aubreyturner.org

The Darwin Award folks may want to keep an eye on this one.

A 12-year-old Granbury boy struck by a car while lying in the street with a pillow as his friends videotaped the accident is in critical condition.  A spokeswoman with Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth said the boy, Wesley Dell Parker, was in the hospital’s critical care unit and was in critical condition Tuesday afternoon.

On Saturday at 10:30 p.m., Parker was struck by a car as he laid with a pillow on Spanish Oak Drive near Misty Meadows Drive close to Emma Roberson Elementary School, said police captain Alan Hines.

Hines said two of Parker’s friends videotaped the accident. Although police did not officially say the kids were imitating a cable television show that airs stunts and physical accidents, officers at the scene said it appeared similar, Hines said.

The driver of the car that struck Parker left the scene but was tracked down by police Sunday, Hines said. When told she struck a person, the female driver became distraught, he said.

She told police she thought she hit a rock where the accident occurred.  The videotape is considered evidence, and district attorney Rob Christian must now consider whether a criminal charge of leaving the scene of an accident will be filed against the driver, said criminal investigator Russell Grizzard.

This little stunt takes stupidity to new heights.  Worse, they involved an innocent driver who will have to live with knowing she hit this kid, even if it wasn’t her fault.

When I deal with various companies as a customer I’m fairly easy to please, but at the same time it’s easy to lose me (it’s also easy to lose me before I become a customer).  I had a few incidents over the past week or so that by themselves weren’t big enough for posts of their own.  Here they are:

1. Requiring a phone call for simple things is something that tends to turn me off.  I’ve dealt with so many poorly organized phone mazes that have wasted so much of my time and left me so frustrated that I dread calling any company these days.

   The knob on my washing machine broke recently.  It was made out of plastic, so I suppose it was inevitable, although in Whirlpool’s favor is the fact that it lasted nearly 9 years.  I went to their website to see about ordering a replacement.  It took me a while to find the section on parts, but all it did was give their 800 number.  It seems to me that ordering parts should be a simple operation that can be automated.  But no, Whirlpool was mostly interested in trying to help me find a local service center.  I found another vendor online that stepped me through the process of identifying the part.  Interestingly enough, they had a replacement part made by a third-party that used metal threads and was $6.00 cheaper than the plastic Whirlpool part.  From the front they were indistinguishable (at least in the pictures on the website, which were well done and used a grid pattern underneath the part for visual reference).

2. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram recently left a complimentary paper on my driveway with an offer for a six month subscription for $30.00 (including weekends).  I decided to take them up on it, since they cover North Tarrant county fairly well (their national coverage reeks of bias, and don’t get me started on their editorial cartoons, though).  A few days after I subscribed I got a phone call.  It started with a recording that said it was the Star-Telegram’s customer service department calling to confirm my subscription and that I was happy with it.  It then asked me to wait on the line for the next available operator.  I said a few bad words and slammed the receiver down.  There’s nothing that infuriates me quite like being called by a machine and then put on hold.  If you’re going to call me at least do me the courtesy of having someone on the line when I pick up.  I almost called back to cancel the subscription, but I counted to 10 first.  I noticed that they finally had a human call me today to follow up, though.  Maybe if enough of us refuse to deal with automated callers they’ll get the message.
3. Ignoring my express wishes is a good way for a company to be on my shit-list forever.  Rainsoft called a few months ago and I told them to put me on their do-no-call list.  For the past week they’d been calling again on a daily basis between 6:00 and 7:00pm.  I’d been ignoring them based on the Caller ID until last night.  When I picked up they said the exact same thing they said before (“we’d like to welcome you to the neighborhood, etc…”).  I told them I’d asked to be put on their do-not-call list previously and that my number is on the national and state do-not-call lists.  It’s always a bad sign when a company ignores the do-not-call list, so I did some checking into them.  From what I could find it appears that Rainsoft is a high-pressure telesales firm that sells water softening equipment using questionable tactics (and at inflated prices).  If they’d have left me alone I’d have never bothered to look them up.  Now they’re on my permanent do-not-use list and I’m writing about them here.
4. Calling me after I’ve made an order to try to sell me more stuff is a generally bad idea.  If I’d have wanted the other stuff I’d have bought it already.  Thompson Cigar did this to me.  At first they pretended the call was to follow-up on the order and give me status.  Then they started in on trying to sell me a membership in their club (where they ship you cigars every month).  I don’t smoke enough cigars to warrant any kind of club.  Given my habits, I’m probably better off going to a local shop anyway.  That way I can buy singles and try out new brands.  With online/catalog ordering you frequently have to buy a whole box (or a minimum of 5 or 10, depending on how expensive the brand is).

Update: Added last item after the entry was published.  I got distracted while writing the post and forgot to add this one.

Humans are prone to try to find connections in things that may at first seem unrelated.  It’s one of the traits that has allowed us to make sense of the world around us and formulate scientific laws through empirical observation.

However, examining the website of Confluence Against Gun Violence (a group that’s planning protests at the NRA Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh) I’m starting to be convinced that a number of things are related in such a way as to form a giant hairball of stupidity.  I can only hope society survives the wretching required to cough this sucker up.  I suppose that it remains to be seen whether this is so.

Anyhow…

They seen very sincere in their hatred of the NRA, as if it were somehow an organization that sprang fully formed from the gates of hell with the sole purpose of pushing lethal death machines on unsuspecting rubes (like yours truly).

As usual, they’re planning to trot out the memory of victims of violent crime in their candlelight vigil to remember the victims of “gun violence.”  I am always moved when an innocent person is killed by a criminal (or through an act of stupidity), but I fail to see how the NRA or I could be responsible for this.  And assigning blame to an inanimate object is just silly.

But this, along with their “Teach In” entitled “Militarism and the NRA” got me to thinking a bit.  The very term “gun violence” is a collectivistic thing that seems to hold all guns and gun owners responsible for the actions of criminals.  And that’s where our fundamental difference lies, one that is likely unbridgeable in our lifetimes.  The antis see this as some kind of societal, collective issue that is addressable through the public sphere in the legislature and in the courts (when the legislature rightly ignores them).  We, on the other hand, understand that this is an issue of personal responsibility that cannot be collectivized (further, it makes no sense to even try).  Combine this with the fundamental right of a sentient being to self-defense and most gun-owners’ understanding of the evils of socialist schemes and you’ve got a impasse that cannot be resolved without fundamental changes to either side (which would effectively eliminate the side that changed).

How did I get to the evils of socialism from “Militarism and the NRA”?  Of late we’ve seen the socialists and communists coming out of the woodwork and scurrying around like roaches at the antiwar rallies.  The topic of militarism was the final link in the chain between the anti-gunners and the barking moonbats. 

It should be interesting to see just what kind of people show up for these protests.  I’ll be taking my camera to the annual meeting and depending on the scheduling I may try to get some shots of the crowd.  I’ll have to be careful not to get sucked into the hairball, though…

Not only does the state want to hear everything you say, it doesn’t want to pay for the privilege.

Hoping to contain “skyrocketing” costs, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has asked the Federal Communications Commission to limit how much U.S. cell phone service providers charge law enforcement to wiretap calls.

After a period of spiking prices, Spitzer’s office now spends a budget-busting $400,000 to $500,000 annually on wiretaps, while some smaller law enforcement agencies aren’t using the basic crime-fighting tactic at all, according to a document Spitzer filed Monday with the FCC.

“Such a cost-recovery scheme (makes) intercepts prohibitively expensive for virtually all law enforcement agencies, and result in depriving law enforcement of an essential crime-fighting and anti-terror tool,” he added.

Cell phone service providers have warned for more than a decade that wiretapping would be an expensive proposition, much more so than traditional phone networks. Furthermore, there are mechanisms in place that allow law enforcement agencies to dispute any wiretapping costs if they feel they are being overcharged, a representative for the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA), a cell phone industry trade group, said in response to Spitzer’s request to the FCC.

According to Spitzer, a yearlong wiretap costs between $5,000 to $26,400, depending on which U.S. cell phone service provider is doing the setup and maintenance. The CTIA representative did not comment on figures Spitzer’s office provided.

Poor big brother… can’t afford to listen as much as he wants…  <Screaming Baby>Waaaaaaa</Screaming Baby>

Can you tell that I’m not entirely sympathetic to Mr Spitzer?

I keep seeing this obnoxious commercial from AARP (I think).  It starts out well enough with a recap of the tons of money we’ve wasted on the War On Drugs.  But then it goes into their message about “affordable and safe” imports and working for “affordable” drugs in this country.  They use war terms concerning getting prices down.

It gets me to yelling at the TV at that point, because if these people succeed in their socialist war on drug makers, they’ll be killing the goose that lays their golden pills.  It costs a lot of money to bring a new drug to market these days, and America pays the bulk of these costs.  If they succeed in getting the same kind of government fiat pricing that Canada has, the drug companies will never be able to recoup their costs, and no new drugs will be developed.  It gets really frustrating that they can’t see something as simple as this.

What’s worse is that the drug companies are starting to have to spend money on public relations ads to fight back.  That’s just one more cost that they’ll have to pass on to the rest of us.

I was trying to get the data kit for my Motorola V400 working with my Cingular Wireless Internet Express service, but kept getting failures to connect.  After tinkering with it I finally bit the bullet and called Cingular support.  After a while on hold I finally got a live person, but this guy was somewhat clueless about the data connect kit and I finally asked to be transferred to the data group.  After another 15 minutes or so on hold I got connected to a tech who knew what he was doing.  After confirming a few settings, he had me power-cycle the phone and it started working.  It turns out that when they added the Wireless Internet Express package they forgot to add a “data line” to the account. 

Anyhow, the techs were friendly enough once you got through to them.  The problem was that they were running Cingular commercials while I was on hold.  This is somewhat annoying in and of itself, but I’ve come to expect it.  The problem is that I spent 30 or 40 minutes on hold listening to the same four ads.  They could have at least done me the favor of running some different ads given that they have to know their hold times are long (which is obvious since they repeat that “your call is important to us” message every minute or so).

One thing I found curious from the ads is that their road-side assistance package is less expensive per month than their cellular phone insurance ($2.99 vs $3.99).  I guess the ads managed to penetrate my brain through sheer repetition.

Now that the data kit is working, though, it’s pretty handy.  It lets me connect my laptop to the internet directly through the phone using GPRS.  It doesn’t use any airtime minutes, but instead charges on the basis of amount of data transferred.  I don’t know if I’ll ever have to use it, but it’s handy to have as a just-in-case backup or for use when traveling.

Murphy is a nitpicky bastard.  Whenever something goes wrong it’s usually the result of the confluence of a number of small things that if taken by themselves would likely be considered nuisances, but not critical.  On Saturday Slashdot picked up this article from SecurityFocus that summarized the results of the report issued by the blackout investigators.

The problem began when three of FirstEnergy‘s high-power lines sagged into trees.  Normally, this would have sounded an alarm and the operators would have routed around the trouble.  A few people might have lost power, but that would have likely been the end of it.  However, it turns out that there was a critical bug in the GE Energy XA/21 Energy Management System (EMS).

Sometimes working late into the night and the early hours of the morning, the team pored over the approximately one-million lines of code that comprise the XA/21’s Alarm and Event Processing Routine, written in the C and C++ programming languages. Eventually they were able to reproduce the Ohio alarm crash in GE Energy’s Florida laboratory, says Unum. “It took us a considerable amount of time to go in and reconstruct the events.” In the end, they had to slow down the system, injecting deliberate delays in the code while feeding alarm inputs to the program. About eight weeks after the blackout, the bug was unmasked as a particularly subtle incarnation of a common programming error called a “race condition,” triggered on August 14th by a perfect storm of events and alarm conditions on the equipment being monitored. The bug had a window of opportunity measured in milliseconds.

“There was a couple of processes that were in contention for a common data structure, and through a software coding error in one of the application processes, they were both able to get write access to a data structure at the same time,” says Unum. “And that corruption led to the alarm event application getting into an infinite loop and spinning.”

The GE representative thinks that this kind of bug would not have been caught, even with more testing.

The company did everything it could, says Unum. “We text exhaustively, we test with third parties, and we had in excess of three million online operational hours in which nothing had ever exercised that bug,” says Unum. “I’m not sure that more testing would have revealed that. Unfortunately, that’s kind of the nature of software… you may never find the problem. I don’t think that’s unique to control systems or any particular vendor software.”

I’m not so sure that he’s right about that.  Allowing multiple concurrent accesses to a data structure sounds like a problem of poor locking control over that structure.  This could occur because the developers didn’t realize the need for locking in competing modules (which can happen when dependencies aren’t well communicated, or the side-effects aren’t well considered).  It can also happen inadvertently through copying of pointers to the data (C and C++ are highly flexible, but this flexibility allows for all kinds of nasty problems like this).

In any event, it may be possible to prevent these kinds of bugs, but the question becomes one of cost.  A rigorous, process-based development environment like SEI CMM Level 5 can help alleviate the problem (as an example, the Space Shuttle’s onboard software development team is at CMM Level 5).  However, this requires additional time and effort to do rigorous, line-by line inspection of the code as well as thorough documentation.  Reviews are done at every step (requirements, design, development/code, test plans, etc).  Every step is documented as to defects found and corrected, and each defect is analyzed to see where in the process (requirements, design, code) it was injected.  Then actions are devised to prevent that type of defect from being repeated.

But this is slow, and costly.  Most commercial software development is under time and budget pressure which results in people working long hours with few breaks just to “get it out the door.”  Unit testing, functional testing, system testing, and systems integration testing will find the majority of the bugs, but that just means that you’re left with the nasty, pernicous ones.  The kinds that only show up after 3 million hours of operation.  It requires up-front time and effort to prevent these kinds of bugs.

I see that the History Channel is running Band of Brothers starting tonight with “Currahee.”

If you haven’t seen it (what, you’ve been living under a rock the past couple of years?), do yourself a favor and skip the 9/11 crap on NBC and check it out.

Those who would perceive themselves our masters are at it again.

Pleasanton is about to turn the fast into the furious.

In a move unprecedented in the Bay Area, the city’s traffic engineers have created a traffic signal with attitude. It senses when a speeder is approaching and metes out swift punishment.

It doesn’t write a ticket. It immediately turns from green to yellow to red.

Residents and commute-jockeys said Tuesday that the light, which the city plans to unveil today on Vineyard Avenue at the intersection of Montevino Drive, is either an inspired leap into the future or a blatant example of government overzealousness.

I’m not terribly convinced this is a good idea.  In fact, it could either encourage red-light running or it could cause rear-end collisions if someone in front of the speeder sees the light and stops.

It’s not speeding per-se that is dangerous.  Further, I’m cynical and experienced enough to know that many times speed limits are set with revenue generation or political motives in mind (*).  Many times we see that prevailing traffic patterns (when the road isn’t overloaded) move quite a bit faster than the speed limit.  The real problem is reckless driving.  Maybe they should reexamine the speed limit on this road if there is a lot of speeding.

* Some examples that encouraged my cynicism and my contempt for speed limits:

• The whole 55MPH debacle.
• The reduction of speed limits on the interstates in the D/FW area from 70 to 65 to “reduce air pollution.”
• The town of Argyle.

I just finished filling out my tax forms.  It was a tedious mess, because I had sold some stock last year that was acquired in my employee stock purchase plan.  Because they were bought in small quantities over time, each purchase had to be entered manually.  This meant that I had to enter 57 stock lots.  The final printout that TurboTax produced with all the forms is about 3/4-inch thick (there’s a worksheet for each of the 57 stock lots). 

On the plus side, President Bush’s tax cuts made a difference.  Taking into account my basic income and taxes already paid and using the standard deduction showed me with a tax liability of about $50 as compared to the $250 that I paid last year.  However I was able to itemize deductions for interest paid on the house, property taxes, points paid on the mortgage, and charitable contributions.  Once that was taken into account TurboTax showed that I will receive a refund of $668.  This will be the first time in seven or eight years that I’ll be getting money back.

Even with the refund, though, I’m still not terribly happy about paying a five-figure amount to Uncle Sugar throughout the year.