Protecting Us From Ourselves, Part 943
( Cultural Note )
Whoopi Goldberg’s disclaimer on the new Looney Tunes collection gets Tino thinking about the Root Cause of everything that annoys him.
( more )A Trip To The Mall
( Cultural Note and Customer Service and Unpredictability )
Tino goes to the mall, and finds it an unrewarding experience.
( more )Interesting New Orleans Story
( Government Mischief )
Here is a first-person account of the aftermath of the New Orleans flooding that showed up today on the Daily Kos.
I’m not sure how true it is; on DK they aren’t even sure of its provenance, so I’m taking it with a grain of salt for now. One of the writers credited has an unusual name, and to judge from Google she is a paramedic and a labor-union rabble-rouser from San Francisco; the other has a name too common for
( more )TSA Security Changes
( Government Idiocy )
Some proposed TSA rule changes make even less sense than the current rules do.
( more )Why The Grocery Store Is Always Out Of Things
( Customer Service and Unpredictability )
Maybe your experience is different, but I find grocery shopping pretty frustrating. Very, very rarely — if ever — can we get through a full shopping trip without at least one item on the list — usually more — being out of stock.
( more )Pain Was Too Good For Him?
( Cultural Note )
Why is the idea of women doing violence to men seen as so amusing and sophisticated?
( more )1994 Vintage Jerry Pournelle
( Random Interesting Thing )
I was poking around Byte’s website for some reason, and I stumbled across this perfect example of vintage Jerry Pournelle’s writing about computers. When I face a computer that’s screwed up in some way that defies all logic, I often refer to it as a ‘Jerry Pournelle situation’, after the kind of thing he used to write about every month:
( more )Last night, I found I couldn’t print. Chasing that
Doing The Unthinkable
( Corporate Idiocy and Customer Service )
Sears has rejiggered its 119-year-old customer satisfaction guarantee, to the at least nominal disadvantage of the customer. This does not bode particularly well.
( more )Just Say No To Government Networks
( Government Idiocy )
Philadelphia’s plan for a free or low-cost city-wide wireless network is a nice one, but not the sort of things that governments can do well. Why does everyone think it’s such a good idea?
( more )Panera Proxy
( Panera and Tinotopia Update )
Tino gets Tinotopia to be visible at Panera. Their filter is actually more robust than he would have bothered to make it, had he been put in charge.
( more )