Way to go green, semi-governmental entity! While I’m at it, should I make stacks of tear-off sheets for this blog, so people can save what I wrote in a filing cabinet, too?

* He’s the guy who inspired this screed. He fought his way past the guy with the ball to get into open space so the enemy could get a basket. Don’t ask me who he was; he’s not exceptional. This is how they play the game.

Side note to Memphis: Your yellow shirts and dark green shorts are the Worst Uniform Ever, in any sport (except maybe the Padres and Astros in the ’70′s). The awfulness is amplified by your total disregard for your team identity. Grizzly? Hardly. How much did you pay your marketing team? I’ll do better for half as much.

It started when I moved overseas. I sold my house and disencumbered myself of most of my stuff (so much stuff!) but there was a nucleus of belongings that I thought would be useful when I started my next home in the US. So I paid a monthly charge to have someone else store it. Door-to-Door was awesome because they brought a big box to my house, I packed it, and the they took it away. Because they can store the boxes efficiently in a big warehouse, it costs less than a self-storage place.

Over the next few years I would visit my stuff now and then, and the people in San Diego were friendly, accommodating, and helpful. I never had an issue with them (except the one that was totally my fault, and they were cool about that once we got it worked out). But I don’t live in San Diego, and there’s a Door-to-Door facility up here, less than five miles from my apartment. Eventually my sweetie and I decided it was worth the considerable expense to have the big box of stuff moved up the coast to Silicon Valley.

And then the nightmare began. Before the move I agreed to a new rate based on an annual contract, and made sure that there was nothing else I needed to do. Nope; money was paid, contract was set up, and the box with most of my worldly possessions was loaded on a truck and hauled up to San Jose.

Two months later, I wanted to visit my stuff in its new home. It’s a pretty simple procedure; you call in and make an appointment and they make sure that the box is pulled from the warehouse and waiting for you when you arrive. I called to make an appointment. Confusion ensued.

The system didn’t show my box in the San Jose warehouse. I spent some time on the phone with a very friendly guy in the national office. He determined that the box had been properly recorded leaving San Diego, but had never been checked in in San Jose.

Well, crap.

After a few more days it was discovered that yes, the Big Box of Stuff was indeed in the San Jose warehouse. Hooray! As a way of apologizing the corporate guys gave me two months free, based on my annual rate. After all, my annual contract was in the system. (We actually had an extended discussion about the contract based on a misunderstanding on my part.) At that time there was no doubt at all that I was paying an annual rate.

So, finally, I made an appointment to get into my Big Box of Stuff. The day arrived and my sweetie and I went down to the facility. There wasn’t much in the way of signage, but we found the office and the woman recognized my name. She told us how to get to where the BBoS was waiting.

It wasn’t there. We checked and double-checked, and the BBoS was not there. We spoke to the guy who moves the boxes. He flipped through all his work orders and there was nothing about our BBoS. At the front of the building they knew my name; at the back no knowledge of me had penetrated.

There is obviously a computerized system that manages where all the various BBoS’s are. Just as obviously, the people in the front office of San Jose’s Door-to-Door storage don’t know how to use it.

Anyway, the fetcher of boxes left and some time later returned with our BBoS. The only catch: it was still sealed shut from transit. Usually (according to the very friendly box-fetcher), boxes are sealed with two or three screws. The San Diego Boys had used maybe seven, all clearly marked with spray paint, and Friendly Box Fetcher didn’t have the proper tools to unseal the BBoS.

Our man persevered, and eventually we got to our stuff. The important takeaway here is that Door-to-Door San Jose took more than one try for every single operation.

And then the invoice arrived, charging us at the monthly rate, rather than the annual. Twice as much, even as it showed the initial “incompetence credit” (my phrase) for two months at the annual rate.

It has taken months to get this straightened out (if it truly has been – I got a call the other day that I didn’t pick up). In that time I dealt with friendly and competent people at the national level (email replies in minutes with useful information, with a real feeling for personal attention), but the errors made by the San Jose folks took a long time to erase.

I’m hoping they’re erased, anyway.

Message to Door-to-Door: I like you guys, but your San Jose franchise is awful. Do something about it.

Now we call that machine Kinect for XBOX Live.

Some of this is old news in privacy circles; it was more than a year ago that Microsoft first bragged to investors that the Kinect platform could be used to gather data on people using their product — what people are wearing, and things like that. This is what happens when you have a Web-cam in the house that’s always connected to the Internet, and someone you don’t know is on the other end.

Well, as you might expect, these revelations raised quite a kerfuffle. Microsoft very quickly and very loudly promised not to use data gathered through the camera in your home for targeted advertising. In the articles I read, journalists took two approaches:

1. Whew! I’m sure glad Microsoft promised not to be evil!
2. You know, targeted advertising isn’t as bad a people keep claiming. Relax and get information tailored to you.

The commentary, and Microsoft’s reassurances, miss the point entirely. With the government pulling flagrant rights violations like National Security Letters, how long before the video feed in your living room is handed over to the FBI? Hell, it might have happened already. Microsoft would be legally barred from telling anyone it even happened. This is the state of our constitution these days.

(If the government really thinks this is all cool and the public wouldn’t mind, why do they work so hard to keep it secret?)

There are ways to prevent the video feed from reaching the outside world, but as I understand it, the default is always on. Not only can it report what game (or political convention) you’re watching, it can report when you cheer. Better think twice about that Che Guevara poster on the far wall from the TV. My video-game playing, dope-smoking neighbors may not be too concerned about privacy anyway (judging by the clouds drifting through the neighborhood), but I doubt they’d feel great about knowing they have a live video feed that any government monkey with a frightening letter will be able to watch.

Let me repeat that just so I’m clear: Any government monkey with a frightening letter will have access to a live video feed from your living room, as well as every email you’ve ever sent and what you checked out at the library. Things are bad enough without handing them the most invasive tool yet to pry into your lives.

I would LOVE to see a big company like Microsoft stand up to the government and publish a policy that states that they will not surrender the feed without a legal warrant signed by a judge. The chances of that actually happening are zero — unless Microsoft thinks it’s losing a very large amount of business due to those privacy concerns. That’s not an indictment of Microsoft, I doubt any major US corporation is ready to go to the mat with the Feds on this one.

Microsoft once more finds itself in the very familiar position of creating something that sounds really cool without considering all the consequences, much like when they put into Microsoft Office a system specifically tailored for adding executable code to Office documents. Office automation, they called it. A great time-saver. “Capital idea!” shouted the virus writers with glee. Now once more Microsoft has come up with something that is almost magic in how it works (e.g., parental controls based on the metrics of the people in the room), but those things require the camera to be on, even when you’re just watching TV.

If someone gave me a free Kinect and XBOX, I’d probably use it. But I’d be very, very careful about when the Internet connection is active. And, while exercising I’ll be sure to give it my all.

I don’t know all the details, but this seems to me like a terrible idea. I will not be participating, and please don’t take it personally when I reject your invitation to follow your aimless drifting through cyberspace. Tedious at best and embarrassing at worst, this is a level of personal intimacy with the general world that I will not be embracing. Call me an old fuddy-duddy.

I’m at home this week, a change that may merit its own episode, or maybe not. I’ve got the game streaming to my computer in our office, commercials and all. Ain’t technology grand?

I just saw an ad for a movie coming out sometime soon. It looks like a very expensive version of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. On closer look, the movie looks like… an expensive version of Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots that you watch rather than play. Much of the allegedly gut-twisting action is watching machines damage each other in a boxing ring. Yippee.

Although they give the movie some name that does not include the words ‘rock’ or ‘sock’, I would be very disappointed if at no time does one robot punch another robot in his shiny metal chin and make its head pop off.

Well, except for the part where I won’t actually see the movie at all.

Suddenly: a grating series of beeps that sounded like they’d been put through a blender assaulted my ears. This is the attention tone for the Emergency Broadcasting System. Those beeps were followed by a long purer tone. Then another tone at a different pitch. Lesson one for the EBS: Quit with all the tones. I almost turned off my radio, figuring that there wasn’t going to be any information, just some sort of beep-fest. The only thing that kept me listening was the bank of thunderheads looming ahead of me. Just this once, the EBS might be giving out useful information.

Finally the broadcast tired of the beeping and booping and hit me with a burst of static. From within this noise, a distorted voice that sounded like it had been bouncing through phone lines since 1920 began dispensing… what? I don’t know. It was completely incomprehensible. Lesson two for the EBS: the information won’t help anyone if no one can tell what you’re saying. I think I picked out the word “alpine” and later “water”. That’s about it.

Flash floods? Possibly. Were they anywhere near where I was heading? No way to tell. Was there something I should do differently? Only one way to find out. I drove on.

I had the top down, so I was not in ideal listening conditions, but I could understand all the other people on the radio, all too well. Now there was something I actually wanted to hear, something intended for public safety, and it was just a jumble of noise.

Now it may be that the guy who recorded the message was not in a position to make a high-fidelity recording, but come on. Surely somewhere in this entire damn country there was someone who could have taken one thin minute to re-record the message in better circumstances.

So, hang in there, guys, and be safe. I’ll write more later, when I’m not supposed to be working.

As I perused my options I came upon this table:

Note that, depending on how I reach Los Angeles, the Southwest Chief departs at different times. The back end of the train catches up with the front end over the course of the journey; the arrival time is almost the same.

Sometimes a movie maker will see a shot in a film and have to ask, “how did they do that?” Most of the time, a question like that is a compliment. But here I am, a Web/database guy, asking, “how did they do that?” and it’s with a disbelieving shake of the head. Who on this planet would design a system that allowed such inconsistency? Trust me, it takes extra work to get system behavior like that.

Don’t tell the people signing my time sheets every week, but this stuff is not that hard.

Months passed, and then years, and I’ve been wearing the finish off my desktop with my unpadded mouse. Then my sweetie started having trouble with her mouse, and changing mice didn’t help. Her mouse pad was old and losing contrast, and the mouse’s laser was not tracking well. So, off to the mouse pad store we went.

Mouse pads cost about six or seven bucks, which is six or seven bucks more than I wanted to pay, but it actually is an important piece of equipment, so as long as I was spending money on one, I figured I’d get one that kicked ass. And there, hanging amongst the others, was a mouse pad that cost two dollars more, but looked to be awesome. It was the Bahama Pad Co. Always Smooth Micro-fiber mouse pad. For one thing, it didn’t have a photo on it. For another, it looked like it would be durable and provide a good surface for both gliding and for the laser, for years to come.

It is awful. I tore open the package when I got home, laid it down, and moved my mouse across it. There was a lot of friction. The motion was smooth, but it took (unscientifically) five times the effort to move the mouse across that surface of that pad than any slick surface. Was it because my mouse is relatively heavy and sank into the pad? No, the light of my life reported that on her wired mouse the friction was outrageous as well. No getting around it; this mouse pad sucks.

Unless you have a hover-mouse (Note to self: invent hover-mouse), stay away from Bahama Pad Co.