Brian's Blog

I just finished reading an excellent essay entitled What is an Agnostic in which it explains, almost exactly, my views on such matters. I must say it's nice to see what I've felt for so many years put on paper by someone who is actually good at expressing such views.

As I've said, it is almost exactly how I feel. I disagree on two points. First off, to the question of if an agnostic believes in an afterlife he say:

The question whether people survive death is one as to which evidence is possible. Psychical research and spiritualism are thought by many to supply such evidence. An agnostic, as such, does not take a view about survival unless he thinks that there is evidence one way or the other. For my part, I do not think that there is any good reason to believe that we survive death, but I am open to conviction if adequate evidence should appear.

While I realize this essay is what the author feels applies to most agnostics and I realize that I'm not necessarily like most I just can't believe that there is nothing after death. Without going into long winded and very personal explanations I'll just say I've seen to many strange and weird things to totally deny the existence of an afterlife or a spiritual realm of some sort. The second point I can't agree upon totally is the question of "How do agnostics explain the beauty and harmony of nature?", His answer is:

I do not understand where this "beauty" and "harmony" are supposed to be found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each other. More of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any very great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm. Let it not be said that this creature is sent as a punishment for our sins, for it is more prevalent among animals than among humans. I suppose the questioner is thinking of such things as the beauty of starry heavens. But one should remember that stars every now and then explode and reduce everything in their neighborhood to a vague mist. Beauty, in any case, is subjective and exists only in the eye of the beholder.

While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I just can't deny that the way nature works is beautiful in certain ways. I think he centers on the negative aspects of life vs the postive. I can't help but marvel at the intricate way in which nature works. How the systems exist together and the complexity of it all. To me, the fact that all this works the way it does it a beautiful thing. Sure, I don't find any good points about the tape worm, but over all nature is a wonderful thing.

Basically, you can say I believe there is "something" out there but that is just belief based on emotion. I can't say with any certainty if there is a higher power nor can I say that there isn't.

As I sit here sipping one of the last of my first batch of beer I thought I'd mention that my second attempt at beer fell flat on it's face. I made the mistake of using bleach to sanitize, even though it says you can use it if you rinse very well it still totally halted the fermentation.

So, I've learned my lesson and am sticking with the OneStep sanitizer from Mr Beer. I've already started my second try at Ginger's Castaway Ale and it's already fermenting after less than 24 hours. The only difference between this try and the last is what I used to sanitize.

I better sip this slow, I've got a long wait until this next batch is ready to drink.

My wife has a Mazda Protege that out of the blue started with a rough idle and would stall at stops. It would stall even more so when the Air Conditioning was on plus the check engine light was on solid. I'm not a car person in the slightest but I think anyone can see that a car isn't supposed to do this. So, we took it over to our local mechanic over at Service Tire, one of the few mechanics that I actually trust. He did his mechanic magic and explained that one of the valves was probably bad but felt that he couldn't service it properly for me and recommended a trip to the dealer since they are supposed to be specially trained in these sorts of uncommon repairs. To put quality of service above making a buck and actually turning away business and recommending the competition is a rare thing these days. (See why I trust them? They are honest.)

Anyway, we called up Allentown Mazda Volvo and explained the situation and were promptly given an attitude and a refusal to give any kind of rough estimate until we paid them $80 or so to diagnose it. They also couldn't resist commenting that you never know what you'll get at a "Little Mom and Pop Shop" which I thought was an inappropriate thing to say. Fine, think it, but don't go verbally bashing. It make you look bad. So, we took it in and they came up with the exact same diagnosis at Service Tire, which was that a valve needed to be replaced but then proceeded to charge us around $120 for the diagnosis instead of the initial $80 we were told over the phone for "additional testing". Why the hell couldn't they have mentioned that additional testing may cost more? No, we were told $80 and then surprised with the extra after it was done. A minor annoyance, but the car needed to be fixed so we gave the go ahead.

Six hundred dollars later we got the car back and it ran better, but the check engine light was still on so we took it back in and ended up paying an additional $300 or so to replace an oxygen sensor, that $900 spent in a month.

Now, we get to the part where things happen that piss me off. On the way home from the sensor replacement the check engine light comes on yet again. Yes, we didn't even make it home from the dealer. Do they actually test drive these things or just replace the parts the computer tells them to and then park it in the lot? My wife was getting agitated since she now had to take the car back a 3rd time in a month, and I was getting annoyed at being the only transportation for the family. My wife called and ended up talking to Earl, the Service Manager and asked for a rental since the invoice she has said you could get a free one if the repairs were over $300. She was told that he can't give her a rental and only after some pushing and being reminded that we spent three times what was required for a rental already did he give in and give us one. That was bad move number one. He did assure us that if there was a problem with their previous work that it would be repaired at no cost, but was sure to mention that there were about 70 different possible causes for the check engine light. That give 69 different reasons that he could choose from to tell me and I'd have no way to really check.

Totally expected by me the next visit had something different, but related to the O2 sensor and, surprise, he would have to charge another $250 or so for that repair. The problem was the engine are intake duct if I remember correctly. I've been to dealers before where they keep adding things on in this fashion to get more money out of you so I called my trusted mechanic and explained the situation. He told me that depending on where the break was in the duct, it could have caused a false reading for the O2 sensor. This was my red flag and, in my mind, caused reasonable doubt that the $300 for the sensor was needed.

Another call to Earl resulted in yet more frustration. He was willing to not charge labor but wanted us to buy the part which was a nice move, but not enough in my mind since this would have been caught if they actually test drove the car before we picked it up. After dropping so much money on the car in such a short period of time, the fact that they over looked this duct problem, and the possibility of an unneeded repair was cause enough for me to demand a free repair. Earl had a bad attitude through all this but he refused to bend on this flat out. Saying he was doing us a favor already. I told him he could either loose the $79 or so for the part now, or loose the $300 for the O2 sensor when we dispute the charge on the credit card because we paid for a service we did not get. He then said, "You can do that, but you might not like what you're getting into. We've had to deal with this kind of thing before." That sounded like a threat to me. Granted I threatened first, but all other diplomatic talks were useless. It was obvious to me that Earl really had no regard for the customer. He could have defused the situation in a number of ways, the first being his tone of voice. Or offering to talk to the owner to see what he could do. At least make me feel like you care and are trying.

As it stands, I contacted the owner myself, who was much more reasonable to speak with. I explain the entire situation, left him know how I felt about Earl and his people skills, and simply wanted him to look into the chance of a misdiagnosis. I didn't demand a free repair and even told him I'd be willing to pay if he felt the work was legitimate. Much to my surprise Earl himself called, about a half hour later to tell me the repair would be free. He sounded a bit subdued so I'm guessing that the owner chewed on him a bit and chose to swallow the entire repair to try to keep a customer.

Earl's handling of the situation was far from good. Even in my short stint at Radio Shack they took extra steps to train us on how to deal with angry customers. Earl could use a little bit of that training and could have probably gotten paid for the final repair if he had a better attitude. The only one who made me feel like he cared at all about my satisfaction was the owner himself. No one should have to seek out a company owner to get help. And above all, even if a customer is wrong, the last person to give an attitude should be a manager.

NOTICE: The car has been sold and is no longer available.

Since I have my newer car now I've decided to put the old Shadow up for sale. It's on display on the busy road behind my parents place with for sale signs in the window. But I figured I'll put info on it here in case someone who reads my humble site needs a cheap car. Here are the specs:

• 1994 Dodge Shadow
• 78038 miles
• Power Steering
• Power Breaks
• AM/FM Stereo w/ cassette
• 5 Speed Manual Transmission

I give it a rating of "fair" as far as condition goes and Kelly Blue Book gives it a value of $595. I'm asking for $575 but will take the first offer that is reasonable.

As far as what is wrong with it it's mostly cosmetic. The paint job isn't the best as is common with Dodges around that model year. The paint is pealing at spots and there is a little bit of rust. Also, there is a very slow oil leak. Slow as in I've been putting about 1/2 qt in every 3 months or so to keep it full. Also, the cassette tape plays but has a warbly sound. Really nothing major.

I figure, with just a little bit of work and the low mileage for it's age it's a good set of wheels for a new driver or anyone who doesn't want to take their nice newer car into harsh places.

Anyone interested can just send me an e-mail and let me know.

Not that anyone will really notice, but I decided to reorganize how I had the directory structure of my photo gallery. Before I was sticking all gallery's into a gallery directory and using a name like 2004-hunting or whatever to differentiate between years. Now I have separate directories for each year. As in 2004/hunting. The only problem is this broke the up one node link in jgal but I modified the jgal template to deal with it. Oh the terribly exciting things I do for fun.

Normally I like snow, but today it kind of sucks because it's preventing me from getting my new car. Well, it's not really 100% new, it's a 2004 Impala (see picture). It's about time I finally got a newer car though, my old Shadow is falling apart. The hatch doesn't stay up anymore, the paint is pealing, and it's starting to leak oil slowly. Not bad after about 11 years of use though.

The Impala set us back a bit though, so no big purchases for a while. Well, except for repairs on the wife's car, which is probably going to be expensive, but still less than buying two new cars at once.

Time to get back to reading HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide. I'm looking forward to the chapter on CSS.

There's not much to say about our little home brew project. Most of the important stuff has already been said. The beer has been in the bottle fermenting and carbonating for about a week, then spent two days in the fridge chilling. Tonight Bob stopped by and we tried it out. Much to our surprise, it actually tastes good! Really, we were kind of shocked. The beer itself, called as I think I've said before, West Coast Pale Ale, is comparable to an average American beer I guess. I'd describe it as a light bodied beer, with very little after taste that was very easy to drink. It wasn't as carbonated as commercial beers. I'm guessing that's because this stuff is naturally carbonated where I'd assume that commercial beers are artificially carbonated in addition to whatever occurs naturally. Even so, it was definitely carbonated and I think I actually like it better that way.

Since this worked out well I think I'll be ordering another set of bottles so I can have two batches going at once. The next one to try is called Ginger's Castaway Ale and has brown sugar and fresh ground ginger in it. Should be good stuff.

Today, much to my surprise, I was greeted with a package containing the Grease Double LP that I won on eBay. It only took a month to get it. Not that it took that long to get from TX to here though, it was postmarked Jan 28th. So, he sat on it for nearly a month before it went out the door. Even that wouldn't have been so bad if he had actually replied to any of my multiple attempts to get a status on it.

On the plus side though, it is in good condition and plays 99.9% perfect. There is one ever so slight skip in one song, but what can one expect from an LP? If I wanted perfection I would have bought the CD.

I couldn't bring myself to adjust the negative feedback at all. His lack of communication just doesn't warrant it. I did cancel my Paypal complaint since I did actually get the item. I sent him an E-mail explaining my feelings in a professional way on why he still gets negative feedback.

I don't expect an answer.

The previous two entries related to this are here and here.

For those who care I've recently updated my gallery by adding some family related pictures. Also, Bob came over and we bottled up the beer we brewed so I've updated the section related to that with more pictures and comments.

By the way, I just had to put this picture of Angie on the front page here because it's to cute to keep to myself.

Not much to update, but this morning I got a reply to my Paypal complaint with vinylguitarguy related to an eBay bid I had won. The specifics can be found here in my initial clog entry about it. Anyway, the reply didn't contain any sort of explanation or apology but simply provided a tracking number and that it was shipped via the USPS. I checked the tracking number tonight and USPS.com claims that tracking service was not purchased for it. So I sent him an E-mail in forming him of this that he'll probably ignore like all the others but we'll see. Just out of curiosity I checked his current feedback and it looks like he's screwed a few others recently. Needless to day I'm not canceling my complaint.

I can't believe it. I've bought a mess of things over the years on eBay and never had a problem. Then my first won auction after not even looking at eBay for a couple of years I get screwed.

I've already mentioned that I bought my wife a new turn table for Christmas. This, of course, prompted me to break out all the old vinyl and spend some time reliving my younger days. One of my favorite LPs from my childhood was the Original Grease Soundtrack, which much to my dismay turned out to be scratched beyond playability. I figured if I could get a replacement anywhere it would be on eBay so off I went and searched. I was happy to find a near mint copy of it being sold by a guy named vinylguitarguy and won for a grand total of $3.50 + $5.00 shipping. I payed the day the auction ended via Paypal and waited for my item to arrive.

I've been waiting a grand total of 19 days as of today and still nothing has shown up on my doorstep. I've made multiple attempts to contact this fellow who has not responded in anyway. I even gave a time limit of 7 days for a response after which I'd take action, still no answer.

I took a deeper look at his feedback and, even though he has a high positive rate, all his negatives center around the theme of accepting payment, not sending the item, and ignoring contact attempts. Now, this is my bad, because I didn't review as deep as I usually do. And if I had I know I would have never even bid. But to late now.

So, I've left some pretty darn harsh negative feedback for this fellow and initiated an investigation to get my money back with Paypal. After I started this I notice he actually left me a positive feedback, which has brought a small tinge of guilt at my harsh words but still, ignoring a customer is not excusable. At best, if he resolves this issue he'll get the negative bumped up to a neutral rating.

It seem silly to go off over $8.50 total but it's the principal of the matter.

Yesterday I woke up to find my home "server" system dead. It looked like it was turned off so I tried to turn it on. Nothing happened, no drives spinning up, no display, no beep from the POST, nothing except the power supply fan and the hard drive LED on solid. Oh boy, what fun. I hate it when this happens even when it is a secondary system that my daughter plays Dora the Explorer and Tux Paint on. So I grabbed an extra hard drive I had thinking it was one of the drives bringing it down. I disconnected all of the drives, including the CD-Roms and floppy and this darn thing still refused to reboot! What the heck... So, I simplified even more, by striping it down to the power supply, CPU, motherboard, and memory but still no life could be breathed into this thing. I even tried an extra power supply just in case. You'd think that it would give the BIOS beeps about not having a video card but it didn't. Time to simply even more so out came the memory and BOOM now I get BIOS beeps about missing memory. I don't have any PC2100 memory laying around so I guess I'll have to put Newegg's return policy to the test and start ordering parts to trouble shoot with. 512MB of memory is on the way, if this works then I'll have a nice memory upgrade in the name of troubleshooting. I just hope it isn't the CPU or motherboard.

To continue the technology theme so far I finally decided to check out the M$ AntiSpyware Beta. It looks to have promise but let us not give M$ all the credit. In the normal Microsoft fashion they simply acquired the technology when they bought out GIANT Company Software Inc and stuck their name on it then called it an innovation. We'll see what they turn it into though. I'm always on the lookout for good Spyware/Adware removal tools since the majority of my job seems to boil down to cleaning up the PCs of hapless users. I think I spend a good 70% or more of my time dealing with Spyware/Adware, browser hijacks, and viruses. I'm glad I use Linux at home so I can actually use my time to do something useful or fun with my system instead of endlessly defending it. I've only played with Microsoft AntiSpyware for all of 15 minutes but it did find and remove several bits of nastiness and looks like it can help you remove browser hijacks. I'll know more after I get a chance to see how it stands up against a badly overrun client PC.

That being said though on Monday I had a chance to actually use some of my MCSE skills! This is a rare thing since most of our customers are so small that they don't bother using most of what I was used to doing at IQE. I got to help a couple of internal IT guys who needed an "expert" to help them adjust from NT to Windows 2003 SBS. So I got to be teacher at the same time as helping them use Group Policy to reach their goals. One of these days my Linux skills will be sufficient enough to actually use them in a work environment but not yet. Speaking of increasing skill I need to actually get back into some reading and experimentation. I just haven't been in the mood lately for some reason.

Now for a total subject change. Tonight was a fine night spent with the family. We had a really nice warm fire in the fireplace since the weather is so darn cold and we watched The Sound of Music (again) while Cindy and I played with the kids. We all really like having a fire but the only problem with the open face style of fireplace we have is when the fire goes below a certain level the amount of heat sucked up the chimney is more than the fire is giving off. A fully enclosed stove like my parent have is more efficient but it doesn't look nearly as nice. It's a worthwhile trade off though.

Oh, I checked the status of the fermenting beer and it's well underway. There is a thick foam on the surface and you can see the yeast has grown significantly. The beer itself is cloudy but should clear up when fermentation stops. The cool thing is if you sniff at the pressure release lid it smells just like beer! So I guess we are on the right track.

I recently read Beowulf in which it is mentioned fairly often about the warriors drinking in the Mead Hall. Since it's mentioned so often it got me thinking, what the heck is Mead and how does one make it? Especially since I've never seen Mead offered anywhere on a menu. This got me searching the net and browsing a slew of home brew websites covering Mead, Wine, and Beer. To made your own Mead isn't hard. In its most basic from it consists of water, honey, and yeast. The problem is the process takes a year or more. I don't want to invest a year of time into making something like that until I know I can actually brew something successfully.

This got me thinking of beer. I checked the yellow pages looking for any kind of home brew shops in the area and found none. Google gave plenty of hits though and I found three types of kits. One was so simple a retarded monkey could probably make beer. If you can add water and mix in a pouch of beer mix powder then that's about all the skill you needed for this one. That's not making beer to me, I want to feel like I made a difference in the final product so I looked farther. This time I came up with what looked like a mad scientists setup from some horror movie. I don't have a chemistry degree so that was out for now. Then I came across Mr. Beer which seems to be a happy medium. This is what I wanted so I ordered it up.

While I was waiting for it to arrive Ricardo S pointed out that a new home brew shop opened close to us called Keystone Homebrew Supply. I stopped in and they have all the stuff of the mad scientist setup but, after talking to the person at the store it didn't seem that bad. Well, to late now, Mr. Beer was on the way but at least I have a place to go to get ingredients and advice. If this turns out to be something I like to do then maybe I'll upgrade.

Anyway, through all this I'd been talking to one of my fishing buddies, Bob. And we decided to go into this together as a treat for the rest of the guys on the next annual fishing trip.

So, Mr. Beer arrived yesterday. We got the Premium Edition which comes with the keg, the ingredients to make West Coast Pale Ale, and eight 1 liter bottles with caps. We also bought the recipes and ingredients for Dutch Apple Ale and Ginger's Castaway Ale. Bob stopped by this evening and we decided to go with the basic West Coast Pale recipe that it came with to get a little experience before we tried anything else out.

We had a hell of a good time setting up and starting our first batch of beer which is currently sitting on top of my dresser getting ready to ferment. It'll take at least a week before it's ready to bottle and then another week after that to carbonate. Until then we took a few pictures of our fun and I put them up in the Photo Gallery for the world to see. I'll take more photos of the bottling process and add them to the gallery when it's ready.

A minimum of 2 weeks to wait! I hate waiting. I guess I'll just have to buy some beer to drink in the meantime.

I don't recall what Google search I was doing but I saw down toward the bottom of the list a site titled What Torture Method Would You Be?. Well, this is the kind of thing that I just have to click on out of morbid curiosity. So, once I clicked on it I discovered that it's a quiz to answer the question posed by the title. And tells you, based on your answers, what kind of torture method you'd likely be or what method would be your favorite if you were an inquisitor, executioner, or say the US Government.

After answering a series of 20 questions asking this about what I like to do with I'm mad it spit back that my favorite method would be Burning at the Stake. It then provides a prioritized list below that of what your 2ND favorite would be down to 25 possible methods. Luck for us they provide little graphics with an explanation. They even provide the HTML code to past into your site if you want to show off how much of a psychopath you really are. Here are the results of my test:

Witches were tied to you, and burned to a crisp. A classic, though not very nice. People probably tiptoe around you a little.

There are all kinds on the net I guess. I'm just glad I wasn't The Pear. Youch!

I feel the need for a theraputic rant. I'll try not to dump to much here but I am fully convinced that humans suck in general. I mean, there are those who really care about things, have moral character, and are willing to think of people other than themselves. I know quite a few of them. But I think those of us who are really decent beings are a small percentage of our population. That being said, I have a few things that make me feel this way. Most of them are IT related since that's my work and exposes me to the general population. Here are a few examples of things that drive me up the wall about people in general.

• People who feel they can judge your work as an IT Professional because they used to run a BBS on their Commodore 64. And then are critical about your work when they haven't touched any sort of computing device beyond the power button for 20+ years.
• Anyone who makes technical decisions based on poli-ticks and ignores the technical issues. Poli-ticks must have very little to do with technical decisions or you get crappy solutions. Technological decisions need to be made based on things like how easy is the implementation, administration, and maintenance of the solution in question. Not if it will make you look good. Poli-ticks played a big roll when I was layed off from work in 2003. It's a topic that really gets me going so I'll stop now or I'll have written a book before I realize it.
• People who ask you a million questions about what you are doing, then turn around and complain that you are being to technical behind your back. Especially when the answers are watered down to the point where the only way to water them down farther is to use terms like Thingamajig, Doodad, and Whosits. Please people, if the answer is getting to technical just tell me, I'll shutup and get back to work. And, above all, don't ask more questions, especially if they are asking for yet more info on the topic I'm getting to technical for you on.

That's just three, but the more I work with the humans the more I grow to dislike them. Especially when I'm doing my best to do the best work I can and then they pull crap like that listed above.

I just wish the mindless masses would stop walking around in thier self-centered, what's in it for me, tunnel vision little worlds, and stop acting like nothing more than huge hunks of meat. Why do people act this way? I just don't understand.

An unmentioned part of my holiday loot was The Return of the King Extended Edition. A couple of days ago I had an extra 4 hours of time just laying around so I took the time to watch it and I wasn't disappointed overall. A few of the major goodies added in is the scene where Gandalf and Saruman have their confrontation. That scene was very well done with some obvious but needed changes from the original text to make it fit in the movie. Related to this scene in a way is the fact that one of my favorite sections of the book, The Scouring of the Shire, is not included in the film. Thus Saruman and Grima get to meet their end here vs in it's proper place in the Scouring. But, since the Scouring was supposedly never filmed I guess it just had to be.

There was another really cool bit where they added in The Mouth of Sauron who is Sauron's ambassador. This guys mouth is huge and it bugged me enough to turn on the commentary to see if they mentioned how they did it right after I finished the movie. Basically, they just digitally magnified his mouth 50%. It looks subtly wrong when you view it. I though it was well done even though my bud Bob doesn't like it. But what does he know.

Among the other goodies that I noticed as new were The Houses of Healing and a bit about Faramir and Eowyn meeting there. Plus there are a load of extended scenes. The only real disappointment I have is the exclusion of the Scouring of the Shire. Still, it's awesome. My wife and I are going to watch it again tonight.

Aside from that, today ended up being a surprise day off (unpaid unfortunately). So I've spent some time with the kids, did some more reading of Beowulf which is excellent so far, and did a little shopping for drinking supplies for tonight. My wife can't have alcohol since she is breastfeeding, so I guess I'll have to drink for the two of us. It's a hard job to take up, but I'll do my best.