eBay sucks

In recent weeks I made two significant purchases on eBay.  A trailer and a motherboard.  Let me give you a bit of a backstory.  As you may or may not know, I'm a linguist in the Air Force, and I got them to send me back to school for a year-long language course in California.  This means that instead of doing a job that I kind of hate for 10 hours a night, I will essentially get to go back to college in California for a year with almost no military responsibilities.  Awesome, right?

Armed with the knowledge that I'm currently in Georgia, you will agree that it is indeed relentlessly awesome

Anyway, I tend to procrastinate on most things, but anticipate excessively on things that get me excited.  This trip was one of those things.  I'd been wanting to learn a new language ever since I went through the langauge school the first time over 6 years ago.  Let me put it this way: when I found out I was getting the Farsi class, I popped a woody that could break a lesser man's spirit. 

The military is pretty awesome when it comes to taking care of you.  People often complain that the pay isn't very much, and soldiers in combat don't get paid "nearly enough for this shit," and all that is true, but I'm referring to the benefits.  Free medical care.  Housing and food allowance commensurate with your location.  Education paid for (if you do it right).  And a litany of other things.  Granted, there's a lot of bullshit you have to put up with, and there are horror stories about the medical care.

Tricare, the medical insurance company that the military uses, loves to prescribe Motrin for everything.  Vitamin M, we call it.  In fact, the doctors are so used to giving that shit out for everything, that I had a friend who went to the hospital with a broken leg, and who was in intense pain.  The doctor automatically gave him a bottle of the stuff, and then, after my friend gave him an "Are you fucking kidding me?" look, snapped out of his trance, scratched his head and mumbled "Oh yeah, you're probably going to need something a bit stronger, huh?" 

I imagine this is the look that crosses everyone's face when dealing with military doctors

I personally know 2 people who went to the hospital with acute abdominal pains.  Anyone with the least bit of medical training (and yes, episodes of "House" count) will recognize this as a possible case of appendicitis, which can be serious if left untreated. They were sent home with a bottle of Motrin, and intructions to come back in the morning if the pain got worse.  Essentially, they were told to "walk it off."  Of course, the pain did get worse.  One of them actually burst in the night, and had to be rushed to the hospital.  He almost died.  The joke about military healthcare is as follows:

Q: What do you call a med school graduate who got all A's in class?
A: Doctor
Q: What do you call a med school graduate who got all C's?
A: Captain.

For those who don't get it, his rank is Captain

But I digress.  Apart from some slip ups, the military treats their people very well. They want everyone fully fit for duty, be it physical fitness, mental fitness, social fitness or emotional fitness.  Basically, if there's anything bothering you, it can affect you ability to do your job, and they don't want that.  Financial distress is a big one, and for that reason, there is a housing allowance, which you get on top of your base pay.  If everyone got the same pay nationwide, people in some areas wouldn't be able to afford to live.  If you live in Tennessee, for example, a decent 2 bedroom apartment plus utilities may cost $700 a month.  Take that same apartment in Hawaii or California, and you're out $2000 a month.  At least.  The housing allowance reflects that.

Now you may be asking what the point of all this is.  I'm getting to it.  When you PCS (permanent change of station) to another base, the government pays to move you, your family, and your household to that new location.  Normally they'd buy you all plane tickets and pay a moving company to ship your stuff.  The government, being the government, tends to overspend, because it requires a certain level of uniformity and quality.  That's why you hear about them buying chairs for $400 a pop or spending millions to renovate a habitat for feral children.  You or I may be able to spend time looking for deals at Office Depot, Craigslist or Goodwill, and pick up the same chair for $20.  However, the government doesn't have the time or resources to troll yardsales, so it resorts to contracts, asking a number of companies which one of them can provide 5,000 chairs for the cheapest.  And they tend to overbid.

True story

 To save money on PCSing soldiers, the military offers its members the option of moving their stuff themselves, a do-it-yourself (DITY) move.  They pay you up to 95% of what it would cost them to hire a moving company.  You may see the benefit here.  Get a U-Haul, load your stuff, and drive out there, and you end up pocketing a few thousand dollars.  Everyone wins!

So back to me planning for stuff well in advance.  I started thinking about the move a few weeks ago (it wasn't for another 5 months), and decided I'd like to make some extra cash on my move across the country. I briefly considered a rental truck, but decided the gas cost would be astronomical, and could save a few hundred by putting my stuff in a trailer that I'd tow behind my car. 

My car

Obviously, this car wasn't designed with towing in mind.  However, where there's a will, there's a waiver, and there are aftermarket kits you can buy.  I got one from Auto Zone, and it was relatively simple to attach.  It just took me the better part of an hour because it's cramped under my car (my driveway isn't equipped with a lift), and I couldn't figure out how to hold up one side of the towing hitch while I bolted the other side to the car's frame.  I tried a stack of books, but after a half hour of no luck, I ended up using my car jack.

Shut up, Picard

My car can only tow 1500 lbs, including the driver, and every pound the trailer weighed would subtract from the stuff I could carry.  U-Haul offers trailers for rent but the lightest is 900 lbs. YEEEAH... not gonna happen.  I ended up going with a bare bones frame on wheels which weighs 250 lbs, and folds up so you can put it in your house.

The cheapest I could find it was on eBay for $450 including shipping.  It took a few weeks, and arrived in a 52' truck which could barely navigate the narrow roads of my neighborhood.  I immediately started putting it together.  The basic frame took about 6 hours over 2 days to assemble, mostly because I kept screwing up and putting stuff together upside down or backwards.  A few days later, I installed the axle, and a few days after that, I went for the wheels.  This is where the problem presented itself.  Something was wrong with one side of the axle, and wouldn't let the wheel hub on, even when I tried to coax it on with my foot.

Read: I kicked the crap out of it and it didn't go on.  Somebody will be getting a swift kick to the nuts instead

After my initial exasperation passed, I decided to call the company.  A 30 minute hold later, I was talking with a helpful but clueless man with a Spanish accent who said they had no record of a sale having been made to anyone with my last name.  Normally bullshit to me is like lactose to an Asian - it simply will not be tolerated - and I was up to my neck in it by this point, but I decided to share the trivial knowledge of the item's precedence with my phone captor.  It was then that a lightbulb came on, and the murky depths of bull receded.  Turns out that since I had bought it on eBay instead of directly from the company, they couldn't warranty it, and I was shit out of luck.  To add insult to injury, the company had a store in my city, not 10 miles away from my house.  So I could have saved myself $117 in shipping.

The second part of this cautionary tale involved my desktop computer.  Don't worry, there's no drawn-out explanation here.  It stopped working, and after troubleshooting it with a friend, we both decided that the motherboard was the bitch causing all my problems.  Most techies shudder at the thought of replacing the motherboard, because it's expensive and is a hassle.  They recommend you just get a new computer.  I didn't feel like doing that, as I had programs on there I didn't feel like re-installing, and I was attached to this one.  So I went to (you guessed it) eBay, and bought a refurbished $200 motherboard.  A week later, it was at my door, and after carefully installing it, I hooked it up to my screen, and excitedly pushed the "On" button...

Nothing happened.  There was no picture.  On top of that, both my mouse and keyboard had mysteriously stopped working.  Another friend of mine, who knows a thing or two about computers, came over 2 days later, to take a look.  He pored over it, testing everything.  Eventually he said "fuck it, it's not working, get a new one." 

He also took a look at the trailer axle, and asked where I had acquired it.  Upon hearing the verdict, he intoned: "And what have we learned today?"

I learned that eBay sucks.

Adventures in maturity

A few years ago I realized that if I ever wanted to get ahead in life, I'd have to dress the part, and that ratty T-shirts with pithy quotes like "Boobies make me smile" and "I sell crack for the CIA" were no longer considered haute couture. 

"This is totally going to be me in 10 years.  These shirts are funny now and they're gonna be awesome then"
- Me at 18

So in the interest of dressing the part of the responsible adult who is cultured enough to know how to pay taxes and not confuse the salad fork with the cake fork if the occasion called for it, I decided I would get a suit sometime in the near future.  I'd be all classy and smooth and stuff.

Pictured: classy as balls

Then I started watching How I Met your Mother, and Barney's philosophy on life pretty much clinched it:

Suit up!

Well, I have yet to take that step, but yesterday, as I accompanied a friend to the mall for some shopping therapy, we happened upon the watch counter at Dillards.  I have a fuzzy memory of me looking at fancy watches behind a counter made of bulletproof glass back in the day and thinking that some of them looked pretty sharp while others seemed reserved for the old and the uncool, or people whose fashion sense was indirectly proportional to the amount of money they earned via less than reputable methods.

Derek arranged his entire collection of 'bling' around his neck in preparation for his daily stroll.  He paused for a moment, then grinned sheepishly, two fingers extended in the universal sign for 'poor fiscal responsibility'

The most expensive watch I've ever owned was a digital Casio which cost a whopping $15.  As I looked around the store, a couple of watches caught my eye due to their brilliance.  People are like fish, in that we're social creatures, and also that we're attracted to shiny things, and I'm no exception.  One watch in particular, cradled carefully between the plump fingers of the overweight salesman, whose knuckle hair curled ever so softly around the garish wedding band he was sporting, caught my eye.  It blinged extra hard at me, and I was sold.  It was an Emporio Armani (which I was assured was a snazzy brand) and cost $250, but considering a man in a nice suit with a $10 watch will always be missing something, I figured it would be an investment, and plunked down the money.  I also ended up getting a more practical everyday Fossil watch, which was a cheaper (but still fairly costly) $125.  Hopefully these two will suit my watch needs for any occasion for years to come.

The suaveness oozing out of the Armani isn't properly captured in this photo

In closing, I'd like to leave you with another T-shirt for old time's sake.  This picture and the one at the beginning of the article are screencaps from the 2007 movie "Ten Inch Hero."  I highly recommend it.

Pi Day

Happy Pi Day, everyone!

As most people know, Π is the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference, and it's equal to 3.14159265...

Today, being 3/14, has been named as Pi Day.  This morning I wondered what time exactly would be Pi time (i.e., the 159265 following the 3.14), and came up with a possible solution:

If we take a 24 hour day as a single unit, 0.159265 of 24 hours gives you 3:49:20.  So Pi time would occur around 3:49 am on March 14th.

Of course, since our measurement of time isn't based on a base-10 system (it's 60, 24, 7 and 365), nothing really corresponds, so I suppose you could say the most consistent Pi time will occur on 3/14/15 at 9:26:54

In honor of this number, have some pie!

Déjà vu

Déjà vu.  We've all experienced it, though some of you may not know it by that name, or even that it had a name.  It means 'already seen' in French, and  is the experience of feeling sure that one has already witnessed or experienced a current situation, even though the exact circumstances of the prior encounter are uncertain and were perhaps imagined.

Some say that a déjà vu is a glitch in the Matrix

I can haz teh invizibl glitchez?

Another explanation (and it's going to be far-fetched, but I don't see you coming up with anything, so sit down and shut up) is that Earth has always been populated with a certain group of time-travelers, ones whose mission has been to go back in time and try to change specific events in our history, such as the Lincoln assassination.

Of course, that still happened, so either they figured out it would behoove them not to do it, or we were left in this dimension, and the time travelers created a new timeline.  Something like that.  Anyone with a cursory knowledge of theoretical time travel knows that going into the past is impossible, due to the whole feedback thing. 

You know how when you put a microphone up to a speaker, the sound and interference builds and builds until the speaker explodes?  Well it's the same with wormholes.  The radiation getting transferred to the past as the time traveler goes through joins the same radiation in the past, which stays around until it gets to the present, where it doubles and builds up, and much like the music speaker, the wormhole can't handle it, so it explodes or implodes.  Either way, it ceases to be.  And word on the street is that the radiation builds up so quickly the time passage expires almost before it was created.

But lets say time travel to the past were possible and there were time travelers going back and changing specific events.  Each time they go back, they're creating another layer, or dimension, on top of all the pre-existing timelines.  And each time they do, the layers of alternate timelines get thinner and thinner.  Of course, since they try to maintain things as unchanged as possible (except, of course, what they went back to change), not much will change in your life.  You will probably do mostly the same things in your life in the alternate timeline as in the original one.  For example, you may go to the bathroom at 12:30 in one dimension, but at 12 in another.  When you and the alternate you cross offset paths like that, you sense it.  Deja vu.  That's the hypothesis, anyway. 

Here's an article on how deja vu works from a more scientific angle

I'll find a title for this later

I don't know how many people actually read my posts regularly, but you may have noticed that they've been declining in frequency. 

I don't know what it is.  Maybe it's my penchant for noticing the squirrels when the situation calls for focus.  I guess if like me, you've been living for close to 30 years with unmedicated ADHD and possible (undiagnosed) Asperger's syndrome you would have some understanding of the need to go charging off after shiny things in the middle of a tense hostage situation.

Either that or it would just make people want to 'slap some sense' into you.  I just went off onto a tangent, didn't I?  See what I'm talking about?  It's a wonder I've made it through school or accomplished anything.  I'm as procrastinating as they come, yet always seem to get things done at the last minute, and done pretty well.  Any time I have a project, this is what I feel like for the first 75% of the time leading up to the deadline:

Eh, whatever, I got time

Then, when I notice I'm a few days away from the deadline, I start freaking out, knowing there's no way I can actually get the project done in time.

Why didn't I start when I had the time?

But unfailingly, after a few days (or usually hours) of harrowing work or cramming, the project turns out fine, sometimes even better than everyone else (if it's a test or something) and I wonder why I was even worried.

And repeat.

Anyway, back to the original topic.  I haven't written anything in forever, because ever since I got back from Afghanistan, it's like my muse has been lost.  While I was over there, the only things to do in your precious free time were work out and...  Yeah, pretty much just that.  Of course, you could watch movies or find a hobby or something.  For me, that hobby became writing.  There was always some subject that incensed me and got the creative juices flowing.  The thoughts poured out of my mind through my fingers in perfectly worded sentences engineered to deliver the greatest comedic effect or ridicule or whatever the goal was.  But I got back.  Life returned to normal (read: boring) and while I'm glad to be out of that hellhole, I miss the experiences that made writing so interesting.

I think another reason was that I got kind of lethargic.  Whenever an idea popped into my head in Afghanistan, I'd write it down as fast as possible for use later.  Now, I'm too lazy and can't be bothered to do that.

God, this post sucks.  Hope you enjoyed

Gay marriage

New York passed gay marriage yesterday, becoming the sixth state (plus DC, though they don't really count.  "Taxation without representation" and all that.  It's even on their licence plates.  Why would they even advertise that?  But I'm rambling.  Here's the rest of the sentence) to do so.  First of all, I think many, if not all of the rights afforded to straight couples should have been given to gays a long time ago, and withholding them is just stupid.  Hospital rights, inheritance and military service are a few of the things that come to mind.  Many on the religious right would argue that homosexuality is wrong, period, and while I personally am not comfortable with the thought of two sweaty dudes going at it, the morality of it is not where my beef lies.

Though this is pretty much wrong no matter who you ask

We lost much valuable manpower and skills by not allowing gays to serve in the military up until now.  They can turn a wrench, fire a rifle or type on a keyboard just as well as their straight counterparts.  There are certain areas where it wouldn't be wise, in my opinion, such as the battlefield,  for the same reason they don't allow women into some types of combat; because it can degrade morale, some people would be uncomfortable, etc.  However, most of the military today is now in either a support position or working in offices.  Only a small percentage fights in the traditional infantry position that comes to mind when you say 'soldier'.

I get that two people of the same gender can love each other.  I really do.  But the only thing I disagree with is the term 'marriage' to describe a homosexual union.  Marriage has always been a religious institution.  Even though many LGBT supporters will argue that its current definition as the union between one man and one woman is relatively new, homsexuality has never been accepted by most religions.  And I doubt that's going to change any time soon.  In fact, why would gays even want to subscribe to something promoted by groups that have persecuted them for millenia?  That's like an African American demanding entrance into the KKK, because...I don't know, equality or something. 

Just...no.

My point here is that instead of trying to get the religious right to accept gay marriage as a thing, homosexuals should focus on getting the same rights offered to straight couples.  Leave 'marriage' to the religious.  Be the bigger person.  Let the baby have its bottle.  Smell what I'm serving here?  Gays complain about their rights being infringed, and that's true for the most part, but marriage is an intrinsic part of the life of faith of (non-gay accepting) religious people, and demanding entrance tramples upon the beliefs of a large segment of the population.

What I propose is that it be called something different.  Call it a domestic partnership.  Call it a legal union, call it whatever the fuck you want, just not marriage.  I think it would have been passed a lot sooner if they hadn't stubbornly insisted on using that term.

Update

Hey everyone, sorry I haven't written in a while, I just got back from Afghanistan.  It's been a long week  Lots of inprocessing and stuff to do.  I was there for 6 months, and though I was the one that volunteered for the deployment and was really excited to go, mostly to see the country I'd studied so much about, and practice the language with the natives, by about week 3, I was ready to leave.

This is an excerpt from one of my weekly emails home a few weeks before I left:

"Have I mentioned I can’t wait to leave?  It’s not that life is terrible here.  Not anymore anyway, since the last rotation of people left, taking she-who-must-not-be-named (see the note below) with them .  Everyone’s getting along just fine, I have a place to sleep and food to eat.  Not great food - it’s been chicken wings, hamburgers, corn dogs and mini frozen pizzas every day; no fruit or desert and hardy any vegetables – but food nonetheless.  I just think they stopped caring.  There isn’t any one factor in particular that makes me want out.  I’m just restless and yearn for some freedom, the beach, hiking in the mountains, regular clothes and an actual weekend.  I want to hang out with people who aren’t in uniform.  I want to do something outside of this monotony.  I want to be able to jump the rails of this fixed route I must take, stop having to carry this rifle around, stop having to throw myself to the ground in the middle of my night due to an impending rocket attack because some asshole insurgent decided he’d spend $800 on a rocket to shoot at us instead of using that money to educate the next generation of kids who know nothing but war and to whom “making it in life” means selling opium or becoming a corrupt government official."

Note: The unnamed lady in the excerpt was a female supervisor who took an intense dislike to me from the very start and made my life hell while I was there, the single biggest factor in making me good and ready to leave by the end.  She was a very unpleasant person, and just to give you an idea, think Naomi from the movie "Waiting..."  

The personality resemblance was uncanny

Though, other than the perpetual scowl and cigarette smoking, she didn't look much like her.  Plus, she was about a foot taller than Naomi, making her not just mentally but also physically imposing.