No more blogging

Not here, anyway. I found that it makes more sense for me to keep all my blogging in one place — where it’s been for the past few years. Separate blogs for separate subjects is too much of a time sink. So from now on everything will be at kantor.com.

Wild rides

A group of about 15 kids turned the see-saw into a game. They put all their shoes in the middle, then took turns trying to bounce them off. I’ve never seen the thing go that high!

Photo note: I should have used a slower shutter speed so you could see the motion, but oh well.

Alternative fuel

Now this is the way to travel.

Kroger dopiness

One thing I like about Kroger over Food Lion (one of many, in fact) is the self-service checkout. It may not be faster, but it feels faster because I’m doing something. Also, The Boy loves it. So I use it all the time whether I’m buying one item or 50.

In Roanoke, as here, there were four U-Scan-It stations. But, as I learned when I approached with a cart holding about 20 things, the manager here decided to limit the number of items you could have on two of the machines. A couple of crude magic-marker signs attested to this.

Let’s not get into the fact that "less" is wrong — it should be "fewer." Kroger doesn’t hire people smart enough to know that.

The two "15 or less" scanners were idle; the two others were occupied by people with a handful of items. The woman minding the U-Scans came over right away and counted my items — 17. "You can’t use those," she informed me.

"But there’s no one waiting and they’re empty," I pointed out.

"Sorry."

"So why didn’t you tell those people to use them?" I asked. After all, they only had a few items, so by not using the ‘15 or less’ machines they were forcing me to wait.

She didn’t answer.

So I stood there, incredulously, while the two stations sat idle.

If you’re gonna limit items on those things, you have to enforce it both ways — you have to tell people with fewer than 15 items to use the correct ones, too.

Anyway.

Next time, same deal — I had about 25 items this time and all four scanners were occupied. Luckily, one person was almost done and I had a moment to wait.

Then a manager-type comes over. "Fifteen items or less," he said. No verb.

"I’m waiting for this one," I said, pointing to a station without the sign.

He appeared confused. Then, "Come over here," he said, indicating a register. "No waiting."

OK, that’s cool. I start to move the cart over. Then I see that one customer is being rung up at the register while another is already waiting with the conveyor filled with stuff!

I said — and this is a quote — "You have a different definition of ‘no waiting’ than I do." And I went back to the U-Scan-It, which had just become unoccupied.

From the alternate universe, the manager type said again, "15 items or less." I ignored him. Then — and I kid you not — he pointed again to the register with the two women already in progress and said, "No waiting."

"No waiting here, either," I said. And he stood there, watching me, for a good minute. I have no clue what, if anything, was going through his mind. Or, for that matter, what color the sky was on his homeworld.

Zippadee bus driver

Coming home from dropping The Boy at school, I was on Church Av. Rd. — a two-lane, 45 MPH road. I was following a school bus when I realized that, honestly, I don’t like the smell of Diesel fumes. So I move to go around it (it was doing between 40 and 45, so I had a few MPH to work with) and the driver guns it.

I didn’t quite realize this as I was passing until I looked down and realized I was doing more than 60 to pass her. So I decided not to.

Henrico County schools doesn’t hire wimpy drivers, that’s for sure.

Here she is, in bus #540 (sorry for the lousy shot, but I took it without looking):

Comcast-free

When we moved here, I was very clear that I wasn’t going to use Comcast for Internet access. (I use DirecTV for television because it’s the only place to get NFL Sunday ticket and thus watch my Giants games.)

I don’t want to give my business to a company that thinks it has the right to monitor what I do online and slow down my connection if it doesn’t like the content I’m getting. That’s exactly what Comcast does. If you use Bittorrent to get files, good luck; Comcast throttles it.

The logic is that Bittorrent is used by people illegally sharing music and movies. But it’s also used for downloading large files. For example, video-game demos, which can run into the hundreds of megabytes. Ditto for versions of Linux. And other stuff, all of which I’ve downloaded via Bittorrent.

Bittorrent lets content providers ’spread the pain’ of sending enormous files to people. Everyone who downloads is also uploading, so no one person (or company) has to supply all the bandwidth. It’s by far the most efficient way to download a big game.

But because it can be used illegally, Comcast thinks it has the right to slow down users’ Bittorrent connections without telling them. It then denied it was doing such a thing, but the Associated Press — and others — went and proved it was.

The company is now facing lawsuits over this, as it should. Can you imagine if every Internet access company decided to monitor traffic and decide what it would allow and what it wouldn’t? Immediately you’d have every right-wing nut group demanding that ISPs cut off nudity, information on religions other than Christianity, information about birth control — you name it. In fact, every interest group in the world would demand that information not meeting its agenda be stifled.

Wonderful.

Verizon understands this at least. The New York Times writes that AT&T is developing software to scan what its Internet users are doing and attempt to identify and block pirated content. (This is the same AT&T that let the feds tap its users’ phone calls without a court order.)

Forget the problems with identifying what’s pirated and what’s legal (maybe I’m sending myself a copy of a song so I can listen to it somewhere else). AT&T wants to get into the content-police business.

Verizon is a lot smarter. Said Tom Tauke, its EVP for public affairs,

Once you start going down the path of looking at the information going down the network, there are many that want you to play the role of policeman. Stop illegal gambling offshore. Stop pornography. Stop a whole array of other kinds of activities that some may think inappropriate.

Exactly.

So I won’t use Comcast, even when DirecTV’s monopoly on the NFL runs out, and I certainly won’t use any AT&T product. There are better alternatives.

 

Note to Comcast users: There are simple ways to bypass the company’s filtering. Read about them here.