The Struggle Within

So this message just popped up on my laptop:


(And no, I'm not running Windows Vista, which you'd think would be the only flavor of Windows that would do such a thing.)

All of this takes me back to the days when I listened to Metallica's eponymous black album. (Sidenote: my prepubescent sister reported having nightmares after listening to "Enter Sandman.") On this album is a song entitled "The Struggle Within" and it goes something like this:

Struggle within, it suits you fine
Struggle within, your ruin
Struggle within, you seal your own coffin
Struggle within, struggling within

Yes, very insightful.

Handy Business Tip: Randomly Being a Moron Will Drive Your Customers Away

Today, around 3:45pm, the Captain left his suburban office with the intent of arriving back home in the city in time to get his hair cut, work out, and shower before heading out for dinner. As his Mystery Ship cruised down the Mass Pike with its sunroof fully open and his radio tuned to All Things Considered, the sunny afternoon promised a bounty of relaxation and personal-life productivity.

However, [insert here your favorite cliche or other literary device that connotes "it was not to be so" and/or generally changes the tone of the established narrative].

I arrived at Kendall Barbers at approximately 4:32pm. For those that aren't familiar with this particular shop, this is the quaint little venue with the barber pole right next to the Kendall Square Post Office in Camrbidge. (For more information, please see the overly small stock image to the right.) Recently, having decided to graduate from SuperCuts, I've alternated patronizing this shop and my girlfriend's (significantly more expensive) hair stylist, with the idea that this routine achieves some sort of optimal balance of quality, convenience and value.

Well, no sooner had I strolled into the shop when a woman working there announced to me that they were closed. This notion of "being closed" seemed a bit strange to me, since the sign outside the store indicated that they were open from 9am - 5pm, Monday through Friday, and that they were currenly OPEN. Appealing to logic, reason, and the general making-sense-ness of things, I pointed out the fact that the sign ouside said they were open until 5pm, that it was currently 4:33pm, and that (above all else) the door sign that indicated the shop's current OPEN / CLOSED status clearly stated that the shop was presently OPEN. (I could have just as easily argued -- probably quite successfully -- that the hour of 4:33pm generally occurs before 5pm, holding the current calendar date, time zone, and integrity of space-time constant -- and therefore the shop should be open regardless of its stated status, but I felt this was unnecessary.)

At any rate, the woman responded that they did not accept new customers after 4:45, as if this meant something. Now, perhaps I should have considered the fact that she could have invented a time machine over her lunch break, or that her perception of time had been adversely affected by a miniature black hole courtesy of CERN, but at the time it seemed pretty obvious to me that her argument had no merit. However, as I began to point out that it was barely past 4:30, the woman abruptly cut me off and stated simply that they were closed for the day.

Now, in my experience, when businesses post a sign that says they are open until a certain time, they will accept new customers up until that time, since the posted hours serve to inform customers as to when they are welcome much more than they serve to indicate to employees when they can go home. Additionally, if by chance a business forgets to shut its doors and change its OPEN sign to CLOSED when its employees no longer want new customers, they should at least be courteous enough to honor the requests of an unsuspecting customer who happens to wander in and actually expect to receive a service in exchange for monetary considerations. And, finally, regardless of whatever misunderstandings may arise, there's never any reason to respond to a customer's honest inquiries by snapping at them.

So, given today's events, and the fact that this shop really doesn't offer any value-added over the likes of SuperCuts and the other big chains, I see no reason to go back again. Is this an irrational reaction to the trivial act of one employee (who was likely just having a bad day)? Most likely... but what's driving me to abandon this shop is not so much this one act itself, but rather the degree to which the act had to contradict objective reality and notions of common courtesy in order to achieve whatever end the woman had in mind. Among the hundreds of other possible easier courses of action, why choose the one that's least professional, least congenial, and least good for you and your employer in the long run? Is a mere 10-15 minutes of additional work and pretending to be nice to someone really that horrible of an alternative? And if it is, what's wrong with giving a quick and simple explanation that doesn't directly contradict established facts or insult anyone's intelligence?

Eh, whatever. Let's just call it an arbitrary decision on both of our parts and move on.

Some Reasons Why Bunnies Are Funny (Honey)

I like rabbits for a variety of reasons. They're usually quite skittish little creatures, which makes sense given that they've been hunted by a multitide of predators for thousands of years. However, if you're one of the kind, eccentric souls that adopts one as a pet, you'll discover that, over a period of a few years, they tend to mellow out a bit, sometimes to an unnerving degree:

If you feed them sweet things (such as papaya), they will often reward you with a random happy-dance or two:

In addition, rabbit jumping is, apparently for some, a professional sport:

And, if you're ever in doubt, just throw a chicken into the fray:

But if you ask me, the #1 source of rabbit-derived amusement is to just watch them hop around aimlessly, stopping at random intervals to do nothing at all, only to resume the hopping in a completely different direction some time later:

Ah, if only my girlfriend weren't allergic to the little buggers, my living room might look like this:

In the end, I may have to compromise and settle for an outdoor rabbit:

Today's Random Depictions of Jesus

Admit it. Somewhere, in the stale recesses of your mind, you knew all along that Jesus of Nazareth packed one hell of a hadouken:



Maybe you didn't know that Jesus was also very skilled in the art of the short sword, but that shouldn't surprise anyone who's familiar with this t-shirt:



Okay, so you didn't play Dungeons and Dragons as a kid. Neither did I, so I found this one more interesting:



No? Hmmm... okay, how about:



This one even has a backstory:

The Attack of the 500-foot Jesus will begin on a Tuesday, not far from the Independence, Missouri bus stop you normally pass on your way to work. At approximately six seconds past six minutes past six hours into the day (that's 06:06:06, derived from the number of the beast), 500-foot Jesus will rise from the depths of a nearby underground train station, cracking the ground as He rises up. He will carry two train carriages all the way to downtown Kansas City; the carraiges[sic] which will then be thrown into the two tallest buildings in the vicinity.

So there you go.

The Fallacy of Measuring the Price of Oil with Numbers

We humans seem to have a thing for numerical milestones. Each year that a person spends on this planet warrants a celebration, especially if it's their 1st, 16th, 21st, 30th, (40th?) or 100th birthday. In 1976, the U.S. Treasury was so eager to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the day the Second Continental Congress told the Brits to go wank off with a moldy crumpet that they minted a special quarter (many of which I used to buy large quantities of SweetTarts, sometimes in conjunction with a $2 bill). And, earlier this year, a collective gasp was heard from sea to shining sea as the price of crude oil topped $100/barrel.

Now, apart from the related bigger-picture issues -- e.g., the fact that $100/barrel oil indicates that our energy policy / priorities are out of whack, that the dollar is falling, etc. -- there really isn't any reason why this event is newsworthy per se. Think about it: if we had a base-16 counting system, that ominous $100/barrel mark would instead be a relatively unimportant-looking $64/barrel, and we'd be waiting until oil hit two hundred fifty-six decimal dollars before stopping the presses and sounding the panic alarms.

The interesting part is that, in spite of our affinity for base-10 and milestones that are multiples of 5 or 10, now that we're past $100/barrel, the media are not waiting around until it hits $200 or even $150 before once again going shock-and-awe with the doom-and-gloom. Indeed, it seems like every day, your morning newspaper(.com)'s front page blares something to the effect of:

CRUDE OIL PASSES $102/BARREL

OIL TOPS OUT AT A RECORD $104.36/BARREL!!

SKYROCKETING OIL PRICES SURPASS $107/BARREL!!! OH NO!!!

These headlines are especially bizarre given the fact that, unless we as a species can collectively kick the oil habit (and given the rate of growth in the developing world, that's not going to be anytime soon), the price of oil is always going to go up over time. That is to say that, in terms of their efficacy in conveying useful information about the state of the world, these headlines are functionally equivalent to this one:

TIME SETS ANOTHER RECORD FOR THE NUMBER OF SECONDS THAT HAVE ELAPSED SINCE THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE

In a couple of years, our current per-barrel price of $124 (or $7C hex), will seem like a steal. Even now, as Americans complain about paying $3.50/gallon for gas at the pump (or, in the case of the Captain's diesel-powered Indigo Mystery Ship, $4.50/gallon), much of the rest of the world (including our friends across the Atlantic who pay $9/gallon) has erupted into fits of melancholy laughter.

So, rather than wasting our energy (actual and metaphorical) lamenting the fact that oil has entered the realm of triple-digits (at least in base-10) -- and will likely stay there forever more -- how about if we instead focus on finding more innovative, affordable, and scalable ways to power our cars, planes, and 60" plasma TVs? And hey, if the numbers still make you nervous, just fire up calc.exe and switch it to Hex mode. You'll feel better.

Stuff You Think About When You Don't Sleep Enough

Whenever you play an especially memorable movie character, you are forevermore chained to that character's identity. Lawrence Fishburne will always be Morpheus. Hugo Weaving will always be Agent Smith. In the immortal words of my friend the Hornett:

"Welcome to Rivendell...	... Mr. Anderson."

I was therefore very disappointed when I saw 21 this past weekend and witnessed Lawrence Fishburne beat the hell out of Jim Sturgess without making him choose between the red pill and the blue pill.

When milk is in short supply, or you find yourself in such an environment where milk will quickly spoil (i.e. there is no refrigerator), you can still make decent espresso drinks with Swiss Miss... but you'll still need an espresso machine.

I have no idea how to throw a football. For most American-born-and-raised males of the species, this skill is second nature. Unfortunately for me, I can't help myself from trying to throw it like a baseball, usually with disastrous results for the would-be receiver.

Sometimes you just want to pole-vault over a sleeping elephant.

The sounds and gestures that baseball umpires make to indicate a strikeout used to be so much funnier. Will there ever be a revival? One can only hope. Until then, I guess this will have to do.

I Am a Valued Verizon FiOS Customer

The Captain just received a dose of classic corporate customer-service awesomeness from Verizon's FiOS Division.

My roommate and I have had FiOS in our apartment for the past year and a half. Over this period of time, we've logged several tech support issues (probably around 5 or 6) relating to our ActionTec MI424WR router (the standard router that Verizon gives you when you become a FiOS customer). Issues included:

• Intermittently, the router would start dropping all wireless packets, in spite of 100% signal strength and the fact that wired LAN packets continued to flow at full-speed. Restarting the router always fixed the issue, if only for a few minutes.


• Intermittently, the ethernet ports would go dead. Restarting the router sometimes fixed this, other times it did not.


• Intermittently, it would be impossible to login to the router's configuration utility, as it would reject our [correctly-entered] username and password. Restarting the router would fix this issue.

Since these issues were intermittent in nature (as you may have gathered), the tech always found a way to cite "wireless interference during certain hours" or "faulty wiring in our [3-year-old] apartment" as a reason for not actually attempting to solve our problem. Whenever we asked the tech to replace the router, they denied that Verizon had ever given us one (?!), and then went on to recommend that we go to our loal electronics store to get a new one.

A few months ago, the router flat-out died, so we plugged in a random linksys as a replacement and moved on with our lives.

Fast-forward to today, when I checked the mail and discovered that Verizon has sent us a small package for some reason. Inside was an A/C power adapter for the ActionTec router, along with a letter that says [emphasis theirs]:

Dear FiOS Customer,

At Verizon, we are committed to delivering the future of the Internet to you today. To achieve that goal, we continually monitor and test our products, searching for ways to improve them. We have recently improved the life expectancy of your FiOS router power adapter and are excited to share this enhancement with you.

Please replace your current router power adapter with the enclosed enhanced power adapter. This new power adapter is provided to you at no additional charge. We want to ensure you continue to enjoy the benefits of our fiber-optic network, delivering the full potential of the Internet with mind-boggling speed and TV with 100% digital picture. [Editor's side-note: it's really unsatisfying to watch 87% digital TV.]

Please follow the simple steps in the instructions sheet* to replace your router power adapter.

Important: This power adapter is compatible only with Verizon-provided FiOS routers with Model Number MI424WR.

Sincerely,

James Kilroy
Director, FiOS Product Management

* In case you're wondering, the attached "instructions sheet" really does just tell you to unplug the old power adapter, and plug in the new one. Of course, nowhere does it tell you how to verify that you do indeed have Model Number MI424WR.

All of this very interesting for a couple of reasons:

1. After we repeatedly asked Verizon for a new router, and after Verizon repeatedly told us that they never actually gaven us a router in the first place, here we find ourselves presented with a power supply for a router that doesn't officially exist.

2. Translation of the term enhanced power adapter: "a power adapter that is actually compatible with the electronics that it is powering, unlike the previous model, which was widely reported and known to fry the router within a year or so"

So, Mr. Kilroy, although I do appreciate the free power adapter for a router that was not electronically sound and and never 100% functional (and which you may or may not have ever actually given me), I think you and your cohorts at Verizon could make better use of your time if you made a concerted, organized effort to get your marketing, engineering, and technical support staff all on the same page, and invested more in the overall up-front quality of your product than sending your customers an ex post facto half-fix transparently sugar-coated with vacuous marketing blather.