Or at least trade them in. While I can’t really afford a car payment right about now (I’ll be needing to break the news to the dogs that they’ll have to start catching their own food – and the cats won’t make much of a meal), I decided that the only way to get peace of mind on my daily commute was to get a new car that I won’t have to worry about for a few years. So if all goes as planned, after ten mostly happy years with my 2004 Hyundai Elantra, I’ll be picking up my new vehicle after work today. Just don’t tell my current car. I once traded in an old junker of a Chevy Impala station wagon that never failed to start – until the day I was to trade it in. I wound up having AAA tow it to the dealer – “here’s your trade-in!”

Speaking of cars and car repair, if you haven’t read Alex Magliozzi’s eulogy for his dad, Tommy, you should.

In other news, apropos of getting a new vehicle, the weather around here is about to head straight into the crapper. Yesterday was gorgeous – sunny and 66°, and by the time I get home tonight, it should be down to 40 – which will look good come Friday, when it isn’t supposed to get above 35. Oh, and did I mention snow? Yeah, snow. They don’t know how much just yet (speculation is that our friends to the north will bear the brunt of it – as they should), but I might have to mount the plow on the tractor and push some snow around this weekend.

It also means I’ll have to think about snow tires, which sucks because I was pricing them out online yesterday, and damn they’re expensive.

Good thing I probably won’t live long enough to retire.

This past weekend was what I would call shitty in pretty much every way imaginable (other than nobody died – or at least nobody I know died). I’m too exhausted, disgusted, tired, stressed, and even nauseated to spell it all out. It involved cars, car repair, and, uh, the reason I should neve actually consider doing anything. Let’s just say shit broke, I had wrong parts, I was so sore and tired from 12 hours worth of grovelling on the garage floor that I couldn’t sleep on Saturday, I found more problems on Sunday which made it impossible to sleep last night, and I was waiting for something terrible to happen on my way in this morning. It didn’t, so now I can spend the ride home anticipating something bad on the way home. I’m just too old and tired and poor for this shit.

It’s decidin’ day here in ‘merica. For instance, I need to decide if I’m gonna go vote before work, or after. Probably before, but I need to get gas, too, and I hate to pack all that activity into a single day. Here in NY, besides the vote for Governor (I’ll vote for Howie Hawkins), we have three ballot propositions. The first one is a “change” to how they draw the voting districts.

By change, I mean the same assholes who draw them now (aka, the State Legislature) will basically keep doing it. Here’s the convoluted change they want to make to the State Constitution: Assholes pick eight members of a “commission” and then two more members get appointed by the eight legislatively-appointed members. These remaining two members cannot, in the preceding five years, have been enrolled in either of the two major political parties in New York State. Oh, and if these ten sub-assholes can’t get a consensus, it goes back to the main assholes.

Sounds like bullshit to me. Just a way to avoid changing anything while pretending they changed something. I vote NO!

Second prop is to allow electronic versions of bills to be presented to the assholes who won’t read them anyway, in lieu of printing copies for every member. Sound good to me. Maybe they’ll save a tree or two (though I’m sure their staffs will just print them out anyway.

The third one is money for schools:

This proposal would allow the State to borrow up to two billion dollars ($2,000,000,000). This money would be expended on capital projects related to the design, planning, site acquisition, demolition, construction, reconstruction, rehabilitation, or acquisition or installation of equipment for the following types of projects:

To acquire learning technology equipment or facilities including, but not limited to,
Interactive whiteboards,
Computer servers, and
Desktop, laptop, and tablet computers;

To install high-speed broadband or wireless internet connectivity for schools and communities;

To construct, enhance, and modernize educational facilities to accommodate pre-kindergarten programs and provide instructional space to replace transportable classroom units; and
To install high-tech security features in school buildings and on school campuses.

I think I oppose this. If it was just for the infrastructure to add decent Internet, I might go for it (though even in the rural areas around here, schools have access to broadband Internet, so I don’t know that this is really needed – let them fund it in the State budget as needed). But, like, $2 billion worth of 20 year bonds to buy laptpos that are gonna be obsolete and in a landfill about 15 years before the bonds are paid off? Doesn’t sound like a good plan to me. And when they start talking about “high-tech security features,” I start thinking about throwing lots of money away to contractors.

I think I’m gonna have to vote no on this one.

Otherwise, for the first time since we moved here, I get a choice of who to vote for for my State Assembly representative. Used to be the old white Republican dude ran unopposed every year, but this year there’s an old white Democratic woman running against him. I’ll have to go with the old broad (one of her slogans was “Albany needs some fresh blood – even if it IS 68 years old). She used to be a nurse, but I’m trying not to hold that against her.

We also have two candidates for Sheriff for the first time in, I think, my lifetime. The current one is retiring, so we get a choice.

I could go on, but I need to get off my ass and get ready to go if I’m gonna vote on the way in. My only regret is that I can’t stick around for the pancake breakfast at the Methodist church. On the bright side, I earn a day off for working today. Yay!

UPDATE: So, since I know you were all wondering, I did vote on the way in to work this morning (got gas, too – now I need a nap). I saw the wife apparently beat me there on her way in. There was a pretty good crowd, all things considered. I was #64 on the scanner that I fed my ballot in to (there were two machines there).

It’s funny, but I guess I don’t really miss the old lever machines as much as I thought I would. FOr one thing, I’ve been taking standardized tests all my life, so filling in the little circle is second nature to me. Plus, you don’t have to stand in line while the person in front of you spends half an hour trying to figure out how to get the curtain back open (though cranking that lever back over was a lot more satisfying than watching you ballot disappear into the little black box).

Instead there are plenty of little privacy stations where you can actually sit down and read the propositions if you want to. All they need to do is put out a carafe of coffee and add a urinal and it would be the perfect setup.

So my civic duty is done for another year, and now I can just sit back, relax, and wait for the Senate to fall into the hands of the Empire.

Ah, November. Cold, dark, grey, bleak, leafless November. Not quite frigid yet, but you can feel winter in the air and you know you’ve got six months of shitty weather to look forward to. God, I love me some November. I trust everybody had a happy Halloween on Friday and an enjoyable game of “Jesus Christ, when did we get all these clocks?” yesterday. This falling back stuff is strange. Yesterday morning, I went through the obligatory, “I can’t believe it’s only <insert time here> – it seems so much later!” Then in the afternoon – around one o’clock or so, I kinda got used to it, and kind of bummed when I found out I was looking at a clock that had already been changed. Then by about 5:00, I was back to thinking it was later than the clock said but by the time I stayed up too late (until nine – aka, the “old” ten), I was feeling as though we set the clocks ahead instead of behind, which kind of how I feel this morning (and what I’ll wish this evening – sunset is 4:53 PM today around here, and that just plain sucks).

Since I was off Friday, I took my sister to Costco to see what was so great. It was big and shiny and new. And they have some nice stuff, I guess. I didn’t really see anything that jumped out at me. There were way too many people, all milling about like “walkers” from the Walking Dead (shuffling around with no apparent regard for moving in a straight line and basically just being in my way). They actually made me produce my membership card just to walk in, and they only accept debit cards or AMEX (I have no desire to get another credit card – fee or no fee).

I greatly preferred my Sunday morning trip to BJs, to be honest. I got there two minutes after they opened, hardly any other people there, and I was in and out and back home in less than an hour.

Otherwise, it was kinda friggin’ cold and windy this weekend. Not much good for doing anything but consuming media. I’m really diggin’ my new Chromecast (why did I ever wait so long?), primarily for “casting” music to my stereo. It’s really kind of nice to be able to control it from my phone of computer or my tablet. And I had no idea, but when I “cast” to it, it actually turns on my receiver and sets it to the appropriate output. Aint that something? Those crafty bastards at Onkyo (OK, it’s not unique to them, it’s HDMI CEC – Consumer Electronic Control – but still)!

It’s supposed to warm up a bit this week, but don’t worry – it’ll be cold again next weekend.

It’s Friday the 31 – a day that will no doubt bring bad luck to dyslexics everywhere. I had the foresight to take the day off, which I’m quite happy about at the moment. I’d rather have taken Monday off (Mondays just seem eminently better to miss than Fridays), but I’m on call next week, so I went with today to burn one of my use-it-or-lose-it vacation days. Right now, that seems like it was a pretty good idea. In fact, all day yesterday it seemed like a really good idea too – it was all I could do to get through the day.

So I don’t know if you saw it, but they have the “Amazon Fire Stick” available for preorder, and up until Wednesday Prime customers could get it for $19. So I figured, what the hell (it won’t actually be getting here until the end of December, so I guess it looked like a good deal to lots of people). It really won’t do much more than the Roku does, but what the heck.

I’ve also been wanting to get a Chromecast, and since they’re only $28 or so, I ordered one of those, too. That, fortunately, wasn’t a backorder pre-order kind of thing, so I got it on Wednesday. What with me being already so far up Google’s ass highly invested in the Googleshpere, it’s working out quite well. The thing I’ve used it for more than anything else so far is “casting” music to my stereo (both the collection I’ve uploaded to the Google “cloud” and from my all-access music subscription).

My plan, I think, is to drop satellite service when my current contract is up (which, fortuitously, should be right around the time I can get HBO w/o a cable/sat subscription). This means I’ll need to mount an outdoor antenna on the roof for OTA teevee and build a DVR to record stuff (there’s not a lot of “regular” tv that I watch, but there are a few things – and the local PBS station, in particular, has very spotty reception out here).

There are things I’ll miss (SU sports on the cable networks, for instance – though we may be entering some rather bleak times around here), but it’s all just too damn much money for what amounts to at most a few hours a week that would be better spent reading a book.

I’m currently in the final month of all my DirecTV “incentives” so I need to cut my service back anyway. In fact, I’m trying to decide if DIY is worth paying $7 a month for, or if I can live with just HGTV. They both recycle each others’ content, but I like DIY better (mostly for Renovation Realities, where I get to make fun of all the happy homeowners doing stupid shit that thank goodness nobody ever caught me doing on camera).

Well, I’ve got time to think it all over – and, hey, I might not even be alive in a year.

Happy Halloween, if you’re into that kinda thing. I used to sit around with the curtains drawn and the lights out to discourage the little bastids from ringing the bell and getting the dogs all worked up, but now that we’re out in the middle of nowhere and way off the road, that’s no longer a problem.

Unfortunately, it also makes it more difficult for Santa to find us.

Congratulations to you San Francisco fans out there on winning yet another World Series. Enjoy it while you can, San Fran, because your ungodly way of life is set to end come election day. By all indications, it appears that Republicans will not only remain in control of the House (in fact, my less-than-wonderful Democrat representative appears poised to lose his race), but will also take the Senate. The first thing I figure they’ll do is get rid of the filibuster entirely. If you thought things sucked before (and by “you” I of course refer to wildlife, women, minorities, working people, and the poor), you aint seen nothing yet, ‘cuz as we all know, the only thing worse than Democrats is Republicans.

Republicans also seem to be about to take control of a record number of state legislatures and even in places where there are “Democratic” governors, many of them (such as Governor Snotball) are really just Republicans anyway.

I’m once again fearing for my Social Security and retirement. My only hope is that I’ll squeak by on the low end of the group they decide to grandfather (so to speak) in. Either that, or Obama realizes the only thing he’s got is the veto and he won’t play Chamberlain to the Republicans’ Nazis.

History is not on our side with that hope. So my Plan B is to die before I retire, which isn’t an unlikely scenario, all things considered.

I think it’s gonna be a long, cold winter.

My parents were married 68 years ago today. Holy shit. That means my oldest brother is pretty damn old, what with him coming along nine months and nine weeks later. They didn’t waste a lot of time back then, right after the war. My folks had to get married in the rectory, what with my dad being “one of them.” Yeah, a Lutheran. A disciple of that dirty Kraut who screwed up the good thing the Catholic church had going back then. I mean, selling people shit that they won’t realize they’ve gotten swindled until after they die is one helluva scam. Just look at the size of those mega churches out there.

So I don’t’ know if you’ve heard this or not, but there’s a consortium of retailers (that include the likes of Walmart, Best Buy, 7-Eleven, and Rite Aid) that are planning an alternative payment system called CurrenC (not to be confused with CurrenC SF, which should totally sue). They want to bypass credit card companies (and processing fees), and some of them are shutting down their NFC card readers in order to thwart Apple Pay (not to mention Google Wallet and SoftCard – nee ISIS. They changed their name for obvious reasons – both of which were around for quite a long time before Apple “revolutionized” everything and adopted NFC).

Hmm. Greedy retailers like Wal-Mart vs. greedy credit card companies. Tough call there. The CurrenC app requires you to give direct access to your bank account to this “consortium,” which is a dealbreaker for me. With Wallet or Apple Pay, I can use a credit card complete with fraud protection, or I can give my bank info to a single company – Apple or Google – but only if I want to.

It’s pretty handy to be able to tap my phone to pay, but I don’t really use it much, because I have to pull my phone out, turn on NFC (which I don’t keep on all the time – they say it uses negligible battery, but I don’t buy it), and then make sure the app is turned on and available. Whereas with my credit card, I pretty much already have my wallet out because I need to show ID to buy beer (even at my advanced age), and if I’m in a store, I’m pretty much buying beer.

I checked a lot of prices online yesterday between BJs, Costco, and Amazon. Not really a lot of difference there. I would say that Costco sells a wider variety of shit than BJs (you can actually buy caskets from their website), but that’s about it.

UPDATE You can get caskets at BJs online, too. Amazing.

It did remind me I should get busy building a casket for myself. Though I’m kind of leaning toward cremation at this point. I always thought it would be a waste of energy to burn my carcass (I mean, decomposition is free), and I kind of thought a “natural” burial would be better (basically, toss me in a hole). With a coffin something like this (maybe a nice tie-dye one) filled with those cornstarch packing peanuts.

But as I get older, I’m thinking that’s all a lot more trouble than anybody wants to deal with as far as I’m concerned. Find a natural burial “park” (the closest one around here is a fair drive away), the casket or shroud (I guess I could pre-order that), and then scramble to get me in the ground in hurry before I get too stinky.

I mean, if I’m the last one standing (so to speak), by the time they find me I’ll probably be more of a pile of bones in a puddle of goo that they’ll have to use a Shop-Vac to clean up, or somebody I know will have to deal with everything at a time when they shoudl just be enjoying the insurance money. Who wants the bother?

Speaking of bother, I guess I better think about getting ready for work. It’s supposed to be 76° out there today, and a high of 38° with perhaps some snow by Saturday. Whoopie.

We got an e-mail at work yesterday informing us that, pursuant to a CDC-issued Level 3 travel warning, we are not allowed to travel to Guinea, Liberia or Sierra Leone. Or at least, not on the company dime. Apparently there is also a Level 2 travel warning issued to “…travelers to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, urging them to protect themselves by avoiding contact with the blood and body fluids of people who are sick with Ebola.” I’ll keep that in mind. I’m not a doctor or a contagious disease expert (or even an MBA), but I’d think “avoiding contact with the blood and body fluids of people who are sick with Ebola” would be a good idea no matter where your Halloween party is located. Like, “sorry, but if you’ve got the Ebola, no apple-bobbing for you.” On the bright side, travel to Nigeria has now been downgraded to Alert – Level 1. So if you’re headed there for Thanksgiving, you should be good to go.

There’s good news for you if you happen to need a heart transplant. Previously, the protocol called for a still-beating heart to be removed from a donor and then put in a cooler full of ice. This meant donors had to be in one of two categories: Chinese prisoners (such as the one that Dick Cheney no doubt had harvested), or the brain dead. But Australian doctors have found a way around that.

Two months ago, doctors in Australia transplanted a “dead heart” — a heart that had stopped beating inside a donor’s chest — into a 57-year-old woman, reports the BBC. The operation, which has been deemed success, was unlike any other, because for the first time, it didn’t involve a brain-dead donor who’s heart was still beating.

This shows us two thing: first, you don’t gotta write good English to publish stories at “The Verge,” and second, you no longer need to get your heart transplant from a brain dead Republican, and can instead opt for a dead Liberal.

Big news yesterday as we got our first area Costco. Previously, you’d have had to drive to Kingston, ON. This would be great for me, were it not for the fact that my union worked out a deal for BJs (perhaps I should say, “at” BJs) which is like Costco in that you have to pay for the privilege of going there to spend money. We not only get a reduced rate, but we get a 15-month membership instead of 12.

I’d prefer to go to Costco, because it looks like they have some good shit, their gas is even cheaper than BJs, I hear they treat their employees well, and they have really big Teddy bears. So hopefully the union will reach out to them and at the very least ignite a bidding war.

It’s not a particularly pleasant-looking day out there today, but I’m gonna try and cut the grass one last time and get ready for winter. Not a pleasant thought, really, but the snow could fly at any time now. I really should get the storm windows in and see if the heat still works, too.

I think this image tweeted by Scott Bixby yesterday really sums up the differences between the US and Canada.

Our for-profit media pushes terror, and their public news pushes…. News. I bet they’re not even all that afraid of Ebola up there. Though I hope if any actual highly communicable disease outbreak occurs, nobody goes to Texas for treatment, ‘cuz they just don’t seem to take this isolation shit seriously. Probably ‘cuz “Universal Precautions” sounds too much like socialism or something.

Speaking of socialism and undermining the American way of life, if you work for the right company, you may get cheap solar power as a benefit.

On Wednesday, three major companies — Cisco Systems, 3M, and Kimberly-Clark — announced they will now give employees a deeply discounted way of buying or leasing solar panels for their homes.

Called the Solar Community Initiative, the program promises a flat rate that is on average 35 percent lower than the national average and roughly 50 percent less expensive than average electric utility rates. According to the announcement, the offer will start as a benefit to more than 100,000 employees. If one percent choose to power their homes with solar, more than 74,500 metric tons of carbon emissions would be avoided each year.

Offered through Geostellar, a cost comparison site for solar panels, the program will also include options for employees’ friends and families in the United States and parts of Canada.

That ought to piss off a lot of teabaggers and Koch fiends. Needless to say, if anybody out there works for one one of those companies, please add me to your “friends and family” list.

I noticed that there might be some of you (OK, mostly one of you) running afoul of the anti-spam plugin I’m using now. It’s mostly there to prevent the annoying spam registrations that occur at the rate of about 20 per day, give or take. It also tests comments for spam, though that’s not really needed since you need to be registered to comment. It did allow me to turn trackbacks and pingbacks on again (not that that is really important, since we don’t get many here and they were a major source of spam for a while before I turned them off).

So, anyway, I don’t see an option to turn off the comment spam checker and it looks like we’re stuck with it. There are a bunch of algorithms that it apparently uses, but I turned logging on and noticed a bunch of legit-looking comments getting blocked. Really, just one comment, but somebody tried it a whole bunch of times. Here’s the only thing I can see about it that doesn’t look Kosher:


<a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ben-bradlee-legendary-washington-post-editor-dies-at-93/2014/10/21/3e4cc1fc-c59c-11df-8dce-7a7dc354d1b1_story.html?hpid=z1\">Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor, dies at 93</a>


See that backwards slash right after the href= and before the “http://” part? That aint right. Neither is the one at the end before the closing ” in the link. I don’t know how those got there (tried duplicating it, but to no avail), or why they’d cause the comment to be considered spam. Maybe that wasn’t it, but that’s all I could see that looked funky.

So, anyway, if you find your comments disappearing, before you post, click on the “source” button and you’ll see the non-formatted code. You can try taking out anything that looks odd, or you can copy and paste the code and e-mail it to me, and I’ll see if I can figger out what’s wrong.

Oh well, time to get back to work.

For the first time in more than a month, Syracuse actually found a football team worse than they are – and we thank the kind folks in Winston-Salem North Carolina and Wake Forest University for the much needed ass-kicking they allowed us to give them yesterday. I don’t bring this up to rehash a sports event that I know nobody really cares about, but rather to mention how much I miss the olden days.

Back in the day, when SU won a football game on Saturday, I had to wait until Sunday in order to devour the newspaper sports section. Now with the Internet and online news sites, I’d already read everything there is to read – which is basically the lo-cal “paper” site and the same AP story recycled on ESPN, SI, USA Today, and the other national sites.

Of course, it’s not just Sundays during football season that I miss. There once was a time when I’d go out and get the local Sunday paper as well as the Sunday NY Times (and even the Daily News, more for the amusement factor than the news) and spend all Sunday drinking coffee (and smoking cigarettes and/or pot, back when I used to do that sort of thing), reading the papers, and doing the crossword puzzles.

Ah, those were the days. Not that there aren’t advantages to how things work today, of course. For one thing, I don’t have to fiddle with the shortwave radio to get the BBC or play with the rabbit ears to get the CBC news on Channel 11 from Kingston. But there was just something about sitting around amidst piles of newspaper that really took the edge off the end of the weekend.

The pot helped, too.