I’m a day late in mentioning it, but yesterday, December 2nd, some 7 years ago I launched SEB under a different and entirely stupid name with the following really lame entry:

Homepage is now live

Well, it took awhile before I found a layout I was happy with, but I now have a home page up and running and some of the links even work. Seems like the part I have the hardest time with when making pages is the layout and coming up with some graphics that won’t cause visitor’s eyes to bleed the instant it comes into view. I’m still not certain what sections I plan to put into place, but the page as a whole will reflect my interests and opinions.

Certainly not a harbinger of the monstrosity that SEB would become both in terms of megabytes of text devoted to mostly trivial topics and amount of traffic it gets for being about nothing in particular. It would be a couple of weeks before I would write anything else because I was so clueless as to what the hell I was doing. The oldest archived version of SEB I could find on the Internet Archive is this page from May 29, 2002 which was prior to our purchase of the SEB domain name. The graphics are long gone, but it gives you an idea how how I quickly settled into the routine of blogging after the initial hesitant first steps. Alas a lot of SEB over the years is missing from the archive because they don’t archive dynamic websites which SEB became with the move to ExpressionEngine.

Now, some seven years later, we’re up to 6,104 entries (counting this one) and 72,877 comments. The average number of daily unique visitors is between 1,200 and 2,000 people and the amount of bandwidth consumed is way more than it probably should be. In the past seven years I’ve been laid off twice, moved from Canton to Brighton and then to Ann Arbor. I have had six different jobs and one honeymoon (we didn’t take ours until a year after we were married) to exciting Frakenmuth Michigan. My daughter grew up from the age of 11 to her current age of 18. I’ve been on Canada’s news show The National and been interviewed on being an out-of-work automotive employee. Best of all I’ve had the chance to interact with some of the most amazing people I have ever met both in comments here on SEB and via email/phone/in-person. 

There’s been some rough times as well, including a period where I nearly packed it all in and shut down the blog back in 2006 thanks to some frustrating hosting issues. I have no idea if SEB will continue for another 7 years or just another 7 months, but I don’t show any signs of stopping anytime soon. As long as you folks keep coming around to see what idiot thing I’ve said recently then I’ll probably keep saying them.

It amazing how time flies by though. Had you told me seven years ago I’d still be at, or that anyone would be paying attention, I’d have laughed out loud.

Here, for the first time, is a sneak peek at Santa’s Gmail account:

Click to embiggen!

I have a lot in common with Santa! I totally have Bono and Jesus Christ in my Google Talk buddy list too!

Found over at Gizmodo.

It’s not easy being a multimillionaire in these tough economic times. Having all those whiny middle class and poor people crying about how they’re out of work or about to lose their homes just takes all the fun out of conspicuous consumption. It’s gotten so bad that Newsweek has a big article about it:

Multimillionaire Michael Hirtenstein used to flaunt his acquisitions of opulent real estate. “I collect homes because I enjoy it,“ he once told DansHamptons.com about his eight properties—which included a $27 million apartment on the 76th floor of Manhattan’s Time Warner Center. In August 2007, the 45-year-old Hirtenstein, who made his fortune in telecommunications, regaled the New York Post with his plans for a $35 million, glass-enclosed duplex in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, replete with suede-covered walls, three living rooms and a heated pool with built-in underwater video screen. Alas, the economy ground to a halt, and so did Hirtenstein’s conspicuous consumption of real estate. He quietly reneged on the Tribeca duplex, forfeiting a hefty deposit. That isn’t to say Hirtenstein is now selling pencils from a tin cup. “I could walk downstairs now and buy a Ferrari,“ he says from a suite at Wynn Las Vegas, which boasts a dealership. “But all of my friends are hurting. I don’t feel like buying random toys.“

Across America’s upper strata, rich folk like Hirtenstein are experiencing an unfamiliar emotion: luxury shame. The late Coco Chanel, doyenne of 20th century fashion, long ago said that luxury is “the opposite of vulgarity,“ not of poverty. But in these recessionary times, it seems vulgar to flaunt one’s luxurious lifestyle. And so the wealthy are going blingless and eschewing the spending sprees of the recent Gilded Age, giving new meaning to the phrase “embarrassment of riches.“  The trend is horrible news for the $175-billion global luxury market, which is already absorbing the blows of plummeting personal wealth. Just in time for Christmas, this new “embarrassment of riches” is cutting into sales of high-end retailers and brands like Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, Bentley and BMW, Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

This is terrible and only further weakens an already weakened economy. Fortunately I have a solution:

Are you embarrassed by the obscene amounts of money you can spend on a whim without affecting your net worth in any negative way? Has the troubled economy taken all the fun out of purchasing $500,000 sold gold toilets? Do you feel guilty for your ability to earn more in thirty seconds than some countries’ entire GDP in a year? I can help. My name is Les Jenkins and I’m offering you a Luxury Indulgence that will absolve you of all guilt associated with your ability to spend ridiculous amounts of money on things you would never need in your entire lifetime.

The process is simple: Send me $25,000 and I’ll send you an official Luxury Indulgence good for the guilt-free purchase of any non-essential item(s) up to $1 million in price. Send me $50,000 and the Indulgence will be good for up to $10 million of stuff you don’t need. Or for the low-low price of $100,000 I’ll send you an Indulgence good for purchases of any amount you feel like spending 100% guilt-free.

No longer do you need to feel ashamed for the massive wealth you’ve managed to acquire when everyone else around you is eating out of trash dumpsters. By purchasing my Luxury Indulgences you will not only be helping out one of the impoverished members of the middle class, but you’ll also be helping to stimulate the economy and bring about an end to the recession the country is currently enduring. Les Jenkins’ Luxury Indulgences are more than a way to regain that ability to spend freely without regard to the plight of others, it’s a patriotic way of helping your country return to its once dominate position as an economic powerhouse. It’s a win-win for everyone involved so send your check today!

We last check in with the nutcases at the The True Bible Code and Lord’s Witnesses website back on May 15, 2008. They were up to failed prediction number seventy at the time and predicting that a terrorist attack would strike New York City on either the weekend of the 23rd or 27th of that month.

Have they given up yet? Ha ha! What are you, stupid?

There will be a dual terrorist attack on the US and the UK taking the form of fire from the heavens and a rising mushroom cloud, in 2008Heshvan (before 2008December3). The US arm of the attack will hit Westside Midtown Manhattan producing a man made mushroom cloud rising from the Hudson river. The UK arm will most likely occur on the same day but may be a few days later.

Now would be the time to buy 12 months supply of candles, solar power, wind power, food, water, gas bottles, deisel etc. for yourself your loved ones and some guests.

So they’ve expanded their list of potential targets to include someplace in United Kingdom in addition to New York City. They’re up to the triple digits in number of failed predictions so far and are they at all embarrassed about it? No, not at all. In fact it’s become a point of pride for them:

Now some churches have attempted to deduce the date of the begining of the Kingdom of God from the scriptures and got it wrong a few times. God bless them! The Watchtower was the most tenacious of these and made perhaps 6 or 7 steps towards that date, their last step being 1975, which is 6,000 years after Adam was born according to their pre-flood chronology which is very good. But then they gave up at what was actually the last fence. Because the Kingdom of God begins not 6,000 years after Adam was born but 6,000 years after he sinned, since his sin was the founding of the world, not his birth. And he sinned aged 33½, the same age that Jesus was when he paid for that sin. So the Kingdom of God began on 2008Nisan17, 6,000 years after his sin on 3993Nisan14 BC.

[...] Yes, 7 steps in humiliation was the most that any church had made before us. This was the largest number of mistakes any church was prepared to make publicly before they let embarrassment in front of men trump their fear of God. The LWs, standing upon the shoulders of the work of the JWs, got the date of the start of the Kingdom of God after a few weeks of independent research in one step on 1992February1!

But getting the date of the start of the Great Tribulation was not a one step journey. It was at least a 125 step journey. This was the lock that the holy spirit put on that knowledge. And no church on this earth loved the glory of God and detested the glory of man enough to make that journey. No church other than the LWs.

Let me repeat that: They’ve been wrong 125 times and they’re still guessing. Come tomorrow they’ll be wrong 126 times and they’ll just keep pushing the date back a couple more weeks. This is the power of faith. The ability to keep believing in something with absolutely no basis in reality despite being shown to be continuously wrong literally hundreds of times. Chances are they’ll still be at it when we check back in another six or seven months.

More proof that religious belief makes some people a little crazy:

SAN ANTONIO - A man who rammed his truck into a woman’s vehicle on a highway early Friday told authorities he crashed into her while going more than 100 mph because God told him “she needed to be taken off the road.“

[...] “He just said God said she wasn’t driving right, and she needed to be taken off the road,“ Bexar County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Kyle Coleman said in the online edition of the San Antonio Express-News. “God must have been with them, ‘cause any other time, the severity of this crash, it would have been a fatal.“

You have to admit that having God both blamed for instigating the incident and then credited for protecting the people involved in it makes him seem a bit schizophrenic. Maybe it was another one of those sacrifice-your-son-to-me-hey-I-was-only-kidding moments and God just forgot to tell the guy before he rammed the other car. He really just wanted to see if the dude would do it.

Sent in by SEB reader BlueEyedBanshee.

Meanwhile back in the Windows ‘verse all the anti-virus and system patches in the world won’t make a bit of difference if no one bothers to actually apply them to their systems. A new malware package known as Conficker has been making sudden gains on systems across the net taking advantage of a vulnerability in Windows that was patched months ago. This prompts Joel Hruska over at ArsTechnica.com to ponder whether critical updates should be forced onto systems:

Microsoft issued a patch for MS08-067 on October 23 and rates the severity of the flaw as “Critical.“ for all previous versions of Windows 2000, XP, XP-64, and Server 2003. Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are apparently less vulnerable; Microsoft’s aggregate severity rating for these two operating systems is “Important.“

There’s a story within the rise of Conficker that I think is worth exploring. Microsoft appears to have dealt with this issue in textbook fashion; the company issued a warning, released a patch, and (presumably) rolled that patch into November’s Patch Tuesday. A significant amount of time—five to six weeks—has passed since Microsoft released its fix, yet PC World reports Conficker may have already infected as many as 500,000 systems.

It would be extremely fascinating to see data on how a patch spreads throughout the Internet once released by Microsoft as well as information on whether or not the severity of any particular flaw affects how rapidly users move to apply the patch. Events like this this raise the question of whether or not Microsoft should have the capability to push critical security updates out to home users automatically, regardless of how AutoUpdate is configured. I say home users for a reason; businesses and enterprise-class companies may still need to deploy the patch on a specialized timeline in order to ensure servers stay operational.

The idea of mandatory updates is unpopular with a lot of folks, myself included, but there’s a fair argument to be made here. Microsoft takes a lot of shit for having major holes in their OS, but a lot of those holes are patched within a reasonable time upon their discovery. Those patches don’t do any good if they’re not applied and the average PC user is not a technical support guy like me and probably won’t even be aware that he needs to apply patches, but he won’t hesitate to blame Microsoft if he gets infected. At the very least I could see an argument for setting the option for critical updates to be installed automatically as the default with the option to turn it off for folks who know what they’re doing. We already have a number of different software packages, mostly DRM systems, that update themselves automatically whether the user wants them to or not and a lot of folks seem to have no problem living with that situation (the rest of us just don’t use that software). I see a much stronger argument that can be made for Microsoft doing the same with critical updates than any DRM system.

The problem of unpatched systems has gotten bad enough that back in 2005 some ISPs started blocking infected systems from using their services and others have been breaking Internet protocols in controversial ways to try and combat the problem, but the best offense is a good defense and that means individual users keeping their systems patched and running current anti-virus software.  The question then becomes: Should Microsoft be allowed to at least force the critical updates on its users?

The security through obscurity that Mac users have enjoyed for years is finally starting to crumble and even Apple is owning up to it. They recently put out a support advisory last month in which they recommended that Mac user start running anti-virus software on their machines. It’s long been a gloating point for Mac users that anti-virus software was unnecessary on their systems, but as Apple’s market share increases it’s getting a point where there’s a profit motive for malware authors to start writing for the Mac platform and some of them already are.

Still there’s a resistance to the idea that the Mac may be vulnerable to the same sorts of malicious software that Windows users are and that prompted Graham Cluley to ask in a blog entry Do you really need anti-virus on your Apple Mac?

It started with just a small pebble being dropped into a pond. Apple updated one of its support advisories on 21 November, informing its customers that they are recommended to run anti-virus software.

Most people would never have noticed this announcement. I didn’t at first. I only heard about it when I saw the guys from Intego mention it on their Apple security blog on 25 November. A couple of days later, recovering from a bout of man-flu, I blogged about a new piece of Apple malware and mentioned in passing that Apple were now recommending their customers run anti-virus software.

Today, however, that small pebble dropped by Apple has turned into a tidalwave of commentary - and we’re seeing lots of news stories about Apple urging Mac users to protect themselves with anti-virus.

So, do you really need anti-virus on your Apple Mac?

From there he goes on to list seven facts and the comes to the following conclusion:

So, back to my original question, do you really need anti-virus on your Apple Mac?

The answer is yes.

It’s worth noting that Mr. Cluley works for Sophos, a company that produces anti-virus, anti-spam, firewall software packages for both big and small businesses, so it’s possible he may have a conflict of interest in promoting anti-virus software on the Mac. The fact that Apple has recommended the practice and that Mr. Cluley has been active in anti-virus research for some time prior to joining Sophos should help balance that out. That and the seven facts he lists make a pretty good argument.

The threat for Apple users is still relatively small compared to what Windows users face, but if Apple continues to gain market share then it won’t take long for it to grow. Of course the best defense is being educated about the threats, but for a lot of people that’s a commitment they don’t seem to be able to make.

Despite it being a couple of years since I’ve been able to officially visit my doctor—my charts had been archived due to inactivity and I had to resubmit a lot of paperwork—my doctor remembered me and was pleased to see me in spite of the circumstances. She’s probably the best doctor I’ve ever had and that makes the trip to Canton worthwhile. So I sat on the exam table, took off my shirt, and she put me through a bunch of range of motion tests to see if we could figure out what the hell was my problem. Turns out a few of you had guessed what the issue was based on my description: a damaged rotator cuff. Which seemed odd to me as this didn’t feel like a joint issue at all as it felt specifically like a muscle problem as the pain is in much of my arm.

She explained that, unlike our hips which are really nice ball-cup joints, the shoulder’s rotator cuff is composed of muscles and tendons that surround the shoulder joint and are responsible for holding our arm in place. Somewhere along the line about a year ago I managed to injure mine—not sure how but I’d guess from my habit of sleeping on my arm—and it’s gotten progressively weaker since then. The good news is that she doesn’t think I need surgery to fix the problem. I should be able to get it back to normal using physical therapy. The bad news is the closest PT office that my crappy health insurance considers in-plan is in Livonia which is a good half-hour away by freeway. But at least I know what the problem is and it’s not something melodramatic like shoulder cancer or something.

So I have a prescription for a pain killer and a physical therapist. I also have a prescription for a CAT scan thanks to a last-minute question I had about how a certain activity, which I won’t go into here but does involve some strenuous effort, that occasionally results in a major headache that shoots up from the base of my neck to encompass my whole head to the point that I can feel my pulse in my head, my nose feels like it’s bleeding, and my eyes feel like they’re about to explode. It doesn’t happen often, last time I can recall was maybe seven months ago, but when it does happen it can put a major dent in how my day is going. She thinks it sounds like I’m triggering a migraine, but she’d like to do a CAT scan to rule out something much more melodramatic such as a potential aneurysm. So assuming I can find a facility my insurance will cover nearby I may soon be getting my first ever CAT scan.

Oh yeah, one other bit of bad news: I’m back up to 296 pounds having managed to regain the weight I lost by switching to diet pop. She was less concerned with that at the moment than the rotator cuff injury, but it’s something I’m going to need to address as well eventually.

So this picture to the left here, click to embiggen, is a crappy cellphone camera shot of, what passes for, our backyard. As you can see we got a reasonable amount of snow Saturday night into Sunday morning. It was pretty wet and we only got maybe two inches total, but it was enough to put you into a holiday frame of mind. Considering we’re in Ann Arbor, which is in southern Michigan, it’s a decent amount of snow.

Now if you drive just a mere hour and a half north to Otisville, where my parents live, the same snowfall nets you pics like these my mother took.  Here’s an example in the image to the right. Again, click to embiggen.

As you can see a mere 75 or so miles can make a huge difference in how white your your landscape becomes during a given snowfall in Michigan. If it weren’t for the fact that there’s not jack in the way of jobs for my chosen career or much of anything else to do further up the state then I’d be inclined to move there just for the better snowfalls. Though given the shortage of funds to do much of anything other than hang out at the house probably makes the fact that Ann Arbor has quite a lot to do rather a moot point. Just the same, I have snow-envy.

It’s an argument I can recall having in my youth. Who would win in a battle between a star destroyer and the starship Enterprise. Now, using recently discovered documentary footage, the question has finally been answered:

Found over at /Film.

News stories like this one are what prompted SEB’s tag line. Jdimytai Damour was hired as seasonal help at a Long Island Walmart only to perish under the feet of deal-crazed shoppers this past Friday:

“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,“ said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43.

“They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.

“They took me down, too ... I didn’t know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back,“ Overby said.

Damour, a temporary maintenance worker from Jamaica, Queens, was gasping for air as shoppers continued to surge into the store after its 5 a.m. opening, witnesses said.

Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by wild-eyed shoppers streaming inside, a cop at the scene said.

“They pushed him down and walked all over him,“ Damour’s sobbing sister, Danielle, 41, said. “How could these people do that?

“He was such a young man with a good heart, full of life. He didn’t deserve that.“

What the fuck is wrong with you people in Long Island? I love a good deal as much as the next guy, but how you could trample someone to death trying to get a good deal is beyond me. That pic on the left (click to embiggen) is what the scene looked like as the doors opened. They have a whole gallery of pics from this tragedy that shows just how stupid people can be.

Roughly 2,000 people gathered outside the Wal-Mart’s doors in the predawn darkness.

Chanting “push the doors in,“ the crowd pressed against the glass as the clock ticked down to the 5 a.m. opening.

Sensing catastrophe, nervous employees formed a human chain inside the entrance to slow down the mass of shoppers.

It didn’t work.

The mob barreled in and overwhelmed workers.

“They were jumping over the barricades and breaking down the door,“ said Pat Alexander, 53, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “Everyone was screaming. You just had to keep walking on your toes to keep from falling over.“

After the throng toppled Damour, his fellow employees had to fight through the crowd to help him, police said.

Witness Kimberly Cribbs said shoppers acted like “savages.“

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since Friday morning!‘“ Cribbs said. “They kept shopping.“

Seriously, what the fuck? Even after you’ve crushed a man to death you insist on shopping? Have you no empathy at all? Are you so bereft of concern for your fellow man that killing him in the mad rush for a deal isn’t enough to give you pause? Couldn’t some of you have stopped and helped this poor man to his feet before he had the life stomped out of him? Help me to understand the insanity of this event, please.

Hat tip to ***Dave who has some choice words of his own.

As I mentioned previously we stayed home this year due to Courtney and Anne both having to work the holiday. Anne made up a very traditional and yummy Thanksgiving dinner which we ate as a brunch before she headed off to work and then I had seconds with Courtney once she got home. After that I figured out how to carve as much of the remaining meat off the bird to put into a ziploc bag for the fridge. This was a first for me and I believe I did a decent job at it. I spent most of my day alone at home either playing World of Warcraft or working on my sister’s PC which had died awhile back.

Saturday started off OK, but saw me slowly sliding into a funk as the stress of trying to hold onto my job, get through Krismas without going bankrupt, new car problems, and my health started to build up. You already know about how I recently had to apply to keep the job I’m already doing as they’re converting it from a contract to an internal job so I won’t go over that again. The Krismas issue is the standard one of not having enough money to do all the things I’d like to do in part because there’s all these other problems cropping up. I don’t even have a new artificial tree yet and I have a feeling I’m going to end up buying what I can afford as opposed to what I would like to have and that happens so much these days that it’s really frustrating.

The latest car problem involves the driver’s seatbelt. Something has gone wrong with the latch for the belt such that simply sliding in the tab doesn’t latch it and I end up having to repeatedly ram the tab into the latch to get it to, well, latch. Obviously this doesn’t affect how the car runs, but I’ve been in enough accidents to understand how driving without a seatbelt puts me at risk of more than just a traffic ticket. I have no idea how much it’ll cost to fix it, but I’m sure it won’t be cheap.

As for health problems, well I’ve mentioned previously how I’ve been having a problem with my arm muscles for about a year now where if I stretch too hard to reach something it feels like I tried to rip my arm off. In my right arm this has gotten progressively worse to the point where it’s now constantly sore with a dull ache and even simple efforts like reaching to my back pocket to pull out my wallet while sitting in the car causes excruciating pain. I have no idea what could be causing the issue. Perhaps a blood clot or a vitamin deficiency, it’s hard to say, but I’ve gone ahead and made a doctor’s appointment for this evening to have it checked out. Trouble is I’m sure it’ll be the sort of thing where I’ll need to have all sorts of tests done to figure out what the hell the problem is. Tests that’ll probably only be partially covered by my crappy insurance.

Add all of that up and I’ve not wanted to do much of anything over the past several days which is part of why I haven’t blogged like I had intended to. I tend to be fairly laid back so when I do get stressed I tend to really over-stress and as such I ended up being awake all Saturday night into Sunday morning. I finally went to bed about 8AM, was back up in an hour to drive Anne to work as she got called in on her day off, went back to bed an hour later and slept until 2:30PM. I’m feeling a bit better today, but not quite back to normal. I was depressed for about two days and now I’m just kind of out of it. Which means I’ll probably be back to (what passes for) normal tomorrow.

Got the following yesterday. Haven’t responded yet. Don’t know if I’ll bother:

From:
Subject: Godless people…

Since you have removed Christ from many secular places now, He has been kicked out of the schools.  Tell me, what do you have in our young people now? Nothing!!!
They have no thought of marriage and children, just what they can get out of life.  The can plan no future anymore. Henceforth America is going to the dogs.
They have nothing to stand up for now. It’s live and let live.
  We each have the right to choose or not choose.  I choose to live for Christ and when He returns, you will watch me leave this old world that people like you have made Godless.
Why can I not live like I want to and you live like you want to and leave each other alone?

Yes, Live and Let Live!
  In Christ,

  Genie

I love how “live and let live” for this person involves forcing their religion on a captive audience by having prayer in school.

EMPLOYMENT LAW Is booting up a computer work, or a work break? 

The National Law Journal

Tresa Baldas / Staff reporter
November 17, 2008

Is booting up a computer work, or a work break?

More companies fending off suits on the issue.

It seems just about anything in the workplace can find its way into wage-and-hour litigation.

I’m often asked who it is, considering I am an atheist, that I give thanks to on Thanksgiving. The suggestion is that without God there is no one to be thankful to or for, but that’s not true at all. My life is full of people that I am grateful for and on this day of all days I try to take a moment to let them know. I am naturally grateful for my family. My lovely wife and wonderful daughter who have helped me to grow and mature in ways some folks never thought would be possible. My mother and father who have been the best parents anyone could be lucky enough to have. They aren’t perfect, but I’ve heard some stories of other people’s parents that make me realize that my parents were pretty cool overall and for that I am thankful to them. My brother and sister whom, despite the fact that we are not as close as we could be, have still given me much love over the years. My extended family of in-laws who have been more welcoming and accepting than any son-in-law could ever dream of. My friends who have stuck with me over the years, both those I know in person and those I’ve only known virtually, who find my company a worthwhile addition to their lives. I know I find their company very worthwhile in mine and for that I am thankful to them.

And to you, the SEB regulars who show up here every day just to see what I’m blowing hot air about today. We’re coming up on the seven year anniversary of SEB and that just blows my mind. I never thought I’d still be at it after this much time or that I’d still be saying anything interesting enough to attract much attention. You folks have had a much more profound impact on my life than I would have guessed when I started this venture back in 2001. You have given me encouragement, helped see me through some of the worst times, celebrated with me through some of the best times, and shown a generosity that knows no bounds. So let me say sincerely and from the bottom of my heart: Thank you. I am so very grateful that you drop by every day and say hello.