Did you have your V8 today?

I did, and it hurt, but not where you'd expect.

Prices for 11.5 oz cans of V8 recently surged from $0.67 to $0.88 each. I know, I know, you're all up in arms about it too. It is, after all a Netflix-style 35% price increase (slightly less fanfare, yes, but equally diabolical).

This is going to hurt my wallet to the tune of $150 per year, so I made plans to cut back and weight wait until they realize that I was single-handedly drinking all of the Low Sodium V8 in north Austin.

Then I found a scientific study¹ that says I'll go back to two-a-days, despite the expense. The people at V8 probably commissioned falsified read that study, so my siege may not succeed.

Stupid science.


¹ You mean you don't ready scientific studies before making rash decisions?

Virtually useful

Today, I introduced my wife to a wonderful, nerdy waste of time: WinDirStat.

WinDirStat sorts your hard drive folders by file size, and then shows you a colorful, interactive chart of your hard drive usage (see a screen shot by following the above link). It also makes it easy to send unwanted files to the recycling bin (where they will continue to take up hard drive space, as the graph will show you), or to delete them permanently.

My wife was excited to see what was taking up all her space, but was a bit disappointed to realize the inevitable: her writing, which she loves, takes up significantly less space than even a single mp3.

I am always adding new files to my hard drive, so to prevent a loss in performance, I regularly use this program to help me prioritize the files to sort, delete, or move to an external hard drive.

I called this program a waste of time. There's no question in my mind that it's immensely useful. If your hard drive is full, Windows is going to do nothing to help you find the principal culprits efficiently. But after the 10 minutes it takes to run the program, find the 550MB Microsoft Office Enterprise 2010 installation file, and burn a backup CD or two; or move those ridiculously large home video files to an external hard drive, are you really going to stop there?

No, you're not, because freeing up hard drive space is more fun than most video games, and has a direct tangible (virtual?) benefit! So you're going to spend another hour looking at pictures, thinking about deleting them or saving them for posterity, and contemplating whether they make you look fat.¹

Due to the advent of the digital camera, and because I've attended 3 family weddings and taken 2 vacations in the last year, there are thousands of unsorted pictures sitting on my hard drive, and at least 500 of them deserve to be deleted to make space for new ones.

Challenge accepted.


¹ Maybe that's just me.

You're interventioning me?

My friend Jason sent me one of them newfangled Gmail intervention e-mails. It was hilarious. And yet, I'm sticking with Hotmail.

I told him so, and he asked what it is that makes me like Hotmail. I went a little overboard in my response:

What I prefer about Hotmail:
1) Junk e-mail:  I get to approve or deny all my junk e-mail. I never miss a thing.
2) Keyboard shortcuts:  Hotmail uses most of the keyboard shortcuts now that Outlook uses.  I use Outlook for work, so it's an easy transition.
3) Folders:  Gmail has labels and archiving, and that system is more robust in theory, but it's a different system, and it requires more clicks than the folder system.  My brain knows how to store everything in folders on my computer, and it wants to do that for e-mails, too.  Computers are always going to work with folders, so there's no reason to slow myself down by having to remember two different systems.
4) Legacy, (from an IT definition):  I have all my contacts here, and more importantly, all my contacts have me here. (Yes, I know you can use POP3 settings with Gmail to receive and send e-mail from other addresses, but then I have to use the Gmail interface.)
5) Chat: It doesn't try to link me to a chat account.  I hate chat programs.
6) Speed:  Now that all Google sites are linked to Google+, it's actually slower than Hotmail.  I'm removing Google.com as my home page for the same reason.  Hello, blank page.
7) The interface: To me, Hotmail looks and feels the way an e-mail program should.

What Gmail does better:
1) Grouping conversations (minimal value to me)
2) Attachments (Hotmail used to be awful, but recently improved to being only a step behind Gmail)
3) Searching
4) Saving drafts
5) Undo send (I'm pretty careful about what I send, so this has minimal value)

Where they're equal:
1) Storage.  They both give me more storage than I'll ever use.

Why I'll probably never switch fully to Gmail:
1) Habit: I forget to check my Gmail account for months at a time.
2) My username: My Gmail username is much longer than my Hotmail username (all the good ones were taken), so logging in is a more annoying process.
3) Video chat and other features: Gmail offers lots of amazing features that I don’t care about at all, and will never use. So many of these are the "selling" features, and they don't sell me.

What do you think?

Size matters

It's all a lie! I can't believe such deceit would be perpetuated throughout the ages by and for both genders! Do you know what this has done to the children?!? Think of the children!!!

I'm upset. Allow me to explain.

Short story: Today I'm throwing away a too-small pair of pants and a worn-out belt. The pants lied to me, and the belt had no right to up and die. Why didn't it think about how that would make me feel?

Long story: When I was but a lad, my mom bought me a black leather belt. Everywhere I had to go that was dressy, that trusty belt was by (around?) my side. It lasted for six whole years. Since then, I've never found a replacement that lasted for more than a year, and half of them didn't even fit.

Soon after I began college, I became aware of my clothing sizes. My working hypothesis is that it's because I had to start buying my own clothes. I learned my waist and inseam sizes. I learned my suit coat size. I learned my sleeve size (a whopping 35 inches; I'm like a monkey!). I learned my neck size¹, for cryin' out loud.

And yet, even with a graduate degree, I've never been able to figure out my belt size.

I did everything you'd expect. I went to stores that sell belts. I gained weight to try to fit in to the belts I'd already bought. I wore my dress slacks to the store and tried on belts until I found one that fit². But no matter how I tried, I couldn't find a belt that still fit when I got home. Maybe they shrink in the wash, I don't know.

It's not that I'm a moron³, it's that belt sizes, pant sizes, and waist sizes are apparently completely unrelated!

Women are not surprised by this. You've been dealing with "vanity sizes" for years. I, however, trusted Old Navy and Dockers not to stretch the truth⁴. Nobody wants to wake up one day (hypothetically) and find out that their size 32 jeans that they've been drying in the dryer for seven years actually measure 34 inches⁵.

So that's the crux of it. Women know that a size two dress may actually be a size eight, but some are happier with a tag that says size two. Not so for me.

I'm never happy in a size two dress.


¹ It's almost as large as my biceps.
² Okay, I didn't actually do that one, per se, but it's sounding pretty darn reasonable from where I'm sitting in my elastic-waistband sweatpants.
³ No, it's not!
⁴ Get it? Stretch? Get it?
⁵ After all, they may have hypothetically cut off your circulation two weeks ago.

Atlas Shuddered

Urgh.

Atlas Shrugged has the dialogue quality of The Phantom Menace, the special effects of the 1978 Incredible Hulk TV series, the casting of Waterworld, the directorial timing of a home video, and the cinematography of something that picks a lot of awkward camera angles. I needed a Big Mac to wash the movie's taste out of my mouth.

The movie was 97 minutes long. There was time available to improve the three things in which this version severely lacked:
1) Using Rand's arguments,
2) Introducing us to the characters as Rand wrote them, and
3) Preparing us for the climax.

Rand's Arguments

Atlas Shrugged is one of the best books ever written. It's complex. It's intelligent. It's a philosophical allegory, and it's convincing. Ayn Rand wrote it to make an argument, time and time again, from all angles, and she did so extremely well. I recognize that it takes talent to make a good movie, even from an extraordinary book. But it takes a special kind of failure to ruin Atlas Shrugged.

Rand's arguments made the book great, but really weren't part of the movie. When John Aglialoro¹ actually included any of Rand's arguments, he threw in some of the good lines but removed the context, making the dialogue painfully choppy and illogical.

You ruin the argument, and you've ruined the movie.

Aglialoro even cut the almost unending stream of whiny entitled pleas. They came from any number of talentless characters (here's looking at you 20th Century Motor Company), demanding a handout because they "never had a chance" (i.e. got fired for incompetence). The unproductive looting from the productive is the whole point of the book, and was not adequately addressed by the light-on-exposition news headline montages.

Speaking of not adequately addressing things …

Character Development

… the entire character of James Taggart is written as whiny and desperate, but portrayed as self-confident and somewhat relatable.

Similarly misrepresented, Dagny Taggart is written as confident, brilliant, tough-as-nails, and successful, but portrayed as vacant, unassertive, and a little dazed. In one particular scene, she takes what is supposed to be a confident "I'm telling you how it is" stand against her brother, but looks everywhere but at him. Confidence looks you in the eye.

Finally, let's take a deeper look at Francisco d'Anconia. He was cast as a scruffy, moderately handsome man whose wardrobe was at home in a local night club. The real d'Anconia is dashing, clean-shaven, full of intrigue, and stands "as if he wore a cape waving behind him in the wind." His shirts cost more than your wardrobe. Imagine Dos Equis' "Most interesting man in the world", but 25 years younger, without a beard, and with millions upon millions of dollars.

The movie showed the kind of guy you pick up in a bar. Francisco is the kind of man with whom rich women have affairs.

Confidence leans back. He slouched forward.

Stage presence is noticeable. There was none to notice.

*shudder*

Ignoring the mistreatment of Rand's ideologies and characters …

Plot & Climax (***spoiler alert**)

… this movie did a poor job of leading up to its climax (or what I am led to believe was the climax because of the music).

In the book, people talked regularly about how horrible it would be if the bridge made out of Reardon metal collapsed. In the movie, Aglialoro talked about the metal being "untested", but stubbornly refused to connect the dots about the bridge. He only even mentioned the bridge once. Small wonder, then, that the audience is entirely unprepared to stand up and cheer when the bridge doesn't collapse.

…

At least it ended fittingly; with a bloodcurdling scream.


¹ Executive-turned-screenwriter because his rights to Atlas Shrugged were about to lapse and his actual screenwriter bailed.

I hate math

Chase just charged me a $12 "service fee," and I'll give you a buffalo nickel if you can tell me why.¹

Here's my history with Chase: I fell in love with online banking because of Chase's user-friendly site. In five years I've never had a problem. Since the CARD Act, I've had 3 unexplained fees in 3 months, two of which were reversed when I called (one because it was completely and utterly bogus, the other because they felt so bad about the bogus charge), and one that I'll call about when they open (because it's 3:30 AM).

It may be petty, but I so desperately want to punish them by taking all my business elsewhere. It's not like I'm lacking options. Banks are, to use an expression that doesn't apply particularly well here, a dime a dozen.

Why don't I do it? In five years, I've earned $700 of cash rewards from my Chase credit card.

I hate math.


¹ No, I won't.

The kindness of strangers

While I waited at a stoplight downtown, a car to my left honked. This was strange for two reasons: 1) nobody in Austin ever, ever honks¹, even if you practically kill them², and 2) there were no cars in front of said honker. She made the universal "please roll down your window" sign, and I complied.

"Can you tell me how to get to South Lamar?"

A fair request in any other city that has a South Lamar, but Austin was not built with ease of transportation in mind. Although I was a tad uncertain myself, it was my civic duty to help a damsel in distress, so I guessed.

"You have to turn right³ to get on Lamar southbound⁴. It should be two stoplights ahead. Lamar is an overpass, and we'll go under it."

Yeah, I know, that's a lot of detail to give someone if I'm just guessing. Call it an educated guess; after all, I have a college degree.

She thanked me for the directions, and for rolling down my window, and then the light turned green. She sped ahead, cut me off (it's okay, she signaled and I still had the parking brake on), and the winding roads of Austin proceeded to prove my educated guess entirely correct.

I drove away feeling very warm and fuzzy inside. I think I was happier about having helped a complete stranger find her destination⁵ , but I don't want to downplay the joy of guessing directions correctly.

MORAL: I'm always right.


¹ Full disclosure: Stay out of my lane, guy on a cell phone, or I will honk until your grandmother removes you from her will.
² Of course, when that drunk guy practically killed me, I didn't have time to honk because I was too busy trying to get control of my vehicle. And if he hadn't driven off, I would have honked. [nodding] Yeah, I would have.
³ Right = North. Always.
⁴ South = Left. Sometimes, not always. It's very complex stop asking me questions.
⁵ I hope she wasn't a contract killer.