dannyman.toldme.com

Hello,

I made a reservation for a one-day rental, to pick up at Palo Alto at 2pm, and return to SFO at 4pm. I was told that this would cost $30. At the facility, I agreed to another $20 for insurance. “You don’t already have liability insurance?” He prattled something about “piece of mind.” As I don’t want to drive without the state-required liability insurance, and I don’t want to be liable for your vehicle, I agreed to about $20 in insurance.

I received a free upgrade, drove around, filled up the tank, and dropped the car off promptly.

Total charges $78.54. I was figuring I’d be out around $50. What happened?

I note you nailed me for “1 HR and 1 DY” though technically I guess I had the car for “2 HR and 1 DY” .. okay, yeah, whatever. $10.

Then, $3.19 sales tax. Okay …

LDW? $18? What’s that? And PAE/ESP/SLI CHG? $23.90? Which of those are insurance and what insurance am I obligated to get when I rent a car?

As it stands, I can not say that I would use Budget again. I feel as if I have been taken advantage of.

Thanks,
-danny

hey say. If anyone wishes to impart some car-renting advice or wisdom, I’m happy to hear. I could publish your message here.

/danny

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I was looking at those pictures yesterday from Abu Ghraib … they are terrible. And while I believe that we have to root out whatever elements of the chain of command are responsible for what happened, I have a hard time accepting the excuses of those little guys … you weren’t schooled in the Geneva Convention? You were forced to smile while doing depraved things to naked men? I like a bit I read somewhere about one guy in the prisons wasn’t willing to do anything the least bit shady unless the party ordering it filed appropriate paperwork.

Ginmar, who is stationed in Iraq, and whose blog is totally worth reading, put it well:

Maybe it’s the idea that these soldiers just weren’t the scary-looking weirdos in the alley we’d like to believe they are. It’s so easy to look at the mob and hang their savagery on their religion, their country, whatever. But when the mob is one of our own, I think it’s important to claim them and confront whatever it was that made them do it.

I’ve heard that Iraqis are sickened by the video of that guy beheading an American. You know, I don’t want people to die, but if the guy is killed for a particular nefarious purpose, and it backfires … I think that guy who lost his head, if it reminds the Iraqis that their partisans are at least as sick and depraved as our confused kids from West Virginia … there is plenty of evil to go around, hopefully a lot of folks can keep it in mind that America is less evil.

We are, aren’t we? I’ve heard as much from Americans and from Arabs.

What is really disgusting … I saw some Republican Congressman saying that the controversy is worse than the act itself, because, after all, these were a bunch of bad guys who may have had blood on their hands. This at the same time that I hear about 80% of Iraqis who are picked up are picked up by accident. Pandering. It is dishonest, it is cheap, it is without honor. The honor lies with Senator John McCain, who said something along the lines of “and I have some personal experience with this, but torturing prisoners never works, they’ll just tell you whatever you want to hear.”

The ruthlessness of our enemies can never excuse our reciprocal depravity, since the reason we are fighting is because we hold ourselves to a higher level of moral expectations than our enemy. Right? I wouldn’t have us win by becoming indistinguishable from that which we sought to replace. Torturing Iraqi’s in Saddam Hussein’s prison … that should have ceased when the statue got pulled down.

/danny

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Apparently, if you are a political conservative, being a dumb-ass who undermines your nation’s war effort by torturing other human beings is all in a day’s work, or so Rush Limbaugh would have you believe:

“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?”

To prove that he just doesn’t get it, he goes on to state:

“This is a pure, media-generated story. I’m not saying it didn’t happen or that the pictures aren’t there, but this is being given more life than the Waco investigation got. It’s almost become an Oklahoma City-type thing.”

Uhm, hello? The bigger point is that it is a big media thing! Not only is fucking with prisoners wrong, not only is it a big deal for us, but it is an even bigger deal on Al Jazeera. The whole point is that we have to win “hearts and minds” and you do it by not being a complete bonehead who takes pictures of your colleagues acting like inhumane jackasses, humiliating subjects of the population you are trying to dissuade from rising up and trying to kill you.

A fraternity prank? Torturing and sexually humiliating Arab men is not the same as cow-tipping! If we refuse to see Arabs as the human beings that they are, then why should they see us as something other than sexually depraved monsters with no moral decency who might as well be destroyed?

There’s a lot of fucking retards in this country.

/danny

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I spied a pretty Microsoft mouse laying near my desk. It has laser beams. Cool. I swapped it in to my workstation. I was apprehensive at first, because the existing mouse is PS/2, and this new mouse is USB … oh man, this could be a pain in the ass. I even avoided unplugging the PS/2 mouse. Back in 1997 when PS/2 mice were new, I recall a coworker at NCSA being reluctant to reboot FreeBSD so that it would see the PS/2 mouse, which was in those days only probed at boot.

Well, wouldn’t you know, but the new mouse worked right out of the box, so to speak. The USB architecture detects the mouse, then runs the appropriate daemon and hooks it up to /dev/sysmouse, which X is looking at. Everything was great, except the wheel didn’t take. I dropped by the awesome and handy Mouse Wheel Support for X in FreeBSD, edited my usbd.conf, restarted the moused, and everything was groovy.

Yeah, Windows handles mice better, but I’m impressed that FreeBSD did well enough in one of its weak spots – I didn’t have to restart X or nuffin’!

/danny

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I figured out how to get the damned Comodo Certificate that somebody else installed into the damn Plesk server to work. Among my obstacles were unhelpful technical support from Comodo, and bizarre rambling posts in the Plesk message board, and at long last, completely inscrutable documentation from Apache:

Because although placing a CA certificate of the server certificate chain into SSLCACertificatePath has the same effect for the certificate chain construction, it has the side-effect that client certificates issued by this same CA certificate are also accepted on client authentication. That’s usually not one expect.

Basically, the trick is that Plesk puts a rootchain.pem in the /usr/local/psa/admin/conf, so what one must do, is try not to read the Apache documentation too much, and add the following line to the /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.conf:

SSLCertificateChainFile /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/rootchain.pem

It’s only taken a few weeks of casual research to figure this out.

/danny

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Benjy,

Isn’t there anything in your current life that makes you nuts? Like, the other day I got some coffee grounds. I have a twelve-cup coffee pot, but the instructions for the coffee grounds are for ounces or milliliters of desired coffee. How many ounces in a cup? Well, I looked in my fridge and was able to convert a cup on the milk serving size to ml, which I then correlated with a 6oz serving size on the orange juice, to arrive at 1 cup = 8 oz. And it’s like 2 tablespoons per cup or so, which is just insane.

I went back to my normal method of just dumping grounds into the filter ’til I figured thats just enough. Yayoi called the Starbucks consumer hotline, and a guy with an Indian accent had no idea what she was talking about. He probably drinks tea, but apparently his best advice was “I’d use more coffee.” After all, he is taking that call on Starbucks’ behalf.

It is not fair that a person who has not had their coffee should have to perform so much math in the morning.

Love,
-danny

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I’m on my third day of my new work shift of 7am-3pm. It is a little rough getting out of bed, sure, but I get the office to myself for two hours, I get lunch early, and at 3pm I have time to enjoy some sunshine and maybe the paper and a magazine or two, down the block at the local coffee shop. Then it is five or six and I still have time to engage in domestic or creative activities. So, today, I have some time to type stuff here. A random smattering of links and observations and whatver.

In cleaning out the mailbox, I have to give props to Matt Johnson for what he titles “YA Mirror” … the contents? A copy of “Curt Tucker is a Liar” for posterity. Google is doing its job just right, at the moment. I’m such a mean, defamatory person, huh?

Yayoi’s Mom visited last week, alla way from Japan’s third-largest city, right between the big big Tokyo in the East, and the nearly as big Osaka in the West. Well, you see the parallel as apparently we’ll have to visit Nagoya next year for their own World’s Fair. Anyway, the whole visitation worked really nicely. The ol’ lady has an awful fondness for food and drink, but today I’ve noted that my belly has shrunk considerably from the massive swelling it exhibited Monday. I also have new pants and a belt and you know what, a little N Scale steam engine for my future model railroad. Japanese-style! Yum!

It was sad for the both of them ladies to part with each other Monday morning. So, when dropping off at the airport I did the smoothest thing I could to park in the far lot and ride the people mover in to give them ample time for goodbyes. Among my newfound afternoon activities I ought to write that lady a thank-you note.

On Saturday I drove us all down to visit Champaign. Weird weird story is that as soon as I arrived at the Illini Union, I received an e-mail from a stranger on my hiptop with the title “Curt Tucker is Still a Liar” purportedly from a current employee who closed with the words “wish I’d seen this web page before I started work there.” I’m no Ralph Nader, but we can all do our small, incendiary part to get the word out when a public entity gets us a notably good or bad experience.

Ah, by the way, I’ve got a GMail account. More out of curiosity than anything. I’m not checking it so often at this time: dannyman@gmail.com. The interface is kind of slick. It groups messages in to “conversation” threads, which is something that Microsoft notably sucks at. It is also good at folding quoted blobs of text out of the way. I’d be impressed if some of their storage came from some algorithm that cleverly identified quoted text and simply cross-referenced the blob appropriately. But then, text isn’t so expensive, right? The big savings would come from being clever with binary attachments. Calm down, Danny!

I’m also on orkut in case you have decided to join that hip wave of friendster technology.

Oh, you need cheap ink for your bubblejet? I’ve done well with 1800ink.com. They sent a little business card with my order, which I taped to the printer for the next time I run out. Stuff came fast, and I paid like $3 for perfectly good cartridges that retail for like $20.

Eh, fuggit. I’m caught up on e-mail to early April now. Progress progress.

/danny

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That’s right, dannyman will soon visit the San Francisco Bay Area for a three-day weekend!

Plane arrives Thursday, May 13, at 10:30pm. I’ll have Friday and Saturday and the first half of Sunday to while away, before departure Sunday, May 16, at 6:00pm.

And I won’t be alone! My girlfriend, who speaks fluent Japanese, will actually be in the area for two weeks, one on either side of my visit!

So far, I’ve only really planned to visit Tellme on Friday and get a lunch gang going with my IT people and whatever other interested folks want to eat some food, and then rolling along with whatever party plans people have. It sounds like the girlfriend has a place to stay. I may rent a cheapo car.

But, uhmmm, suggestions or invitations are entirely welcome! Let me know what’s up that weekend, drop me a line, give me a call!

E-mail dannyman@toldme.com to get the 312 cell phone!

Alright,
-danny

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Busy week at work. More stress than I think I like but then maybe it is just enough stress that after work I feel pretty good about work. The nice touch is that it is tech support. Helping folks makes me feel good, though the truth is the few nuts in the bunch who demand too much attention … well they’re easy to forget about after work.

I’m not paid as much as I have been. And I feel that a bit more because I’m going from zero to outfitting a pretty nice apartment and Yayoi too. But then she enhances quality of life, while also taking up my time.

Truth is between work and homelife I have very little idleness. But its all pretty much quality time. Work could be better, yeah, but then if it were less of a chaotic small company then it would suck in other ways. I think the suck factor in a small company is actually easier for a human to deal with because it better approximates the same sort of troubles you encounter in a family or a clan. We are more adapted, each of us, to this level of suck, than to the suck of a larger institution.

So maybe I’m not paid as well as I’d be elsewhere and yeah I am pretty busy these past couple of weeks and it aint soon to let up, but all in all I’m pretty happy. And while the company itself may be less stable than a larger company, I feel personally a bit more stable because of the greater relative magnitude of my personal contribution.

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Meanwhile, just down the block …

http://www.nbc5.com/news/3020231/detail.html

… aint exactly Mister Roger’s neighborhood.

/danny

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It has been a busy busy week at work. And just now at noon on Friday it has started to calm down a bit. I figure I can spend some slack time. It is not just that I feel tired, but I do this clever thing of keeping a log of all the stuff I do at work. Based on the size of this week’s log, I have evidence that this has been the busiest week I’ve had at work so far.

Especially because the sun has come out the past few days, warming Chicago up to a pleasing 70 degrees, I start to lament the virtuality of my existance. During the Winter or during the Summer, it is not so bad to be cooped up in a climate-controlled environment, taking it easy, whiling the season away. But you know, doing computers eight hours a day, five days a week … there’s less interest in the virtual work hobby after hours. And especially when the sun comes out … it is just time to take a nice long walk and smell the grass.

Things have been moving around at work, and things will be moving around more. I’m stepping more into the role of “manager” and one of the things I’ve had very little time to work on is a job req for some introductory-level first-tier support representatives. There is a lot of work to be done. It is actually somewhat intimidating, but then that is good because it is nice to have a challenge. Anyway, can’t talk much about that.

Yayoi’s Mom is coming in from Japan for a week, starting Wednesday. I’ll be surrendering my bedroom to our honored guest. Yayoi seems a little cheerier lately. I think she feels more secure in her relationship with me, and the weather it is not winter any more … there’s that feeling of liberation when you can just step on out of your house without wrapping yourself in layers and layers of stuff.

And it is nice when your Mom can appear in the flesh from 10,000 miles away. It is tough to be a stranger in a strange land where none of the words are pronounced as they are spelled.

Though, she does like Chicago. We went out last night with a whole bunch of strangers that she knows through an association with a cooking club she joined online. She likes that we can go out to a fancy sushi restaurant and rap with a gaggle of intelligent young professionals. We shared our table last night with a loud-mouthed young doctor lady, and a quiet British-Canadian from Toronto who is working for a video game company, thanks in no small part to NAFTA. Champaign-Urbana is not the same.

One thing I’ve done lately is move back to FreeBSD. Windows is nice when you don’t feel much urgency about getting work done. But if I want sheer productivity, it is hard to beat a crisp, clean fvwm2 desktop. Where Windows lends me alt+tab, and tends to run out of memory and sit around swapping, fvwm2 with a 3×3 grid of nine virtual desktops lets me jump around from screen to screen. It is actually more visual than windows … it lets me spread out, but the real estate is in part a cerebral one. The rest of the guys at work have twin flat-screen monitors. I’ve appropriated a single, large 20″ CRT … I have nine very large work screens that I can swap through, and my workstation can keep up. I’m such a freak.

Still, it is a bit painful in that it is not easy to work with Word documents, and I have to figure out how to configure Java to work in the web browser, and Flash, as well as the little bits of glue that would let me click on something in the e-mail client, and have it open in the web browser. And then there’s the web sites — and we have a lot of “control panel” stuff at work — that only work in Internet Explorer, so I have to turn and talk to the old laptop waiting at my side.

Well, there’s still plenty of work to do …

/danny

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<dman> Man.
<dman> I had a passing desire just now to be in FRANCE.
<lotus> hopefully it was for the ass
<lotus> that’s a good reason to go
<lotus> they have good ass there
<dman> No. I wanted to wander down the hill from Vieux Lyon and lose myself in the twisty ancient streets.
<dman> Maybe buy some chocolate.
<dman> Eat a baguette and drink a few bottles of wine, and curl up in a gutter, blanketed by warm rain and horse piss.
<dman> Must be the pining of some medieval ancestor of prior life in me.
<dman> Ah, sweet melancholy.

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