escape to insanity

To the woman in the green Honda Element on the bypass this morning:
Thanks for the angry glare. Traffic is rough in the morning, often slowing to a crawl for no apparent reason, and your harsh gestures help make it all worthwhile for all of us. It's just one of those things.

I know it was completely unreasonable for me to expect to change lanes. I'm almost ashamed of myself for needing to be in a lane that doesn't have a big yellow “Exit Only” sign above it. How dare I try to stay on the freeway instead of getting off at some exit downtown? The gall of some people, I tell you. So when I eased my Subaru into your lane, I can see how furious it must have made you to see another car embracing your section of the road. Those roads aren't made for more than one car, clearly. Maybe it's like Highlander for cars; there can be only one on the freeway at a time.

Pay no mind to my careful attention to where your car was at the time. Never mind that I carefully checked, several times, to make sure I wouldn't be cutting you off. That's completely irrelevant; I understand that no one may enter your lane ahead of you, and that you command a thirty-foot cushion of space in all directions around your car. See, that space between you and the white Buick ahead of you was just perfect for my little car, and I needed to be there. So thanks for the angry glare, and the sarcastic head movements. It shows you care.

To the guy in the black Mercury Grand Marquis on 35th:
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to listen to your music. Even though I was perfectly comfortable in my own car with my own stereo on, I'm grateful for your willingness to share your taste in music with those around you. I'm sure everyone within 50 feet of your car appreciates being given the chance to enjoy the delightful stylings of your favorite rap artist.

I particularly enjoyed the part where my car was shaking from the bass. Those custom subwoofers must have been expensive, and I appreciate every penny you spent on them. Were it not for your generosity, I wouldn't have been able to experience the wonders of losing my hearing for the duration of that stoplight, and each of the next four stoplights from there on. Thanks to your car, I received what almost felt like a full-body massage through my driver's seat, though that may have been my body attempting to run in expectation of an earthquake.

I hope you do well in your attempts to look “bad-ass.” I know the Grand Marquis is about as rough and tough of a car as they come, so you're well on your way to being a ghetto superstar. All you need now is a sticker across your back window with the name of your favorite rapper, maybe some of those fake bullet hole stickers, and some spinners. I'll let my grandmother and her friends know to upgrade their Grand Marquis in like fashion.

Okay, okay, I know it's been a while since my last post. I've been busy, alright?

Busy, or lazy. Pick one.

Anyway, I've accumulated some grievances and annoyances over the last few days. Most of them aren't new to me, just newly revisited. And because a good rant is always fun, here goes.

Cell phones in inappropriate places. I'm a fan of cell phones in general. My cell phone is my only phone, with the exception of the phone on my desk in my cubicle. That one's harder to carry around in my pocket, seeing as how it's tethered to the wall by an ethernet cable. In any case, I like cell phones. They're handy, they're convenient, they're lightweight, and they're getting cheaper (at least as compared to the original “mobile” phones of a decade or so ago).

But… there are times and places where cell phones are unwelcome. Theatres, churches, bodily cavities, and the like. Another of those places is the post office. At least, the post office that I use has a sign right at the front (and additional signs every few feet to the counter, in the event that you somehow missed the first seven) requesting that customers silence their cell phones while in the post office.

Now, I don't know about you, but I try to do whatever I have to do to appease the postal workers. Their lives are tough enough as is — how many other professions do you know of that have spawned phrases with the sort of implications “going postal” carries? Not too many, I'd imagine. I don't want my cell phone going off at the counter to be the trigger (no pun intended, I swear) that sets off an enraged worker.

And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to you.

Bonus points to whoever knows where that quote is from. I know at least one person who should get it immediately (I'm looking at you, Erik). Back to my rant. Today I was at the post office, sending a DVD back to the idiot who sent it to me (hold on, that part's coming eventually); who should be ahead of me in line but a girl with a loud cell phone. It rings amazingly loudly for a phone with a quarter-inch speaker — do they make aftermarket amplifiers for cell phones? She of course answers it, because why not. She proceeds to talk fairly loudly to whoever's on the other side, right up until she gets to the counter, pausing only to tell the woman she needs postage, blah blah. She hangs up and goes about her transaction; except… her friend apparently didn't understand that she was at the post office, and called her back. When she failed to answer, the same person called again, and again, and yet again. She finally answered it again only to say, “I can't answer the phone, I'm at the post office.” Um… silence your damn phone!! See, I used two exclamation points in that last sentence. That means extra grr.

Seriously, people, silence your phone. You're only going to be in the post office for a few minutes, you can live without a call for those precious seconds. Unless you're waiting to hear that a kidney just became available for your transplant, the call can wait.

So that's my cell phone rant for this post. Now, up a bit, I briefly mentioned that I was sending a DVD. Here's the second part of the rant, and the reason that I was at the post office in the first place.

I recently ordered a movie off Amazon.com, as I tend to do fairly often. The movie The Abyss was on television the other day, and reminded me that I wanted to get it on DVD. So I check Amazon, and of course there are multiple versions of the movie available. Well, I want to work on getting a good chunk of the Fox Collector's Edition DVD Series into my hands, so I settled on the Collector's Edition. Sure, it costs a bit extra beyond the regular version, but hey. I've got a real job now, I can afford to splurge every once in a while. So I plunk down the money for the 2-disc collector's edition, then sit back and wait for the package to arrive.

Well, today it showed up. Pretty decent shipping response, so I'm pleased. I open up the mailing envelope, and immediately I'm dismayed. Something was amiss. The box didn't look right. There was no collector's edition number on the spine, and the box doesn't look like the Digipack packaging that it was supposed to be in. Eh, oh well, I'll just list it on Amazon, and try to buy again from a different vendor. Then I notice… it's not actually the “Collector's Edition.” It's the “Special Edition.” Is there a difference? Well, not really, but yes. The big difference is that the going rate for the “Special Edition” is only about six dollars instead of the 18 I spent. Well, to hell with that, I'm not spending $18 for a $6 movie.

I immediately contacted the seller, crafting a careful response detailing my situation, making sure I don't sound angry or upset or anything. After sending, I got an email a few minutes later with seven words: “return for refund, sorry about the error.” How thoughtful. So I had to go to my local K-Mart (which has apparently degraded past “ghetto” to “disgraceful” since my last visit so long ago) to pick up a suitable envelope. Looked like someone had raided the shelves, because I ended up getting a giant envelope that could probably hold two DVD cases side-by-side.

Grr. That's beside the point. Okay people, Amazon has very specific listings, and very specific guidelines on how to list items. Before you list anything, it says to check to make sure that the item you're selling matches perfectly the item in the listing. Things like “special edition” versus “collector's edition” DO make a difference, believe it or not. Especially when there's a $12 price difference between the two. Oh, and when the cases look COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

So that's my Amazon rant. It felt good.

That's a lie. It felt like every other rant.

I decided to watch Kingdom of Heaven today, mostly for the simple reason that it features none other than the beautiful Eva Green. You may recognize her as the most recent Bond girl, cast as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. In any case, I decided to watch 'Kingdom of Heaven' because I've not seen it in its entirety and because Ms. Green graces the screen with her presence.

It's a fairly long movie. The director's cut is over three hours long, putting it in the runnings with movies like any one of the 'Lord of the Rings' installments. Right in the middle of the movie, at an hour and a half into it, it fades to black and displays the word 'Intermission' in the middle of the screen.
Now… this confuses me. I started this movie knowing full well how long it was. I knew I was in for a long movie; I was fully aware of the amount of time I was committing to. So here I sit, in the comfort of my own home, watching a movie at my own leisure. This isn't a public performance, it's not being put on as a show on Broadway, there are no others in attendance for this viewing. Just me and my glass of orange juice. And animal crackers. Never mind them, they don't talk much.

In any case, I'm free to come and go as I please. I can start, stop, or even — gasp — rewind this movie as I see fit. It's as though I'm a minor deity, with ultimate power over this, my digital entertainment du jour. My media player bows in accordance with my wishes, playing on my command. So why does it feel the need to tell me it's time for an intermission?

Why can't I choose to have an intermission, say, at the one-hour mark instead of the one-and-a-half hour mark? What about the 23-minute mark? Or the two-hour mark? I'm just confused as to why there would be an intermission on a DVD — is that not what the remote control is for? I'm pretty certain there's a pause button here… lemme check… yep. There it is, an intermission button right there on the remote.

I don't get it. Maybe it's just me.

Eva Green picture from PopStarsPlus.com.

I know I promised suggested a longer and more meaningful entry on the topic of organized religion, and it's coming. Probably. Sometime. Just not… right now.

Not right now either.

I'm confused about something. I'm confused about the purpose of something that doesn't seem to be recognized as much as I'd have thought it would be.

Progress bars. They're intended to display the amount of progress some operation has made in the time it's been running, right? For example, I start a scan of my entire hard drive to check for viruses; the anti-virus application knows the size of the hard drive and how many files need to be scanned. It then displays a progress bar displaying what percentage of those files have been scanned. I then have a pretty good estimate of how close to done the scan is at any given time.

If I start a download, my browser's download manager knows the total size of the file and how much of it has been downloaded, and thus displays a progress bar with the percentage of that file that's now on my computer.

Except… I've been seeing these “progress bars” used recently in instances where it doesn't really mark progress at all. Today I installed a program called CCleaner to see what the fuss was all about. Once the actual installation started, a progress bar appeared in the top of the dialog box. It was even labeled as such: “Progress” it said, clear as day. It seemed to be flying along, and in practically no time at all the bar had filled to completion.

And then it cleared itself and started anew. Wait… what? I thought… didn't it… wasn't the installation complete? Apparently not. The bar began to fill again. And again it reached its capacity, cleared, and begun anew. This happened at least three or four times before the installation was actually complete. Fully, finally, complete.

What's the point of using a progress bar if it doesn't offer me any information about the progress of the operation at hand? If you want to let me know that something is in fact happening on my computer, use a blinking light, or a rotating graphic, or something. Use something that implies an unknown progress. I see a progress bar and assume that the end of that bar is the same as the end of the operation.

Don't play games with my head.

Today's bit of advice:

To the guy ahead of me in line at Subway:
While going to Subway for lunch may sound good when you're stoned at 1:00 in the afternoon, there are others behind you in line who are genuinely hungry without the aid of recreational drugs. We'd appreciate it if you would make up your mind on what you want in terms of a sub.

No, you cannot get your footlong sub two different ways. You can get one footlong sub made one way, or you can get two six inch subs made two separate ways. You cannot go halfsies on the sub without paying extra. It's just not how it works.

Cheese. There's only a few different kinds, just go with whatever you like the best. No, you cannot get a little of each unless you want to pay the extra cost — it says right there on the glass that extra cheese is $0.20 extra. Deal with it.

Toasted, not toasted. It's only two options. Pick one and stick with it. Don't decide you want it toasted, then seconds before it goes in the toaster oven decide you don't want it toasted, only to decide a few seconds later that you do in fact want it toasted. And then rescinding that decision a second time. I know you're toasted, but what about the sub? Just pick one.

Ok, I understand you can get whatever veggies you want, but if you screw up and pick one you don't want… gah. Fine, she can pick off the cucumbers if you actually wanted tomatos, but it's a hassle for her and it's an extra thirty seconds I have to wait for you to get out of the building. And I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but the dressings aren't quite as easy to remove if you make a mistake. Don't tell her you want the southwest sauce, and then say “no no no no not that” a half-second before she pours it out on your sub. If you wanted the oil instead, you should have asked for that the first time.

Seriously. It's not that complex of a task to order a sub. My advice is just this… don't get stoned before coming to Subway. It makes life easier for all of us.

What exactly is the point of canned laughter? You know what I'm referring to. You hear it mostly in sitcoms — one of the characters cracks a funny line, and you get a pre-recorded laugh track. It's like a cue that whatever line was just delivered was supposed to have been funny, and you should now laugh.

I just don't get the point. Are viewers too dumb to figure out when something was supposed to be funny? I'd just think that if you have to cue your audience to laugh, you're defeating the purpose. No? Why is it necessary to inform your viewers that your joke is funny? If it really is funny, they should laugh on their own.

Right now I have the distinct pleasure of hearing my roommate and his girlfriend watching a season of “That 70s Show” in the living room downstairs. This show has quite possibly the most canned laughter of any show I've ever come across. As I'm listening, I've been keeping track of just how often I hear the laugh track. It's literally every other line. Every… other… line. For every two lines of dialogue, at least one of them is guaranteed to be accompanied by fake laughter. Doesn't that seem a bit extreme?

There aren't laugh tracks in movies. In movies, if a joke isn't funny, people don't laugh. We're not told that we should be laughing, we don't get a pre-recorded studio audience laughing, we get nothing but the joke itself. Why is it different for TV? Seriously… I'm getting sick of hearing canned laughter.

I'm not laughing.

What is it about older generations that gives them the idea that it's perfectly acceptable to cut off others mid-sentence with some random topic switch?

me: yeah I actually graduated las–
my grandfather: When I was in the CCC, I was glad not to work in the kitchen.
me: *obligatory acknowledgement* um… yeah. *silence, trying to figure out what just happened*

Seriously. I've noticed this in a good portion of the older generations — from my parents' generation and upward, mostly. You could be in the middle of a sentence, mid-word, when they decide to interrupt whatever insignificance you punk upstarts had to say and inject their own inane trail of thought as if you weren't speaking at all.

What is it that gives them the idea this is okay?

This happens all the time. The above excerpt is not made up. It happened. Today. Well… technically it's after midnight now, so it was actually yesterday. I was talking to my grandfather — more accurately, sitting in the living room keeping him entertained while Easter brunch was being prepared — and he consistently interrupted me with his own seemingly random thoughts. As far as I know, he does not have Alzheimer's, or any other sort of mental illness that would cause this.

And I'd tend to assume it was some sort of mental instability, were this an isolated case with one individual. Nay… I've noticed this as a pattern in the older generations. (Read: anyone over forty.) They seem to regard the statements of anyone younger than them, especially those considerably younger, as worthless. In no other situation is it considered acceptable to blatantly disregard whoever is speaking, and whatever they're saying, and begin your own completely unrelated train of thought. Even if you want to take the conversation elsewhere, you generally wait for the other person to finish speaking before starting yourself.

I just don't understand. Were I to reverse the situation and rudely interrupt the older individual mid-sentence, completely disregard their statements, and start talking about something else entirely, I'd be chastised immediately. But the older generation thinks nothing of doing it themselves.

Why?

Today I picked up GoldenEye at my local WalMart. It was on the cheap (cheap as compared to most DVDs at WalMart) DVD rack, so how could I refuse? The great Bond movie that spawned one of my favorite video games of all time had to be mine.

Right there next to GoldenEye were four other Bond movies, all priced the same as the one in my hand. The only thing keeping me from getting them right there on the spot was the reminder at the back of my mind that I could get all of the Bond movies in boxed sets now, and if I did decide to pick those up, I'd be stuck with the single copies of each of these and have to sell them off. Not that it's a hard thing to do, but then I'd have dropped an extra $40 plus tax on these extra movies. (I'd probably still keep GoldenEye on its own, just because.)

I'd actually been looking at the four boxed sets — sorry, “volumes” — a few days ago at Best Buy. They're ridiculously expensive — around $70 each — although I suppose each box does have five movies plus some bonus material. If you assume each movie would be at least $15 if not more, then I guess they're actually pricing them fairly accurately. In any case, I don't usually like to drop several hundred dollars on a whim, so I left Best Buy empty-handed that day.

What I don't understand is the way the movies are sorted. Each “volume” has five movies, but they're not arranged in any sort of understandable fashion. I would have expected them to be grouped by release date — the first five movies in Volume One, the next five in Volume Two, and so on. Instead, it seems to be completely random. I'd hate to have to read each box every time I wanted to watch one of the movies.

“Hmm, I'd like to watch 'Diamonds are Forever.' That was the seventh movie in the series, so that must be in the second box. Oh wait, that's right, it's not arranged in some logical order, it's actually in the first box.

Well, you know, actually I think I'll watch 'Die Another Day.' That was one of the most recent ones with Pierce Brosnan, so that's gotta be in the last box. D'oh! No, that's right, it's in the second box!”

Ridiculous. What was the logic behind the order of the movies? Every boxed set I've ever seen has had the movies arranged in order of release. Granted, there's usually not twenty-plus movies, but still. The principle is the same. I see no discernible pattern to the order of the movies. I thought maybe it was by actor, but no. Maybe it's some sort of theme to the movies themselves, but again no.

Gah. It doesn't really matter, but it's terribly inconvenient. The extra few seconds I'd spend looking for the movie I want could be spent… um… getting chips. Cause those extra ten seconds are ten seconds I'll never get back. I'd like to think there's going to be a boxed set released with an order that makes sense, but I know I'm just being idealistic. Eventually I'll pick these up, but right now the price tag is still a bit too high for me.

Edit: Sami has a suggestion as to the reasoning behind this idiocy:

Sami: probably pairing the ones that bombed up with the ones that did well just for marketing

Which… oddly… is probably the case. I mean, why else would they pair a fantastic movie like A View to a Kill (featuring none other than Christopher Walken as the villain) with a movie like Die Another Day?

Sorry to break it to ya. Unless your ancestors were born in Ireland, you're not Irish, and I don't care what the calendar says today is.

As you may or may not know, I'm a member of the forums over at BigBlueBall.com, where the main focus is “everything about IM.” IM of course stands for Instant Messaging — AIM, MSN Messenger (now known as Windows Live Messenger), Yahoo, et cetera. For a bit, about two years, I was a staff member in the AIM support section. Basically I was just there to help members find what they were looking for, keep the forums nice and tidy, etc. Of course, I was on the forums long before becoming a staff member.

In my time on BBB, I've of course seen lots of members come and go, lots of questions get asked, all the usual things that go on with online forums. There's one thing in particular that I'm sure anyone who's ever been a part of a forum has noticed — new members never search before asking, and inevitably someone gets mad and yells at the new person to search before asking a question that's been asked and answered a hundred times before. There's usually even Frequently Asked Questions sections on most of these forums, and BigBlueBall is not an exception. I should know, I re-organized the AIM FAQ when I became an advisor. These FAQ sections usually address, well, frequently asked questions. Questions that get asked all the time, and answered all the time, and then asked again. The idea of these sections is to provide a list of answers to the most common questions so people don't have to keep asking and keep answering.

The problem is that not everyone reads those, and even less people search before asking the same questions over and over. One of these questions in particular is “Can I track who views my AIM profile?” This question gets asked all the time, and the answer never changes. You can only track who views your profile or away message if they manually click a link in your profile that takes them to an external website. The AIM profile by default does not support the kind of code needed to do profile tracking. What I don't understand is why this is such a huge deal.

Is it really that vital for you to know exactly who is checking your away messages? Or who is checking your AIM profile? Why is it so important to know? Are you stalking people who might be curious to see what your latest away message is? I just don't get why it's such a hot topic. I've had to deal with people furiously ranting that they know it's possible because their boyfriend's cousin's girlfriend's friend knew that her ex-boyfriend had checked her profile. Or that they know it's possible because they checked someone's profile and seconds later they were blocked. People. What the hell is wrong with you? It's just AIM. It's an instant messenger program, not the be-all end-all of communication. Who cares if they checked your profile? If you don't want them seeing whatever's in there, then don't put it in there. They can't check what isn't there. If you don't want people reading your away message, then don't put one up. You can in fact block people from seeing that you're online or from messaging you. Do that.

Don't come whining and complaining to the people on a forum that they must be lying or don't know what they're talking about. We've been asked the same questions a million times, we've even put up helpful reference guides for you to check. We've provided search functions so you can search through every topic ever posted on the subject — all of which have the same answer we just gave you. If you've managed to find the forums, managed to register and managed to post a topic, then you can certainly manage to click the link that says “Search.”

Can someone explain to me why being able to track profile views is such a huge deal? Can someone tell me why it's so crucial to know who has viewed your profile? I don't get it.