Robert Aitchison

Now the U.S. isn't big on personal responsibility these days, this was underscored when I came across this news story a little while ago (via Digg). The state of Wisconsin has decided to classify Alcohol as a "Date Rape" drug.

Sadly this isn't news, as TFA points out Wisconsin was the last state to declare this a law, and laws like this have been used (and more often abused) for years..

Now I'm going to start by stating that there is no excuse for rape, rapists deserve severe punishment, this includes those who use drugs (including alcohol) to incapacitate their victims without their knowledge or consent (such as giving a girl a Roofie Colada).

Second, I'm going to generalize by stating for example for the rest of this article that the accused rapist in this scenario will be a man and that the alleged victim will be a woman. Yes I know that it's possible for men to be rape victims, and yes I know it's possible for women to be rapists but lets face it this almost never happens (at least outside of prison).

A woman can go out with a guy, or maybe she meets him at a party, they are both drinking. They have a great time and by the end of the evening they have sex with both parties consenting. Now in 95% of cases this works out great for everybody involved. Sometimes the next day one of the people regrets that decision or one of a myriad of possible reasons, this has been going on since the dawn of time.

In the past, if this happened to you you used it as a life lesson, maybe you decide next time you won't drink as much. Clearly no crime was committed, after all the intoxicated party voluntarily consumed the alcohol, it's been well known for millenia that alcohol both lowers inhibitions and impairs judgement, so if you decide to drink you know what can, even will be the result of that choice.

Many parts of our legal system agree, people are (and should be) held accountable for crimes committed while intoxicated, so long as they administered the intoxicant themselves. Drunk driving is a perfect example of this, you wouldn't want the drunk drivers to be able to use being drunk as a defense.

Now for this one scenario things are different, if a woman decided the next morning they she really shouldn't have gone to bed with you, or worse, if she gets mad at you she can now claim that she was raped because her intoxication prevented her from properly consenting to the sex.

Seriously, we as a society can't have double standards like this, either a person is held responsible for their actions after voluntarily consuming an intoxicant or they aren't.

I've talked before about the Parents Television Council, one of my nominees for the "most evil organization". You may remember them as the group responsible for more than 99% of all FCC complaints.

Well some time ago on the CBS show Without a Trace there was a scene that simulated a teen sex orgy. As you might predict there were a number of complaints related to this and CBS was fined $3.3 million.

As it turns out, out of the 4,211 complains, 100% of them were submitted by people who didn't even watch the show!

It just goes to underscore that these people aren't out to protect their kids from indecent programming, they are'nt even out to protect my kids, they want to protect mke, you and everyone else. They want to be the ones who decide what everyone gets to watch.

You may recall more than a year ago I talked about a fire station being built along the way to work. Well this week for the first time there is a fire truck parked in there so it looks like they finally finished it.

It's been at least 18 months since construction started on this station. As I mentioned originally no private enterprise would ever think of taking so long to build a 12,000 square foot commercial building, if they did they would be out of business, I don't think the typical Las Vegas hotel takes this long to build.

I found this little gem, in 2001 it was expected to be finished in 2003 and was expected to cost $1.5M, looks like they are only 3 years late and nearly three times over budget. In any case it's finally done, no doubt it was funded with bond money and as such it will result in $8M in increased taxes for the $4M station.

Ok maybe it wasn't exactly 2 Days in the Valley, it was more like a week, but I was in a Chevy Aveo. Last week the car was in the shop getting repaired from the damage caused by the retread. (still haven't gotten the stereo fixed yet). For my rental car I ended up with a Chevy Aveo sedan. I figured I'd post a mini-review of it here.

Now the Aveo is a small car, Chevy's original tagline for the car was "it's small, pirhana small". The sub-compact class is a relatively recent returnee to the U.S., being driven away by auto makers quest to sell super-profitable SUVs in the early & mid 1990's My old Geo Metro was one of these, other cars in the class include the Toyota Yaris & Honda Fit as well as the upcoming Nissan Versa. Chevy is the only player of the original Big 3 thats currently playing in this space. Ford makes the outstanding Fiesta & even smaller Ka and sells them almost everywhere in the world except the U.S., Chrysler (now a owned by Daimler-Benz) also has a stable of smaller cars they choose not to sell here. Even Chevy is entering the market half heartedly, with the Aveo being merely a rebadged Daewoo. You would think that the American companies (as well as Chrysler) who are so far behind on hybrid technology would be rushing to use these small cars as a short term gas mileage solution. Instead they are for the most part trying to distract us by singing the praises of Ethanol and hoping that people don't realize how impractical ethanol is as a short term solution.

Like most small cars, the Aveo has an abundance of interior space, more than many larger cars in fact. Even for my nearly 6'6" height and nearly 300 pound frame interior space was not an issue, there was one exception to this, the design of the dashboard, primarily the corner of the center console protruded into my knee space which was somewhat uncomfortable, were the dashboard designed slightly differently this wouldn't have been an issue at all. I have noticed a disturbing trend among (especially American) automakers to make dashboards two dimensional instead of the previous "cockpit like" designs that used to be in favor. When Ford of North America replaced the interior of the U.S. market Focus in 2005 they introduced this exact same problem. Hopefully this particular trend will be short lived.

Power is pretty much what you'd expect from a small four cylinder mated to a slushbox, it could get out of it's own way but not much more than that.

Handling was another issue though, I hardly put the car "through it's paces" but even in normal driving I found the suspension to be extremely squishy, to the point where the car felt a little unstable at 65Mph and quite a bit unstable at 70Mph. Even if I had not been keeping my speed down due to recent speeding tickets I would have been because it would have been unsafe to drive at a normal freeway speed. The Geo had the same problem at speeds above 90Mph while the Mazda3 is rock solid at the speed limiter (116). I actually thought about taking it to the Autocross for the heck of it but decided against it because I was concerned it might rollover if I attempted any sort of extreme maneuvering. These problem could be easily fixed with stiffer springs, firmer shocks and stronger anti-sway bars, why Chevy elected to cripple the suspension of the car I don't know.

One of the major gripes I had with the Geo was horrible road noise, to save weight they eliminate nearly all the sound deadening material and there was actually exposed steel pieces visible inside the car. The problem is that these sub-compact are almost entirely marketed as "entry level" cars, they are priced very low (from ~$10,000) and offer almost nothing in the way of amenities. I guess they figure that people who can afford something "better" will opt for something "bigger". That said the Aveo was surprisingly free of road noise, it didn't have anywhere near the road noise that the Geo had and may even have been a bit quieter than the Mazda3 is (though much of the Mazda3s noise can be attributed to agressive tries).

Other than it's low purchase price one of the biggest selling points of this car is it's gas mileage. Unfortunately I can't really speak to that as I only had it a few days and only used about a half a tank of gas. My estimation is that the mileage is pretty good yielding low 30s in real world driving, even higher if one got the manual transmission.

Gas prices are only going to go up, it's likely that you will see more smaller cars coming out from more automakers, for me it's a good thing.

As for Chevy's opening entry into this market I'd give it a solid B grade, with it's only major shortcoming being the handling problems. I can't wait for GM to square off the body, slap a "HUMMER" badge on the thing and sell it for 50% more.

Yes I've heard your insulting, insipid commercials far too many times, yes you'd better believe I'm sick of them and NO I don't have to listen to them anymore.

As a matter of fact whenever I hear one of your commericals come on I IMMEDIATELY change the radio station.

Believe me, like I would sleep on the floor before I bought a mattress from sit n sleep I would live in a cardboard box before I financed my home through your company, but then again I don't think I'm in your target market, perhaps I'm not enough of a human being.

Just a random rant, if you get it you get it, if you don't you are probably thoroughly confused.

Like many assholes, I'm a volunteer leader in my sons Cub Scout Pack, specifically I'm the Cubmaster.

There's a running joke among scout leaders, or scouters that to volunteer takes a commitment of "only an hour a week", the joke of course is that it's a way bigger time commitment than that.

This past weekend the pack went on our annual spring campout (one of two campouts a year), today was one of the final den meetings of the scout year. I was putting together a list of our remaining events through then end of the scout year and this is what I came up with:

• Firday-Sunday, May 19-21 : Spring Campout (last weekend)
• Saturday, May 27th: Memorial Day Flag Planting
• Monday, May 29th: March in Canoga Park Memorial Day Parade
• Friday, June 2nd: Present awards earned at Camporee a few weeks ago
• Tuesday, June 6th: Last Pack Meeting of the year
• Sunday, June 11th: Pinewood Derby
• Monday, June 12th: Annual Bridging Ceremony/Dinner

Yeah, I got your hour a week right here :-)

One of the limitations of this software is that it doesn't notify me when there are new comments to one of my articles. This means I need to browse the main page periodically to see if there are any. Sometimes it can be a while before I notice.

I happened to notice one posted just today in the article talking about my car getting broken into. The comment may not be sweet but it sure is short, consisting of two sentences:

Interesting, now I'm well aware that I'm opinionated, stubborn, temperamental, extremely politically incorrect, a tad arrogant and possess a number of other arguably negative qualities (and I'm modest too) but I don't really see how the label "Asshole" applies to me.

Now I don't know who wrote the comment (anonymously), if it's someone who I've met (and angered) or if it's some random surfer who maybe doesn't like something I've written here. Honestly I don't care nearly enough to start looking at my server logs to try to find out.

Now I'm a believer in karma, and endeavor to treat pople like I feel they deserve to be treated, I guess at least one person disagrees.

So for Mr./Mrs. anonymous commenter (or anyone else) please enlighten this asshole on how exactly I am an asshole. If you don't want to come out of anonymity please give specific examples. If being not an asshole is something I'm supposed to strive for it would be immensely helpful to identify my assholeness.

The Trilogy is complete, no not that Trilogy, the trilogy of the three contestants of the next generation video game consoles and their ability to screw up.

First there was Microsoft with the XBOX 360, this one was first to market and the first with reported problems.

Next, is the Nintendo Wii, which I've already covered in depth.

Now we have Sony, the current king of the market with their long awaited PS3. The blunder? The PS3 will be priced at $600.

So a few weeks ago I talked about how my car was broken into and my stereo stolen. Now my car has suffered more indignity.

Friday I was returning to work from lunch, driving on the freeway, when the car ahead of me suddenly changed lanes revealing a complete re-tread from a semi truck.

I instinctively started to change lanes while checking my blind spot, unfortunately there was indeeed a car to the left of me, as well as to the right of me so I was unable to change lanes.

I ended up clipping the chunk o rubber with my right front bumper, the result was:

1. Bumper cracked & Scuffed
2. Under car splash sheild severely damaged (dragging on ground)
3. Wheel well liner torn
4. Fog light bracket obliterated
5. Fog light bulb broken & lens scratched

Saving the worst for last:
6. Rear passenger side door skin mangled
7. Rear quarter panel damaged

Ttotal damage, about $1500. I'm afraid to think about what might happen to the poor car next though.

I came across this one today. A science teacher in Kentucky was fired after it was discovered that she had appeared in an adult film 11 years ago.

It doesn't matter that since that time she has, as she put it, turned her life around. She served in the U.S. Army, went to college and has been teaching for two years.

According to the school superintendent she was fired because her presence would be "distracting" to students who had seen the film or knew about it.

Personally I don't have a problem with porn and wouldn't have a problem with someone being my kids teacher if they made pornos on every other weekend. What matters is how good of a teacher they are. Obviously you don't want anything inappropriate going on in the classroom setting but that falls into the "duh" category.

It seems like she should have grounds for an wrongful termination suit but who know what the laws are like in KY. Now that I think about it maybe they are just mad because she made a porno with people she wasn't related to :-)

It's worse than that, I'm getting an HP (Compaq) server! For those who know me this seems pretty hard to swallow but it's the truth, I can hardly believe it myself.

For years I've been a Dell advocate, in fact for about 7 years every computer I've bought for personal use has been a Dell. I always liked that you could get a Dell customized any way you wanted on their web site and I liked their adherence to industry standards.

By the same token, I've never liked Compaq, with the exception of their excellent Fibre Channel technology (which they acquired when they bought Digital in the 1990's) I have consistently avoided them because their systems have been overpriced and overly proprietary. Compaq never used off the shelf components if they could build something themselves. I have more than a few horror stories about getting no support from Compaq when there is even a single non-Compaq device installed in the system, the best example of which is when they refused to help a customer of mine with a failing hard drive because there was a Digiboard modem card installed in the server. Compaq was purchased by HP a few years ago, HP decided to abandon their own excellent NetServer line and stick with Compaq's (admittedly more popular) ProLiant line, re branded as HP Proliant. I even created a "Compaq Sucks" group on eGroups before they were bought by Yahoo!

But here I find myself making the decision to buy an HP ProLiant? server to replace the old Dell Poweredge 2400 server at my parents work (in fact this web site is hosted on that server right now).

I wanted to by a Dell, I tried to buy a Dell, but in the end I couldn't, because they refused to sell me the server configuration I wanted, because it wasn't in their "cookie cutter" configuration list.

I suspect a good lot of you instantly knew what this was going to be about as soon as you saw that headline. For some of the rest of you this will be shocking & disturbing.

It all revolves around the ultimate, the one, the only, In-N-Out burgers, a fast food chain that mainly exists in California but has begun to branch out to neighboring states.

If you don't know what In-N-Out? is about it would be hard to explain it. I can refer you to Wikipedia's entry as well as other sources but you really need to eat there to understand. In truth everyone should eat at In-N-Out? at least once in their lives.

This is a story of one man with a dream, a contest, a deathwish if you will, to best the legendary 20x20. He succeeded what few have attempted and lived to tell the tale.

There has been a lot of activity in the past couple years around video services on the Internet. As broadband becomes more commonplaces and as bandwidth increases you are seeing more and pore applications of deliverying viewo over the web becoming practical.

Some people are trying to make money from it already, as iTunes tries to get you to pay for TV episodes for your iPod. Some are free, like YouTube.

ABC is jumping into the fray with streaming episodes of their current TV lineup. This offering is free however the episodes contain commercials (IMO completely reasonable considering the price). Several shows from their current lineup are represented including my favorite new show since Battlestar Glactica, Commander in Chief.

IMO the video quality is decent, and you can move around to different places in an eposde.

As a TiVo user I don't think this is as useful to me as it is to someone without TiVo, who could use to to catch up on an episode of one of their favorits shows that they may have missed.

While we're talking about video, I came across a hillarious short video a couple weeks ago that wasn't really worthy of it's own entry. I present to you WHEEEE!

I don't normally talk about video games but this one is just too strange.

The "next generation" consoles are either coming or already here. Microsoft has released the XBOX 360, Sony is gearing up the Playstation 3 and Nintindo, they were there too with the Revolution.

Nintendo for a while dominated the console video game market, they had the NES and the SNES as well as the N64, all of which were extremely popular. When the PS2 and original XBOX came out they both had superior graphics to Nintendos Gamecube but the Gamecube was priced lower and was regarded as having gameplay at least equal to the fancier, more expensive rivals.

Moving forwoard it didn't look to change. The XBOX 360 and PS3 rached up the graphics and horsepower and while few expected the Revolution to match the raw power of Microsoft or Sony lots of people were (are) looking forward to what Revolution had to offer.

Then came the news today, the name of Nintendos new console is not revolution but Wii (apparently pronounced "we"). Wii, are you serious?? What the heck kind of name is Wii??

This weekend we went to Palm Springs (well, specifically Cathedral City) to attend the wedding of Brian and Jennie.

For those that don't know, Brian was my boss at my last job, I've known him for close to 10 years.

The location choice for the wedding was interesting, they had the wedding at the Doral Desert Princess Country Club (you can't throw a rock in Palm Springs without hitting a Country Club).

The wedding itself was outdoors and it was very windy, though the ceremony was nice and the wind provided a cooling breeze.

The reception was also good, the food was excellent by wedding standards, the band was quite loud though.

It was also kind of a mini reunion for current and ex Clark Consulting/Clark Bardes/CRG employees. In addition to Brian there was Amy and Eric, Rich was the best man and Anna was a groomswoman and she brought her boyfriend Andy.

I took a bunch of pictures (over 150 of them), most of them came out quite badly. I definitely need a new camera. Here is a picture of the group (minus Amy who left before this was taken).

Yesterday was NOT a very good day. As I was getting ready to leave for work Tove (who left just a minute before) came back to tell me that my car had been broken into and trashed.

Sure enough it was true, overnight my car rear passenger window had been broken & ripped out, my negative battery leads had been cut and my year old Pioneer AVIC-N1 had been stolen.

Piecing together what I believe to be the sequnece of events, it seems they broke the window, several people have volunteered they probably used a spark plug to do this. Once the window was shattered they were able to rip the entire window.out of the car (held together by tint) and dump it on the curb lawn. Then they crawled inside the car to pop the hood, once they had the hood open they cut (hacked) the leads for the negative battery terminal, presumably to disable my non-existant alarm. Then they opened the car and removed the system.

On the bright side, they were trying to be quiet so they didn't do as much smashing as they could have, they appear to have used a screwdriver to take apart the dash leaving it almost intact.

More info and pictures of the horror below.

For those of you that don't know me professionally, I'm kind of an E-Mail? nut. I've been running my own mail server for almost 7 years, as an IT professional I have specialized in Microsoft Exchange and messaging in general.

I'm pretty hard core about E-Mail?, I'm definitely a pack rat, keeping every E-Mail? I possibly could ever need. As an example last year I wanted to buy a couple technical books, I price checked Bookpool, a site I bought books from many years ago (specifically in 1997) and found them to be the cheapest. I figured they still had my account in their system but couldn't remember what I was using for a password back then. I was able to find a specific E-Mail? from 1997 that had my account information in less than 5 minutes, which allowed me to access and use my Bookpool account.

I'm also a big believer in less is more, when it comes to E-Mail? that means keep your messages small and to the point. Don't include stuff you don't need (like lengthy signatures, large graphics, unnecessary (or unnecessarily large) screen shots or even fonts & colors unless it adds value to the E-Mail?.

As someone who started out with Dial-Up Internet access (actually to be more specific I started out with BBSs and 300 baud modems) I had it ingrained into me that every kilobyte counts. I'm not hard core enough to use something like PINE as an E-Mail? client but I'm definitely on the miserly side.

Yesterday we were driving by a local park and saw a sign promoting an upcoming event, a Spring Egg Hunt.

Now being a non-Christian in a largely Christian society I'm definitely for trying to be inclusive wherever possible. I'm one of the people who believes in Holiday Parties instead of Christmas Parties but people should be able to keep their traditions unmolested.

An Easter Egg Hunt is just that, an event that is linked to Easter. It does happen to be a secular activity, and not a religious one it is still an inseparable part of Easter.

Governments annd Organizations are running scared, they are afraid to piss off the ACLU, which has an agenda to banish all evidence of religion from public eye. If they government is too afraid of a BS lawsuit to call an Easter Egg Hunt and Easter Egg Hunt, they should skip the event altogether.

Tonight at sundown Passover started, for the next 8 days that means no chametz, this means no bread or bread products.

Honestly it's not one of my favorite holidays, prmarily because there are so many reminders of the hypocracy of the Orthodox controlled commonly accepted "laws" of kashrut.

Can't have corn syrup, because corn can be used to make bread, unless of course someone paid an Orthodox rabbi to certify that the corn syrup used isn't infact bread. Cookies are bad unless you cook them really really fast, and pay another Orthodox rabbi, in which case they are fine too. I apply a common sense rule to decide if something is OK for passover, if it looks leavened, than I don't eat it, regardless of who was or wasn't paid to say it was OK, if it doesn't look leavened than I do.

On the bright side, I always look forward to the Seder.

I'm not even ashamed to admit that BITD I used to listen to, among other things, hardcore rap music. As well as the more tame (and socially acceptable) DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, Rob Base & DJ Ez Rock or Run-DMC I also listened to Eazy-E, Naughty by Nature and N.W.A..

Now here's something completely different. I bring you T.W.A., these guys are hardcore or something, I guess instead of a "drive by" they might do a "bounce by".

Thanks to Fark for the story.