Random Thinking

A friend of mine (Officer Joe of the NYPD) sent this to me. It’s a takeoff on the movie Goodfellas written as if working for IT was the same as being in the mob. Hysterical! (Caution: strong language)

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be an I.T. guy.”

With thanks to 19W for making this little movie.

Technorati Tags: TechFellas, humor

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers

Maybe I’m just too old. Maybe I’m just not cool or hip enough. It has to be me, right? After all, this book was a book of the year according to the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today among others. But I found it unreadable. Really. Sixty pages into this book and I wanted to just give up on it. Both of Eggers’ parents died of cancer within a few months of each other and this is his memoir of their death and his raising of his younger brother. It actually starts off OK but fairly early in the book Eggers runs out of things to say. This probably could have been a good short story but at over 400 pages it just drags on and on endlessly.

Even the writing style is annoying as he writes these long, boring run on sentences that go on to discuss how he and his brother are the coolest people on the planet and how he can throw a Frisbee higher and farther than anyone which the San Francisco Chronicle thinks is the Zen of Frisbee but that I think it is just attempting to write stream of consciousness sort of like you are James Joyce but Joyce took years to write Ulysses and the paragraphs here read like they were written in an afternoon after a couple of beers while Oprah’s playing in the background and you really wish that you were back in the car driving to the nude beach because hanging out with your brother is a lot more fun than writing a book even if you know that people are going to spend their money to read it but you did warn them in the preface so if they are bored beyond tears then too bad because they were warned and so they really have no right to complain about the dreary and pointless paragraphs about imagining that your brother is killed in some insanely tragic way like being run over by a van in slow motion or the uninspired complaints about neighbors or women at the little league games or any of the other dull, lackluster, pedestrian, spiritless, and unimaginative paragraphs that grace this tedious book.

Anyway, I am sure you are much cooler than I am so you will love this book so don’t pay any attention to this review and go out and buy the book and be fascinated by stories of warehouses and starting magazines and excrement coming out of backed up toilets and meeting Bill Clinton and wanting to kill people because they don’t treat you and your brother like the horrible tragic victims of the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone because God knows that no one has ever lost their parents before and that no one has suffered as much tragedy as you and your family so writing a memoir and whining for 400 pages makes perfect sense and this reviewer is just a big jerk who doesn’t get it.

Technorati Tags: book reviewing, books, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers

I haven’t been online as much as usual because my laptop had an accident. We have a home computer but Michel is on that one most of the time so I usually use my work computer at home. It has a built-in wireless card so I can sit in bed and surf the web.

I was working from home on Wednesday. I ran downstairs for a minute and when I came back up the cat had knocked down my glass of water on to my PC. That was the end of that. I brought it into work and the PC support guy was able to get it started but last night it failed again. Today he looked at it and decided it needed a new motherboard. Lucky enough they were able to give me a loaner until they could get the parts to fix my PC.

Meanwhile Beth came home from school complaining about feeling nauseous. She is lying in bed and told me she doesn’t want to go to her guitar lesson. For Beth to miss a guitar lesson she must really not be feeling well.

Technorati Tags: cats, ThinkPad

I meant to discuss this earlier but one thing gets pushed ahead of other things and it ended up in the back of my mind. Well I have finally dug it out so let’s talk.

If you recall, GM had a Super Bowl ad showing a robot committing suicide because it lost its job. The The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention complained about the ad because it makes light of suicide. Coming from GM this is even worse than just bad taste. One of the leading causes of suicide is having lost your job and GM has laid off tens of thousands of American workers over the last couple of years. So perhaps making fun of suicide wasn’t a real clever idea for GM.

GM did have a response: “We have no plans to change the spot.”

Technorati Tags: GM, bad taste, commercials, layoffs, super bowl

Waiting for Beth at her school.

Cold and icy.

Following up on my earlier post about the Cartoon Network…

I sent off emails to Cartoon Network and the various sponsors and mostly received obnoxious spin. No a single sponsor apologized for sponsoring an offensive program. Most of them gave the same kind of double-talk, corporate crap response. For example, this was the response I received from General Mills:

Thank you for contacting General Mills. We appreciate your comments regarding our advertising for General Mills products. Your opinion is important to us, and will be shared with our marketing and advertising staff.  

Kellogg’s was similar but longer:

Thank you for your comments regarding the spot placement of our advertisements in a recent Xiaolin Showdown program. We appreciate your opinion regarding television programs that do not meet your expectations.  

They then went on to explain that they have 19,000 advertisement spots per year blah, blah, blah. Anyway this has been the sort of response I have been sending to these generic corporate responses:

Dear Ms. Banuelos,  

Thank you for responding so quickly to my email. I understand how difficult it is to preview every program but in this case the program was originally aired one year ago and this was a repeat showing. Many of us with children with Down syndrome had registered our complaints at that time but they seem to have gone unnoticed by both Cartoon Network and the advertisers. What we are asking is that Kellogg’s use its enormous influence (since it is such a large advertiser) to discuss this issue with Cartoon Network and ask them to take this particular episode of the show out of their repeat rotation or at the very least that they edit the episode to remove the offensive line. I am sure you understand that when one character refers to another as having Down syndrome as an insult that this is completely unacceptable. This is as beyond the pale as if they had said that the other character was stupid because they were part African-American. Hurtful stereotypes aimed at school age children are destructive of everything that we are trying to do by mainstreaming children with disabilities into our public schools. We are trying to build acceptance and Xiaolin Showdown is tearing this down to promote fear and hatred.

I know that Kellogg’s wants to do the right thing and support all children (whether disabled or not) and their families. This is an opportunity for Kellogg’s to use its influence in a good way.

I would also like to add that my wife is an RN with AHRC on Long Island in NY. She trains people who work with the disabled. If you think your marketing staff could use an in-service to discuss diversity and its relation to the disabled, she would be more than happy to do that at no charge, of course.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

All the best,
Thomas Paul
webmaster: http://www.downsyn.com/forum

P.S. Please note that any correspondence will be shared with the thousands of parents who participate on our website and forums.

If I get any meaningful responses I will share them here.

Technorati Tags: Cartoon Network, Xiaolin Showdown, Kellogs

Cold but no snow.

Americans hate the dollar coin . We like paper money. Paper money is easy to carry and when you drop it, it doesn’t roll away. Coins get thrown into jars or on counters and left. Coins fall out of your hand and roll under counters or down sewer grates. But paper money is expensive to make and has a short life span. So the Treasury Department has been trying for years to get us to use dollar coins. Switching to dollar coins would save millions of dollars each year.

We have had dollar coins before, of course. In 1971, the mint introduced the Eisenhower dollar coin no one other than coin collectors ever really wanted. The real attempt to get us to use dollar coins instead of paper money started in 1979. First we had the Susan B. Anthony that was too close in size to the quarter. Next we had the Sacagawea coin that had the problem that no one could pronounce the name of the Shoshone Indian who helped Lewis and Clark. The coin was bigger than a quarter but not too big and it was a different color that regular coins. But no one used them and they piled up at the mint. Americans just weren’t ready to give up their paper habit.

Meanwhile, starting in 1998, the mint released special edition quarters for each state. Each year five new states would be released and they proved to be very popular. So the people that make our coins decided to copy that idea for the new dollar coins. But instead of states, the new dollar coins will contain the image of a president. Each year, four new coins will be released and the mint is hoping this will stir up some interest. But I am betting that it won’t. At least it won’t get more dollar coins into circulation. People might collect them (although the idea of a Franklin Pierce or Chester Arthur coin doesn’t excite me very much – and who can wait for the Richard Nixon dollar coin) but collecting is not the same as using. So I have a hint for the mint… want us to use dollar coins? Stop making dollar bills. That is the only way you will get us off our paper habit.

Technorati Tags: dollar coins, paper money, wasting money

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World
by Mark Kurlansky

Cod could have been a good book but the author, Mark Kurlansky, seems intent on driving home his point that the cod fish has been vital through the course of civilization. Unfortunately, Mr. Kurlansky isn�t afraid to exaggerate or in some cases simply twist the truth in order to make this point. I can’t speak for the entire book since I am not an expert on the entire history that he covers, but I can point out a couple of blatant errors. “How did the Vikings survive in greenless Greenland”, Mr. Kurlansky asks on page 21. Cod is his answer. But that is incorrect. Greenland was not “greenless” when the Vikings settled there. As a quick trip to Wikipedia shows, Greenland was much warmer at the times the Vikings settled there. “These remote communities thrived and lived off farming, hunting and trading…” Not a single mention of fishing for cod. The second serious error of fact has to do with the Pilgrims. The author claims that the Mayflower was heading to New England for the rich cod fisheries. This is not true. The Pilgrims were actually headed 250 miles further south to the mouth of the Hudson River and only ended up in New England because of bad weather, lack of reliable maps, and illness on board ship. The book “Mayflower” doesn’t even have an index entry for “cod” which would seem fairly unlikely if the fish was really as important as Mr. Kurlansky makes it out. These are two very serious errors and leave the entire book open to question. Looking through the reviews on Amazon I found quite a few small errors mentioned. Is any of Mr. Kurlansky’s remaining history reliable?

What about the book in general? It is what is best called pop-history. Short chapters that mention a topic but go into depth on nothing is the rule. A perfect example is his discussion of the three cod wars between Great Britain and Iceland. You will find very little detail on a topic that could have been very interesting. Instead Mr. Kurlansky moves quickly through the wars apparently to keep to his sixteen-page chapter limit. We don’t even get a detailed chapter on the star of the book, the cod. The simple fact that cod is a good source of omega-3 fatty acids isn’t even mentioned.� And there are also many examples of contradictions within the book. For example, on page 145 Mr. Murlansky says that the Icelandic fishermen avoided basing their boats in the fjords because they used oar-powered boats and it “would have added too many hours of rowing time to and from the fishing grounds.” But a couple of sentences later he says the fishermen preferred to use oars “because the winds around fjords are erratic.” If the fishermen aren’t traveling through the fjords then why are the winds in the fjords even relevant?

Overall, the book is lightweight, quick reading that will be forgotten soon after reading. The book is not much like the many interesting cod recipes that Mr. Kurlansky sprinkles through the book but more like processed fish sticks produced by factory ships.