Frenzied Daddy

It seems like every day we have another spiteful story about Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. It reminds me of the Incredibles. Syndrome has done away with all of the other superheroes, so there’s only himself as a logical candidate when the crap hits the fan, or his robot goes haywire, or whatever.

I propose to you, my fellow democrats, that Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee aren’t really the candidates that we need to worry about. I suspect that the Republican party has already forgotten them, and that their candidate will be running on a platform of “not-them.” Like “Dick Cheney…. He’s not Huckabee.” Know what I mean?

The Republican Party is doing some sleight of hand to get us all riled up about how much “worse than Bush” a Romney President would be, and then will pull the carpet out from beneath us, and surprise! a Cheney/Rice ticket ! (Or something even I can’t imagine.)

Get your tin foil hats out and put up your shields; this could be a bumpy ride.

Damn.

It’s things like this that make me wonder what the heck I’m doing living in the basement and writing web pages. I haven’t really ranted in a while so I’m due. Stand back while I clear the bile from my ducts.

This 78 year old pensioner lived on her Social Security for ten years and still managed to save enough money to take the dream trip of a lifetime; she and a friend planned and booked a flight and then a cruise to Alaska. It looks like she paid her money directly to Princess Cruises.

This woman was scheduled for a trip to Anchorage, where the cruise would start, from Baltimore, to Minneapolis and then to Seattle, and then on to Anchorage. She made it to Minneapolis.

Things went downhill. The flight from Minneapolis to Seattle was delayed for two hours due to mechanical problems. We’ve all been there. It happens. So she missed her flight from Seattle to Anchorage. Then she had an opportunity to run from one end of SeaTac to the other — to be faced with a full airplane, and no room for these two elderly ladies. They raced to another plane, but that offered flight was booked too. Two people offered their seats to the elderly women but the flight attendants wouldn’t let them switch. So these two pensioners who saved for ten years for this trip of their dreams missed their boat when it left from Anchorage.

Northwest Airlines did great; they offered to send the women on another flight to a different port and they could meet up with their cruise. But they would have missed the glaciers — the part that made it all worth while for the ladies. And when the ladies decided they’d rather just go home because they were exhausted ( I guess waking up at five in the morning, taking two flights, racing across SeaTac can be kind of wearying ), Northwest flew them home for free. And then refunded their money for the flights that they didn’t use.

They refunded it to Princess Cruises. Another person might expect that something would be returned to the woman; at least the airfare for the trips, trips that weren’t even on Princess. This is what pisses me off.

But Princess spokeswoman Julie Benson said the woman will not get the refunds; Princess keeps the combined total of $559.80. The cruise line negotiates fares and special refund conditions with the airlines, Benson said, and the line’s policy is an industry standard :”The cancellation penalty applies to the cruise, airfare, prepaid excursions and pre- or post-cruise packages.” Because the woman hadn’t bought travel insurance (her friend did), she gets nothing back. Benson said it would be unfair to other passengers to do something different for just one.

So not only does this woman not get the dream trip she saved for ten years for, but she’s out the $2500 and the $550 for the airplane tickets. Damn.

I don’t like to write about my life in Anchorage. I always feel that y’all are gonna judge me based on it. But it was a long time ago, and things have changed a lot for me. However, somethings have stuck with me. First, most of my “formative” years were spent in a trailer park that was built on, what to all intents and purposes used to be a swamp. I hated it. Well, I didn’t really know different, so I can’t say I hated it, but looking back, it was pretty bleak.

The toilet pipes ran under the trailer, and would freeze once or twice a winter, and our toilets wouldn’t flush and the shower wouldn’t run. We had a small bathroom next to my room, and in the middle of it was the washing machine. It was almost always pulled out of where it was “supposed” to be, sitting in the middle of the bathroom connected to the bathroom sink. It was difficult to get past, my clothes didn’t get cleaned, and I rarely got a shower. So I was greasy and smelled funny.

I was embarrassed by our trailer. One time in Junior High school my Science Teacher (Sandra Dexter) took several of us to a science fair. I asked to be dropped off last, basically because I didn’t want any of the kids to see the trailer. I still can’t believe that my father brought up two boys in that single wide. “At least,” he would say, “it’s paid for. We couldn’t afford the rent on a house, and we have this.”

It’s funny; I never really thought of my dad, who would crawl under the trailer with a space heater or a hair dryer to unfreeze the pipes. It was “something he did,” and so I didn’t think too deeply about it. But it would be hard to get myself to crawl under there. Dark, closed in, smelly, muddy. I can’t even crawl under my car to change the oil.

Anyway.

I routinely violate the main tenet of working from home; I stumble out of bed, pull my pants on (usually the ones from yesterday), get a cup of water, and stumble downstairs to the computer, where I stare at the Internet until my brain works enough to start working. A shower isn’t really in that plan. If I don’t have anywhere to go, taking a shower doesn’t enter the picture. For that matter, I’m frequently in the same shirt I wore to bed. In this way, I’m repeating my childhood; I’m sitting in smelly wrinkled clothes and haven’t showered in days.

Some days I’ve turned around to see Miss B “ready to go to school.”

In the same shirt she wore yesterday.

I’m hoping it’s only a role-model thing and not a “totally uncaring” thing. At any rate, I have even more reason now to shower every morning, and change my shirt.

This is probably the saddest cartoon I’ve ever seen. Of course it’s not mine, and it’s not Bill’s. It really highlights to me that my generation loves the creativity and the energy of Calvin / Spaceman Spiff and yet we’re happy to give our kids drugs to “help them focus.” I think we parent too much through medication these days, and we don’t pay attention to the perils of the television or other distractions.

Now get off my lawn you hippy kids!

We meditate on the transcendental Glory of the Deity Supreme, who is inside the heart of the earth, inside the life of the sky and inside the soul of the Heaven. May He stimulate and illuminate our minds. Lead me from the unreal to the Real. Lead me from darkness to Light. Lead me from death to immortality.

This was the nondenominational prayer being spoken by Reverend Rajan Zed before first the US House, and then the California Senate. He was interrupted several times during his prayer at the US House, but his prayer in Sacramento was uninterrupted.

However, Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, told the San Francisco Chronicle that it remains a mystery to whom Zed was praying.

“I don’t know if he even knows who he’s praying to. We’re not opposed to the ability of people to worship their own gods or god, but when it comes to our civil government … it’s always been the recognition of the God of the Bible. Every religion is not equal. That’s my belief. That’s logic.”

Nice. I refuted the whole “that’s my belief, that’s logic” argument in sophomore philosophy; it can’t be both logic and belief. I have a somewhat more generous view now, some twenty years later. But the “our civil government only recognizes the Judeo-Christian god” turn of phrase turns my stomach.

Source

It’s been a hell weekend.

Saturday was Ms B’s work picnic at the zoo. How cool is that? We got free admission to the zoo, late at night after the zoo closed. Most of the animals, were, sadly, sleeping, but we had food, played bingo, looked at elephants, and even rode the zoo train. Miss K had way too much fun and threw a total tantrum when we left. I mean a serious tantrum. We’ll have to go back; she loved it. I think she’d move there if we’d let her.

Sunday was a different story. I’m nominally in charge for my “regular” job while Chris gets married and has his honeymoon. Saturday morning before I came on, the main database server failed. The main replicator from this server failed. When I came on, it took about an hour to an hour and a half to get it back online. However, I didn’t check for the other servers; and shortly afterwards, they failed too. That wasn’t so great, because when that happened I was dealing with another issue and then mowing the lawn. If I had dealt with it right away, it would have been (relatively painless). But since I waited, the log files were cleaned up, and I had to suffer.

The other issue I was dealing with? One of my main clients has a webserver and does web hosting. They were having phishing sites uploaded to their servers and spam messages being sent out. It took me a while to straighten this out, and then since I don’t have as much time for them. I scripted some protection. And updated their firewall. And … well, you get the idea. It was a heavy job.

Then it was time to check back with my “real” job; and start the laborous process of redoing mysql replication from square one. I got those started and it was time to go get some food for dinner. Hurray for me! I went shopping. And made dinner, and came back into the office to find out that the drives on the slave database servers were full and replication still wasn’t going.

I turned the task over to the two other guys on call this weekend so I could get some sleep. I’m logging in now to find … yup, mysql replication is still broken. So, it’s being a rough week.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, a democratic ruler faced a losing war intertwined with civil chaos and an extremely low popularity rate.

This man was named “Julius Caesar,” and he successfully sailed his storm by ordering the slaughter of the Gaul and occupying their territory with outplaced Romans. Then he used his military might to quash his country’s internal problems. Philip Atkinson recommends that President Bush emulate Julius Caesar and do exactly the same. Order his military to kill all the Arabs in Iraq, move Americans into Iraq, and then turn the military against the sane people of America. By doing this, he would turn the liability of Iraq into an asset, he would cast fear into our enemies, and he would be popular with his military.

Oh, and he would be “President for Life Bush.”

President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.

I only have one question for Mr Atkinson: ARE YOU FREAKING INSANE?

Geez sometimes I think I should just start a personal finance blog. Or bring up more pf entries. My rantings on USBank get the best traffic on the site.

When it comes to paying my bills, I’m kind of a luddite. I think I’ve mentioned this before. I don’t want automatic bill pay, I don’t want electronic bill pay, I just want to feel the check in my hand as I write it and send it out. It’s the same reason I used to keep track of my business accounts in a ledger book; I like the physicality of the process. It makes it seem more real to me. Besides; what if something went horribly wrong.

I’ve had so many problems with USBank and overdrafts that I signed up for email alerts; if our account goes below $50, I get an email, and if our account goes negative, I get an email. So it really surprised me when I got an email yesterday that our account had been overdrawn the day before. So, yeah, that’s another hundred bucks in overdraft charges. Completely avoidable if I had gotten the email the day it had happened (I had the money sitting in the savings account). I called USBank and bitched them out. They transferred me to the online services department who told me that this was “working as intended.”

Ok, I’m not arguing that it’s the bank’s responsibility to tell me when I’m overdrawn, but when they tell me that they’ll alert me when I am, then I expect them to tell me, ahem, when I am. I’m not blaming the bank for the fact that I was overdrawn. I take responsibility for that- but their system is supposed to let me know if something went awry.

They only send out emails three times a day, and paper checks go through all in the middle of the night sometime. Electronic tranfers are handled immediately, but paper is processed at the end of the day, which happens to eb about six hours before they send out emails.

So yeah, one paper check goes through, bam, you’re overdrawn, five electronic transfers get handled immediately, and suddenly you’re $200 overdrawn, and wake up to the musical ka-ching of US Bank’s registers.

This is from their FAQ regarding account alerts:

You will receive an alert when a transaction posts to your account that causes your available balance to become negative. Subsequent account activity may make your end-of-day available balance positive and prevent an overdraft condition.

So on 7/16, I had activity and could have made a deposit. However, I wasn’t alerted to this until 7/17, which meant that I got banged for the “overdraft condition.”

Are there any banks that treat their customers fairly? Jeez.

I spent part of this morning looking for an image of the Family Circus’s “not me” schmoo. Because he and his brethren (“I dunno” and “Not My Fault”) have moved in. I would love to evict them; which means I need to teach my kids to take responsibility for their actions and to help find solutions rather than placing blame.

Not that I don’t do that now, but somewhere I’ve gone wrong with it.

But in searching for that image, I stumbled upon the Nietzche Family Circus, a parody of that damnably tepid comic. This quote made me pause; “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” I can totally see where Nietzche is coming from with that, and in some of my more angsty days, I could actually think that.

Hope provides a barrier, a resistance to acceptance. If you hope for an outcome, you’re not accepting some other outcome. I wonder what our Bhuddist friends make of this. “Life is suffering” is not that too far removed from “hope is the worst of all evils” — or is it? Both seem to lead one to an acceptance of “the bad situations we find ourselves in,” from which we can work our way out of them.