A carnival of technology

The boundaries between governments in Georgia are strange and fascinating beasts. The attitude towards local government in Georgia is that the asshole across the street doesn’t understand the problems that you face from day to day, and this home rule attitude results in both a fine-grained control over local issues and a perhaps inequitable distribution of tax money. A recent example of this is Sandy Springs: though there was a well defined boundary for Sandy Springs, it was only as a community improvement district of Fulton County; Georgia doesn’t recognize any governments overriding counties other than cities (and towns), so Sandy Springs was mostly an academic concept until they recently voted to secede from the county. The incorporation of Sandy Springs was driven by the idea that tax money was not being properly spent on improving the community, but, on the other hand, Sandy Springs is very much a white flight area, and, though their roads may suck, it’s arguable that the tax money from all the rich assholes (median household income $60,428, median housing value $345,200) is more deserved by the more poverty-stricken areas of south Fulton. The desire for separation from the more urban south Fulton (According to the 2000 census, Sandy Springs is 77.5% white, Roswell 81.5%, Alpharetta 83.6%) is further evidenced in movements to split Fulton back into its constiuent counties, Fulton and Milton. I’m a bit torn as far as this desire: on the one hand, the original intent of joining Fulton and Milton was to create an opportunity to distribute tax money more evenly throughout the Atlanta metro area, ideally offering eventual finiancial equality through community improvement, but, on the other hand, any politcal area with a neck, especially in the South, just screams gerrymandering. The congressional district borders aren’t really any more heartening.

One of the things that made me think about Georgia’s boundaries was an advertisement for condos on Atlanta Road. The billboards include several features of the condominium complex: it’s 1.5 miles outside of I-285 on Atlanta Road, it’s in Vinings, and the prices start in the $150’s. One thing that struck me as odd was the combination of the first two claims. The borders of Vinings have become a bit fuzzy—it was supposendly once a city, though, never having learned any Georgia history, I’m only as sure as the lack of information I can find on the Internet. The area currently known as Vinings was made popular by Hardy Pace, a man famous because he owned a boat and was able to send it across the ‘hooch, and Vinings is not currently anything in particular as far as government is concerned. It’s generally accepted, however, that Vinings is in Cobb and inside the perimeter. Vinings as a Census Defined Place [4] exists between the ‘hooch and I-285, bordered by Cobb Parkway (US-41) on the north and a zig-zaggy line on the south. All of the Census Bureau’s concept of Vinings exists north of Atlanta Road.

Fuzzy borders are forgiveable, though. The divisions of districts are confusing even when separate governments are involved [5], and anything within a couple miles of Paces Ferry tends to have “Vinings” in the name, so the Vinings claim of The Palms seems a reasonable following of marketing trends. Advertising that your condominiums and townhouses are in Smyrna or unincorporated Cobb county (I’m really not sure which this place is in; the maps do nothing) just doesn’t pack the same punch. The thing that really bugs me about The Palms, though, is the rest of the ad. In addition to the fun facts at the bottom of the billboard, they had a plea at the top to (paraphrasing from memory) “Be selfish, live in…The Palms,” followed by a picture of a woman enjoying herself on the beach. Vinings may have a wide, poorly defined boundary as an unincorporated suburb of Atlanta, but there is at least one thing that I can certainly state about it: Vinings does not have a beach.

References:
Sandy Springs Fact Sheet
Alpharetta Fact Sheet
Roswell Fact Sheet
Vinings CDP Reference Map
Cobb County Street Map
Palms of Vinings
2002 Georgia Congressional Districts

How many times have you said, aloud or to yourself, following some spectacular disappointment in the goods or services provided by a company, that you would never patronize them again? I know that I’ve said that to myself several times, but, since I never wrote it down and I have a terrible memory, I doubt that I’ve followed these personal mandates very well. Well, now I’m writing them down.

The entries for each company will include the perceived offense, any related correspondence, and the reparations I require to consider forgiveness. Members of a capitalist society are often told to fight the injustices of companies with their dollar, and this is exactly what I plan to do. I don’t expect to have much of an impact, since companies tend be big and even the foolishly spent disposable income of a young, single adult is but a drop in the bucket for most, but perhaps one or two will listen, and, even if not, I can’t bear to give my money again to an organization whom I detest.

This may all seem stupid and petty, but isn’t that what the Internet is for?

And now, on to the tale of Compusa and the broken UPS.

My birthday is on June 23. My parents, knowing that I seem to always have power issues with computers, bought me a much-needed UPS my 23rd birthday. They purchased it in Huntsville on June 19th, and I received it when they passed through Atlanta on July 2nd. Not wanting to unplug everything right away to hook it up, I waited until the next power outage, which happened to be on the week of the 21st. I opened up the UPS, connected the gigantic battery, hit the switch, and…nothing. No lights came on, no circuit breakers were thrown, and no power came through. Further attempts and tests were unable to produce any sort of reaction from the UPS; I couldn’t even get it to make the beeps and flashes that it’s supposed to when no battery is connected. It was dead, and nothing short of a miracle was going to bring it back.

I decided that it would probably be more sensible to take the UPS to a store than a priest, so, after getting the original receipt from my parents, I stuck the 23 lb monstrosity into my car and drove across the street to the nearest CompUSA. APC, the makers of the UPS, were very understanding of my situation, offering to replace it under warranty, but they wanted me to pay for shipping to Rhode Island. I can’t blame them, really; I didn’t want to pay to ship it, either. Having heard of CompUSA’s usually lenient returns, and thinking that they would be more understanding since I only wanted an exchange, not a refund, I tried them first. I was met with no complaints about the fact that I was returning to a different store from the one at which it was purchased, but instead I was denied on the ground that it had been more than 21 days since the UPS was purchased.

The thing that irked me most about this was not that they refused to take the UPS due to me being outside of a returns windows, since I did, admittedly, have it for a while, but that the return window is so very short. A quick scan of CompUSA’s competitors reveals a sea of 30-day return policies. Wal-mart boasts a 45-day return allowance on electronics. Target, the most lenient I’ve found, has a 90-day gift return policy. Of course, no one can accept returns indefinitely, but 21 days is a bit short, especially for gifts, which one would think could be granted a little more time.

I shipped the package by FedEx Ground on 7/23 from a Kinko’s. I missed the cutoff for Saturday pickup, so, at the time of this writing, the last information on this package is that it left the Ellenwood hub and is, presumably, trundling north towards West Warwick, RI. Shipping by FedEx cost a lot less than I was expecting, less even than USPS, so at least one company in this ordeal gave me a pleasant experience.

Reparations demanded: A change in the official return policy and the $9.53 I spent returning the unit to APC.

CompUSA does not provide email addresses to which to direct complaints, so the following is what I stuffed into a web form, including the extra fields and radio buttons that I would have preferred to ignore.

david@gophernet.org
07/21/2005 11:04 PM

To:      customer_service@compusa.com
cc:
Subject: In-Store Customer Service: 21 day return policy

Please process the following request:

=========================================================
In-Store Customer Service
=========================================================
CONTACT INFO:
Name:               David Shea
Phone(Day):         404 547 XXXX
Email:              david@gophernet.org

CONCERN:
Store:              Marietta, GA(491)
Type of Concern:    21 day return policy
(NB: "21 day return policy" came from a dropdown box and was not inputted manually)

Have you spoken to a Manager in the Store? No

I recently came into possession of a UPS backup system
purchased from your store, a birthday gift from my
parents, purchased on the 19th of June.  I held on to it
for about a week, and recently, after attempting to hook
it up, I found that the unit was defective.  APC
technical support confirmed that I was doing everything
correctly and that the unit was at fault, so, after
getting the receipt from my parents, I felt that the best
course of action was to attempt to exchange it for
another UPS at one of your stores.

I was heartened to meet with no complaints that I was
attempting to exchange an item purchased by a different
person at a different store (Hunstville), but my hope
turned to anger after I was eventually informed that an
exchange would be impossible, since I am 11 days beyond
the acceptable window of returns.  I am not trying to
cheat your company out of the cost of the UPS; I merely
wanted a functional one in exchange for one that could be
returned to the manufacturer.  The unit is still under
warranty, so I will be able to return it to the
manufacturer, but the inconvience of waiting for shipping
and, as a person of more limited shipping resources than
CompUSA, the cost of mailing something the approximate
size and shape of a sack of Quikrete across the country
are disapointing, to say the least.  Though your return
policy claims to be fair, it seems to me that it is fair
only to CompUSA.  Any item given as a gift, as
electronics often are, is effectively unreturnable.

I thank you for the kind service that you provided my
parents in your Huntsville location, but I was not
pleased with my CompUSA experience.

Reply on 7/26:

Dear Mr. Shea,

Thank you for contacting CompUSA. Your email has been forwarded to the
appropriate department for review.

Thank you,

Customer Service
CompUSA

I don’t like songs that celebrate a genre. I think this is the root of my hatred of Huey Lewis and the News, since “Heart of Rock and Roll” is the only song of theirs that I can remember. They are certainly not the only offenders: Joan Jett and others did “I Love Rock and Roll,” The Rolling Stones did “It’s Only Rock and Roll,” and I don’t like those songs, either. Singing praises to your genre strikes me as the last refuge of the songwriter out of ideas. Once the well of songwriting ideas has run dry, write a song about what it is that you do. Genres in themselves aren’t terribly interesting. There are good and bad songs in any style of music.

I got a haircut today, and whoever is in charge of the radio at Great Clips decided to tune it to Kicks 101.5 (WKHX Marietta). I’ve grown more tolerant of country over the years, so I mostly just tuned it out as I would if I were listening to WJZZ in a dentist’s office, but there were two songs that were memorable. One of them, playing when I walked in, was the country equivalent of “I Love Rock and Roll.” Some guy was singing about how great country music is and was requesting that the person playing the steel guitar turn it up, or possibly rock a beat. The other song was playing when my hair was actually being cut, and it had a similar theme. It was Alan Jackson singing “Don’t Rock the Jukebox,” a song explaining how country music is superior to rock and roll for sad times, since rock and roll is ineffective at capturing the pain of heartbreak. The song’s theme was similar to the earlier one, but I didn’t mind it as much, because, after I thought about it, I realized that he was right.

These children are home alone, too. But their parents won’t be coming back.

Rated R for horror violence and language.

Starring a combine and that filter from Predator.

Viewed 2005-07-07 by David, Susi, David, Mike, and Dane

Corn: America’s true amber waves. It’s in nearly everything we eat, as starch, sweetener, or oil, and it sees some popularity as a fuel source, both in the form of ethanol and biodiesel. Also, it can host a deadly mold that causes children to form a corn-worshiping cult and kill their parents. Yay, corn!

Children of the Corn II was oddly hard to find. When taken as a whole, one expects the Children of the Corn series to be horrible: it’s a seven-movie long horror series with Stephen King involved. However, even given these low expectations for movies 3-7, every movie except the second is still in print. For number two, I’m not sure if it was even ever put on DVD; we had to settle for a poorly-made pirate version that I suspect was manufactured in Hong Kong. The compression was a bit bad, but at least it was in English.

Notable in Children of the Corn II is that after watching the movie, we’re not sure who the protagonist was. I remember some of the characters—there was the single-dad tabloid reporter looking for a story on the corn children, bravely facing ridicule from more legitimate reporters and disinterest from his son; there was the rebellious son who became entangled with the evil children; there was the teenaged son’s big-breasted love interest; there was an Indian guy; there was some lady who wore shoulder pads with her t-shirt; and there was the old lady who tried to move her house. All of these people were threatened by the children in some form, but, in true horror movie fashion, none of them received much character development beyond the summaries I just provided. I suppose that one could say that the plot actually centers around the cult of corn, following the religious fervor of the kid with the creepy eyes (Isaac? Jedediah?) as he bravely stood up against the tyranny of adulthood, but the thing that kills people is never the protagonist in horror movies, and this movie isn’t nearly artsy enough to try something like that.

Of course, what would character development be without bad acting, forced dialog, and a painful, tedious plot? They talked about corn a lot. Adults are bad. Corn, corn, corn. The corn tells us to kill our parents. Let’s go back out to the corn; there aren’t any adults there. That’s about it. The lack of stupid crossfade wipes and stupid camera angles were an improvement over Battlefield Earth, but nothing blows up in Children of the Corn II. This is an unfortunate missed opportunity. Corn is such a versatile plant that they should have easily been able to find some excuse to make it explode.

The Internet has changed significantly since 1994. Ignoring the commercial element, the nature of how people distribute information has shifted. The idea of protocols tailored to the tasks of distributing certain types of information has disappeared, leaving the habits of the Web to drive the direction of the Internet as a whole.

I’m going to make some unfounded speculations and historical generalizations based solely upon memory, but I hope that my points remain. Once the frontier of the Internet was opened up to the masses, it quickly became a resource for anyone to publish their ideas, no matter what their commercial viability. The advantage in this is that unpopular and marginalized ideas have a place to voice themselves without fear of backlash, becoming a new realization of the ideal of freedom of press. This ultimate freedom also made the Web into a vehicle for libel and unfounded conspiracy theories, but all of this is simply part of the rich pageant of humanity: every fringe is given a voice. The Web was the place chosen as the media for these newly freed data due to its easy access for both publishers and readers, and other reasons that I don’t care to elaborate. From the reader’s point of view, the Web offered an infinite landscape of information—accurate and otherwise—and entertainment. In the early days, the habit of the web user was to maintain and exchange lists of links, so that pictures of pornography involving only carefully arranged furniture and articles explaining how Zoroastrians secretly control the one world government were available at one’s fingertips.

One-shot articles hold limited appeal for the bored browser of the Web, however, and it was eventually the sites that offered continually updated content that attracted the world’s attention. From this came blogs, where anyone could easily publish their recurring content for all the world to see. The blog also provides a means for those of us who don’t believe that the Illuminati is behind JFK’s assassination to have our voice heard: we don’t have the ideas for such articles, so articles are written about the mundane, instead. Obviously, I, too, am a part of this trend. I enjoy writing, and the Internet provides an outlet for my vanity by allowing me to publish my meaningless content at no cost. However, when compared to traditional writing, blogs are really lame. Using myself as an example again, I have a very limited supply of ideas, I have no formal training in journalism, and I am entirely unqualified to publish anything of merit. My best hope is that exposure to literature and years of language classes have provided me with some ability to creatively manipulate English. Blogs in general have no specific purpose, but they provide a method for publishing to a limited audience unpolished articles that, in general, would fail if distributed through more traditional means. In this sense, blogs are good for their writers and for a handful of readers.

There is something even more lame than the blog, attempting to establish itself as the new means of information distribution: the wiki. Wikis take the pointlessness of blogs and make them unrestrictedly editable, removing one of the few redeeming qualities of the blog. With a blog, there is a level of consistency. On this site, I am the reporter, proofreader, and editor-in-chief. I’m not qualified to be any of these, but I have the final and only say on just what appears on gophernet.org. Readers are left to decide only whether I write well or not. Wikis, on the other hand, are based on the belief that collaboration is the ultimate vehicle for information disbursement, that the act of connecting the world is the ideal way to improve humanity, rather than innovation, or even accuracy. Of course, I’m talking about Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an intrusion of the cavalier wiki upon the hidebound world of fact, which Wikipedia’s fans see as the natural progression of collaboration into every reach of society, and which its detractors, like me, see as really dumb. To say that a wiki, any wiki that permits anonymous edits, is in any way authoritative is to cheapen information on whatever topics it covers. To say that a wiki is a reliable repository of all information displays a level of a level of confidence and hubris that is nearly unfathomable.

The core idea of Wikipedia is that articles, regardless of their value at any particular point in their lifetime, will eventually converge upon a state of fact and polished style. Anyone who has attempted to write a large essay with more than three authors ought to know that this is foolish. Since the content of any page is open to change by anyone, roving ignorance and sloppy edits can mortally deface articles, and the only oversight is the thousand eyes reading it, who, since they’re searching for information on a subject, are likely to be even more ignorant on the matter than the authors of the article. Everyone is a journalist, everyone is a copy editor, and everyone has total control over what is published. A few highly unscientific experiments by myself and David Cantrell have revealed that it often takes little more than bullshit stated authoritatively to embed inaccuracy in an article. Large edits and significant changes to popular articles are spotted, but blatantly inaccurate sentences are most often ignored. I don’t know much of the internal culture of Wikipedia, but I suspect there exists a group of people who take it upon themselves to watch the list of changes for vandalism, and, since it would be highly unlikely for all fields of knowledge to be covered by this group, small edits that don’t consist entirely of swear words are likely to be ignored, leaving only the poor seekers of knowledge to realize that vending machines don’t really know anything about differential equations.

Vandalism isn’t as much an enemy to Wikipedia as ignorance. As noted in some of the articles mentioned at the end of this one, people just plain don’t know what they’re talking about, and they often don’t know how to say it, either. Factual, grammatical, and stylistic errors are encouraged—through the encouragement that anyone write articles, no matter how rough—with the belief that errors will eventually be eliminated by the omnipresent thousand eyes. This simply isn’t going to happen. The thousand eyes are just as ignorant, untrained, and unexpressive as the poor sap who wrote the article to begin with. Convergence on a polished article can only occur if each edit is made by someone more knowledgeable or skilled at writing than the person who made the last, but instead new misinformation and errors are introduced at each step along the way, leading to a constant level of mediocrity.

Normally I wouldn’t care what some random band of people are pretending is fact, but Wikipedia annoys me in two specific ways: they claim to be authoritative, and they show up far too often on google searches. Authority cannot be derived from its opposite, and their prevalence is likely a sign that unwary users of the Web are being lured into their trap, making this ideal a disservice to mankind. I don’t mind wikis, mostly because they tend to stay under my radar; the methods of disseminating information on the software engineering trend of the week isn’t something that I particularly care about. But when a wiki claims to be authoritative for all things, that is overstepping its bounds. The best fate for Wikipedia now is that it be forgotten, lest it continue to erode humanity’s knowledge.

Further reading:
http://www.burdell.org/?p=314
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/23/wiki_fiddlers_big_book/
http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html

Among the ridiculous things that I bought for my hamster were some overpriced wads of cotton. I remember having these for hamsters in my younger days, and the idea is that the hamster will tear up the blanket-shaped piece of cotton and make a nest. My hamster apparently doesn’t have the same desire for a permanent nest, and instead it just goes to sleep wherever it feels like, making a little hole for itself in the pine shavings. Occasionally it’ll use the cotton blankets to build a fort.

You can’t smoke in restaurants now, but fireworks are legal. Georgia legalized “sparklers” this year, which they defined as anything that doesn’t launch itself or explode. Any kind of gigantic spark-shooting contraption is allowed, though, and I bought $20 worth at the grocery store yesterday. I’ll post pictures soon.

In other news, calendar says that today is Canada Day. Happy whatever you’re celebrating, Canada! Party on!