Heathen Airline Smackdown

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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.

Contractor Diary: Long Term Ennui Edition

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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.

Yet another reason to hate Microsoft

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Working in Project just now, it admonished me for repeatedly using the much-faster (but needlessly verbose) keyboard shortcut for indent/outdent (alt-p-o-i and alt-p-o-o), suggesting it might be faster to use buttons on the toolbar.

Think about that again. Project thinks it’s faster to take your hands off the keyboard and use the mouse to click a button than it is to hit a keystroke. Now, it’s manifestly stupid that the keystroke to engage two of the most common Project tasks is so fucking buried — seriously, FOUR keys? — but even that is faster than mousing. W. T. F?

Clearly, no one is left at Microsoft that understood how fast the last good version of Word was (5.0 for DOS, baby; we still have our disks somewhere), or why WordPerfect was kicking their ass pre-Windows, or why real programmers still use emacs or vi or other power editors with rich keyboard interfaces. Goons.

Resident Anglican Heathen on the ECUSA/AC issue

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As discussed previously, the careful analysis of our Resident Anglican:

Yep, personally, it is easy to call bullshit on the actions of the AC. It is even easier if you disagree with them, as I do. However, I think that the overriding mind set with regard to cash distribution will remain Mr. Radtke’s response: “We certainly are in partnership with people who disagree with us, and that’s just fine. We give out our money based on the need, and not on the basis of some theological discussion.”

Of course, there is some pie-in-the-sky hopefulness to that. Politics is involved and will be forever. Property debates rage on right now over who owns churches and accounts that were previously associated with parishes that have withdrawn from ECUSA over the gay ordination issue. These issues will be in court for a long time. And, there are groups like Ekklesia who, while funding some of the same sort of mission programs ECUSA funds, blames ECUSA for trying to buy off its critics even while Ekklesia is spending more money on creating more critics as opposed to more poverty elimination. Makes the church look like the beltway. That is unfortunate.

It is enough to make you sick, really. Especially since it is likely that ECUSA will bend on the issue of gay ordination. I think the new Presiding Bishop has already mentioned that. Not sure. I don’t like that too much either. But, progress is slow when you’re trying to convince the world to end their prejudice. In order to keep working on that, ECUSA can’t afford an actual split from the AC lest they find themselves a “fringe” group with no weight to throw around. (Ed: isn’t ECUSA’s weight their cash?)

I guess the bottom line is that I find the waters are much more hopeful for change in the ECUSA camp than anywhere else. That said, the ECUSA camp has plenty of hurdles to cross itself. And, most of those hurdles are in this country. The tide is not overwhelmingly in support of the Very Rev. Gene Robinson, yet. So, we continue to work here and we continue dialogue there. Hopefully progress is being made, in spite of the politics of it all.

Heathen: We’ve got your experts.

The Anglican Communion is just a little confused

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The AC is the global body of Anglican/Episcopal folks; they’re at odds with the more liberal Episcopal Church USA (ECUSA) over the ordination of homosexual priests and bishops, and the support of gay unions. There’s been lots of talk of a sectarian split over this, even, with the ECUSA going one way, and the AC going the other; it happens all the time in matters of faith, if you take the long view.

Except there’s a wrinkle. Nobody’s really saying it out loud, but it looks an awful lot like the AC wants the ECUSA to kowtow to its prejudices where gays are concerned, but really doesn’t want them to stop contributing to the global AC fund. The ECUSA contributes about a third of global AC money, apparently. From the NYT article:

American resentment at their role as the Communion’s deep pockets emerged last year when the Episcopal Church’s executive council was asked to increase its contribution to the Anglican Consultative Council, the Communion’s central coordinating body, by 10 percent each year for the next three years from $661,000 in 2007.

At the council’s last meeting, in England in 2005, the Episcopal Church’s representatives were asked to look on as observers, and not participate in decision making — a measure promoted by some conservative primates.

Mrs. Larom, the Episcopal Church’s director of Anglican relations, said some members of the executive council bristled at the budget request, saying, ” ‘Why should we give money when we’re not at the table?’ “

Something tells us the golden rule is about to come into play, and not the one that Jesus taught.

Contractor Diary: What We’re Reading Edition

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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.

Blogging By Proxy

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It’s from an email, but it FEELS like a post.

“Bellinger, in Brussels for meetings with European legal advisers, did not comment on details of the case but said the United States would never hand over a suspect to another country without assurances about their treatment.”

Assurances about what? That they won’t be tortured unless they use the officially approved methods of torture employed by the U.S.? Geeez.

MORE

Congrats, Lawyer, you’re bloggin’!

TRUTH.

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There is no greater enemy of the music business than the music industry itself. Never before in the history of mass entertainment have we witnessed an industry who worked harder to destroy itself. Maybe once upon a time, music companies tried to expand their business and reach wider audiences, but those days ended long ago…and if the RIAA has its way, they’ll be gone for good.

Let us count some the major mistakes the industry has made in our lifetimes: cheering on ownership consolidation that squeezes out diversity on local radio; standing on the sidelines while the Internet revolutionized the way listeners access music…and then trying to close the barn door after the horse had galloped to the next continent; applauding the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision to raise royalty rates on Internet Radio.

Go read the whole thing: NPR Starts a War

Is it any surprise that the RIAA beat out Halliburton for Worst Company in America over at Consumerist.com?

From our correspondents…

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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.

This is broken.

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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:

Credit summary

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.)

In this era of creeping no-knock SWAT raids, this at least is encouraging

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Check out our new favorite judge — and in FLORIDA, of all places.

John Coffin won’t spend any more time in jail for beating up two sheriff’s deputies inside his house, striking one in the head with a Taser gun he took from the other.

Circuit Judge Rick De Furia said at Coffin’s trial Tuesday that he doesn’t condone the violence against the deputies.

But Coffin, 56, had a right to defend his family and property because the deputies had no right to be in Coffin’s house in the first place, De Furia said.

How to Annoy the CIA

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Hold them to the rule of law. More specifically, when attempts to extradite kidnappers fall on deaf ears, engage Interpol.

See, the kidnappers were CIA. They snatched a German citizen and sent him to be tortured as part of extraordinary rendition. Five months later, they realized they’d fucked up, and brought him back to Europe where they released him on the side of a road in Albania. “Ooops!”

The German government is, understandably, upset. A court in Munich has issued arrest warrants for the 13 agents connected with the kidnapping, but the US has thus far refused to entertain the idea of extraditing them. It’s not hard to imagine how the US would act had one of OUR citizens been treated this way; why they think other countries will accept such behavior is beyond us. “24” is fiction, people.

Pat Robertson loves him some bong hits for Jesus

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In the latest example of truly, epically strange bedfellows, Robertson’s anti-ACLU American Center for Law and Justice (note acronym) has filed briefs in support of the kid in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus (NYT link; local PDF) case headed for the Supreme Court. Also on the kid’s side? The real ACLU, natch. On the other side? The Bush Administration. Yep: we’ve actually got Robertson and Bush on opposite sides of an issue, and it’s Robertson who’s with the angels. Crazy.

First, the gist:

On the surface, Joseph Frederick’s dispute with his principal, Deborah Morse, at the Juneau-Douglas High School in Alaska five years ago appeared to have little if anything to do with religion — or perhaps with much of anything beyond a bored senior’s attitude and a harried administrator’s impatience.

As the Olympic torch was carried through the streets of Juneau on its way to the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City, students were allowed to leave the school grounds to watch. The school band and cheerleaders performed. With television cameras focused on the scene, Mr. Frederick and some friends unfurled a 14-foot-long banner with the inscription: “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”

Mr. Frederick later testified that he designed the banner, using a slogan he had seen on a snowboard, “to be meaningless and funny, in order to get on television.” Ms. Morse found no humor but plenty of meaning in the sign, recognizing “bong hits” as a slang reference to using marijuana. She demanded that he take the banner down. When he refused, she tore it down, ordered him to her office, and gave him a 10-day suspension.

Pretty ridiculous, right? Well, Frederick sued, and has won his case every time it’s been tried; the SCOTUS is the peabrained school’s last chance. And this is when it gets weird:

While it is hardly surprising to find the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Coalition Against Censorship on Mr. Frederick’s side, it is the array of briefs from organizations that litigate and speak on behalf of the religious right that has lifted Morse v. Frederick out of the realm of the ordinary.

The groups include the American Center for Law and Justice, founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson; the Christian Legal Society; the Alliance Defense Fund, an organization based in Arizona that describes its mission as “defending the right to hear and speak the Truth”; the Rutherford Institute, which has participated in many religion cases before the court; and Liberty Legal Institute, a nonprofit law firm “dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights and religious freedom.”

The institute, based in Plano, Tex., told the justices in its brief that it was “gravely concerned that the religious freedom of students in public schools will be damaged” if the court rules for the school board.

More:

The religious groups were particularly alarmed by what they saw as the implication that school boards could define their “educational mission” as they wished and could suppress countervailing speech accordingly.

“Holy moly, look at this! To get drugs we can eliminate free speech in schools?” is how Robert A. Destro, a law professor at Catholic University, described his reaction to the briefs for the school board when the Liberty Legal Institute asked him to consider participating on the Mr. Frederick’s behalf. He quickly signed on.

Having worked closely with Republican administrations for years, Mr. Destro said he was hard pressed to understand the administration’s position. “My guess is they just hadn’t thought it through,” he said in an interview. “To the people who put them in office, they are making an incoherent statement.”

Oh, and Ken Fucking Starr is of course arguing for the government here. Does that guy EVER do anything that isn’t evil?

Contractor Diary: Travel Planning Edition

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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.

Demon Weed

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From Radley Balko:

Right now, I’m reading Dan Baum’s masterful history of the drug war Smoke and Mirrors for the third time. I can’t recommend it enough.

What becomes abundantly clear from Baum’s reporting: Everything, everything about the prohibition of marijuana is and has always been political. It basically boils down to Richard Nixon needing a wedge issue and a hammer with which to beat the dirty hippie anti-war protesters over the head. With just a bit of research, even hardened drug warriors in Nixon’s own administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s quickly realized marijuana was basically harmless.

From that, we have descended to a point where the government has determined it’s better that sick, crippled, suffering people (a) die, and (b) die in pain, than to give those dirty hippies the smallest of victories, even 35 years later.

Word.

USAgate again

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Here’s a few extra facts the media seems unwilling to make clear:

  • Clearing out USAs during a term is pretty much unprecedented, though (as we’ve said before) the 4-year-term usually means new Presidents get to pick their own as part of their new Administration. Saying “Clinton fired them all!” in this context, as a defense of the current gang, makes as much sense as complaining that Bush fired Clinton’s cabinet.
  • Prior to PATRIOT, these appointees were subject to Congressional approval. After PATRIOT, they’re not. This creates a situation wherein Bush could replace his Congressionally-approved USAs with those who would not pass such scrutiny.
  • Moving to clean out politically troublesome prosecutors smacks of a total disregard for the rule of law.
  • Making such a move previously would have opened the door for Congressional oversight, since any replacement would have to be made with their approval. This is known as “checks and balances,” and you may recall somewhat hazily from your junior-high civics course.
  • Post-PATRIOT, the executive branch is free to load the USA ranks with political functionaries presumably free to pursue prosecutions only of troublesome Democrats, as opposed to grotesquely corrupt Republicans like Duke Cunningham. As noted before, this purge-and-replace campaign has far more in common with the Saturday Night Massacre than anything else.
  • Lying to Congress about why these USAs were dismissed is a big no-no.

Clarification on USAgate

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Bush loyalists are attempting to use Clinton’s removal of the Bush-appointed USAs in 1993 as an example of similar behavior, but it just ain’t so. All presidents replace the USAs when they take office; they’re appointed to 4-year terms, so that’s not at all surprising.

The wacky part here is the idea of FIRING them in the middle of a term. Bush appointed these attorneys in the first place. And, curiously enough, several were involved in high-profile prosecutions of GOP lawmakers (e.g., Duke Cunningham) that were making waves for the Administration and the GOP in general. This is far more like the Saturday Night Massacre than the routine changing-of-the-guards that accompanies the shift from one administration to the next.

See more here and here. Oh, and here’s another bit on how Bush’s dismissal of a USA resulted in the halt of an investigation into . . . Jack Abramoff. Whups!

Dept. of Best Wives EVAR

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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!

You need to read this

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That is, you should, unless you already know the difference between Sunni and Shia.

The summary: Islam’s Whittenberg Door moment came when Muhammad died; the issue was not faith vs. works but instead one of sucession.

The more “orthodox” view, held by Sunnis — who comprise by far the largest chunk of Muslims worldwide — is that Abu Bakr, a relative and early convert, is the rightful heir to the Prophet. This was a big deal politically as well as spiritually. Muhammad had a close relationship with Bakr, and frequently asked him to lead prayers in his absence, and furthermore was selected by a large group of Muslims upon the Prophet’s death (at Medina, in 632), which gives credence to this view. About ninety percent of Muslims are Sunni.

There were, of course, those who refused to accept Bakr, and who instead supported Ali ibn Abi Talib, also a relative of the Prophet (and also his son-in-law). Complicating matters is that Ali did eventually become Caliph (the 4th), but this doesn’t seem to mollify the Shia. To them, he’s the first Imam, as opposed to the last of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs (as he is to Sunnis). Shia have a significant majority only in Iran and Iraq.

The divide was sufficiently far back that oral tradition has produced different traditions and spiritual laws as well as titles; Ayatollah is a Shia role, for example (apparently).

All this matters for lots of reasons, but one big damn deal to take note of is the fact that the Taliban and Osama are fundamentalist Sunnis, not Shia.

USAgate gets better, or worse, depending on your point of view

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From the WaPo:

The White House suggested two years ago that the Justice Department fire all 93 U.S. attorneys, a proposal that eventually resulted in the dismissals of eight prosecutors last year, according to e-mails and internal documents that the administration will provide to Congress today.

Via Josh Marshall:

As has happened so many times in the last six years, the maximal version of this story — which seemed logical six weeks ago but which I couldn’t get myself to believe — turns out to be true. Indeed, it’s worse. We now know that Gonzales, McNulty and Moschella each lied to Congress. We know that the purge was a plan that began at the White House — and it was overseen by two of President Bush’s closest lieutenants in Washington — Miers and Gonzales. Sampson is the second resignation. There will certainly be more.

Your War On Drugs

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In Florida, you can rot in prison for taking legally prescribed meds. No shit.

Florida’s Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Richard Paey, a wheelchair-using father of three who is currently serving a 25-year mandatory prison sentence for taking his own pain medication. In doing so, the court let stand a decision which essentially claims that the courts have no role in checking the powers of the executive and legislative branches of government when an individual outcome is patently unjust.

Richard Paey — who suffers both multiple sclerosis and from the aftermath of a disastrous and barbaric back surgery that resulted in multiple major malpractice judgments–now receives virtually twice as much morphine in prison than the equivalent in opioid medications for which he was convicted of forging prescriptions.

There’s so much wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start:

  • Judicial oversight ought to be a check on Executive tyranny and Legislative cravenness. The Florida Supremes are seriously derelict here.
  • Also, just why the fuck did the Executive target this dude in the first place? We’re under the impression that there’s a trade in actual illegal drugs in Florida; why do they have time to chase wheelchair-bound pain patients?

DST sux.

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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.

In case you were laboring under the false assumption that Fox was news

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Take a look here. They are now, have always been, and probably always will be a mouthpiece for the most extreme wing of the Bush partisan GOP. Everything pro-Bush is good; anything at all contrary to White House talking points is buried or slimed. That’s SOP for them, and there’s no reason to think they’ll shape up. They’re not journalism; they’re propaganda.

Geekery

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Dude, thanks to Sprint, we’re totally blogging from an airplane.

(Door’s still open. Calm down.)

It seems wildly improbable, but…

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If you only read one piece about the Arcade Fire this year, make it this one. Here’s a great sample:

There were church organ pipes along the wall behind the pulpit, but they did not use the church organ for the church organ parts. Disappointing. Also, no one playfully ripped out Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor, which should be the very first thing you do when fucking around with music in a church.

Rock on. We gotta hurry back to H-town so’s we can snag Neon Bible. Who the hell knows if they have Montreal weird-art-rock in Maryland?

(Via BrainWidth, who is also responsible for us knowing about the MP3 of their 17 Feb show at NPR. He’s awful cool for a lawyer.)

Contractor Diary: Observations from the Road, Part 1

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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.