Blessed by the Potato

I was wondering what exactly I should write about today, deathly afraid that I had run out of ideas after just over 50 posts. Thankfully, Dell has saved me with a piece of spam.

A while ago, my supervisor wanted a new computer for his home, and got me to buy it for him. The deal was, I would buy it on my credit card, and he’d pay me back with a bonus for setting it up and all that jazz. He was fairly stuck on Dell (though I did offer to build one from parts), so I watched the specials for a few weeks, and when one with “free” extra RAM came up, I ordered it.

A few days later, I got an email from Dell saying that there was a problem with my credit card, and asked me to phone a certain representative at a certain number at a certain time. Of course, when I called at that time, I got a voicemail saying she worked completely different hours. After a few days of that, I finally got a hold of her, where she tried to blame the problem on me not putting in the expiry date properly (I did), then maybe a typo in the card number (there wasn’t). I kept trying to tell her that the problem was that I was ordering a computer and having it shipped to my supervisor’s house, which my credit card company’s anti-fraud detection was not liking one bit. If she changed it to ship to my place, it would go through fine. Instead, she said that I probably didn’t have a high enough credit limit to cover the computer, and tried to sell me a financing plan. I got fed up at that point and just cancelled the order.

My supervisor ended up ordering the computer through the hospital on his own credit card, which was a very smart move — the Dell government/healthcare division has its own tech support line, which is based in Canada and generally much more helpful than the standard overseas outsourced one. The package ended up costing less, since he didn’t have to pay for anything he didn’t want (out goes the second DVD-ROM drive, goodbye useless add-on 15″ flat panel), but the computer itself cost very slightly more (at least, if you go by what it would cost to get a 15″ screen seperately).

So today, I got a piece of junkmail from Dell warning that my computer’s warranty will expire at the end of the week and that I should really consider buying an extended warranty.

PROTECT YOUR DELL SYSTEM!

A Dell Warranty is the best way to protect your Dell products. And there’s nothing like the peace of mind that comes from knowing you can rely on Dell for:

• Comprehensive knowledge of your system
• Hassle-free repairs
• 24/7 support

Wow, $79/year for three things that Dell is not known for: you often have to harrangue them to acknowledge a hardware failure and send out a replacement, and then they want you to ship the broken part back, even if it’s just a cooling fan, and very rarely do they know much about your system, even if it’s on the waybill you got when ordering. And as I saw with my credit card issue, support is not always available 24/7 — and that was for sales, which is typically the department that gets the best resources from the company.

Anyway, that reminded me of why when Wayfare wanted a new laptop, we went solidly for a Toshiba.

I finally managed to finish the Dune prequel “The Battle of Corrin”, finally putting that series of 6 books to rest.

My biggest praise for the books is that they were long. 6 books all-together (3 on the lives of the familial patriarchs a generation before the events in the original Dune, and 3 taking place ten thousand years earlier, in the Butlerian Jihad), and each book is hefty in its own right (400-700 pages in paperback form). They’re not a terrible series, but I can’t recommend them very highly.

The writing is overly verbose in a great many places, caused, I think, by the fact that each of them seems to try to tell at least 3 stories at once, flipping between stories every 10 pages or less. To try to keep you from forgetting what’s happening in each subplot, they often repeat details again and again. Unfortunately, the style doesn’t draw you in very much, so whenever the action lags a bit (and that happens often in books that long) you find yourself getting bored and skimming a bit.

I can’t really recommend them to people who aren’t fond of Dune to begin with. On the one hand, they are written in a much different style (Frank Herbert seemed to prefer shorter books with much, much less exposition, so fans would often read a lot into single sentences thrown in; you’ll never have to reach like that in the books by his son). This will make them a little more accessible to the people who didn’t like Dune just because of how it was put on paper; but unfortunately, the stories in these more conventionally-written books aren’t interesting enough in their own rights to read without the original books to beef them up (that is, the prequels don’t really stand on their own).

On the other hand, I can’t really recommend the series to anyone who’s a rabid fan of Dune either, since many details that might be considered holy canon will be… “altered”. This can be upsetting to someone who knows the original books very well. Even if you don’t have every detail of those Dune books etched into your memory to spot the inconsistencies, they’re just not very good sci-fi in the technical details that they throw out. For example, it’s well known that in the Dune universe, a method of folding space for instantaneous travel exists that depends on the ability to forsee the future to dodge collisions (since there is zero time to react as you’re jumping through foldspace). Ships that don’t have foldspace engines travel “conventionally”, but it’s clear from the travel times given that this, too is a form of faster-than-light travel. There just seems to be a great deal of inconsistency with this “conventional” FTL technology.

Another example would require the use of spoilers, so here goes:

*** SPOILER WARNING ***

*** SPOILERS ***

Many of their strategies have very obvious flaws that supposedly brilliant tacticians shouldn’t be using. For example, at once point in the last book (the Battle of Corrin) the human fleet discovers that the thinking machines have stripped the defenses of all their planets to send a single combined fleet on a war-ending attack against the humans. However, the machines did not know about the humans’ foldspace drives, and so a plan is hatched to jump behind machine lines and nuke every one of thier planets while they lie defenseless. This is, however, before they discovered the use of prescient navigators, so using the foldspace engines ran a fairly high risk of hitting something on the way and simply disappearing. They say that the odds of this happening are approximately one in ten, per jump. The humans then divide their fleet into 6 (IIRC) battle groups, each of which has to make several dozen jumps so that every machine world gets hit.

The way things go, the jump process causes them to lose approximately one ship per jump. It’s obvious by the end, when they’re fighting with something like <30% of their initial strength, that it doesn’t take very many ships to put down a machine planet that has already sent its defenders to join the attack fleet. So I wondered (and I’m sure you are to) why they didn’t divide their fleet up into smaller groups that would require fewer jumps, yet would still obviously be strong enough to tackle a defenseless world on their own. Then they could have finished the machines off faster, and losing fewer ships to random jump malfunctions.

The series also suffers from a problem common to many galactic empire scenarios: the worlds in their universe tend to only have a single city (sometimes 2 or 3, but hardly ever more). This allows factions to control planets (which are generally large bodies capable of supporting billions of people) with a minor number of military forces. I think the worst offender in this regard was probably Battletech, where a single star of mechs (sometimes, when I was upset at my wingmen, just my one giant mech) would control an entire planet.

Also, continuing with the spoilers… the machines used “cymeks” at certain points during the war. These were combat machines with disembodied human brains controlling them. However, at the very end of the war, humanity traps the machines within a shield that scrambled the artificial intelligence neural nets (but not human brains). Trapped in this way, the machine forces were rendered impotent while the humans took 20 years to rebuild their forces to come finish the job. In all that time, the machines never found a way to break through the shielding to get at the humans. I find it odd that it never occured to them to either create some new cymeks (admittedly, they had some problems controlling the original cymeks, but they were in a fairly desperate situation), or to create radio-controlled battleships. They couldn’t be as sophisticated as the ones with AIs loaded into them, and the radio control would introduce some minor lag… but early on the machine forces vastly outnumbered the humans, and the only thing holding them back was the shield. It makes no sense that they wouldn’t have at least considered those two options for getting around that. (They did end up sending simple, mindless automatons out to try to wreak havoc).

I just got back from the L-dot and there’s a nice package of homemade peanut brittle on the counter. I didn’t know peanut brittle was the sort of thing a mom could make. It’s like hard candies or fudge: you know that it is possible to make them “homemade”, but that it is in fact usually only done for small “homemade” stores. It’s not the sort of thing you find your mom actually making in your kitchen. To be perfectly literal, I still haven’t found my mom making it in the kitchen, just strong evidence of it. But it’s so good, she very well could have just bought a batch from Maple Leaf Fudge and put it in tupperware for me.

I really like peanut brittle. As I write this I’ve eaten almost half of what she left me, and I think I broke a tooth in the process. It was worth it. Anyhow, despite my obvious love for all that is sweet and nutty (hi Wayfare!) I hardly ever buy peanut brittle, because the best peanut brittle is only found in small confectionary shoppes or at tiny booths in town fairs. And those places without exception always have fudge available as well (usually peanut butter chocolate fudge at that), and for some reason peanut brittle costs as much or more than fudge, pound-for-pound, so I usually end up going with the fudge.

Yes, it is hard on the teeth. It’s hard, so you have to chew (it might dissolve upon prolonged sucking, but I don’t have that kind of patience, and from what patience I do have, it’s obvious that it takes more than 3 licks to get to the tootsie pop centre… er… I mean, it disolves slower than comparable “sucking” sweets, such as life savers), and once you bite into it, there’s a good chance that it will form some kind of peanut brittle concrete in the cusp of your molars.

My teeth are in terrible shape to begin with. I’ve liked my dentist a fair bit since she took over the practice from my old dentist, but there’s one thing that’s got me a little concerned. You see, due to a number of factors including diet (lots of sugar, acidity, and a terrible tendancy to graze rather than eat a small number of larger meals), behaviour (apparently there’s a period after eating where the most damage is done to the teeth, and that the damage over time goes down drastically about a half hour to an hour after eating, so eating non-stop never gives your teeth that minor break, and on top of that, my dentist says that I have a very strong bite, which is just doing mechanical injury to my teeth), the side-effects of my depression medication (chocolate) and genetics (my dad maybe has 6 natural teeth left in his mouth, having had dentures since his 20’s [gulp] and my mom’s had at least 4 root canals, 2 crowns, and a filling in every other tooth except her 4 front ones; I often joke about whether I’m not sure if I’ll end up with my dad’s teeth or my mom’s, but that it can’t be good either way), my teeth aquire cavities at prodigious rates. A new spot has formed since my last visit that is now large enough to poke with my tongue and see in the mirror. My dentist will wait until they get a bit bigger (the first sign of pain) and fill them then. The issue is that I’d like to see if there were some way to prevent these cavities from forming in the first place (aside from you know, brushing my teeth more than 2x a day, since I’m really only a morning & evenings kind of brusher, and, er… flossing, since I’m just really bad at it). Wayfare claims her dentist gives her teeth some sort of plastic film every year or so to seal out the worst of the damage. I remember getting this as a kid, and figured that they must have found out it caused cancer or something, since they stopped giving it to me. I asked my dentist about it recently, and she said she wouldn’t bother scheduling me to get it since with my “ferocious” bite, I’d wear through it in about a month, so there was no point. Now, it’s good that she’s always dealt honestly with me (AFAIK), but Wayfare thinks I should get a new dentist who will let me pay to get a much-needed protective coating on my teeth, and I think she has a point.

As for the coke that I drink, Wayfare’s been looking into buying 2L bottles instead of cans. I like the idea, since I know it takes less material to package a single bottle than a handful of cans, though I don’t know about the downstream recycling efficiency (apparently they make money recycling aluminum?). The big benefit she sees is that you can adjust the amount you want from a bottle, taking less than a full 355 mL if that’s all you want (though I’m not sure she’s counting the extra load of dishes in her figuring). The cost is comparable: cans are on sale for $3.33 for a 12-pack every other week (though the regular price is a painful $8 for 24, or $4.50 for 12, but unless I’m desperate I never pay that much), which is about 0.078 cents/mL, while bottles go for between $1-$2 (depending on sales, again), which works out to 0.05-0.1 cents/mL. However, I find cans to be much more convenient since there’s a nice spot on the door for them (whereas bottles would take up room on the already crowded shelf used for juice and milk), they’re more portable for taking in the car and to work, and since they’re small, it’s easy to keep a number of different flavours in the fridge (typically I have 2 7-up, 4 Coke, 2 diet mountain dew, 1 ginger ale, and 1 orange pop or root beer), and most importantly, you can finish a can of coke before it goes flat.

To help with that problem Wayfare recently got a pop bottle pump, a little device that replaces the bottle cap with a small bulb pump. The idea is that you use the pump to keep the pressure inside the bottle high so that the carbonation doesn’t come out of solution. It seemed to work well enough at first, as I was able to use the pump to make the pressure inside the bottle high enough that I was barely able to dent it with my fingers. However, the seal on it was very poor, and after about an hour, it was actually worse than simply screwing the cap back on in the first place (which might seem impossible, until you realize that with the old fashioned cap-only method you get atmospheric plus the pressure of some of the lost carbonation over an hour, whereas with a leaky pump seal you’ll always bleed back to atmospheric as the pop degasses). So it looks like the best method is still my uncle Al’s (yes, I have an uncle Al and an uncle Bob, it’s very stereotypical :) method of simply crushing the bottle until the liquid is near the top, then screw on the top. I haven’t had as much luck with that, since I’m as the Gungans say “… er… clumsy”, so in the process of trying to squeeze the bottle, I usually get a bit flying out the top if it’s more than half full, and if it’s less than half full then it gets really hard to squeeze enough of the air out of the bottle. It remains a handy method for crushing bottles and having them keep their small size for recycling, however.

Well, it’s been a slow week in the blogosphere (I can’t believe I’m using the blog jargon now… ugh).

Most of my Canadian friends/regular reads still seem to be reeling from the election (Conservatives? Balance of power in the Bloc’s hands? Seriously? What’s wrong with kids these days). I, myself had almost a week off from the web page, following having something very uncomfortable shoved in a place where things do not go back in, which was itself followed by the flu. I smell sick now, and I hate that (it also usually means I’m in for a big nasty week-long flu). That is what’s keeping me up at the moment, writing truly uninspired blog posts that will haunt my archives, forever wishing that I could expunge their uselessness. DJ_Paradise has been putting up a few entries, but still hasn’t added my live journal account to his friends list, so I still can’t post comments (though I’m not even sure live journal sent it out; I got so many errors registering and all that there). I don’t know what exactly he’s up to, but he’s talking about government forms and storing his stuff, so I’m thinking he unwittingly signed up for a military tour of Afghanistan, or he’s getting a job in another country. Netbug’s been dead silent, and we’re still waiting on Baum’s update (with pictures!) after his trip out West.

Thanks to Michael Giest (whose blog I’ve been checking weekly since I was sent there by the CBC to learn more about the Sam Bulte scandal) I found out that a Canadian record company has stood up to the RIAA prosecuting teens for downloading music in the states, offering to pay the legal fees of the hapless teenager in his fight against the RIAA. Makes me want to go out and buy that BNL Christmas album after all. In a similar vein, here’s a funny parody of the MPAA warnings prior to watching a movie on DVD. Interestingly, the RIAA is demanding that the boy, who has 600 “suspect” songs on his computer pay $9000 in damages ($4500 if he pays by a certain date, without fighting it in court). That works out to $7.50 (US) per song. I know that they like to charge more as a penalty than they would to sell legally in the first place, but that’s pretty ridiuclous. I completely disagree with their insane crackdown and abuse of the American legal system to begin with, but this is just going over the top. If they made the fees more reasonable they might actually get people to pay the royalties. IIRC, a song from iTunes runs about $1. A fine of $1-2 would not be too unreasonable, and it would have the added bonus of not requiring them to serve up the bandwidth to provide it. All they have to do is surf the user’s shared folder on Kazaa or whatever filesharing program they’re using and send them a bill. Then instead of being total dicks and suing a few kids at a time for a few thousand each, they could hit thousands of people with bills for a few hundred. At those prices, people might be more willing to pay, and they could even make the whole thing fire-and-forget (let the users decide which songs they need to pay for — after all, they might have ripped an MP3 in their shared directories from a CD they already own and shouldn’t pay twice).

Back to the topic of blogs: I’m really abusing the “uncategorized” category for my posts. I didn’t really know what I’d be talking about with this website when I was setting WordPress up, and even after having 40-some posts up now (yowzah!) I still don’t know what sort of categories I should set up. I had planned on making Rants a separate section (similar to how Recipes are handled now), but most of them have fitted neatly into “insanity”. School & Gaming are obvious, but that still leaves a lot of other uncategorized posts, and as Wayfare told me she learned in library school “everything has a classification, if you use a ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘uncategorized’ folder, you fail.” If anyone sees a pattern or three to reorganize my posts (I can resort them post hoc) feel free to let me know.

This has been a very bad year for hurricanes, with some very large, devastating storms hitting the equatorial region (notably New Orleans), and with the season extending well past the usual end-date, exhausting the prepared list of named storms and spilling over into greek letters.

Last year, storms damaged lettuce and tomato production in Mexico, leading to shortages in grocery stores and Subway restaurants. This year’s weather hasn’t improved the supply situation too much (though the notices in the windows have long since come down). As a result, Subway staff have really been skimping on the toppings for the last year or so, and that’s really starting to get on my nerves.

You see, I really like Subway. They’re furiously expensive (getting subs for two people costs as much as pizza for 3, and IMNSHO, pizza tastes better — or to put it in Wayfare’s terms, you get leftovers with pizza, so that’s two meals you don’t have to cook!), but even at the end of the day the sandwiches are hardly ever skanky, and it’s no trouble to get your sandwich built the way you want, even if you’re a freak of nature like me (no, just one slice of tomato for me). I can even fool myself into thinking they’re healthy (as far as I know, they’re the best of the fast food options out there, but still not as good as a nice plate of mashed potatoes or an actual salad with actual low-fat dressing)

But lately, Subway’s been pissing me off. First came the lettuce shortage, which hit me the hardest since basically all I get on my sub is lettuce (bun, cheese, lots of lettuce, bit of onion, cucumber, and if the tomato looks good, one slice of tomato). Sure, it tripled in price for a while there, and hasn’t fully come down, but it’s still the cheapest of the sub toppings. It’s still filler… like popcorn at the movie theatre, it’s not a big factor in the final sale price. It used to be that I’d ask for lots of lettuce, then if they didn’t put enough on, I’d ask for more, and they’d comply. The last few times though, I’ve asked for more and they’ve looked at me and just put on like two leaves, which barely brought the whole affair up to what used to be the default amount of lettuce before the shortage (nowhere near my salad-in-a-bun “lots of lettuce” sub). They’re even skimping on the other toppings, with the cucumbers being sliced so thin lately as to be transparent. Here’s a quick hint: lettuce & cucumbers are virtually tasteless, their purpose in my sandwich is to add crunch, and thinly sliced toppings in small quantities add no crunch, it just leaves me with a soggy bun with green stuff in the middle.

Though maybe it’s an attempt to get me to toast my bun so that I’ll recover some manner of texture.

Anyhow, next up came the cancellation of the “Sub Club” stamp program. This also hurt, since it effectively raised the price of eating there by about 10% (one sandwich of every 9 was free, but you had to buy a drink), and there was no corresponding decrease in base price. Keep in mind that the reasons stated for axing the program were theft: when I asked, one employee told me people were printing sub stamps by the roll and selling them on eBay (I have to wonder though, if they were printed off or simply stolen). So by axing the program they should have been saving enough money to pass some along to their loyal customers, whether through base cuts, or a new sub club program (perhaps just carry the card to flash for a 10% discount, along the lines of the coke card that ran for a few summers). But no, instead, prices have gone up! The thing is, unless the fraud was really widespread, I can’t really see them losing that much money, since you still have to buy a drink.

Which brings me to my third point, and this one actually predates the lettuce shortage: the nebulous Subway price structure. When I go in to order a sub, I have no idea how much I’m going to have to pay when I get to the register. It varies store-to-store quite significantly, and even a little visit-to-visit. When I first started eating there it was $4.25 for a footlong veggie sub at the UofT cafeteria, and $4.59 at the subway down the street. Prices have gone up since then, passing the magic $5 price point. The one close to the hospital here typically charged me $4.94 for a veggie sub, then raised it to $5.05 after about a year. Since then, it’s fluctuated almost daily between $5.05 and $5.26. The one by the grocery store has never rung in below $5 for me, usually at $5.15, but sometimes going to $5.74 (are they ringing me in for extra cheese I didn’t order, I wonder?). I’ve seen the phenomenon mentioned on other blogs too, so I know that I’m not the only one who’s seen this.

And then my yearly Subway coupons arrived in the mail, the same as usual: a few coupons for buy a drink and 6″ sub, get another 6″ sub free, and a few for the 12″ ones for 99 cents. But the ones that came to Wayfare’s parents’ house (for some reason, my parents never get any good coupons) were 49 cents for the 6″ and $1.49 for the bonus footlong. Now the prices have even gone up for the two we could get with coupons? What a rip-off!

But then I got some Quiznos coupons in the mail yesterday, and they’re better deals (and more of them, too!). A straight $2 off coupon if you just want one sub and nothing else, a free upgrade to a combo, and a buy one get one free coupon (no need to buy a drink if you’re taking it home anyway). I’ve never been to Quiznos, largely because their angle has centred around the toasted subs (and people always tell me they’re more expensive), which just doesn’t work for my plain veggie sub. But with these decent coupons, I think I’ll try them soon and let you know what I think.