Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

I can’t find a damn thing wrong with this analysis.
Of course I work in Technical Support two days a week, so that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

2) Stop trying to drive.
It is exceedingly rare that you’ll have a problem that the technician has never heard before. Most calls fall into one of a dozen or so categories that your tech has seen a hundred times at least. They know how to fix it.
There’s nothing wrong with telling a technician what you tried to right before you called. But after that, you’ll find that most tech support calls go faster if you just do what the technician tells you to do with a minimum of fuss. Interrupting to give information you weren’t asked for, to say “I already did that,” or worse, to say, “why am I doing this?” will generally only slow things down. Let the technician do what he wants, then if you’re really curious ask him after the fact what it was all about.

Abso-god-damn-lutely. Shut up and let me drive. I’ve been here before. Did I mention my 10+ years working with this product? Beats your 10 minutes all hollow.

4) Don’t emphasize your credentials and experience and try to impress the tech with how smart you are.

Damn straight. Start trying to tell me how smart you are and you immediately go to the back of the queue. (I don’t do phone support, so you’ll get an email from me when I’m done with everyone else.) If you flaunt your MCSE, I might get back to you next week.
And that guy Jerry who made an ass out of himself with his comment would be lucky if I even acknowledged his existence. That’s what we have junior techs for.

Apparently CBS considered (for half a second) pitting Rush against Slick Willie for their 60 Minutes revival of Point/Counterpoint. One CBS staffer characterized the possibility as “it would have been a fair fight.” Another take was:

“Dole isn’t a patsy; he was a good choice to go up against Clinton,” says a CBS news producer. “Limbaugh? Gingrich? This is a former president we’re talking about. Next people will be saying we should have signed Ann Coulter to do it.”

Well, first of all, Dole is a patsy. Clinton is a former impeached president who was found guilty of perjury (a felony) and lost his license to practice law, in case anyone had forgotten.
And I think Ann Coulter would have been a PERFECT foil for Bill. I can just hear it: “Bill, you impudent slut.”
I’ll bet money the lovely Ann dreamed about this last night after CBS made the announcement…”If it could only have been me…”

Helen Thomas.
Need I say more? Well, I will anyway:

Now syndicated by Hearst Newspapers, Mrs. Thomas has also denounced Mr. Bush outside the confines of the White House briefing room. “This is the worst president ever,” Mrs. Thomas told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif., in January. “He is the worst president in all of American history.”

This is the worst news person ever. This is the worst news person in all of American history.
I hope she’s first up against the wall when we start shooting liberals.
UPDATE: Oh, and the lovely and talented Ann Coulter doesn’t agree with Mrs. Thomas about who the worst president in all of American history is, either:

If impeached former president Bill Clinton had ever caught a fish as big as Mohammed, he would still go down in history as America’s worst president, but at least he would have a single foreign policy accomplishment. Last September, Clinton was among those braying that it was insanity to go to war with Iraq rather than concentrating on al-Qaida: “Saddam Hussein didn’t kill 3,100 people on Sept. 11; Osama bin Laden did.”

(My emphasis.) Big surprise there, eh?

…now they want to impeach the President.
More proof that, as Rush continually points out about liberals in general, the DemocRATic Party is funnier when it’s out of power than when it’s in.

…the Ninth Circuit is out.

Like a favorite hymn learned in childhood, the words are as comforting as they are familiar: “The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, accordingly, is reversed.”

Ya gotta love it. Read the whole thing.

NEW YORK — Former President Bill Clinton and his opponent in the 1996 presidential election, Bob Dole, will debate national issues in a series of segments for the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes.

A half-senile old moderate vs. an impeached scumbag Commie.
Hopefully that will kill the ratings for 60 Minutes, whose 15 minutes were up years ago.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that states may put pictures of convicted sex offenders on the Internet without unconstitutionally punishing them twice, a victory for states that use the Web to warn of potential predators in neighborhoods.

Finally! Some sense has been made.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for six justices, said that the law is not punitive, and therefore it does not punish the inmates after the fact.
“Our system does not treat dissemination of truthful information in furtherance of a legitimate governmental objection as punishment,” he wrote. “The purpose and the principal effect of notification are to inform the public for its own safety, not to humiliate the offender.”

Yep.

In a dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that “however plain it may be that a former sex offender currently poses no threat of recidivism, he will remain subject to long-term monitoring and inescapable humiliation.”

Justice Ginsburg, them’s the breaks. There is no class of criminal I think more richly deserves such humiliation as someone who would sexually abuse and (in some recent cases) murder a small child. No matter how much you reform and apologize and try to make it up, you’ve destroyed at least one life and ruined countless others. It would not bother me one whit to see states make child molestation a capital offense. A few justifiable hangin’s and Amber Alerts would be few and far between.
You can talk all you want about a free society and fairness and unlikelihood of recidivism, but most child molesters ARE recidivists. It’s a sickness, and the only way to cure it is either to make damn sure that everyone keeps an eye on the sicko and prevents him from striking again, or to simply execute him as being unfit for human association. TOUGH. SHIT. If I had a minor daughter or son and one of these assholes got within spitting distance of her or him, both barrels of my 12-gauge would be a-firin’ in his general direction. BELIEVE IT.

This day got hosed, too. I’m not going to be able to post anything till tomorrow at the earliest.
As a heads up, One Man’s Vote will be on hiatus next week. I have to travel to an undisclosed location to act like an employee, and while I’ll have internet access (boy will I have internet access), I won’t have much time to blog.

Well…that day certainly went fast…
Read yesterday’s posts 🙂

The Professor notes that Swedes are now reversing themselves on recycling.
Sorry, but I knew recycling was crap years ago, even before Dr. William Rathje, et al., published Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage in 1992. It’s a waste of money and resources that could be better used for other things. And burning trash can be done cleanly and without need for huge landfills that you can’t do anything with but use for parks for a thousand years.
LATER THOUGHT: Before anyone jumps me about what to do with the ash from incineration, first of all ash takes up a lot less space than the trash it came from, and secondly, I think it can be used for various things. It’s been ten years since I read Rathje’s book so you’ll have to excuse me for not remembering offhand what his solution to that problem was. However, even if you bury it, it takes up a lot less landfill space than unburned (and often uncompacted) trash, and again, you get the benefit of the heat of combustion as mentioned in the article.
I don’t expect to see a renaissance in backyard trash burners and basement incinerators of the type that were commonly used when I was a tad. But a properly-designed mass burner can get things hot enough to totally destroy just about anything cleanly. The black smoke and stink that used to waft through neighborhoods on trash-burning day (and on leaf-burning day, for that matter) are the product of incomplete combustion due to temperatures too low to do a good job of destroying the trash, which is generally not only designed to be a little sterner than waste paper (think the old paper milk cartons), but is wet to boot. Using natural gas for heat and a blower for forced draft to really get the heat up would have solved a multitude of problems. (Of course it probably would have burned down a few houses, but that’s another reason why municipal mass burners are a better idea…:)