Recently in Generic Rant Category

 There's been a lot of bloviating lately about Obama's blurb to the chilluns next week. It seems that the new prez would like to address schoolkids with the usual "study hard!" meme that we've seen from time to time. This is nothing new, previous presidents have done so (Daddy Bush did it, if I recall correctly, but of course back then Democratic congressfolk said this was a bad idea...guess it isn't anymore. Yay politics.)

 In the past 24 hours, the following things have annoyed the living shit out of me:

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.

 I have been making these all weekend long, adjusting here and there to make them perfect. Not quite there yet, still need more testing.

And don't rub your eyes after peeling one of these, kids. You won't like it.

 I can't even begin to be sarcastic about this one. A squishy bug is in the same class as the rack?

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

I feel curmudgeonly and pissed off at this thing. 

 Should this bill look like it will become law, will buy several "qualifying firearms" and never, ever, tell the federal government I have them. I will not submit to the license procedure, I won't fork over $25 and provide a picture of myself, my current address, or my mental health records.

Nobody asked me for a thumbprint for blogging. It is nobody's business if I own a gun in my home.

 Or, in more day to day terms, "i've superglued my glasses".

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.

 It seems I have been chosen by a group of amateur wealth redistributionists to volunteer my GPS and MP3 player to serve their income disadvantaged needs, compounded by my new impetus to obtain a replacement passenger side window.

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

President Obama will appear in more Hollywood productions either acting as himself in a cameo appearance, or as film footage, than all other presidents before him combined. 

 So The Day the Earf Stood Still And Was Eaten By Gort-nanobots was released today, and not just in select theaters:

Twentieth Century Fox makes history by transmitting the first motion picture in to deep space, making THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL the world's first galactic motion picture release. The first deliberate deep space transmission of this highly anticipated science fiction thriller will begin this Friday, December 12, 2008, to coincide with the film's opening day on Planet Earth. If any civilizations are currently orbiting Alpha Centauri, they will be able to receive and view the film approximately four years from now in the year 2012.

Wonderful. That's all we need, 60 years or so down the line when some advanced species gets the signal, warps into low orbit and demands an expianation for Keanu Reeves. Or, "Bob" forbid, we frighten some similarly developed species into catatonia thinking we've transmitted out dying historical record so that others can save themselves.

I'm so leery about going to see this movie. I know the plot, I know that it is all environmental handwringing and pseudoconcern over our ecological survival. (Busybody extraterrestrial nannystaters with superior biological technology unleash the grey goo on humanity for not cleaning up the bedroom when told. That's the story.) But it is entitled with one of the greatest movies ever made...and I am filled with a compulsion to get off my duff and watch it on the big screen. (This is almost the same sort of compulsion that strikes when a new zombie flick comes out.)

The original movie was essentially a booster film for the United Nations. If we all banded together and governed ourselves peaceably, all would be well and we would not have to worry about a robotic police force bent on enforcing peace through total conversion weaponry. As a bonus, there would be, well, peace. Now, I can understand the concerns of a dogmatic galactic confederation worried about the clever monkeyspawn developing technologies that could ge tthem out of their local system. It isn't too far a jump from fission to fusion to antimatter production in larger quantities and if this sort of thing isn't nipped in the bud, someone could get hurt. (As if humans, noncitizens, could legally be considered sapient anyway, we can hurt ourselves to our heart's content)

I'd always thought that humans simply wouldn't take this lying down. The US military already knew something of the threat after the Roswell crash in '47, and when an identical craft arrived a few years later on the Mall in DC, the US knew something had to be done. And Klaatu made a mistake contacting Gort to let him in the ship...Gort's transmission was copied, and later, when Klaatu left, it was used to open the saucer in Hanger 18, and the United States began reverse engineering the damaged Gort and saucer.

The saucer, of course, had two drive systems. The planetary drive, used for landing from orbit, clearly was magneto-gravitic in nature, and useful only against large bodies with a significant magnetic field of their own. The other drive was used to render the ship inertialess for interstellar flight. Given that the Gort cruisers were all identical, there would be places the ships would have a hard time going, namely smaller bodies, such as asteroids.

After the battlecruiser manufacturing base was completed on Ceres, the United States started pumping out warships powered entirely by total conversion, armed with total conversion weapons and filled with troops in powered armor ready to take on the galactic despotism. And naturally, we won. (Just like the biological genocide committed against the Martians after their ill advised invasion in an alternate timeline.)

Despite the slightly different motivations of the new movie's alien, the result would be exactly the same. Rather than the overthrow of a stagnated utopian society, this would be the casual dismissal of overwrought tree huggers...all we'd have to do is drop a crushed Pepsi can on their own planet's surface and there would be total capitulation.

Both films underestimate the human desire to tell perceived authority to go straight to hell . Like Heinlein said, the universe will tell us eventually if we weren't meant to do these things, but there will always be cap troopers about, in one shape or another, on the bounce and swinging away for our side. So having technologically superior beings dictate to the human race just how we are going to behave will have unimaginably bad consequences for the species involved. They'll all end up in zoos, or worse, be used to test hairspray and wood glue for toxicity in consumer goods testing.

Anyway, I'll probably go see it because I'm a sucker for the title and for a fleeting glimpse of a CG Gort. I'll reluctantly swallow my suspension of disbelief, for a while at least, and enjoy my pap.