Please wait for the next available moron

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Since I’ve been moving I had to do the obligatory calls to the local utility companies. Amazingly, a person from Comcast picked up and had me taken care of in less than five minutes.

DTE, our local energy company, was a different story. After navigating the menus to transfer my service I was told to enter my phone number. I did and was put on hold for the next available operator. After waiting for about 10 minutes an operator gets on the phone and immediately asks me for my phone number! Didn’t I just enter that? Aren’t you and your voice automated system connected? Didn’t the system say to enter the phone number to speed up this whole process? ARGH! At any rate, after a few minutes on the phone with her everything was taken care of.

The new place is nice. It’s a big three bedroom apartment on the third floor of an old house across the street from campus. Interesting side note: I live in the same room the Michigan Murderer lived in when he went to EMU.

Supreme Court Decides

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There are a few interesting cases that will be brought before the US Supreme Court in the coming months. They include patents on Mickey Mouse, a decision on the U of M affirmitive action case, and whether or not states can fine gays and lesbians for sex acts that the state deems abnormal even if they occur in the privacy of your own home.

The two that us Internet users should pay close attention to are the Mickey Mouse patent case, which revolves around how long a patent should be valid for. Currently it’s only supposed to be 20 years I believe, but they can be extended on a case by case basis. The other involves filters in libraries. I’m torn on this issue. Sure a kid could browse to a porn site while visiting the library, but how many actually would? I, personally, would not browse explicit sites and if I did I would think a librarian should be close by to tell me to stop it.

In other news I’m moving. I’m finally getting out of this hell hole of an apartment and moving into a nicer one a few blocks away. We should know if we were approved by the end of today.

Move along, nothing to see here

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Colin Powell, in an amazing display of arrogance, has attempted to tell the nation that the nuclear fiasco in N. Korea is not a crisis.

How this can’t be a crisis I don’t know. Here is an extremely hostile country, who has been caught red handed proliferating arms, that could have a few nuclear warheads within a year or two.

Something interesting that the article points out is that China isn’t happy about this either. Pissing off your biggest ally isn’t usually the best political move.

DVD Addiction

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I’ve recently found myself addicted to DVD’s. That, combined with my recent fascination with books, is going to proove quite time consuming. I especially am interested in boxed seasons of my favorite shows.

In other news I’ve been ponding some upgrades to the site. Top on my list is the ability to add funny quotes to each posting (a la starkdavingmad.com) as well as fulltext searching. If you actually use this site let me know what you would like to see.

Geekville, USA

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I’m over at Paul‘s house swapping files and geek tales. Of course, no trip to Paul’s house would be complete without having to do major upgrades to zebulon. In the end we had to reinstall qmail, dist-upgrade, and recompile PHP/Apache. If I wasn’t so tired from that I’d upgrade to MySQL 4.0. All of this because the Debian maintainers decided to throw in a buggy version of libc6 the other day.

What's that thing keeping the table level?

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I received quite a few books for Christmas, which makes sense since that is mainly what I asked for. I’ve started reading Running with Scissors. It’s a book about a young boy growing up in a very unusual environment.

I’ll warn you that this book is not easy to read. If you are homophobic, do not like reading about feces, or just plain believe June and Ward Clever are the norm of family life, you should not read this book. You find yourself nervously laughing just to keep from getting too upset at the storyline. Basically, Augusten is left to grow up in his mother’s psychiatrists home. Needless to say, a household where “Bible Dips” are used instead of Magic 8 Balls can give a person a distorted view of life.

What about North Korea?

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Maybe I’m not the only one worried about North Korea. There is a story running on CNN about North Korea violating the DMZ between North and South Korea. The story also briefly covers Nor th Korea’s recent decision to boot the UN nuclea watchdogs and restart its nuclear program

This brings me to my main point: Who else is worried about North Korea? At least Iraq is letting us send in inspectors, though he may be giving us a smoke screen again. On the other hand North Korea is basically saying “We want nukes, and when we get them we are going to use them as bargaining power”, which is a dangerous proposition with the current U.S. leader.

Merry Christmas

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I hope everyone has had as good of a Christmas as I have so far. I’ve recieved some really nice presents from Lauren’s family. Lauren bought me a desktop refrigerator that is going to be promptly placed on my desk when I get to work. Hope all is well!