And one more thing: It may well turn out that the blackout began with something happening in a Niagara Falls plant, but it weren't no lightning strike. Got it? There was nothing remotely resembling even a cloud in our skies yesterday, much less a thunderstorm. So there.

Well, that was interesting.

Remember those safety movies they used to show in school, the ones that told us not to plug two octopus-plugs and four extension cords into a single electrical outlet? Well, those folks knew what they were talking about. I'm just sayin'....

But seriously, our own domicile never lost power, as of this writing. Weird. At about 5:15 yesterday, I turned on the TV for no particular reason, and saw footage of thousands of people hoofing-it out of NYC. Of course, my first thought was some kind of terrorist attack, but that was assuaged almost immediately by the headline of a massive blackout. And then the news flashed a map of the effected area, including all of New York State, Ontario, and the eastern half of the Great Lakes Region -- and I'm sitting in the middle of it, with uninterrupted power.

I'm incredibly impressed at the general calm reaction to it all, pretty much everywhere -- if going through something like 9-11-01 can ever be said to have a silver lining, that would probably be it. I find disheartening the parade of experts on TV pointing out that our electrical grid is an antiquated mess and has been for years; I just heard on the Today Show that a year ago Congress refused to allocate money for grid modernization, and I can't wait for the inevitable debates as to the role deregulation played versus the solution being more deregulation. I do hope that maybe something like this will maybe get people to think of nuclear power in terms other than those shaped by Chernobyl.

(Oh, and I lost my writing day entirely due to the outage. Even though we never lost power, I turned off the computer and unplugged its cords in the expectation that we would lose electricity at some point during the restoration process.)

I'll be postponing the Image of the Week until tomorrow because I'm too distracted today. I have to do dishes, laundry, write something like 2000 words, and watch two reruns of Friends. Luckily, I don't have my wife's murder to plan nor Guilder to frame for it, but still -- I'm swamped.

It doesn't appear to be loading right now -- probably server melt-down -- but here is a nice, and big, map of Middle Earth for those who want to see in greater detail where the movies take place without actually reading the books. (The camp of those who love the movies but are seriously turned off by Tolkien's writing style is not a small one.)

Question for the tech geniuses in my readership (there's gotta be one, somewhere): Since I installed my new security programs and applied the various Windows patches and updates, I'm getting error messages informing me that I don't have enough free memory to run all the applications I like to run at the same time. This is becoming inconvenient. Is there anything to be done about this? I don't know if the hard drive space has anything to do with it, but I'm still less than half-full on the hard drive, maybe a little more than two-thirds. What gives, folks?

ADDENDUM: Well, I just exhibited how long its been since I had any tech training (about nine years now): in computer jargon, "memory" does not equal "storage". Ack. I've learned now that I need to pony up for actual, additional chips to install inside the machine. This I find mildly daunting, as I have never delved inside this particular machine before, but I'll get through it just fine. I'm not that daunted. And hey, while I'm at Circuit City pricing RAM chips I can pick up an employment application.

Random notes on the Erie County Fair, which we attended yesterday. The Fair is one of the biggest such events in the country, although there is some dispute in my family as to whether the Buffalo version is bigger than a fair that's held in Iowa somewhere.

:: Sometimes it's depressing to note that a lot of things really never change, but sometimes it's also heartening. While we were eating dinner, Def Leppard was warming up in the grandstand for their big concert last night. (Yes, I made a tasteless joke about their drummer only requiring half the time to warm up. Sorry.) The entrances to the grandstand were barred, of course, and there were the big guys in yellow shirts with SECURITY in giant letters on the front, standing there and basically acting unmoved whilst skimpily dressed teenage girls and their skinny boyfriends, tried to talk their way inside just for one free look at the guys in the band. It's things like that which make me think that things may be more right in the world than I usually give them credit for.

:: And here's something I always notice: why is it that those amateur rock bands that put on free gigs at street fetivals and fairs and such events never actually end a song? Instead, they reach kind of a consensual point of "Let's stop here, guys", and the lead guitarist will do one final riff of some sort while the bassist stops keeping his part of the rhythm. The drummer, accordingly, does one last bit of pyrotechnics, a sort of rock-esque "stinger" is applied, and then the bassist keeps noodling about for a second, and the drummer gives his toys a few more whacks, with a few thumps on the bass drum, and the lead vocalist says things like, "Yeah! All right now....good one, guys...how about it, people!"

:: Tucked amongst the lemonade stands and hot dog stands and places selling popcorn and cotton candy and Italian sausage and ice cream, you can now find stands trucking in espresso. And there were people buying it, on an 85 degree day. And I though I was hooked on coffee.

More observations later, maybe....

If you're looking for some good conservative or libertarian leading weblogs to read -- whether you're on that side of things, or you're a liberal who wants to see what the other side thinks -- Kevin Drum has a good list of such today. I link a couple of these, and sporadically check out a few more of them, and they are all good.

Operating under the theory that "Nonconformity is strictly for squares!", I have decided to join the great "Fair and Balanced" protest thingy. Because, you know, I like stickin' it to The Man. Or something like that. Workers of the world, unite....Oooooooo, donuts!

Via Pandagon, I see that Glenn Reynolds -- he of "I just link 'em, I don't read 'em to make sure they actually say what I think they say" fame -- links some post on some guy's blog in an attempt to "a little perspective to the -- genuine -- gloating we're seeing from some antiwar folks about 'massive' U.S. casualties". Of course, just who's doing this gloating over deaths of US soldiers is never established. Just one of those all-purpose "leftists think this" bits that doesn't hold up too well when one actually starts looking at actual leftists. And of course, the post he wants to use to give "perspective" to the leftists about gloating includes actual gloating, in the comments, about those poor French people who happen to dying in a heat wave. And of course, he's nice enough to assure us that he sure isn't gloating about French people dying, you know, because linking approvingly isn't the same thing.

This is why I neither link nor read Instapundit.

Another writing day bit the dust today with only about 500 words done, because I spent most of the time actually updating my pathetically lame and outdated security stuff on the computer. I actually bought a copy of McAfee Internet Security and got the thing installed. Then I spent a lot of time cleaning up the hard drive, and then scanning it, and then downloading updates to the software I'd just installed, and then scanned again, and then set up my firewall settings, and then reconfigured my internet answering machine to work with the new stuff and....on and on. Important stuff, but I didn't get much writing done, obviously. But I learned some stuff about the machine that I didn't know, and I did some lovely thinking-in-circles about a certain plot development in the book and trying to decide if I want to do it or not.

Talk about your boring posts....

In my Dayquil-induced haze last night, I ended up watching a reunion-show for that old chestnut from my youth, That's Incredible!. Man, I feel unclean. I should have known they'd find some excuse to let John Davidson sing, and sure enough, his voice is still one of the worst I have ever heard. He managed to reduce "One More For My Baby (and One More For the Road)" to something nearly unrecognizable. And I don't know what medical procedure he has undergone, along with Cathy Lee Crosby and Fran Tarkenton, but Vladimir Lenin's corpse has aged more than these people.

But at least they replayed the one segment I've always remembered from that show: the creepy, six-foot-six Yoga guy who managed to get himself squeezed into a two-foot square glass box.

For future reference, I have listed below every single one of my thoughts on the Kobe Bryant fiasco:




































By the way, the above also constitutes all of my thoughts on World Cup Soccer; the price of yellow tulips in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and whether Intellivision had better games than the Atari 2600.

TBOGG and Jim Capozzola have posted a couple of fine experiences in customer service they've been lucky enough to experience.

The strangest CSR experience I've ever witnessed was not even something that happened to me. It happened when I worked for Pizza Hut. At one point, the company decided to implement a 1-800 customer service line, under the theory that people not inclined to "voice their concerns to a member of our management team at the point of sale" (i.e., "complain in person" -- gotta love that Business English) might instead wish to complain to an impersonal operator on a telephone hotline, and those operators were authorized to give the customers gift certificates as they saw fit or, perhaps, even pass the contact on to an Area Director for further resolution if it was really horrid.

Well, one day a shift manager I worked with had the unfortunate experience of having a person who was clearly "three sheets to the wind" come in and try to order a pitcher of beer. Quite properly, she denied the request, and the customer stormed out; later, the customer called the complaint-line to report that she had been denied service. The 1-800 operator, who actually worked for some third-party call-center to which PH had outsourced the whole operation, showered this customer with gift certificates and whatnot, and if I recall correctly the Area Director was referred in this case -- all because the Shift Manager in question had done her job correctly. The poor woman was utterly incensed because, in her eyes, this was as if the company was not backing her up.

I'm not sure what the moral here is, but it illustrates some of the pitfalls of business today. Outsourcing is a fact of life, but surely it says something about what companies today think is important when they're outsourcing customer service. "We value you as a customer and we value your business, so in the event of a problem, please feel free to call this number and talk to someone who not only doesn't actually work on our company's payroll, but is in all likelihood not even in the same state as you -- and might even be in a different country entirely, since a lot of these jobs are going to India these days."

This just in: Akira Kurosawa's RAN is an amazing damn film.

I've already requested The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress from the library. (You just have to love big, metropolitan library systems where each branch is part of one, giant shared collection, and where you can thus request materials from anywhere in the library system, have them delivered to your local branch, and then take 'em home.

O! for the quick passing of tort reform, that we might finally end the scourge of frivolous lawsuits....

I had my first experience with Internet hackery yesterday, in the form of the worm du jour. So I got to spend much of my day downloading and installing patches and doing all manner of other wonderful, scintillating stuff -- instead of writing, of course. Between that and my attention being constantly drawn to the mucous draining into my throat, I got nothing of note accomplished yesterday. Damnable hackers.

Via Matthew Yglesias comes this report of sex-crazed squid, which may be of interest to readers of Christopher Moore's novel Fluke, which is partly about sex-crazed whales.

Happiness is a trailer to Return of the King. Enjoy.

(Via Greg Harris.)

Kevin Drum reports that Arnold Schwarzenegger is already dictating to the press. When did our press decide that its reaction to the policy of "You'll get nothing and like it" would be, "Yes sir! May I have another!"

I actually missed my writing goal yesterday, only coming up with 700 words toward my 1000 that were expected. Ugh. I'll chalk it up to the fact that I spent the time when I was planning to be writing, actually sleeping in my recliner. I'm feeling a bit better today -- still stuffy, but less groggy -- so I'm sure I'll be able to make up the difference.

(BTW, what's the point of having a recliner when we can't recline it, since the second we do one of our cats goes underneath it and falls asleep? They don't get hurt when we close it, but they won't come out until they're good and ready, either. Weirdos. Oh, and another sucky thing about getting sick in August is that when it's mid-afternoon and it's 80 degrees in the apartment, I can't summon up the urge to drink green tea with honey, which is my favorite beverage when sick during the winter.)