What Is Currently Making Me Angry With the Heat of a Thousand Firey Suns

I need to update information on a website I control with information about a company in India -- and I was just on their contact page a few minutes ago, which loaded and gave me all the data I needed. However, that page now will not load, and no amount of googling or futzing around has made IE just show the god-damned cached page you had five minutes ago!

Back in the early days of the 'net, it wasn't uncommon to set your browser to "work offline," and poke through the pages you'd loaded before. But that seems impossible now, and of course that's exactly what I need right now.

I really, really hate it when technology removes capabilities.

Update, two minutes later: Before anyone asks, I has a couple of IE windows open at all time at work because our portal site is set up to only authenticate with IE, so most of the systems & resources I have to use only work that way.

Heaving a Large Sigh

So Google is going to shut down Reader, now?

(They aren't satisfied with all of their other failed products, and they need to get rid of one that works well and that I use every day?)

Is Bloglines still out there? I guess I need to start researching what else is out there. And I'm sure porting over all of my folders is going to be a huge pain, curse those Mountain View bastards.

Anyone out there using anything particularly good to read RSS feeds? I really don't want to go back to a list of bookmarks and nothing keeping track of read/unread.

A Short Political Comment, In Re the US 2nd Amendment

Directed to whoever needs to hear it:

Look, nimrod, no part of the Constitution gives you the right to rebel against the government. No part of any legitimate country's legal framework could do so, and, in the case of the US, rebellion is specifically outlawed in the Constitution -- Article III, Section 3, under Treason: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

If you declare that you need guns to battle against the government, you are not protecting your rights under the 2nd Amendment; you are actually declaring your intent to betray your country. Perhaps it's time to empty the prisons of drug criminals so we can fill them up anew with traitors.

Impressing People Who Can't Do Math

I got an e-mail with this message in it some days ago, and it rolled up in my inbox until I had time to properly focus scorn upon it.

Oooh! I'm one of the top twenty million profiles! Let me drop everything and start celebrating.

If your marketing communications assume that your customers can't do basic math, you're doing it wrong.

The Rare Obligatory Political Post

Or, A brief jeremiad aimed at people who agree with Hobby Lobby and the various other companies jumping on their bandwagon.

For those who haven't been following the news, first a chain of profitable craft stores, and now a whole slew of other organizations, are claiming that they shouldn't have to pay for some of the health-care requirements of the Affordable Care Act [1] (aka "Obamacare") because it interferes with their religious freedom.

I know the religious freedom card is one with powerful sentiment, particularly among the kind of white middle-class Christians who have never had to suffer the tiniest bit of actual persecution in their lives, but please do think through the implications.

This is a private company -- not a religious institution, not a non-profit, not any kind of specialized organization, but a plan ordinary company trying to make money -- that wants to enshrine in law a right to avoid following a particular piece of law. And the basis of that right to skip out on a law would be their own interpretation of the personal religious beliefs of the owners. Logically, there's no reason why the same argument couldn't be extended to any company -- or any individual, since a company is a legal person just as a natural person is -- and any law.

In other words, Hobby Lobby is trying to make it impossible for any laws to be enforced at all if anyone can think up a pseudo-religious explanation for wanting not to follow that law. This is literally a prescription for anarchy.

Look, think of even this mild extension of the doctrine: what about a company run by Christian Scientists? They don't believe in modern medicine at all, so does that mean that company should be free to avoid paying any health-care coverage?

This is just a stupid legal argument. Admit it, give it up, and move on. Your side has comprehensively lost the battle against contraception, and the tide is just not going to shift back the way you want it.


[1] Specifically, the requirement that employers cover FDA-approved contraception for female employees, which Hobby Lobby and its lik say they consider abortion. This is actually one of the core issues: this case is based on what they consider a procedure to be, not what the general understanding or the actual scientific facts of that procedure are. In other words, they're demanding that their faith be given preferential legal treatment, because it is their belief.

(inspired by this Chuck Asay cartoon, which I couldn't manage to make work for Editorial Explanations, since it's not even wrong)

The Lack of Context Should Protect Me

Look, nimrod, your Annual Meeting cannot, by definition, be "an unprecedented event."

And if you're a group of smart people, you know that already, and have no excuses.

In Which I Demand More Windows

What is the deal with new versions of applications not wanting to have multiple windows? Is this some new trend among designers?

I finally upgraded to Office 2010 at work recently (kicking and screaming, because I needed the newest whiz-bang Excel formatting for a particular project), only to find that Outlook searches all now run in the main window. That's horrible -- the whole point of a search is to hive it off in its own little window, so you can refer to it, and do other things while it's searching away.

I've also been avoiding upgrading to the newest iteration of iTunes, since that also, apparently, doesn't allow the user to create any additional windows. (So this clearly isn't either a MS or an Apple thing -- both of those bastards are doing it.) Again, I usually have at least five iTunes windows open at a time, because I'm building a playlist or just playing music in one window while I sync various devices in another window.

And what I'm seeing of Windows 8 looks like the worst aspects of both of those multiplied, all sleek surfaces and one-thing-at-a-time-ness.

Programmers: your users like multiple sessions. We like control. We like doing what we want to do, and not waiting for your system to get back to us. Put it back the way it was, or we will be forced to hurt you.

Ghouls of the Media

I said what I had to say about the Newtown massacre over the weekend (though the topic is certainly coming up over at Editorial Explanations, my other blog -- look for a bunch of cartoons with bizarre slants tomorrow).

But I do have to note one particularly slimy sidenote.

My last name is Wheeler; one of the kids murdered in Newtown had the same last name. And Newtown is less than a hundred miles away from me, which is practically next door, in US terms. There's no connection, as far as I know -- Wheeler is a common name.

But there was a call, from some random reporter from my local paper, on my answering machine yesterday. I have to assume they sat someone down with a phone book and a list of last names of the dead, to scare up potential relatives who might give a sad quote to their fish-wrap.

And at moments like that, I'm happy that the US newspaper industry is in such decline, if this is how they work a major story. It's disgusting, stupid, and a massive waste of time, all in the service of "human interest." And The Wife wonders why I'm such a misanthrope!

What Does, and Doesn't, Kill People

Yesterday, in two great nations, alike in self-regard but different in nearly everything else, there were startlingly similar attacks. Young men, afterwards described as mentally disturbed, each burst into primary schools, attacking over twenty children, and some adults, with intent to kill.

In Chengdeng, China, Min Yingjun stabbed twenty-two children and one adult outside the local school, sending nine to hospitals. No one is reported to have died, and no life-threatening injuries are reported.

In Newtown, USA, Adam Lanza shot twenty children and seven adults, only three of whom survived long enough to reach a hospital. All twenty children and six of the adults are dead.

The gun-rights folks like to say that crazy people are everywhere, and that we can never completely stop them. That is true but besides the point. Maybe Yingjun was just as crazy as Lanza, and maybe there was no way to stop either of them before their murderous rampages. Even granting those arguments for the moment, Lanza had access to a bulletproof vest and high-powered handguns, so he was able to kill people in an industrial, hideously efficient way that similarly crazy, murderous people in most nations of the world simply can't.

Maybe Newton will finally be the USA's Dunblane, the uniquely shocking event that makes this country wake up and realize that its gun policies are insane and horribly destructive. (And I write that as a man who worked for a book club for hunters for five years; I believe in the rights of individuals to own some guns, under some circumstances, for some purposes.) And maybe the discussion, and the legal framework of gun control, will finally move forward from the NRA's paranoid scorched-earth defense of the right of every last lunatic in the country to have military weaponry and armor, though I suspect the NRA itself will need to be marginalized and shouted down to make that happen.

For that to happen, though, we'll all need to remember Min Yingjun as well as Adam Lanza. This was not that cliche, the one lone crazy young man -- the world has thousands of similarly lonely crazy young men. Some countries do a better job than others of identifying them and getting them help, and some countries do a better job than others of protecting themselves when those young men go on rampages. And we can identify the policies that work, in both ways, and fight to have them implemented where they don't already exist.

Because the USA is currently horrible at both things: we don't find and help these men, and we don't stop them from arming themselves like elite soldiers to slaughter our children. And that is simply unacceptable for a nation that keeps insisting that it's the beacon of liberty and the wellspring of justice for the world.