mcgees.org

Here’s a weird one from the US Postal Service.

If you want the signature of someone to prove a letter was delivered, the minimum cost is $4.34, for a 1 oz. letter, as of this writing.  According to the DMM, a letter must conform to certain characteristics, including a thickness “not more … than 1/4 inch”.

A piece of mail that is “not less … than 1/4 inch thick” is automatically a package, even if it’s in a normal envelope (presumably a mailpiece exactly 1/4 inch thick could go as either, although to what accuracy the measurement is required is not defined.)  Now, a service called “Signature Confirmation^TM” is available for packages.  A 1 oz. package can be sent with electronic Signature Confirmation for $2.40, or 45% less than a letter.  The trick?  Add a single packing “peanut” to the envelope.  I learned this trick from a games dealer.

I’ve gotten into the habit of using Signature Confirmation for anything of reasonable importance, from shady rebates to returns of $400 hardware.

Income taxes fall into this range for me.

I sent a suitably-padded envelope of my California state taxes to the Franchise Tax Board with Signature Confirmation.  Signature Confirmation is trackable at usps.com.  Try my package: 4209 4240 9121 8052 1368 3160 5043 59.  It gets “Processed through Sort Facility, April 16, 2009, 8:41 pm, SACRAMENTO, CA 95834″ and then — poof! — it’s gone.

This is where I learn the awesome fact that the USPS only guarantees delivery for Express Mail.  The other services entail, I guess, delivery at their discretion.  Like, if they’re not too busy or something.

I have a copy of my state taxes (electronic) — I plan to print out another, enclose a cover letter, a printout of the tracking information, and send it in, also with Signature Confirmation.  I could, you know, spend $19.80 to send it Express Mail this time.  Then they would “guarantee delivery”.  Then, hey!  If they lost it that time, I might get my twenty bucks back!

Problem: Attempt to watch Dollhouse

Attempted solution: Visit Fox On Demand

Result:

We’re sorry, but only the following operating systems are supported at this time:

    * Windows XP or Vista
    * Mac OS X 10.3 or greater

… actions.  Topclassactions.com maintains a list of active class action lawsuits.  If you are not opposed to the whole concept (some people are) it can feel really good.  This one, for instance, is for anyone who was charged overdraft fees related to use of their Bank of America debit cards between 2000 and 2007 — the stuff I’ve been complaining about for years, such as not denying debit card payment, expressly for the purpose of extracting overdraft fees, and clearing larger transactions first to maximize this revenue.  The payout is $78.

I have no financial interest in this website.  I have deep personal interest in sticking it to BofA, however.

A former colleague of mine had once written an expert program to help physicians diagnose different sleep disorders.  He thought the coolest (his word) occurred most frequently in otherwise healthy young men from Southeast Asia.  I don’t remember the name, but by his description, it is a degenerative neurological condition in which the sleep center of the brain is slowly destroyed.  One gets progressively more severe insomnia until the sleep center is gone, then is incapable of sleeping and dies (from lack of sleep) within a week.

The only sleep disorder I’ve found in Google that is correlated with being a young Southeast Asian man is SUNDS, but the details don’t match up.

SUNDS, though: “Sudden unexpected nocturnal death syndrome”.  That has been associated with an extension of the heart’s QT interval.  And I’m on medication that can cause lengthening of the QT interval, such that I have to have regular EKGs.

So yeah, panicked insomnia is fun.  I think, “Oh my God.  I am never going to be able to sleep, and I’m going to die.”  Completely rational, right?

Thought so.

I just knew that there had to be another reason for resenting being Southeast Asian — something other than Henry Kissinger alone.

Think the United States will start supporting the ICC when that fuck dies?

Thought not.

Wikipedia’s list of war crimes.  I think they forgot to list one of the possible crimes against peace: WAR.  Damn.  Am I missing something?  Isn’t war by definition a crime against peace?

Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, aggression, treaties, blah blah.  Can a country (the U.S., to pick one at random) really sidestep this by claiming that another nation (pick one) is trying to weaponize a particular metal?  A metal of which the first nation has already weaponized and deployed approximately 1.86 trillion times as much?  And actually fucking used those weapons on Real Live People?

I did finally get to sleep yesterday, and slept my normal 3.5 hours.  You know how you can cut your foot on a piece of broken glass, and only then realize just how many steps you take in a day? Insomnia is like that.  We tend to take sleep absolutely for granted, like breathing.  And then we forget how to.  Fun stuff.

So, that was a fun night of soul-crushing insomnia.  As opposed to sole-crushing, which are already flat, whether you’re an icthyologist or a podiatrist.

I had begged for four more hours of sleep to augment the 3.5 hours I had been getting.  Like the old joke about the fortunate Russian balloonist, something got mangled in the transmission, and I actually got 4 fewer hours of sleep.

Yes, I had a night of -0.5 hours of sleep.  Or, as my Pentium claims, -0.499838 hours, which is apparently close enough for non-scientists.

As you can see, negative sleep leaves me in a state in which my only means of conversation is bad jokes (”Did you hear the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the dude wearing lederhosen?  You see, the dude wearing lederhosen thought the golfer thought himself to be Arnold Palmer.  He absolutely had no grapes, though, which is funny because horses named Thorndike can’t talk.”)

Successively blunter mechanisms — we are now at “cinder blocks” — have been wished for to pound my brain into submission.

Sigh.  Which is actually more characters in HTML (<b><i>Sigh</i></b>) than ””Sigh””, but is paradoxically much easier to remember.  I don’t want to hack Wordpress right now to give me four actual straight single quotes around that, so please use your imagination.

A certain patient Mississippi Penguin will wonder whether I succeeded in finding legal papers in the allotted interval.  The answer is, “No, that would be absurdly responsible.”

””Sigh””.  That’s “double-secret-bold-italic”.

Have I gotten a joke in for all my subscribers?  Answer: No, not close.

Quick, what’s the difference between a duck!?  Answer: Mohammad Chung.

III.I.72, which is entirely different from the cryptic percentage at the bottom of my sidebar that has been so far incomprehensible to readers, although if no one else, Karina should get it.  Entirely different.

Behold sentence fragments. Another.  Good device.  Will be used more later.

As Alan Ruck would say after being handed the phone: “Oh, darn….”

♪I had negative sleep, negative sleep, negative sleep, and I’m profoundly not stoned.♪

Shame on your browser if you see something different (and uglier) than the musical notes above.

Check the Passing the Torch post for what is actually more intelligent writing than this.  Give me four more hours: I’m going for Outlaw’s record, which I will rehabilitate with a eulogy for a dead hamster.  A mixed-race hamster.

Maybe it’s time for the serious stuff: a memorized Eddie Izzard DVD.

(My guess: the Russian balloonist is bothering you most.  Should we have a contest to determine who is most conversant in bad jokes?  The answer is not found in Mission: Impossible, but it’s worth entering anyway, as I’ll snail mail something bizarre from my apartment to the winner.  Honorable mention [and imaginary prize] to the person who successfully counts the number of obscure references in this post.)

I was watching DIY Network’s program Cool Tools, specifically, the episode on woodworking tools.

A representative from POWERMATIC was showing off their top-of-the-line woodworking lathe: an 800 lb. cast iron Goliath with lots of bells and whistles.  One neat thing was a hollow tailstock, apparently airtight, with a door that opened into a compartment.

“Oh, neat,” I thought.  “You can keep finishes or sandpaper in there without it getting dusty!”

The POWERMATIC representative smirked, “We say this compartment is to hold your favorite beverage.  What that beverage is, we won’t say.”

Whoa, wait!  What are we talking about?  Why the circumlocution?  It’s not infant’s blood, right?  It’s not cat urine.  It’s clearly an intoxicating beverage that he’s suggesting you hide.  While working on a full-size lathe.  Is he insane?

They really need to send woodworkers to tool conventions, not just salesmen.  This has totally turned me off of POWERMATIC.  Drinking alcohol while turning is a good way to lose a limb.  Talk to a turner, and he will give you a list of what you want while turning: a full face shield, ideally one with positive air pressure; long sleeves that button or tape tightly at the wrist; a full apron; something to cover the opening of your socks; no loose jewelry or hair; super-sharp tools; a safety kill switch; etc.  One thing he will not suggest is that you need to drink a fucking beer.

Man.  I’m thinking about writing a letter of complaint.

I wish USA Network would hurry up and air The 40-Year-Old Virgin already.

Surprised?  Let me clarify.  I don’t plan to watch it when it airs.  But I watch a lot of USA Network, and they have had the same thirty second promo for this film debut for a couple weeks, and they always start it right after the fade to black of my shows’ commercial breaks.  I don’t even get a fair chance to skip them.  Awfully sneaky.

Anyway, God, get it over with, USA, so I can start watch your next crappy in-house promo.

(Wow, USA Network’s ad campaign worked, didn’t it?  They successfully, and against my will, infected me with this “New movie on USA coming” meme.  It annoyed me so much, I turned around and passed it on to thousands.  Hmmm.)

When you place a bid on eBay, and it’s the high bid, the screen says “Hope you win!”

No they don’t!  They hope someone comes along and bids $500,000, and then another guy ups that.  “Hope you win!”  Gawd.

It’s that whole mentality of making computers seem more like people, like when Tellme says, in a concerned and slightly embarrassed voice, “Hm, I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” instead of “Please repeat”.  Or when — I am not making this up — my bank added the sound of keyboard keys clicking in the background to the recorded voice telling you they are looking up your account information.

Or — and this drives me up the wall — when charities use script fonts and blue ink on their solicitations, so it looks like someone personally wrote it with a ballpoint.  I can always tell, because there is not a single person on the planet who writes the two es at the end of my name exactly the same.  One is a transition letter, one is a closing letter, and they shouldn’t be perfect matches.  The next logical step would be to commission fonts that have n (five to ten) slightly differing letterforms for each glyph, all of which connect, and the software to randomly choose which one to render.  That might fool me.  Until then, if you send me a fake hand-written letter, you are not getting money.  Period.

Good for the gas bill:  Leaving your heater off at night!

Good for the environment:  Leaving your heater off at night!

Good for waking up to a 60°F house:  Leaving your heater off at night!

(HiNiceToMeetYou YesI’mFromCalifornia.)

Reviewers found 109,263 errors when reviewing Houghton Mifflin’s math textbooks that were submitted to the state of Texas.  Seriously.  That’s with real math, not Houghton Mifflin math.  Texas imposes a $5,000 fine on each mistake.  The state’s letting them off on a technicality, so the textbook publisher will not have to pony up half a billion dollars to pay the education department.

Ah, Texas textbooks.  Ring a bell?  Go read that link if you haven’t.  It tells about Texas’s textbook standards, which, I swear I’m not making this up, must glorify “free enterprise”, “patriotism”, and the “values” of the state’s heritage (of Texas.  Uh-oh.  Then again, not to worry.  “Lying” is clearly one of their values, so when they deceive students, they’re actually teaching them an important lesson about the values of the state.  See?  Neat, huh?)

Go read.  At the time of that post, the chairperson of the Board of Education co-owned a petroleum company, and explained that “The oil and gas industry should be consulted” when it comes to textbooks, because they “always get a raw deal.”

OK, I will continue to take it.  But I am bored.

I left early from Hemet, where Jenn and Niall are, to medicate the cat.  I have tons I could be doing, but: the book I’m reading is written on ultra-low-contrast paper that will have to wait, probably, until I get new glasses or the sun supernovas; the TV needs to be smacked about every five minutes to do its job (no comments, please); my Windows XP notebook is dead; my video player is fucking stolen; and I’ve promised myself I won’t start any more projects until I clean up and organize all my existing ones.

So I’m doing the only rational thing: I’m sitting at my computer, poised in case anyone sends me an email.

OK, that’s not “the only rational thing” as much as it’s “an utterly irrational thing”, but hey.

Oh.  Maybe a new CSI tonight?  Maybe it’s recording on the good TV?  Worth checking.  See you later.

Well, I’ve thought myself pretty high-and-mighty for my public transport experiment.  Fantasies about selling my car and all that.  Bus to the light rail, light rail to Metrolink/Amtrak, Metrolink/Amtrak to the bus, then unwind the procedure on the way home.

What have I seen?  Sick people.  Lots and lots and lots of sick people, with active respiratory (and otherwise) infections.  Nurses still in their bodily-fluid-stained scrubs riding next to me.  A crazy lady with a metal bowl on her head who kept attaching and detaching a bandage and screaming at the conductor.  I’ve endured this, in addition to increasing my commute from 45 minutes to 2.5 hours.  I’ve rejoiced that I can now read, or work, or sleep on the way, and savored what it has done to increase my patience.

Today, I slept.  And some motherfucker stole my backpack.

My laptop is busted, so this is the first time I haven’t had it on me, which would increase the loss by about $1500.  Fortunately (fortunately?) my loss was only $920, in electronics and luggage and tools, including my trusty calculator that I actually considered a dear friend.

Let me let this sink in.  He stole my motherfucking backpack.  How empty did the train have to be for this to transpire?  Could I be dead now?  Could he have held me at knifepoint or gunpoint and asked for my wallet, phone, and keys as well?  Absolutely he could have.

Jenn tells me that my bag could just have easily been stolen out of the back of my car.  But my sample size is leading me to an opposite conclusion.  I’ve been driving to work for over a dozen years.  Nothing has ever been stolen.  I’ve been taking public transportation for a week.  And I cannot afford to replace $920 worth of stuff right now.

Yes, I’m privileged.  Yes, I’m wealthy.  Yes, I’m pretty spoiled.  I make a good living in a plush job in a nice office.  I drive a luxury car.  I have options.  I tried to take the train to reduce my environmental impact.  But is it worth it?  What do you think?

I beat my Windows Mobile Solitaire for the first time today.  I scored 3696 points and solved the puzzle in 228 seconds.

In other news, my work XP notebook crashed today.  Hard.  It won’t boot in Safe Mode.  It won’t boot in Recovery Mode.  I’ll be playing Alt-F8 debugging games over the weekend so that I can be productive on Monday.

My question is, does Microsoft have a rebate or exchange scheme for these items?  Could I trade in my valuable Solitaire win for a machine that just, say, works?

Sweet baby cheeses.  I would have thought that devising theoretically-unsolvable Solitaire puzzles would be difficult, a problem beyond Microsoft’s grasp.  But I have now played 1.232 trillion games of Solitaire on my mobile phone, and have yet to win a single one.  Shenanigans!

My A2 gives me a “DivX video on demand key”.  It tells me to go to http://www.divx.com/vod.  It redirects me, then I get a screen that simply says, “It works!”

Sorry to be the one to break it to you, guys and gals, but it doesn’t.

In the past six months, exactly, I have received exactly 160,928 pieces of spam in my inbox.  If every one of those had come in the mail, in addition to all the dead trees, I would have kilos and kilos of stamps to sell off as a “mission mix”.  A pretty nice one, with Russian and Chinese and Nigerian stamps in there.

But of course spammers don’t pay for their mailings, instead making you pay for their mailings.  That’s why they exist, and that’s why they are scum.

We need an efficient micropayments scheme in the world.  A way in which we can give fractions of cents to people.  We could have wireless agents and web agents do the negotiation for us.  Set your phone so that if a beggar asks for money, it automatically gives them a nickel without showing up on your radar at all (this is a plot element of the sci-fi novel I’m writing.)  We could, instead of challenge-response, just charge people a tenth or twentieth of a cent to email each of us.  Nobody legitimate would notice (you’d have to send 2000 emails a month to have it cost you a buck) but it would stop the spammers dead in their tracks.

There’s more, but I’ll save it for the novel.

I was a dick at the pharmacy yesterday.  My doctor called in a refill of my Compazine as I’m still on Flagyl, the latter causing nausea.  I drove up to the pharmacy window.

Tech: Josh, it’s too early to pick up your prescription.  You had a ten-day supply filled on the 27th.

Josh: What’s the dosage on that?

Tech: One pill every eight hours.

Josh: Which is three pills a day.  Seven days.

She picked up a calculator.

Tech: Well, to me, seven days is 21 pills.

Which of course just proves my point more.

Josh: OK, six and two-thirds days.  I should be able to pick it up.

Tech: The person who put this into the computer put it in as a ten day supply.

Josh: The person who put that into the computer isn’t very good at math.

Tech: (chuckling) I hope it wasn’t me.  Can you come back later?

Josh: You know, I’m really up a creek here.  I need my Compazine to deal with the nausea from my antibiotics.

So I called later, and spoke to a pharmacist.

Josh: You know, there is a real problem here.  If your staff can make this kind of error, then they can make a dosing error with something I give to my child.

Pharmacist: (broken English) No, it was computer error.

Josh:  Uh uh.  A computer did not divide twenty by three and get ten.  A person did that.

Pharmacist: No, sometime computer make mistakes, and we have catch up.

(I’m really hoping her Latin is better than her English.)

Josh:  Oh, so the computer made this error, is that right?

Pharmacist:  Yes.  We have to put numbers in right columns or computer makes mistake.  I’m very sorry.

So that’s apparently the definition of a computer error.  An “ID-ten-T” error.  I think I need a new pharmacy.

Right now, there are two nag screens running at PayPal.  One tries to convince you, when you try to pay with a credit card, not to use one.  It gives a litany of reasons: no bills to pay, no interest, no impact on credit report, etc.  The other nag screen you have to click through?  An ad for a Paypal credit card!

I used to have a “Where Else Can Joshua Be Found on the Web” page, where I also listed the Joshua McGees that are not me.  It’s no longer maintained.  But I feel I must cry out, this lazy loser is not me.

Were the rates for postcards eliminated?
No, postcards are part of First-Class Mail International. The rates for eligible cards will be 69 cents to Canada and Mexico; 52 cents to the Marshall Islands and Micronesia; and 90 cents to all other countries. Remember, for postcard rates, cards can be no larger than 4-1/4 by 6 inches.

Dumbasses.  The question is obviously “were lower rates for postcards eliminated?”  And the answer is, “Yes.”

Bzzagent.  And Tremor.  And others.

Word-of-mouth advertisers that allow you to sell your soul for free product samples.  Talk up products on your website, at work, at parties, and earn points to get, say, an iPod.  Free mint samples to turn yourself into a corporate shill.  MetaFilter addresses here and here.  More than a year ago.  I’m out of touch.

Err … nice.  I hope the system’s just temporarily offline.

I’m not sure if Steven Seagal ever bothered to jump the shark or whether he was just born with a school between him and the mainstream public, but he’s still jumping something.  As his physical fitness declines and he relies more and more on slow-motion to hide his slow reactions, he’s portraying ever more benign characters forced into violence by ever more tragic circumstances.  I mean, it used to be sufficient for him to be an EPA agent forced to punch and kick by ruthless big-business profiteers.  Then, it escalated.  He had to be a Buddhist recluse forced to punch and kick when his daughter is kidnapped.  I don’t know where he can really go from here.  I mean, what, maybe a guy who nurses sick birds back to health at a wildlife refuge forced to punch and kick by a gang of thugs selling little orphan girls as sex slaves?  I mean, maybe I could write that up this weekend and sell it.  “Birdman rescues vestal orphans.”  It could fly.

(Hold on, gotta take this.  Hi.  Yeah.  No, I hadn’t heard.  Really?  Really?  Oh.  OK then.)

Hi, I’m back.  Umm … seems he’s got that one covered.  Anyone else with a spec script?  I’m out of ideas.

I thought Pearl Jam would send an email update when West Coast shows were announced, as they have with the East Coast shows. I was wrong, and missed the window to buy tix for the LA Forum show. There is a possible second show being added, on contingent presale from 10am to 10pm PST on 31 March (tomorrow).

Pearl Jam’s new news feed is http://www.pearljam.com/flat/pj-rss2.xml.  Use it in your favorite reader, such as the Google Reader I discussed recently.

If Blogger stopped publishing to your server four months ago, change (or ask your sysadmin to change) “PasswordAuthentication” to “yes” in your sshd config file (check /etc/ssh/sshd_config).

In related news, mcgees.org is back.

If Blogger broke the formatting of your blog, as it did mine for the last month, go to Settings -> Formatting and change “Enable float alignment” to “No”.

Anybody know a way to report a bug to Yahoo! Mail?

The End of Late Fees!  Big advertising blitz!  Rejoicing in the streets!  All hail!

So I asked the young woman at the counter what the details of this are.

Joshua: Could you tell me the details of the new program?
Employee: You still have a due date, but you have seven days from the due date to bring it back.
Joshua: And then what?
Employee: And then we sell it to you automatically, and it’s yours to keep.
Joshua: You what?
Employee: We charge you for the video, and you don’t have to bring it back.
Joshua: That’s pretty sneaky.
Employee: You have 30 days from when we charge you to return it for credit.

But hey, that’s not a late fee, I guess.

I almost want to let them do that to me once so that I can make a tidy profit when the inevitable class action lawsuit goes through.

Oh, and the “refund” you get?  “You will be charged a restocking fee plus applicable taxes.” Why? “BLOCKBUSTER incurs processing, administrative and other costs when we have to convert rental product to a sale, as well as when you return the product after that sale. The restocking fee helps to cover that cost.” Poor buggers. You almost feel sorry for them, don’t you? Pitiful bastards with their administrative costs when the big mean customer makes them take a video back.

I almost left my purchases sitting on the counter and walked out, but I didn’t want to be confrontational with the employee who, despite complicity by having no intentions of informing me of the new policy without my asking, couldn’t seem to care less. And I really wanted to see Life of Brian tonight.  But I had no idea how mad I’d end up.

The address, if you want to cut up your card and mail it with a nasty letter, is

Blockbuster Inc.

1201 Elm Street

Dallas, TX 75270

This company is so going to tank.  Divest now.

Well, Tavis Smiley has not renewed his contract and his show is going off NPR. I don’t know where I’ll get daily information about the reparations movement now. Or where I’ll get to hear every issue under the sun framed in terms of race, from politics and culture to diet and entertainment. Or hear people justifiably angered by discriminatory assumptions, but who in turn assume everyone listening is a conservative Christian. Or hear Tavis tailor his accent and vocabulary to match each guest’s, giving the impression that he has no real accent or vocabulary of his own. And I’ll miss the experience of feeling racist because I think he and his program are full of shit. But I think I’ll learn to cope.

TV-B-Gone. If you are the kind of person who enjoys being self-righteously but passively aggressive. This is probably the same same set of people who think anonymous chalk graffiti is a great idea.