Category: Life

Today, I changed the paperclip in my sainted mother’s toilet.

This time, I used a rubber-covered one, so it should last a while.

In retrospect, it really wasn’t that hard to stop a Rough Riders 4x4s at all. As I recall, any of the obstacles in the commercials would easily stop the production models.

Ad on the back of the new Yellow Pages:

The Destroyer	A Mortgage Broker

Easy home equity credit and low, low mortgage rates as the destroyer. That’s a mighty deep ad.

Everyone sing:

“Midwest Hemorrhoid Treatment Center. Don’t suffer in silence.”

Put it into your head-based jingle rotation along with Frederic Roofing for more fun.

Instapundit links to a piece from a book about higher education or something, and the author relates a story about a faculty member teaching a graduate level course on technical writing wherein the faculty member gets in trouble for having a potty mouth:

“I will no longer tolerate,” the chair writes in his letter to my friend, “what can only be described as your insensitive, vulgar, and obscene language in the classroom.”

The colleague’s intent in a graduate-level, academic tech writing class (i.e., not a vocational training workshop) is not just to teach students how to type memos, but rather to challenge students to consider how they know what they know as tech writers. This can be achieved while they expand their knowledge of their field, which exists right in the oily hinge, right in the fishy craw of the intersection of higher education and the corporation. Given the mess such a collision must be, he and I agree, some form of institutional critique is vital, and this sort of three-dimensional, reflexive analysis can, over time, only make students better tech writers. To know your context is to know your work.

Like many of his grad students, the complainant is his age, and already works as a tech writer. For much more than his salary.

Oh, give me a break. The “ends” of which academic types, particularly in soft sciences, of technical writing is to deliver correct and useful information to people who need it. Take it from a technical writer. Any time spent on institutional critique and three-dimensional, reflexive analysis is a waste of time unless you want to become a professor of technical writing somewhere since the whole expertise on Dickens’ view of male/female relationships isn’t working out.

You want to teach a technical writer something, teach him or her how to suss out information from the misanthropes on the development team, how to actually freaking open the software or somewhat understand the thing they’re writing about, and how to make a good business case that documentation isn’t a waste of time and saves money on help desk calls and whatnot. But teaching them how to approach their jobs as though they’re academics ain’t it.

Nor is teaching them that swearing is professional in any way shape or form. The tech industry already skews to younger people who have already developed the habit of f-bombing everything in sight to show their intensity and passion instead of, I don’t know, showing quiet competence. I hate to see that taught in the universities as good institutional technique.

I just got a credit card statement in the mail today for my Commerce Bank Small Business Visa. I’m turning around and paying it right away because I missed the last deadline by a day because I’d been in the practice of letting a couple of bills collect before I sat down and wrote a bunch of checks.

So I sit down and look it over. The statement date is November 18. Today is November 26. It took Commerce Bank eight days to get this to me, which gives me a little more than, what, two weeks to turn it around without exorbitant penalties.

I called and told them it was poor form, and the customer service representative sat in silence while I said, procedurally, this was a dirty trick, and I was displeased with the way they conducted themselves. I’m not the best guy at venting my spleen on the phone, and certainly I had no end game (I want a free night at the hotel, I want a charge removed, et cetera), but even calling them to complain ultimately made me feel smaller than if I hadn’t called because I don’t expect the policy to ever change because we are a nation of small fries (and now, Goverment Sponsored Entities formerly known as Big Businesses).

But I am empowered, through this blog, to tell you, gentle reader who is searching for photos of Natalie J. Rabb or Commerce employee tracking the business’s online response. So there you go.

At this point, I sometimes want to throw up my hands and say, Big Government, Big Business, what’s the difference? It’s all about ossified bureaucracies and procedures designed to glean every possible drop from you for their own purposes. I guess the difference is choice, which means Big Business needs to trick you, whereas government just has to tell you, so it’s quite a big difference indeed.

Things your little army cannot afford to equip its soldiers with? We give them to our children:

On the other hand, watch for bands of swarthy looking men in cars with Michigan plates driving from Target to Target, buying each out of this item using cash.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are drinking the water.

Sorry, Mr. Wilde.

A phishing scam that sends you an e-mail form to fill on the dotted line? Sweet!

Dear Account User

This Email is from Hotmail Customer Care and we are sending it to every Hotmail Email User Accounts Owner for safety. we are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of Hotmail accounts so we are shutting down some Hotmail accounts and your account was among those to be deleted. We are sending this email to you so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account. If you are still interested please confirm your account by filling the space below.Your User name, password, date of birth and your country information would be needed to verify your account.

Due to the congestion in all Hotmail users and removal of all unused Hotmail Accounts, Hotmail would be shutting down all unused Accounts, You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login Information below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.

* Username: ………………………….
* Password: …………………………..
* Date of Birth: ……………………….
* Country Or Territory: ……………..

After following the instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal. Thanks for your attention to this request. We apologize for any inconveniences.

Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

Sincerely,
The Windows Live Hotmail Team

——————————————————————————–
Connect to the next generation of MSN Messenger Get it now!

Bonus for including a hyperlink to a fake domain offering malware downloads instead of MSN Messenger. Demerits for absolutely abhorrent grammar and style.

Every generation must live through its own 1970s. After a decade of an unpopular war, opposed by reflex and not because you might be drafted to fight it, so now we’ll have this generation’s Carter.

Hopefully, it will only be that bad.

John Kass might just be offering a nice eulogy for America courtesy of the Boomers:

On those nights when they were young, they smoked pot in the streets and listened to Dylan in the car and dreamed of the risks they’d take.

But now, as Baby Boomers grow old, they welcome those police surveillance cameras on the light poles outside their homes, thinking the cameras make them safe. And they rush toward the warm embrace of big government and promised security.

I don’t know why Kass isn’t a blogosphere favorite. He’s the best columnist in Chicago.

Bookworm recounts a conversation with a liberal friend, who has a mantra when confronted with the liberal leaders’ plans as stated in the liberal leader’s own words:

No, he’s not.

No, they’re not.

That’s just not true.

It’s sort of like this DJ friend I have, also a liberal coincidentally, who doesn’t know a lot about the lyrical content of the songs he plays. He only knows to play something up tempo and something slow for the people to dance. So he’s caught by surprise when the bride writes on his little information sheet, “Don’t play ‘Soldier Boy'” and he asks the groom, “Is that don’t play ‘Soldier Boy’ or should I play it?” and the groom says, “Play it,” and then the bride rushes off and the bride and groom withhold payment. You know, those words mean things.

I wonder how many voters of either stripe don’t actually listen to the words, but like the hip beats that the parties spin. I’d like to think that the subrational party does it more, but I imagine there are the subrational in our party, too.

But when a Congressman says he’s going to take 401(k) money for the slush fund, you’d better believe he means it. If a leader of a country threatens radioactive fire upon a democratic nation that happens to be mostly Jewish in population, you’d better hear more than the tone of the voice.

(Plus, free taunt: For someone who calls the blog “Bookworm Room”, I have to say, “You have some books? How cute!” Which reminds me, I need to get an update to the Noggle Library to account for the 3 or more new bookshelves.)

I received my first text on my cell phone today, a message from my uncle.

“From a 64 year old man,” my wife said. “How does that make you feel?”

“Better than you’d feel if it was a 21 year old woman,” I thought, but didn’t say, mostly because I fear her displeasure.

Instructions for changing the battery on a heart rate monitor:

Click for full size

The coin-slot starts in the horizontal position; notice that the text says “one quarter turn,” but the image is actually a one-eighth turn.

It opens on a one-eighth turn, but it will helpfully turn a full quarter turn in case you’re wondering. Which passes the point where the little locking things pass through the gaps. One quarter turn results in locking it again.

Technical writers are cretins.

To be like all the cool kids, I compelled Jack Straw to take me to the local indoor gun range with an assortment of his armaments. I shot:

A Browning BuckMark in .22lr with a C-More Red-dot sight firing CCI subsonic hollowpoints.

A Para Ordnance P1445 in .45ACP with open, fixed sights firing Sellier & Bellot 230gr FMJ.

It’s my first time firing those new-fangled semi-automatic handguns, or as they’re soon to be known in a House bill and set of laudatory news stories, high-powered assault sniper cop-baby-and-puppy-killer automatic machined pistols. Still, for all the hoopla, they don’t always fire a bullet when you pull the trigger.

Not depicted: the Glock G36 in OD Green with fixed sights with a LaserMax guide-rod laser (pulsing) firing Sellier & Bellot 230gr FMJ and the Romanian WASR-10 (AK-variant) with Pentax red-dot sight, folding stock, aluminum quad rail fore-end, AK-74-style muzzle compensator, rear pistol grip & forward folding grip, TAPCO single-hook trigger, and Axis Pin Retaining Plate firing Wolf Military Classic Hollow Point, soon to be known after a House bill, Senate Bill, signature by President Obama, and laudatory news stories as illegal.

Also not depicted: the RehabCare logo on the ball cap.

How did I do? You had to ask that, didn’t you? Well, I aimed consistently low. Jack Straw tells me my grouping was very good, but let’s be honest, if I used my hand instead of a pistol, it would have been called a groping and not a grouping, okay? I dunno what I was doing wrong; we were shooting at little adhesive targets affixed to the paper target, and I missed consistently low and left when I fired at the right side of the target and hit pretty good on the left side of the target.

I blame the change in my dominant eye in the 20 years since I last fired a gun.

Still, I’m pleased to have gone and will have to do so again. Understanding a semi-automatic pistol and firing one tolerably might not be in Heinlein’s list of things a man should be able to do, but it’s on mine.

I’m sitting in my sainted mother’s living room, and I flip through one of the innumerable catalogs she gets. It’s the Carol Wright gifts catalog, from which I and she have ordered many Christmas presents and trinkets for loved ones in years past. An innocuous piece of cataloguery, or so I thought.

Until I hit the page that had the personal massagers, male enhancement products, and Naked Aerobics/Naked Yoga and Tai Chi DVDs.

Crikey, Carol Wright–Carol Wright!–has a sexual aids section (NSFW, probably).

I mean, I’m not shocked on account that these things are available, but I am shocked that I found them amongst the throw blankets, quilted air conditioner covers, and magnetic windshield covers.

What’s next? A Vibrating Touch of Class?

A bit of perspective from tonight’s IM conversation with gimlet:

gimlet: so are you busy hoping for audacious change?
Brian Noggle: Dude, I’m stuck in the eighties. I want bodacious change.
gimlet: that’s pretty rad
Brian Noggle: But I’d settle for gnarly.

I lost several moments of Sarah Palin’s speech last night and didn’t catch the next paragraph after the John McCain uses his career to promote change because the cutaway shot went to a camera focused on a woman’s bosom:

Which the cameraman widened as quickly as he could, but ultimately too late to save me from near hysterical laughter:

You can enjoy it for yourself:

It occurs with about 8:30 to go.

I bet that cameraman got a talking to. Or a promotion to the CCTV security team.