The Random Thoughts Review

Official Google Blog: Our position on California’s No on 8 campaign

Google, you disappoint me. And I don’t know that I’ve ever actually said that before.

I fear that you are starting to channel your inner movie star. I fear that you are starting to think that, because you are famous, that you need to make a political statement about your stance on political issues. This disappoints me. You aren’t a PAC. You are an internet company.

I’m not going to discuss what I think about the stance you have taken. Whether you come down on the side of gay marriage, or the side against gay marriage isn’t relevant to this blog post. I’m just disappointed that you felt that, as a company, you needed to choose a side in an issue that isn’t relevant to your business.

Focus… Focus.. Eye on the prize, G.. Eye on the prize.

What percentage of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups end up with double wrappers?

Don’t act innocent. You know exactly what I’m talking about. So, what do you think? Give me a number..

Back it up with a link if you’re really cool.

There are several things that science current sees as a “best guess” that don’t make much sense to me, from a cause & effect standpoint..

The Inflationary Period. Shortly after the big bang, the universe expanded rapidly and then, for no apparent reason that anyone has given me, stopped expanding so rapidly. Why did this occur? Well, that’s the wrong question. The right question is, “What magical event do we need to have to make the big bang numbers work out?” They don’t work without this inflationary period.
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Today I had a message in my email InBox telling me that I had a new bill waiting for me from AT&T.

This particular bill was for my home telephone and DSL service. When I first got DSL, it was $15 a month. My home phone and DSL bill was around $30, and I was happy with that. Over the past couple of years, my bill has slowly crept up in price. The DSL price was an introductory price… A year or so after that went away, they decided to raise the price of DSL again.. So, my bill has been getting more and more expensive.

Today’s bill was for $44.xx. I thought that seemed annoying, so I went to their website to check it out. I noticed that last month’s bill was for $42.xx, and I decided to investigate.

It turns out that the difference was the long distance bill. I use my cell phone to make my calls. I don’t see any reason to do anything else. EXCEPT, in one very special case: When I need to send a fax. I was checking out a prospective tenant last month, and the previous landlord’s needed a fax of the authorization sheet. So, I had to send it to them. I ended up sending 3 different faxes for this. Each one was 1 minute long, and I was billed 12 cents for each minute. 36 cents, right?

WRONG!!!

My long distance bill was $2.34. The extra $1.98 was for fees and taxes. Let’s get one thing straight. I’m all for giving people what they need to survive. I understand infrastructure costs and all that jazz. But, when I spend 3 minutes on the phone at an advertised cost of 12 cents a minute, it annoys me to see a bill of $2.34.

When we look at the bill in more detail, we can quickly see that the majority of the cost is for AT&T’s Carrier Cost Recovery Fee, which is $1.49. Seriously, AT&T? Did my 3 one minute phone calls really cause you to need to recover $1.49 in carrier costs?

Anyway, if you’ve ever had issues with this sort of corporate capitalism, feel free to post below. I feel slightly better now, but I’m still $2.34 poorer for 3 tiny phone calls.

This morning I woke up at 5:38 after a rousing Genghis Khan type dream.

What’s it mean? You tell me.

The dream wasn’t a long one. It started out before a battle. I was looking down into a small-ish valley, and the enemy was (apparently) on the other side of the valley on the hills there, even though I couldn’t see the enemy. My comrades and I made our way into the bottom of the valley and were looking up the other side. The other side was filled with trees (or something tree-like, I guess). So it was us, the trees, and then the apparent enemy. At that point, the enemy started up with their artillery. A couple of things to note at this point. This was apparently a battle in the 1200s or so. No guns or anything. And the “trees” were really, really thick.

In fact, it’s really a stretch for me to even call them trees. It was more like a wall. Amazingly enough, this wall looked incredibly like the back of my couch. When the bad stuff started coming in, I dove below the edge of the wall/couch so that the incoming projectiles were being blocked by the couch-type thingy. The projectiles were like pikes. They were round, straight sticks about an inch and half in diameter with a pointed end. Probably 6-8 feet long. They came flying in in large numbers. I was briefly reminded of the scene in Braveheart when the arrows come in and go through the guy’s shield and kill him. These pikes came flying in, killing people behind me that weren’t behind the wall (probably 3 feet high). So I was laying there. These pikes were coming in. When they would impact the “wall” they would go through it far enough to poke out the fabric on the backside (next to where I was laying) but didn’t actually come through and cut me.

Not a pleasant situation, and my future clearly wasn’t that bright.

This continued for a little while. We were very pinned down. At this point, I saw some hands reaching out over the wall above me. They were hold red flexible sacks (probably about a foot high) that were “pooched” out a little bit in the bottom, as though full of liquid. The sack said “OIL” on it in big white letters. My guess is that it was hot. The hands turned the sack over…

…

and that’s when I woke up at 5:38 this morning.

It’s incredibly rare for me to have a dream. So rare that I decided to blog about this one. Let’s see. Background information from yesterday… Nothing exciting happened. Didn’t watch any war movies, don’t remember reading about anything like this. I have no idea where the thoughts came from.

Interesting thing, dreams.. Joseph, where are you?

After what many would say was “too long”, the Qdoba matter is finally resolved. Read the whole story at

Problems With The Local Qdoba

My dear, precious, Scratchy cat turned 13 yesterday.

Pictures of him are here.

And, his home page, (albeit not updated for a while) is also available.

Yesterday morning I removed most of his food. He still had enough to live on, but my little Scratch really likes having a food bowl that is at least half full. If it falls to the point where he can see the bottom (at all!) he gets really paranoid and starts thinking he’s going to fall over dead right there.

So, in anticipation of last night’s events, I removed most of his food yesterday morning. You see, Scratchy’s yearly treat is a can of tuna. He gets it on his birthday each year, and he really, really enjoys it.

Last night, after an appropriate amount of waiting, Scratch finally got his food. Wasn’t tuna, though. I had a can of fancy feast that I had gotten somewhere, and thought that I’d give him that instead. So, he had a can of Chicken with Cheese fancy feast. (exact name will be put in once I go home and get it). He really liked it. He sat there and ate and ate and ate.

All things considered, a great birthday for the little guy.

Pictures that Mariya took of the food festivities are forthcoming.

I sometimes need to look at a cookies.txt file and figure out what the entries mean.

Basically, you have a line in the file that looks like:

www.someURL.com FALSE / FALSE 0 VNAME v,value,and,more

• www.someURL.com – The domain that the cookie applies to
• FALSE – can other webservers within www.someURL.com access this cookie? If there was a webserver at blah.www.someURL.com, could it see this cookie?
• / – more restrictions on what paths on www.someURL.com can see this cookie. Anything here and under can see the cookie. / is the least restrictive, meaning that any (and all) requests from www.someURL.com get the cookie header sent.
• FALSE – Do we have to be coming in on https to send the cookie?
• 0 – expiration time. zero probably means that it never expires, or that it is good for as long as this session lasts. A number like 928934729 would correspond to a number of seconds since the epoch (Jan 1, 1970).
• VNAME – The name of the cookie variable that will be send to the server.
• v,value,and,more – cookie value that will be sent. Might be comma separated list of terms, or could just be a word.. Hard to say. Depends on the server.