Thothblog

Friend-

When I took this job, I made a promise to visit every single one of our state’s sixty-four counties by year’s end.

And in nearly eight months, I’ve visited with folks in every corner of our state, not to talk, but to listen and hear first hand their concerns, ideas and aspirations for the future.

What I’ve found is that people in rural and urban areas across the state want the same things-for themselves and for their families.

They want to earn a decent living for an honest day’s work. They want health care coverage they can count on. They want access to a quality and competitive education for their kids and grandkids.

But they also want a serious conversation on the issues-and they want their opinions heard.

This desire to have a seat at the table is why I made my 64-county promise. It’s why I traveled over 8,000 miles to hear directly from folks across the state about the issues that are important to them.

Folks like Shelly in Frisco, who said we need to stop fighting each other and start fighting for the American people.

Or Dr. Higi in Durango, who told me the health care system we have is making it harder to provide his patients with quality care.

And Randy in Montrose, who’s being crushed by rising health care costs, but isn’t so sure Washington can deliver on meaningful reform.

These are the stories I’ve heard time and time again in my travels across the state-in all 64 counties.

And though I’d much rather stay in Colorado and continue these conversations (Susan and the girls would probably prefer that, too), I’m headed back to Washington all the more convinced that we have some serious work to get done.

Because people all across our state face serious challenges-whether it’s searching for a good-paying job, struggling to pay for health insurance, or trying to put their kids through college.

By putting aside our differences, we can find common-sense solutions to the problems we face and we can build a better future for Colorado’s working families and small businesses.

Sincerely,

Michael F. Bennet
U.S. Senator for Colorado

I am reminded of Ghostbusters II when i read this, as Egon told Louis Tulley, “Short but pointless”.  People want good wages and cheap products.  Really?!  Thank god Bennet went around(on the tax payers dime I would guess) to all 64 counties to figure that out.  People like Nancy Pelosi irritate me because they have shot so far past what is sensible and decent that at least I know if I dialogue with one of them they will be shoveling me shit.  But at least they stand for what they believe.  People like Bennet irritate me even more.  Michael, could you say less with more words???

I could rant and rave about how your policy voting record is shoddy or how you never met a fence you didn’t like to sit on but no real point.  You have once again shown why come the election in 2010 your own party is trying to oust you.  Pick side a man!  Consider your chops busted!

So as some of you know, I have an on going battle with Sony regarding my laptop.  A brief history in case you don’t know.

Last year, I purchased a Sony VGN-FW190, a new model of theirs with a 16 in screen, awesome construction, overall a good laptop.  Unfortunately, they lied to me when I purchased it saying that it was 64 bit compatible.  it is in fact 64 bit compatible, but they refuse to release/produce the drivers.  here is the rub, the later two modesl of the same damn machine have 64 bit drivers!!!  So I called for a few months asking when the drivers would be available, and they kept telling me the 64 bit drivers were still in development, but a bout a month out (always a month).  Finally I called to complain and after being on the phone for almost 2 hours and speaking to 9 different people, someone finally told me that those drivers are never going to be in production.  Needless to say i was pissed, I wanted a replacement laptop.  Newer model, same specs (FW290 or above).  Sony wouldn’t hear of it.  So I complained to the BBB and reported their sleazy sales tactics.  Sony calls me to tell me they don’t give a SH!T and will not be replacing my laptop.

So today, I got an email from the BBB with Sony’s response to my complaint:

Thank you for contacting Sony Electronics Inc. regarding the complaint your office received from Jason Wilcox concerning his Sony VAIO notebook computer.

There is no documentation to support Mr. Wilcox claim that Sonystyle told him that his notebook PC would be upgradeable to a 64 bit operating system or that there would be 64 bit drivers available for his model. Sony will not exchange his current model for a current model notebook with a 64 bit operating system.

At this point Sony would seem to have me in a pickle…unless of course I was a crazy bastard with trust issues in which case I might have recorded all of my conversations with Sony people and all of my email transcripts where they talk about the 64 bit drivers availability and it being in development.  Teeeeheeee.  So I have quickly responded to the Empires..<ACK> I mean Sony’s response with some yummy transcripts attached.  I even color highlighted for easier reading!  Here is my response below:

Better Business Bureau:

I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID 7884617, and have determined that this does not resolve my complaint.

To assist the BBB in bringing this matter to a close, please explain why this does not resolve your complaint:

As I informed the multiple people who I have had to contact regarding this situation, I was not provided with documentation during the sales process..  I was provided the 64 bit information over the phone when I spoke with there sales staff.  In addition, I had multiple conversations with multiple Sony tech support who instructed me that the drivers I require for my machine were in development.  Sony records these conversations and has them on file.  However, having the foresight I did, I also recorded the conversations where techs have informed me that the drivers were in production.

Logic would seem to dictate that Sony can’t both provide a unit with only 32 bit drivers and have 64 bit drivers for that same unit under development.

Sony’s response does not solve my complaint because my accusation is that their sales team provided false advertising on this laptop.  They can claim this never occurred in which case I have multiple Sony techs on record as telling me the 64 bit drivers were in production.  So either the Sales team is providing false advertising or the support team is providing false post sales.  Either way some part of Sony is lying to the customer.

As I wrote, I recorded several phone calls with Sony.  I also kept 1 of the transcripts from an email chat session where the support person apologizes that the drivers are not yet posted.  I have hightlighted the areas in red in the attachment.

So we shall see.  Oh, the coup de grace to this whole situation is that my company has completely blacklisted Sony product from our sales and I would estimate in the last few months since we did this they have lost easily 5 digits worth of revenue.  What’s the phrase??????  Oh yes, Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!

I write this post, having just read one of the most ridiculous articles that I have read this week and let’s be honest, there have been some doosies.  We have the city of Houston wanting to pay of credit card bills for people who can’t get a mortgage because they have too much debt; Bernake is getting up in front of Americans and claiming…”meh, recession should only be another couple of months.”; and Congress is going to decide if chimps can be pets…. otay then.  As my mother always says, Ya can’t fix stupid.

However, the ridiculousness that I want to discuss is this cartoon situation with the New York Post.  Now, my own feeling regarding this story is utter terror.  I think it was only about 6 months ago that Europe was torn asunder by a little Dutch cartoon picturing Muhammad and the violent outrage that poured out of a sub group the Islamic religion.  I remember thinking to myself, “at least that could never happen here in America.”  How holy was I wrong.  However, I am not here to debate the pros and cons of this cartoon, nor am I here to argue the merits of “being outraged” over the chimp cartoon and comparisons to Obama.  If you don’t get the cartoon, you are one of 3 kinds of people; either someone who doesn’t know about the chimp story, ergo, doesn’t have the requesite knowledge to understand the cartoon; or you are someone who knows about the chimp story, but is frankly dumb and doesn’t get the cartoon; or someone who is racist and has gone past the humor of the cartoon to exploit this as another race related hate crime.  And we all know which Reverend I am refering to there.

The point of this little musing has more to do with the article that I read regarding the cartoon.  If you can, please read Kathleen Parker’s column, linked here: Article

Hello and welcome back.  Thoughts about that article?  Here are a few of mine.  I realize that Kathleen is most likely a woman, and therefore does not have balls persee.  However, and editorial journalist should have at least some sort of virtualized balls, even if they are running as a service in a backroom on a little used virtual machine.  Why even write this column?  She starts out in what seems to be the road to some nice “shut the hell up” for the outraged racial group and then 180’s to how this cartoon is in poor taste and not funny, and then another 438 degrees to the cartoonist himself is a crappy cartoonist because some dead cartoonist taught this lady who doesn’t draw cartoons all he knew about cartooning.  WTF?!  I don’t have a clue who to root for, I have no villain in my story and frankly, I don’t like ti when someone invokes dead people to validate their point with the, well he’s dead, but he taught me….

I started out thinking, good someone to stand up for the newspaper’s and say hey, if you don’t like the cartoon, do the American thing, and don’t support the product.  Then I am thinking she has not gutso cause she is caving to these groups and going to crap on the cartoon…and then on the cartoonist (via invoking great dead other cartoonist) and then she finishes with the cartoonist is in the right….I am assuming she is banking on the idea that 99% of readers(and hopefully those pesky racially charged ones) have stopped reading.  I don’t think I have read many editorials that have attempted to take very position on a story.  Waste of time, thats what MS NBC is for…balanced news, we decide.  (That’s sarcasm)

Wow, ok, anyway it got me thinking that we have a tiered intelligence problem not only in this country, but maybe in the world.  This is a problem that occurs when someone of a higher intelligence tier makes a comment that is read/heard/ingested by someone of a lower intelligence tier.  What happens is the nugget of whatever is viewed as this strange obelisk thing and those of the lower tier dance around it like idiots because they can’t figure it out and then boom we have some sort of cultural tension explosion.  Sadly, as I write this I am comfortable enough to say that this is an observation of mine, and it would be great if people could take that as it is, but I don’t have an answer as to how to fix the intelligence tier issue.  I think we will always have those who are opportunistic looking for the next idea they don’t understand.  It lets them scream to the heavens and anyone else who will listen…”I’M SIGNIFICANT!!!”

Tickets…you hate to get them, the police love to give them.  It has become a damn national past time for police officers to go ticket happy.  Quota season is upon us once more.

Now, I should be upfront about the fact that indeed my license plate registration is expired, but that being written, it should be known I have attempted multiple times to register my car.  First I didn’t have proof of residence, then I had proof but it wasn’t a bill.  Well it turns out I don’t have ridiculous amounts of time to throw at this endeavor….ya know, having a job and all.

I woke up this morning to a 30 dollar plate expiration ticket left on my car.  My parked car.  My parked car in front of my house that was ticketed at 4:30 am this morning.  Apparently, I missed the news story where Denver area police had solved all other crime in Denver.  Are you kidding me!  We have one of the largest drunk driving problems in the country, not to mention big time drug and pan handling, and there are cops canvassing neighborhoods checking plate registrations.  I can’t understand how a single person can look at the way cops are viewed these days and say to themselves that they just don’t understand the negative perception of the police.  We have officers executing unarmed drunkards on the light rail and walking the beat to catch expired license plate registrations.  Yep I feel safe!

It reminds me of animation I saw once, and for the life of me cannot remember the name.  In it, there ship gets damaged and the ice machine and hyper drive are the two things broken.  After an hour the tech comes back and says, I have successfully fixed the ice machine!  FIX THE F$%#ING HYPER DRIVE!

I thought police were supposed to be someone to be looked up to, who the average citizen felt safe speaking to?  Below is a great piece from Newsweek by Suzanne Smalley.

The image of a drug dealer driving a Mercedes is a Hollywood favorite, so maybe it’s not surprising that the African-American preacher, speaking on a panel about how to shut down urban drug markets, went for the cliché. It’s hard to get the dealers off the corners and into straight jobs, said the preacher, since selling drugs pays so well. A voice piped up. “This is not true,” said David Kennedy. “They’re scraping by, living at home.” Kennedy offered advice: when confronting dealers who say they’re getting rich, tell them, “I’m calling bulls–––.”

Kennedy is a rail-thin white man with weary eyes, a goatee and hair down his back; he resembles country singer Willie Nelson. He has never been a cop, and, as one friend says, he “looks more like a biker than a professor.” He has no Ph.D. or masters in criminology; he studied philosophy as a Swarthmore undergrad. But in the hotel ballroom packed with police and U.S. Justice Department officials, everyone was listening—because Kennedy is the only person who has ever come up with a consistently viable (and cost-effective) strategy for helping the inner city with its chronic blight and shame, the dope dealer on the corner.

Kennedy’s classroom has been the street. As a researcher for Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he spent years in the rough neighborhoods of cities like Houston, Los Angeles and Boston. He watched the same sad pattern: locked and loaded, cops would repeatedly kick down doors—or make undercover buys to catch dealers. The locals began viewing the police the way residents of Tikrit saw the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division in the summer of 2003: as an occupying army. Very few of these residents were dealers and even fewer were violent, but many people subscribed to the “don’t snitch” ethos that made it difficult for the cops to make cases.

In a 2004 experiment in High Point, N.C., Kennedy got the cops to try a new way of cleaning up the corners. They rounded up some young dealers; showed a videotape of them dealing drugs; and readied cases, set for indictment, that would have meant hard time in prison. Then they let the kids go. Working with their families, the police helped the dope dealers find job training and mentors. The message, which spread quickly through the neighborhood, was that the cops would give kids a second chance—but come down aggressively if they didn’t take it. The police won back trust they had lost long ago (if they ever had it). After four years, police in High Point had wiped the drug dealers off the corner. They compared the numbers to the prior four years and found a 57 percent drop in violent crime in the targeted area.

“We’ve been in this cycle in which law enforcement pushed harder and harder and harder, which drives the community further and further away,” Kennedy tells NEWSWEEK. “That creates additional space for the relatively few bad guys to operate, which makes law enforcement push harder and makes the community step further back. We’re in this spiral of decline, and the great revelation of the High Point work was that we can consciously step out of that spiral and, in fact, reverse it.” Kennedy’s research shows that shockingly small numbers of people—dozens, not hundreds—cause the violence plaguing cities’ worst areas. Most people just want a safe place to live, but feel anger toward heavy-handed police. The most effective cops are not the ones who make buy-busts, but who can find a dealer, show him photos of him committing a crime and give him a genuine choice: get straight or go to jail.

Cops were initially wary of Kennedy’s methods, which some mocked as “hug-a-thug.” But Kennedy is much in demand now. Police in more than 30 cities have received his training (thanks mostly to Justice Department funding); his tactics are being adopted by police departments from Atlanta to Seattle, with some spectacular results. One crime-infested Nashville neighborhood where Kennedy’s program was used saw a 91 percent drop in crime and prostitution in 2008, largely attributable to Kennedy’s good-cop, bad-cop approach.

The hippieish Kennedy surprises some police with his ability to relate to black and Hispanic gang bangers. He grew up in a privileged Detroit suburb and was working in L.A. when crack hit in the 1980s; today he seems fearless about wandering in dicey areas. His basic interviewing technique is to listen intently to criminals. Now 50, he is a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he is left alone to do field work. His longtime friend criminologist Mark A.R. Kleiman claims that Kennedy is just smarter than everyone else in the room. “He has a million brilliant ideas,” says Kleiman, who recalls Kennedy obsessively brainstorming about how to kill urban drug markets as a low-level researcher at Harvard 15 years ago. “He invented caffeinated beer before they did. He was going to call it Whipsaw, with the slogan, ‘Friends don’t let friends go to sleep drunk’.” Kennedy just “fell into crime,” says Kleiman. Good thing for High Point and other troubled inner cities across the country.