Singuloddity

Slooooowwww Cooker

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 16:54:00 -0500

We still don’t have air conditioning.

I called the HVAC company two nights ago. A company that has been in business for 30 years, and which I’ve worked with before. To their credit they showed up first thing the next morning, but then it took them all bloody day to drive half an hour down the tollway to pick up a part at the warehouse. Then they had to stop at a half-dozen more warehouses for more parts. Then they had to take the part back to their home base, which is an hour across town from me.

Only then, when they had the part in their hands at their shop, would they deign to schedule a service call to actually install said part so that my A/C could start running again. I tried to get them to schedule me in advance yesterday morning, when they told me the part was at the warehouse and that it was definitely going to be picked up that day. They refused.

Of course by the time they did get the part in-hand, it was five o’clock in the afternoon, so they weren’t going to be able to install it until the following day (today). And of course, by then, their schedule for the day was mostly booked up, so I had to take an afternoon slot.

Now it’s five o’clock on the following afternoon and I still haven’t even gotten a call that a tech is on the way over here. I’ve called the shop three times, once just minutes ago even, and each time they assure me that a tech is definitely coming today and that they still have a few service calls left on the schedule.

I swear that there will be very unkind words said on the phone if I get a call at eight o’clock only to be told they’re pushing me off till tomorrow. At this point I’m beyond caring when they get here today, as long as it is today.

Naturally, this had to be the week when I’d be knee-deep in some ridiculous new project at work with another infamously ridiculous deadline. I’ll be working on it until bedtime tonight without a doubt, which is just what I need when I’m already exhausted, nauseous and sweat-drenched, with a serious case of eyestrain from having to stare at bright monitors while all the window blinds are closed to keep the heat out.

I do know one thing for sure, and that is which HVAC company I will never be calling again.

The Great Texas Bake-Off

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 23:41:54 -0500

…Where the main dish is US! Tomorrow is forecasted to be the hottest day so far this year with a high temperature of 99 degrees, and tonight our home’s AC condenser fan motor crapped the bed. So it looks like we’ll probably have to escape to somewhere cooler, or at least my wife and infant son will. It all depends on how quickly we can get a tech out here to get the system up and running again.

We’d started getting clues that something was awry a day or two ago. My wife mentioned in passing to me that she had woken up during the night in time to hear the AC kick on and said it had made a strange sound. Then my parents (who just so happen to be visiting us this weekend) said that our upstairs game room didn’t seem to be cooling off as quickly as usual. Then today I heard the condenser fan running and thought it sounded unusual, like a bearing failure was on the way. So my dad and I went round the back of the house for an inspection.

The fan didn’t quite sound healthy, and there seemed to be an inordinate amount of vibration. When I shut the system off, it took only a few revolutions for the fan to come to a complete stop, and with an ominous scraping sound at that. Yeah, looks like the bearing, all right.

The funny thing is, I was ready to man up and fix it myself. Having identified the problem with certainty, and knowing that the condenser fan motor is typically easier to replace than the interior blower motor, I thought I’d order a motor and capacitor and try my hand at a repair. I was gonna have to do some research and watch some how-to videos, but I figured if I could replace the garbage disposal at our old house, I could do this.

Too bad the damn thing failed spectacularly not five hours later, leaving me in the lurch with no time to wait for parts to ship or training videos to be absorbed. I left a message with our AC tech and will probably follow up with a call first thing tomorrow. Having an infant son to take care of means I can’t screw around, because the heat is not good for him.

My parents are heading home tomorrow afternoon, too, so I feel bad that their last night with us will be fairly uncomfortable with no AC in the house. (At least we have ceiling fans.)

Everything rides on when the AC tech can get here tomorrow, so I really don’t have a clue what my day is going to be like — except to say it’ll likely be a little crazy.

An Improper Start

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 09:24:00 -0500

It was not a good night.

Something — perhaps the energy drinks I’m consuming every morning — had me awake and fairly wired last night, such that I didn’t get to bed until 1 a.m. After that, it looked like it was going to be a somewhat short but otherwise fine sleep session until the 6:30 a.m. bike ride, but that’s not how things turned out. At the crack of 4 a.m., we woke up to the hideous sound of an electronic alarm hooting at us.

Took us a moment to realize that it was the baby monitor blaring. What the crap? Apple tried to pick it up and look at it, but when the screen came on it was so bright that she was unable to see anything and dropped it. I gave it a try, squinting, and saw that the monitor had lost communication with the camera. No signal at all. So it was emitting an alarm that would be right at home in the prelude of a post-apocalyptic film, just before the nuclear warheads launch and destroy the world.

Power-cycling the monitor didn’t fix it, so I decided there was only one thing to do: go into Connor’s room and power-cycle the camera itself. Well, that was going to be fun: if I went in there guns blazing, he was probably going to wake up and get excited, and neither one of us was feeling up to trying to calm him back to sleep (or worse, actually get up with him for the day) at 4 a.m. So there I was, crawling across the floor slowly so as not to wake Connor, keeping my head down so he wouldn’t see me if he did happen to bat an eye.

Squeezing into the corner between the crib and the glider chair, where the camera’s AC adapter meets the wall, was the big challenge. After I got the thing rebooted, I lay there in a silent contortionist position for a minute and contemplated just going back to sleep on the floor. Eventually, though, I slunk out and returned to the bed proper, where fortunately the “no signal” issue with the monitor had been resolved.

As if that wasn’t enough, less than two hours later a freak thunderstorm blew through the area, soaking us with rain and waking me up yet again with all of the racket. By that time I was in no mood to slither out of bed in another thirty minutes and go on a five-mile bike ride — even a stationary one in front of a plasma TV, as would have been the case — so I slept in. I suppose I’ll have to make up the lost ride later. Perhaps this evening, if this day doesn’t kill me first.

We See What We Choose

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 00:55:16 -0500

As I type this, “Kenan & Kel” is trending on Twitter. For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, it’s the name of a teen comedy TV show from the Nickelodeon network that aired in the mid-to-late ’90s. Apparently Nickelodeon (hereinafter referred to as “Nick” to save my fingers the wear and tear) recently started re-airing some of its mid-’90s favorites after midnight, including Kenan & Kel, Rugrats, Rocko’s Modern Life and All That, in what used to be the old Nick at Nite time slots. (Apparently Nick at Nite still exists, but most depressingly, it is currently dedicated to nothing but reruns of Friends. Man, I never thought I’d be nostalgic for Get Smart or Dick Van Dyke.)

I noticed that tonight’s trend has led to lots of people a decade younger than me waxing nostalgic on the merits of all their favorite Nick shows from the ’90s. “Remember Hey Arnold? RugRats? CatDog? RocketPower? Kenan & Kel? The Amanda Show?… when Nickelodeon made sense,” muses one Twitter user. “I want a Kenan & Kel, Smart Guy, Hey Arnold, Boy Meets World, and Fresh Prince marathon. We had way better shows!” says another.

It’s funny, because I remember saying the exact same shit…fourteen years ago when I was their age and these shows were actually on TV at the time. “You Can’t Do That on Television…Danger Mouse…Turkey Television…Out of Control…Pete & Pete…we had way better shows!” I groused like an old codger with pipe tobaccy in his mouth. “Why, in my day…!” (insert first-waving here)

I’ll admit, there is some overlap with the “classics” Nick is rerunning now and the stuff I grew up on, like Doug and Ren & Stimpy, two of the original “Nicktoons” when that was some kind of hip and cool thing amongst we happenin’ sixth graders. Otherwise, though, seeing the youngins complaining now about how much today’s crap sucks and how much their stuff ruled makes me realize that we all see what we choose to see. We all look back with rose-colored glasses at the era that’s closest to home for us and consider it the pinnacle. In another fourteen years there will be a crop of twenty-somethings moaning about how awesome it was to be able to watch Spongebob Squarepants or whatever Nick runs these days.

Nostalgia, after all, is a very personal thing.

Now where is my Hey Dude DVD boxed set.

Random network security tip for those about to appear on TV

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:09:03 -0500

Random network security tip for those about to appear on TV:

Hint: it might help if you didn’t stand in front of a piece of paper taped up on the wall with your wireless access point SSIDs and passwords printed on it in huge letters.

Automated Google Asshattery

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:29:00 -0500

I kinda went off on a bender about Google a few days ago. Just as I was starting to simmer down and think that maybe I came off a bit too harshly, Google pulls a dumbfuck maneuver on me this morning that immediately halted all such consideration.

Last night our IT admin took our website offline for about 15 minutes to do some database maintenance. During that window, apparently, one of Google AdWords’ bots scanned the destination URLs of a bunch of our company’s ad campaigns and decided that they needed to disapprove dozens upon dozens of keywords because they were returning an invalid HTTP response. Because, obviously, if a URL isn’t resolving properly for 15 minutes, it means that it will never, ever work again and you should just discard it. Right? NO! Jesus!

Before running last night’s maintenance, we followed our web CMS’ instructions to activate a catch-all “app offline” page that users would see if they tried to visit during the downtime. We thought that would prevent problems exactly like the one we’re seeing from Google. However, our CMS apparently returns an HTTP response of 503 (Service Unavailable) when the “app offline” page is used, which Google AdWords treats as invalid. Goooooood lord.

So now I have to go through all of our AdWords campaigns and make some kind of superficial edit to the destination URL of every disapproved keyword, so they will be submitted for re-testing and approval. What a waste of my time.

In doing a little searching on this issue (to find out the fastest way to get my keywords resubmitted for approval), I found a forum where someone else had posted the same question. After responding with an answer, an AdWords expert reminded the user that “AdWords’ policies state that in order to comply with them your website must not be down at any time.” Is Google so deluded that they believe this is actually feasible? They might as well require that a natural disaster never strike at any time either, or that morning traffic on the LBJ never slows down.

To be fair, I looked through Google’s actual AdWords advertising policies myself and was unable to find that specific language, but the way Google reacted to our very temporary downtime last night suggests that this requirement may actually be in force.

I’ll ask you again: Is this the company to which you want to entrust all of your data, including personal information?

Never Game Alone

Tue, 08 May 2012 14:28:00 -0500

When asked how Chinese developers were dealing with the problem of video game piracy, a Chinese friend replied with a shrug, “Every game in China is an MMORPG.”

I guess that could do it.

A friend at work just showed me this and I about died laughing....

Tue, 08 May 2012 12:33:00 -0500

A friend at work just showed me this and I about died laughing. Watch Mike and the Bots from Mystery Science Theater 3000 make light of a bizarre 1950s PSA about the importance of hyper-structured family dinner dates and the seething cauldron of angst they will almost certainly become.

Jimquisition: Don't Charge Retail Prices For Digital

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:02:32 -0500

Jimquisition: Don't Charge Retail Prices For Digital:

Destructoid’s Jim Sterling put together this amusing (as ever) video about game prices, with a special focus on digital distribution and the issue of artificial price parity between digital and physical copies of the same game. It goes right back to the post I made recently on the very subject, including a shot at Nintendo’s assertion that digitally-fulfilled games have no less value than their physical counterparts, which I’ll gleefully say again is unmitigated bullshit.

The Google Singularity

Sat, 05 May 2012 11:17:36 -0500

Bloomberg: Google Said to Face Fine by U.S. Over Apple Safari Breach

CNN Op-Ed: Why reining in Google is good for us

It confuses me how at-odds my opinion is with most tech-savvy people today, but I trust Google even less than the proverbial mustached guy selling candy out of his ‘78 Ford Econoline.

Seriously. This company that built the greatest web search engine in the world now has its hand in so many pies, and is backed by so many dollars, that it has become a juggernaut that can upset almost any industry on a whim. Any small business owner in the technology sector must cringe at the ever-present spectre of Google, fearing the day when Google might whimsically decide to make his entire business irrelevant by offering its own facsimile at a price that he can’t possibly afford to compete with.

In short, I view Google increasingly as the Wal-Mart of the Internet.

And oh, how I hate Wal-Mart.

“But how can anyone hate low prices?” you ask. Who said anything about hating low prices? I hate the fact that Wal-Mart’s incredible size and bullying power has increasingly made them the only retail source for goods, and reduced the overall quality of goods in their single-minded race to the bottom on price. Which means that if you don’t like the selection Wal-Mart offers, if you prefer a product of better quality rather than lowest possible price, or if you just don’t like the shopping experience Wal-Mart offers, you may soon be SOL — if you aren’t already.

Google is largely doing the same thing. It’s behaving similarly to Microsoft of the past decade, the one that ran afoul of anti-trust laws by bundling its own services with its own operating systems, which EU courts saw as anti-competitive. Except that for some reason, when Google does it, everyone laps it up and falls all over themselves to gush about the wonderful, generous Google overlords and how they’re all doing us such great favors.

Sure they are. Because the more people who use Google services, the more data Google can collect about who those people are, what they search for, what services they like to use, what they buy, and so on — data that is worth a fortune to every marketer on the planet. And as it happens, it’s marketing itself — yours, in fact — that has made Google so much money, via their PPC advertising programs.

I’ve seen how it works; my company has used Google AdWords for years. It’s incredibly easy to screw up and pay Google an absolute shit-ton of money if you don’t know how to use it properly. Occasionally, Google account representatives would contact us and offer advice on how to “improve” our advertising account, which would almost always involve broadening our sponsored keywords to the point where they would be making significantly more money from us, even though that didn’t make sense for our target market. When they come calling now, we ignore them.

With all of this money that it has amassed, it seems to me that Google has become empowered to operate increasingly close to fine lines of legality and ethics. Case in point: my first link above, which details the case of how Google deliberately ignored privacy settings in the Safari web browser so that it could surreptitiously plant a cookie on end-users’ machines that would deliver targeted Google advertising to those users, even when they had requested not to receive it. Careful, Google — your hubris is starting to show.

Now, we’re told to welcome with open arms all of the wonderful free* services that Google offers us, anything from file storage (Google Drive) to cell phones (Android) to cars that drive themselves. It boggles my mind that no one else seems to believe that it’s dangerous to place so much of your information in the hands of a single company. Much as Microsoft’s excellent new Windows Phones can’t gain any traction today because of the years of ill will they cultivated with their craptacular Windows Mobile OS, I’d wager that Google’s fans are largely ignoring their increasingly worrisome behavior as a result of all the goodwill the company created in its earlier years. Hell, there was a time that I was a huge Google cheerleader, too.

Any more, though, I regard every new and supposedly amazing service that Google offers with a healthy dose of suspicion. Before I give them any data, I consider what might happen if that data were to be scanned, translated, OCR’ed, analyzed or otherwise shared with other portions of Google’s services (or worse, the Internet at large). And I wonder from time to time if I’ll wake up one day and not have a job anymore because Google has decided to replicate what we do and offer it for free, subsidized by the millions of dollars it makes from its advertising networks (which, ironically, we’re using — we might be contributing to our own demise).

I just seems weird that people harp on companies like Microsoft and Apple for doing this same kind of stuff, calling them “bullies” and accusing them of “using strong-arm tactics” to squash their competition, when I see absolutely no difference between them and Google. Well, okay, maybe one difference: Google cloaks their predatory actions in a blanket of altruism, pretending they’re doing you a tremendous favor by reducing your choices in the marketplace and monetizing every aspect of you and everything you’ve ever shared with them.

And a Google self-driving car? Unless it talks in a smartass voice and looks like a third-generation Trans Am, I’ll have nothing to do with it.

Oddball Update: Time Heals Wounds. Journals Reopen Them.

Fri, 04 May 2012 23:28:48 -0500

Oddball Update: Time Heals Wounds. Journals Reopen Them.:

In the past week I’ve spent a goodly number of hours perusing old journal entries and audio recordings made during my high school years, as I am wont to do from time to time. I’ve had a different reaction to this stuff this time than I have before — discovering a new perspective on the difficulties I suffered in that past life, and realizing that there is perhaps wisdom to be gained from this perspective. Even more importantly, it makes me realize that I have things to teach my son when he comes of age, especially if he encounters problems similar to the ones I did.

I’ve posted all of my thoughts over on Oddball Update, should you be interested.

More Uhaul Nonsense

Fri, 04 May 2012 19:56:59 -0500

The Uhaul trailer that’s been in my favorite parking spot for three days was finally gone when I went down to my car after work today. That’s timely for whoever’s leasing it, since I was prepared to complain to building management at the start of next week. As I fired up the GTO, I figured that was one problem I wouldn’t be having any more.

And then as I’m sitting there behind the wheel, facing the gated entry to the parking garage, I see a big Chevy Tahoe come gliding up to the gate with the same Uhaul trailer in tow! Somebody was bringing it back into the garage, presumably to park it in that spot again. Ooooh, I was gonna be pissed.

Hilariously, the Tahoe stopped when he saw the gate and had to back up, suggesting that whoever owns it doesn’t even have a garage pass. Even we “licensed” employees with garage passes aren’t allowed to park trailers and crap down there, but this guy thought he could cruise up as a nobody and store his shit in our building’s garage? What the fuck?

Earlier in the week, I remember the entry gate being stuck open during the morning. I’ll bet that’s when this guy snuck in the first time. Why he’d retrieve the trailer at some point this afternoon, only to bring it back at 5:30, is a mystery to me.

So anyway, he backed away from the garage and drove off toward the front of the building, where I saw him pull up at the entrance. I decided to cruise over there and see just what was going on. A big middle-aged cowboy and what appeared to be his wife were messing around with a bunch of boxes and plastic tubs from the back of the trailer. Honestly I couldn’t tell whether they were loading or unloading the thing, whether they were tenants of the office building or what. Weird.

I’m going to tentatively keep my scanners peeled for Uhaul trailers come Monday. I have a feeling this isn’t over.

EA Backpedals on iOS Rock Band Killswitch

Thu, 03 May 2012 15:08:00 -0500

I previously wrote that players of Electronic Arts’ Rock Band game for iOS received in-app notifications that their game would no longer be playable on May 31st, representing a move where a publisher can remotely sabotage software that you’ve paid for when they’ve decided that they no longer want you to use it (which they might do if, say, they had a newer version they wanted you to pay for). Today, gaming blog Joystiq reports on an announcement from EA that this message was sent “in error”.

Sure it was. What actually happened, I’d wager, is that EA decided to back off (at least temporarily) from their plan to sabotage iOS versions of Rock Band, at least until the shitstorm blows over and everybody forgets about it. You don’t compose a very specific message like this and broadcast it to every player “by mistake” (although you might mistakenly send it at the wrong time, not that that improves anything). You especially don’t add the same shutdown warning to the Frequently Asked Questions page on the game’s website. There is too much evidence that this was (or is) a real, planned shutdown.

Even if it really was a mistake, EA has curried so much ill will amongst the gaming community that there is zero chance that anyone will believe it. None. That ought to tell them everything they need to know about what people think of the way they conduct business.

Further Examples of Content Owner Overreach

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:09:00 -0500

I was just talking in my earlier post “Going Back to PC Gaming?” about how content owners (of movies, TV shows, video games, et al) seem increasingly inclined to push the envelope of exactly how much crap consumers will take and still fork over money for their wares. I gave specific examples in the TV and video game industries.

Well, the hit parade rolls on, and today I received word on an example from the movie industry. The Avengers opened in Thailand on May 1st, and a friend of my wife’s went to see it in Bangkok. The ticket price was a whopping 700 THB, roughly equivalent to $23 USD. That’s crazy expensive already for us here in the U.S., to say nothing of markets like Thailand where cost of living (and wages) are proportionally lower.

What is the reason for this?

Day two of Uhaul trailer in the coveted corner space. Anybody...

Thu, 03 May 2012 10:21:07 -0500

Day two of Uhaul trailer in the coveted corner space. Anybody got a truck? We could tow it away to some undisclosed location and hold it for ransom.

Going Back to PC Gaming?

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:32:00 -0500

There seem to be a lot of stories in the news of late about entertainment industry publishers and rightsholders believing that they can extract a penance from every consumer that is not at all equal to the value being returned. For instance, there are rumors that Hulu, an online streaming service for network TV shows, will soon adopt the cable industry’s “walled garden” authentication mechanism where you will need to prove you pay for cable TV in order to watch the shows online. Of course, guess who owns Hulu? The cable industry.

Things are not much different on the video gaming front, a sphere of far greater personal interest to me. Rumblings have indicated that the next generation video game consoles from Microsoft and Sony, due in late 2013, may come engineered with restrictions that prevent you from playing used game discs. Alternatively, it has been suggested that one or more of the next-gen systems may not even have disc drives at all, with the industry prepared to make a push for an all-digital distribution system for games. Of course, should the latter happen, guess who owns the sole mechanism by which you can acquire games for your console? Microsoft or Sony, depending on which console we’re talking about.

And today brings a story about Nintendo’s plans for game distribution for its upcoming Wii U console (seriously, I didn’t think this company could shoot itself in the foot with a horrendous name twice in a row, but it has). Publishers apparently are pressuring Nintendo to price digital copies of their games the same as the physical retail copies, so to appease them, Nintendo will comply — but as a carrot for consumers, it will also continue to offer physical games through traditional retail channels. What really struck me about this story was Nintendo president Satoru Iwata’s assertion that digitally distributed content does not “hold less value” and thus it does not make sense to price it more affordably than physical disk. Really? Something that I cannot trade, loan or sell does not have inherently less value than something I can? No. I’m sorry. That is complete bull. Full stop.

Edit: After I published this entry, an announcement was released by Electronic Arts (recently voted the Worst Company in America, rightly or wrongly) that the iPhone/iPad version of the original Rock Band game will simply stop working on May 31st. If you bought this game, you will no longer be able to play it after this arbitrary date that EA has decided upon. This means that not only are we being pressured into paying for digitally-distributed software that we can’t resell and which never gets discounted, but that said software may also be supplied as “timebomb content” that can be remotely detonated whenever the publisher/puppetmaster feels that it’s time you bought a newer version of their product. Lovely!

Add all of this up, and you can invariably see where this is going. Content owners believe that they can make consumers jump through exorbitant hoops and pay double or even triple to access content through largely similar means (i.e., TV vs. Internet delivery of shows) simply because they are holding all the cards. A lot of people will go along with it, too, for lack of any better options, so the content owners will be proven correct. And we’ll all be stuck paying outlandish prices for media that we cannot acquire any other way, be it on a second-hand basis or through discount retail channels.

I already cut the cord on paid television long ago. With nothing but an over-the-air antenna feeding about a dozen watchable channels to my TiVo, I’ve found that I’m not really missing out on anything I give a shit about. I’ve discovered that shows that I used to watch but now can’t (because they’re on cable) really must not interest me that much, because I’m not losing much sleep over being unable to watch them. And if I really wanted to, most of them are available on DVD or Blu-ray after months after they air. I don’t need to see anything so urgently that I have to watch it within hours of it being released in the wild.

Besides, if I’m going to pick an activity that involves looking at a screen, I’d already much rather be playing video games than watching TV. And here lies my real problem, because the same flavor of of exorbitant greed that killed television for me is starting to infect the gaming industry in a serious way.

This has all got me thinking about going back to PC gaming. Despite having moved to a largely digital distribution model already, PC games can routinely be found at discounted rates, even through digital storefronts like Steam. There are also numerous ways to enjoy old games, such as through services like GOG.com. And now that I have a modern TV, it wouldn’t be hard to hook up a computer in my game room, attach a wireless controller dongle and play PC games the same way I play Xbox games now.

All I’d need is a new gaming computer to replace my 5-year old workstation. And that’s the real issue with a switch back to PC games, because I don’t see how I can put together a decent gaming box without spending significantly more than I would on a game console. I recently laid out $350 for a new Xbox 360. I doubt I could build a new computer from the ground up for that kind of money, at least not one that could handle current-gen AAA games. And after moving, clearing out my closets and spending the last half-decade keeping the same PC running, I’ve run out of spare parts with which to jumpstart a new build. It would all have to be built up from square one.

Still, as we get closer to the release of the next generation of game consoles, putting the money I’ve saved for one toward a new gaming PC instead may become an increasingly palatable affair. We shall have to see how it goes.

Buick sheds its image as a brand for the elderly | The Detroit News

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:28:00 -0500

Buick sheds its image as a brand for the elderly | The Detroit News:

The average Buick buyer’s age is 59 now instead of 62. I was shocked to learn that it was that high to begin with — I mean, this is the average age? I suppose it indicates that very few buyers, other than those nearing retirement age, were ever interested in Buicks (at least since the last Grand National rolled off the line). There are those who don’t even know that Buick has had a lot of storied performance cars in their lineup, and that it was a Buick turbo engine (with less than eight cylinders, no less!) that powered one of the fastest Pontiac Trans Ams of all time, the 1989 Indy Pace Car special edition.

One of the commenters on the Detroit News article makes a valid point when he reminds us that a likely part of the reason for the reduction in Buick’s average buyer age is the fact that a lot of younger GM buyers were very heavily shunted toward Buick after the demise of Pontiac and Saturn. I know that I was definitely “upmarketed” toward Buick and GMC in 2009 after PMD was mothballed. At the time, there was not a single Buick that I would ever have considered buying (today’s Regal GS is the only Buick that really interests me, though not enough to purchase one). Although as a purchaser strictly of Pontiac’s halo cars (Trans Am, GTO, et al) over the years, I probably wasn’t representative of the mainstream Pontiac buyer either.

Personally, after the loss of Pontiac, I found myself freewheeling around and unsure of where to place my automotive loyalties — other than the fact that they were definitely staying grounded in something Western. It’s oddly freeing, in a way. If I were to pick out a new car tomorrow, I would probably test drive all three of the Challenger, Mustang and Camaro, in that order of preference. But if you threw in a Camaro that had been done up as a Hurst Edition Trans Am or a 7t7, then that automatically takes my pick, all other considerations rescinded.

Windows 7 Hanging at Logon? Try Hotfix 2578159 | Oddball Update

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:54:33 -0500

Windows 7 Hanging at Logon? Try Hotfix 2578159 | Oddball Update:

Ran into an interesting problem with my computer tonight in which I could not logon to Windows. As it turns out, Microsoft hotfix 2578159 resolved the issue. Check my full article on Oddball Update for the details.

City Bans Dance Halls, Nightclubs, Skating Rinks 'To Protect The City'

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:09:04 -0500

City Bans Dance Halls, Nightclubs, Skating Rinks 'To Protect The City':

My first thought: Is the city Naples, FL? (Hint: No, but it IS in Florida.)

Previously on April 17th

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:03:00 -0500

On this day in 1995:

John Romero announced episode four, “Thy Flesh Consumed”, as an expansion to the original Doom, which I only remember because…
…I mentioned it while recording the Wolfenstein Modified Sounds Extravaganza Volume III at 7:04 p.m.

When you record mundane details on tape, mundane details have a way of resurfacing years down the road.