Monica

Last night's episode of 24 was interrupted locally at an inconvenient time by a storm warning. (What happened to running those as tickers across the bottom of the screen?) Can anyone fill me in on one ( spoiler )

The fridge, but not the freezer, is no longer doing its temperature-control job. It's less than two years old. Well, at least it ought to still be under warranty. I'm so glad I decided not to go grocery shopping on the way home tonight.

Can anyone give me a summary of the last four minutes of tonight's 24? I didn't know that everything was being shifted 20 minutes; my generally-excessive 15-minute cushion on the tape didn't quite do it for me. The last thing I saw was ( spoiler )

Edit: A link to a locked post was here.

Women aren't in academia because... from patrissimo; a theory about career tracks and where the payoffs really are.

Some interesting thoughts on our relationship to God, from osewalrus.

A few aphorisms from patrissimo.

Despite having plot holes you could drive a truck through and a main character I would not even think about counting as a friend in real life, 24 continues to hold my attention. Even so, after last night's episode I must ask: shall not the guardians of national security practice a little security? Sheesh! (And as for the final scene: damn you, writers, damn you.)

Prior to receiving an invitation to one I had not heard the word "webinar", but I instantly understood what it meant. That's a good sign in new vocabulary. (Contrast with, for example, "blog".) Not that I'm eager to start talking about webinars (let alone holding them), but still.

This week's episode of 24 included a PSA saying, essentially, "not all muslims are terrorists". Well duh. If the show were one of those fake documentaries I could see something like that, but doesn't everyone understand that 24 is fiction? And anyway, it looks like that's going to become very, very obvious next week, unless the previews are very misleading.

Someone posted "flushing 101" posters in the restrooms at work. I first saw the poster in a stall where the previous occupant had not flushed. I hope that wasn't the person who posted the sign.

This appalling discrimination from Virginia can't possibly be constitutional, but it's still scary. How did it pass? Bah.

Today I called Consumer Reports to find out why they had charged me for a second month of web access when I had cancelled 30 days after the initial 30-day subscription. "Let's see, it says here you cancelled on March 26." "Yes." "And you subscribed on February 25." "Yes. That's 30 days." "No, you cancelled on the 26th." "February doesn't have 30 days". (Pause.) "Oh. Right; we'll get that credit right out to you." I am completely satisfied with the support representative; their billing system might need some tweaking.

I hadn't seen this spammer tactic before: send a message faking one of those "spam-guard" services that requires people to confirm that they're real people (once) before their email addresses get added to a whitelist. I'm on enough mailing lists that it's possible I might have fallen for it if the sender had put my address, rather than a bogus one, in the "to" line. (On the other hand, I might have been suspicious of any subject line that wasn't "Re: [one of my recent subject lines]". Now I certainly will be.)

Quote from the lawyer defending the first people charged under the "Can Spam" law: "No one's done this before. It will be fun -- not for my client but for me professionally." If my lawyer publically called my case "fun", I might wonder if I had chosen wisely. :-) (Granted, the one time I hired a litigator he was excited about the case, but not because it would be "fun". It was going to be precedent-setting. I'm all for having my lawyer be motivated to do a good job because of the potential journal articles. :-) )

One of today's pieces of (physical) junk mail was from the "food fulfillment center" at some anonymous post-office box. I figured it was probably a charity looking for money, but I was curious enough to open the envelope. Yup -- Feed the Children. I wish I could deliver two clues to organizations that send me junk mail: (1) if you're not willing to put the name of your organization on the outside of the envelope I'm not going to be favorably disposed toward you, and (2) any organization addressing a general problem but only for children is not going to get my money because that's just a sympathy ploy. There are hungry adults too, y'know -- and adults who get cancer, are disabled in various ways, and live in cardboard boxes, just to pick three more child-specific causes that showed up in the mail in the last month. (Lest you get the wrong impression, I do give to charity, and fairly generously. But not to organizations whose tactics I don't approve of.)

Last night I took a short highway entrance ramp from a dead stop (because sometimes Edgewood is like that) for the first time in the new car. Vroom! My old car was pretty good for that (best I'd driven, though all the other examples were automatics so that's not balanced), but my new car is zippier. :-)

Memo to Tony on 24, c. 8:58AM: you idiot! That is all.