I would like to thank the local AMC theatre for screwing my day up.

We’ve got an after-hours maintenance event, tonight. So, I figured I’d use my late-start day to go see The Avengers. The earliest available showing was the 3D IMAX showing. Only reason I picked it was because it started the earliest.

We got our glasses, our concession and our seats and waited for the movie to start.

The local AMC likes to show “special features” and commercials before the previews. As we sat there, the “special features” and commercials were running but silently. Hmm… Fortunately, when the previews came on, so did the sound.

Midway through the previews, the thing pops up saying “put on your IMAX 3D glasses now”. Did as instructed, only to find that the left eyepiece was oddly and distractingly dark. Took the glasses off and noticed that the screen was pretty much crystal clear. At first, I thought “ok, they played the ‘put on your glasses’ thing too early”. Then, the movie started and still it was more watchable without the glasses than with. So, I began to wonder, “did they put the wrong disk into the projector?”

Just after Loki had tesseracted-in and was instructed to put his “spear” down, the screen froze. Apparently, one of the joys of “watching the future of movies, today” is that the projection system can crash.

I figured, “take an early bathroom break and maybe they’ll have it sorted out by the time I get back”. I get back and the screen’s still black. Un-good. I walk back outside to ask the two theatre staffers what’s going on. I’m told “we’re hoping to get the projector back online in about ten minutes”. I ask if the projector problems were related to why the 3D glasses weren’t functioning as expected. They informed me that “yes: the projector had been miscalibrated but the glasses should work as expected once the movie restarts”.

Fifteen minutes pass and still no movie. Just as I’m about to get up to ask how long the “ten minutes” is going to continue, a theatre employee comes in to tell us that, because the projector’s taking so long to reboot, that they have to cancel this showing because it will cause delays to the next one. We’re then offerred free passes and the thoice of either a refund or free tickets to the next screening.

Given that I’d chosen this one for its start time - it would have allowed me to see the movie and still make it to work in plenty of time tonight’s maintenance window - waiting for the 14:30 showing of a 2.5 hour movie just wasn’t an option. So, we got in line for our passes and our refunds: an hour of my day wasted; a movie not seen and $20 spent on “medium-sized” hoglegs of soda and a burnt hotdog - concessions not refundable.

Thanks AMC: you really Mondayed things all up.

I know that Plus is probably more geek-oriented than other social networks, but the fact that the NHL playoffs don’t really seem to be “trending” in any meaningful way is kinda ridiculous. It probably doesn’t help that most of the NHL teams that have a social media presence have that presence almost exclusively on Twitter and/or Facebook (and, seems, most frequently, FaceBook by way connecting their official FB account to their Twitter account).

But why is it that entitities like the NHL concentrate their efforts almost exclusively on sites like Twitter and/or FaceBook? For starters,  FaceBook, Twitter and other networks make it dead-easy to post once and get your message out to a number of sites at once. Google’s Plus? Not so much. Crap like this is why Google really needs to work on their cross-platform sharing APIs (have they even published anything meaningful, yet??).

For me, this lack of being able to see updates via Plus is the second biggest reason (behind friends’ not being willing to move off FB) that I still need to log into FB and/or Twitter. I come to Plus because I want to. I have absolutely nothing I could (correctly or incorrectly) conflate with a need to login to Plus.

I used to work for Verizon (technically Digex, at the time) as a UNIX engineer (glorified systems administrator, to be honest). One of the most annoying things I had to deal with was getting customer call about problems with their host, doing diagnostics, determining that there was a networking issue, calling our NetOps folks to see what might be going on (usually after telling them what was fucked up on their side), then, minutes later having everything “magically working again, asking “what’d you change” and being told “nothing: everything’s still the same”.

Really? I called you with a problem. I told you what the problem was. I listened to you type for a few seconds and then things suddenly started working, but you made no changes on your side to cause things to suddenly start working again? Ok: sounds legit.

I’d thought I’d gotten away from that, given that I last worked for Verizon in May of 2004. Apparently, even though I’ve gone on to bigger and better, networking at Verizon is still the same.

Today, I was killing time, waiting for my wife to fill a prescription at the local Walgreens. Not wanting to participate in the slow death that is sitting at the pharmacy counter, I opted to sit out in my car and listen to Last.FM and mess around on Google Plus.

All was going well until the music stopped. I flipped back to Last.FM from Plus and found that I couldn’t get the music to restart. Kept getting “insufficient content” errors. I flipped back to my profile page and noticed that the app couldn’t load my user profile. At first, I figured “Last.FM must be having server problems.”

So, I flipped back to Plus to bitch about it. I noticed that it was taking hitting “post” multiple times in order for a post or a comment to actually get posted without a “can’t post at this time” error message popping up.

After about 20 minutes of this nonsense, I dialed *611 to see if VZW might be having issues. The friendly CSR representative took my information, checked her systems and informed me that she wasn’t seeing any issues. She suggested that, after I got off the call with her, I should take my battery out for about thirty seconds and then restart my phone - that that should clear up any phone-caused issues.

Um. Yeah. Sounds legit.

At any rate, I opted to not pull my battery out. However, in about half the time that it would have taken to have followed her instructions and for my phone to finish rebooting, I had full, uninterrupted network connectivity back. Last.FM was happy and I had tunes again.

I’m almost certain that were I to have re-dialed *611 and asked “what’d you guys have to do to fix things,” I would get the usual Verizon NetOps answer of “nothing. We didn’t change anything”.

Today, I think I coined a new work-related term: “multi-blocking”. It’s sorta like multi-tasking, but different.

At any rate… “Multi-blocking” is the (necessary) habit of running multiple, concurrent projects, but letting “blockers” determine which project goals you’re actively working towards at any given time. That is, you work on a project until some dependency stops you, then hop onto the next most pressing project that isn’t blocked.

Other interruptions to multi-blocking can be “suddenly critical” things that aren’t on your project plans being dumped into your lap. These either get added to the multi-blocking queue or supercede everything in it.

The big down-side of this working-model is when you reach a state where you’re 100% blocked. Then, it’s total frustration time. If this happens frequently enough, or you’re given a superceding task that also blocks, it can cause a total freak-out of frustration and denial of satisfaction.

Wasted two+ hours of my life meeting with a vendor for a lunchtime presentation.

The lunch was at a restaurant that, of the dozen or so times I’ve had to go, I’ve had an edible meal maybe twice. None of those two occasions coincided with a meeting. I’m pretty sure that Rosa Mexicano is unable to make meals for groups and have the results turn out well. Today, I just skipped th food altogether - which was easy, given that they opted for family-style service and I seemed to be sitting in a passing dead-zone (oh well). So, needless to say, as we were entering the second hour of the meeting, I was beginning to itch for the door so I might go some place and get food.

The seating, overall, was weird. Normally, when we’ve had meetings at Rosa Mexicano, there’s five or six six- to eight-top tables set up and we spread ourselves out amongst them. The vendor’s sales team didn’t want people staying too far from the action, so they opted to array four tables into a horseshoe arrangement. Now, I get what they were trying to accomplish, but forcing my to sit cheek-by-jowl with others - especially when food’s going to be served and even more especially when it results in tons of wasted space in the room - isn’t a way to get on my good side. I like having plenty of personal space. I find being crowded to be unsettling and detracts from my ability to attend to things other than the fact that I’m being crowded.

Given who the presentation was for - a group of engineers who worked for an organization that uses closed networks - one wonders why the vendor’s sales folks were so keen to crow about the ability to manage their storage with an iPad app. Given our environment, ability to manage devices from a moble phone or tablet just isn’t a priority. Given my feeling about Apple, in particular, it quickly became grating how much time was wasted on the topic.

Lastly, I’ve been dealing with technology for a long time, now. I’ve used it in a lot of “edge case” and “forward-thinking” scenarios. That means that I’ve seen a lot of interesting technologies used in a lot of interesting ways. Giving me a presentation that slags on buying component technologies and going the DIY route, and then pushing how great your solution is when all I’m seeing is shit that I’ve done years’ or decades’ previous just doesn’t sit well. The reason all your crap is, essentially, old hat to me is because the stuff I did was “DIY”. Doing things “DIY” means that I don’t have to wait five-plus years for some vendor to discover “hey, if we package this into a turn-key bundle, we could sell the hell out of this stuff”. So, don’t slag on DIY, especially if your solutions are all things I’ve already seen, played with or done.

I dunno …the whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way. Yeah, some nifty, potentially useful stuff, but it was all presented so wrong. It was like a flashback to my SGI days: great technology that was poorly-sold.

I gotta say, if there was a possible way to fuck up the marketing of the NHL Winter Classic, the various outlets found a way to do so.

I should not have seen empty seats in the stands. But, when you’re setting extortionate purchase-terms for season ticket holders (you had to buy tickets to all three WC events if you wanted to be allowed to buy the “main event” tickets), you pretty much guarantee that a significant chunk of the tickets will go to scalpers ticket purchasing services and package promoters. And when those outlets are charging as much for a pair of seats as an entire season ticket plan, you’re gonna have a hard time filling all the seats.

Back in November, when the NHL Shop started the Winter Classic marketing blitz, I’d ordered a pair of “authentic” Winter Classic jerseys. I’d figured “since I can’t reasonably afford to go to the event, I can splurge on jerseys for my wife and me”. So, I put in the order for the customized jerseys - a Hartnell/19 for Donna and a Timonen/44 jersey for myself. The order sheet said to expect fulfillment around Decemer 15th. At the time, that was a nearly three-week wait, but, “whatever”.

Christmas came and went and still no jerseys. So, I called up the NHL Shop to find out where the hell they were. I was told, “they haven’t arrived at the warehouse, yet, but we’re expecting them in soon enough to have them to you in time for the game.” This was not at all reassuring, but, “what can you do?”

The week of the Winter Classic, still no box with jerseys were to be found at my door. So, I called them again. “They still haven’t arrived at the warehouse”. I was a touch incredulous at this and pointed out that there wasn’t much time for them to get them and get them to us. I was told how sorry they were for the delay but that there was nothing to be done.

The Winter Classic came and went. Jerseys never arrived and no indication of what the fuck had happened to them showed up in my email. Yesterday, I called to find out “whut the fuck.” The person I got hold of gave me the same story of “they still haven’t arrived at the warehouse.” This time, however, they told me I could call back the following week to open an investigation or I could cancel the order. Having been waiting nearly two months for this disappointment, I told the CSR that I wanted to just cancel the order since they were well late and they were able to give me no indication of when or if I might ever see them. She canceled the order and gave me a cancellation number and told me to expect cancellation confirmation to show up in my Inbox (no such confirmation ever came). She then asked if there was anything else she could do for me. I took this opportunity to point out that she and the NHL had, to date, done nothing for me, so how could she do “more”. I also pointed out that their order fulfillment was abysmal and that I’d never bother to try to use their service again (and, to anyone reading this, I’d advise a similar path). She gave another useless apology before we concluded the call.

Today, I spoke to someone that sells NHL merchandise for a living. I was informed that he’d only been able to get a very limited quantity of them and had sold out several days ago. Additionally, the manufacturer, who clearly had a hot commodity on their hands, wasn’t going to make any more (and, looking at shop.nhl.com, today, even they aren’t advertising them any more).

I am, to say the least, a touch incredulous at how stupid this is. I mean, they were selling these jerseys for $350 per unit. Rather than cranking out more to sell, they opted to discontinue them and sell only the much cheaper “replica” and “Premier” jerseys. I’m sure, at some point, we’ll hear how problematic mechandise forgeries and the like are to these companies (I’ve already seen the “don’t settle for cheap immitations from Asia” on some sites selling the Indonesian made “Premier” jerseys). Yet, when they have the opportunity to sell things that people want and are demonstrably willing to pay for, they choose not to. That leaves people with the choice: of be price-gouged by third parties that bought big, early so they could price-gouge later; settle for lesser goods from “legitimate sources” or, since you can’t get the thing you really wanted in the first place, buy fakes. If the recording and movie industries have shown us anything, it’s that people will either do without, or will resort to piracy to get the things they want.

Stupid.

All I can say is, “fuck you, NHL” and “fuck you, Reebok”. I hope the lot of them die in a goddamned fire.

Google is trying to link together their various services (Picasa, BlogSpot/Blogger, Plus, etc.). It’s sort of a Good Idea™, but it’s “not quite there,” yet.

I’m one of those people who uses online services like Picasa as a cloud-based backup of my home storage. I use BackBlaze for my general data (really sweet service: I recommend it to anyone that has a good up-stream connection and gives a crap about protecting important electronic documents, images, etc. against hard drive failures or home disasters) and I (currently) use Picasa for my photo memories (Flickr has better storage pricing, but, when I was making the decision, Picasa had the better management software).

When I first opened my Picasa account, it was very much a stand-alone service. This was reflective of it being one of Google’s many acquired services. Eventually, I noticed that images I’d posted via my BlogSpot account were automagically showing up in my Picasa account.

When I cashed in my Plus beta invite, one of the things I had to do was link my Picasa account to my Plus profile (no choice was given: if I wanted to try out Plus, I either clicked on the “accept” button or I couldn’t do Plus - in retrospect, the latter might have been the better option). It didn’t seem like too big of a deal at the time, so, I clicked “yes”. I didn’t post my first photo to Plus for several days after joining up (might have even been a couple weeks). It was several days, after that, that I noticed Plus-posted photos were showing up in my Picasa account.

Honestly, I think what alerted me to that fact was that Donna and I were out and wanted me to show some pix of our dogs to friends. So, I fired up my Android phone’s “Gallery” application and noticed there were photos showing up that were from Plus. When I got home, I logged into Picasa and, sure enough, there was an album (tree) of my Plus-originated photos.

Sidenote to Google: data aggregation is great, in theory, but the way you’re doing it for me - and not giving me any good method to manage or override - makes my data utterly chaotic: not good. At least give me options to determine what things appear in multiple applications. The first time I end up embarrased by your “helpful” stream-crossing, you can expect a subpoena. 

It was mostly a shrug-worthy moment. I mean, at least I knew how to get at photos after I’d posted them via Plus. It did raise the concern of, “do Plus photos count against the Picasa quota I bought”? I’m hoping that what I discovered today indicates that the Plus folder-tree doesn’t count against that quota: 1) it’s the only album that seems to allow sub-albums; 2) unlike all of my Picasa-originated albums’ photos, the Plus originated photos don’t seem to be online-editable the way my Picasa-originated ones are. Dunno. It might be buried in a Google FAQ (or similar document) somewhere, but there’s no quick indication of it.

I’ll give Google kudos for making data available. Unfortunately, what Google really doesn’t seem to get is that masses of data suck if you don’t have good tools for logically-ordering them. And, no, I don’t consider having a search engine to plow through the data-heap to be a good organizational method or solution for masses of data.

Since shortly after moving in with my now wife, we have had one or more dogs. Due to my wife’s allergic sensitivities to longer-haired dog breeds, all of our dogs have been bull mixes: our first pair were an American Bulldog/Boxer-mix and an American Bulldog/Bull Terrier-mix; our current pair are an American Staffordshire Terrier and a American Pitbull Terrier. All four have been great dogs. They’ve been friendly, happy, people-oriented dogs.

We frequently take our current pair for walks around the neighborhood. Most days, our walks are uneventful. We walk anywhere from a half to a mile-and-a-half around the neighborhood.

Late yesterday afternoon, we took our dogs for a walk. My wife wanted some stuff at the local convenience store, so, we leashed up the dogs and walked over. We decided that, rather than walk the short way around our block and back to the house, we would go home by the long way around our block. 

I’d had my head down, grinding documentation for work, all day. I had no real grasp on what time it was. It turns out, our walk back to the house coincided with when the local middle school was letting out. As we were comeing to the end of our block, the school bus left off a mob of kids. Several of them caugh sight of our dogs and came ambling over. They did the usual thing of asking “are they friendly” and, upon giving our affirmation, began to fawn over the dogs. We stood around and chatted while the dogs happily soaked up the attention. A couple minutes into this, one of the kids said, “wow, she’s really pretty (referring to our blue-eyed dog, Lady): what kind of dog is she?” I replied, “she’s a pitbull”. All but one of the kids tensed-up and stepped back. Fortunately, the one most engaged in fawning over Lady kept right on going. She pointed out to her friends that “there’s nothing to worry about - they’re friendly dogs”. They relaxed but didn’t return to fussing over the dogs (though the one continued her attention). 

This strikes me as really sad. I mean, here they were, happily interacting with the dogs while they were unaware of their breeds. However, upon hearing the word “pitbull”, immediately changed how they saw the two dogs. I get that pitbulls have had a lot of bad press over the years. And, if I were going just by that, I’d be wary about approaching them - moreso than, say, a Shi-Tzu. But, to have been interacting with demonstrably friendly dogs and then going cold at the mention of a breed? It just doesn’t make sense: act based on what you see before you, not what you see re-hashed in the fear-mongering press.

I dunno whether to be impressed with myself or absofuckinglutely livid at the contractor who was “helping” me most of the summer. I’m pretty sure I’m livid.In the space of about three hours, I was able to just run through building and linking three functional backup servers - inclusive of downloading and staging software and repeating two of the servers (because I forgot to capture the install session to a text file). The contractor who had been previously “helping” me, had taken over two and a half months and been unable to achieve the same feat.

When Donna and I take the SUV out, she frequently has the station on WTOP. For her, it’s just background noise and easily ignored. With my inability to filter, I get stuck listening to each and every story they drone out. Because the programming effects us differently (Donna not at all and me listening), Donna frequently talks over things - with a special nack for being most radio-obliterating right at the critical part of a given news report. Simply put, I hate listening to news radio when Donna’s in the car. This is not to say that I’m fond of having the news on, in the first place: generally, all I’m hearing on news programming is “news of the annoyingly stupid”.

Today was another exercise in the “news of the annoyingly stupid”. The 9/11 commemorartion riders came through DC on their 1800-strong motorcycle convoy. Ok… First, this weekend isn’t 9/11 - it’s not even September. So, why this weekend (and, no, I don’t care enough to Google for it). Secondly: why try to stream an 1800 motorcycle convoy through one of the worst traffic regions in the nation during rushhour???

Yeah, I know I’m a cranky bastard on my best days, but nothing about this debacle made sense. On top of it, it made little sense to me that the ride-supporters were chapped by the locals who had complaints about the timing of the ride (not the ride itself, mind you, just the timing). I get that people like to commemorate major events. I get that DC was tied to 9/11 by the fact that the Pentagon was one of the sites directly impacted by the events of that day. However, I think it’s at least as selfish of the riders to time their event as they did as the ride-supporters seem to think people like me are for not liking the inconvenience it caused.

Unfortunately, a lot of people think that just because something is “for a good cause” that makes everything about how it’s conducted is justafiable. It’s the same effect that powers all the legal abuses and shortcuts because of “think of the children”. To the people in the 1800-motorcycle convoy, it’s just a ride to commemorate a tragedy. To the people that live here, along the pathway of that convoy it’s more than just inconvenience, it’s lost time and lost money. The extra time in traffic means wasted gas - and gas, particularly lately, is decidedly not free. The extra time in traffic means time spent in traffic hell that could be better spent with family, friends, etc. Time has value and for the sake of 1800 riders, tends of thousands of locals were compelled to spend their time in a way that they might have otherwise more-constructively spent it. Some people, anticipating the hell that the convoy was going to cause, opted to take off work. That’s vacation days that they won’t have to spend elsewhere. That’s work-productivity lost at what might have been a critical time in their job-cycle.

But, hey, at least 1800 riders got to commemorate 9/11. Fuck everyone else.

Tell me, again, what that commemoration did for the people who died on 9/11? At least the Rolling Thunder folks do their stuff on a holiday.

So, in today’s email, I find the below image/message from Verizon Wireless:

I find it a tad confusing. I mean, I upgraded both phones to Samsung Charges in June. So, it’s not like either my handset or Donna’s handsets are eligle for a “new every 2” uprade for nearly two years. So why email this to me. Am I supposed to tell my freinds, who aren’t yet VZW customers, “hey: look at this awesome deal?” I mean, if that’s the intent, it makes no sense, either? Why the hell would I recommend, to anyone, “go get Verizon so you can stream video at LTE speeds and blow through your data cap in under a day!” Seriously: it makes no sense at all. It would only have made sense to send me this if: A) either of my phones were not recently upgrades; or, B) VZW hadn’t just put data caps in place for all new customers. Neither A nor B is true, so why spam me?

So, on Saturday, May 28th, my SUV was backed into by a driver insured through The Hartford’s Small Business auto insurance group. We exchanged information and went about our respective ways. I contacted my insurer to aprise them of the situation. They recommended I contact the other preson’s insurer (The Hartford) and file a claim directly with them.

The Hartford, being a customer-service oriented company, doesn’t really make themselves available for people to file claims. They only have agents available to open and process claims from 08:00-17:00 Eastern time during the regular business week. So, if you have a day job, you’re stuck trying to call them during business hours. If you’re like me, this is made difficult by not having predictable access to phones during those hours.

At any rate, the following Tuesday (5/31), I opted to go into work an hour late so that I could call the ass-hats at The Hartford. A little after 08:00, I called in and opened a claim. I was told that an adjuster would contact me within two business days. I informed them that I had limited phone-access, but they assured me that I would be contacted and that, if I wasn’t reachable, they’d leave a message. Well, it’s now 18 days later and I’ve yet to hear from an adjuster and there have been no voicemails left at any of my phone numbers. 

I guess I’m a bit spoiled by my insurance company. My insurance company allows one to file and track claims 24/7. Their only real hours limitation is that of individual claims adjusters. While their adjusters’ hours are limited by comparison to the overall claims service process, their adjusters are very prompt about returning phone calls or contacting you via alternate means (such as email). Dealing with my insurance company shows how craptacular the service of companies, such as The Hartford’s, is.

Interestingly, I opted to call the actual policy holder, Rick’s Carpet and Flooring. I spoke with a nice gentleman (Rob, I believe) who told me that The Hartford had told them that they’d already taken care of the issue. I found this rather odd, considering that my vehicle was still not repaired and I had yet to be contacted by a claim’s adjuster. Rick’s is supposed to call me back, Monday, after they’ve had a chance to re-engage the Hartford and find out what the heck is up. They’re a small, local, family-owned business, so, the solicitousness of their response was about on par with what I expected.

So, it should be interesting to see how this all works out. I may have to delay the start of one of my work days, next week, to try to track down an adjuster from The Hartford. The damage was only slight, but, at this point, it’s more one of those “the principal of the thing” exercises.

This evening, as I drove home from work, I was thinking to myself, this looks like it could be a great weekend. I’d figured out that the reason why two weeks of my life had been spent troubleshooting a poorly performing system at work was because the standard Linux build didn’t include PAE support. Thus, the 16GB-requiring application running on a 32GB system was thrashing the hell out of the host. I’d been able to get the requisite RPMs and shove them through our security process and get the boxes fixed before leaving for the day. All in all, not a bad way to end the week and start the weekend.

I drove home, with the top down, enjoying the beautiful, sunny weather (at least, that’s what it was like at 17:00). First indications that my Friday - and possibly the remainder of the weekend - was about to go sideways was that, when I got home, the top to my car wouldn’t go back up. So, I popped the rear seat cushion out and used the little allen-wrench thing to reset the top’s safety lock. I hit the button and the top returned to the full, upright and closed position. So, no real problem, just a hassle.

Donna had come out to see why I was taking so long to come in. She suggested we pack up the pups and go down to the nearby dog-park. I was a touch leary, since Lady’s only been to dog parks two times previous, and both of those with our dog-trainer present. She did pretty well, until a surly scotty dog decided to fuck with her. She didn’t go nuts, or anything, but Lady definitely has an unnerving “back the fuck off” snarly-bark. No furball ensued, but, I decided discretion was the better part of valor and we left after a little less than half an hour at the park. One of the downsides of bully-ownership is that, no matter which dog starts it, the bully is seen to be at fault. C`est la vie.

Since we needed more milk and miscellaneous provisions, and it was nearby, we stopped in at Whole Foods. I stayed in the car with the steam engine-sounding, panting dogs while Donna ran in to shop. As I was sitting in the SUV, the thunder clouds started rolling in and the wind was kicking up. By the time Donna came back, the rain was beggining to come down.

We made our way home …Duke Street to Telegraph Road, then onto Farmington. As usual, car after car was speeding through our neighborhood, using it as the shortcut between Telegraph Road and North Kings Highway. I turned onto Edgehill, on the home stretch to our house. Per usual, the oncoming cars were turning right off of Fort Drive and swinging wide into the oncoming lane - the one we were in. I was well on my side of the center-line of the street. As we were approaching the intersection, I saw a white Chevy utility-van roll the stop-sign and pull wide into our lane. I slowed to a near stop to try to allow him additional buffer to get himself back into our lane. He made no effort to cross back onto his side of the center-line. I sat there helplessly, a matter of seconds stretching into what felt like hours, as he smacked into my left front wheel and scraped the whole way down the side of my SUV. As he scraped by, I watched the mirro fold in and saw pieces of plastic popping off the SUV. I still don’t know how the mirror did’t get ripped off, given that he hit us hard enough to bend the wheel at the axel-mount and render the SUV undrivable. At least the airbags didn’t deploy and the pups stayed well-fastend in their doggy seatbelts (yes, they actually make those - thankfully).

Now, this is the second time, in just about as many weeks, that the SUV has been hit by white utility-vans operated by careless drivers. The first time was two Saturday’s ago at the 7Eleven near our house. The fuckwit driving it, a worker for Rick’s Carpet & Flooring, had backed into us just as I was reaching for the drivers’ door-handle. We’d stopped in on the way to the Saturday farmer’s market in Falls Church (they carry Mtn. Dew Throw-back, so, it’s a must to stop there). For some reason, he was unable to back out of his parking space without hitting us. It was mostly cosmetic damage, so, when his insurance company failed to return my call after I filed the initial claim, it hadn’t been a huge priority to find out where the fuck their adjuster was.

Today’s incident was a bit more severe. After waiting nearly an hour and a half for a Fairfax County Police officer to show up, we were able to start the requisite paperwork. In fairness, a hellish storm had just torn through and caused all sorts of havoc on Richmond Highway between the Mt. Vernon police-station and our house - it was just such a departure from the norm where it’s usually less than 10 minutes from the time you start your call with the dispatcher till the time they’re at your door to find out what’s up. The guy was contrite and admitted full fault (and, even if he hadn’t, the guy living three houses down from the accident had been working in his front yard and stated he was willing to sign as a witness to the accident). The cop gave him two citations: one for the accident and one for driving an unsafe vehicle (it’s citeable, in VA, to drive a vehicle with tires so bald you can see the chording). Unfortunately, while the guy claims he has insurance through Liberty Mutual, he wasn’t able to provide proof of such insurance at the scene. In VA, unlike DC, it’s not a citeable offense to not be able to provide proof of insurance at the scene of an accident. The officer instructed him to contact me with his insurance info so I could file a claim. The guy claimed he would do so as soon as he got home. Unfortunately, we’re now four hours post-accident and two-hours post-citing, and there’s been no such phone call. Given that the guy was “self-employed”, didn’t have the insurance paperwork and was driving a citably unsafe work vehicle, I’ve the sinking suspicion that this is going to have to be run against my insurance. Thank god I’ve got USAA.

For now, we’re kinda boned. It’s not even Saturday and we’re kind of limited in what we can do. No dog parks, this weekend. Won’t be able to run errands and pick anything up. And, I’ve got the prospect of dealing with insurance companies and trying to sort out a suitable rental vehicle come Monday. What’s more, if the guy does fail to provide insurance or whatever, I’ll probably be having to go to court in July when Fairfax brings their case against him. Fmeh.

On the plus side, no one was hurt and we do have good insurance. It’s just annyoingly inconvenient.

And, in case you ever are involved in a vehicular incident with Donna …it’s not a pleasant experience. Even with her sole level of involvement being as a passenger - in both cases - she goes completely fucking bonkers on the other drivers. I really worry that if she doesn’t start to keep her shit under control, it’s going to lead to an unfortunate incident that I really don’t want to have to deal with. Talk about need for “anger management” classes… Oy.

I am a StumbleUpon user. It’s a great way to kill time. Sometimes, it’s amusing; sometimes horrifying; many times it brings you things that can’t be “unseen.” And, there are times where it brings you stuff that’s just fucking annoying. A few minutes ago was one of those annoying Stumbles. Apparently, someone liked something hosted on MSN’s entertainment portal. I don’t inherently have a problem with MSN or entertainment sites. I don’t even particularly have a problem with the main content of the page StumbleUpon sent me to. No, what I have a problem with is this:

All I can think is “Fuck you, Microsoft.” I really don’t like a websit telling me “use a different browser” particularly to tell me to use their browser (I can be tolerate being told, “this site best viewed in a more standards-compliant browser, but that’s about it. Telling me “use our browser so that the you can see all of the nifty standards we’ve broken rendered correctly” just pisses me off). Even if I was inclined to change browsers, I wouldn’t be going back to that site. Shit like this pisses me off. Makes me want to add MSN addresses to my hosts file’s loopback list. 

Fuckers.

Whatever asshats thought this was a good idea need to die slowly in a fire.