Month: October 2006

10/10/2006

The mortgage on my house is through Chase Bank, and today I received a Special New Offer from them. Whee!

They “noticed” that my last payment was delivered in a U.S. Mail envelope. Since every payment I’ve sent them for the past four years was also delivered via U.S. Mail, one wonders why this is such a revelation to them… but apparently it made someone over at Chase sit up and take notice. “Hey,” I’m sure they said, “we need to extend a Special New Offer to this guy!”

So the Special New Offer is an opportunity for me to sign up for their “Chase FastPay” program, wherein my mortgage payments are deducted directly from my bank account. According to their nice personalized letter, this will make my life so much easier, and will also save me money. Well, heck, I’m a sucker for an easier life and saving money, so I skimmed the next few paragraphs.

It turns out there’s a Low Monthly Fee of only $12.00 to enroll in this program. Hmm. I don’t know if they checked the price of stamps at their local post office, but I’d be surprised to find any twelve-dollar stamps around there. One wonders how twelve bucks will be a savings over the thirty-seven cents I normally spend every month, but I’m no financial wizard, and we all know the guys at Chase are. So maybe I’m missing something.

It also occurred to me that an electronic payment would most likely make their processing easier, since they wouldn’t have to open my envelope, pull out the check, open the computer program and enter the account number, enter the amount, and verify that it posted. It seems that they should be paying me to use their FastPay program, although maybe they have Third-World sweatshops staffed by poor children who only cost a few pennies a day for the data entry. Who knows.

So, sadly, I’m going to have to pass on the Special New Offer and continue licking stamps every month. Hey, wait, I don’t even have to lick them any more– isn’t technology great?

10/09/2006

Remember those inspirational posters that were so hugely popular in the Nineties? It’s hilarious how even after all these years, they still provide fodder for a near-infinite number of spoofs.

10/09/2006

It’s so much fun to live in a world where stuff like this happens:

BERLIN – A small pile of leftover Jell-O discarded beside the road after a wedding party caused a large-scale security alert in Germany with biochemical experts, firemen, and police called in to investigate.

“Passers-by called police after finding a pool of a flabby red, orange, and green substance on the roadside,” a police spokesman in the eastern town of Halle told Reuters on Monday. Fears of toxic waste led to the closure of a wide area after the emergency call on Sunday, and experts wearing chemical warfare suits spent two hours examining the gelatinous substance before deciding that it was… Jell-O.

“The fire brigade always has to assume a worst-case scenario,” said a fire brigade spokesman. “We conducted a variety of tests and figured out it was Jell-O.”

Any time you hear someone say, “we conducted a variety of tests and figured out it was Jell-O” you know the terrorists have won.

10/08/2006

Tom and I went on our annual hiking/backpacking/photography road trip last week, and had a fabulous time in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevadas and the northern California coastline. Armed with my (relatively) new Panasonic Lumix digital camera, I was able to take much richer pictures than I did with the old Sony Cybershot.

Now I’m going through the photos, adjusting black levels and colors and so on, pulling out the natural hues and pushing them to a much more realistic look. As I mess with various settings, it’s amazing what can be done with a simple digital photograph.

Take, for example, this shot of the eastern side of the Sierras. The rocks are generally grey (granite), the sky is of course blue, and we have some white clouds. Compare the left half of the photo– the raw data from the camera– with the simple black-level adjustment on the right. It’s dramatic.

It’s also interesting to see the things the camera captures but doesn’t necessarily show in the photo. Here’s a shot of a tree near the beach at sunset:

After I took the picture and lowered my camera, I noticed a couple walking along the road. They’re not visible in the raw image, but tweaking the brightness of the image reveals them (along with a trash can and the curb).

Cool stuff. I think I’m getting addicted to this photography thing.

10/04/2006

Gene Callahan says:

My fellow Americans, it’s official now: We live in a fascist nation.

Now, the term “fascist” has been thrown around over the last fifty years in a loose way that has drained it of much of its meaning. If someone wanted to cut 5% off of a leftist professor’s favourite welfare programme, the professor would call his opponent a “fascist.” I’m not using the word like that. I mean honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned, 1930s style fascism, featuring such old favourites as:

Secret prisons — they’re back!
Torture — yes, we’re doing it.
Spying on all citizens.
Arrests and indefinite imprisonment without trial.
Rampant militarism.
Secret detention.
Enforced disappearance.
Denial and restriction of habeas corpus.
Prolonged incommunicado detention.
Unfair trial procedures.

An absolutely mind-numbing response to complaints that our traditional legal system is being torn apart is the question, “So, you want to protect the rights of terrorists?” Umm, no, I want to protect the rights of non-terrorists who might be falsely accused of terrorism! That was sort of, you know, the whole idea of our legal system. I’m sure there was some neo-con around in the 1700s saying to Jefferson or Madison, “So, you want to protect the rights of murderers and robbers?” but luckily they ignored him.

We’ve now gotten to the point where Nazi Germany was, say, in 1934. Remember, at that time, if you had told a typical German what his government would do over the next ten years, he would have looked at you as a madman. His nation could not possibly descend into barbarism! If you tried to tell him he was living in a police state, he would have pointed out that his government had used its vast new powers very judiciously, and only against a few trouble-makers. So far.

Like the use of the word “fascist” to describe anything that’s even remotely oppressive or even irritating, evoking the Nazis in a political discussion is vastly overused. But in this case, it’s honestly frightening how many similarities exist between 1934 Germany and 2006 America. Bush may not be Hitler, but his continual consolidation and expansion of government power is a shocking parallel to Hitler’s manipulation of the Reichstag.