Monthly Archives: December 2013

Rule 5: Lauren Thompson

Posted on December 3, 2013 | 6 comments

winnmcmurrybikini-400x600

This is a Golf Channel commentator? So they say.

Via The Fat Guy.

6 Comments

Posted in Blogosphere, Rule 5

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Blue Norther

Posted on December 3, 2013 | 5 comments

Today, we are promised, will be in the low 80s. Likewise tomorrow. But not Thursday. Daytime Thursday is to drop 20 degrees until nightfall brings an arctic blast that lasts the weekend into next week, plunging daytime temps into the 30s with freezing rain. Or sleet if you want to get technical.

Weather extremes are what Texas is all about, but 50 degrees difference in a few days is pushing it. Must be global warming, as Wormtongue’s hencethings have insisted since at least 2009. They must raise our taxes so they can solve the problem. How? Well, they’ll start off by taking the money and partying ’til they drop.

Happy Days Are Here Again, as the Democrats like to sing.

More likely it could be one of our Blue Northers of song and story. Well known (and feared) on the Texas plains—west and northwest of us here at the rancho—for many years. Their warnings once could be only a few hours at best, sometimes mere minutes. Bringing death to unsheltered livestock and, sometimes, people.

I wonder if we’ll get a rare snow? Freezing rain will be enough to start.

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Posted in Texana, Weather

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The thieves at Yahoo!

Posted on December 2, 2013 | Comments Off on The thieves at Yahoo!

Even if Yahoo! was justified in taking down my old blog Texas Scribbler dot com, they had no right to steal it. I paid them every month to host it on the Web. Every month for seven years. I’m still paying them and will until I’m absolutely sure they won’t return my property.

The latest word from their low-level techs at Small Business Support is that Yahoo!’s engineering staff has my case under “further review.” They have no right to do that, either. If I was willing to pay some lawyer an open-ended amount of legal fees—at some ridiculous hourly rate—I could sue their fat California asses off.

But I’m not stupid. The only people who win lawsuits are lawyers.

The first tech I talked to, for an hour on Nov. 28, while other people were enjoying Thanksgiving, told me Yahoo!’s excuse for “deactivating” my blog the day before was that I had not signed off on the latest change in their terms of service. Very similar to what happened to this pediatrician. (He eventually got his site back, but not before a disruption in his business affairs for which, as you will see if you follow the link, he’s still angry.)

Yahoo! avers that I was notified to sign. I saw nothing. Even if their email went into my spam filter, I always check the spam before deleting it. There was nothing from them warning me to sign or they would steal my property. Nothing at all.

They have likewise stolen my domain name, which was registered with them. They had passed it on to an Australian firm for, what?, safekeeping? I was notified on Nov. 29 by the Aussie firm and Yahoo! that Yahoo! has reclaimed possession of my domain name. So they have stolen that, too.

I’m dealing with a criminal enterprise here disguised as a reputable international corporation. If that was not so Yahoo! would have notified me by now that, because I allegedly failed to sign their new terms of service, I had 24 hours to move my blog to someone else’s server and, oh, by the way, my domain name registration as well.

Instead, five days after they stole my property, my case is under “further review.” A pox on your house, Yahoo! So good of you to have already supplied the exclamation point. As my blog friend Akaky says, Johnathan Swift, who knew a Yahoo when he saw one, would have understood.

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Posted in Yahoo! Sucks

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Robo-Longhorn

Posted on December 2, 2013 | Comments Off on Robo-Longhorn

_MG_3522

In case you’re wondering, the blog’s new header pix is cropped from this photo of mine of a unique piece of sculpture on private property a few miles outside Johnson City on the way west to Fredericksburg.

It’s a ginormous thing made of various metal thingies, some of them chromed. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it has been the cause of a few accidents. Drivers passing it for the first time must be so distracted by it that they could cross the center line into oncoming traffic or else wind up in the bar ditch on the shoulder.

UPDATE:  It may have been moved to South Austin, or else duplicated by some ambitious person there, according to this.

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Posted in Texana

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The healthcare fix that isn’t

Posted on December 2, 2013 | 2 comments

You just knew Wormtongue and his hencethings would claim to have beaten the problems of healthcare dot gov by their Saturday deadline. Sure enough, they did. Claim it, that is.

Howsomeever. Five hundred million lines of code… A ten thousand page rulebook… Management by such as Slow Joe Biden…

“The ‘front end’ user experience may be improved, but the back end apparently still spews out garbled data to the insurers, rendering the whole process useless…Many key features and aspects of the site (actual payments to insurers; small business signups; etc.) have now been jettisoned as too problematic and complicated to repair in so short a time…”

No more than I predicted a month ago on a destroyed blog now far, far away.

Via PJTatler.

UPDATE: Indeed, “…insurers haven’t yet noticed a difference, according to a spokesman for industry lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans.”

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Posted in Blogosphere

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B-25 Mitchell bomber

Posted on December 1, 2013 | 2 comments

B-25

Proof, in case any was needed, that World War II was not fought in black-n-white by aged segregationists, homophobes and sexists masquerading as “the greatest generation,” but actually by the young and middle-aged in Kodachrome color.

The rest, unfortunately, is true, except the “greatest generation” twaddle invented by a biased television news reader who has, mercifully, retired. Not that I ever watch his former employer’s contemporary nonsense anyhow.

Via Shorpy

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Posted in Viet Nam, War Without End

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Those good Indian techs

Posted on December 1, 2013 | 2 comments

The one bright spot in my dealings with Yahoo! in the past few days has been with three of their good support techs in India. I won’t use their names because the criminals at Yahoo! HQ in California might decide they were too helpful and punish them.

Some Americans complain about winding up with foreign tech support whenever they have a computer problem, and I may have done so myself once or twice. It’s their accented English that can make it irritating, but these guys were affable about slowing down their speech so my age-addled brain could process the sounds coming through the phone and my hearing aid. And they did their best all around and I appreciate it.

So just let me say thanks, guys. In the end, your employers refused to follow up your good support help and advice, but that’s not your fault. I hope we meet again under better circumstances. And that you get better jobs with a better company. I can’t imagine they treat you any better than they do their customers.

UPDATE:  And then there were four. The Indians are proliferating. This morning’s msg: “We’ve reported your case to our engineering specialists for further review.” I’m not holding my breath.

 

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Posted in Yahoo! Sucks