Is it just me or did I get lost in stupid land?

From this past weekend:

Me: I would like to exchange this. It is the wrong size.
Home Depot: the smallest one we have is 2 3/4 inches.
Me: that won't work, I need 2 1/4 inches. That is the standard size, all of your pre-fabricated pieces come with that part at that size.
Home Depot: yeah, that part will come in the kit.
Me: I don't need to kit, I just need this one piece.
Home Depot: well sorry but we dont carry it in that size.
Me: ok, let me have a refund then.
Home Depot: do you have your receipt?
Me: not with me, I was planning on doing an exchange.
Home Depot: You don't need a receipt for an exchange.
Me: I know that, I am just telling you why I don't have my receipt.
Home Depot: Oh. Ok. Let me see the credit card you made the purchase with.
Me: I don't have that card with me, will this one work?
Home Depot: I need the one you made the purchase with.
Me: If you have it on record, can't you look it up. If you know which card is correct, can't you look it up off of my name?
Home Depot: sorry sir, it doesn't work that way.
Me: So I can't return this?
Home Depot: I can give you store credit.
Me: That's fine.
Home Depot: can I see you drivers license.
Me: why?
Home Depot: I need your drivers license to issue the store credit.
Me: why?
Home Depot: So I can write down your info.
Me: I can give you my info.
Home Depot: sorry sir, it's policy.
Me: look, I don't have my license and I don't have the card you want because I left my wallet at home. Are you going to not let me return this because I can't show you a license to verify my identity when you have no way to tell if I actually purchased this thing in the first place.
Home Depot: sir, they need the correct info on the store credit so when you use it the cashier can check it against your id to make sure it was issued to you.
Me: but if I tell you the right info when you issue the credit, it will be correct when I need my license. No problem
Home Depot: Sorry sir, it's the way I have to do it.
Me: your kidding me
Home Depot: Sorry sir.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Midlothian, Va

Movies that I recall as having influenced me

I was skimming another internet article listing the author's take on the best movies of all time and it got me thinking.  So far, during my lifetime, I have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of movies.  Most are a short repast from reality, a light diversion that is soon over.  A few have been great movies that captured my imagination and left me with a feeling of having seen something better than most everything else.  A Lion in Winter, Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back, Start Treck: The Wrath of Khan, Gladiator, Grand Torino are a few, a sampling.  Each was great and I have enjoyed watching them repeatedly.

But I have a fondness, a recollection of an even smaller group of movies that, while not necessarily great, left me with a sense of having learned something I can, or have, put to use in life.  I think the impact of each movie can be be attributed to when I first saw it and what was going on in my life at the time.

So here is that list:

Scaramouche (1952 w/ Stewart Granger)
Cyrano De Bergerac (1950 w/ Jose Ferrer)
From the Hip (1987 w/ Judd Nelson)
The Ninth Configuration (1980 w/ Stacy Keach)
American Beauty (1999 w/ Kevin Spacey)
Elmer Gantry (1960 w/ Burt Lancaster)
A Patch of Blue (1965 w/ Sidney Poitier)
HouseSitter (1992 w/ Goldie Hawn)
Hustle and Flow (2005 w/ Terrence Howard)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1991 w/ Gary Oldman)

I have the urge to ramble on about these movies but I don't think I have the words to succinctly communicate what it is I learned from each.  The lesson from each is more abstract, at least upon reflection it seems more abstract.  So I will just leave the list to stand on its own.

Real life sound tracks

Today I was sitting in a waiting room. Everything was blending into mindlessness when I realized I was getting really irritated. It took me a minute to realize that the source of my irritation was the canned music being piped into the room. So I went outside and was greeted by "Bad Moon Rising" drifting across the parking lot from a car dealership.

This got me thinking, every where we go is music. All sorts of music, rock, adult, punk, 60's, bee-bop. Occasionally we are someplace where they are piping in the news or talk radio. Even my office cafeteria has a TV that is perpetually tuned to Fox News.

I remember a time in my life when I could sit down at an establishment and not have my auditory canal bombarded by something. Or is that just my imagination? Have I always been forced to listen to canned noise and I have just forgotten because it is so ubiquitious?

Why do public areas do this? Is there some marketing strategy behind forcing people to listen to Micheal Bolton, The Rolling Stones and crew. Does it increase sales or does it reduce lingering?

I know that when I go to a coffee shop, such as Starbucks, I refuse to sit inside if the music is more than a whisper. I would rather sit in my car with the windows up than be subjugated to their idea of music - whether I agree it's music or not.

And some of us can't sit in a quiet car anymore, or in a quiet house. Now we have to buy "White Noise" machines that pump in static or surf or rain sounds. My wife even bought an iPhone app that plays a sound the programers claim sounds like an A/C window unit, and she listens to it when she goes to bed.

Is that necessity or conditioning, that even in our sleep we need some sort of noise to beat a rhythm on our ear drum...




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Stray dog round up

"April 15th to May 15th - Illegal Period for Dogs Running at Large
It shall be unlawful for any owner or custodian of any dog to allow any dog to run at large in the County of Amelia during the period of April 15th to May 15th of each calendar year. A dog shall be deemed to run at large while roaming, running or self-hunting off the property of the owner or custodian and not under the owner or custodian's immediate control."
     - Amelia County Animal Control

Both sides of my family are farmers but my parents left that life behind and I have lived in a city or suburban environment ever since, until, that is, my wife and I moved to Amelia.  Of course, by Amelia standards, we live in a suburban area (Rural Residential (RR)), not on farm land or in the country (Agricultural (A)) but to us, we live in farm country. 

**the difference between RR and A zoned land lies in the number and type of animals you can have per acre, buildings, waste disposal, etc with A being more or less ungoverned**

Amelia is a great place and we have been loving the local culture.  One piece of that culture is a local newspaper, The Monitor.  In this month's issue of The Monitor there was an article reminding everyone to round up your dogs and to make sure they are licensed and their rabies shots are up to date.  Dogs that are picked up are held for five days and then, if not claimed, are put up for adoption.  During the adoption period they can still be claimed by their owners until an adoption is finalized, after that, little Billy's Spot is now Jo Bob's Patch.  Dogs that are not adopted are, well, Animal Control is not specific so anything I say would be speculation.

So I read this piece, which shared the front page of The Monitor with two stories on the local school system, and one on a local wildfire (I love reading a paper with no crime or scandal on the front page), and the first thing that came to mind was - there must be a problem with stray dogs. And then I thought - well, this is an efficient solution, no haggling with the public, no public service campaign, just set a 4 week period to gather up every dog you can find.  Anyone who cares about their dog will take precautions and those who don't probably were not taking care of the animal anyway.

But now I want to know, what about cats.  I know of a feral cat colony not far from where we live with a population of about 35 (according to the local gossip).  From past experience, I know a feral cat colony can decimate an environment.  My mothers neighborhood was over run by a feral colony for a couple of years.  The cats hurt and maimed domesticated cats and small dogs, got in the trash and there was not a squirrel or bird to be found in the area for most of that period.  It took a coordinated effort among neighbors and a dedicated vet to capture and neuter as many of the cats as they could catch.  The effort expended itself after they had neutered 98 cats.  As far as I know, no one ever determined the actual population size so I don't know what percentage of the population 98 cats was, but today there are squirrels to be seen and bird feeders are emptied daily.


I understand that a pack of stray dogs can be more than a nuisance for farmers.  Once, when I was visiting family in Kentucky, I have watched a pack chase dairy cows through a field.  And I understand that dogs can inspire a greater fear in people than cats, Stephen King never wrote a horror novel about a house cat after all.  But every where I have lived, people seem to be able to ignore or forgive the damage that a large, unmonitored population of cats can cause while taking measured actions against the threat of harm from an unmonitored population of dogs.

Why is that?  It's not just because of the cute kitten posters sold to children and sentimental adults, there are just as many cute puppy posters out there.  And I do not think it has anything to do with the relative size of each species.   So what is it?

WTMD-FM Townsend University Public Radio

I have been listening to this station via the Public Radio app on my iPhone for a few months.  I just found out that they have released a dedicated app for their station and it is great.

You can listen to the two streams they have, set the app to act as an alarm clock to wake you in the morning and there is a buy button that will take you to the iTunes store to buy whatever you are listening to.  It also has a quick link to a quicktime web stream of each broadcast so you can use safari to listen to the station.  "So what?" you say...  well, safari is one of the few apps that can have a background thread so when you launch the web stream you can leave the app and go launch another app, as long as the second app doesn't use safari.

A couple of things...

NPR had a story this morning that discussed the oil speculation taking place in Uganda.  The story opened up with what the reporter characterized as an old Ugandan joke, "When the White man came, he came with a Bible.  And they told us to close our eyes and pray.  By the time they opened their eyes, their land was gone."  funny, and seemingly accurate of the British occupation of Uganda - justified in part with bringing "God" to the "Godless".  If the joke really is an indigenous joke, it really says a lot of the self awareness of the people and culture that gave birth to that view point.

American media, and cinema, and schools (at least the schools I attended) are regularly reinforcing a narrative of how the Native American was displaced by the invading European (well, that's what I took away from my American History classes).  History is constantly being re-written and, depending on your definition, there definitely was something of a genocide perpetuated on the indigenous population of North America, hell, of all the America's.  Of course that was way before, I believe, genocide was part of the popular vernacular. 

And I have to ask, was any less done in Africa? or parts of Africa?  Is it too much to suggest that the "joke" presented in that NPR article hints at just such a tragedy?  culturally if not literally.  I will confess I have never studied African history.  I did an IS course in college on Traditional African Beliefs but I did not go so far as to compare how those belief systems were impacted by historical events and vice verse.  The classes in Islam and Islamic history I took only briefly covered the Islamic crusades to convert northern Africa which ended in the occupation of much of Spain.  There was only one course in modern Christianity that ever mentioned Africa and that was only when discussing the European successes and failures in spreading the state sponsored religion that was appropriate for the territory claimed by the occupying power.

The point of that little detour down days of college past, is that I am in no way an authority on African history of any kind.  If anyone has an opinion on my musing and feels inclined to point me towards some good source material, please do.  I am a slow reader and do not have a lot of free time but I will digest anything sent my way...

Now, on to the other thing in my couple of things.  I just finished watching two episodes of "Life Unexpected" on the CW website. My first comment is that the CW video player works much much better than Hulu on my eeePC and at what seems to be a similar resolution - whats up with that Hulu - I thought streaming video was supposed to be your forte?

My other comment is that, "Life Unexpected" has strangely captivated me for two'ish hours and I don't feel the time was wasted (as I often do when I get mindlessly sucked into some shows).  Sure, the show is filled with "pretty" people and the characters are drawn with telegraphed flaws that (hopefully) will not (but probably will) turn into perpetual excuses for conflict and tension.  But the setup is good and someone cared enough about the material to flesh out the main characters (and a number of the supporting characters) so that each character is more than the sum of his or her cliches.

And in two episodes the writers have raised some interesting discussion points on the effects of adoption and foster care on all parties involved.  On responsibility and what that means and how different people manifest responsibility.  And, like in all the shows I seem to really like, each episode adds to the history of the narrative - the shows "universe" does not "reset" when the credits roll like in so many lesser shows.  Which, if the writers maintain this trend, will lead to some interesting moral choices.  It is not Firefly or Lost in terms of well developed characters and contigious storylines but it has the potential.

27 days later

So it has been 27 days and not much has changed. I still have not made any progress on esrphotos, I still need to decide on the copyright notice, and I still have photos to finish processing. usually when I hit a block like this I sit and talk it through with one or two of a small group of close friends who have some interest in what I am talking about but, sort of like installing gentoo on a eeePC 1005HAB, doesn't seem anyone I know or can find is interested in the subject.

Sure I know people who will sit patiently and let me ramble but that doesn't do me any good and I end up wasting both our time. I wish I could still pick up a phone and make that call but my Ka is still on a separate path and I can no longer see where that path is - let alone...

I think of all the relationships I let go... well I keep telling myself there is a fine line between support and co-dependence. :)