The Prisoner 2009

So far what I like most about the remake of The Prisoner is, "wraps." All food served in The Village comes in the form of sandwich wraps. Wrap sandwiches? The one exception seems to be cherry cake.

I always hated wraps. Only people who don't know what good bread is could like wraps. In The Prisoner and in real life wraps represent bland, corporate catered lunches. A McDonalds hamburger bun has more character than a wrap. Wraps utterly fail to be bread. Pita bread is what you should use if you want a rolled up sandwich.

When wraps come into contact with something moist they get slimy and since most sandwich fillers are moist, wrap sandwiches are almost always slimy.

I'm not a big fan of burritos either. Burritos are fake Mexican, IMHO. Wraps are similar to white flour tortillas, which of course are not real tortillas. Real tortillas are made with corn.

rantmore re Windows

My employer was not willing to give me a Mac so for the next week I had to use a Dell E6400 running WinXP 64bit. He wanted me to run VMware on XP so I could run Linux virtual machines on the lappie. Great. That's like seatbelting yourself to the hood of a car and reaching in through a window to steer.

So wow. Big surprise; the experience has been pure hell.
The box spontanious resets itself at least daily. Yay! And yeah, I have all the latest recommended patches installed from the Beast of Redmond.

OS X and Linux distros have plenty of "features" that annoy me but they don't crash with anything like the frequency of XP. And I never know how J. Random Windows app will behave. There's no consistancy. Today WinSCP pissed me off severely. What does it do with a file you double click on? I assumed I was downloading the file to -somewhere- but POOF a blank window pops up and the file is nowhere to be found. WTF? Shouldn't the default action be "SAVE TO LOCAL DISK"??? I'd look in /tmp if windoze had one.

Verizon h8

Man, I fuckin hate VZN. At least three times this week I am alerted to new voice mail but the phone has not rung in hours! Apparently the call never made it to the handset because there is no "missed call" in the display.

This made me want to test my phone to see if it was working.
So I called my cell from a landline and immediately "BING BING BING" goes my cell phone. Is this because the landline was VZN? Do they send calls from other providers straight to voicemail when their oversubscribed network is saturated?

I'm guessing, "yes."


Oh, and when VZN does send me voice mail alerts for new voice mail, the alerts arrive TWENTY MINUTES after the inbound call was placed!

VZN, you are teh suck. If I was not getting this phone for next to nothing, I'd jump to some other provider. I may do so anyway.

If Obama straightened out the FCC that would make up for all the mistakes he's made to date.

I'd like to roast Michael Powell on a spit. Kevin J. Martin too.

Stargate Universe is teh suck

Man, such a blatant, pathetic attempt to ape the style and substance of Battlestar Galactica. What a odoriferous pile of steaming dung.

Snow Leopard is good

I paid the $25 for Sniz Leopard and installed it last night. I bought it only for the much hyped Exchange integration features.

Seems to work fine so far. I now have access to the Exchange server's address book, which is the only part of Exchange that seems useful. The appointment alerts work in iCal, too.

Some day before I die I hope Exchange will cease to be thought of as indispensable. That will be a good day. There are plenty of alternatives but in 2009 it is unthinkable for most companies to ditch Exchange for anything else. The reasons for keeping or deploying Exchange are primarily based on FUD.

EJD

How it all began . . .

http://mirror.uncyc.org/wiki/EJD

Horseneck and East Beach

Nice weekend for the beach. The temp of the water at Horseneck was perfect but the waves were no good for body surfing. A crab pinched my toe hard enough to make it bleed; no foolin. There were crab carcasses and claws all over the shingle.

I got curious about the jetty and point to the east of the beach. When I drove out of the Horseneck parking lot I turned right and ended up on East Beach Rd which allowed me to drive out onto what turned out to be Gooseberry Island (or Point depending on who you ask). There is a massive stone jetty leading out to the island. There is room for about 30 cars to park and a boat launching ramp. The island has two dilapidated concrete observation towers roughly in the middle. Don't bother looking in them. They are trashed. Looks like a crack den inside. I can't help wondering why they were built. Was it to spot Nazi uboats?

There are tall reeds growing over most of the island and the mosquitoes breeding in these marshes are ferocious. It's better to walk around the island than down the paths bisecting it. The bugs attract lots of swallows who dazzle the viewer with their acrobatic flight. In turn, the swallows attracted a small raptor who's species I could not identify.

The water on the eastern side of the island/jetty is calm, clear and shallow for 200 yards or more. The island blocks the wind effectively despite being pretty flat. There are big stands of eelgrass growing in this lagoon-like body of water. (Is there a word for lagoon-like?) Plenty of crabs in the water here too. Saw shoals of fish; five or six inch fellers. There were some tiny, brown, centipede-like creatures swimming in the shallowest water. They seemed to be hunting something even smaller.

There was a huge amount of garbage on the island. Half of it looked like it had washed up out of the sea. We ought to put some unemployed burger flippers to work cleaning it up. That means you, Enrico de Nuevo Bedford. You aren't going to catch anything fishing from the jetty anyway, dumbass.

The neat thing about East Beach is that there is no fee to park there and there's plenty of parking if you get there in the AM or in the evening. If there's no space on the island, you can park on East Beach Rd. Pretty cool place to swim if you are tired of being bounced around by the waves and want to practice the breast stroke.