a review of citizen's bank

on the radio

has the following ever happened to you?

You're driving down the street in your car, listenign to the radio, when you hear a siren. Your heart jumps and you start veering off the road, looking around for hte flashing lights, and you are cursing the drivers around you who are not reacting to the siren. Then you realize DUH it was sound effect on the ad playing on the radio.

Sometimes I hear a beep tone on radio ads that sounds just like my cell phone text message alert.

Since a huge number of radio listeners are listening in their cars, has anyone ever considered that context, and the potential dangers (well agravation anyway) when putting sirens in a radio ad? i doubt it.

unintended consequences

i suppose like most people you have seen previews of the coming technology in hydrogen cars. I am all for it, i think it will be great to get rid of all that carbon monoxide and other nasty stuff. All the programs on PBS gleefully say that all that comes out of the exhaust will be fresh clean water.

Well hmmm . . . wait a minute. For any of you who live north of the Mason Dixon Line, I would like you to consider for a moment what your commute to work will be like on some 20 degree morning in january when every car on the road is collectively creating freezing rain on the road surface. With millions of hydrogen cars on the road, there will be no such thing as "dry pavement" on a major road any more, even in warm weather. considering how people drive even in mild drizzles, this is going to be a major pain.

I suppose this could be easily remedied with fill tanks installed in the cars to take up the "exhaust water." But again, wherever that water has collected, on a cold day or night it has to get drained out before it freezes and bursts whatever is holding it. I do hope the engineers have foreseen this problem.

yes i am a germophobe

and i try very to avoid getting other people's nasty viruses on me. i wash my hands a lot, and i run when i see a pack of school children, they are walking biological weaponry in my book.

So whenever i use a public restroom, well, i try to wash my hands without getting them dirty in the process. my big complaint about public restrooms: the most obvious way of getting germs on your hands is on the door handle. so all public restrooms should have doors with no latches that swing out, that way, even if you touched the knob on the way in, you don't have to touch it on the way out with freshly washed hands, you can just push it with an elbow etc.

just a suggestion . . .

low technology

like many people I have a little portable stereo. It's nice to have, I use it mostly at the gym, makes running on a treadmill seem less dull than it is.

Here is my problem: I have a wide range of a lack of taste, and my music sources are from CD's all over-- classical, oldies, bossa nova, whatever. And every one of these songs had a different engineer determining the audio level of the song. This means the agnus dei from a recording of the faure requiem needs to be turned up all the way, but unfortunately, the next song in the queue of the player (a sansa 250 which I can't control all that well in terms of order of songs) is the motwon shoop shoop song, and blasts my eardrums into dust unless i remember to quickly grab it and turn it way down.

In this digital age, would it be so hard to look at all those 1's and zeros of each song's files and allow me to set a preferred volume level on my player that would be applied to all songs no matter what the original engineer did to muck it up?

morning bigots

all of my life I have been a night person. There have been days where I have never been awake when the sun was up. I like working at night-- it's quiet, there's nothing to distract you, nothing on TV to draw you away from working, and I get my primary creative energy bursts after 9 pm.

Now being a night person, I am aware that there are people who are not. After 10 or 11 pm, even though I am often full of energy, I know there are day people who have gone to bed and I make a sincere effort to not disturb them. I walk tippy toe and I don't slam doors. It takes a tenth of an ounce of effort to do this.

So yes, I do sleep later than most, but it's not because I am lazy, it's because I was UP LATE WORKING. So why I can't I get the same courtesy from the day people? Why is their circadian rhythm deserving of courtesy and mine are not? Every morning they wake me up.
They are up, so in their limited rem-fascista world view, everyone else must be up too. They bang doors and rattle dishes.

It must be nice to be so oblivious to other people. maybe that's why they sleep so well.

USB blues

Well like a lot of other folks must do, I deal with USB plugs a awful lot. I plug in my mp3 player, printers, thumb drives, etc etc etc. And one thing that endlessly bugs me is I end up putting the USB plug in upside down 50% of the time, since the top of the plug is virtually identical in appearance to the bottom, if indeed there is a top and bottom-- it will only go in one way tho, and since the 2 sides of the plug are so similar i screw it up half the time. too late to fix it now, but gee whiz, what were they thinking? not.

things are getting worser

i don't why this bothers me so much, but laely i am noticing a lot of people on radio and television who don't understand some basic rules of grammar.

specifically, i hear this a lot on the history channel-- the narrator will say "a squadron of planes were" . . . "a pair of jets were" . . . those are just little examples. Please tell me dear reader, that you know the subject of those sentences are singular . . . i heard a reporter on public radiomake the same mistake the other day. I can sort of forgive an extemporaneous reporter making a flub like that but not in someone reading a written text/narration. it's not an isolated problem either, it's almost like they never do it right.

I suspect it is a function of ever descreasing writing communications that we fall into this trap of picking plurality/ singularity of a verb by the noun closest to it. But it bugs me. --jl

tax dollars trying to get to work

this is the time of year that, being self employed, I receive all my 1099 forms from all the people who paid me anything in the past year.

A 1099 isn't a whole lot different from a w-2, except no taxes are taken out (and since the "employee contribution" is not there to mask it, you have to face the fact that 15, not 8, per cent of your money is going to social security). But along with receiving these chincy forms, since I also hire people on occasion, I also have to fill out, send out, and file 1099's.

Here is my complaint. To file form 1099, you have to order the forms-- you MAY NOT print them out like all other tax forms. So weeks later if, the IRS didn't misplace your order (this has happened to me), you get a stack of these forms in the mail. Each form has room on it for 2 people's info-- and for me to fill it out, I have to put my name, address, and ssn twice-- once on the top half, once on the bottom half. When you have to fill out 80 of these, having to repeatedly enter this information by hand is a real pain.

The forms are 6 pages deep-- the top sheet goes to the IRs, the next 3 layers go to the payee, and I keep the bottom 2 (or something like that). Once they are filled out, I have to tear the top sheet off and put it in a stack, then take the next 3 layers, rip those out of the form's binding, and then tear those 2 in half (it's like paper mache class) to send the hard copy to each of the 2 recipients listed on the page. (hopefully I, or the assistant i hired to do this, pressed hard enough with my pen so the info got imprinted on the lower sheets.)

You would think that the process of providing this info, so important to the tax structure, would be more automated than it is, but it ain't. there is no way to print up your own 1099's either-- you MUST order them from the IRS.

It is an absolute no-brainer that all of this can and should be done electronically-- the "technology" (if you can call it that) of the current system is reminiscent of bob cratchett working with a quill pen. I can only assume that the people who fill these forms out for a fee have lobbied hard to keep us from using computers for something so complicted as filling out forms.

i like bloomingdales

well let me first say that I am, in a phrase, fashion challenged. I know very little about clothes, it is very hard for me to see why this goes with that, and why this doesn't . . . and usually when i buy clothes, half of thetime the items i buy don't look right in the light of day and never get worn. It seems it is pure luck when i get something that fits and i like and doesn't wear out.

Buying suits and dress clothes is a whole 'nother level of aggravation, tho, as so much more money is at stake. I have tried buying dres clothes on sale-- I invariably ended up with a lot of stuff that is green, brown, or plaid.

So anyway I decided to bite the bullet and go to bloomingdales and buy a nice italian suit. canali looked good. I called, they said, come on down, we just got a whole bunch of new stuff in stock.

Well of course that means it's not on sale but i didn't care.

Anyway this very nice sales lady listened to my tales of woe and carefully brought in various items for me to try on (it helped that it was on a monday night and no one else was around) longer story short, the only thing they had that fit me at all was . . . you may have guessed it-- an armani suit. I admit, it sure looked nice. I was ready to buy. It was a pricey item, but i didn;tcare. only thing, it wasn't hanging quite right. the tailor came in and said, NO. We can't sell you this suit, the cut isn't right for you.

Now just about any other store would have gone crazy trying to get me into something that sort of kind of fit just to make a sale. so I was VERY impressed that bloomie's put my looking right ahead of their own immedate sales goals.

If this sounds like a remake of miracle on 34th st., maybe it is. I will be going back for the "trunk show" where they say they have a good chance of fitting me with some good stuff. I'll be scruffy til april. I can do that standing on my head.

what we need is less change

well even tho we just got through an election, already the campaign for '08 is in the works.

I have one compalint about this process, and that is the use of the word "change."

I am amazed at how often I hear politicians offer us "change." I appreciate the need for change, but I wonder if politicians know what this word means. After all, we have been repeatedly promised "change" every two years sice I can remember voting, and, other than little old ladies being required to take their shoes off before boarding at the airport, I have seen very little change anywhere.

granted, I suppose there has been some "change," but most of them have not necessarily been good. i think a politicain should least offer "good change."

Clearly, since "change" has been promised so many times and so many people have been elected to provide it and so little change has occurred, I think my definition of the word must mean something else. I guess "we need change" really just means we're going to stay the same but different people will be paid for providing this lack of any other difference. oh well, it IS a change . . .