aubreyturner.org

Last year on Halloween Edward Rivera, of Lorain, OH, knocked down a 10-year-old boy and stole his candy.  Rivera pled guilty and was sentenced to stand outside a local hospital today between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. handing out candy and wearing a sign that says, “I’m sorry. I will not steal from children.”

He’s lucky I’m not a judge.  I’d have given him time in jail (and put in an unofficial word to the jailers to tell the other inmates that he hurt a child).  What he did is despicable.

I’ve been stewing about this Wellstone rally (I won’t call it a memorial, ‘cause it wasn’t) all day now and apparently I’m not the only one.  A lot of people had unkind things to say.  This is just a sample:

• Instapundit
• VodkaPundit
• Rachel Lucas
• Cold Fury
• a small victory

Well, this is the final straw.  It’s bad enough the Dems turned the memorial into a dammed political rally, but it turns out that we’re footing the bill for it.  Typical behavior for politicians.

I can’t really add much to this.

I was checking my referral logs and I found out that someone posted my earlier rant about personal information gathering to a Yahoo message board.

Someone calling himself silence245 had this to say:

and one more thing…

this is probably the woman I tried to help on Saturday.

From the second she walked in the door… I knew it wasn’t going to be a pleasant experience. She was incredibly rude to me…
I approached her to see if she needed assistance and she snapped at me saying that she could find it herself.
Then, in an all-to-often ironic twist, she soon after approached me seeking help after she couldn’t “find it herself”

Not.  I realize you may have just been venting, but when you assume you make an ASS of U and ME.

The first thing to know is that while the given name Aubrey has been used for females, it is primarily a male name.  Of course, I’m used to this by now.  The only thing that really sets me off is when someone calls me Audrey, which is a female name and shows that they don’t have enough respect for me to learn my correct name. 

The next thing is that I am very rarely rude to sales staff, even if they are being a smartass or exhibiting a bad attitude.  I learned years ago that being polite can often get you what you want more easily than being rude or flying off the handle (although I admit having done it a few times in the past).  If I’m upset by something outside the store I don’t take it out on the staff.  In the case of Office Max and the ZIP code incident, I didn’t say or do anything rude to the cashier.  I simply stated that I would not participate in the survey.  That was all there was to it.

In those rare (these days) cases where the sales staff is so incompetent or rude that it upsets me, I generally tell them that I’ve changed my mind about the sale and leave.  I generally try to avoid confrontations.  If they can’t treat me with courtesy and respect, I simply go somewhere else.  If the problem is not as serious, I have found that a polite word said with a bit of quiet anger will usually take care of things. 

And finally, when the sales staff asks me if I need help, I generally say “No, thanks” or “I’m just looking.”  There’s no need to be rude (even after the fifth salesperson does this ).  If I’d come into your store, you’d probably never know I’d been there (unless you remembered my refusal to participate in your store’s information gathering efforts).

Update: This whole retail thing isn’t one of my primary concerns.  My interests lie more in freedom and libertarianism.  It’s also interesting to note the amount of juvenile name-calling and snarky attitude that you get when you decide to break from the herd.  The link to the article was posted to another Yahoo board where someone posted a scarastic (I hope—maybe he/she was really that ignorant; I shudder at the thought) reply that implied that I was some kind of paranoid redneck.  Oh well, I guess some people just don’t get it (and probably never will).  I think I’m done with this topic for a while, though.  There are more important battles right now, especially this stupidity over so-called ballistic “fingerprinting”.

I had previously mentioned an OfficeMax survey that was the last straw with regards to my participation in surveys and information gathering at checkout.

I was in the OfficeMax in Denton yesterday and I noticed that the cash register still prompts the clerk for the survey questions (intended use of the merchandise and zip code), but the clerk zipped by them and just put filler.  She never asked me for any of it.  I didn’t ask about it, but I suspect that this is a case of practicality taking over in place of the grand schemes of marketing.  The clerks just want to get through the work day and if the survey questions cause them a lot of grief, they’ll stop asking them (and fill in junk or nothing if the computer makes them fill in something).  After trying the survey for a while, I suspect they found that people were being put off by it and gave up.  Maybe the market sorted this one out for the better this time.

Or it could be that they recognized me as the curmudgeon who wouldn’t answer their questions last time and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble .

This is the kind of thing that really sets me off.  As I mentioned earlier, I’m not very fond of being profiled and tracked by retailers.

Safeway is testing these carts in Moraga and Cameron Park, California:

Shopping carts in those stores have been equipped with a touch screen and scanner, where shoppers are invited to swipe their Safeway Club Cards—“loyalty” cards that keep track of everything their holders buy in exchange for discounts on merchandise.

As customers stroll the aisles of the store, the screen flashes promotions based on their purchasing histories. For instance, if a shopper is passing the detergent shelves and hasn’t stocked up in while, the cart could flash a coupon for his or her preferred brand.

On the surface, Safeway says it is interested in the technology as a tool for boosting convenience for customers, according to Safeway spokesman David Bowlby. “As with Club Cards, it’s an added convenience for customers,” said Bowlby. “We’re constantly enhancing the customer shopping experience and making it more convenient for them.”

Right.  Requiring a card to get a higher price is really convenient.

But the data gathered by stores such as Safeway represents a treasure trove of consumer buying habits, which may ultimately allow retailers to boost profits by better tailoring their inventories to customers’ desires. The data can also help retailers squeeze more efficiency out of their supply chain by ensuring that they are stocking up on inventory that consumers want to buy.

Inventory my arse, they want that “treasure trove of … habits” so they can build a portfolio on you and market crap to you based on it.

Katherine Albrecht, founder of CASPIAN (whom I came to know because of Albertson’s breaking their no card promise here in North Texas):

I think the average shopper would be creeped out by being tracked around the store. It’s a disturbing thought—being treated like a lab rat.

Instead of creeped out, try infuriated.

Marketing tools like “smart” shopping carts could backfire, however, if people aren’t given the choice not to use them, said Boone. Customers could get annoyed, for instance, if the cart beeped at them until they swiped their card.

If these things are linked to “loyalty” cards, then I probably won’t encounter them, since I won’t shop in a store that uses them.  However if I ever encounter one of these that can’t be disabled I’m going to perform a field study on the distruptive effects of magnetic fields on electronic devices (i.e. clamp a big honkin’ magnet on this sucker).

This weekend I decided to rearrange my office/computer room/workspace because I had added a new gun safe.  As part of this I dismantled my home network, including my cable modem.

When I went to put it all back together, I noticed that my Linux box wasn’t getting a response from the DHCP server.  I checked the cable modem and saw that the cable light was on and the data light was flashing.  However, the PC light was off and the hub¹ didn’t show a light for the cable modem.  I swapped the hub for a spare.  No luck.  Then I tried a different ethernet cable, in case the first one was bad.  Still no luck.

At this point I’m starting to think the cable modem has gone bad.  That sinking feeling starts to settle in as I’m thinking I’m about to be without internet access for an extended period of time.  Kind of like a junkie without a fix.

After a while (as I’m about to head out to buy a replacement cable modem), I remember that cable modems have the TX and RX wires reversed, so that they can use standard ethernet cables when connecting directly to a PC (rather than more expensive crossover cables).  To use them with a hub they have to be connected to the uplink port.  I moved the connection to the uplink port and all was well again.

Oh well, nothing of great importance.  But beware of acute dumbass attack when reassembling your network setup.

¹ I use a Linux PC as a masquerading firewall.  It has two ethernet cards, one goes to my internal 10/100 switch and the other goes to the 10Mbps hub that the cable modem is connected to.  I suppose I could ditch the hub and connect the firewall directly to the cable modem, but I like the flexibility of being able to plug in directly without rewiring if something goes wrong with the firewall.  One of these days I’m going to get a dedicated firewall and ditch the Linux firewall (Linux is fine, but I’m getting tired of building and maintaining PCs and their associated hardware).

Gun Shows for the Dallas/Fort Worth area between now and the end of the year:

• October 26&27: Big Town¹
• November 16&17: Dallas Convention Center¹
• November 23&24: Mesquite Rodeo¹
• November 30, December 1: Dallas Market Hall²
• December 14&15: Big Town¹
• December 28&29: Fort Worth Convention Center³

¹ North Texas Gun Club, 214-341-2895
² The Dallas Arms Collectors Association Inc., 972-223-3066
³ High Caliber Gun Shows Inc., 281-331-5969

I compiled this list for personal reference, but I thought it might be useful to have it available.  There is contradictory information out there and this stuff is kept in a lot of different places.

Suman Palit excoriates some GFW¹ nutbag who had the gall to vomit forth the following steaming pile:

The obvious question is: What fresh outrage and what sort of body count would it take for voters to conclude that at some point the constitutional right to “bear” arms must be abridged in new and more imaginative ways?

The only outrage is that someone so idiotic could get an article into Newsday.

¹ GFW = Gun Fearing Wussy (thanks to Kim du Toit for this excellent term).

This has been building all day, ever since CNN.com plastered it on their front page that the make of the sniper weapon was a Bushmaster.  It finally came to a head for me on the way home.  I was flipping through the news and talk channels on XM and I came across someone talking about Islam.  During the commercial break they did one of those short news roundups, this one being from the Wall Street Journal.  The news reader intoned that Bushmaster was taking a lot of heat and that it was using “loopholes” to sell its guns. 

As soon as I heard that I thought my head was going to come off.  I wouldn’t be suprised if steam was actually coming out of my ears as I cut loose with a stream of obscenity that is probably still floating over Lake Lewisville¹.  This was a couple of hours ago now, so I’m finally calming down a bit (at least to the point where I’m not yelling at the TV and radio anymore).

My first thought was what exactly in the blue hell does the make of the rifle have to do with anything?!  Who gives a flying flip who made the damn thing?!  Some whacko nutbag killed a bunch of people and these idiots are nattering about the make of the rifle!

I swear I’m going to give myself an aneurism if I keep this up.  I usually know better than have anything to do with CNN (or any of the other mainstream news outfits).  These idiots wouldn’t know a Busmaster from a DPMS from a Colt from a Rock River from a Les Baer, etc (you get the point).  Now they’re presuming to tell me (who happens to own 14 guns, including a Bushmaster XM15 E2S) about guns?

That’s pretty rich coming from people who think that shell casings exit a gun’s barrel and who feel the need to explain how the evil scary black gun works (see link). 

But none of this really matters to anyone but the prosecution (which can use the gun against the killers).  The ultimate responsibility for these killings rests with the people who did them.  These idiots don’t ever stop to consider that guns don’t just get up and start shooting people.  It takes a person to make them function and it’s up to the person to be responsible for what happens.  It’s easier for them to blame the instrumentality than the personality.  I suspect they’ll be the same ones crying when the shooters get the death penalty².

Idiots!

Next we’re going to be hearing about “ballistic fingerprinting” and registration and a whole raft of nonsense.  Those of us who own guns are going to be spending the next few months fighting this crap, although there may just be some hope for the future.

Personally, I’m going to support the gun industry any way I can.  I’ll be buying a bunch of ammo on November, 19th and maybe a new gun this weekend.  Politicans should take note that I become a a single issue voter at times like this and I have a long memory and no allegiance to any political party.  Anyone who votes for any anti-freedom victim disarmament measure will never get a vote from me again.

¹ If that sounds familiar, it’s because I borrowed the phrase from a movie (with a slight modification).  You’re welcome to guess which one.

² I’ve been meaning to write about the death penalty.  I’m coming to oppose it, but only because I don’t trust the state to get the facts right when applying it.  I still strongly believe that certain crimes warrant death for the offender.  This a perfect example.

Update:Instapundit has a link to this post by Alphecca.  I like how this guy thinks.  I may have to add him to my links.