Atomictumor

Word on the street is that Boeing is going to be shuttering its Oak Ridge operations in 2008, officially for “lack of work”.

Says the Boeing peoples, in the Ridger of Oak:

“…the decision to end Oak Ridge operations was not related to a worker strike that lasted more than three months last year and resulted in significant layoffs.”

Hmm.

Man, this news about blew my mind. To think little ol’ Tennessee, bring up the rear in damn near any survey of the 50 states, is manning up to the .gov, and telling em to stick the Real Id where the sun don’t shine. This is news that just reaffirms my faith in state goverment, man.

Real ID, for those who haven’t been around, was hidden in the back of a government war appropriations bill as a rider about 2 or 3 years ago, and by the time anybody noticed it, the bill passed (I mean, who’s gonna vote down a war appropriations bill, right? Not in this country). It says that all states must contribute to a national database by Dec 2009, essentially setting up a national ID card. The costs are passed down to the states, and the Real ID card would be required for passports, driving, and essentially all other identification in the country, bringing us further away from the whole “govern by state” thing that Washington (the dude, not the town) was all cool with (except that he was a federalist, so he probably wasn’t as cool as, say, Jefferson, or somebody like that. whatever)

Anyway, I’m proud to say I’m from Tennessee because of this, and lemme tell you, thats not usually the first thing I’m proud to say.

Word around the campfire is that the state has laid down the hammer on public smoking, with the house passing a bill 84-10 that would ban smoking in all public places but bars.

Now, I was on the fence about this back in March of last year, and am still kinda there now, maybe more so.

My problem is I don’t like seeing the Man telling people what they can and can’t do in their business. A private business should be just that, private. Market forces should be driving health initiatives, ideally. If Joe the diner operator wants to allow people to smoke, thats his right, but he should be aware that he’s going to lose the business of people who aren’t interested in getting smokey second hand death with their grilled cheese.

When the government steps in (and this is where I’m going to be looking all Ruby Ridge, so just bear with me) telling people what they can and can’t do, it moves us one step further from a free state, and I have a basic fundamental problem with that.

Yes, smoking is bad, and Flo the waitress will very likely get sick breathing Jack the Truck Drivers cigarette smoke working at the diner. Its unfair to Flo to have to either find another job or jeopardize her health by working there, I conceed that, but thats freakin’ capitalism for you.

I like the idea of taxing smokes. Make em unaffordable, sure, because that’d still be the market correcting the problem. I’d get all behind the idea of having to make a bar, or restaurant, or whatever get a smoke license, laying down money that would go to funds to pay for workplace second hand smoke sufferers, sure, that’d work too.

Bannination, tho, is unamerican.

When the hell did I become such a capitalist?

So, I wake up at 7:30, and get a burst of panic thinking “OH SHIT!  I overslept!  Gotta get to work!  Gotta get the kids to school”

Then I remember that its Saturday, and the combination of the panic, and the wonder that there are days that I don’t have to do this stuff in the morning drives all the sleepy away.

So, I wind up starting my day just about the same time I would have on a weekday.

For the third Saturday in a row.

Sigh.

So, I had a problem.  I have this habit of renting movies, and it seems like whenever I rent a movie, after a while it clones itself onto one of the blank DVD-Rs here in the house.  Not sure how it happens.  I think it has something to do with food after midnight, or something.  Anyway, before long, I have this stack of formerly blank DVD-Rs that now have movies that I or the kids enjoyed watching at one point, and probably won’t, but may want to watch in the future.

What to do with this big ass stack?

I have a big booklet that holds about 100 discs, which is full, and I could get another, if I want to spend 20 minutes looking for the disc that I want, because, lets face it, I’m not Martha Stewart, and organization and Atomictumor are two things that appear to be diametrically opposed.  Like bees and fiberglass.

So I called my old girlfriend technology, and she turned me on to the idea of electronic DVD storage.  I’ve had something like that happening to my CDs for a while now, and I’ve loved my jukebox, so I figured that would be a good idea.  There are pretty much two entries in the crowded and lucrative field of electronic disc organizers, the Century CD thing, and the Imation Disc Stakka.

There were pros and cons for both of them:

Century CD Pros

1. Was about half the cost
2. Was advertised to allow searches by cover art, so Pigpen could just pick out the movie he wants off the computer by the cover
3. Looks like a crockpot, for that crockpot computer style.

Cons:

1. Seriously, click that link for the Century CD up there.  See that big part about “discontinued by the manufacturer”?  Yeah, that should be a red flag.
2. Looks like a freakin crockpot.   Thats really not cool.

Imation Stakka Pros

1. With a name like stakka, its gotta be good…
2. A bit more of an aesthetic appeal

Cons:

1. Twice as much
2. No functionality to search by covers

So, after a few days of pondering, I jumped the gun and got the Century CD from this website I hadn’t bought stuff from before, computergeeks.com.  It got here the other day.  Ironically, I was talking online with a friend at the time, and she was party to exactly how much this thing sucks.

When I opened em up, I found there was no software.  There was a little slip of paper directing me to a website to download the software.  The software, DDS, is a sub Access level database generator.   Once working, you pop a disc in the century CD thing, it asks if its a new one, you say ‘yes’ and pop the name in, and then it rotates around.

And wow.  This bitch is loud.  Its like an underwater chainsaw.  It damn near literally makes me jump every time it comes on.

When it comes on.  I had the first one hooked up fine, and popped the second one on top (which is nice, to add a unit you just stack it), and the second one jammed.  I head over to the tech support site (I’d link it, but like the ether, it’s disappeared now), and the advice was “Strike the unit on a hard surface”.

REALLY?  If only all IT were that easy!

So, I had two choices.  I could RMA the beast, or take it apart and see if I can improve it.

With the ghost of BJ laughing her ass off at me, I took the sucker apart.  I managed somehow to fix the jam, but the noise is caused by the worm gear that rotates the thing, and theres nothing I can think of to do to quiet it down.  WD-40 would probably mess up the discs inside, and besides, I don’t think it works too well on plastic.  I saw somewhere that maybe silicon gel or something might work, so I might just lube the thing up and hope for the best.

We still didn’t have cover search capabilities.  I dug around, and found that the people selling this thing now have new software, Media Tracker V2, which they’ll be happy to sell me, at $20 bucks a pop.  The ability to search covers is on a ‘wish list’, and evidently the stores selling these things just magically added that to the advertisements on their own.

So hell, that means its RMA time.  Only I emailed computergeeks.com for one three days ago, and again yesterday, and still have heard nothing.  I have noticed that I’ll be paying for return shipping, as well as a 15% restock fee, which makes it almost worth it to run these pieces of crap over with my car just for the satisfaction of hearing them crunch.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I think I’m going to keep the damn things, as a constant reminder about buying stuff on the internet…