Windows Genuine Advantage

Speaking about Microsoft…

The other week we were catching an American Airlines flight from Austin. We went to the automated check-in kiosks only to find all 6 machines stating “THIS MACHINE IS OUT OF SERVICE.” Moreover, all 6 had the following dialog box front and center:

“This copy of Windows is not genuine

You may be a victim of software counterfeiting. This copy of Windows is not genuine and is not eligible to receive the full range of upgrades and product support from Microsoft.

Click Get Genuine now to get more information and resolve this issue.”

Is this an example of Windows Genuine Advantage run amok, or is this American Airlines trying to screw Microsoft of a couple of hundred dollars?? I just found it hilarious that nobody had at least bothered to turn off the machines or do *something* to make that embarrassing message go away…

No love for Microsoft

There is no shortage of bad press about Microsoft, how they abused their monopoly position, how they force unfavorable contract or predatory pricing terms on their customers etc… well, we came across a great personal example of a pissed off company – we were buying tickets for the Austin Wine Festival and got the following message when we hit submit:

“Since Microsoft has decided for you that you don’t need to receive an order confirmation from us unless we pay a couple thousand dollars, we politely request that you use a non-Hotmail email address”

I love it! You rarely see such spite so openly expressed… stick it to the man!!

Puppet sex

I just watched Team America: World Police again and am a little concerned that I was no longer thoroughly disturbed by the sex scene (it was 2 puppets having sex, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure).

My Integra is a Texan

Well it’s official. After 12 years, my car has given up its Californian citizenship and become a Texan. While it’s still a little hard to get used to, I don’t mind so much the Texas plates.

What really bugs me is the registration sticker. While California has a small inconspicuous sticker that goes on the corner of the license plate, Texas has *two* big-ass stickers that go on the corner of your windshield. They are ugly and very obvious from the outside. However worse than that, they are colored dark blue from the inside and emblazoned with the message “Check the date, love your state.” It is impossible to ignore, and frankly, I am just not yet ready to love this state (not that it’s a bad state mind you, I am just not ready).

An American Werewolf in Canada

I saw something which makes me really question the entire Tim Hortons organization (for the non-Canadians, Tim Hortons is an overrated donut chain)… we stopped at a TH at the border crossing to Buffalo, NY and saw this sign:

Haunted Tim Hortons

Haunted Tim Hortons

Seriously, WTF?? Am I crazy or is this nuts? I do have a couple of theories as to why such a severe sign is required:

  • The stairs are really steep and the lightbulb has been broken (permanently).
  • The employees are all vampires.
  • The donuts are actually made, not by people, but by a colony of murderous gnomes who only come out at night.
  • Mr. Horton is actually a werewolf and built a chain of stores across Canada so that he was never more than 5 minutes away from a place where he could be safely contained during his lycanthropic transformations.

If anyone has any better ideas, please let me know!

I feel it is telling that by the time I got back outside from eating my overrated donut and coffee that the door was closed.

One step in the grave

In the past couple of weeks both Gary Gygax (the creator of Dungeons and Dragons) and Arthur C. Clarke (the author of god know how many science fiction novels) died – it is pretty embarrassing to think how much influence these two had over me in my formative years.

Outside of whatever crap they made us read in school, I quite literally read nothing by sci-fi and D&D rulebooks… man, I’m getting old. On that note, I found the first white hair in my beard the other day. Combined with the 1-2 white hairs I have on top of my head, the long straggly hairs I now have growing out of my ears and the one nasty mole thing that appeared on my back (that I picked and picked at until I scraped it off), I am definitely getting old!

Total waste of my time

I just watched the Hillary/Obama debate in Austin (well technically, a recording of the rebroadcast of the debate 🙂 and I can safely say it was a total waste of my time. Earlier, when I eyeballed their positions on the issues, they were identical. It felt like the two are clones of each other and it shouldn’t matter which gets the nomination. Given that, I was looking to the debate to find out what some of their differences are. All I learned was that, on *EVERY* issue, they agree with each other and that it’s all really George Bush’s fault.

I will say, Hillary is growing on me, she generally sounds like she knows what the hell she is talking about. While Obama’s lack of experience did shine through (especially compared to Hillary) the idea that we need a fresh, optimistic face in Washington is growing on me as well.

Following are two SNL sketches from the Bush-Gore debates which show that the more things change, the more they stay the same – Bush-Gore debate 2 spoof (2:50, 2.6MB) and Bush-Gore debate 3 spoof (7:02, 4.83MB).

New Years in the Eastern Hemisphere

Me, my brother and our respective wives spent New Years in the Eastern Hemisphere – Abizer & Alifiya in Chennai and Mumtaz & I in Dubai. Both of us ended up getting caught in massive traffic jams from hell. It took over 2 hours for the stinkin’ cab to even get to our hotel and in both our cases, we ended up spending New Years in the car – what should have been a 10 minute commute took us both 1.5+ hours.

But what we found really interesting was watching the thousands of people out on the road – in *both* cases, they were ALL men!?!?! All we saw were drunken hoards of roaming men, with no women to be seen anywhere.

Now Abizer and Alifiya were shocked and appalled (“WTF??” was Abizer’s exact quote as I recall, Alifiya referred to this experience as the “Gay Parade!”), however, I was much more understanding. After all, what business does a woman have outside the home, drinking and carousing in the middle of the night no less? She should be home cooking, cleaning and caring for the 8+ children that she has sired for her husband! Anything additional is just not appropriate.

Mumtaz was in total agreement (Hey, I can dream, can’t I??).

Deep insight

My favorite bit of insight so far from this election season is General Wesley Clark stating, while commenting on the Democratic race on the night of the New Hampshire primaries, that, “it’s still too early to call this election.”

In other news, later that night, General Clark’s retinas were burned after he stared into a mysterious glowing orb – observers characterized the orb as, “a blinding flash of the obvious.”