wonder that if there is some backlash and we all go to eating locally produced food (or even regionally produced food) I’ll ever be able to eat fresh pineapple again, or stinky cheese, or clementines.

How far does “eating local” extend? I can buy locally-smoked fish, but I don’t know where the fish came from. I can buy produce from the expensive shop around the corner, but they drive across the state twice a week to pick it up. I can buy locally-made mozzarella, but it sure doesn’t taste like the Italian stuff.

Where’s the line to be drawn? Is there a line that needs drawing? Where does not-local begin?

I’m still watching movies, but no kung-fu lately (I’m waiting on some to come back into the library). A few days ago I tried to watch Brokeback Mountain, but it’s not really my kind of movie. No, not the gay part — that’s not the issue, but the drama part. Sure it’s a love story, but it’s tragic. I prefer escapist stuff. Though the scenery was nice (and now I’m talkin’ ’bout Canada, not the actors).

So, when Plagioclase came home with another stack of DVDs (and I had reason to want to hide in bed¹) I looked over the pile.

“Hmm,” I thought to myself “nothing that really leaps out at me — these are more Plagioclase’s style.” But, being tired of beating my head against TextMate, and having had just a few too many happy pills², I gave in.

First, I tried to watch The Pirates of Penzance — the 1985 version by the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, but I couldn’t understand half of what they were saying/singing and there weren’t any captions (don’t they have deaf G&S fans in Canada?). So I ejected that and went on to Batman Begins.

I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. After the increasingly crappy other Batman movies, this one kept me entertained enough to avoid snarking about the one really big plot hole until after the movie was over³.

Except for the fact that the fight scenes weren’t as pretty as a HK action movie⁴, I thought it was pretty tightly put together. Even so, there was a lot of backstory to slog through, so it was quite long. I didn’t fast-forward at all, though.⁵ Which is saying something.

1. when your doctor says that you should feel better in two weeks, don’t believe him or her↩
2. uh, that would be 2 in a day. I’m not an addict, yet.↩
3. and I’m not talking about the lack of any issue over Wayne’s return from being declared dead↩
4. like Kung Fu Hustle or Hero↩
5. Plagioclase got X-Men the other day, and I watched him fast-forward through most of it — don’t think I’ll be watching that anytime soon…↩