Inverted Musings

Linkmania -- understanding other perspectives

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 22:05:29 GMT

I know that most of my Linkmanias are pretty throwaway...this one has considerably more substance and is probably worth your time to look through.

Same-sex marriage:

Much of the way the two sides on the same-sex marriage issue seem to be talking past each other comes down to different concepts of what marriage fundamentally is and what its purpose is. I may not agree with those on the other side of the debate, but after reading this article, I understand the basis of both my position and theirs better than I ever had before.

The near-Ground-Zero mosque:

Ignoring the all the issues concerning how close it is and what else is close and whether there's already a mosque that's nearby, much of the "heat" on this issue comes from different senses of what's morally important. This article, originally published elsewhere and subsequently removed(?), lays out the conflict.

The danger of the single story:

A Nigerian author giving a pretty compelling TED Talk on the danger of reducing any person, thing, or situation to a single story.

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It's the little things...

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:48:56 GMT

So I just took a multivitamin. A perfectly ordinary Costco-brand Centrum-clone multivitamin. Thing is, it's the first time I've been able to do that in a year or so. Something about going in this morning and getting the stricture in my esophagus stretched to 15mm. (It was 7mm until last month's exploratory endoscopy; getting the endoscope past it involved stretching it to 10mm.) And if I can swallow pills now, then I can swallow boluses of fibrous meats. Beef and pork are once again things I can eat in more than microscopic quantities (and thus in less than geologic time). I'm kinda psyched about this.

I'm less psyched about the news that the doctor found (and removed) some polyps from my esophagus and stomach. Gee...polyps at both ends of my digestive system and an immediate-family history of colon cancer. Guess I know what I'm looking forward to at some point.... But that's then. Right now...right now, I can eat. And not throw up at Really Inopportune moments. I can work with this.

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Quick update

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 02:03:37 GMT

To update my possibly-cryptic post from yesterday: Went in Friday for an endoscopy and a colonoscopy. Endoscopy found that, yes, my mid-esophagus is rather constricted. In fact, they opened it up a bit just getting the endoscope through. Current theory is that it's allergy-related...no idea yet whether it's a food allergy or a pollen-type allergy.

Colonoscopy found two polyps, removed 'em both. Glad they're gone; it made going through the prep worth it. It does mean I have to do it again in five years (rather than 10), though.

Monday night's likely-food-poisoning-induced vomiting wrenched something in my back; the frequent standup-sitdown of the pre-procedure bowel purge aggravated the hell out of it. Result was last night I found myself on the couch and unable to move without spiking my pain levels beyond what I could fight through. We got through that, and today went to urgent care. At this moment, I'm on vicodin and flexeril (and am thus drowsy, which is why I'm not doing the Long Entry), and a bit of Voltaren gel (frustratingly, because the polyp sites need to heal, I can't take any internal NSAIDs for 10 days). It's kinda cool to be able to stand up without significant pain. Still going to take it easy this weekend; I *need* to be ready to work Monday.

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Linkmania -- videos I found on Buzzfeed

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 06:08:56 GMT

Stupid:

It's an Adidas commercial, set to run around the upcoming World Cup. I'm just trying to figure out how you create something that lame and that unoriginal and then close with that slogan.

Eeep-worthy:

Near the end of this video, a participant in the Red Bull Air Races has a very near-miss.

Awesome:

Ozzy Osbourne spends some time at Madame Tussaud's, doing exactly what you'd expect him to do.

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How To Train Your Dragon

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 07:23:47 GMT

It's sitting at 98% on the Tomato-Meter.

It is that good. Really excellent animation, tight writing, wonderful characters, and top-notch voice acting. Toy Story 3 is going to have to be as good as its predecessors to contend for the animated Oscar this year.

Go see it. Unless doing so messes with you in some fashion, go see it in 3-D. The cinematography was done with 3-D in mind, rather than being an afterthought.

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Linkmania: the Internet continues to contain weirdness

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:22:31 GMT

Ow...

I'm thinking I don't actually want to know if the rest of Birdemic: Shock And Terror is as bad as its worst-I've-ever-seen trailer.

Kim Jong-Il looks at things:

So apparently every so often, insane North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il goes out on heavily scripted inspection tours where he looks at factories and such and offers advice and encouragement. The North Korean press agency releases pictures, which are often subtly weird...even before the Internets get hold of them and start captioning them.

We will obey the Gaga?

Lady Gaga's new video, Telephone, is allegedly full of Illuminati symbols and is trying to control your mind.

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Linkmania -- WTF video

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:35:56 GMT

Kind of inevitable:

The People of Wal-Mart rap. (NSFW, language)

Weird, but I can get behind it:

It's a trailer for a book, which is a bit odd...but it's the next book from the author who brought us Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

The stupid, it burns:

I'm not really a fan of tosh.0, but his take on this video is just wonderful. In a horrifying way.

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Linkmania -- controversial things

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:35:29 GMT

A bit later than I should have...

Banned Books Week ended a few weeks ago, but it's still worth posting a link to this remarkably thoughtful letter from a librarian explaining to a patron why the library was not going to remove or reshelve the book the patron was challenging.

Which is the tail and which is the dog?

Is the Tea Party movement making it harder for the Republican Party to get Republicans elected, or is the Republican Party making it harder for the Tea Party movement to get Republicans elected?

I'd hoped it wasn't so...

Andrew Sullivan summarizing how we tortured a man we knew was innocent at Gitmo. (And the actual habeas hearing verdict in case you think he's misrepresenting what happened.)

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Almost not worth it...

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:50:21 GMT

So recently F------'s folks extended the more-or-less permanent loan of an Xbox 360 (along with Rock Band and a few other games) to the household. We were, of course, thrilled. We've had a regular Xbox for quite some time, but used it primarily as a media player. (Hardware hack.) Anyway, I still had my old Xbox Live account, and it made sense to move it over to the 360.

Foolishly as it turns out, I assumed that I would need my Xbox Gamertag and associated password to do this, so I emailed Xbox support *from the email address they send the annual billing notices to* (m-----[Bad username or site: z----- @ com]). I got a form email back explaining that I actually needed the Windows Live ID associated with the account and giving me information about where to go online to submit a request for that. Microsoft has redesigned the Windows Live site since that email was written, but I managed to figure out where to actually go to submit the proper request. I got back *another* email saying that they totally couldn't tell me anything unless I had a paid subscription of some sort linked to that Windows Live ID...which I did, and if I did, I needed to dig up the credit card receipt with the annual billing on it and call the phone number listed as part of the transaction info.

After a bit of viewing old statements for my various credit cards online, I located the correct one and called the number...only to be told they were closed for the night. So, next morning (Sunday the 13th), I called again. I was told that my Gamertag, because it was so old, wasn't actually associated with a Windows Live ID, but that I could do this myself using the Recover Gamertag function in the 360.

I made sure I'd set up the aforementioned email address as a Windows Live ID, and tried that. It told me that the Gamertag wasn't associated with that Windows Live ID, which made me headdesk pretty hard because that was supposed to be the *point* of the process. So I called support again, and spent an hour on with them. They had me walk through the process again (same error message). Then they had me go on my laptop, create a brand new Windows Live ID, and try to associate that, which was a bit strange because the first rep I'd talked to had told me that only the email address that the billing notices were going to *could* be associated with the Gamertag. (Same error message, BTW.) Then they themselves tried to associate it on their end. No luck. Finally, after the supervisor I spoke with was unable to come up with anything, even when consulting with other supervisors, they took all my information and escalated my case. I was told to expect a call or email (I specified email as my preferred contact method) in 3-4 days. Personally, I thought this seemed a bit long for someone with write access to the relevant database to read the notes and populate the correct field, but hey, it's a big company.

After five days (Friday), I called them back. The rep I spoke with kept wanting all the same information that was in the notes ("That should be in the case notes, but it's blah-blah-blah...." at least three times) and finally figured out that I didn't expect him to solve the problem, I wanted him to look at the damn notes and see if there was anything that had been added to them. He had to transfer me to someone *else* who could tell me that...and the answer was No. Nor could this person tell me when to expect any contact.

So this morning, my phone rings. It's Xbox support. The rep walks me through the Exact Same Process Yet Again, and when that doesn't work, points me at a web page that he assures me will allow me to fix the problem. Instead, the web page is nothing but a FAQ page that tells me to do (wait for it...) EXACTLY THE SAME THING I'VE JUST DONE AGAIN. At this point, I'm ready to explode. If I were actually employed, it would have been easier and cheaper to just write off the six months of *already-paid-for* subscription time and bought a whole new subscription.

But there is a happy ending.

Nick does some Googling, and finds that somewhere *completely else* on the 360, there's a process you can go through that involves creating a new Windows Live ID and associating that ID with the Gamertag. And that worked. Apparently, you *can't* associate it with an existing Gamertag, so all the time the support people were telling me to make sure I already had a valid Windows Live ID, they were not only wrong, they were pushing me away from the actual answer.

Should I have Googled sooner? Absolutely. I got locked into thinking it was something on their end, and thus something I couldn't expect to do anything about.

Should Xbox Support have known their own product well enough that in multiple interactions over a week and a half, *somebody* might have been able to give me correct information? Because, really, take a look back at that. Everything they told me was wrong. Wrong process, wrong information about the Windows Live accounts, and don't get me *started* on that completely worthless "escalation." Meh. Oh well...time to start re-unlocking everything that I'd unlocked already on a non-online profile....

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Linkmania -- Immigration, health care, and the budget

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:19:46 GMT

Not what many would expect...

It is "...[a] city of illegal immigrants with easy access to guns, just across a river from a metropolis ripped apart by brutal drug war violence." And yet, El Paso, Texas is one of the safest cities in the country. It seems that, contrary to conventional wisdom, immigrants (whether legal or illegal) are noticeably less likely to commit crimes than are the native-born.

Interesting take on health care

I'm not sure I necessarily agree with the answers, but I think this makes some excellent points about whether we're asking the right questions in the health care debate.

It's good to know these things...

A detailed yet comprehensible graphical representation of the Federal Budget and how it breaks down. (I recommend taking an especially hard look at "The Total Budget" in the lower-right corner to let you know what actually matters budget-wise.) Thanks to lockes5hadow for the link.

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Linkmania -- increasing WTFery

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:41:16 GMT

What was that?

It's a CG video, it's about two minutes long, it's rather well-executed, and it's notably NSFW. Beyond that...I got nothin'.

Who did this...and why?

It's a singing, laughing, moving-up-and-down mechanical clown-face urinal. There's video. (And is anyone surprised it's Japanese?)

I...have no words

Some time ago, I linked to a list of Disturbing Crossover Fanfics. I don't think there's anything on that list that can even touch this Dragonball Z/Diary of Anne Frank effort.

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Linkmania -- a pair of thoughtful things

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:06:51 GMT

This needed saying...

Glenn Greenwald on how an awful lot of people inside the Beltway forget that there are some things that aren't subject to "practical politics."

Scalia's dissent discussed

I find this post notable not just because the post itself is reasoned, informative, and accessible to laypeople, but because the comments are, too.

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Linkmania -- things to make your brain hurt

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:48:12 GMT

Flee now

In 1830, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton set pen to paper and produced the following immortal first sentence: "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness." For the past 26 years, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has invited entrants to create something even worse. The 2009 winners are up.

First there was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies...

...now there's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead, which ties together Shakespeare, the Holy Grail, and vampires.

For the creative among you...

Orbit Books is running a contest to create the worst possible (fake) SF book cover. The folks over at io9 have...helpfully...posted a number of real, already-existing ones that will take some some beating.

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Linkmania -- One you can buy now, one you can buy later, one you (thankfully?) can't buy at all

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:39:01 GMT

Is the tie worse than what's on it?

If you've ever wanted a necktie with plague or rhinovirus on it...here you go.

Made of Win...

Available this November will be the Haynes Manual for Apollo 11.

I didn't see an Allen wrench in there...

It's an IKEA-style guillotine. For Great (Do-It-Yourself) Justice!

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Linkmania -- three from YouTube

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 03:09:46 GMT

Now that's how to do it...

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet (which may not be many, since this one's gone viral), one of the coolest wedding processionals ever.

He's got a point...

Late-night talk-show host Craig Ferguson has figured it out.

...and so does he

Late-night talk-show host Conan O'Brien has his own epiphany. Only his involves William Shatner.

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On a lighter note...

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:28:40 GMT

So Saturday-eight-days-ago, I stop off at a Fry's grocery on my way home from work because you can't make business tax payments through the ATM...and my car decides it won't start. The accessories come on, and the starter relay clicks, but there's no cranking. Yay. After an unsuccessful jumpstart attempt, I call AAA and tell them my battery has succumbed to the heat. An hour later, the AAA battery van shows up. He tells me they don't actually have the right battery for my car (and even if they did, it'd be $165), but he can give me a jump and I can drive a mile up to AutoZone. I'm cool with this, so he hooks up his portable jumpstart rig and the engine fires up, no problem. Except as he leaves it on there (for this very reason), he sees the battery voltage slooowly dropping. In other words, this isn't a battery issue, this is an alternator issue.

Joy.

So he calls back in to AAA and they set up for a tow truck to come get me. (Understand at this point it's about 4pm, and Teresa and I already have tickets to the 7pm Cine Capri showing of Half-Blood Prince.) They say it'll be about an hour, so I retreat back into the Fry's and start waiting. (Fortunately, I have two books with me, and they're playing Cars on the big-screen TV in the video-rental area where I've parked myself. *g*)

An hour later, no tow truck. I call back. The truck assigned to get me has been called away on a priority call and will be another 40 minutes. I go back in and watch more of Cars.

Forty minutes later, no tow truck. I've never had to call AAA back even once, and today I'm having to do it twice? Ten more minutes, they say.... By this time, Teresa and I have given up on the whole movie thing, and Teresa has called Harkins to find out if we can get a refund or exchange on the tickets. (Yes, we can. Harkins is Made Of Win on this.)

It was more than ten minutes. But a few minutes after 6, the tow truck does finally show up. Once my car was loaded on it and we're on our way to the mechanic, I ask about the delay. Seems that everyone is running behind, and the priority call he got was an old man with a flat tire on I-10 down near Riggs Rd. Dude wasn't physically able to change his own tire, and he'd been out there for a few hours in the 110+ heat. Right...I have no problem with that.

Teresa picks me up from the (closed, but I knew that) mechanic, and we head home. We did go catch Half-Blood Prince that Sunday afternoon instead, and exchanging the tickets took maybe 90 seconds. Good movie, by the way. They cut pretty ruthlessly, but they left in what needed to be in there both plot and character-wise, and did it without making the pacing seem rushed.

Monday rolls around, I drop the key off with the mechanic and let him know what's up. Later that day, I get the call. Good news is, the battery is fine. It's taking and holding a charge. Bad news is, the alternator is well over $300. Final bill comes in at right around $500. Ouch. But my car works again, which is what matters.

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I'm a what?

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:01:56 GMT

Some twenty-mumble years ago, I was first introduced to the book "Please Understand Me," and with it, the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (the Reader's Digest Condensed version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator). I read the book and took the test (INTX), and was astonished at the accuracy and insightfulness of the results. (In fact, if you've not taken it yourself, now might be a good time to do so.) I Xeroxed a copy of the test and gave it to several of my friends, who tended to be similarly impressed with it. Over the years, I've had occasion to take the Keirsey a few more times (and the full Myers-Briggs once), and had pretty well stabilized at XNTP. Let's break that down:

I/E -- I used to be a pretty hard-core introvert; now I straddle the line between introvert and extrovert. I still need my Alone Time and I'm still not completely comfortable dealing with strangers in an unstructured environment...but I have no problem dealing with large groups of people known to me, and actively enjoy things like running meetings.

S/N -- I never did fully get what this one was about...but I always come out N.

T/F -- The most stable and unquestionable result on the test. I believe in logic, and in making rational and considered decisions.

P/J -- I'm fairly accepting...there are large areas of human behavior I sort of shrug at. There are things I do find wrong, though.

So Tuesday last week, I'm talking to the therapist about how it seems like my decision-making isn't really rational, about how so much of it is unconscious and revolves around whether I Want the thing or outcome. Honestly, half the time I figure out whether I want to do something by trying to do it...if I attack it with gusto, then I want it. If I get bored and wander away, I clearly don't want it. But note that this has nothing to do with the rational reasons for whether I might want to do it.

And she hits me with it. I'm not a T. I'm an F. The one item in that inventory that I was most certain of, and it's flat-out not so. I don't know if I can express how wrenching this was for me. It was one of those things that I absolutely and unquestionably knew about myself. OTOH, I've had a fair number of beliefs about myself or the universe cut out from under me in the past several weeks....

I still haven't absorbed all the implications...but I can look back over the last however-many years and a lot of things that didn't make sense before, suddenly do. It explains why I'm so afraid of and exhilirated by Wanting something. It explains why I will ignore all logic and reason sometimes. It...fits. And it says so very much about why I have problems with follow-through...because too often I have chosen something based on logic and reason without consulting my emotions. The core question I've asked is "Should I do this?" rather than the more relevant "Do I want this?" Now this is not to say that "should" shouldn't enter into the discussion...but it's not the primary factor.

So it seems that even during the years when I thought I was Being Me...I wasn't. And wow...if I was fooling myself about what I wanted and how I decided things, then the passive-aggressive behavior I've exhibited over the years suddenly makes a lot more sense, too. After all, if I can't even admit to myself that I don't want to do something, then I'm certainly not going to argue against it or outright say I don't want to or I'm not going to. Instead...I'm just going to Not Do It. Regardless of how crazy this drives my conscious mind and the people around me. See AniZona 2 for a textbook example of this....

(I will note in passing that this makes learning the sort of emotional mastery I've mentioned in previous entries even more important.)

So the changes keep coming...and I expect they'll continue to do so for a while yet.

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Linkmania -- clearing tabs

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:00:17 GMT

You can't take it with you...

...but you can leave it with someone and pick it up when you come around again. For those who not only believe in reincarnation, but believe that they can accurately remember past lives, there's a way to use this to get ahead. Simply bequeath your money to Reincarnation Bank, along with instructions on how you will identify yourself in order to retrieve it, and if your next life can remember successfully, they'll give you it back.

Things...have changed

Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald with a disturbing piece on how today's TV journalists don't seem to do the sort of things that made Walter Cronkite's reputation.

Wow. Just...wow.

I'll quote the lead-in: "Last year, an awkward high school senior in Wisconsin went online, passed himself off as a flirtatious female student, and conned dozens of his male classmates into e-mailing him sexually explicit images of themselves. What he did next will likely send him to jail for a very long time."

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Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:07:49 GMT

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who responded to my last substantive post. I should have done this weeks ago, but well...the inside of my head is a somewhat confused place right now. I read and thought about every last one of your comments, and am deeply appreciative that y'all care enough to spend the time and effort to respond. So thank you.

Also, I wanted to clarify that the sort of emotional mastery I'm talking about is not a "I decide I'm going to feel X, and lo, I instantly feel X" sort of thing. It's that by reinforcing emotions we want and not reinforcing ones we don't, we can, over time, induce real change in our emotional responses. This does still mess with my head some. And there have been additional relevant meta-revelations to come out of the ongoing therapy (more on that in another post at some point). But no, I'm not talking about becoming some sort of robot.

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Linkmania -- things that boggle me

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:30:35 GMT

I don't think anybody talks like that....

In 2006, bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton released Micah, which contained this contender for Worst Sex Scene In Commercially Published Fiction.

Plot, what plot?

Word is the latest video game to be getting the big screen treatment is...Asteroids.

Ludicrous doesn't go far enough

ASCAP has decided that if your cell phone has a copyrighted song as a ringtone, that your phone ringing qualifies as a public performance of that song, and is suing AT&T for royalties.

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A bit of life update

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:11:48 GMT

When I was very much younger (and shorter) than I am now, I had issues with emotional control. Nothing particularly over the top, but some definite issues. So, somewhere in early adolesence, I learned how to suppress my emotions, and I learned the fine art of lying to myself about how I felt about things. I told myself I was okay with a lot of how my high school experience went, and I told myself that I didn't want certain things. But I wasn't, and I did. I figured this out around 19-20, and over the next few years, got back in touch with my emotions. I nurtured them and explored them and gloried in having them. I swore that I would never try to suppress, control, or dictate what I felt, because it Didn't Work and I was never going back to not feeling again. While I might not choose to act on what I felt or what I wanted, I felt what I felt and I wanted what I wanted, and that was that. Coming out of my first marriage, I similarly swore I was going to be Me, and that was it. I was not going to be what or who anybody else wanted me to be, because if it wasn't what I wanted, it just led to me getting all twisted up inside.

So last week, when I was told that mastery of emotions is not only possible, but desirable, I was...bewildered. That I could consciously decide to feel or not feel a specific emotion about a specific person, thing, or circumstance and have this actually happen struck me as akin to consciously deciding to start floating six inches above the ground by the power of my mind and have that actually happen. I was also profoundly disturbed by it. Emotions should be what they are, not something subject to will and intellect.

Apparently, I've been doing it wrong. Not sure where I missed the memo, but I'm told that mastery of emotions is one of those essential elements of true maturity. That deciding what you're going to feel, and then genuinely feeling it is one of those things that adults just...do. (As an aside for the Christian among you, it's also something we're commanded to do.) And that my inability to master my emotions is all of a piece with my lifelong inability to reliably Get Shit Done.

(Important side note: this is not to say that if you've been suppressing or denying your emotions, you shouldn't work to cultivate them and bring them out and be honest about them...it's that once you've got a good, healthy, and comprehensible emotional flow going, that you need to move on to the next step, which is gaining mastery of them.)

I've spent the last week not dealing with this particularly well.

First, of course, is the deep-seated belief that conscious control of emotions is Wrong. I'm coming to accept that I'm going to have to change my thinking on this, but it's not going to happen today or even next week.

Second, I have to deal with the idea that, if in fact I am stronger than my emotions and I should be able to master them and thus master my behavior, that my history of failure after failure after failure was not inevitable, but instead completely unnecessary. I have wasted my entire adult life. (So far, anyway...we'll see what happens moving forward.) Not in the sense of not getting anything done, but in the sense of operating at maybe 30% of my actual capacity. Dealing with the idea that the last twenty-plus years have been feckless fuckuppery, without spending too much time in an emo daze has been...challenging.

And third, there's dealing with the internal changes that are going to have to happen and what effect they will have on me. Taking responsibility for all my choices (not just a willingness to accept the consequences of my failures, but owning them as something I did), and recognizing that everything (no really...everything) is a choice...these are not small things. We're talking a complete rewrite of the inside of my head. And while I can intellectually accept that the end result is likely to be a happier, healthier, more functional Dave, I remain scared shitless that the result is, in some fashion, not going to be me anymore. And while I'm painfully aware of my own shortcomings, being Dave is something I often enjoy, and from what I can tell, it's something that a fair number of you out there like me being. And...I don't want to give that up.

But the upshot of all this is that I, at age 38, apparently have to finish growing up. (And no, I'm not dealing with *that* particularly well, either.)

So yeah...this is going to be an interesting summer.

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Linkmania -- another mixed bag

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:26:00 GMT

Ahead of our time...

Who knew that back in 2003, when a bunch of THEM started playing around with the idea of redneck sushi, we were (in our own twisted, tangential way) presaging a small part of the current revolution in American sushi.

An important article

This article from the New Yorker, is one of the things currently driving the debate on health care reform and how it might be made to work.

On a lighter note...

The same sort of wheeled trash and recycle bins that are ubiquitous here are apparently something of a blot on the landscape over in the UK.

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Tires!

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 05:23:12 GMT

So one of the issues with the car I bought back in February was that the right-side tires were in pretty lousy condition. (The left-side tires were in decent shape, but matched neither each other nor the right-side rubber.) Thus, it wasn't exactly a *surprise* when the right rear tire ate itself last Friday as I left the shop's parts supplier. I pulled into a nearby parking lot, unloaded the three complete systems worth of parts from the back of the car, pulled out the jack and the mini-spare, and changed the tire.

(Digression for those who have never changed a tire: nearly all passenger cars anymore don't come with a full-sized spare tire. It's simply not a good investment of space for something that gets used very rarely. Instead, you get a mini-spare (aka donut spare), which is generally about as big around as the regular tires, but less than half as wide. Donut spares shouldn't be used for long distances or at high speeds, and they're generally inflated to 60-90 PSI, while normal tires are inflated to 26-35 PSI.)

Now since no mini-spare is going to stay fully inflated riding around in your car for years on end, I carry with me an inexpensive electric tire inflator that runs off the cigarette lighter. (Something like this one, just a generation older. BTW, if you own a car, I recommend carrying something like this around with you. It's saved me a call to AAA a time or three.) So, feeling pretty good about being Actually Prepared, I plugged it in and turned it on. It was then that I discovered that the cigarette lighter in my car does not, in fact, work.

Well, shit.

Okay, loaded the computer parts back into the car, moved the front passenger seat all the way forward, put the dead tire in the rear passenger footwell, wiped my hands on the old clothes I've been meaning to drop off at Goodwill for at least two years now, and limped my way on back streets to a nearby QT. (One of the things I like about QT is that they have free air.) That got me from 28 PSI to...29 PSI? Yay broken compressor. I then limped my way down the road to a nearby Shell station. Their compressor was working fine, but the actual nozzle had a leak in it that meant I couldn't get my pressure higher than about 45 PSI. I was, as you might expect, starting to get a tad grumpy. But I did manage to get myself a further two miles down the road to a Chevron, where I was finally able to get the donut fully up to pressure. And since I still had time left on the compressor, I wandered up to see if my right front tire needed air. It didn't...but it was also starting to experience tread separation. (This is when the part of the tire with the tread on it starts to separate from the inner air-holding carcass of the tire.)

Frabjous. Just...frabjous.

I drove to work, and spent much of that day and the next deciding what to do. I've been a loyal Discount Tire customer for years, but I'd recently discovered the coolness that is Tire Rack. (Let me say this: Discount Tire has good-quality tires for reasonable prices, and if you're looking to just drive into a tire shop and leave a few hours later with new tires, then I don't know of anybody better.) Tire Rack is a web-based company with an interesting business model. They sell tires (and wheels, and other things), which you can have shipped to yourself or to any one of thousands of shops that work with them. Said shop will then install the tires for a fee *that you can see on Tire Rack's website* before you choose that shop. They have an *enormous* selection of tires, and they have both objective test results and customer survey results. So if I went with Tire Rack, I'd get exactly the tires I wanted, and I'd probably save a bit of money. I'd just have to wait for them to arrive from Tire Rack's ginormous warehouse facility in Reno. By UPS Ground. Or I could go to Discount, get marginally less-good tires for marginally more money, but do so on Monday.

Decisions, decisions.

In the end, I gambled that if I drove as little as possible and stayed at or under 40 mph as much as I could, that I'd be OK. I ordered a set of General Altimax HP tires. This was purely a result of the online research; General was not a brand I would have even considered before. But scores between 8.6 and 9.1 in every non-snow category in the customer surveys, and a base price of $60 a tire convinced me.

So. Sixty bucks a tire...plus seven bucks a tire for the road hazard guarantee, plus $48 shipping added up to $316 for the tires themselves. (Note that since Tire Rack does not have a physical presence in Arizona, there's no sales tax on that purchase.) I had them shipped to the Goodyear tire/service/whatever place on the NE corner of Ray and Cooper. They arrived there yesterday, and I went in for the installation today. They were reasonably fast, and charged me a grand total of $75 for installation, spin balancing, and disposing of my old tires. (And because that was all labor, no sales tax there either.) Grand total, $391 and change. Based on past experience, I'd expect to have paid about $40-50 more going through Discount.

Now it's time to worry about new struts....

comments

Linkmania -- things people have linked me to

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:10:44 GMT

A useful conceit...

"Culture, in the part of the world in which I've been, and, for all I know, in other parts as well to which I cannot speak, has two rough parts: the Mainland and the Isles.
The Mainland is what calls itself the "mainstream" or "normal" culture.
You know... Mundania.
The Isles are everything else. Everything that's not "mainstream" is an island."

Dorky song, nice idea

I don't know what to call it...sort of a filk-with-storyboard doing new Trek to a song by The Lonely Island. It's rather cool, though. (Audio and visual cussing. NSFW.)

About as accurate as you'd expect

For the December 1900 issue of Ladies' Home Journal, the author of this piece went to "...the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning...asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been wrought in his own field of investigatin before the dawn of 2001...." Some of it's dead on. Some of it...isn't.

comments

Linkmania -- Themeless clearing of tabs

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 04:32:24 GMT

I'm kinda amazed this exists

For high schools willing to push the envelope some, there's Rent: School Edition. One song ("Contact") goes away and there are "minimal changes to language"....

I see London, I see...wait, where'd France go?

Beer tycoon Freddy Heineken, in the year before he died, proposed breaking up all of the EU member countries into a total of 74 states, each with a population of 5-10 million.

Speaking of France, I thought they had better labor laws than that...

So an employee of French broadcaster TF1 wrote his MP [congresscritter], from home, using his own time and resources, expressing opposition to a position that his employer favored. His MP passed it on to the Ministry of Culture, which passed it on to TF1, which fired him.

comments

Inverted Musings

Linkmania -- understanding other perspectives

It's the little things...

Quick update

Linkmania -- videos I found on Buzzfeed

How To Train Your Dragon

Linkmania: the Internet continues to contain weirdness

Linkmania -- WTF video

Linkmania -- controversial things

Almost not worth it...

Linkmania -- Immigration, health care, and the budget

Linkmania -- increasing WTFery

Linkmania -- a pair of thoughtful things

Linkmania -- things to make your brain hurt

Linkmania -- One you can buy now, one you can buy later, one you (thankfully?) can't buy at all

Linkmania -- three from YouTube

On a lighter note...

I'm a *what*?

Linkmania -- clearing tabs

Linkmania -- things that boggle me

A bit of life update

Linkmania -- another mixed bag

Tires!

Linkmania -- things people have linked me to

Linkmania -- Themeless clearing of tabs

I'm a what?