I Ordered My New Sidekick 3 Today!

I am SO excited! I ordered my new Sidekick 3 today!

As anybody who has followed any of my writings for more than, oh, a day, knows, I extoll the virtues of the Sidekick whenever I get a chance. It is only the most versatile, under-rated of all of the all-in-one devices out there. In short, it kick’s the Blackberry’s battery door all over town.

In fact, I wrote about how by using a Sidekick you can keeep all of your data, on every single computer you own (PC and Mac) synced – all with each other.

You can read that article here:

http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/syncing-your-life.

And now the Sidekick just got even better! With the release of the Sidekick 3 they have added EDGE (finally) and bluetooth (FINALLY!), and even an MP3 player.

I have a friend who works for T-Mobile, and they let me play with theirs (the Sidekick!.. get your mind out of the gutter!), and let me tell you, it is one sweet device.

If it works as I hope that it will, I will finally give up carrying a separate phone, and be down to one single device that truly does it all.

I’ll keep you posted; it’s due to arrive early next week.

This is a contraband picture:

Taking the Piss Out of a Dry Cleaner that Won’t

Today it was definitely time to take the dry cleaning in. First, it hadn’t been done in way too long. And second, our female cat had decided to stake her claim – if you know what I mean – on one of my husband’s dress shirts, and so that shirt definitely needed a little spot and odor removing TLC.

So I bundled it all up and took it to a certain dry cleaning shop in Sunnyvale – let’s call them “$1.75 Cleaners” because, hey, that’s their name – and I had the following somewhat surrealistic, and thoroughly irritating conversation.

Me: I have some clothes here that I need to have cleaned. Let’s see, I have four sweaters, some shirts to be laundered, and a suit – do you do suits here?

$1.75 Cleaners guy (whom, I might add, was no spring chicken, certainly someone who had seen a cleaning or two): Yes, we do suits.

Me: Super. Ok, oh, and this one shirt is in this plastic bag because our cat urinated on it.

$1.75 Cleaners guy: What do you expect us to do with it?

Me, rather stunned: Uh..clean it?

$1.75 Cleaners guy: Oh no, we can’t do that.

WHAT…THE…

$1.75 Cleaners guy continues: They wash them all together, it will get on all the other laundry. We can’t have that.

So correct me if I’m wrong, but when an article of clothing or linen gets a stain on it, or – gasp – an odor, aren’t you supposed to take it to the dry cleaner?

Isn’t that what they DO?

Isn’t that their reason for BEING?

Morons.

We had been going to that particular shop ever since it opened; now we’ll go past that shop and thumb our noses when it closes.

Which it probably will soon, what with its not actually wanting to do what cleaners do for their customers.

Not to mention that new sign in their window which says, in effect, “It now costs $2.50 to get your item cleaned at $1.75 cleaners.”

Nice.

I give them two months, tops.

Jellyfish Picture

I took this at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, in their awesome jellyfish exhibit.

A Word by Any Other Word…

Maybe I’m getting cantankerous – or maybe flat out intolerant – in my old age. But having seen the word “partner” twice used in the past 5 minutes, in two completely unrelated fora, to mean something completely other than what “partner” used to mean, this rant just overflowed.

Remember when “partner” meant the person with whom you were in business?

And remember when “bad” meant not good?

How about when “sick” meant ill?

And hey, remember when “red” and “blue” meant two of the primary colours? And “I’m blue” meant that you were sad?

C’mon, help me out here… I’m sure that you can think of more… is anybody else here longing for the ‘good old days’?

Why I Love My Sidekick and WordPress

These very words that you are reading now, and the penultimate post with the picture of the Starbucks fashion horse, are why I love the combination of my Sidekick and WordPress ‘blog by email’ function.
As I write and post this, I am doing 70mph down Highway 24, headed on our way to try a new raw food restaurant in Berkeley (chauffered by my indulgent husband).
Blogging from the road (litereally) rocks, it just doesn’t get any more real time than this!

WTF is She Wearing? Part 2

What is it about Starbucks that attracts people who dress like this? The good news is that if her fishnets threaten to fall down she has a bunch of safety pins with which to hold them up. They are all safely stashed in her earlobe.

14 Year Old Sues MySpace for Date Gone Wrong

Update! The lawsuit has been dismissed!

A fourteen year old Texas girl and her mother (and let’s face it, it’s really the mother, and the damned lawyers) are suing MySpace because girliepoo went out on a date with Pete Solis, a 19 year old who, they claim, sexually assaulted her.

Apparently the fact that the 14 year old went out with the 19 year old Pete Solis is MySpace’s fault.

Because, you know, it’s wrong for a 19 year old to talk with a 14 year old (which is all that MySpace enabled).

Now here’s the kicker: they are ticked because he supposedly lied to her, telling her that he was a high school senior. Of course, it’s not unheard of for a high school senior to be 19 years old, and so who is to say that Solis lied about that. But more to the point, apparently it’s ok with mom if her 14-year old dates a high school senior, but not a 19 year old?

Thank goodness for Solis that he didn’t actually have relations with the girl, or he’d be looking at jail time for statutory relations, and who knows what the girl and her mom would be demanding from MySpace!

According to the girl’s lawyers, “The suit alleges that MySpace.com had full knowledge that sexual predators were contacting young children on the website but did nothing to stop it. Additionally, the suit alleges that MySpace.com fraudulently represents it has security measures in place to protect its young members but, in reality, it does not.”

Jesus H. Christ, didn’t mom have full knowledge that her little girl was playing around on the Internet, and didn’t mom have full knowledge that sexual predators contact young children on the Internet, but do nothing to stop it?

Why the f*ck doesn’t anyone take personal responsibility for themselves – and their children – any more?

What the f*ck was that 14 year old doing going out with someone she thought was a high school senior?

And why the f*ck is it MySpace’s fault?

I’ll tell you why. Because the capitalizing leech of a mother wants $30million from MySpace, that’s why.

Whose to say that the girl and her mom didn’t just set MySpace up? Wouldn’t that be sweet, to find out that they looked for someone over 18, just so that they could sue MySpace for the money?

Said MySpace’s Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam “No one is more committed to Internet safety than MySpace. We take aggressive measures to protect our members. Ultimately, Internet safety is a shared responsibility. We encourage everyone on the Internet to engage in smart web practices and have open family dialogue about how to apply offline lessons in the online world.”

Apparently it doesn’t matter.

*In an interesting footnote, it turns out that Pete Solis is counter-suing, claiming that the girl lied, saying that she was 15. This is relevant because if you are 14 or under, MySpace makes you have a private profile, so that people who don’t know you can’t find you. So it seems that girliepoo intentionally bypassed those protections which the lawsuit claims MySpace doesn’t have.

Talk About a Shill!

Our favourite Whole Foods is selling these bird houses. Apparently a pair of nesting birds thought them of good quality, because they built a nest and hatched a family in one! There were four of these houses altogether, and we noticed that Whole Foods had quickly taped over the holes of the other three! (But they had put a hand-written note on this one saying to be careful to not disturb it.)

It was too funny walking among the outdoor produce at Whole Foods while this baby stuck his head out of the display and squawked!

From the Men’s Room Door

What the Hell Did They Expect 7 Marines (Jackson, Thomas, Pennington, Hutchins, Bacos, Jodka, Shumate and Magincalda) to Do to 1 Iraqi (Hasham Ibrahim Awad)?

The only thing surprising about the indictment charging 7 U.S. Marines (Lawrence G. Hutchins III, Trent D. Thomas, Melson J. Bacos, Tyler A. Jackson, John J. Jodka, Jerry E. Shumate Jr., Robert B. Pennington and Marshall L. Magincalda) with the brutal and unprovoked murder of Iraqi Hasham Ibrahim Awad, in Hamdaniya, Iraq, is that anybody is surprised by it.

There is a war going on – agree with it or not – you can hardly disagree that it is a war.

And the Marines, above all, are trained to kill first, and, uh, not ask questions. Let alone think.

You train someone to be a killing machine, tell them that the enemy looks like this, sounds like that and dresses like them, and then you are surprised when he kills someone who looks like this, sounds like that and dresses like them?

You let a pack of trained killing machines loose (for some value of “loose”) in enemy territory (for some value of “enemy” and, for that matter, “territory”) and you don’t expect that killing to machine to.. you know .. kill?

What the f*ck did you expect them to do? Sidle up to the Iraqi people and have a cuddle?

For chrissakes, these are the same guys who are coming home and killing their wives, their parents and their friends, because they have been trained so effectively to kill, and not so effectively to cope.

You think they would kill their loved ones, but not someone in the country in which they are trying to drive out the scourge of the scum and where they have a hard time discerning who is the bad guy and who is the good guy and hey after a while under those conditions doesn’t it all blur together? I mean, their wives sure don’t look like Iraqi men but they are getting pasted too.

Now, before someone accuses me of being down on the man, I would remind them that I am a veteran, and darned proud of it.

What I’m saying is this: you made this mess. Now cop to it. Yeah, what Jackson, Thomas, Pennington, Hutchins, Bacos, Jodka, Shumate and Magincalda did was heinous. Unforgiveable – all the more so because they alledgedly dragged Hasham Ibrahim Awad from his house, unprovoked, and returned him – dead – the next day.

But while they need to and deserve to be judged – and harshly – don’t leave them hanging in the wind to take all of the blame.

Just as it’s the owner at fault when a pit bull attacks..well… you get it.