the Toyota hybrid SUV I've been driving has been bugging me for a while. it makes obnoxious noise from the rear axle, which I'm told is rotational and "fixed" after hundreds of dollars, only to become "un-fixed" shortly there after. alignment? bearings? whatever. the noise corresponds to annoying drop in gas mileage. when I want to haul anything in it I can't let it stick out the rear with a red flag since the rear door is more like a minivan. the seats don't fold flat so there's always one uncomfortable dog when I go on a road trip. the temperature control... doesn't, really - and Toyota told me that it was working as intended. last but not least, I've really been unable to convince Toyota to sell me the nav system upgrade they keep sending me flyers for in the mail. wth.

yesterday, my ESO and I websurfed a bit to look at inventories, and then went to the local Ford dealer to test drive an Escape Hybrid. I don't like Ford dealers, they are all hard sells and really obnoxious, but these cars are spiffy. both 4WD and 2WD get better mileage than the Highlander. they drive like an SUV, the back window opens, the rear seats fold flat and low, the electronics are pretty awesome. they all sync with a bluetooth phone and have voice-activated nav systems. the higher end ones will rip your CDs to an onboard disk even, so you don't have carry any in the car, and selecting what to play is voice activated. all in all lots of doodads if you get the high end options package. and all of them, regardless of options, are cheaper than the Toyota one. so we bought one, traded in the Toyota. it's black and spiffy and feels much more like my Rodeo, which I really liked, than the Highlander it's replacing ever did. buying it took a long time becuase the hard sell really put me off. the first sales guy lied to me - egregiously - and when I caught him at it suddenly I was being talked to by a Senior Sales Rep.

wary of Fords, I got him to throw in 5 years maintenance, including oil changes and all that. we had some back and forth on options, I didn't want to spend that much but I think in the end I still did but got a rather insanely low interest rate as well as discounted extended warranty and more on the trade in. first payment is in February. the payments are closer to the Rodeo's too. the insurance - going from a 2006 highlander to a 2012 escape - went up $38. that's it: just $38.

I can't believe I have a Ford again. well, we have it, both our names are on it.



ah well. I did enjoy handing the Toyota recall notices on the Highlander to the sales guy along with the keys for the trade in.

I hear Ford is discontinuing the Hybrid Escapes, as well as the ability to use "Flex Fuel" (aka natural gas). what an idiot move. I've not talked to a single person who has driven one who doesn't like it. I guess Ford isn't used to selling cars people actually like? Google uses them as part of their fleet. SF Taxicab does too; they meet airport regulations for emissions and fuel economy. that right there is a lot of money Ford is walking away from.

this summer I gave up on Apple Lossless encoding. I converted everything to FLAC, retagged it with Jaikoz, re-retagged the classical manually, and got the music magic mixer/genpuid working again, sinking all the data into the tags. I also got most of the tracks with the right artwork.

I updated the squeeze server with a plugin that tracks statistics too. that's sort of neat, it's rare I pick what I'm listening to with more care than selecting a song I want to hear and making sure the mix isn't awful (every once in a while it is). so watching what gets played and not is rather interesting.

that said, some observations now it's ben going a couple months:
• for some reason the mixer REALLY likes Leftfield's "Open Up" with John Lydon on the vocals. I have two different tracks and it's been played 32 times, between them.
• it also likes Sister Machine Gun's "Burn" which it's played 16 times.
• becuase I am dropping the data into the track, it stopped putting a time limit on the tracks it will mix in.
• I can mix classical and rennaissance-y music and it doesn't totally suck (it used to). however sometimes I get the feeling I'm in a Peet's Coffee.
• the spectrum of tracks it picks has smoothed out a lot since the conversion, although there are still a few train wrecks.
• I probably still have a good 40% or more tracks not yet played since conversion.

anyhow, I'm kind of happy with it. which is of course terrifying. the musicmagic software is really old and has been left in the dust by mac osx. I really hope a viable replacement is available by the time it can no longer be used at all.

a coworker today, confided in me that he has just found out that his daughter is gay. he'd mentioned in the past that she was struggling at school for a number of reasons, but recently his wife found a racy letter from the Girlfriend in her pocket whilst doing laundry.

unsure how to react, I asked if he (and his wife; she is not the mom) was ok with it all, and he said o sure, she'd confided in me years ago she thought that might be the case, and I said "ok". he went on to say he was just glad she was part of his family, becuase one couldn't get more accepting/nonjudgemental/supportive group of people for a family.

how times change, and how they stay the same, I mean gee, racy notes in the pocket!

I dunno. I mention it here becuase it really got me thinking; he was glad she was his daughter becuase otherwise she might not get the support she needs. I wish more parents loved their children so much to have that kind of attitude. I'm saying it awkwardly but it's clear he cared so much about his daughter's welfare that he was relieved that she didn't have to struggle with an unaccepting family. and that last has just really struck me.

I guess he's now in the unenviable position of knowing what's up with his kid before she told him even though he thinks it's just fine but she might not think it is really. but that's no different from the bulk of teen shenanigans, is it?

those of my Gentle Readers who know where I work and with whom, just stop speculating, I talk to a lot of people in the course of the day, I'm not saying more than this.

MassLive.com reports that a first-class passenger on Delta Airlines was arrested upon arrival at Logan International becuase he was watching child porn on his laptop in flight. apparently he didn't even bother with a privacy screen and at least one of his fellow passengers complained:

Delta officials contacted authorities just before 3 p.m. Saturday to report a male passenger "viewing pornographic images of children on his laptop computer during the flight," Procopio said in a statement.

A little more than an hour later, [Grant] Smith was on the ground being interviewed by troopers, who placed him under arrest for alleged possession of child pornography.

really? watching any porn on one's laptop in flight is bad enough, but with no privacy screen and, and, child porn? what does that say about someone's mindset, that having/watching child porn is so not a big deal that they just have it on their laptop and watch it to ease boredom on a domestic flight? ugh.

my LJ has been languishing, becuase of the way social media has been evolving. buzz-word-y or not, that's how it is. but here I am back! and it seems appropriate to explain this situation first.

I've not been wanting to post about what some call my "first world problems", worries about how this journal might end up inadvertently tying to Google+ in some way, and lastly, my getting a sudden concern about my fucked up news entries.

working backwards, I first got the idea for the articles from angelboi and was trying to save off the article. I think it's fair use for what I was doing and am pretty sure my Gentle Readers were appreciating it. but a May post in Box Turtle Bulletin about Righthaven gave me some pause, and I stopped becuase of that and did nothing else. well, I started linking the articles in Twitter. now, I have fewer Twitter followers as LJ, since I lock all Twitter posts and will continue to do so, so that's no good either. I'll probably go ahead and file the paperwork recommended here by Wired just as a CYA measure sometime in December (i.e. once I'm back from Thanksgiving). meanwhile, future fucked-up news posts will not have whole-article citations.

I had been considering using Google+ for the same purpose, but as is broadly known and somewhat controversial, Google+ requires real names... but my Google account is the same as this (and my AOL, and my Yahoo...) and I'm too paranoid about how my opinions tie back to my employer and their policies to do turn that on right now. my real name can stick with my LinkedIn, I don't really want it to tie to draNgNon. it can be surfed there from a search right now; I'm working on removing those links (I pulled the website link off my LJ about page, for example). also, Google+ appears (like Twitter), to be more about the now than the past. and I want things in a journal so I can look later.

BTW I still won't use Facebook becuase of the real names thing. also it strikes me that Facebook drama far, far eclipses LJ drama and lo and behold, it's with real names too!

as for first world problems. I hope my saying so doesn't jinx anything, but, I've been weathering the economic storm that Bush brought upon us relatively well. I'm painfully aware it's sheer luck; I still heave a sigh of relief every time I pay the mortgage, but I am actually paying the mortgage. we'll see if that keeps up in the new year... :-( I'm still encountering a lot of problems one would not worry about in a time of prosperity, and still have enough debt exposure that I worry about homelessness - a lot. but nonetheless I'm doing well enough that joining Occupy Wall Street would be hypocritical, and I think my Gentle Readers who are unemployed and/or having serious struggles would be unappreciative of these concerns, which have nonetheless dominated my life - what's left over, time-wise, other than concerns with work - in the year and a half since schoonergirl and I bought our new house together. I've tried not to write these kinds of posts in LJ for the purpose of others, it's supposed to be for future me to look at, but I can't ignore it either.

which means I had very little left over to post about, so I haven't been, well I have posted stuff to Twitter. but I find that echoing Twitter back to LJ to be annoyingly context-free. so I have not done that either. I've instead now, enabled the public LJ to echo back to Twitter, and this should be the first post that does that.

it is thanksgiving. I have a lot to be thankful for, not least of which is that I have the rest of November off work. I hope all my friends and readers here are doing well.

lastly, since I did tag this post as fucked-up news, here are a some articles I recently linked on Twitter, all of which qualify for unrelated reasons.
• the Boston Globe reports, in all seriousness, that a guy named Mullet is arrested by the FBI for 'haircut attacks' on the Amish in 3 separate states. his actions are being treated as a federal hate crime. {compare this to the Larry King murder, in which hate crime charges were dropped.}
• the Washington Post reports that a woman, unfriended on Facebook by her French lover with a Middle-eastern sounding name, reported him as a terrorist once he boarded his flight home.
• the New York Times Magazine has an extremely long article explaining how bulldogs have such terrible health problems from inbreeding and breed traits. moreover, like the official Rottweiler club in the US claims that it's for the dogs' own good that we dock the tails, the official Bulldog club in the US resists all calls to crossbreed enough in to lengthen the nose, improve the posture, and fix the wrinkles, all of which contribute to the health problems cited.

so when I first moved into Pacifica 15 years ago or so, there was a cutting in a glass of water in the kitchen window.

I kept it, and let it grow. and grow. and transplanted it into pots as it got bigger. and bigger. it was pushing on the ceiling for the last year or so.

I've always thought of it as my lucky tree. it was thriving, and I was doing alright financially. in my old house, I put it in the wealth corner. I am never 100% sure what species it is, but it looks like a money tree.

a month ago, I decided the crappy weather was done, and I would put it outside. I'd put it for a couple weeks to acclimate, and then stick it in the ground. I read up on how this sort of tree can actually grwo to 75' and tolerates temperatures down to freezing.

as soon as it went outside it got taller. the ceiling wasn't oppressing it anymore! so happy. I was happy.

and 3 days later, the dog knocked it over. OMG! I was so upset. I shrieked

but my ESO and I put it back in the pot, and moved it to sit away from the dogs. we were going to put it in the ground.

and then, a cold snap came. and it was windy. many leaves blown off. it doesn't HAVE that many leaves! we brought it back inside to recover. after all, when the dog knocked it over he knocked off the growth that was pushing against the ceiling.

now, I watch it struggle. it's taken quite a shock, and (it's done so in the past) when that happens it drops the damaged parts. I look at it and go aaaaaa. I am so dismayed. I have to just keep watering and hope it won't die.

Dear Ms *****

When you look at the full-color wolf photograph I've enclosed for you today as your FREE gift, some of the words that may come to mind include "Majestic" "Wild" "Free" ... and "Spirited."


...

well, Defenders of Wildlife, actually the words that came to mind were "cheap" "wasteful" "staged" ... and "photoshopped".

sigh

I got mail from someone pointing me to http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-h/id1280.htm

in particular, to this one



the guy to the right and behind the guy with the ink, reaching up, is my grandfather.

I noticed Sunday that Balou was coughing. wasn't sure. maybe he had something stuck in his throat.

Monday it was worse. so we took him to the vet. he so doesn't like being at the vet. he growls and growls. how is the vet spose to listen to you breathe buddy?! anyhow the vet said, bordatella was like the flu. the shot helps but doesn't not prevent for sure. it was a dual infection of both bacterial and viral and so here are 10 days of antibiotics for the bacterial and good luck with that bye.

but apparently that wasn't enough. home again it felt like I was getting a sympathy cough. and then I woke up the next morning with a sore throat. ugh, now it seems I am getting a chest cold. I know, part of it was not eating well for the last few days, bad timing with that plus exposure to a whole bunch of people at that wedding that had who knows what from other places in the country...

so it's emergen-cee for me. at least I think that's all I need to worry about. it's been so long since I had a cold I am not quite sure how much to pamper it. am trying not to breathe on anyone at work. yes, I'm still going to work. I have been taking too much time off.

the groom - Hellshot
the best man - Crisara
the maid of honor - Viljo
the bride - I can't spell her avatar's name, she just started playing...

guests whose avatars I know -
Drognin
Sigvold
Kuanchichi
Ironspike
Gleric
Hazemaker


http://kenandpeggyswedding.shutterfly.com/pictures/8 - the wedding itself starts around picture 100. picture 176 is all the wow players that were at the reception. even the ones behind the plant.