Tag: door

The TSA

Random Thoughts

I don’t usually talk politics and such on here, but I feel I need to put a few things out there…

First off, lets go ahead and get the bit about people who trade liberty for security deserving neither.  I believe that.  If we have to live in fear, like slaves, to a huge machine of rules and regulations then the terrorists have won.

Second, to all the people who are supporting the TSA and their new scanners and pat downs with the defense of “We need to prevent another 9/11” … you are disgracing the memory of those who died.  Want to prevent another 9/11?  One, make the cockpit door stronger to the point where it cannot be battered down, and any explosive strong enough to open the door will also damage the plane enough that getting inside the cockpit is useless.  Two, a new policy where the pilots enter the plane first, close and lock the door, and they don’t open it unless one of the cockpit crew is in medical distress.  In future plane designs/redesigns, give them their own bathroom and a place to store a meal so that they don’t need to leave nor does anyone need to come in.  Done.  If terrorists cannot get into a functional cockpit, they cannot use the plane as a weapon and you have prevented another 9/11.  No amount of confiscation of nail clippers and water bottles and junk touching pat downs will prevent another 9/11.  Did you know that a properly folded copy of the Sky Mall magazine can be used as a weapon?

It’s all security theater, and if it makes you feel safer then you don’t understand what is going on.  Mostly though, as with many things, this is about money.  By mandating that every airport needs to have these new scanners they guarantee sales of the scanners.  The enhanced pat down exists mainly to make using the scanner feel like the better option, and they released these new regulations during the holiday season because they knew people would put up less of a fight if fighting meant missing a flight home for turkey and pumpkin pie.  And if you want to avoid all this drama and just skip flying… you are much much more likely to be killed in a car accident than you are to be killed by terrorists on a plane even without the new enhanced security.

I guess what I’m saying is… take the train.  I also hear that trans-Atlantic cruises are nice.

One Month To Go…

Dragon*Con

… until Dragon*Con.

I’m excited.  Are you excited?  I mean, how often do you get to go to a place and congregate with more than 35,000 people of similar interests to your own?  I do it once a year.  And how often do you get to be a part of making an event like that happen?  I’m hoping this year is the first of many.

This will be my first year working as staff and I couldn’t be more thrilled.  Sure, I could just go to con like I usually do and see some panels and go to some parties, but this year I’m helping make the magic happen… as long as by “magic” I mean “standing at the door counting people and occasionally telling them the room is full” which is likely to be the extent of my action.  It’s not like I’m running the panels (although, you never know) … I’m more of a Kleezantsun.  Yeah, I just went there.  But it is an apt description.  Dragon*Con is a convention for fans by fans.  It isn’t run by companies or marketing firms, it’s run by us.

Anyway, PBS is going to be airing Four Days at Dragon*Con on Saturday the 28th at 9PM.

Zombie Economics

Random Thoughts

You know, it isn’t often you hear the shambling masses of the living dead used in economic theory.  But Nicoholas Colas, ConvergEx chief market strategist, is not afraid to invoke the word zombie.  The best part is that he continues through with the analogy, covering the spread of infection and the inevitable need to close the door on someone outside calling for help surrounded by the undead.  I don’t normally talk politics on this blog, but this particular item leaped out at me (for obvious reasons).

It is a harsh thing to think about, letting the economy of an entire country fail, but I think sometimes we are better off air dropping supplies or tossing them over the wall instead of entangling and dragging everyone down.  There is a point where the financial end of government needs to step away and let charitable and private organizations step in to help the survivors get back up on their own feet.

The Station

Writing

3979765871_f5e0676fedAs his foot crunched in the gravel between the tracks, Edward stopped and waited.  It had been more than six months since he’d seen another living soul, but he’d run into one of them just a few days before.  He kept his weight steady.  His right palm gripped against the stock of the rifle started to sweat.  He eyed the windows of the building, looking for movement.  Nothing moved.

He quickly took two more crunching steps and stopped again.  Edward was tempted to call out, but voices carried and there was no sense alerting anything that hadn’t already heard his footsteps.  Still nothing moved, so he finished crossing the tracks to the cement walkway.

Everything looked clear and dry.  He carefully leaned the rifle against one of the roof supports and slipped off his shoes.  After tying the laces together, he hung them over his shoulder and picked the rifle back up.  He momentarily juggled it from hand to hand, taking the opportunity to dry his palms on his pants.

The light was beginning to fade and he needed to find a room, preferably without windows and a single door he could lock and barricade, before night fell.  Edward approached the nearest door in sock feet, as silent as he could manage.

It was dark inside.  Electricity had first started failing within days after everything went to hell.  Some places, powered by hydroelectric had managed months of power before their mechanisms began to fail.  The last of Edward’s own working batteries had died out weeks ago, and he hadn’t been able to find any more.  Entering the building took several long minutes as he stepped forward into shadow and then waited for his eyes to adjust.  By the time he was a few feet inside, it wasn’t so dark anymore.

Most of the windows had been boarded up on the inside, which meant that someone had secured it at some point.  But the door had been wide open, so unless that someone had retreated to and was holding up in some deeper room, it wasn’t likely that any living person was inside.

Safety was important, but he didn’t have time to check the whole station.  He made his way down the first hallway and found a supply closet.  It wasn’t big, but he could see a small rectangular shape high up on the far wall he guessed was an air vent, and the wire shelves on the left and right would provide good support for barricading the door.  Opposite his closet was a boarded window, and if he needed he could use the shotgun on his back to blast a way out. He stared into the room for a minute, occasionally looking left and right down the hall in either direction.  Edward shifted his weight to his right foot, then patted his left foot on the floor a couple times.

Nothing moved.

He slipped into the closet, turned and very slowly shut the door.  Carefully he knelt down and placed his rifle on the floor, then unslung his pack from his back.  Reaching in with his left hand he quietly rummaged around for a candle and a lighter.  At this point his flash light was little more than a club, but he’d found a box of fifty disposable lighters long ago and had kept them.

Producing a candle and a lighter, he flicked the lighter to life and lit the candle.  On his left was a shelf of cleaning and janitorial supplies.  Quickly his inventoried it in his head, taking note of there was nothing to eat or drink, but there was a bottle of plain Clorox he could use to clean some water later and number of other chemicals.  There were buckets on the bottom shelf he might make use of tomorrow, and in the corner were three mops he could use to bar the door.  He found a stack of paper cups, possibly for a dispenser next to a drinking fountain somewhere in the station, and took one to use as a candle holder, which he did and set it on the same shelf at chest height.

On the right was a shelf of office supplies.  Some pens, a couple pads of paper, a stapler.  Nothing he could really use.

He looked up and saw the dark rectangle on the wall opposite the door had indeed been an air vent.  There wouldn’t be any heat or air conditioning, but it made him feel better about locking himself in a room if it wasn’t air tight.

Edward grabbed up the mops and wedged them into the wire shelves across the door.  It probably wouldn’t hold long if trouble came, but the noise should wake him up.  With that done, he moved his candle down to a lower shelf, moved his rifle into the corner the mops had occupied, and pulled his sawed off shotgun from his pack and placed it on the shelf with the stapler.

He sat on the floor and leaned against the back wall of the closet, then went searching through his pack for something to eat.  Edward came up with a water bottle still half full and one mostly full that represented the last of his clean water.  He also discovered a granola bar at the bottom, which was a surprise since he thought he’d run out last week.  He unwrapped and ate the bar, as well as a small bag of peanuts, and drank the half full bottle of water.

Less hungry than he had been, Edward blew out the candle and settled on the floor curled in a fetal position.  Using a t-shirt from his pack as a pillow, he closed his eyes and tried not to think too much about tomorrow’s trip in to town for supplies.  For now, he was safe in the station. Still he spent a long hour listening for noises in the night before drifting off into a fitful sleep.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/gali_367/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Ring The Bell

Random Thoughts

I own a house.  This house has a front door.  Just to the right of the door there is a button.  If you were to come to the front door of my house and push the button a magical thing occurs: inside the house, a bell rings and lets everyone inside know that the button next to the front door has been pushed, indicating that a person standing at that front door would like to speak with someone inside the house.

If you were to approach that same door and instead of ringing the bell you were to just knock on the door, due to the nature of acoustics and the properties of sound waves, if there is not a person standing in the foyer or in the living room, the possibility is quite high that they will not hear the knock.  This is the purpose of the bell.  This electronic device, this button, is connected to speakers in a couple of places in the house, arranged in just such a way that a person anywhere in the house will hear it.

So, when I order a pizza, I expect the pizza delivery person to come to the door and push the button.  He has my pizza, and I’m fairly certain he would like money in exchange for it, and the best way to facilitate that transaction would be to push the button and notify someone inside the house that he has arrived.  And yet, every single pizza delivery person from every single pizza place that will deliver here approaches the door with pizza in hand… and knocks.  Being that I spend so little time in the foyer and the living room, and instead can often be found watching TV in the media room, or on the computer, or possibly even in the room with the workout equipment, I cannot hear the knock.  Now this, in and of itself, wouldn’t be too remarkable.  He knocks, he waits, perhaps he knocks again, he waits, then perhaps he gets impatient and rings the bell.  Not the optimum path, but acceptable.  However, this is not what happens.  Instead, he knocks, he waits, he knocks again, he waits… then he gets out his cell phone and calls the phone number associated with the order.

The package delivery men are worse.  They simply knock, drop the package on the doorstep and run away.  So, not only have they not notified me of their presense, they have also left potentially expensive goods unattended at my front door.  My house, in addition to having a front door and a door bell, has a garage.  I park there, and being as my car is there, when I come and go from the house it is very rarely through the front door.  Due to this, packages have sometimes sat on my doorstep for a day or two, especially when said package comes through the USPS and I was not given a tracking number by which to follow the progress of the shipment online.

At first, I thought this might be because people could not see the button.  But I checked, it lights up.  Even in the darkest night, the button is visible.  But perhaps its harder to see during the day.  No.  I checked that too, and the button is raised and clearly distinguishable from the surroundings.  Perhaps I need to place a sign on my door that says, “Please ring the bell.”  But part of me worries that a sign like really says, “I absolutely cannot hear people making noise at my front door, so please, break in.”  Not that I’m horribly worried about people breaking in.  We live in a nice neighborhood, and I don’t have a whole lot worth stealing.  No cash, no jewels.  Just electronics, and most of those are heavy or locked down in some way, and I just don’t envision a thief hauling my whole desk out the front door just to get my PC.

All in all, I just don’t understand why people do not ring the bell.  It exists for that purpose.  If I didn’t want people to push the button and ring the bell, I’d remove the button.

Misguided vs. Wrong

Random Thoughts

Note: The following post has nothing to do with any particular issue. Its just something I thought of and wanted to put out there.

I am rarely ever wrong.

Now, before you get all upset and fire off a ten page missive about how I am wrong, read on…

If you were to want to borrow my car, and I hand you the keys and tell you “It’s the first white car on the third row.” If you now go and try use my keys to open the door of the second red car on the first row, you are wrong. I gave you the facts, you forgot them or ignored them, you are wrong, and now you are setting off the alarm on someone else’s car. If, however, I were to tell you it was the second red car on the first row when it is really the first white car on the third, when you go to the red car, you are not wrong, you are misguided.

When I get into discussions with people, when I write long blogs here, I do so from the vantage point of everything that I know, every fact that I have… if I am misguided, I expect and appreciate when people show me how I am mistaken, clarify something I don’t understand, or show me the right path. I tend to try to treat others the same way… I try not to slam people when they state things I don’t agree with, I’d much rather get into why we disagree and see if I can learn something from them or teach something to them.

So… if you read anything on this site that you feel is not correct, please, feel free to show me where I have gone awry. I may disagree at first (because obviously I am under the impression that what I know to be true is true), but I’m pretty much always amenable to changing my mind if I can be convinced.

On the other hand, if all you are going to do is say “You’re wrong!” or some other definitive yet unexplanitory statement, don’t bother. If you can’t be bothered to show me where I am misguided, I would rather not be bothered by you at all.

One Day in February

Random Thoughts

On February 27th at 5:30 PM, Jodi and I got married. But it was one heck of a day…

The morning began like any other day… waking up, getting dressed, discovering my car had been broken into. They took my digital tire pressure gauge, a leatherman multi-tool and three packs of gum. They left behind the stereo, the CDs and the $15 in change in the ash tray. However, having somewhere we needed to be, Jodi and I decided we’d report the theft later and for now just empty the car, lock it back up and leave it, seeing as how the thieves were kind enough to not break any windows but just jimmy the lock in such a way as to render it useless on the outside but still operate inside and lock the door just fine.

We loaded up the other car and headed off to some friends’ house, K and P, the ones we’d roped into being our chauffeurs and valets for the day. Once all packed into their car we began the long journey from Atlanta to Savannah.

Upon arriving in Savannah, we were nervous. We needed to check into our hotel early… at noon, but the woman on the phone had said check in was 4pm, 3 at the earliest. Score one for our team as the rooms were ready and we checked in. But another strike for the day, P forgot his suit and has no pants.

Quickly we decide to head to the mall and buy some, he can do without a suit jacket, but he needs pants. Also, Jodi needs a bouquet, so she called up Flowerama (listed in the hotel service guide) and arranges for one over the phone. The shop is on Abercorne which is only a few blocks away. So we pile back into the car and head out. We drive past at least a dozen flower shops and finally reach the mall. We stop, buy P some pants at Macy’s and the girls get their nails done at Le Nails. Back on the road, we keep driving. Finally we find Flowerama. Basically, the farthest point you can get from our hotel while remaining in Savannah, that’s where it is.

Its obvious we are going to be late meeting up with the photographer at 4 PM as planned, so we call and ask to meet at 4:30. She’s fine with it and we get back to the hotel with plenty of time to get ready. While Jodi is putting on makeup, she spills some which I start cleaning up. Crawling around on the floor I didn’t realize that I had gone under the coffee maker drawer and WHAM! I get a nice little red whelt on my head that starts bleeding a little. But fine, we can cover that up or I can just make sure I don’t look down in the photos. Finally I start getting dressed, I open my suit bag and scream something like “Where are my pants?!”

Up until this point, I had totally kept my cool. Now I lost it. I was swearing like a sailor, I wanted to punch and break things, I was going to drive back to Atlanta and kill everyone at the Men’s Warehouse for forgetting to put my pants in with my suit jacket… when I realize… I’m looking at my sport coat. I packed the wrong bag.

I throw my jeans back on and run next door to K and P’s room.

Me: We have a problem. I don’t have my suit.
P: That’s not funny.
Me: I have a sport coat, which is fine, but I don’t have pants.
P: Oh my God, you’re serious?
Me: I’m going to go find pants, Jodi is going to need some help.

And I run to the lobby. I speak with the concieges and explain my predicament. The woman there just goes blank and mutters something about Banana Republic and the Gap. Then the man steps up and tells me to step out the doors, turn left, go down to Broughton, hang a left and a few blocks down will be J. Parker Limited who can hook me up. I run out of the hotel.

At J. Parker Limited I walk in and explain my dilemma. The man there calmly asks, “What color?” I tell him black and he asks, “What size waist?” I answer him and he turns around, flips through the rack he’d been leaning on and pulls out a pair of pants. I try them on. Perfect fit. He marks them, I take them off, and he hands them to the tailor. While we wait we talk about weddings. He thinks we are right in just running off, big weddings are a hassle. He tells me a story of a bride with a $6,000 Irish linen dress whose reception runs out of booze before the wedding party arrives who should have gotten a $500 dress, lied about what it was made of and spent the other $5,500 on more drinks and food. Because honestly, as long as the dress looked good would anyone care that it was Irish linen? As we talked and laughed, my body slackened and I calmed down. Fifteen minutes of waiting at the pants were done. I thanked both him and the tailor and headed back to the hotel.

Everyone else was ready. I got dressed, threw my tie over my shoulder, and we headed to Factor’s Walk, the location our photographer picked for the ceremony. On the way we went over everything. Rings? Check. Checks for the officiant and photographer? Check. Marriage paperwork? … So I sent everyone ahead and ran back to the hotel for the papers.

Finally, I catch back up to the group. We chat a moment and then I inform them that I can’t tie a tie. P makes a valiant effort, but fails. The Reverend Steven P. Schulte steps in and does it up right. I think this is where the laughter started.

We moved out on to the bridge for the ceremony and took a few quick photos. Then the photographer, Nancy Heffernan, moved off to a spot to take shots during the ceremony. Since we had no time to rehearse, Nancy resorted to yelling out instructions as they were needed. “Get closer!” “Back up!” “Not you!” “Move to your left!” “Your other left!” We couldn’t stop laughing.

Reverend Schulte said the words, we exchanged vows, I gave Jodi her ring, she gave me mine… which got stuck halfway over the knuckle. We were going to just force it on when my finger turned purple. Quickly I fought the ring off and left my ring finger red and throbbing. We put the ring on my pinky and vowed to resize it later. We finally managed to stop laughing long enough for Rev Schulte to pronounce us man and wife, and we kissed. We were married.

After the ceremony, we hung around the park at Factor’s Walk for a while taking photos. Then we strolled River Street, getting congratulated by the passerbys and taking more photos until the light faded. We went back to the hotel for Nancy to burn us CDs of all the photos she had taken.

Earlier in the day we had made reservations at Elizabeth on 37th, but now none of us wanted to get in the car and drive somewhere. Nancy suggested Vic’s On the River, which happened to be not fifty feet from where we got married. When Nancy left, we headed out again on foot and went to Vic’s. The atmosphere and the food were excellent, and we sat and ate and chatted over the day’s events and laughed.

I think that if my wedding had been better planned and gone more smoothly, the day would practially fade to nothing in my memories. I’d remember that I got married, and I’d look at the photos and recall some of the day. But the wedding I had… I don’t think I’ll forget a single thing.

Me and my spider

Random Thoughts

It’s not actually my spider, he just lives outside my front door. Normally, I’d kill a spider living around my front door. I’d go out and spray him with insect spray until he stopped running or twitching. But I decided this time it would be different. However, I still didn’t want him building webs for me to walk through when I’m coming or going from my apartment.

So I trained him. With judicious use of knocking down web strands, I have trained this spider to build only on my neighbor’s side of the front stoop. This spider started out pretty small, but the stoop has lights on it that we, the apartment dwellers, can’t turn off, so it attracts its fair share of flying bugs. So he eats well. He’s pretty big now, I’d say his body is the size of a nickel, and with the legs he’s easily a half-dollar. And the webs he makes are pretty interesting. One night he managed to spin a perfect octogonal web, eight main lines with smaller and smaller octogons at regular intervals. Then one night he made an intricate web with two central points, which might have been an accident, or maybe he was supposed to have a guest. It’s become a nightly ritual for me to walk the dog and check out the web he’s spinning before going to bed. And he only spins his web at night… one, because only at night are the lights on that attract the bugs; and two, because my neighbor keeps tearing down the web.

Unfortunately for my neighbor, he can’t train the spider like I have. That’s because when he gets up in the morning and walks through the web, the spider isn’t in it anymore. The spider gets his food at night, then hauls it up to the top of the stoop and webs himself into a corner with his catch for sleeping and feeding. In the morning the web is empty. Now, you might be wondering why I would train a spider to build a web that my neighbor walks through just about every day…

Well, I hate my neighbor. I live in a pretty ghetto neighborhood. Guys sit on their front step and drink forties, and hang out in packs or gangs and make horrendously rude comments toward any woman who dares walk by trying to be “player of the year” or something… But my next door neighbor doesn’t do that. He’s from South Africa. His whole family is. Now, I don’t have anything against South Africans per say… but in this case is means that there are two families with a total of about 9 people living in a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my animosity toward these people comes from their attitudes. The kids like to use car parking spots to park their bikes. They like my dog and they want to pet him, but only if he sits still, faces away from them, and they pet him lightly on the back of the head from behind. Any attempt on the dog’s part to sniff or move toward the kids earns a response of screams and running, sometimes crying. Usually this is when the dad comes out and says we shouldn’t scare the kids. Umm… what? Anyway, when we moved in, we used to walk the dog out front to do his business. But we stopped doing that, and he does his business out back. Oh, at night before bed, I’ll let him pee out front, but for any number 2, he goes out back into the weeds and trees. However, for some reason, all the other shitheads in our neighborhood like to just let their dogs run without a leash… so they come over to our area to poop, following the smell. Even though its been over 18 months since our dog has pooped out front, other dogs still come there to do their business. And my neighbor, he yells at me for it… “All thees sheeting. I come outside to sit and its smelling sheet.” “Your dog is sheeting under my front window.” and so on… but its not my dog, I explain that, but he just waves me off and gives me nasty looks. And he complains about our dog barking and making noise, which is pretty rare… and when I try to mention his kids thumping up and down the stairs at all hours of the day and night, he waves me off again.

So I trained a spider to build webs in front of his door…

The Duality of `Doo`

Reviews

Let me begin by saying that neither ‘Scooby Doo: The Movie’ nor ‘Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed’ are real winners. Neither is going to win any awards, and neither is really going to stand the test of time and become a classic in twenty or so years.

However…

These two movies wind up being perfect partners. The first Doo is an attempt to take the cartoon characters and put them in the ‘real world’. They give them real problems and make them deal with them, while telling a story thats mildly interesting and moderately funny. The second Doo is a live action cartoon, complete with ‘running in place over an empty pit’ and the goofy ‘sneaky big step walking quietly’ they always do. Its story is pretty much exactly out of the old cartoon, and the humor is actually better simultaneously comically paying homage and sending up the original.

** SPOILERS AHEAD **

If you just missed it, I’m about to tell some specifics of each movie, so stop reading if you don’t want things to be ruined.

I mean it. This is your last warning for the spoilers. If you keep reading and get mad because of spoilers, you are an idiot.

Now, on to the spoilers…

In the first Doo the biggest laughs really came in the Scrappy Doo scenes. Admit it, you hated him too. EVERYONE hated Scrappy. He totally ruined the Shaggy/Scooby & Fred/Velma/Daphne formula of the show that made it as enjoyable as it was. So when they show a flashback of Scrappy Doo being an ass, peeing on everything and then getting left in the middle of the desert I was literally cheering. YEAH!! Then at the end, when the villain turns out to BE Scrappy in a robot-human suit, I was rolling on the floor laughing and having trouble breathing. Sure, the movie had some other funny scenes, but the flashback and the end were head and hands above the rest of the film and made it worth watching.

The second Doo movie was overall more enjoyable. I was snickering and laughing through the whole thing because it was just like the old cartoon only with bad actors too. There is one scene, Shaggy and Scooby are running from the Black Knight Ghost and are piling items up on a door to block it, and I’m already laughing, I see it coming. The Ghost comes in through a secret door and starts handing items to them, Shaggy says ‘Thanks’ then put the item on the barricade, pauses, looks back the ghost, says ‘Zoinks!’ and he and Scooby freak out! Classic Doo. Then in a send up of it, Fred comes in with a shield, says ‘Bring it!’ and the Knight bangs the shield about a dozen times rattling Fred’s noggin, he stands dazed for a second, says ‘He brought it’ and passes out on the floor. There is even a bar where all the ‘unmasked’ villains go to hang out and share their hatred of all things Mystery, Inc. called ‘the Faux Ghost’. They ring a doorbell and get a voice warning saying to ‘Go Away, or Else!’, Shaggy says they shouldn’t ring it, Fred asks ‘What could possibly happen?’, and when he rings it again a trap door opens and they all fall, one at a time, and Scooby runs in place for a couple of seconds before doing so. And the ghosts… the Black Knight Ghost, the Thousand Watt Ghost, the Tar Ghost, the one-eyed skeleton ghosts, Miner Forty-Niner… hehe, pure Scooby Doo.

** SPOILERS DONE **

Yeah, whatever, you read the spoilers anyway…

The only other thing I have to say, besides the fact that these movies are worth watching at least once, is that Matthew Lillard is a horrible horrible actor… however, he is perfectly cast as Shaggy. Perhaps if they keep making enjoyable Scooby Doo movies, we can keep him from making anything else.

And that`s two.

Random Thoughts

This time its the vent glass on the rear door of the passenger side. And it turns out the vent glass isn’t as useless as I pictured. An enterprising thief used a stick or something after breaking the vent glass to push the power door lock button.

With the doors open, he was free to pry off the dashboard cover and steal my stereo.

Twice in two weeks. What are the odds? I was even parked in a “better” packing lot… better only so far as unmanned-pay-money-in-a-slotted-board lots can be.

I decided I want a car alarm… but not one that prevents break-ins. I want one that allows the break-in, and then kills the intruder. I was to find dead street thugs laying in pools of blood when I discover my car has again been vandalized or a target for theft. Kill ’em all.