Category: Random Thoughts

The general category for posts on this blog.

Just the Fax, Ma`am.

Random Thoughts

Why isn’t this technology dead yet? With scanning, PDF formats and email, why are we still using the fax machine over the phone line?

I only ask because in the pursuit of my home loan, I have had to fax over one hundred pages of documents, forms, and other assorted junk. Do you know how long it takes to fax a hundred pages? It takes… like… forever, or nearly two hours at least. And you can’t even load all the pages in at once because the weight will cause multiple page pulls through the machine and jam, which means you’d have to start all over again and that is just not happening!

Join with me folks! Take those fax machines outside and set them on fire! Smash them to bits with baseball bats! Tell them to take their toner filled asses back to hell where they belong! Unite! Down with the fax!

Independence Day

Random Thoughts

Freedom. It is a word that many of us here in the United States take for granted, and often, not comprehending the worth of it, are willing to trade for security. Elsewhere, people fight for freedom, and our forces fight for their freedom, whether they want it or not. But I’m not here to talk about politics.

If you’ve followed my blog, you know my feeling on the crutch of New Year’s Resolutions. Sure, they work for some people, but they are so horribly open ended that most people end up picking things that are just too much to hinge of the turn of a year. So I am proposing a new tradition: Freedom Day.

July 4th every year I am going to pick something that is holding me back, something that is oppressing my advancement, and I’m going to break free of it.

For our inaugural year we going to pick something simple: my weight. I am not a fat man. I’m 5’9″ at 200 lbs. and all my extra poundage is centered around my waist. If you dig, somewhere on this site you might find a picture of me with my shirt off. So, what I am breaking free from this year is my excuses for not exercising. I always seem to find some reason to avoid it. “I have work to do.” “I’m tired.” “I’ll do it tomorrow.” “I need a home gym.” “I need new shoes.” Well, no more. I have home equipment, an eliptical and a Total Gym, and work I can do pretty much any time I want, I have shoes, being tired is part of the reason I need to get in shape, and tomorrow never comes.

Three days a week minimum, starting this week. I’m out of excuses, and I will be free.

Ignoranceproofing

Random Thoughts

In Business, there are two types of people.

The first type is the kind of person who expects any individual who has a job to be able to do that job. This means that the individual needs to make the effort to understand each job function and why it is done. They also need to have a fundamental comprehension of the equipment they are involved with on a day to day basis.

The second type is the kind of person who expects the tools they use in their job to not allow them to make mistakes, so that even if they do not understand what they are doing, what they need to do is explained for them at every step and wrong choices are incapable of being made.

I’m the first type. And because of that, when I write programs, I write them so that everything that needs to be possible is available. Many people I write these programs for are the second type, and they want my program to analyse data (and read minds) and allow them on any given screen to only be able to do what they are required to do for their job.

For example, I have a screen that allows you to edit the status of a port and to edit the assignments of that port. I coded it completely open (you can edit either at any time) because our database and backend has been shown to have… quirks where data goes missing. The people I am writing it for want the screen to only allow you to set a port’s status to working if an assignment exists, and only to set it to available if no assignment exists. They also want adding or deleting an assignment disabled if the port is in a working status. So, if a bug happens that obliterates an assignment while leaving the port in a working status… my way, you add the assignment back. Their way… you have to set the port to available, then make the assignment, and then set the port back to working. And if for some reason you want to manually delete a port… my way, delete assignment, set port to available. Their way, set the port to available, delete assignment.

Now, the question is, do you see why my way is better?

This screen is not the entire application. And there are hundreds of people using the application. On another screen, there is an equipment assignment page that searches for and offers available ports for assignment. In both cases, they are making the port available for assignment when it is not ready to be (or is not going to be) available.

So, I do it their way… and the next complaint I get is that one person was working on the manual screen above and the port was assigned by the automatic screen after they made it available when it wasn’t really available. Now they want me to code in a delay, store a time stamp and only offer to automatic assignments ports that have been available for at least an hour… *sigh*

Personal Responsibility in Transit

Random Thoughts

As always in the afternoon, I’m riding the bus… At the MARTA station, a man gets on and asks the driver what is the best way to get to the Gwinette DMV. The driver tells him to get off at the Buford Highway/Beaver Ruin Rd stop and transfer to the 30 bus (we are on the 10) and the 30 will take him there. So the guy says, “Tell me when I need to get off.” And the driver replies, “Sir, I can’t be responsible for every passenger’s destination, so just list for when I announce the Beaver Ruin Road stop and get off then.” The guy just nods his head and says, “You let me know.”

Of course, we get on up Buford Highway, the driver calls out that the next stop is Beaver Ruin Road and transfer to the 30 bus, and of course when the bus stops, the inquisitive passenger doesn’t get up. I wish I had been paying attention because I might have told the guy about his stop, but I was reading my book.

A few stops later, the guy gets up and asks the bus driver, “So how much longer until my stop?” “Which stop?” “I got to go to the DMV.” “Sir, I told you that you needed the Beaver Ruin Road stop, I announced it a while back. You must have missed it.” The guy stomps his feet, “You didn’t tell me to get off!” “Sir, I can’t be responsible for the destinations of every passenger, I told you the stop you needed, I announced the stop, it is not my fault you didn’t get off.” The guy is furious, he starts stomping some more and yelling obscenities and banging his hands on the hand rails.

The bus driver remains calm, “Sir, you have two choices, you can either stay on this bus and we will come back around to that stop in about a half hour or so; or you can get off at the next stop, cross the street and catch the southbound 10 and take it back to that stop.” The guy is screaming, “I don’t want to wait, I don’t want to switch buses! I wanted you to tell me when to get off this bus!” “I did.” “No you did not!”

This “Did not”/”Did too” argument went on for a while, then finally the guy decides he’s had enough of this “Nazi bus driver” and his “flagrant racism” and gets off the bus. The driver tell him he’ll need a transfer to which he replies, “You can take your transfer and shove it!” As we pull away the driver is shaking his head and says, “Now not only did he miss his stop, but he’s going to have to pay for the bus again.”

A couple of people behind me started talking in hushed tones about how mean the driver was being, and all I could think to myself was, “What?” Seriously, how hard is it to pay attention for your bus stop? And really, do you expect the driver to remember which stop thirty different people want to get off at and to individually remind them that it is time to get off? Sure, the driver could have done it, but I’ve ridden the bus with that driver before and he never does it, but he does clearly announce every stop, local destinations, transfers, and all that, which some drivers don’t.

The Government Inaction

Random Thoughts

If you read here, you may know I am buying a house. This house is a HUD home. From the neighbors I have heard that there was a messy divorce, the husband moved out and stopped paying the mortgage but did not tell his wife (nor did she know who the mortgage was with, etc etc), so the bank repossessed the house, and eventually turned it over to the government. Or something like that.

Anyway, in our process of buying, we had to fill out a ton of forms. Mostly just signing and initialling stuff that came preprinted from the HUD website. We sent in the documents and then we waited. And waited. And waited some more. After sitting on the papers for two weeks, HUD finally looked them over and rejected them.

Not the sale of the house, that we are still moving forward on. They rejected the paperwork. It seems that their program did not include either my or my wife’s middle names. This isn’t stuff we filled out wrong, it is stuff their program printed out wrong. So they said we had to reprint out the documents and re-fill them out.

Well, that’s done, and hopefully today they will look over the forms and find nothing else wrong and sign the contract. Meanwhile, I am having dreams that parallel the movie “Moving” starring Richard Pryor. Since the house is already missing appliances and a few odds and end, and a couple more were missing the last time we walked the house, I dream that we get the house and find it nearly stripped bare of all fixtures and windows, the sinks and doors gone… I just hope my dreams are not prophetic.

Life in the Spin

Random Thoughts

There was a great quote on Commander-in-Chief a couple weeks ago, and yes, I am aware that the wife and I are probably the only ones watching the show. Anyway, the quote was the mother of the President reflecting back on her days as a young ERA advocate and she said something like, “I preferred spin back when they called it lying.”

Honestly, that is how I feel. I hate that people try to make lying okay by calling it spin or damage control. When you are asked a question there are three answers: Yes, No, and I Don’t Know. “Yes” means you tell the truth. “No” means you lie. And “I Don’t Know” means you cannot answer the question and you side step it or put it off until later. It seems that these days “I Don’t Know” is something people are scared to say, and so they’ll try to twist some lie into the truth they think you want to hear.

My most recent encounter with this is with Home Mortgage Loans. If you can’t afford to put a sizable down payment on a house, you’ll likely be offered an 80/20 loan. This means you get two loans, one for 80% of the cost and another for the remaining 20%. The main reason this is done is to avoid Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI). PMI is basically you paying up to a couple hundred bucks a month insurance for the bank so that they don’t get screwed if you default on the loan. Most loan companies have a rule, if your current monthly debt payment plus the mortgage payment is greater than 45% of your monthly income, they won’t do 80/20 with you, they’ll do 100 with PMI. Pretty standard.

Now here comes the “spin”. The loan officer will likely tell you something along the lines of, “Since you don’t qualify for our 45% debt to income ratio, what we can offer you is a 100% mortgage loan, with a slightly higher APR, but a lower monthly payment.” The lie here is two fold. First off, the only reason you get a lower payment (supposedly) is that the loan is likely to be some sort of Interest Only or ARM loan, which means you pay Interest up front, or at least a high percentage of Interest. The payment is lower because the bank is willing to let it be lower since they will be getting “their” money first, because the bank earns its profit in the interest. See, if your payment is Interest Only, you are not paying anything into principle, and this means you don’t really own anything of your house, except appreciation of value. Buy a house at $200k and pay only interest, when you sell it you will still owe the bank $200k. The only thing you get to keep is anything that is left over $200k after all the fees are paid. And if you just did the math… if your house didn’t appreciate in value in excess of the agent commission and taxes, you could actually lose money when you sell your home. Now the second part of the lie… your monthly payment? It will likely be higher. I know what you are thinking, “Didn’t the loan officer just tell me it would be a lower payment?” Well, yes, and technically, in an I’m-an-evil-banker sort of way he’s not wrong. The PI (Principle & Interest) payment will actually be lower on the new loan as opposed to the 80/20, by as much as a hundred dollars a month. But, with the new loan, in addition to the PI, the taxes, and home insurance, you will need to also pay PMI which is likely to be one hundred fifty to two hundred dollars.

So, here is the logic… you fail their ratio, meaning that they don’t believe you are a worthy risk due to your ability to pay, and in return for not making enough money they will force you to pay more. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Why doesn’t the loan officer just say, “Given the price of the house and the payment schedule, we recommend you find a cheaper house.” At least that would be honest. It is almost like they want you to default on the loan…

Perfect Inefficiency

Random Thoughts

I dropped by the local branch of Bank of America last week to do some banking. While I was waiting for them to open at 9 AM, I sat in my car and listened to music and watched the road crew continue to work along side Satellite Blvd.

They’ve been digging up the side of the road for a while now, either laying some new cable or preparing to widen the road or something, I’m not sure. So there is a crew of six guys there. Five of the men are literally leaning on their shovels, while the sixth man operating a mini-backhoe is thrashing around trying to align himself correctly in order to use this machine to put dirt into a two foot hole. It took him over thirty minutes to complete the task… a task which the five guys with shovels could have completed in under two minutes.

I just don’t understand why people would want to deliberately work so inefficiently. The gasoline alone that it must have taken to operate that thing for over a half hour… It hurts to see my tax dollars wasted.

Blipverts

Random Thoughts

One of the things I used to enjoy most about going to see a movie at the theater was the pre-show entertainment. Long ago it was simply some piped in music. Then they upgraded to those movie network things where they would actually play selections from movie soundtracks and on the screen they would project slides with ads for the candy counter, upcoming movies, local businesses where you could take your ticket stub for a discount, and trivia.

The trivia was the clincher for me. Either it was actual questions or those ones where they show you the high school yearbook picture of someone famous and you had to guess who it is. Sometimes they weren’t even entertainment questions.

At the Delk 10 cinema, my theater of choice for a couple of years, one of their auditoriums had the slides mixed up. My younger brother and I went and memorized the mixed up order, and at later visits we would confound the other audience members by yelling out the correct incorrect answers. “Who is the top money winner in professional golf?” “Cooperstown.” What movie is the most recent to sweep the top oscars?” “Tom Kite.” “What city is the location of the baseball Hall of Fame?” “Silence of the Lambs.”

This week I went to see Cars at the theater (I’ll review that later), and noticed that there was no trivia anymore. In fact, their slideshow had been cut down to about maybe twenty slides at most (it is actually a Power Point presentation these days, no more slides). And the music wasn’t real music anymore, it was fifteen to twenty second clips of songs, not even enough to decide if its worth going to the music store to check out the rest of the album. Even worse is that they only had about four of these clips with introductions, so the whole loop only took about ninety seconds to play. Having gotten to the theater with about twenty minutes to spare, it was fairly maddening to hear the same clips over and over, all with a backdrop of the same repeating images.

Did they do this because people’s attention spans have gotten so short?

The movie theater isn’t the only place I’ve noticed the shorter, rapid fire, less involved advertising going on, and it all makes me fear the possible real introduction of blipverts. Fight the power people… demand slower, demand quality, demand better. Faster and shorter isn’t always best, just ask any woman.

My Jeep

Random Thoughts

I have a love hate relationship with my Jeep Cherokee. On the one hand, it was the car I wanted. Of course, at the time of purchase, gas was about $1.19 a gallon. With typical prices of $2.80 a gallon these days I begin to hate my car. In the years that I have owned it (6), we’ve been through a number of things… flat tires, break ins, minor accidents, and the usual tune-ups. About two years ago, it developed a squeek.

Now, having been through squeeks before in other cars, I decided to have someone look at it and tell me where the squeek came from before deciding to fix it. Some squeeks are bad. Some are not so bad. In a previous car, the squeek ended up being a need to replace a $5 plastic fan blade that was part of the airconditioning system. So I had the car checked and… same problem. They fixed the squeek. But there was a side effect. Appearantly, they knocked a wire loose, and from then on sometimes the dashboard would go dead. They looked for the wire, checked the plugs, but ultimately couldn’t find anything to fix, but I could home remedy the problem by banging on the dashboard and it would spring back to life.

About six months ago, the car developed a squeel. The squeel could be stopped by turning off the air conditioning and then turning it back on, so I figure it wasn’t a big deal. Probably another fan blade issue.

Sunday, I’m driving over to Acworth from Duluth, the back way using Pleasant Hill and Arnold Mill. As I’m driving, the dash goes dead and the Check Gauges light comes on. I bang the dash and it all goes back to normal. I cross over 400 at Old Milton, and the light comes on again, only this time the rest of the dash is working fine. We drive for a bit as I look at my gauges. Gas, fine. Battery, fine. Oil, fine. Temperature, fine… no, wait… no… fine… umm… redline!

It was kind of like in the movies. I pulled off the side of the road and popped the hood, steam blowing off the engine. I give it a minute, then check the coolant. Empty. So we call my brother and have him drive over to pick us up and bring some coolant. I’m fuming now because I just got an oil change and they were supposed to check this stuff.

My brother arrives with the coolant, we fill it up and head on our way. All is right with the world again and I’m talking about how I’m going to give those guys a piece of my mind. Then the temperature redlines again. We stop, the coolant is fine, but still its over heating. We give the car a few moments, then head out again.

A little while down the road, redline. Once again I check the coolant and once again its fine. I decide to check everything. The oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid… basically everything with a dip stick or a valve I can open I check. All is a-okay. So we begin to travel yet again. Everything is going great until we start hearing an awful clanging under the car. And of course the temperature redlines again. We finally decide to give up.

Everyone piles into my brother’s girlfriend’s car, a VW Bug Convertible, four people and a dog, and we leave my car to deal with it later.

After dinner with Dad, we borrow one of his cars and the wife and I head to get the Jeep. The plan is to limp the car, which should be fully cooled now, to the Goodyear place not too far away, and leave it for them to inspect and repair the next day. So we get to the Jeep and I start limping it while the wife follows me.

Now, I’ve never been one to treat my car like a person, but somehow the moment felt like a good time to start. Back when I got my white Jeep Cherokee, some people insisted that I name it. The only thing I could think of was “Moby Dick”. So as we drove, I began, for the first time, to talk to Moby (Mr. Dick to strangers). I promised we’d make it better, that the Goodyear guys would fix everything that ailed it. All it needed to do was get there.

Moby almost did it. As I topped the last hill, I felt the engine begin to go. We were a hundred yards from the station and there was only a left turn remaining to go. But I knew that it would quit on me when I made the turn. I was right, and as I slowed to make the turn the engine gave up, along with the power steering, and I fought the wheel to make the left into the shopping center, and then the right into the parking lot of the Chinese place, and Moby finally silently pulled to a stop… with about a hundred feet to go. I tried the key twice and realized that it was no use.

Swept up in the moment, I threw open the door, popped the truck into neutral and began to push and steer. The truck was really heavy, but adrenaline gave me the strength to get it moving, and the power to steer. Across the parking lot we glided, but one more obsticle stood in our way… a small incline and a speed bump. The front tires cleared the bump, but not the rear, and quickly I hopped back into the car and slammed on the breaks.

For one last time, I turned the key and the engire roared to life. Together we made the last fifteen feet into a parking spot, and then I let Moby rest. It had done its best.

Honestly, I figured Moby and I were done, that it’d gone to big junkyard in the sky. However, one water pump, some hoses, new breaks, a transmission, and a head gasket later, and it appears Moby will be sticking around a while longer. And that makes me smile.

It may only get seventeen miles to the gallon, but I still love my Jeep. Hopefully in the near future, I’ll start working from home and more of my time in Moby can be spent enjoying the road.

Madness

Random Thoughts

So, the wife and I have been looking for a house. Again. We started some time last year, but it didn’t work out, then we started again and found nothing. This year we went and looked at a bunch of places but either they were too small, or too damaged.

But about two weeks ago we were told about a house which was just going on the market. A foreclosure. In fact, it was a HUD sale. So we went to see the house and… wow. It was perfect. Following procedures, I got myself preapproved for a loan again, and we put in a bid. See, HUD homes work like this, everyone who is interested fills out some government forms and puts in their best offer. Then HUD closes the bidding, reviews the applications and decides who wins.

We won!

Our House.