1) Line jumpers. I'm at Walmart, obtaining motivational materials (read: candy and cream stuffed doughnuts) and waiting in a long line for the express lane. Some tard (let's call him Pablo) runs up with a 24 pack of Bud Light, bypasses the line, and parks himself as the next to be checked out, charming the checkout lady with a line that sounded like "Aposté que sus labios prueban como la manteca de cerdo de la cereza!" I couldn't hear what he said when his female companion came over and started chewing him out over his statement, also carrying a large box of beer.

This is very peevesome. A quick evaluation reveals that not only is his immigration status in doubt (perhaps his documentation is inadequate) but he's spent time in a correctional facility...the spit and pencil tattoos of crudely drawn cobwebs and emo tears are a positive sign that someone has spent some time in county jail at a minimum. Undoubtedly he merely served his time in jail, and didn't learn a thing about basic human decency. I'll bet the 20 he used to pay for the beer was the proceeds from some crime or another.

2) Customers who don't know their hole from an ass in the ground. I could write several tomes on this subject, but today's peeve is quite simple; there are people out there who cannot master the technology they are leasing, and think the internet is some sort of profit pipe and if it isn't connected at all times, thousands of local currency units are lost every minute.

It starts first with the idea that you take a server, upload something to the thing and craft a webpage, and people will then come visit and pat lots of money for your crudely formatted content. When the money doesn't happen, obviously it is because the service I provide is defective, there's too much latency in the network, the default packages installed on the server are inadequate for their needs.

In my personal opinion, and this is not the opinion of the company I work for, entirely too many people live in countries where there is entirely inadequate telecommunications infrastructure. I am almost certain that Turkey has a single cable, with four untwisted and frayed copper wires, running across the Bosporus and into Greece where it plugs into a more modern switch. I have been besieged by sob stories about why we need to vastly exceed our scope of support and craft a moneymaking website, because the entire village has forked over their life savings to lease this Celeron based server, so they can use the profits to purchase a pump for the village well, and the shared laptop they have in the thatched roof hut just isn't up to the task of programming AJAX based applications. (If we could be making websites that generated obscene profits, we'd be in the business of doing exactly that, after all)

3) Shock absorber mounts. I understand the risks of buying a used car, hell, it is an elementary observation that on average, a used car will be a crappy car. (Why? Glad you asked. In any market where the seller has more information on a the product than the buyer, a rational choice by the buyer is to assume that the product is average, especially if the seller is not forthcoming with complete information on the product. Since buyers will only accept an average price for an average product, sellers with superior products won't be able to sell at the higher price that the buyer won't accept. This actually gives an incentive for the sellers of poorer products to sell at the higher average price, therefore, the market will be filled with more products that are below average! Which is absurd, a mathematical impossibility, but you get the point.) Anyway, the car isn't bad, there's just little things that need fixating. I'm almost finished with all the fixes, this last one involved two bits of machined metal and rubber, which the shock absorbers fit snugly. And now, the car doesn't rattle, which earlier this morning annoyed me, but not anymore. The ride is quite smooth.

4) $1.35 for a 16 ounce bottle of Mr Pibb. Almost FIVE BUCKS for a pack of cheese filled hot dogs. FIVE DOLLARS! I remember when they were two fifty, the price has doubled in 10 years. How is that? Seeing this sort of thing makes me wonder if we shouldn't have a period of deflation, just to bring bacon prices down.

This is how I wake up to go to work.

Item One: Weaponized tribble eggs

You scoff, oh yes, but consider: tribbles already breed like bacteria and it wouldn't take much more to adapt them to a more carnivorous diet, increase the growth factor a smidge and make the eggs more like little spores. Perhaps other additions to their genome could be made as well, so they could stand vaccum for short periods, noxious atmospheres, and resistance to certain poisons. After weaponized tribbles have consumed your planetary food sources, they will start in on you.

Item Two: Tribble farming

An outgrowth of weaponized tribble technology. Think of huge orbital farms, filled with free range tribbles, and giant scoops to dump them in vats for protein harvesting. You think that resequenced chicken salad sandwich is just algae? With additional tweaking, all sorts of animal fats can be produced for the black market as well...I'm certain transfats are outlawed in the Federation and replicators will refuse to provide triglycerides.

Item Three: 1st Horta Battalion, Space Marine

What could be more unnerving than having sentient rocks slam into your hull, burn through every deck and expose all of it to space, and know it was done for the price of a few bags of gravel?

I'm sure I can cough up more, but work calls.

In this particular case I have in mind, there is the following error message that was dropped into our ticket system with little context:

You are currently operating within the grace period of your product license. To update your product license select the Retrieve Keys option from within License Manager.

The words "License Manager" are a hyperlink that leads you to the button that will allow you to retrieve the updated license keys.

There must be a certain class of people out there staring dumbly at their fuel gauge, wondering why the car never seems to start when the needle points to E. It is but one step removed from the people who excitedly chew the little silicone packets marked DO NOT EAT.

This is why I do not fear these trying economic times. 

What the hell is this thing?

 I feel better already. How much did this stupid thing cost to design?

I feel curmudgeonly and pissed off at this thing. 

It doesn't matter how it started. Maybe you were trying to fix something and you got careless. Perhaps you were stupid. That is in the past, we may never know, and we can all live without knowing, right? Right!

So youwere a dumbass and smeared superglue on your lens. DO NOT PANIC. If you try and wipe it off it will only get worse, I assure you. A clean cotton cloth will just leave lint embedded in a matrix of glue, and possibly melt your lens. So ust let it dry, you are screwed for a while no matter what you do. Go grab the spare glasses, or ust squint for about an hour.

DO NOT WEAR THE GLASSES. As the glue dries it emits vapors, and doubly so if you tried wiping it off with a cotton cloth. Just set them down!

After a while the glue will finish curing and you can examine the damage. It will be firmly smeared all over the lens, and when you put them on you will see strange shapes and blurs. This is normal, because you have glue all over the lens.

If only one lens is affected, you can hobbl around on your good eye for as long as you see fit. Eventually you may want to get the stuff off.

Don't try polishes or horible solvents. You don't want to destroy the lens of your glasses or melt them away. You need enzymes!

Get a pot of water and set it to boil. Add a couple of squirts of dishwashing liquid, the kind you put in a dishwasher. Don't use surfectants, it will boil and cause a mess...automatic washer liquids don't have surfectants (bubble makers) so you can boil it to your heart's content.

Allow the pot to boil and then for about 15 seconds, dip your glasses into the mixture. Pull them out, then run to the sink and rinse. The glue will have formed a thin removable skin on your lenses, polish it off as you normally would.

You've also probably ruined any antiscratch coating your lenses have. Polish the layer off, but that's ok, because you are going to buy another pair anyway.

This information has been brought to you by personal experience.

Note: polycarbonates have a transition temperature exceeding that of boiling water, meaning that it won't hurt your lenses. The enzymes in quality dishwashing liquid work better at higher temperatures and work pretty fast. Ploycarbonates are used in all sorts of drinking glasses (injection formed!) and so the detergent won't hurt your lenses. If you think things through, you can fix quite a bit with things around the house.

I'm a fan of both series. I would watch both side by side, but I don't compare them. They share common elements, and I love it when a small part of the original series appears in the new, but I understand that they are, in essence, two different tales of a similar event.

Science fiction isn't just about wild new planets, bizarre future technologies and white clad humans working in a utopia. (Although it can be pretty cool.) Good science fiction is about people, and what happens when all of these things are introduced. Its a giant metaphor for all of us. Stargate SG-1 inserted a brief monologue by a ficticious cast member of a show within a show that explained it better than anything I've ever seen in the genre, a quote from Asimov:

Science fiction is an existential metaphor that allows us to tell stories about the human condition. Issac Asimov once said "Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and intellectuals of today. But the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

The original BC had a grand scope, and it really did live up to that. Humans, fleeing the Cylon threat, triumphed and prevailed and even made it to Earth (although the BG1984 season was...flaky.) A whole civilization crammed into ships, many not designed for the task, always under the impending pursuing threat of cold, calculating machines (well, maybe lizard cyborgs) and their human Quisling Baltar. And don't forget Satan! Even he plays a part (well, Iblis, close enough) and the humans rise above it. The story was always about a spiritual aspect that the humans all shared, set against a backdrop of a fleet of spacecraft and a huge carrier craft, that while somewhat fragile, was always up to the task of playing it's role as defender and home to the colonials.

That was GREAT.

However, there were aspects to the story that weren't told. Of course, the writers didn't concentrate on them.  Good science fiction, Heinlein once said, must do more than predict the automobile. You must also predict the traffic jam.

What does this mean? Essentially, when you introduce a future element, there are consequences. If you imagine cars, that's great. Its even better if you include the traffic jam, the freeway, gas prices, and insurance. And this, New BG has in spades.

Yes, I admit, the morality at times appears to be that of humans during Katrina and New Orleans. It is dark, it is not healthy, and many times, you wonder where the hope is stored in the cargo hold. This is also a fact of the human condition. Offsetting this are the times when it is more like ferries and workboats rescuing passengers off a plane crashed in the Hudson. There's sacrifice, personal bravery, and honorable action.

Sure, you might have invested somewhat in the characters, only to find that the writers have introduced something into the character you may not like. (For this reason, I find I personally identify with Tigh more than any other character.) This is a part of the human condition, and how we deal with this dissonance is something that the show explores. I may not always like these decisions (sometimes I feel it is a little inconsistent, a fatal flaw of the genre in series) but it also mirrors what people go through every day.

This is a story about people, mostly randomly selected, thrust into tiny sparefaring boxes and terrorized every lightyear they jump. Resources are limited. Working conditions are extreme. The military isn't always appreciated, sometimes vilified. Stuff breaks all the time. Even worse, there may be Cylons posing as humans committing invisible sabatoge. These are people faced with imposible challenges, but they overcome them anyway, despite the varied flaws they al share.

Both shows tell a story about people. I was never happy with the conclusion on the older BG. I'm eager to see what happens with the new.

I can't even say I am angry, but I am possessed by a new resolve to shoot someone in the head.