Category: Life

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1. You can disagree with or dislike people in your government, from your city council up through the President, and still love your country. (Conservatives disliked the President for 8 years; denying that privilege to the rest of us is hypocrisy at best.)

2. You can oppose war – or a particular war – without being anti-American. Speaking out against your nation’s policies and actions is not treason, it is necessary for a free society. If no one disagrees with the official policy, and that policy turns out to be a mistake – say, slavery, for instance – the mistake will never be corrected.

3. No, being a movie star does not make you an expert on politics. Neither does being a country singer. But neither job makes your opinion matter any less than anyone else’s.

4. America is not and should not be a theocracy. Freedom of religion does not exist without freedom from religion. If you are free to attend a Lutheran service only if you also attend a Catholic mass, you don’t have freedom of religion. If you can practice Christianity at home but your children are expected to recite Allah Akbar daily in school, you don’t have freedom of religion. This doesn’t mean that you can’t pray the way you want to. It does mean you cannot coerce me into praying the way you want me to.

5. Remember, the first amendment is there to protect unpopular speech. The popular speech doesn’t need protecting. And not everyone is offended by the same things.

6. The right to speak freely does not compel others to listen. You always have the right to turn the radio to another station, hang up the phone, or walk away. If I don’t want you to call or email me, I have the right to block you, and as long as the choice is mine, there is no reason I can’t let someone else handle the administrative details – whether it’s a restraining order against a stalker, a spam blacklist, or a do-not-call list.

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Aaagh. Every time we try to get something going on wedding planning, we find more reasons to scrap the whole thing. Last month we got soured on a whole lot of aspects with one series of tours, and we just managed to get ourselves out of the house on the subject again today.

I had vowed at the beginning of this to avoid David’s, the Wal-Mart of bridal stores, like the plague. However, being this close and having nothing to show for it but a pair of shoes, toasting glasses, and a cake server has begun to freak me out, so I braved the place. I remembered walking in and being accosted by a plethora of pushy, smiley salestwigs who wanted us to try on all sorts of stuff. Not this time. Turns out the place is having a sale, and as a result was completely packed. And sometime between 2000 and 2003, they made appointments mandatory for bridal tryons. So here I am, getting wonderful upper-arm exercise pawing through the racks, trying to get the attention of someone who won’t even take the time to ask if I have an appointment, and nobody bothers to tell me that I need one. For half an hour. So they’re off my list, again.

Then we get home and there’s another piece of paper spam for a hotel offering reception sevices. Since there’s no way my hair could make a standard-time-slot morning wedding on time, we’re looking at afternoon, which means a dinner reception. Their cheapest dinner is $31.95 a plate, not including 19% gratuity and 7.75% sales tax, which makes it $40.97 a person. And depending on what the “chef’s choice” of vegetable might be, Kelson might not be able to eat it. No, thank you.

Vegas is looking pretty and shiny again.

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Yes, it’s real! Last week Katie remarked we were running low on coffee, and I remembered an article on MozillaZine a few weeks ago about RJ Tarpley’s Mozilla Coffee. I figured, what the heck, let’s order some. It’s a way to get coffee and support Mozilla at the same time.

An open box containing a bag of Mozilla Coffee.

We went out for a late lunch/early dinner today, and as we came up the stairs we noticed a note tucked into the doorframe. At first I figured UPS had left a “sorry we missed you” note, but when we got up to the landing, the doormat was propped up on a six inch tall box! (That and it turned out to be FedEx, but I digress.) “Hey, no one will notice if we hide this under the doormat!”

We haven’t tried it yet, but we’ll post the results of our taste-test once we do.

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Yet another call of “I can’t retrieve email!” Always from Outlook users. If you use Eudora, Netscape – hell, even Outlook Express, you’ll get some sort of error message if it stops working. You can usually solve it by closing the program and starting it up again. But Outlook… Outlook will get into modes where it says it’s connecting, but it will never actually contact the server. Outlook will decide it needs to ask you for your password over and over again. And if you close Outlook, it’s not necessarily gone. Even “Exit and Log Off” doesn’t always do it. No, you have to reboot the %#@! computer. And if you’re lucky, you don’t have to track down the elusive Inbox Repair Tool (which might be in the Start menu. Maybe.)

I swear, if Outlook didn’t have the name Microsoft in front of it, no one would buy it. Maybe the latest version is better, but everything I’ve tried to use or troubleshoot is still just Schedule+ on steroids with email thrown in. Calling Outlook an email program is like calling a big clunky van a race car because you’ve replaced the engine. Outlook Express, for all its rampant security problems, is a much better mail program than its namesake.

Yecch!

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The world of email viruses has changed. In the old days, they would piggyback on the messages you sent, or make your regular mail program send them out while you weren’t looking. These days they send the messages themselves, so they pick a fake return address from the same source as its list of victims: address books, web caches, and so on.

The return address on a virus like Sobig doesn’t mean crap.

So why the heck are all these idiotic virus scanners (*cough* Declude *cough*) sending me messages saying “You sent us a virus!” when a cursory glance at the headers clearly shows that it originated on the other side of the planet?

I’ve already got the server filtering out the virus itself – I’m seriously thinking about filtering out the useless warnings.

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….because right now, they’re more fun than handmaidens. This took place in the car on the way home today.

Kelson: “I’ve heard 193, 195, and 196. Where’d those numbers come from?”
Katie: “Two minutes, five minutes, and ten minutes later.”
Kelson: “I mean, the deadline was Saturday!”
Katie: “‘Uh-oh, it was stuck to somebody else’s. ….It was stapled to the chicken.'”
Kelson: (smirking) “Peer pressure.”
Katie: “So we have one stapled to the chicken, one peer pressure, and two stuck to other people’s. So who turned in the chicken?”
Kelson: (laughter)
Katie: “I know, it was filling out the forms as it went.”
Kelson: “No wonder they’re so hard to read!”

…..kind of like my notes on this conversation…..

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