I’m sorry, but Larry King is an idiot. For proof, see this actual quote from last night’s program :
LARRY KING: “…how can you out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?”
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he really said that. And that is why Larry King won’t do two shows a night. He just won’t. It wouldn’t be fair to him or to his audience.
I see that UK Home Secretary Charles Clarke has announced new rules under which foreigners in Britain can be deported or excluded from the country. Under the new rules, “fostering hatred or advocating and justifying violence to further beliefs” makes one eligible for deportation if already in the UK, or exclusion, if one is seeking to enter the UK.
“Individuals who seek to create fear, distrust and division in order to stir up terrorist activity will not be tolerated by the government or by our communities,” said Mr Clarke, promising a crackdown on “preachers of intolerance and hatred". “These are unacceptable behaviours and will be the grounds for deporting and excluding such individuals from the UK.”
I expect, then, that Pat Robertson won’t be traveling to Britian anytime soon.
I wish I had had Fog Creek Copilot a long time ago, but they only just released it last week. It really helped me get out of a jam!
See, I spend a lot of time providing computer tech support for my family. This is more by chance than by design. Most programmers I know are also the designated tech-support persons in their families. (Even though programmers aren’t necessarily the best people to do tech support – but I digress.)
I don’t mind providing advice and troubleshooting for my family (and some of my friends); the way I look at it, it’s one way for me to be useful. However, since my family is spread out across several states, inevitably much of my tech-support duties are performed over the phone. This can be an unbelievably frustrating experience, as anyone who has tried it knows very well. Here’s an actual transcript of a portion of one such conversation:
“Press Start. Yes. Start. Start, in the bottom left-hand corner. Right. Then Programs. No? How about ‘All Programs’? Okay. Never mind. Click your desktop. Your desktop. The big blue area that doesn’t have any windows on it. Behind all your other windows. Okay. Is that Microsoft Office bar up now? Is it on your screen now? It is? On your screen? Okay, good. Now, is there some kind of a menu attached to it? Okay, is there something there that looks sort of like a title bar? A title bar. A title bar – some type of area that isn’t an icon? You’d mentioned that you click in the upper-right hand corner to make it go away, but is there an upper left-hand corner to it?…Yes, go ahead and try, I’ll wait…”
My wife had to leave the room while I was on this call. She later told me that listening to this conversation made her want to stick needles in her eyes. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of either leaving or sticking needles in my eyes. Instead, I kept trying for another 45 minutes, until finally I gave up. One of these days, when we are visiting family, I will sit down at my relative’s computer and probably take about 2 minutes to make the fix the trivial problem he was having.
I’m not relating this call to make fun. I’m relating it to make a point, and to celebrate a real breakthrough which will provide real relief for this pain.
Providing tech support to family and friends can be frustrating for two reasons. The minor contributor is that although my clientele tends to believe I know everything about computers, inevitably they ask me about applications which I don’t know or don’t use. A much bigger problem is that every computer really is different, and I have no way of knowing how your computer is set up unless I see it.
Example: How do you get to the mouse settings? Well, on my computer, I press “Start", then I hover over “Settings", then I hover over “Control Panel", then I press “Mouse". The way to get to your mouse settings is probably a little different. And once you get to the mouse settings, you may have a completely different set of tabs than I do. So I can’t just tell you over the phone how to open your mouse settings. You and I will have to work together, with you telling me what you see, and me telling you what to press. (If I say, “open your mouse settings,” and you say, “OK, now what?” then you probably don’t need me to do tech support for you. If, on the other hand, you say, “how do I do that?” then you have probably had this experience. Hi, Dad!)
So this is why providing tech support to people over the phone is so frustrating. I’m driving blind, and you’re describing what you see. But we don’t have a shared vocabulary for describing things! It would make my tech support job a hundred times easier if the folks I am supporting knew what I was talking about when I say things like “Taskbar", “Desktop", “Right-click,” and “Title Bar".
It just so happens that just a couple of days after Fog Creek Software announced Copilot, another relative called with a problem. He couldn’t play preview clips from Amazon anymore. He was used to listening to preview clips in Windows Media Player while shopping for music, and suddenly they weren’t working anymore. I asked him if fixing the problem was worth ten bucks to him, and he said yes, so we both hooked up through Copilot.
The great thing about Copilot is that there’s no setup and no configuration, for either of us (although one of us has to send a credit card payment through first). After that, it enables me to see exactly what’s on the other person’s screen, and to take command of the keyboard and the mouse of the remote machine.
I would never, ever have been able to figure out and fix my relative’s problem the old way. He had inadvertently blocked the content from Amazon in his 3rd party firewall software. In order to find it, and fix it, I had to do a bit of poking around, not entirely sure myself what I was doing, because I’d never used this particular piece of software. But fixing it, once it was found, was trivial, and that’s why I think Copilot has a big future ahead of it – and my wife will be spared sticking needles in her eyes.
Thank Jesus for James Dobson! See, without insights like this, I would never have realized that I am (are you ready for this?) – gay!
…most homosexuals “…were not explicitly [so] when they were children. More often, they displayed a ‘nonmasculinity’ that set them painfully apart from other boys: unathletic … somewhat passive, unaggressive and uninterested in rough-and-tumble play. A number of them had traits that could be considered gifts: bright, precocious, social and relational, and artistically talented. Tip: Discern whether your boy struggles with feelings of ‘not belonging.’”
Say – I thought to myself when I read these words. Wasn’t I “unathletic, passive, unaggressive and uninterested in rough-and-tumble play"? I bet my gym teachers thought so! Wasn’t I “bright, precocious, …and artistically talented"? Yeah… Didn’t I feel like I “didn’t belong"? Yeah… hmmmm….
<a moment of reflection later…>
Oh My GOD! I must be GAY! And worse than that – I’ve been in deep closeted denial all these years – even though I am totally uninterested in having sex with men! My wife sure will be surprised when she finds out! (So will all those girls I dated…most of them, anyway…)
Dobson also helpfully blows the whistle (no pun intended) on the Homosexual Campaign Against Children. For a while after reading the article, I was puzzled, because it didn’t convince me that there actually is a Homosexual Campaign Against Children (outside of Dobby’s paranoid mind). See, for reasons I can’t quite discern, he doesn’t actually bother to back up his charges with any, um, you know, sources and facts. But never mind! If Crude-but-Inaccurate Stereotypes and Proof by Assertion[*] are good enough for Jesus and Doc Dob, they’re good enough for me!
Since my recent revelation, I’ve changed my mind about Ronnie Paris, Jr., who really took James Dobson’s teachings to heart. I used to think that this man was a despicable murderer, a man who would kill his own child for the sake of his ignorant rage and prejudice. But now, I realize that Paris was only trying to help his Boy Become a ManTM. See, I know now that thanks to Dobson and papa Paris, little Ronnie (3 years old and GAY!) has been spared the prospect of growing up and becoming a part of the Homosexual Campaign Against Children; and countless other little children, as yet unborn, have been spared the prospect of being little Ronnie’s victims. Instead, I’m confident that even now, up in Heaven, little baby Ronnie has been cured of homosexuality by Jesus’s magical touch, and the Apostles are showing him how to have some rough-and-tumble fun in the great outdoors, just like Real Men Who Aren’t Homosexual do.
This is something my wife just brought home for the baby. It kind of creeped me out.
I’m calling it the Sesame Street™ Baby’s First Gallows™.
Don’t tell me it’s a jungle gym, either, because if this was a piece of exercise equipment, the Muppets would be able to reach the floor with their legs. They also wouldn’t be permanently attached to the thing. That’s all I’m saying.
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