09:48 – Barbara went to dinner with a friend yesterday, so I spent the evening watching Heartland reruns. Bizarrely, Netflix streaming has only the first 14 of 18 episodes in series three, so when I finished watching the final streaming episode I popped in the DVD to watch the remaining episodes.
The first menu that comes up when the DVD loads offers a choice between English and French, so just for the hell of it I chose French. I knew that Amber Marshall is an Anglophone, but I figured some of the other cast members might be bi-lingual, so I decided to see if the original actors had dubbed the French audio in their own voices. Nope. All of the voices I heard were done by other people.
But I did notice something strange. I don’t speak French, but I grew up in a neighborhood where many of the older people spoke Italian at home. That and my years of Latin often allow me to work out the general sense of what’s being said by a native French speaker and I’ve listened to quite a bit of spoken French. All I can say is that the French soundtrack didn’t sound French to me. It sounded like a severely degraded French overlaid with a strong accent. But whatever it was, it didn’t sound to me like French. I thought people in Quebec spoke French, but apparently not.
We’re now officially out of chemistry kits. We ran dry this morning, with three orders overnight that accounted for the only three finished chemistry kits remaining in stock. So today I’ll start final assembly on another 30 and move them to the finished-goods inventory area. Then tomorrow or Friday I’ll start building yet another 30, as well as ordering in some components we’re going to run short of.
I ended up spending most of yesterday completing a project that had been high-priority on my to-do list, but had slipped down out of sight. The forensic science book hits the bookstores one week from today. At the end of each group of lab sessions, there are review questions. I was supposed to have done an answer key document for those questions, but I didn’t get around to it until yesterday. So now it’s complete and ready to go.
14:31 – I just received the last item but two required for the forensic science kit. I actually ordered those missing items, along with one other item, on 1 August from imedmart.com. Don’t ever order from them. I got an email from them soon after I placed the order, confirming that I’d placed the order, but without saying what I’d ordered. The email said they’d send me another email with tracking information once the order had shipped. So I waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, on 9 August, I visited their web site again to check the status of my order. Of the three items I’d ordered, two had disappeared from my order as shown on their web site. The third item was listed as “processing” or something similar. So I called their “support” phone number.
At first, everything seemed normal. Rotten elevator music, and a recorded voice that popped up periodically to tell me that my order was important to them. Yeah, right. After the first five minutes or so on hold, the recorded voice changed. It now told me that I was second in line and could expect a four minute wait. A minute or so later, it came back to say I was second in line and could expect a six minute wait. Eh? Then a minute or so later it came back to tell me that I was now first in line and could expect a ten minute wait. Crap. At the ten minute mark, I got a different recording that told me their customer service reps (which I’m sure was an exaggeration; there can’t be more than one, if that) were extremely busy and that I should fill out a support request form on their site. It then hung up on me. I went to that page and filled out the form, which told me I could expect a response within 36 hours.
On Friday, I got an email from them telling me that my order had shipped. Again, no details about what exactly had shipped, nor any tracking number or other information. The order showed up yesterday. The only thing it was the one item they’d admitted that I ordered. So I called back and wasted another ten minutes trying to find out if they ever intended to ship the other two items or not. I finally left them a message on their customer “support” feedback form telling them I was going to order the other two items elsewhere, so please cancel them. And that if they did ship them to me, I’d dispute the charge on my credit card.
I still needed those two items, so I went off to Google in search of a reasonable price on them. I found one, which was about $90 not including shipping for those two items, versus $79 plus shipping from imedmart.com. The vendor is called Cooper’s Nutrition/Living Naturally, and it’s obviously a small family business. I entered the two items in my shopping cart, and clicked on the checkout button. Something happened to me that had never before happened in all of the hundreds of transactions I’ve done to purchase products on-line. The site thanked me for my order and displayed an invoice. It emailed me a copy of the invoice. No problem at all, except that it never asked me for my credit card number.
So I went to their customer support feedback page–one of those things with fields at the top for your name and email address–and left a message saying what had happened. A moment later, I got an email bounce from them quoting my feedback message and saying the email to them was undeliverable. So I tracked down a phone number for them–not easy, since they don’t publish it on the site–and called the place. The guy who answered laughed when I told him what had happened. He said they hadn’t gotten their site setup to take credit card information yet (they’ve been running since 1999), and that he’d have called me to get the credit card information over the phone. He said he’d call me back in a few minutes after he’d checked to see if the two items I’d ordered were in stock. Four or five hours later, I finally called him again. He said he’d been meaning to call me, but had been busy. Okay, I can understand that. He said both items were out-of-stock, but they’d have them in Thursday. He said they’d ship Priority Mail, which means I should get them maybe next Tuesday. That’s soon enough, but I’m glad I followed up.
15:46 – So, I decided to do a quick mini-batch of 6 chemistry kits, just to hold me for the next couple days, I hope. I packed all of the items needed in six shipping boxes. Except for the 100 mL graduated cylinders. I had none of those in inventory, at least not on the shelves. But I did have stacks and stacks of boxes sitting in the library, and among them I knew there was one that had 120 100 mL graduated cylinders in it. I even knew which vendor it was from and that it was in the group of four boxes that arrived from that vendor last week. That meant it was toward the front of the piles.
As long as I was opening boxes, I figured I might as well check the contents against the packing list. So I opened all four boxes–the graduated cylinders were in the last one, of course, and checked all the items in, getting dirty and sweaty in the process. Now, instead of four large boxes sitting in the library, I have bunches of small boxes: twenty dozen each of the 50 mL and 100 mL beakers, twenty half-dozen boxes of 250 mL beakers, ten dozen of the 100 mL graduated cylinders (less the six that I pulled out for the kits I’m building), and so on and so on.
What I want to know is where Obama was while I was doing all this. According to him, I didn’t do it myself. But I sure didn’t notice him helping. Quite the converse, in fact. Just about everything he does hinders people who are just trying to build and run their businesses.
I suspect people in Quebec speak French in much the same way as Americans speak English and Hispanics speak Spanish.
Since it’s a Canadian show, it will likely be French Canadian, which is to Parisian French, as Cockney is to English. Many “proper” French speakers consider it a patois, like Breton, Occitan, and Picard.
French from France and Quebec have followed different paths since Quebec’s initial colonization; the two languages while sharing the same name have evolved in different directions.
What? Americans speak proper English.
Which reminds me of my best friend from 1st grade through college. He decided a couple of weeks before he graduated from Penn State that he wanted to go to med school. It was far to late to apply to any US med schools, so he ended up going to med school in Chile. He didn’t speak a word of Spanish, so he took a crash course over the summer and graduated from med school on schedule.
During one of his return visits while he was in med school, we laughed about the fact that the licensing requirements for getting his MD accepted in the US required him to pass an English-proficiency exam. As it turned out, that was no joke. After four years of med school in Chile, he ended up setting up his own clinic there and practiced for 10 or 15 years. When he finally decided to move back here, he still spoke English, but it was obvious that he was thinking in Spanish and translating to English before he spoke. He sounded like a non-native English speaker who spoke fluent English, albeit with a slight Spanish accent.
He told me that he could easily identify the different forms of spoken Spanish, readily differentiating, for example, a Mexican Spanish speaker from a Cuban or a Salvadorean. And one time when he was booking an airline ticket with Chilean Airlines to fly from the US to visit Chile, they quoted him an outrageous price. He was speaking English to the woman at the US Chilean Airlines booking agency, so he immediately switched to fast, fluent Chilean Spanish to berate her. She apologized profusely, said she didn’t realize at first that he was Chilean, and quoted him a price that was something like a third of what she’d originally quoted.
Ah, that makes sense. Kind of the same way that Americans use English As It Is Properly Spoke, while the version spoken in the Old Country has degraded and shifted.
Way I figure it, there are more Americans than Brits, and we’re both
democracies*, so by simple nose-counting, American English is “real”
English. To be nice, we can let the Brits continue to use the name.
* Not actually, of course, but the demogogues are always proclaiming us
to be democracies and the will of the majority should prevail and blah
blah blah, so I’m making use of that.
“…he was booking an airline ticket with Chilean Airlines to fly from the US to visit Chile, they quoted him an outrageous price. He was speaking English to the woman at the US Chilean Airlines booking agency, so he immediately switched to fast, fluent Chilean Spanish to berate her. She apologized profusely, said she didn’t realize at first that he was Chilean, and quoted him a price that was something like a third of what she’d originally quoted.”
Ah, yes, the gringo tax. When we visited the Mexican highlands several years ago, we spoke mostly English with the locals (my Spanish suffices for little things, but nothing difficult). We always made sure to note that we were from Switzerland; this generally resulted in an immediate price reduction.
The US has not made itself well-loved in Central and South America, recently because of the WoD, and long-term through simple arrogance.
Yet another thing the WoD has to answer for.
One has to feel sorry for Mexico. If it weren’t for the US demand and the extremely high prices that result from the WoD, Mexico wouldn’t have the cartel mess to deal with.
Mexico is pretty much a ‘failed state’ and the border there is a nightmare. We have exacerbated their situation with the stupid and senseless and tragic WoD and the whole mess will become mostly moot in our lifetimes as the Reconquista and new Aztlan come about in our former western states. Simple demographics. As in Israel with their situation.
The French spoken in Quebec is a modern descendant of their colonial experience in the 17th-C, isolated from the mother country, just as our English in Nova Anglia. Both colonial variants are looked down upon contemptuously by their respective mother countries. I occasionally work with an actual French person up here and their CentOS clusters, and he pretty much *sneered* and looked down his long, sharp Gallic nose at the very thought that those buggers up there (actually just a half-hour drive) could possibly speak la belle Francais.
Oh well. I saw a post recently also about the Parti Quebecois, etc.; I hadn’t heard anything for a while about their activities and had last read that they were lying low and staying quiet. Our daughter is at McGill and the most nooz coming out of there has been the Occupy stuff and even that has apparently died down to almost nothing, including the student strikes.
Looks like a younger and prettier version of Frau Merkel:
http://pq.org/
Oooooo la la…
Yeah, the Separatists are out in full force this election year. They’ve stopped being low and quiet, and are now just lying.
They still long to return to the French Motherland, but given how the rest of France’s colonies turned out, you think they would be happy staying attached to a country with three of the top ten spots on the livability index. C’est la vie!
On the one hand, I agree; on the other hand, why not just let them go? And ditto for most, if not all of, the other ethnic/religious/cultural groups around the world; the Scots, the Basques, the Lombards, Aztlan, northern New England….
After all, they were the first Euros to settle the place and they mostly got along with First Nations peoples. And the Anglos can either get along or move to Ontario. They mostly kneel for Ottawa anyway, whatever the nabobs in Ottawa dream up. I am given to understand that such is not so much the case out in yon western provinces, but pray, correct me if I am mistaken.
No, we kneel, but we don’t mean it.
I’d let Quebec go in a heartbeat, but they wouldn’t stay gone.
Re your order woes, RBT, some time ago I wrote a short story showing the
usual, fictional presentation of “guy gets an idea and works hard and
things come together and it works”. It took a couple of paragraphs, a
couple hundred words.
Then the story showed a more real-life presentation, with the guy
wasting ever-increasing amounts of time on mandatory government
paperwork, losing a day’s work because someone drove into a tree a few
miles away and brought down the electrical grid, orders being lost, and
so on. In maybe 6k words he succeeded only by dint of ludicrous amounts
of time spent, mostly unproductively, and by scaling back his original
definition of success.
I didn’t manage to sell the story. “People don’t want to read that shit.
If they wanted that, all they’d have to do is look around them.” I’ll
probably re-tool the story (I’m a better fiction writer now than I was
then) and self-publish and find out for myself if people like that kind
of story. Judging by the, ah, robust health of the fiction publishing
industry, I’m not quite sure that slush-pile editors have a good feel
for what the buying public wants.
…the story showed a more real-life presentation, with the guy
wasting ever-increasing amounts of time on mandatory government
paperwork, losing a day’s work because someone drove into a tree a few
miles away and brought down the electrical grid, orders being lost, and
so on. In maybe 6k words he succeeded only by dint of ludicrous amounts
of time spent, mostly unproductively, and by scaling back his original
definition of success.
I’m afraid I would not want to read it – I read for escapism, not to depress myself. On the other hand, such a story should be required reading for government officials.
Senseless regulations are everywhere (even here in beautiful Switzerland). For example: I am allowed to burn untreated wood in my wood stove (surprise), but I am not allowed to burn offcuts from my carpentry projects, even if I am entirely certain that the wood is untreated in any way. This bureaucratic overreach stems from the idea that you are not allowed to burn your garbage in your fireplace. Some idiot bureaucrat fell in love with his regulations, and lost sight of reality.
There should be sunsets on all laws as a Constitutional requirement. We would have a LOT fewer laws that way.
And the sponsor should have to read the entire text of the bill before the house or senate. No more 12,000-page secret bills.
“What I want to know is where Obama was while I was doing all this.”
You didn’t build that! Or open that box.
Obama’s dumb ass comment has really hurt him. They’re (Dumbacrats) trying to spin it every which way. He thinks nothing would happen without the government building infrastructure. Nobody’s capable of building a road on their own if they needed it. Only government can build a road. Of course it’s just everybody’s taxes that do it. The government doesn’t really do shit.
I think you posted a look into the future some time back where 5% of the population would create everything and the rest just live off it. In Obama’s world the 5% wouldn’t get credit for anything. The government really made all that stuff.
I live beside what most people call an alley, although it is officially a street, because it originally wound around the massive greenhouse which was once located to my west, back in the late 1800’s. The guy kitty-corner out my back door, runs a small construction company. Every day when he arrives home with his crew of 4, his brother’s dogs, who live on the porch while they work, start yapping away. That is my quitting whistle, and it just blew. Er, yapped.
My laptop fan is running on high a lot these days. I suspect the air ducts through it are getting clogged with dust bunnies. Will have to open the thing up and vacuum them out. My attempts to upgrade computing here have failed, due—I guess—to trying to use non-mainstream sources to get better pricing. Problem has been that the 2 things I ordered at different places have ended up being ‘out of stock’, and never come back in stock at the lower price. Why do I think that is a scam? Guess I will have to bite the bullet and buy mainstream at higher price.
I would love to like the Unity desktop, but there are not enough hours in the day to learn how to navigate in it. The word is that all computing, from desktop to smartphones and tablets will have a Unity-like feel: no menu hierarchy, big icons, full-screen applications. Working with Ubuntu 12.04, which 64-bit refuses to install on VirtualBox, whereas 11.10 64-bit installed perfectly. The next major update for 12.04 is due out tomorrow (but word is that it will not be released until 23 Aug), so maybe that will fix it,—but I am not holding my breath.
I have Ubuntu 12.04 on an ancient Toshiba laptop just to say I could do it, but Ubuntu has pretty much lost me, due to the crap they’ve done and put on the o.s. Also gave up on Fedora a while back. I run Win7 on a big media desktop and Mrs. OFD has it on her ancient laptop and a 2GB netbook for work. Other than that, RHEL 6.2 on a big desktop here, 6.3 on the work laptop, and anything from 4 to various 5’s on the hundreds of work servers. I was happy with Mint for a while but I’m done with all the distro wars and competing GUI’s; it’s gotten so I can’t stand using ANY GUI’s at all now, esp. at work, where they are still used via Firefox 3.6 to admin blades occasionally, and the blades themselves run some ancient version of Fedora. Plus we are apparently dumping all our blades now, anyway, so back to exclusive CLI for me, as I had it in the good old days of VMS.
You should be glad the feckless fucktard wasn’t there helping. Your quarter’s profits would have been lost in an hour. Ah, I was thinking in terms of dropped glassware, but if the Fucktard in Chief saw someone actually working, and working competently, he’d probably fall down with the vapors and then sue you for infliction of emotional distress. (Note that he’s had one, short-term job in his entire life, in an ice cream shack or something. In days gone by he might have been a soda jerk. These days, he’s just a jerk.) And a new raft of federal regulations would have come down from On High regarding home-based businesses, dangerous materials, and providing support for terrorists and drug manufacturers.
Chuck wrote:
“The guy kitty-corner out my back door…”
Okay, I give up. What does that mean?
“…due—I guess—to trying to use non-mainstream sources to get better pricing. Problem has been that the 2 things I ordered at different places have ended up being ‘out of stock’, and never come back in stock at the lower price. Why do I think that is a scam? Guess I will have to bite the bullet and buy mainstream at higher price.”
I have 2-3 favourite online retailers where I just buy the stuff I need. They’re cheap, but probably not the cheapest available. I don’t trust the really cheap stores unless I’ve done business successfully with them before or they have come recommended by a knowledgeable friend. I used to buy stuff from fly bu night merchants, just not worth the aggravation.
The Rivendell automation system I am testing is developed on CentOS. A lot of people on the forum have lots of trouble with CentOS, but then, it is not an OS for Aunt Millie. After I get things sorted out for the automation, I will bite the bullet on CentOS, but meanwhile there is less to go wrong in Ubuntu.
Here’s a good one. Latest cases of the swine flu center in Indiana. Indiana pork producers (man there are a couple of smelly ones on my way from Tiny Town to Indy, and it matters not whether I take the interstate or the back road 8 miles north of the interstate—the same farms smell up both roads) want the name “swine” dropped from the disease. Now this is even though it is spread through direct contact of humans with pigs. Apparently pork futures have all but collapsed, and the farmers blame it on the name. They say people have stopped eating pork.
Now seeing as how Indiana was recently named one of the 10 fattest states in the US, I am not sure that is a bad thing.
Give up the marbled beef/pork/whatever and eat lean meat. It’s so much better and doesn’t put a spare tyre on your hips.
Very difficult to get lean meat in the US. They fatten up every animal for market, as it is cheap to do, and the price depends on weight, not quality of the meat. Just try and get ham lunchmeat (sliced for sandwiches) that does not have copious amounts of white fat amply woven through it. It just does not exist. Whereas Germans have taught themselves how to get sick if they eat fat or grease. Just try frying their version of bacon in a skillet, and if you get even a half teaspoon of grease, that will be a lot.
But getting less fat in meat starts with the farmers, as Americans will eat as much fat as is put on the shelves.
There is an organic farm somewhere near my uni alma mater, that does not fatten up any of their animals. But the meat costs 3 to 5 times what is generally available in grocery stores. I would like to try their stuff, but could never afford it on a regular basis.
Greg, kitty-corner is diagonally situated. So not Chuck’s neighbor to the rear, but to either the left or right of the neighbor to the rear.
This appears to be primarily an American-Canadian thing, and typically is used to refer to opposite corners of an intersection. I know some older Germans and English who say it as cater-corner.
Ahh, thanks.
It always annoys me when I grill meat and the fat trap is loaded. Once I was cooking lamp chops for four people and I had to take the cops off, get some thick gloves, and empty the fat trap half way through cooking.
The best meat I’ve ever had was at a conference in Adelaide in 1994. Lean kangaroo, emu and crocodile. Yum.
*lamb chops
**take the chops off
We like fat meat! In terms of health, apparently animal fat is not unhealthy, despite the claims from the 70’s and 80’s.
Of course, one does have to watch calories – given the price of meat here, that is not a problem. A good steak costs about $25/pound. This due to agricultural subsidies and import restrictions.
It’s not the fat, it’s the inactivity that’s the issue. We’ve evolved eating fat, sugar and salt. What’s wrong is we eat too much and then sit around.
Well that and there’s a lot more sugary foods available now than earlier in human history.
Again, that’s a choice. If all one eats is crap and then sit around, then you can expect health issues. But blaming those items is fooling yourself.
If one eats sensibly (which does not mean miserly) and does a modicum of exercise there are far fewer health issues, even if we do eat salty bacon.
Mmmmm, salty bacon.
I am basically off bacon. While in Germany, I always swore that their pork was a different animal than ours—and maybe it is, I am not really much of an animal expert. But we fooled American visitors into thinking pork steaks we grilled were actually beef, and you would never make that mistake in the US.
One of the big party deals in our area of Germany is to hire a caterer who cooks a young pig (head and all) on a spit rotated by hand over an open wood and charcoal fire. Besides their version of duck, which—contrary to the US version—is also a very lean, non-greasy animal, that pork is the best meat I have ever eaten.
Bill is right about American diet. It is not intelligent. My doctor says the biggest shortcoming of American fast food, is that there is no fiber in it. They do not serve vegetables or fruit at all, so one gets only meat, potatoes, and a carbonated sugar-water drink.
And America seems to go off the deep end about everything. When we left for Germany, I felt food was overly salted in the US. On returning nearly 10 years later, both packaged food and restaurant fare is too little or not-at-all salted. Meanwhile, as Bill notes, it is not fat that is the problem, it is carbohydrates. Germans cook with lard, not vegetable oil, and are some of the leanest people on Earth. They even have spiced lard (Schmalz) and put it on bread like butter.
Anyway, bacon and pork here is so inferior to the German variety, that I am not at all attracted to it anymore.
My problem with US bacon is the way it’s cooked. Far too crisp. I won’t generally eat bacon unless it’s flexible. Of course, we have some of the best bacon in the world… 🙂
You left out the fiber-free bread like substance. And fast food places do serve fruit if they serve breakfast. They just remove all the fiber first.
Which is good. Fiber is good for you if you’re a termite.
We eat meat here maybe once or twice a week, at most. Fish and seafood about as often. Mostly pasta, veggies, fruit, bread, cheese, eggs, etc. I also eat a bag of Rolled Gold stick pretzels about every two days and drink a large bottle of Moxie per evening, in preference to my previous worship at the altar of Lord Vodka. I also drink gallons of water and juice.
I like bacon once in a while and I like it nice and crisp, i.e., cooked, not like Ozzie Osborne was doing it in his kitchen with fried eggs in that YouTube video. Ghastly.
I’m sure the bacon, veggies, pasta, bread, fruit, cheese, eggs and even the Moxie are all better in Germany, though.
What a country!
I heard somewhere that the Germans also have better ice so I’ve started looking online to import it for my Moxie, which, sadly, is only made down in Bedford, New Hampshuh.
Yumm, Lard on a stick !
OFD wrote:
“We eat meat here maybe once or twice a week, at most. Fish and seafood about as often.”
Bloody vegetarians! No wonder you’re going soft in the head. If a meal doesn’t contain meat Austrians consider it a “snack”. That’s the sort of thinking I like.
(And fish and seafood *are* meat.)