Joey Devilla points out NASCAR now has romance novels.

Is it worse that (a) they exist or that (b) they might be successful?

We suspect most business travelers with a consistent and long-term destination do what we do, which is arrange for the hotel to hold onto one’s major suitcase over each weekend of the contract. (Some are able to escape the weekly packing/unpacking ritual entirely, by arranging for a long-term rental of the room, but the economics of this are sketchy at best.) Doing so greatly streamlines the whole airline thing; we fly with a briefcase and a small carryon with any other incidentals or return/replacement clothing, check nothing, and have nothing with us that requires a pointless TSA baggie.

The fine folks at the Holiday Inn Express in ClientTown have been very nice about this from week one, and we’re very glad of that. They are quite used to seeing Mr Heathen arrive, tired from the road, ’round about 11 local time each Sunday evening. We pass over the all-powerful Amex, pick up our key to 108 — it’s always 108 — and head down the hall to drop off the travel bags before returning to pick up the big-ass rolling hanging bag we leave here. It’s a routine.

In recent weeks, we’ve actually taken more advantage of this hospitality: we’re now leaving two bags, and have discovered that they’ll gleefully hold onto any leftover beer for the weekend as well, kept safe and cold in the office fridge. Perhaps in response to this, or perhaps because they’re just darned nice people, they’ve started being even more helpful: in the last couple weeks, the Sunday night girl has taken to bringing our bags to the room as soon as we check in, instead of waiting for us to knock on the office door. This isn’t a hotel with bellmen; it’s a business deal without so much as a coffeeshop, so it’s definitely more service than we expected.

Well, this week they did one better. As we checked in, we were informed by the nice desk lady that our bags were in fact already in our room, as was our leftover beer. “Have a nice night, Mr Heathen.”

That was nice. We liked it.

Bored with marathons? Try this one. (Via Rob.)

Mrs Heathen prefers to confuse him with certain Soprano characters, but according to his wife, the real, live local CEJ is a year older today. See you tomorrow, buddy!

The Onion: “This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence“. Heh.

We bought a Playstation Portable, and therefore managed to blink away the entire 3+ hour flight yesterday fighting terrorists.

We note that our virtual kills were precisely as effective and protective as anything TSA did all day.

(Seriously, this thing is pretty excellent. We need game recs.)

Via BoingBoing, we find Esquire’s list of 60 things worth shortening your life for. Call us crazy, but we’re pretty sure 5., 12., 15, 35., and 39. all sound like good ideas. Don’t miss and 14. and 32., just for the writing.

(Seriously, we want some of that coffee.)

We don’t think we’ve ever seen a liquor store shelve wine by brand before.

We had to return to the hotel at lunch to pick up something, and accidentally got off the Interstate one exit early. No problem! We’ll just take the surface streets over!

Er, no. First, it appears that there’s no simple way to do that, as every apparent road — and there weren’t many — turned out to curve inappropriately away from our destination.

Then — second — we found a promisingly named thoroughfare, only to discover that the grandly named “Western Maryland Parkway” is in fact a DEAD END.

Nice.

So, what with the travel, we have little time in the Heathen World HQ to handle bills & etc., so that gets done over the phone and Intarwub. This is ordinarily not a problem, except today.

When we started this gig, we realized we didn’t want our net access filtered by Swedes, so we picked up a Sprint EVDO modem to use with the Powerbook. The first bill was due, but we didn’t remember to bring it until this week. What follows is our attempt to pay the bill:

1. Call the number on the bill. Select “pay bill” when asked. Input the phone number of our device (yes, the modem has a phone number). Get told that we should “hand up and press Star-3 in order to pay.” Unless, of course, you don’t have a phone. Nice one, Sprint.

2. Head to the web site and try to register. Jump through an inordinate number of hoops to discover there’s some kind of problem, and we’re somehow not authorized to pay our own bill. Right.

3. Call the number on the bill and press “0” over and over until we get an operator. Explain our frustration to the idiot scriptreading girl. Explain we’d like a summary of the current bill (yes, they’re stacking with additional charges, which is why everyone hates telcos, but whatever). Then have this conversation:

HEATHEN: Ok, I’d like to pay the whole bill with my Amex. IDIOT: How much did you want to pay? HEATHEN: Um, let’s put the WHOLE BILL on my Amex. IDIOT:And which credit card did you want to use? HEATHEN: For the third time, let’s put the WHOLE BILL on my AMEX.

Sigh. Previously…

“It’s really easy to get caught up in that dog kind of man.” Learn your man to earn your man, ladies. Public access goodness from Alexyss K. Tylor. Remember, if your man won’t get you shrimps from Long John Silver, you’ve got a problem.

It’s wholly unsafe for work, but good GOD it’s hilarious. Don’t miss it.

If you eat there enough, Janka at the Outback will let you borrow a wine glass to finish the bottle of wine you bought at Pomodoro. She knows you’re coming back.

Jo has the bestest picture for celebrating Mr Kim. Check it out, and HFBD to Mr Kim!

(Also, happy Friday the 13th, a day which we hold near and dear to our hearts owning to the first one to occur in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hunnert an’ Seventy.)

We mean it, really. Right, Mrs Heathen?

(Sofa King weird.)

No, really!

(Please, Jesus, don’t let anyone be masturbating to this, okay? It’s a sweet video of a zookeeper scratching a tapir. There’s nothing wacky or weird about it, aside from the sheer existence of the tapir, and we mean no disrespect by that, really.)

Lunch.

In order to get enough hours most easily, we eat on-site in the cafeteria every day. Even the bad-for-you options like burgers and such are terrible there. Leaving the plant, however, produces only nominally better options, so we stay in. Most days, it’s a cold turkey wrap.

Days like this are simply not possible. Dammit.

In re: hotels…

1. Why no-frills business hotels invariably have free Internet, but nicer hotels insist on trying to charge?
2. Similarly, why the quality and variety of the cable package in a given hotel room varies inversely with the hotel’s rack rate or “niceness” factor.

The case study for both of these ideas is pretty simple. We stay in a Holiday Inn Express during the week on the current consulting assignment. It is neither good nor bad. It’s one of those new style hotels with no restaurant or bar, but they do offer a continental breakfast for free in the mornings. There’s a cursory pool and workout area, but that’s it.

Contrast this with the Westin Embassy Row in DC, which is a fancy, high-dollar-ish hotel in the heart of Dupont Circle, which is where Mrs Heathen and I stayed this weekend. This hotel had a nice restaurant, a fancy bar, concierge service, valet parking, minibar, and a delightfully cushy bed.

HOWEVER: at the Holiday Inn, there’s a conventional cable package of some 60 or 70 channels, and free wi-fi; on the first floor, you even have the option of a wired ethernet connection. At the Westin, the TV had 12 to 15 channels, tops, and they wanted $12 a day for Internet connectivity — this on top of a rack rate 2 or 3 times that of the Holiday Inn.

We understand that those who stay at the Westin are necessarily less price-sensitive than those who stay at the business no-frills properties, but at the end of the day that’s really not an excuse. Starwood is opting to attempt to suck more cash from its guests by nickel-and-diming them on services like Internet and, of course, local phone calls ($1.50 each, natch; they’re also free at the Holiday Inn). We certainly liked the hotel amenities the Westin DID offer, but we left there feeling taken advantage of despite the fact that the room itself was paid for in Starwood points by Mrs Heathen’s mother. That’s probably not the kind of response they’re striving for.

Evangelical Christian and CNN contributor Roland Martin has a great deal to say about the myopic and counterintuitive brand of Christianity pushed by most of the American Christian community:

When did it come to the point that being a Christian meant caring about only two issues — abortion and homosexuality?

Ask the nonreligious what being a Christian today means, and based on what we see and read, it’s a good bet they will say that followers of Jesus Christ are preoccupied with those two points.

Poverty? Whatever. Homelessness? An afterthought. A widening gap between the have and have-nots? Immaterial. Divorce? The divorce rate of Christians mirrors the national average, so that’s no big deal.

The point is that being a Christian should be about more than abortion and homosexuality, and it’s high time that those not considered a part of the religious right expose the hypocrisy of our brothers and sisters in Christianity and take back the faith. […]

As a layman studying to receive a master’s in Christian communications, and the husband of an ordained minister, it’s troubling to listen to “Christian radio” and hear the kind of hate spewing out of the mouths of my brothers and sisters in the faith.

In fact, I’ve grown tired of people who pimp God. That’s right; we have a litany of individuals today who are holy, holy, holy, sing hallelujah, talk about how they love the Lord, but when it’s time to walk the walk, somehow the spirit evaporates.

A couple of years ago I took exception to an e-mail blast from the Concerned Women for America. The group was angry that Democrats were blocking certain judges put up for the federal bench by President Bush. It called on Americans to fight Democrats who wanted to keep Christians off the bench.

So I called and sent an e-mail asking, “So, where were you when President Clinton appointed Christian judges to the bench? Were they truly behind Christian judges, or Republican Christian judges?

Surprise, surprise. There was never a response.

Mrs Heathen and I were checking into the Westin on Embassy Row in the District just now, and ran into people from Houston I haven’t seen in 5 or 6 years. Wacky.

(Gar: Nate and Truly.)

Tony’s in Kosovo. This is his blog.

We don’t think it’s because they’re particularly devout, but as of now — 1500 local time — the Client office is nearly deserted. Good Friday is a holiday. Many of the resources we depend on for project information will also be out on Monday, presumably also due to religious fervor.

The wild variance in point awards for our 5-night stays at our hotel confuses us. The last 3 weeks have been in the same room type, but have resulted in very different point awards.

• 3/11 – 3/16: 9,950 pts (3,950 base + 3,000 random bonus * 2)
• 3/18 – 3/23: 10,675 pts (4,250 base + 425 10% Gold bonus + 3,000 random bonus * 2)
• 3/25 – 3/30: 7,675 pts (4,250 base + 425 10% Gold bonus + 3,000 random bonus)

Each includes at least one large bonus award, which we presume to be due to our greater-than-4-night stay (especially in light of an earlier 4-night stay with a drastically lower point award), but obviously the bonus is inconsistent. We think there must be a random number generator involved here somehow.

We cannot decide if it’s sad or not that we’re eagerly anticipating hitting platinum status, which should occur in about 3 weeks, whereupon our point award rate will increase dramatically due to the “rich get richer” clause common to affinity programs (at Platinum, you get a 50% bonus on base award points). Of course, if they stop giving us the 3K extra points, it’ll take longer, but who can tell?

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Joe Warmbrodt was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He was struggling with a lower-GI problem when I knew him that was misdiagnosed for years; even with it, he was never negative or down. Having Joe in the room was always a net positive. I didn’t know him well, but I knew him well enough to know I liked him, and that I wished I had time to get to know him better.

Bye, Joe. We’ll miss you.

You don’t fly much? Really? That’s great. Lots of people don’t fly much, or ever. It’s not a crime, and it doesn’t make you stupid.

However, if you don’t fly much, and you expect the airport to coddle you through the whole process, and you further fail to read any of the VERY prominent signs explaining the [bullshit, useless] security checkpoint protocol, well, that’s when you’re stupid. It’s not fucking hard. The web site has lots of guidelines, but all you really have to do is READ THE SIGNS IN THE AIRPORT before you get in line.

Yes, the whole thing is bullshit security theater that probably makes us LESS safe, but right now it’s the set of rules we have to tolerate. Learn how to get through quickly, and THEN write your congressman.

First: Check your damn suitcase. If you haven’t read, or can’t understand, the rules for what can go aboard with you, check your suitcase and be done with it. You’re scared about TSA riffing through your crap? You’re afraid your bag might go to Hoboken instead of Honolulu? Not my problem. Check your bag and get out of the fucking way. Keep a carryon by all means, but don’t slow me down because you’re confused about what “gel or liquid” means.

Second: How is it possible that you’ve gotten all the way to the front of the line without emptying your pockets into your carryon bag, at least loosening your shoes, and having your boarding pass ready? Seriously, what the fuck, man? Just because the TSA is stupid doesn’t mean YOU have to be.

Third: No, 18-eyelet high-heeled boots are NOT reasonable security checkpoint shoes. I don’t care how good they make your legs look. Dumbass. (This goes for men, too, but that seems to be a smaller problem.)

Fourth: That said, I travel in frickin’ WORK BOOTS, and I still manage to be completely ready before I’m at the head of the line. Use the time in line, genius, and you can wear whatever the hell you want without incurring the ire of the road warriors behind you.

Fifth: Look, if you’re flying with a laptop, how can you POSSIBLY not know to take the damn thing out of your bag? No, it doesn’t make any sense, and has no bearing on our security, but you know good and damn well that Cleetus is going to need to check your bag individually if you don’t follow the rules — which, by the way, are POSTED ON VERY BIG SIGNS ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE — and that means you’re slowing me down.

Sixth: Ask Cleetus McTSA NO questions. Read the signs. Follow the simple directions. Do not engage the slackjawed drones in white shirts. They do not know the answer. If they give you an answer, it will be wrong. In either case, you’ve slowed down the line, and have therefore irritated me and the hundreds of people like me behind you in line.

What’s hard about this, people?

Yesterday, we apparently lost our pocketknife, a Victorinox Swiss Army to which we are very attached. It must’ve slipped out of our pocket(s) during the day; we didn’t notice until we got to the hotel, and were discouraged to discover that it wasn’t in the rental car. Oh well.

This morning, it turned out not to be in our desk area, either — but on a lark, we checked the floor of the conference room where we had our only meeting yesterday. It wasn’t on the floor; instead, it was on the file cabinet behind where we were sitting, together with a quarter that had apparently also escaped the clearly-too-shallow pocket of the khakis we had on yesterday.

Cool.

Hit me baby one more time…

Even MORE shit to hate about Outlook

Why is it that Outlook lacks a “check spelling as you type” option like pretty much every other decent editor?

Dept. of Stress, A/R Division

As we approach 30d from our first invoice, we’ve had to pay the AX bill the first week of this fun-fill ride is on. Ouch. On the upside, we’re watching the A/R balance grow pretty dramatically every week. On the downside, it’s just an A/R balance, which as we understand it is not actually usable as legal tender.

Why we’re trying not to worry about this

Our contact at the contracting outfit assures us we’ll be paid on time.

Horrible things said to us in the dead of night by hotel employees

“Welcome back! You got some mail…”

Good things about this week so far

We’ve taken our last 5:30 Sunday flight. We have only 3 more Continental flights to go.

In which we notice that “plenty” doesn’t mean “well used”

The Client has a seriously Outlook-Exchange-Meeting-based culture, but we’ve already noticed a profound lack of actual written communication skills in the emails here. We send a clear email, with high ‘scan value,’ requesting specific information — and get back replies that, while prompt, are filled with essentially nonsequitor information orthagonal at best to the question clearly posed. We reply, restating the question. The phenomenon repeats, forever, until we actually go corner the person and ask the same question in person. We’d view this as very frustrating if we weren’t paid by the hour.

These trees sure are cool.

In which we balance our choices, and declare a loser.

• Houston to Baltimore is served by both major Houston airlines, Continental and Southwest.
• We have, in years past, preferred Continental for longer flights due to the possibility, however remote, of an upgrade to First.
• Said possibility kind of made up for the fact that Continental flies out of the bigger, more pain-in-the-ass, farther-away airport (IAH) instead of the smaller, more convenient airport (Hobby).
• Such upgrades aren’t on offer with LUV, since there’s no such thing as First. (Confidential to SWA employees: Shut the hell up with that “It’s all First!” bullshit; it’ll all be First when you make the seats 50% wider, have them recline farther, serve hot food, and stop charging for the drinks.)
• However, LUV’s seats are old-style coach seats that are actually fairly comfy, not the flimsy-ass underpadded nonsense that now populates Continental’s aircraft. (We thought this was confined to their regional jets, but we appear to have been wrong.)
• Furthermore, LUV has been on time to BWI every time so far, something Continental hasn’t managed even once.
• To make matters worse for the home team, Continental’s flight is scheduled later on Sundays than LUV’s: 5:30 – 9:55 vs. 4:55 – 8:50. The result has been arrival a net HOUR earlier into BWI, which matters a lot when you’re driving 75 miles after landing and need to be at work at 0700 Monday morning.
• Finally, we note that the elusive upgrades are, well, elusive. The 737 as configured by Continental has only 8 First Class seats, and even at our current rate of mileage accumulation, we won’t be a a shoe-in for an upgrade for a long, long time. That means many, many trips in their crappy coach seats before we have any real shot at a nice seat, and skipping a greater overall average comfort plus the more attractive scheduling available from Southwest.
• Oh, and drinks are cheaper on Southwest.

Continental, you’re fired. We’ve got two tickets left on your airline (3/25 – 3/30 and 4/1 – 4/13), but after that it’s SWA all the way on this gig. Bite me.

Once more into the breach…

How you know you’ve been there for a while

You add the hotel to your list of Amazon addresses. (Confindential to Mrs Heathen: It’s work-related.)

In which time AND money are saved

Last week, the only way we actually made it to the airport was by (a) extending the car rental a week and (b) parking in hourly parking from Friday to Sunday, to the tune of sixty bucks. However, the car rental itself didn’t cost any more, as Sunday thru Friday turns out to trigger the weekly rate. By extending a week, my bill just doubled and the weekend came along for free, which got us thinking… so now we’ve extended the car through 20 April. This produces a significant cash savings for the client (on the order of 20% vs. week to week rentals) AND a significant time savings for us, since all car rental at BWI is a 15 to 20 minute bus ride from the terminal. Score! Monthly rates FTW!

In which words don’t mean what we think they should mean

Owing to our persistent patronage, we’re in a ‘suite’ at the Holiday Inn this week. However, the usual meaning of that word has been subverted; here, ‘suite’ appears to mean “slightly larger room with a minifridge and a microwave where the closet used to be, and a wardrobe instead of a closet” instead of “actual small suite with distinct kitchen/dining and sleeping areas,” as the word has meant in other extended-stay type hotels. We don’t care all that much, but we’re not sure it’s worth the extra five bucks a night. More on this later.

Another drawback to the pseudosuite

As it’s not on the first floor, entry from the side doors no longer produces a shorter route to the room.

And again

Floors 2 and 3 are limited to wireless Internet; the first floor has a wired ethernet option that has in weeks past drastically outperformed the wireless option.

So is there an actual advantage to the suite?

Well, we’ve got beer in the fridge, and it’s closer to the laundry room. So there’s that.

How this turns out to suck later

Said beer was rendered unusable due to some goatfucker setting the minifridge to maximum cold, which turned it into a miniFREEZER. Dammit. Good thing there’s a bar next door.

Things we need to procure

A decent fucking alarm clock. All the ones at the hotel suck ass; none of them have been able to pick up the local NPR station, e.g.

One nice thing about “regular” status

Yanka at the Outback will give you real silverware to go with your to-go, since they know you’ll bring it back.

What we watched while eating with Yanka’s flatware

51 minutes of The Conversation, a brilliant film we’ve had out from Netflix for more than a year. This is a particularly troubling number, since it’s less than the film’s length (113 minutes), but well past the halfway point. And, of course, we only stopped then because that’s when the DVD crapped out. Grrrr.

You know you love it. In addition to the Geeky Lefty Triumvirate of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, sometimes we read crap:

In which normally unacceptable books become desireable

We’ve been sucked into another series mostly on account of the bad-but-kinda-ok TV adaptation. Bonus: noticing how much backstory they’re leaving out on the television. Honestly, Butcher’s not a bad writer, and the books are pretty well plotted. They’ll do as an adjunct to our traditional travel potboilers, of which we’re sadly running short.

What’s on deck

A test run at a no-doubt turgid fantasy series that we’re told is coming to HBO. We haven’t been able to work up the nerve to dive in yet.

And also

Scalzi, about whom everyone says fine things. We’ll let you know.

And last week?

Dreaming in Code, which is so true it hurts. Mitch Kapor has been able to fund Chandler pretty well, which insulates it from the sorts of constraints that usually form software projects. As a direct consequence, they’ve been building for years without actually creating much at all in terms of usable software. In the interim, some have come to embrace those constraints to great effect. It’s by no means clear that Chandler will ever see the light of day, and even less clear that it’ll be useful when it does, but the basic idea sure is neat.

Upcoming in the same vein

Earned Value Project Management, as prep for moving back into software project management. We hope it’ll provide the optimistic counterpoint to Rosenberg’s work.

Why we don’t just watch the goddamned TV like a normal American

There’s no Tivo in hotels. Dammit. We can’t abide the commercials.

We received a communique from HeathenFrau Brun in re: a particularly fine quote from a cable documentary:

Anytime you’re attacked by someone who’s last name is Skullsplitter, you have reason to worry.

Not much to argue with there, is there? While it’s not immediately applicable, we’re going to keep it around for use later. Hopefully in a strictly metaphorical sense.

Here’s a screenshot from our Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards account page. A key piece of data is that “16” is a magic number; after 16 flight credits (most commonly in the form of 8 round trips), you get a free ticket. It’s easily the simplest and lowest-bullshit affinity program we can think of:

Now, what’s broken there is the “Credits earned” line, which clearly shows 16. That’s technically true; the rolling window they show there does in fact include 16 credits. However, that’s misleading and weird, since what they’re NOT showing is that we broke the 16 barrier in January and were issued an award ticket that, if we recall correctly, Mrs Heathen used to visit the L’ilest Heathen Niece. Their figure of “16” includes both spent and unspent credits, and is therefore about as useful as tits on a bull (or, more concretely, a check register showing only deposits).

Thinking there was a problem, we actually called SWA for clarification, which means this little interface flub has cost them money. Once you know what they’re doing, it’s easy to infer the actual credit balance using the second figure, but it’s not obvious. Math (arithmetic, really) isn’t vexing to nonstupid humans, but the data presentation is — especially considering SWA’s usual level of quality.

(Yes, we stole the title.)

Here we go again:

In which we discover our travel pattern is, to put it mildly, in excess of what Holiday Inn expects

We’ll qualify for the top tier of their affinity program in about a month.

What good this will do, long term edition

We’ll not sure, but we’re racking up the points like there’s no tomorrow.

What good this will do, short term edition

Get us a suite at the client’s ubercheap room rate.

Sadly, neither will guarantee a baby-free flight

Our weekly flights can work almost equally well on Southwest or Continental. We’re sort of at a loss on which to go with. On the one hand, Continental will eventually put us in First Class, which is a nontrivial difference. On the other hand, SWA flies out of Hobby, has a more comfortable non-upgraded seat, and provides greater control over actual seat choice (A-group checkin is all you need, vs. buying far in advance at Continental). The deciding factor may end up being the flight times; SWA’s is slightly earlier, which makes a nontrivial difference in Sunday night exhaustion.

How you can tell Southwest is cooler than other airlines

The March issue of Spirit has Tom Fucking Waits on the cover.

Dept. of Sanity-saving devices

The Sprint broadband modem (EVDO) product works like gangbusters, and makes our life *much* nicer on the road. Highly recommended.

Of course, once we get there, we’re halfway to the client site

Why oh why is the BWI rental car location so fucking far away? It’s like a 20 minute bus ride from the terminal. It’s nuts.

How to make this not matter

Just keep the damn car over the weekend. As it turns out, renting Sunday to Friday is a whole week. Keeping the car until the following Friday — which saves half an hour, given that airport parking is actually AT the airport — is financially the same as turning the car in on Friday and renting another one on Sunday night. Score.

Things that sound neat, but really suck

“Wintery Mix.” It’s what happens when snow, sleet, and rain happen more or less at the same time. It’s just about as miserable as it sounds, and it’s absolutely no fun to drive in.

It’s 75 today.

It’s supposed to snow again on Friday.

Mrs. Heathen kept her streak of birthday surprises alive by orchestrating a pile of cards, faxes, and gifts delivered to our hotel yesterday.

We love everybody. Thanks!

It’s our birthday.

So, just when we’d gotten adjusted to the early start of consulting for a manufacturing company — a reality further complicated by the fact that said client is in the Eastern time zone, instead of Central — Congress has to go and fuck with DST.

It was dark when we left the hotel this morning.

We expect there will be several of these.

The cafeteria explained

The Good News: If you go late, you get more.
The Bad News: If you go late, you get more. It is, however, cheap.

Adventures in expense reporting

Attempts to get the legally defined mileage reimbursement rate from the irs.gov site were stymied because irs.gov is on the client’s block list. Fortunately, other random tax-info sites with the same info are not.

One size fits all. Not.

The XP laptop is locked down to the point of uselessness. Users can’t even change their own wallpaper, screen saver settings, mouse sensitivity settings, etc.

Snow

Snow is what happens to terrible, terrible places that are sufficiently wet and sufficiently, but not overmuch, cold. Counterintuitively, we are told that there are places, or at least collisions of certain times and certain places, that produce temperatures that are TOO COLD for snow. We’re certain we never, ever want to go to these places.

Snow and parking lots

On the morning after a snow, the gridlines are gone. Cars park as best they can, resulting in an uneven and decidedly unparallel arrangement of cars, sometimes defying the usual alternating-chevron pattern. We find this disconcerting.

Snow and the Traction Control Button

Deactivating traction control in the rental car is inadvisable in snowy conditions, but it IS kind of fun in an otherwise empty hotel parking lot.

Snow, again

It’s nearly 2, and hasn’t stopped snowing yet. The drive to the hotel will prove interesting. (If you’re reading this, we made it.)

Snow as a marker for nighttime animal drama

There’s a shitload of tracks in the otherwise unspoiled snow in a small yard south of the parking lot. They weren’t there last night. If we weren’t such useless citified folk, we might be able to tell what the hell they were, though we sort of suspect rabbits for no good reason.

On the efficacy and usability of workplace collaboration tools, as compared to free and open-source alternatives

Jesus Mary and Batman, Outlook sucks ALL KINDS OF ASS.

On the architectural foibles of large manufacturing facilities

The stalls in all the men’s rooms are actually complete little privys. Each has its own sink, soap dispenser, paper towel machine, and (natch) toilet. The “common” area of the bathroom has the usual urinals and sinks and such as well, so it’s not because of a lack there.

The good thing about working with engineers

As long as you’re not wearing either a short-sleeved polycotton “dress” shirt or a pocket protector (or, God save you, both), you’re a goddamn fashion plate by comparison.

In which Hertz confuses us

Renting for 5 days is cheaper than renting for 4.

How we can tell United sucks

Their Prez-club analog only has pay-as-you-go wireless via T-Mobile. Yuck. Is Continental the only airline that gets this right?

Dept. of We’re Not All That Bright Sometimes

It took nearly 2 hours of airport waiting before we realized the oddly bare Naval uniforms we kept seeing at BWI were — duh — Anapolis cadets.

At least, compared to these guys. (thanks, rob.)

Kitten on a treadmill, backed by MC Hammer. Taken from this collection of silly cats.

Our birthday is in about two weeks, and it has come to our attention that the best Goddamn Bond Movie EVAR is now out on DVD.

You do the math.

It starts with “Might as well have another…”

His headline: “Apparently, People Have to be Told That.”

No, not us, but the Jackson Office has a delivery on the way. Word has it that the production personnel had sort of hoped to have to work at this longer, if you take our meaning.

Mrs Heathen and I cannot WAIT to start teaching the little tyke terribly inappropriate things and providing the all-important noisy, noisy gifts complete with tiny, breakable parts.

Technology Review on the rampant scientific illiteracy in the US and the world:

Okay, now let’s talk (dare I say rant?) about the 200 million Americans out there who cannot read a simple story in, say, Technology Review or the New York Times science section and understand even the basics of DNA or microchips or global warming.

This level of science illiteracy may explain why over 40 percent of Americans do not believe in evolution and about 20 percent, when asked if the earth orbits the sun or vice versa, say it’s the sun that does the orbiting–placing these people in the same camp as the Inquisition that punished Galileo almost 400 years ago. It also explains the extraordinary disconnect between scientists and much of the public over issues the scientists think were settled long ago–never mind newer discoveries and research on topics such as the use of chimeras to study cancer, or pills that may extend life span by 30 or 40 percent.

As Carl Sagan eloquently wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, ignorance reigns in our society at a moment when science is on the cusp of doing amazing and wonderful things, but also dangerous things. Ignorance, said Sagan, is not an option.

Via Mark Pilgrim, we find this story, which includes this photo.

College freshmen have never lived as adults or even near-adult persons in a world not dominated by post-9/11 hysteria, fear, paranoia, and surveillance.

We’re used to meeting people for whom the Cold War is an abstract history-book concept, but this is a little weird for us.

This is wholly unfair, but we’re running it anyway.

• Context lost, but she WAS awake at the time: “Let’s not think about it. Let’s think happy thoughts about judicial review and dead interns.”
• Later, when she was sleeping: “I got your bananas! I got your bananas!” Us: “What, honey?” Her, dismissively: “It’s in your calendar.”

Right.

Yeah, so, it gives a certain freedom, especially when the WSJ runs stories like this.

The first floor of Heathen Central has had a minor water stain in the ceiling for years, but we just noticed a new development near it — i.e., more staining. Obviously, somebody needs to look at this. Anybody local got a name we can trust?

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