kathy gets picked up by the police for the 2nd time

this will be my last disnts post.  why? because they’re boring.  i’m boring myself talking about it.  the lives of my sims just aren’t interesting enough to warrant a blog about them.  maybe i’m too involved, but it seemed to me like when i left free will to do most of the work, they just went through the motions…which is pretty much what sims do.  maybe there’s just not enough drama — certainly i don’t have anything like the parents being enemies with their kids, but i figured both parents being criminals and generally horrible people would, you know, probably result in a troubled youth.  maybe it’s that i don’t actively sabotage their happiness.  i’m not sure.  but i’m playing the game, and i’m playing it, and i realize that there just isn’t anything interesting enough to report.  even when kathy was carted off to the police station (again) it still wasn’t really all that newsworthy, more anticlimactic.

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i get a lot of crap email.  i spend a portion of my day hitting the delete key and filtering through to the stuff that is even remotely relevant to me.  occasionally i get a few forwards from family, and occasionally it saddens me to see how ignorant and racist they are.  rather than think too long about how these ignorant and racist emails reflect on the family that sent them, i choose to ignore them and move on.

today, however, i got something that seriously blew my mind.

one of the general themes of the racist brand of forwards i get is that outsourcing or getting any kind of products from abroad hurts our country.  (we’ll set aside, for a moment, the socio-economic implications in how our economy would really be crippled if we stopped importing products altogether, suffice it to say that we’ve been importing ever since the first pilgrims jumped on the boat from England.)  therefore, it’s no surprise that the title of this email is “DO IT YOURSELF, AMERICA.”

So here is an actual excerpt of the email, first paragraph:

I WAS BUYING FOOD THE OTHER DAY AT THE COUNTRY MARKET. ON THE LABEL OF SOME PRODUCTS IT SAID FROM CHINA. FOR EXAMPLE THE” OUR FAMILY” BRAND OF THE MANDARIN ORANGES SAYS RIGHT ON THE CAN FROM CHINA I WAS SHOCKED!!…

it then proceeds into a rant about how we should be producing our own food rather than importing “inferior” products from abroad.  really?  mandarin oranges?  from china?  you don’t say.

a quick glance at etymonline — the online etymology dictionary — will reveal that the origin of the word mandarin  refers to a Chinese official.  the usage of the word Mandarin, as in Mandarin Chinese, came about by referring to the specific dialect used by officials and educated people, i.e. the Mandarins.  the mandarin oranges were so named because their color resembled the color of the robes worn by…Mandarins.

wiki’ing “manarin orange” casts an even harsher light on the ridiculousness of the above statement.  in the middle of the article is a chart showing the top 10 countries producing mandarin oranges.  not only does the united states not even rank on this chart, but the number one producer of mandarin oranges?  china.  really?  really.

so, let’s summarize: mandarin oranges are named after mandarins, which was a type of chinese official, because the color of their robes resembled the color of the fruit.  the world’s largest producer of mandarin oranges is, no surprise here, china — by a significant margin.  to beat a dead horse, and because the united states wasn’t even listed in the top 10 countries producing mandarin oranges, i tried to find out where dole — one of the u.s. alternatives the email suggests — gets their mandarins.  dole’s own website says that their mandarin oranges are actually japanese satsuma oranges.  i wonder where those come from.

the thing that gets me isn’t the us-vs.-them mentality, or the racism inherent in the belief that products from China are, by their nature, inferior.  it’s the fact that this argument was started over mandarin oranges.  not just any oranges, mandarin.  which are, by default, chinese.  i mean, it’s in the name — not of the brand, but of the fruit.

i’m glad we have a president who is an intelligent black man, and i’m glad he’s selected a woman from a poor puerto rican family — whose father didn’t speak english — to be a supreme court justice,  if, for no other reason, than because it forces people to confront others with a different heritage — one that’s obvious by their physical characteristics.  but we, as a wired culture, need to be responsible about the information we digest.  not only is it easy to perpetuate blatant lies and twist information, but in our digital culture it is just as easy to publish those falsehoods to a wide audience.   if one didn’t already know, it would take maybe five minutes to learn that mandarin oranges come from china, and maybe then the moral outrage about chinese mandarin oranges would be diffused somewhat.  i’m not against favoring local producers — in fact, i buy local foods if and whenever possible.  but just because it comes from another country doesn’t mean it’s tainted.  however, i encourage people to read labels, buy fair trade products, buy local, buy organic — these things are good not only for you as a conscientious consumer but for the environment, for the workers plowing the fields, and for your body.

meanwhile, i’m less interested in the fact that mandarin oranges were imported from china and more interested in why dole chose not to publish the fact that their “mandarin oranges” were actually satsuma oranges, and where they got their oranges from.  

in doing research for this post, i stumbled across GoodGuide, a searchable index that publishes information about how producers rank in terms of health, environmental impact, and the working conditions for their employees, which looks pretty freaking awesome, and makes deciding what to do with the information printed on labels much easier and gives it a context in comparison with other manufacturers.  i think the next wave would be an iphone app or a handheld device that you could take into the store with you, scan a barcode, and then pull up all the relevant information about that product laid out like what this site does.

so, i went to the corner store near our house the other day because we were out of juice.  this is a tragic occurance in our household, one that results in much angst and screaming if we are not able to supply gavin with his beverage-of-choice.  so, gavin and i took a field trip.

having worked at whole foods, i always choose Simply Orange by default.  it’s been a while since i’ve taste-tested OJ, myself, and i know G doesn’t really care which brand, but i feel better about Simply because i get the impression (whether it’s based on fact or clever marketing) that it’s more natural.  so this quasigoth chick was checking out and saw me and gavin and our Simply Orange and told me, very badly, about this ad with an “easy” girl and a “hard” girl, and how it was Tropicana vs. Simply Orange and the “hard” girl was supposed to be Simply Orange.  or something.  so i Googled this crazy concept and lo! i found this:

girls should be easy

the social context is bizarre, archaic, misogynist, and a host of other words that are not favorable to tropicana’s ad campaign.  but possibly what i find most interesting is that not only do i identify more with the not-easy side in terms of juice brands, but i also identify more with the not-easy girl in the example.  also: i like the shape of Simply Orange’s bottle, thank you.  i don’t care if there’s not a handle.

read the commentary in the post that’s linked above because it’s definitely worthwhile and interesting.  not terribly surprising, all things considered, but there are some good points and possibly the only thing that did really open my eyes about this whole thing was that i really thought we had moved past this type of social and gender stereotyping.  and, is easy really better?  cuz i kinda think not…

so, i’m really, really starting to get tired of the xx things you should ____ blog posts.  like, really f’ing tired.  usually they’re things like 22 ways to make twitter work for you or 18 tricks to monetize your blog or, if you’re a designer, 43 grunge textures or 29 photoshop brushes and vectors.  the last straw for me came tonight as i was reading fudgegraphics‘ latest post recommending you subscribe to fudgegraphics via rss (which i read via rss).

at the end of his explanation of rss and what it can do for you and how he implements it on his site — and i have to give him props because a lot of bloggers force you to go to the site for full content, especially when there’s art and graphics or at least extended articles — he has a link to a blog post on colorburned  for 127 rss feeds that all designers should subscribe to.

127?  really?

seriously.  i check twitter, i glance at rss, i read my email, and somewhere in the middle of that and working a part-time job working in cheese, i get some design done.  when the frack am i going to have time to read 127 feeds?  i mean, really.  and that’s the thing i have against these posts.  53 grunge themes?  how about giving me the 5 best, because i guarantee there’s 48 that suck, and there’s not enough hours in the day to check every single one of these links.  127 rss feeds that all designers should subscribe to?  and in keeping up on those 127 feeds, when exactly am i going to have time to, i don’t know, do any design work?

see, i get the thing that these lists are good for seo and people who are searching for the best whatever, but here’s the catch 22: for most of the x number of tips posts, they’re the same tips you see everywhere.  for the x best blogs to read, ditto, you get the same links. upstart blogger posted a while ago his lament for not being able to find a legitamite list of influential female bloggers.  every once in a while i see a list on tips for twitter and think it might offer something vaguely enlightening and am sorely disappointed.

that leaves the similar posts for designers.  these are tools, plugins, textures, stock photography, or graphics that can be used in our work.  and honestly, if you are a designer, there’s a need, a hole to fill for really good sources for this stuff.  especially if you want to stay on the cutting edge and have new and interesting designs.  every once in a while i see the same old price tag i’ve used or the same cracked paint that i found on stock exchange and i wonder just how many times these things have been used on other sites.  so there is a definite need, but half, if not most of the things that get on these lists are really worthless, unusable or incomplete or so highly specialized you’d use it for one client in a hundred.  so give me 5, 10 at the most.  don’t give me the 53 that answered your tweet when you posted a call on twitter.  i don’t have time to sort through all the crap to find the rare diamonds in the rough.  i have work to do and kids to feed and not enough hours in the day to spend wasting on these huge ridiculous lists.  there’s something to be said about being concise, and if you, the poster of 100+ of anything can’t break that down into smaller chunks and weed out the less useful or lower quality entries, really, what are you doing for the design community?  what’s the last rule of the rules of design?  good design is as little design as possible?  yeah, that.

so the server is having issues. i’m getting a lot of slow loading pages and error 500s on the wordpress sites i’m running.  when i contacted 1and1 to report the issue, i got this fantabulous response:

me:

> Hi–
>
> I have multiple sites running on my shared hosting
> package, and I noticed today that all of
> them, especially the ones using php/mysql scripts
> like WordPress, are having issues.  I’m
> consistently getting Error 500, webpage not found,
> or graphics not loading completely on
>
> arcanepalette.com
> jazzsequence.com
> alhlegal.com
> oldtownguesthouse.com
> gavin.jazzsequence.com
> kids.jazzsequence.com
>
> I’ve had the Error 500 come up before but have
> been able to correct it by modifying the php.ini
> file and enabling php5 handling in the .htaccess
> files, but those measures are not having any
> effect now.  If it has to do with the load
> required for running my sites, I would be willing
> to upgrade to a faster server, but looking at the
> traffic logs, it does not seem like my account
> gets excessive traffic, so I don’t see how that
> could be the issue.  However, as I run my business
> off of these sites, I am anxious about their
> unresponsiveness.
>
> Your prompt response or resolution would be
> greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

them:

Due to some technical issues, accessing your website is currently not
possible. We sincerely apologize for this very unfortunate event,
although unforeseen but which might already be
causing you a lot of inconvenience. We also understand the frustration
you might be feeling right now about this whole issue. Unfortunately, we
still do not have an estimated time frame for a resolution however rest
assured that our administrators are working as quickly as possible. We
are also taking safe measures to ensure that an incident of this nature
will not be able to happen again. Thank you so much for your patience
and understanding as we work to resolve this issue.

so…basically, what you’re saying is there is some kind of unforeseen problem (which, you know, is odd, because usually technical issues you can see coming from a mile a way) and you have no idea when it will be fixed.  i am to rest assured, however, that it is being taken care of by what i’m sure is the most professional team of administrators this country has ever seen who are seeing to my specific issue and it’s prompt resolution of whenever.  thanks.  i’m so grateful for this insight.  your understanding of my frustration is as reassuring as your assurance that this will never happen again.  

this is coming out of your 99% uptime.

in 2000, i couldn’t believe that anyone would possibly vote for an idiot like g.w.  determined that my vote wouldn’t make a difference in the election anyway, since there was no chance gore would lose, i gave my vote to the green party in an attempt to help them get 3% of the vote and a real shot at the presidential election in 2004.  both plans failed.

in 2004, it was so glaringly obvious that kerry was the better choice, and i felt like people obviously wanted a change, i didn’t think it was possible that the country would vote w. in for a second term.

this year, i was afraid that even though obama was the best candidate — and not just the lesser of two evils, but a man who would stand as a president for the people rather than in spite of the people — some unknown factor would cause the vote to go wildly in the other direction.  even the “maverick” (read: insane) tactics mccain used in selecting an inexperienced hockey mom from alaska as his running mate — so obviously a desperate cry for help — could have swayed the impetus toward him.

i watched the blogosphere and the twittersphere refreshing msnbc.com and cnn.com for updates on the polls obsessively, refusing to get my hopes up in case something went horribly wrong.

today, i wake up, and i can breathe easy — like a weight has been lifted.  for the first time in my life, i can be proud to be an american.  and i’m proud to live in the age of the first black president.  the age of change.

history starts now.

so i was really aggravated last night.  we just had a major reset done in the cheese department, and i was focusing on the case, figuring out what i should cut.  there was some chocolate that i needed to deal with and my big, pretty display i built a couple months ago got pulled down and replaced by rolling racks.

 that was annoying, but because our regional analyst person talked to me about it, i was expecting that.  i was annoyed because i thought it looked good and i had it somewhat organized the way i wanted it, and the new set had stuff mixed together and the tags were all mixed up.  plus there was stuff everywhere.

more annoying, however was when our marketing guy — who was doing a demo in front of really big windows letting in the afternoon sun, came over and said “hey, chris, i thought you should know…your chocolate is melting.”

wtf?  i go over to see the halloween display had been moved in front of the big windows since i last worked, with all my specialty halloween chocolate and, in fact, the chocolate had been melting.  hi, chris, you need to do a chocolate reset.  so i did.  the result looks pretty good, but it was annoying to have to come in and deal with some scruffy-faced nerfherder’s brilliant idea to stick the halloween chocolate in front of the frickin’ window.  i mean, seriously.  whose brilliant idea was that?  so far i’ve had no answers (not that i think anyone would take credit for it to me, considering how pissed i was).  so here’s the new chocolate set, halloween candy included:

beyond the annoyance of having to do the reset, that’s $65 of lost chocolate now, that’s unsellable, and while that could have been a lot worse and we generally make a pretty big margin on most of the chocolate, it’s still lost sales and our department hasn’t been doing fabulous with the change in seasons, the economy, etc.  not to mention the fact that my whole day was spent on that instead of other things.

so i came home and made myself feel better with an herb-crusted fleur de france brie and yummy cambozola (a german cross between the italian blue, gorgonzola and the french camembert brie) on la panzanella croccatini which, in my opinion, is the best cracker for cheese.  they’re big flatbreads and kind of unruly, but they’re awesome and crunchy and not too thick like some other croccatinis.  the cambozola was a bit more -zola than cam- having sat in our fridge for a few days, but still tasty.  the evening was capped with some hornsby’s crisp apple hard cider which, i’ve decided, doesn’t suck.

i feel like steve jobs is playing a cruel game of punk’d on me.

so here’s the deal.  i have a macbook.  many applications that i want to use don’t work or don’t seem to be entirely supported or have weird issues in tiger (such as the bizarre instance of photoshop not being able to open .psds).  plus, spore requires 10.5.3, and spore on the mac would be awesome.  so i finally decide to try to upgrade from tiger (10.4.11) to the latest leopard (10.5.5).  

that’s when i started reconsidering suicide.  or at least technocide.

leopard installed okay the first time around. in fact, better than — it was more responsive and had a faster boot time.  so i did the software updates…which proceeded to kill everything.  after the 10.5.5 combo update, the laptop would no longer boot.  ultimately, i had to start over from scratch — erase everything i had installed and do a new install.  here’s the summary:

for some reason, every install directly from the 10.5 disk failed.
trying an archive & install (that keeps all your old settings and applications) didn’t boot after it got trashed from the update.
which means i would need to install 10.4 first and upgrade.
the 10.5.5 combo update, according to various mac forums, seemed to have issues for some people, so I did each incremental update separately, but I only got as far as 10.5.1 before i started having more issues.

so here’s my dilemma.  i love osx, i really do.  if i had a choice, i’d use it as my de facto operating system.  but i don’t want to spend another 2-3 hours hacking away at the laptop to try (and possibly fail.  again) to get it up to 10.5.  i thought about running time machine, and making a backup as soon as i have a successful install of 10.5 so at least i have a restore point when it fails, but that just means that i’m expecting to fail when i install the updates.  i’d rather not just expect to fail.

so my options are:

install tiger again and leave it.  possibly funky-acting programs and no support for current/next-gen applications (making the laptop dated).
install tiger again and sell it.  possibly using the money to buy one o’ dem fancy schmancy asus eee pc’s which i read have had osx86 successfully installed on them.
install something completely different.  i downloaded and was this close to installing the google linux distro, gOS — the biggest detractor was, a) no app support for what i wanted, i’d have to find possibly lesser-quality equivalents of what i want and expect the adobe suite to not work 100% (so back where i started with that), plus, what’s a google OS without chrome?  seriously.  considering waiting until they finish chrome for linux and inevitably release a new gOS with chrome out of the box.

ultimately, installing something completely different doesn’t solve anything, but the install process would be like 15 minutes vs. 2 hours.  and my sketchy cd-rom drive just keeps getting worse everytime i do this, so by the end i’m kind of expecting that it won’t accept any cds anymore at all, which doesn’t help things.

so i’m at a loss.  what do y’all think?

watched obama’s speech yesterday.  here it is, if you haven’t seen it yet:

watching this not only makes me an obsessed obama groupie (he does seem to have that effect), and go out and buy some obama stuff on his website, but also makes me realize that this election is huge.  it’s not even about the issues.  it’s about the future vs. the past.  obama is a politician who i believe can really lead this country into the 21st century, and as a techno-geek, i’ve seen lots of pie-in-the-sky solutions for a variety of environmental and economic problems.  but what all of those plans need is someone who is willing to take a risk and shake things up.

d00d.  mccain is not that person.

i think obama could be.

i was just reading a wired article about electric cars — yes they’re back.  and the program is being developed by someone with a realistic plan to get us off oil.  meanwhile, i’m watching obama talk about getting america off our oil addiction and i’m thinking, this could be the guy that gets the ball rolling.  and i want, want, want a f’ing electric car!

and i thought it was a key moment when he brought up all the hot topics that everyone debates about, abortion, gay marriage, and says, look, we might not agree on these things, but we can at least come to some middle ground – downplaying those issues because that’s not what this election is going to be about.  it’s not.  it’s about the future, and someone who can lead us there, and the past, and someone who will continue what reagan, bush #1 and bush #2 left off.  personally, i’m ready for the economy to not suck anymore.  i’m ready for new renewable energy.  i’m ready to live in a country that i am proud to live in, and not feel embarrassed about if and when i’m abroad.  (”yes, i’m american, but i think our president is a douche, too”)  a lot of politicians talk the talk, but few actually make me believe.

Mike Doughty talked in his blog about this being the first time he’s been politically excited about something rather than against something.  seriously, obama has the commanding presence of malcom x, he’s just, you know, not as angry.  and i was really digging kucinich, even though i knew he had no chance.  with obama, it’s like, the little issues don’t matter as much, because that’s not what he’s going for.  and since high school (when i declared myself an anarchist), i have been firm that the only way to fix the system is massive, radical change.  hell, that was why i voted green instead of gore.  it wasn’t that i didn’t want gore in the white house — i did, and i honestly thought dubbya had no chance of winning…which, you know, he didn’t.  it was that i wanted there to be a third option.  it was that democrats and republicans were two sides of the same worn out coin and neither represented me.  that’s what has made the myspace generation apathetic about politics.  how can you get excited about anything when it’s the same old stuff?  repetition isn’t exciting, not even when it’s techno — what’s exciting is when something gets thrown into the mix that’s different (this applies to the techno metaphor, too, and gee i’m just throwing around metaphors today, aren’t i?).

i feel like i need to be a much more active supporter of obama, which is kind of weird to me.  i feel like i need to tell everyone i see about him and make them part of the obsession too.  i don’t want this to be like the 2k election again, where no one really believes the crappy candidate really has a chance of winning and then he does by stealing florida.  even when mccain’s running mate looks like a blatant grasp at straws, i feel like it’s too dangerous to feel comfortable, because the alternative is another 4-8 years of destroying the environment, drilling holes in alaska, pumping more CO2 into the air and making the cities unlivable.  more economic depression and cold war-era “trickle-down” theory.  as much as i agree with the sentiment, i don’t want the bumper stickers that say “dissent is patriotic” to define my political views and outlook on the country.  we need someone to shake up the system and lead us into the technological future because otherwise, we need to get moving on our martian colonization program because this planet isn’t going to hold up for another generation of pillaging.  i’m ready to move into the future, not the Terminator future, or the Battlestar Galactica or the Matrix dystopic future of creating artificial life that proves its’ superiority and attempts to wipe out humanity for being inefficient, but the future where, you know, we still have ozone.  where the water is still blue and falls from the sky.  where there’s still animals.

there’s an episode in BSG where they’re crashed on Kobol.  Chief Tyrol is sitting by one of his knuckledraggers’ side as he’s sputtering blood and probably isn’t going to make it, and Tyrol says “How’re you doing?”  “Just listening to the birds,” he says.  Tyrol looks up for a second and notices the sound.  and the look is like “wow, I never thought I’d see the day when…”  and it’s terrifying how realistic that alternate reality is — that we could live in a world that has been without animal life for so long we’ve completely taken it for granted.  where we don’t even know to miss the sound of birds in the trees.

i feel like there’s a real momentum toward real revolutionary change and it’s an exciting time.  but i feel like we need to hop on the bandwagon because if we miss the window, it might never happen.  so i’m voting for obama.  you should too.

(by the way, i’ve enabled a new subscriber feature which emails alerts when i write posts.  if it bugs you, you can modify your subsription from the Subscribe widget in the sidebar, or you can email me.)

in my last post, i expressed my woe at the sudden upheaval of my computer.  today i woke up excited because my hardware was coming.  now i have a history of always forgetting something.  i get a new motherboard but the processor doesn’t match.  i get a motherboard and processor but don’t have the right ram.  i get a SATA hard drive but my power supply doesn’t have a SATA connector.  or enough SATA connectors.  or i don’t have a SATA hard drive cable.

so this time i swear i’ve got it covered.  the board specs say it can take up to 4gb of ram, so i max out and get 4 sticks of 1 gb.  i know my older power supply doesn’t have a SATA connector so i think ahead and got an adapter.  i’m getting a mainboard, ram, and a hard drive because i don’t want to swap the motherboard and ram and find out the drive died, too.  or vice versa (but i’m pretty sure something on the board is shot at least.  could just be a dust short, but still…)

well, time to throw in my hat because it turns out my power supply is a 20-pin and the new board requires a 24-pin.  oh, and since i went the cheap route and got a micro-atx board, there’s only actually 2 slots for ram.  so i have 2 extra sticks (which i’m sure will come in handy at some point, but not so much right now).  i could always swap the 4 for 2 2gb, but then i’d have to wait and there’s a restocking fee and i’m sure i can use these eventually.

/sigh

so another couple days before i get the new system running and i can actually figure out what was going on with the old system.  color me lame.