Teen age killers on the rampage

  In today's news, teenager killed his parents and then went on to take out most of the kindergarten class.  From the AP:

 "About nine months after Nancy Lanza filed for the divorce, the couple worked out an agreement that included joint custody of Adam Lanza, who was 17 at the time, although he was to primarly live with his mother, the records state."

Adam Lanza was the killer.  And other kids from his same situation will be more killers.

Isn't it obvious that the failed American family is at the heart of the problem?  This world of easy divorce and dump the kids isn't really working is it?

I apologize for the use of the term "take out".  This is not a movie we are in, this is reality.  Actually he shot and killed them with an assault rifle and they died in the school where they were growing and being loved.

The whole business makes me sick.  And don't give me any crap about gun control or not, until the family gets healed we will be hearing about this forever And also, take your grief control counselors and shove them.  People (govmnt officials) think that air dropping counselors into a situation will solve everything?  WRONG.  Take your sanctimonious asses back home and actually try to prevent these situations.  (see above)

Computer down

So why is it we accept the excuse that "the computer is down"?  It's the 21st century after all and we still hear this.  Just ran into it with the local paper.  So 50 years of computer operations and google etc with a million systems all around the world and this is what we got?

Embarrassing.  How about getting things right?  Not enough money in it?

Tony Bennet, sung at the Giants celebration today

 The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay
The glory that was Rome is of another day
I've been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan
I'm going home to my city by the Bay

I left my heart in San Francisco
High on a hill, it calls to me
To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars
The morning fog may chill the air, I don't care

My love waits there in San Francisco
Above the blue and windy sea
When I come home to you, San Francisco
Your golden sun will shine for me

Marketers win the series

Giants win the series!  Whoo hoo.  Note the picture of the manager hugging and celebrating after the game.  Amazing strikeout by Sergio Romo to put it away.

Notice anything about the hat?  It's not the regular Giants hat.  In fact if you watched carefully as the game concluded, a bunch of guys came out with these world series hats, took off the Giant hats, and put on these new logo hats.  I guess the players didn't care because they had won after all.  But what's the point?  The point is that after they became champions they now belong to MLB and MLB will get the maximum money out of it, including what hat they are wearing.  It's all about the details, from the hoodies the teams were wearing in the dugout to the hats at the celebration. 

I guess I better buy one of each.  Or should I just wear my old beat up Giants hat and enjoy a beer?

This is why electric cars are not selling.

Because they don't have enough of these!  You may say all you want about the performance and range and fuel savings, but if it ain't got no sex it won't sell.  And in fact the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt are both moving way less units than they need to.

Guess where I got this image?  From one of those "come on" ads on the right side of a website that is pushing free electricity from some 54 year old "patriot" who discovered a weird trick that will make everything free forever.  You know, right along side the 50 year old woman that is hated because her trick makes her skin look like a teenager so all the dermatologists hate her.

I guess there's a trick for everything, no need for studying and all that boring stuff.  Is there a government grant for that?

Incongruities

Forgive me for this one, but I just can't resist.

>  Why is the normal pencil still number 2?

Like, shouldn't it have gotten promoted by now?

Lance, so let me get this straight

Mr. Lance Armstrong had a deal with the Postal Service team for bonuses if he won the 2004/2005, and 2006 TDF (Tour de France).  As is normal in these cases the Posties (owned by Tailwind sports) took out an an insurance policy to cover them if he should actually win with a company named SCA promotions. 

He did cross the finish line first those three years but Tailwind decided not to pay Lance because Lance was "not a clean rider" despite being declared the "official winner".  Lance sued Tailwind and won a judgment of $7.5 million including interest and fees etc.

Are you following now, good, just a little more.  Now that Lance has had his victories nullified, Tailwind/SCA is demanding their money be returned.  He is no longer the "official winner" as specified in the contract.  I guess they are in the threatening letter stage but it looks likely to go to court next.

Whatever you think about cycling as a sport, I used to really enjoy it myself, it's an object lesson on how money has taken over everything.  Even the simple sport of getting on a bike and pedaling through the countryside.

Source for this is: BBC news and other recent articles.

Turning Yachting into X-Games

Our favorite billionaire, Larry Ellison is doing his best to make the America's cup sailboat racing into some kind of X-games meets sailing.  After a relatively interesting series of 45 foot catamaran races, the team is gearing up to the full size (72 foot) boats for next year.  The 45 footers had some amusing crashes, but his full size boat wiped out yesterday and got carried out to sea by the currents under the Golden Gate for 4 miles before they could coral it.  Out there, the waves apparently destroyed the sail.  Should have said "wing", sail is just so old fashioned.  This morning the boat was floating upside down next to their base a pier 80 in San Francisco.

I wonder if this will further reduce the number of competitors.  At last count it was down to 5 teams based on the estimated $40 million to mount a campaign.  Maybe when teams realize how fragile these beasts are it will knock out another team or two.

I will limit my comments about creating a class of boat that is so expensive and not seaworthy.  But, people, this ain't sailing.  It's just showing off.   But if that's what the current hipsters want to see, then enjoy.

My role as a citizen

I think I may be falling down in my role as a citizen.  I am definitely not jumping up and shopping for the "exciting" brands that I should be. And it's not just shopping, I should be buying and, well, let's face it, I'm not.

Here's what I think about some of these brands that I am missing out on.

• Abercrombie and Fitch -  Didn't they used to make actual sporting equipment?  Fishing poles and such.  Before they got into the soft porn business.  Sort of like Eddie Bauer before they cut up canoes for display cases and actually sold canoes.

• Hollister - Isn't that an actual town near Salinas?  The first Hollister shirt I saw was in Europe.  I asked the wearer if he was from there and just got a blank look.  Maybe I am behind on these things.  Hollister to me has the image as above
• Paul Frank - Having a stupid/cute monkey on a tee shirt is a nice idea.  Although now that I actually recognize it my daughter tells me it's so "years ago".
• South Pole - OK, so those clothes will obviously never be useful if you are anywhere near the pole so why pretend?  Or am I missing something completely, like here?
• Mephisto - Does the Devil have a brand of shoes?  Good for walking on hot lava perhaps?  

According to the website below, South Pole is rated as making you feel powerful.  Hello people, these all just made up attributes to sell clothes.  These attributes are a complete miss with me.  South Pole is just a sweat shirt that says that on it.  I guess I am missing the hours of ads and images that will build up the image in my psyche.  My loss, I guess.

Brands taken from this list that you can sort their attributes.  Enjoy.

Random tweeters

So now random tweeters are supposed to have some credibility?  Today's iPhone 5 launch as reported on Yahoo had a couple tweets reported as if they were actual reviewers.  So I am supposed to believe these people?  Anonymous texts from who?

These are just a bunch of losers that can make up stuff and get it quoted by another loser company, Yahoo.  I hate to see the internet go down the tubes like this, helped by ad driven companies like Yahoo etc. but I guess that's the way it is.  There's very little left on the internet that is actually free and open anymore.  Too sad.  Everything is out there to make some money for somebody.  Very sad.

Categorize: USA going third world

Going down 680 yesterday about noon, I observed a pickup off the side of the road with a guy standing off to the side and urinating (with great ambition) off to the west.  Since the sun was reflecting through there and the man had stepped away from his truck, it was very obvious what was going on.  In fact, like a small boy, he seemed to be enjoying the arc that he was able to make.

I honked a couple times and he held up his arm with a fist and pumped it a couple times.

Huh?  He couldn't have been in a more obvious location despite there being a few trees around but I guess that held no interest for this man.

Is peeing along the road now acceptable?  In my previous African home it was completely normal, but here in Contra Costa county?  Huh?  I guess it's part of the slide towards the third world that I'm not really ready for. 

It kind of boils down to the fact that I had run out of Clipper cards.  They had changed the rules so that my current system of getting them free, loading $10.10 and using it for a day was not viable anymore.  Now they would cost $3 for an empty card so throwing them away was just not going to work.  It might seem kind of silly, but this situation caused me to focus my thinking on why was I going to work anyway?

So I quit.  I told the boss that I quit, took my last card and used it to get home.

I know that my employer pays Google to get an immediate update if I post anything.  It's a little known service that Google ("Don't be evil") offers.  I'm not using this post to communicate with them but it's a side effect that I can't avoid.

The situation that I found myself in was that I was required to train some offshore (India) staff to take over my job.  And when that was complete I would be fired.  This was the way I saw it anyway, it was never actually stated that way but I think it was pretty obvious.  Too bad American corporate managers can't be honest with their employees.  (but that's maybe another topic for later)

So I quit. 

New life ahead, no looking back, good luck to all of us.

Neil Armstrong at 82.

I remember very well the moon landing. We kids and the parents were stuck in a traffic jam in Sacramento in the back of the Chevy wagon on the way back from a several day backpacking trip. A week or so on our own in the high Sierra and getting rained on this trip several times.  Down in the valley, it was at least  100 degrees plus. Was that Walter Cronkite doing the radio call? Probably. Good times though. Got orange slushes along the way and us 4 brothers sitting in the back and feeling like real mountain men. And maybe we could go to the moon too. Sorry all the ambition fell out of America while we all fought about Right vs. Left and who should steal the most money.

Massacre at Lonmin

On a hillside north of J'berg the South African police gunned down 30+ striking mineworkers.  Check out the smoke from the guns and the distance between the police and the dead and dying.  This is just like the old days of Apartheid, except the police are now the same color as the demonstrators.  Black.

Sickens me.  I guess color is just a code for lowest class versus the class above and easy to spot.  Looks kind of like a US Civil War reproduction battle, except this is real and weapons in use are assault rifles in semi or full automatic mode.

We need our metals, that's for sure but I call foul.  Lonmin can apologize all they want but the time has past for these kind of tactics .  Or, putting on my cynic hat, are we looking for more of this in the future?

Going camping

The younger generation are getting packed to go for camping at Huntington Lake.  A pretty high altitude reservoir in the Southern Sierra.  As the designated man, I am assigned to make sure the stove is in working order.  It really wasn't that great, being 50 years old or so but Coleman has been making the same model for longer than that and I was able to find out how to get it going.  Soaking the leather in the pump with oil and exercising it for a while and it's good to go.

When I opened the cover to check things out, I found my father had left a note on the handle that said "Take Fuel".  My daughter and I got a laugh out of that.  We can only guess at some trip where upon arriving at the campground there was no fuel.  She'll take the fuel this time.  Thanks, Dad.

Paul Ryan

So Romney has chosen a VP running mate.  Paul Ryan.  Too bad, you lose.  He may have good ideas and everything else but he's got a problem that will never be over come.   His voice is high and whiny.  This can never work with the electorate that needs John Wayne/Ronald Regan.  It's like listening to the rich kid give his project presentation and just cringing all the time.  Sorry dude, you just don't have the presence.

The city of Oakland (my birthplace) has gotten further and further in debt because of Police and Fire department pensions.  This is totally amazing since they stopped anyone from getting into this generous plan in 1976.  And what have they been doing with this problem for the past 36 years?  Refinancing it.  Over and over again.  And they just did it again.  Each time they refi, the interest is the same or more of the principle payments and the idiots in the city council think they are doing a good deal. 

One recipient mentioned is Nita Balousek.  Her husband, now deceased had worked for 27 years as a police officer.  So she thinks whatever she's got coming is well deserved.  Well, God bless Nita, but I've been working a lot longer than that and don't expect anything near the payments you are getting. 

What gets me is there are currently only 1086 beneficiary's in this plan.  The article doesn't really layout the current liability, just the periodic refinancing that makes the debt keep growing.  From the city council's view if the payment is out a few years, then it's free. 

It looks to me that who's really making the money is the bond underwriters that collect the fees and the interest on each cycle.  Another city going down to bankruptcy?   They've been working on it for years.

The decline of the Internet

I've just been searching the internet for information regarding the source of bubbles coming into my pool from the filter return lines.  Not that it's a big deal, at least I don't think so but I wanted to see.  BTW, the pool is now up to 80F and just wonderful, shorty (grandson) won't let me go a day without a swim and I feel like the summer fitness program is well under way.  Great way to get a good night's sleep after a swim.

But anyway, back to the bubbles an internet search yields what seems like a lot of useful results.  But on closer inspection, they are a lot of duplicates and the sites are simply aggregators.  I mean like: Ask.com, Instructables, Wiki answers, Wikihow, Ehow, Homegardenguides.com, and Yelp.  Ehow is my least favorite, the article is a bunch of generalities (did you know that air in the pipes can cause bubbles?) surrounded by ads and links to other marginally useful articles.  Although the link to a pool demolition company may be the ultimate solution.  (I did not appreciate the redirect through an ad site to get there.)

I thought our friends at google had made changes to lower the page rank or aggregators, at least there was some fuss about it a year or so ago.  But they seem to be going strong.  How about a search that then removes duplicate articles?  I'll take $10 Billion please.

Olympic Indians

What happened to white suburbia in the East Bay?  Used to be when I took my kids to swimming lessons they were all white except for the occasional Asian.  Now I'm taking my Grand-kid and it's now majority Indian.  Huh?

I do think it's important for people to learn to swim, especially in a neighborhood full of pools.  Is there an Indian history of Olympic swimmers?  No.  My kids were dreaming about Mark Spitz and maybe Summer Sanders or just playing in the water.  Has there been a Rajit Gupta Olympic swimmer?  No.  In the last summer Olympics the only medal won by an Indian was in shooting.

So 15 years from now, will we see a bunch of Indian swimmers from California?  My friend from the subcontinent says no,  their moms will make them all go to medical school.  (or Engineering or etc...)  They're looking for safe careers defined by education, not for any go for glory sort of sport thing.  Except maybe Cricket, but then we don't have that here.  So break out the Biology book and get to work.  In the meantime, I'm glad you can enjoy the water.

Greece to Hell

Austerity will send Greece to hell, warns Alexis Tsipras

For those of you paying attention to the Euro disaster, you might have noticed that bankers keep good books.   That headline was from a recent Guardian article.  It seems to be a surprise to some Europeans that money borrowed needs to be paid back.

In fact banks go to great lengths to keep track of how much has been borrowed and not paid back.  That's what they do!  So the Greeks who managed to borrow billions and now can't pay it back are surprised?  I guess they figure it was the banks fault for letting them have the money.

At some point it gets beyond numbers to the issue of people's survival.  Yes, banks can show billions owed, but can they starve the people to get it payed back?  No.  The banks need to forgive and forget and keep making their billions and we all at the 99% can then change the rules.

Swimming in suburbia

I've been taking my grandson for lessons at the local swim center.  It's been really a deja vue experience.  His mom took lessons there, swam on the Aquabears team and was also a lifeguard.  So I was wondering if I would see some of the same coaches and I did.

Mike was the head coach at the level my daughter had been in and we met each other under the veranda.  We both stopped and stared for a second and then recognized.  What a hoot!  He remembered my daughter and a few minutes later I brought over the little guy to get introduced.  This is all about 25 years after his mom's original lessons.  Later on the way out, I recognized Rick the head coach who has been there at least 40 years and we shook hands and smiled.  I wished him luck with getting an expanded facility since his is just jammed with activities.  There's the lessons, the Aquabears (multiple age groups), the Seniors, and the world famous Aquanuts synchronized swimming team, and by the way a local high school team has been working out there while their pool gets redone.

Besides the swimming I know that one of the greatest things my daughter learned there was getting up and being on time to open the pool at 05:30am for the lap swimmers who would be already waiting outside the door.  Can't teach that in school.  And it's served her well every since.

Where do we get these wackos?

Dallas had some bad tornadoes today that caused a lot of damage. On the Yahoo web site some of the comments are:

- When is someone going to find out if that giant magnet they call a collieder atom smasher thing is on line when these bad storms happen

- Why do people fear death? It is merely the reset of an existance to where it was before birth. I imagine the fear stems from leaving loved ones-not the world, life, and their situation.

- "Giant Jesus lifted the hem of his Sacred Garments and gave Tex-arsians a little taste of Holy Hell straight from His Blessed Rectum. Thank you Lord for you infinite benevolence."

Where are these people coming from? I can't even imagine. Can these people vote? Maybe they should in the alternate universe they seem to inhabit. This is just weird and scary. And I believe the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is down today. Not sure about the sacred garments, maybe this site can help. As for fearing death, seems normal to me. At least you could look yourself up here.

Regards, J

Planes coming in to SFO

During a rain like this (thank God) I've noticed that the planes are noisier. I used to think it was because of the clouds bouncing back the sound. Recently I read a better theory, it's because the routing in a storm like this is from the South, like over my house, into the airport (SFO) instead of the more normal approach from the North over the bay.

Do they change the takeoff direction too? That would be good for my buddy Bonnie who gets the normal westerly takeoff right near her house. Sleep well, my dear.

My new phone

It was determined that I need a phone that I would actually answer so the SO and I went down to the Verizon store. We have a family plan that actually spans the world from California to Boston to Grenada and Madagascar so that seemed sensible. Knowing very little about phones, I requested the model that the current hipsters demand, the iPhone 4S. And it's a beautiful money making machine for Apple.

First thing off the bat, I need to enter my email address and password. Bang! all my contacts sucked off to be analyzed for marketing opportunities, sorry guys. Now I'm presented with a screen full of useful apps, or more like Apple revenue opportunities.

• You tube - ads to view and demographics to collect
• Newsstand - subscriptions to sell for "news"
• iTunes - totally controlled music to sell and to store
• Stocks - who knows what this collects?
  
• Camera - an opportunity to sell some storage options
• Photos - another place to sell image storage
• Game center - another place to collect information and sell content
• Maps - only really useful if you enable the tracking feature for more collection
• App store - at least this tells what it is, a store.
• Weather - another way to get me to turn on location tracking

I did find out how to get most of these icons off the home page. Oh, I just remembered, I put in the password for my home network to get the maps working. I wonder where that will end up?

At 4.9 ounces it's a real money making heavyweight. Time to turn it off! Does it really?

Blogomotion

So let me get this straight. In order to login to Linkedin (where I got my current job) I need to give them my yahoo password so they can suck up all my contacts and go after their contacts. And in order to use my google account that already has my yahoo password I need to open it up to that they can get all the information too.

We've been suckered into the view that google and linkedin and yahoo are all amazing free services. In fact I'm writing this on a google platform known as blogger.com. And as you know my employer has paid a fee to get immediate notification if any of my postings contain certain key words, like the name of the company.

Time to get out. Maybe back to an old fashioned BBS? Like the original Well in Marin county. This needs investigating, the network must be free!

Urban Furniture, San Francisco

We finally got some good hard rain this afternoon here in the Bay Area (and continuing now too) so I had an opportunity to shelter under the Muni roof at the Ball Park platform. I think last year I always walked over to BART so I never noticed this but this year I guess I'm getting soft and waiting for the train. When you spend some time waiting for a mass transit conveyance you start to learn some things. Today I learned about the overhead shelters.

These have undulating wavelike roofs over some parts of the platform. Each dip in the wave dumps it's contents towards the tracks. When the train came up and I had to step out of the shelter, I found that this flood was directed straight towards the car door. And looking down the platform, the next car door also had a perfectly aligned roof dip as well.

Is this some kind of convergent evolution where the train designers and the platform architects had arrived on the same spacing to ensure dumping the rain into each car door? Only future paleo's can tell.

For now, I'm home, it's raining like hell outside and glad to hear it. Maybe push the button on the fireplace remote and snuggle inside. Regards.

Advertising

In my Internet email I get advertising for a lot of different things, like in these categories:

• Credit cards
• DUI defense
• Health Insurance
• Replacement windows
• Credit scores
• Free auto repairs
• Free movies, cheap Internet
• Printer ink and toner
• Cheap Tektronix parts and service (OK, that's maybe just me)

The most frequent is for the various Internet providers. And they really want me to sign up so they can sell me more advertising. Does this make any sense? It's like a perpetual motion machine. I get the internet and read the ads and buy another internet provider and read their ads and around and around. What we used to call "over unity". There are plenty of sites about that if you want to use a favorite search site.

But can we really run an economy this way? I have long suspected that advertising is the only industry that the U.S. is good at, but can I really eat it for dinner?

Foodies!

The paper today has a story about a cruise liner that hit a rock and capsized off of Tuscany. I don't need to tell you which country that is in because we all know it's about Italy and food. Certainly a scary experience and sad for the tourists that were killed but I can't get over that the story had to include the details of the food being eaten when the shudder and crash were felt by the diners.

Hammer, 65, told The Associated Press that she was eating her first course, an appetizer of cuttlefish, sauteed mushrooms and salad, on her first night aboard her first-ever cruise, which was a gift to her and her husband, Gert, from her local church where she volunteers.

As in: "Besides that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"

I'm glad the the locals on the small island opened up their homes and basically every building they had to take in the survivors. I would want to come back again in the daytime and thank my rescuers, maybe a year or so later. Perhaps with a bit more garlic this time.

Political Logos

I ran into this article regarding the logos used by Egyptian political parties for the recent voting. In many countries with less than literate populations logos are a common way to pick a candidate on the ballot. Or maybe I should say in countries with less TV manipulated political news. Can we in the U.S. even imagine politics without TV ads? I don't think so, maybe we would need to actually read something.

What's the fun of that? The way we do it is to watch 20 seconds of Rich somebody getting booed off the stage without ever hearing why. These are the guys we are choosing to launch the missiles?

If I was Egyptian I would vote for the party with the stove logo. I will always support dinner getting ready.

Netflix, 2 billion hours

This company, on the ropes a few weeks ago with incredibly bone headed marketing moves, like raising prices and spitting off a major part of it's business under another name, is back big time after announcing astounding sales of 2 billion hours of movies streamed in the last quarter.

A number like that just needs to get dissected. I'm no Marcus (mkaz.com) but let me give it a try.

2 billion hours/40 hours per standard work week = 50 million work weeks

if a quarter is 4 weeks per month times 3 months thats 12 weeks which leads to

50 million weeks/12 = 417,000 quarters of standard hours watching movies

According to the CIA factbook there are about 140 million employed workers in the U.S.A. So they would have had 140 million * 40 hours * 12 weeks gives 67.2 billion hours of work time for the quarter.

So (tah dah!) 67 billion/2 billion is about 3.3% of time wasted watching movies from just this one source. Which from my experience is the main source of movie watching in a typical office. These days when you walk around there are so many people hunched over their i/android phones that it's not even funny. And since it's not tracked on the corporate network it's all free game.

And we are wondering about productivity? Maybe the reason India/El Salvador/Vietnam etc are so productive is that they don't have any internet for most of the country. My new pack of underwear that I bought Saturday at Walmart for $7 was made in El Salvador and good quality too.

I this really the way it is?

I was vaguely missing some this morning and it just occurred to me. Where's the Rose Parade? It's usually on a couple of TV channels, at least it seems like it but nothing this morning. In a bit of a panic, thought I might have missed it, I looked up the schedule. What a let down, this year's parade is on January 2nd. What's with that?

According to their web site. "The 123rd Rose Parade presented by Honda themed “Just Imagine...” will take place on Monday, January 2, 2012 at 8:00 a.m. (PST) featuring..." They claim that it's a tradition not to have the parade on Sunday. Like a tradition ever since the BCS football cartel has moved around the bowl games to different days to maximize the profit? And the game has to be on the same day as the parade right?

Maybe I'm still bitter from the time I was 10 years old, in Pasadena with reserved seats and I couldn't go to the the parade cause I had the measles. Watched it on TV up in the Hollywood hills at my Dad's friend's place. At least I didn't crash a bike and almost kill myself like my brother who was trying out the speed potential of the hill where we were staying. Kind of an eventful weekend, even leaving out the "cousin" cutting off the tip of her finger using a wood chisel to trim the ribbon on a package she was wrapping.

Does everything need to be "presented by" some corporation? I should have signed up a kid or two to be presented by Pampers! Hopefully could have saved some cash.