aubreyturner.org

I’m about to get out of here and head back home for Thanksgiving.  In the midst of all the food and football and sales don’t forget to be thankful for all the good things you have.

And if you think you don’t have anything good going on, it could always be worse:

The Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, has filed suit against 15 companies in the state for violating the Texas do-not-call list.  Each company named in the suit has at least 10 violations reported against it.

As usual, the telemarketers are using lame excuses to try to get around the law:

Among them, four Houston area companies, including Jospeh C. Sparks Area Wide Auto Glass of Katy, Auto Finance 4 Pre-owned Cars of Stafford, Houston Allstate—a house siding company—and Lakefront Properties of Houston.

Nearly one million consumers have signed up for the do-not-call list. Of the companies named in the suit, each have received at least 10 complaints.

But as Houston Allstate President Jim LaGrappe is concerned, that’s news to him.

When asked if his company has been making illegal calls, he says “No, not that we know of, but evidently we have since we got this lawsuit.”

La Grappe says he just now received letter of the lawsuit, while his marketing director says the company has received the do-not-call list but it’s hard to understand.

“The list is a conglomeration of all different cities, not just Houston and the list is really hard to decipher,” Mike Thompson says.

I really fail to see just how hard a concept it is to not freakin’ call people on the damn list!  If their system is automated they can just feed the list in and compare each outgoing call against the list and move on to another number if the number they’re about to call is on the list.  This is a pretty simple operation for a computer, and most of these damn telemarketers are automated in such a way that the computers do all the dialing.

Lest you think Allstate is getting a bum rap here, consider this:

On the list, consumer Melinda Rohrer, who says when Houston Allstate called her she told them not to call back, but on the other end of the phone was laughter.

“I said ‘Well, we have no interest in your service. Please remove us from your call list,’ and he was still laughing when I hung up,” Rohrer says.

Right now I’m waiting for the next refresh of the Texas and national lists to go into effect so my new number will be off limits to these bastards.  In the meantime I’m having to answer every call and tell them to buzz off.  So far I haven’t encountered anyone who gave me any crap about telling them to put me on their do-not-call list.  I think they realize that they’re treading dangerous ground with us these days.  I’m on a hair trigger just waiting for one of them to give me any grief about it, because it’s become more sensitive on those days when I work from home and can’t afford to screen my calls. 

(The weird grammar in the quotes above is presented exactly as given on the News 24 Houston site.  I would suggest that maybe they need to hire an English major.)

A few days ago I posted about an Alpha Phi Alpha pledge at SMU who was hospitalized after drinking too much water.  From the Dallas Morning News (annoying registration required) we’re learning a little more about just how much water he drank.

Doctors said Braylon Curry, 21, is expected to make a full recovery after ingesting 4 to 5 gallons of water, causing him to lose consciousness and become delirious during an alleged hazing incident involving the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

The SMU student newspaper reports on a detail that seems important:

Weinmeister also spoke of Curry’s initial exam in which doctors discovered bruises near his armpits and on his arms. The bruises on his arms were really the most obvious, said Weinmeister.

Given what I’ve seen of Alpha Phi Alpha when I was in school, I wouldn’t put it past them to have held him down and forced him to drink.

I don’t remember now where I ran across Ghost Wings magazine, but I subscribed to a year of it because it seemed interesting.  It’s a student-published quarterly aviation magazine that tells the stories of America’s veterans from WWII through today (although a lot of their focus is on WWII).

I got an email from them this morning about a fundraiser that they’re conducting to raise money for the magazine.  They’re selling prints of a painting called “We Were a Band of Brothers”, which depicts the men of Easy Company before they made their combat jump prior to D-Day.  The print is signed by surviving members of Easy Company (there are two different ones, with different members’ signatures for different prices).

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of waking up at 3:00am and not being able to get back to sleep.  You know that tomorrow is going to suck because you’ll fall asleep again just before the alarm goes off and you’ll stumble around like a zombie for a while.  Whenever this happens my brain just starts going when I wake up and I can’t stop it long enough to get back to sleep.

The only interesting part of it all is that these are usually the only times I remember much from my dreams.  This morning I was just settling into some REM sleep when the alarm went off, so I have a few memories.  I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t remember them, because they’re often weird and sometimes frightening.  In no particular order (since they’re all jumbled together in my head anyway):

• There were angry pit bulls.  I had to shoot some of them, but I remember feeling bad about it (and angry at the people who had let them loose, forcing me to kill the dogs).
• Unfortunately, getting rid of the pit bulls didn’t lead to safety, because there were small velociraptors (!) stalking me from a corn field.  I found myself shooting at fleeting images as they ran through the corn.
• Interestingly enough I was at the edge of the field and as soon as I realized that I got in my truck and drove away.  Unfortunately, there were trucks and graders spreading fresh dirt on the road and I couldn’t get much traction.  And for some reason I couldn’t find the button that engages 4WD (or I couldn’t get to it).  It was one of those frustrating things similar to when you’re trying to run but just can’t seem to move.
• Next I found myself in a house with what seemed like way too much furniture and too many TVs (they were stacked on other TVs).  There were also at least six clocks, all of which were stopped or flashing.
• A couple of women came in carrying a new dining table and I had to help them before they fell over.  I realized that I was married (!) to one of them and the other was her mother.  At the same time I saw that the problem of too much furniture was just that it was all jammed into one room of this large, older house.
• Somehow I was in college again and there was some kind of exhibition going on and I was trying to get in.  I could see a couple of my friends through the doors, but they wouldn’t let me in.  They said something that implied they were allowing people in on certain days based on their housing status or something.  But what they really meant was that men were not allowed on this day.

I’m not sure what any of it means, as it was all so weird and disconnected.  I suppose it’s better that I don’t usually remember any of this crap.

Here we go again.

Applied Digital Solutions of Palm Beach, Fla., is hoping that Americans can be persuaded to implant RFID chips under their skin to identify themselves when going to a cash machine or in place of using a credit card. The surgical procedure, which is performed with local anesthetic, embeds a 12-by-2.1mm RFID tag in the flesh of a human arm.

I don’t forsee myself ever doing something like this.  I can just imagine that criminals will start using RFID scanners to digitally pick your pocket arm.  Or worse, hacking off someone’s limb to get at their RFID tag.  Applied Digital Solutions has been working really hard to come up with a use for this implantable technology, but so far no one has really bought into it (their first product was an implantable tracking device).  This sounds like another attempt to get some traction.  Frankly, I wouldn’t shed any tears for them if they flopped and went out of business.  I consider them distasteful in the extreme.

Is it wrong to lust after a gas grill?

I really do need one, since I realized that if there was a power failure I’d have no way to cook (my water heater and furnace are gas, but the range is electric).  I suppose, though, that I don’t really need one that fancy.  But it’d sure be nice to have it.  Or maybe this one…

Upon hearing the news that SpamCop had been bought by a company called IronPort I was a little concerned that they might change the way it operates.  The announcement on the front page of SpamCop assures it that this won’t happen, and that IronPort will beef up SpamCop’s defenses against DDOS attacks because IronPort relies on SpamCop’s blocklists.  However, this article worries me a bit. 

In addition to selling spam filtering services (and hardware), IronPort also builds specialized hardware for sending out millions of spam emails at a time (one source quoted in the article called them ‘spam cannons’).  This does not exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling inside as someone who has paid for SpamCop’s services.  I suppose it remains to be seen just how long IronPort will resist the temptation to futz with SpamCop’s blocklists to get one of its slimy spammer clients off of it.  Of course, reputation is key in the antispam game, so IronPort will have a lot to lose if it scares away customers by interfering with the integrity of SpamCop.

I received an email this morning from the subject of a news article that I commented on nearly a year ago in this post.  In the post I commented on the comments of one of the students who was interviewed about the killing of some livestock at Krum High School by dogs.  The subject, a Ms. Kara Arnold was quoted as saying the following:

“For us, it was like a small version of Sept. 11,” Kara said. “We never thought this would happen.”

My response was that this was moral equivocation of the worst kind.  To compare the deaths of a few animals to the deliberate murder of 3000 people is an outrage. 

In the interest of fairness, I present the email I received from Ms. Arnold this morning:

I randomly came upon your comments on the Denton Record Chronicle article from Dec, 7th, 2002. Now, I know that was a long time, but what you said against me was an outrage! First, I have never and will never have any thing to do with PETA! What I meant by my quote, that they randomly took out of a long interview might I add, was that before Sept. 11th we (Americans) felt safe and then we were attacked on our own soil. We didn’t feel as safe as we did before Sept. 11th. That was the feeling of the attacks at our school barn. We had never had attacks and this one attack made us aware that is possible. In NO WAY was I comparing the death over 3,000 innocent people to this event and PLEASE don’t take my words and make it into something its not! The reporters did a poor job of portraying what I was trying to say! I got a great education at Krum High School. That education got me accept into Texas A&M University where I am working on a degree in Agriculture Journalism. That says a lot by itself. So next time think before you just go off on some one you have never meet and do not know! Thanks Kara Arnold the proudest member of the fighting Texas Aggie class of ‘07

And my reply:

Ms. Arnold,

The quote as written in the newpaper left no room for equivocation.  You were quoted as saying, “For us, it was like a small version of Sept. 11.”  If you really didn’t say that, then I apologize to you.  I do understand that newspapers often get things wrong.  However, if you really did say that, I stand by EVERYTHING that I said.  There is no room for moral equivocation as far as I’m concerned in this matter.

I like the “randomly came upon” part in the opening.  It’s OK to admit that you’ve Googled yourself.  Almost everyone does it. 

Anyhow, I do hope that she was misquoted.  But if she did say it (even if taken out of context), I think the statement was the wrong thing to say.  On the bright side, at least she was outraged at being accused of being a PETA member…

While at the Sam’s Club in Grapevine this Saturday I saw a sign in the book section about an upcoming book signing event.  What caught my eye was the name of the author.  It turns out that former President Jimmy Carter has written a novel, The Hornet’s Nest. 

Here’s a review (registration required) from the Dallas Morning News.

If I remember the sign correctly, the signing will be tomorrow evening at the Sam’s Club in Grapevine.