You’d have to put a gun to my head to get me to watch Entertainment Tonight, but simply watching the news on WFAA it’s impossible to miss the damn previews.  Today they were touting their exclusive feature of Tonya Harding returning to the ice (Exclusive!). 

Tonya Harding!?  WTF?  Why is she even still around? 

Jeeze, can you get any lower?  She’s like school on Saturday…  No Class!

Anyhow, her 15 minutes were over a long time ago, and she deserves to rot in obscurity.

It would appear that Radio Shack is having a bad time of it lately.

RadioShack Corp., coming off a quarter in which earnings plunged 62 percent, said it will close 400 to 700 stores and pare overhead costs as part of an 18-month turnaround effort.
…
RadioShack executives capped a challenging week by unveiling a turnaround plan at a meeting with analysts and investors. Slow-selling merchandise will be replaced with more popular items, and outside consultants will examine every expense category to find ways of cutting costs.

Between bad earnings and a CEO forced to resign after lying on his resume, it’s looking pretty bad for them.  I can’t help but wonder if their store experience doesn’t have something to do with it.  I spent many years avoiding them over their demands for name/address for every purchase.  When I finally went back I found that they were annoyingly pushy, trying to get you to buy the most expensive version of whatever you were seeking, or hawking those damn batteries.  It got to the point where I would avoid them unless I knew for sure that they had the item in stock and there wasn’t anywhere else to get it.  I also hated having the salesmen descend on me like a pack of sharks upon entering the store.  I like to shop in peace, and I usually know what I’m after.  It’s not like I need a lot of help to buy speaker wire or A/V cables.  It comes across to me like they’re guarding access to the products and they have to test my knowledge to make sure I know what I want (while making sure to steer me to the most expensive item).  Frankly, it’s a level of hassle I can do without.

Maybe if they made the store experience more friendly and less pressure-ridden perhaps more people would come back?

I’ve been wrapped up lately in working out some details for a project that’s been simmering in the background for a year and a half that suddenly became urgent last week.  It’s a bit annoying in that it’s one of those cases where the requester is hot to get something going, but this person doesn’t control the prioritization of my team’s work.  In any event, I’ve been yanked off another project (which is now on hold, pissing off a whole separate group of people) to work on this (at least to the point where there’s a design definition that can be foisted off onto the development team). 

But what really rankles me about this is that the requester had already decided on the design, in that they had some code written by another group that could handle this new type of data.  Their “requirement” was that we take this code and integrate it on our servers.  And port it from C++ to Java as well as migrate it from SQLite to a real DBMS.  Hmm… perhaps it’s not quite so ready for prime time as they thought?

Anyhow, I didn’t make them happy by saying that we’d consider their code, but that we’d have to review it carefully before we put it into production.  The code is more of a prototype or proof-of-concept right now.  We have to deal with several hundred thousand transactions per day on our servers, so we can’t just deploy any old code that someone gives us.  Not that we want to “reinvent the wheel,” but we have to consider things that they probably didn’t give any consideration to in their prototype.

It also didn’t help that I’ve insisted on written requirements (shocking, I know…).  I was a bit appalled that they’ve been pushing this project for a year and a half and they don’t even have a Business Requirements Specification.

I think the real problem here is that the requester got frustrated about being made to wait and decided to run the project without our input.  Now I’m doing the due-diligence on our part, and it rankles them because it appears that we’re redoing work.  It’s unfortunate that they feel that way, but there’s no way for me to develop something that works without understanding just what I’m supposed to be developing.

Would you expect a home builder to build you a house without a written agreement as to what he’s building?  Most people wouldn’t try to do that, so why do they think they can get away with it for software?

The FCC has come out in favor of unbundling cable channels.

It has been a trend in American living rooms for decades: Every year, the cable television bill goes up as consumers receive ever more channels they do not want or cannot find the time to watch.

But in a frontal assault on business as usual, the Federal Communications Commission, in a report issued Thursday, said consumers would save as much as 13 percent on their cable bills if they could buy only the channels they wanted instead of being forced to pay for hundreds of them. The average household, the FCC said, watches only 17 channels.

I’ve often wished for something like this, or perhaps a pay-per-view per-show option (i.e. view an individual episode of the Sopranos without subscribing to HBO).  So far, all of the on-demand options for something like this only apply to existing subscribers (in the above example of the Sopranos, you can watch anytime, providing you already subscribe to HBO).  We’re starting to see a little movement into this area, with pay-per-view shows being sold via the iTunes Music Store. 

But on further thought, I can’t help but wonder how well this will work out.  My previous thoughts were with regards to price, in that I’d expect the cable operators to find a way to raise effective rates, but hide them in the per-channel billing.  But there’s also the issue of networks funding their niche offerings through bundling them with the more popular channels (which is a rather socialist approach when you think about it).

It looks like it’s going to require the development of a whole new approach to revenue to pull this off.  That, or a bunch of smaller channels will go away.

I recently cancelled my Cingular wireless service in favor of Verizon.  I’m getting better coverage and paying less per month.

Anyhow, I was greatly amused to receive a check from Cingular today refunding me for the remaining balance on my account.  The reason I was amused was that the check was for $0.17.  Looking at the front of the mailer, I see that Cingular spent $0.32 to send me a $0.17 refund.

You’d think they’d just go ahead and put a clause in the contract that any balance less than $1.00 would not be refunded.  It’s not really worth it in terms of my time or theirs to deal with such a small amount.  I certainly wouldn’t make a trip to the bank just for this one check (I rarely deal with checks, so I may go into the bank once every three months or so these days).

What is it about GM and the names they give their cars?  What does the name Lucerne conjure up?  Aside from the city in Switzerland, I get an impression of something soft, fluffy, comfortable.  While comfort is nice, if I were to buy a car, I’d also want performance.  So I was a bit surprised to learn this morning that they are now offering a Northstar V8 (on the CXS model).  That got me to actually take a look at the features on the car, which I normally wouldn’t have done, since I normally tend to dismiss Buick as an “old people” car line.

This thing actually has some interesting features on it, like the Northstar V8, stability control, and magnetic ride control (uses a magnetic coil to change the viscosity of the fluid in the damper).  I was a bit surprised to find these on a Buick until I learned that it’s built on the Cadillac DTS platform.

Buick has always had a bit of a schizo personality.  My first car was a hand-me-down 1966 Buick Wildcat (scroll down to 1965, which is almost identical to mine, except that it was maroon instead of the lighter red).  It had a 401 cu.in. V-8 with a 4-barrel carb.  The Wildcat line was eventually killed because it was considered too “wild” for their core market.  The Wildcat and LeSabre were built on the same platform and the LeSabre continued on (as its name seemed to “fit” their customer base better). 

I wonder how well the Lucerne will ultimately do, given that many people, like me, don’t usually give much consideration to Buick?

Update:  I just played around with their “Build Your Buick” feature and added all the cool options to the CXS model (sunroof, deluxe leather seats, XM, 6-disc CD, theft package, backup assist, etc) and it came out at $37,435 MSRP.

A few bits of hard-won wisdom from the past few days:

• Should one be listening to music while shaving in the morning, Rock Concert Movement No. 1 should be considered right out.

• Any cooking involving flour should not be undertaken while wearing a dark blue shirt.

This post by Jeff reminded me of something concerning the so-called “gun debate” in this country.  Gun owners are regularly demonized by the anti-gunners as blood-thirsty child murderers who have short fuses and who will kill everyone in sight in a hail of gunfire after a minor fender-bender.  Frankly, if gun owners were as bad as they say we are, we’d have killed all the anti-gunners long before now. 

It’s easy to mock or demonize the civilized.  The real test of guts is mocking the violent and uncivilized.

I have a lot of sympathy for the crap that smokers have to put up with.  Heck, I like to smoke a cigar from time to time, so cigarettes don’t bother me.  But people who throw their cigarette butts out of their car windows make me want to reinstate public hangings.  If this sounds a bit harsh, it’s only because the stakes of their selfish behavior have risen considerably in the current drought conditions.  We’re about 17-inches behind in rain right now, and everything is so dry that just looking at the grass the wrong way starts a fire.

It’s really amazing how fast a cigarette can start a fire in dry conditions.  Several years ago I witnessed it first-hand.  The passenger in a car in front of me at a stop light threw a cigarette butt out the window into the grass.  By the time the light changed (just a few seconds), there was already smoke coming from the grass.  I called it in and the fire department showed up pretty quickly, so it didn’t get a chance to spread very far.

If I hear one more story about a grass fire or people being burned out of their homes because of cigarettes, I’m likely to go postal…

This is the kind of crap that tells me that someone doesn’t deserve to be sucking oxygen right now.

A gunman opened fire at an off-campus student party at a Stillwater hotel early Sunday, killing one person and injuring three others, police said.

The shooting occurred after two men attempted to enter the invitation-only party at a Stillwater Holiday Inn about 3 a.m. Sunday, said Lt. Michael Metcalf. When the men were denied entry, one of the men pulled out a handgun and fired several shots at partygoers inside the hotel room.

“Apparently, the suspect and another individual showed up and tried to crash the party,” Metcalf said. “When the people that were hosting the party said that it was by invitation only, an argument ensued and (the suspect) fired several shots into the room.”

When you get down to it, this is a perfect example of the real problem we have with violence right now.  It’s not the guns.  Only an idiot would think that banning guns would have stopped this, since anyone like this isn’t going to be deterred by gun control laws.  The real problem seems to me to be that some people aren’t learning any kind of impulse control.  Frankly, I blame the touchy-feely, don’t-spank-the-children, positive-reinforcement-only numbskulls for it.  It’s possible that the shooter had good parents who punished him for breaking the rules, but I highly doubt it.  If we look back at the shooter’s record, I have little doubt that we’ll find that he had lots of run-ins with the law and little punishment for previous bad acts.