If I hear the newsdroids on TV use the word “escalate” again I think I’m going to go down to the station and shove that teleprompter up their ass.  Perhaps they’ll be able to read it better there.

If there’s one personal habit that drives me completely up the wall it’s when someone smacks while eating.  That wet squishy sound wedges itself under my nerves like fingernails on chalkboard does to some people.  If it goes on for too long I have to remove myself from the room lest I make an unfortunate remark to the offender.

Lately I’ve found myself mortified by that evil sound as I hear it escape from my lips on occasion.  The problem is that my braces take up space and make it more difficult to keep everything “in check.”  It takes conscious effort to prevent any unfortunate sounds from escaping.

Oh well, I suppose I can just remind myself that this will eventually pass.  Only 17 months to go…

You may want to be careful what you say while on hold.

It is the opening line on so many phone conversations these days: This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.

The taped message is so common that many callers might assume that no one is ever listening, let alone taking notes. But they would be wrong.

Monitoring is intended to track the performance of call center operators, but the professional snoops are inadvertently monitoring callers, too. Most callers do not realize that they may be taped even while they are on hold.

It is at these times that monitors hear husbands arguing with their wives, mothers yelling at their children, and dog owners throwing fits at disobedient pets, all when they think no one is listening. Most times, the only way a customer can avoid being recorded is to hang up.

Actually, I’ve suspected this to be the case and I use the hold time (especially when they have some stupid advertisement playing in the background) to get in a few jibes about the ads or about the stupid phone mazes they make you navigate before you can get to a real person.  I also like to make comments about the stupid robots that make you talk in the hopes that the monitors will eventually pick up on the fact that they’re alienating their customers by foisting us off on these chatty-Cathy machines.

Link via Slashdot.

I didn’t know until this weekend that you could buy a shredder that would shred credit cards and CDs in addition to paper.  The only downside is that this model is a strip-cut, rather than a cross-cut model.  Although it’s a cross-cut model, my previous shredder was getting kind of frustrating due to its limited capacity and slow speed.  Since I tend to shred a year’s worth of stuff at once (I keep three years of records and shred all the old ones when they pass the three year mark), I decided to give this new one a try. 

This thing eats just about everything you throw at it and barely slows down.  It sucks in a CD and spits out little chunks without missing a beat.  I’d been wondering how I was going to dispose of old back-up CD-Rs.  They can’t be reused and since they tend to have personal information (emails, account info, Quicken files, etc), they need to be destroyed before disposal.  Now they’ll be no problem at all.  It’s actually kind of fun, in a destructive sort of way.

I hadn’t been paying close attention before, but I noticed this morning that the house number of the last house on my block is 357.  Given my interest in guns, I think this would have been a cool address.

It would probably be even cooler if it was on Magnum Street….

My friend Rodney sent me this link, concerning a new sheriff in Georgia who fired 27 sheriff’s office employees and had snipers on the roof while they were escorted out the door.

JONESBORO, Georgia (AP)—On his first day on the job, the new sheriff called 27 employees into his office, stripped them of their badges, fired them, and had rooftop snipers stand guard as they were escorted out the door.

The move Monday by Clayton County Sheriff Victor Hill provoked an angry reaction and prompted a judge to order him to rehire the employees.

“It appears … that employees of the Sheriff were terminated without cause” and in violation of the county’s civil service rules, Judge Stephen Boswell wrote in granting a 30-day restraining order.

At first I thought that maybe he was just ruffling feathers a bit with some housecleaning, but reading further sent my blood pressure to dangerous levels when I read this bit:

The firings had a racial overtone. Hill was among a spate of black candidates elected last year in the county once dominated by rural whites. The county seat was the setting for the fictional plantation Tara in “Gone With The Wind.”

The fired employees included four of the highest-ranking officers, all of them white. Hill told the newspaper their replacements would be black.

If the new sheriff had some reason to believe that these 27 officers were bad officers, then he could have put forth those reasons when firing them.  But if he’s just trying to bring in black officers to replace white ones, then that’s racist and should be considered as discrimination.  I don’t give a rat’s ass what previous “disparities” may have existed in the past, it’s just plain wrong to do this.

It’s heartening to see that there’s at least one black official in the county who understands that this is wrong:

Another of the newly elected black officials, Eldrin Bell, called the move illegal and filed for the restraining order granted by the judge. Bell is the new county commission chairman and former Atlanta police chief.

If the new sherriff has cause for the firings, then he can enumerate them.  Otherwise, this is just more racial BS, similar to what Terrell Bolton tried when he came to power in the Dallas PD.  The new sheriff may wish to ask the City of Dallas just how many millions of dollars that little fiasco cost the taxpayers.

Laurence mentions Houston’s asinine new “Move It or Lose It” law, which requires motorists to move vehicles from the shoulder within six minutes (!) or the city will have them towed and impounded.  It’s simply silly to think that anyone can move a disabled vehicle from the shoulder in six minutes if there is any kind of problem at all.  While the professional NASCAR mechanic in the article can change a flat in three minutes, most people don’t have that level of skill. 

Further, Fix-a-Flat can’t be used in Z-rated tires or wheels which have tire pressure monitoring systems.  My Avalanche has a TPM system, and the manual is quite explicit about this point (page 5-74), as is the label for Fix-a-Flat.

I suppose I’d better not blow a tire on a Houston freeway, as I expect it would take me longer than six minutes to jack that beast up and change the tire.

As I was reading over that last entry, it occurred to me that I think of movie rentals as a weekend thing.  Mostly for Saturday nights, if I’m not going out, and sometimes for Friday or Sunday. 

Even if I have enough uninterrupted time on a week night, I will typically not watch a movie.  In fact, with Netflix, the movies arrive and sit on top of the component rack until the weekend. 

Does anyone else do this?  Or is this just another idiosyncrasy on my part?

Tamales can be made with more than just spicy meat fillings.  Over the holiday I tried out a recipe for Pumpkin Tamales.  Given that it’s mostly ground corn, it’s probably not too Atkins-friendly.  Still, to help out a little I substituted Splenda for the sugar in the recipe.

They tasted good, despite their misshapen form.  I’m still learning how to get a well-formed tamal.  Of course, it didn’t help that I was impatient.  After a while of making tamales and the bowl of masa seeming to stay full I started getting more generous with the amount of masa added to each corn husk.  Still, none of them came apart in the steamer, so at least I wasn’t too far off.

On second thought, I may know why I liked the toothpick dispenser when I saw it.  But to explain why, I have to detour a bit.

I’m fairly picky about food hygiene and anything that might spread contamination.  I can’t stand anyone who double-dips and I shudder sometimes to think about what germs are living on the shared condiment containers in some restaurants.  A few months ago I had some friends over for barbecue.  At the time I had a toothpick dispenser that was kind of like a salt shaker.  You shook the dispenser and one would pop out of the hole at the top.  One friend of mine thought this was kind of neat, so much so that he had to shake it again just to try it.  But he ran afoul of my food phobias when he grabbed the toothpick that came out and then dropped it back into the container.  At that point I told him he could keep the whole damn thing, since I wouldn’t ever use it again. 

That may have sounded a bit harsh, but I wasn’t mean about it.  I just can’t stand the thought of putting something in my mouth that someone else has touched with unwashed hands.  When I filled the new dispenser I made sure not to touch any of the toothpicks as I poured them in (from an unopened box).

I realize that food preparation involves using your hands, but I’m pretty compulsive about hand washing while cooking (especially with meat).  It also doesn’t bother me as much, since the food will be cooked, which kills most germs.

So, perhaps this dispenser appealed to my peculiar bent without me consciously realizing it at the time.