A New Era In Commuting Dawns

So I turned 57 on Sunday, which made Monday's commute the first of a new Stevieyear.

And what a commute it was! It started really well when I woke early at 6:00 am o'clock in the morning with my bladder screaming that the two sips of water I had yesterday before bed were a colossally bad idea. I thrashed around for a bit but eventually lost the battle for sleep and went to the bathroom. Returning to my bed I fell into a deep sleep, so deep I did not hear my alarm and so awakened for the second time just as my train was leaving the platform.

"Great Scott" I cried ¹ and leapt for the shower, where I spent ten minutes clawing at the packaging to the new bar of soap I needed to replace the soapy smudge on the soapdish. Once liberated, this wonder of modern hygiene science rendered me clean and bereft of certain essential skin oils as per the requirements of modern civilized life as I scrubbed and I was able to languish under the now almost lukewarm water, contemplating the workmen cutting a large hole in my next-door neighbour's roof in the quest for some sort of home improvement. A quick pause to dry off and get some clothes on² and it was off to work on the 10:02 from Wyandanch ³.

Or not.

Because I had forgotten that the LIRR had finally gotten its collective finger out and started to do essential and long overdue trackwork on the single track segment that runs between Pinelawn and Central Islip (I think). Therefore, it was off to Hicksville on the LIRR-supplied bus, via Pinelawn.

It was with a certain fatalism that I saw that the slip road to the Long Island Expressway crossed a bridge which was being widened that day. Naturally, before one can widen a two-lane bridge, it must first be narrowed with large concrete barriers to a single lane, thereby allowing road users to fully appreciate the way their lives will be improved when the widened bridge opens new vistas of road freedom as they fulminate in the near stationary traffic jam the temporary arrangements have caused. Ten seconds after we set off torrential rain descended from the heavens in order to make everything wet, but I cheered myself up by thinking about the hole in my neighbour's roof and the two workmen on the said roof who were by now having to deal with all the lightning zooming around the sky and crashing into things with the usual flashes, bangs and property damage.

In almost some time at all we pulled into Hickville where the elevators to the elevated platforms were all out of order, allowing me once more to demonstrate the mighty Stevielungs in action as I clung to the railing at the top of the fifty-foot staircase wheezing like one of those antique pumps used to feed life-giving air to someone in a hard-hat diving suit ten fathoms below as they patch rents, stop vents and do whatever else is required to raise the Mary Ellen Carter. Not only that, all that nonsense with the soap was rendered moot by the tropical levels of humidity preventing my sweat from actually cooling my body down and by doing so, shut down the sweating. I couldn't have been wetter if I had walked to Hicksville.

The train arrived and I boarded, but unfortunately so did about twenty bajillion yahoos with their luggage and their feet staking out as much real estate as they can in order not to have to share a bench seat that holds three with one other person. Gits.

I got to work a few minutes before noon, where the day went rapidly downhill. I cheered up for a bit when I was informed my section leader had been hospitalized but it turned out to be just an unsubstantiated rumour and he showed up at my desk to yell at me at around two. Someone should tell that man how dangerous it is to wake someone from a sound sleep like that. As it was he almost lost an eye when I reflexively stabbed for his head with my automatic pencil.

He remonstrated with me for what seemed like hours but was really only about one on the subject of giving 110% (this from a man with a masters degree in Pure Mathematics) and all would have been well had I not had the misfortune to doze off again mid-rant. Even then, my precaution of having drawn realistic "eyes" on my eyelids might have saved the day had I not begin to snore⁴.

We had a frank exchange of views in which he explained his (new this week) vision for the enterprise and I made inappropriate noises with various body parts indicating vehement rejection of his thesis⁵ and we parted in bad humor, he to whatever he does when no-one is looking, me to the large conference room where I could be assured of a couple of hours peace and quiet.

Which turned out to be a mistake as one of my colleagues was in a mischievous mood and used the opportunity to sneak into the room while I was deep in contemplation of my boss's plans and draw "humorous" features on my face with a Sharpie. Luckily I visited the bathroom before leaving for the day and spotted the perfidy in the mirror. Unfortunately the wag had used an Overhead Projector pen and the ink was too tenacious for the chemicals I could bring to bear in situ: Soap, scouring paste, dry-erase board cleaner and the spray stuff we use to clean heatsink paste off ciruit boards⁶. I decided the "Frankenstein" stitching across my forehead, the "Harry Potter" glasses and the two bullet holes in my left temple could be carried off as a fashion statement and set off for home. The blacked-out teeth I could hide by simply not smiling too widely.

Which after the day's events wasn't much of a challenge to be honest.

1. Or words to that effect↑
2. Won't make that mistake again↑
3. Pearl of the East↑
4. Which it turned out was why he had come over in the first place. Lesson learned. Obtaining proper nostril-sized nylon bushings now Prime Objective Alpha 1 A↑
5. Since he never listens to a word I say I no longer waste them on him↑
6. Which it turns out is mildly toxic and after a lungful of the fumes I couldn't see blue or pronounce the letter "p" for an hour and a half↑

Why I Hate Everyone and Everything In The Whole World Today

Yesterday the heavens opened so widely that the windows in Chateau Stevie began leaking, thus the watery assault on my domicile was now coming from two directions: Up through the basement floor as always and down through the kitchen floor.

As a result of all this wet several things happened. First and foremost, the Bloody Long Island Rail Road stopped working as a variety of their electrical equipment proved unequal to the task of being weatherproof. This included the brand new signal system that replaced the old one that caught fire and for which the commuting public paid deep in the purse.

Not only that, various tunnels flooded and stopped being useful for moving trains under rivers. The upshot of this was that I was late out and consequently late home.

This morning I reacted to the late finish yesterday by oversleeping past my good train, my okay train and my safety train. The Bloody Long Island rail Road deleted my no-so-late-it-will-be-a-public-relations-disaster train from the schedule weeks ago in an effort to improve on-time service, so I was set to be over an hour late for work today.

I decided to take a corkboard I had in the garage and bring it to work. I've been threatening to do this for years, ever since I brought it home from work in fact¹ and this seemed like the ideal opportunity. The damned thing is just too large to carry comfortable under my arm and the improvised handle I made for it when I brought it home allows it to bang into the floor, an event that can tear the cheap frame into matchwood. By the time I got it from my car to the station my arm was killing me from having to carry stuff while bent. Ruddy thing was heavy too, much heavier than one might think cork would be.

Of course, all the near-the-station car park spaces had been snarfed up by Rich Git Lawyers so I had to park out by the ambulance station, several hundred yards away from where the train would be.

When I got to the platform it was covered in small lakes because it has no drainage. These lakes form right where the people stand for the doors for maximum passenger convenience, and some of them are almost an inch deep. Oh for a hole in the mastic joints so it could all drain away.

I parked myself on the salt bunker, a sort of mini shed about two and a half feet high for storing the ice-melt they need to thaw out the aforementioned lakes in winter lest a lawsuit arise, and within minutes the corkboard had tumbled from it into one of the lakes, soaking the brown paper wrapping completely through. Just when I though things were at an all time low the platform filled with vacuous off-peak on-vacation idiots with their noisy phones and inane chatter.

After what seemed like only eight hours or so a train hoved into view and stopped. We all stood around while the conductor tried to remember what he'd forgotten, and within minutes the doors slid open to let people off and admit the hoi-poloi. The only available seat was now one of the drop-down, abandon in the event of wheelchair ones which offer nil back support but allow one to enjoy the "Voyage To The Bottom of The Sea" locomotion of these bedamned new trains to the fullest. I parked me and my backpack on one and fished for my John LeCarre novel, at which point my bag toppled off the chair to the floor so hard it cause my hibernating laptop to take a stop, forcing me to reboot it to check it was not seriously damaged.

The train passed over various novelty sections of track which serve to magnify the rocking of the trains until they threaten to derail. The inane blither of my fellow travelers was augmented by the moans of those who had drifted off in the window seats and were now sporting concussions and contusions. Is there any feeling so exhilarating as that induced by waking after a good head bang against glass only to realize your head is traveling at speed towards the glass for another go?

We reached Jamaica but put in at a different wharf to that normally used for a transfer to a Brooklyn-bound train, inducing panic in the amateur commuters. The Atlantic terminal train pulled in opposite us, but the train doors once again did not open for a full two minutes. The Bloody Long Island Rail Road wonder why assaults on staff are on the increase. I'd hazard a guess that not opening the bleeping doors once the train has stopped and the connecting train is flashing its 'doors closing" lights is high on the list of assault-inducing stimuli. I mean, how hard is it? The train stops at a station and the doors need to open. That is the entire point of the exercise! Conductors take particular glee in keeping people standing outside in the teeming rain in the winter months. bleepwits.

Eventually I got to Brooklyn, where the improvised handle on my package broke so I was forced to mess around with a very uncomfortable under-the-arm technique that has all but dislocated my shoulder.

I unpacked the thing at the office and discovered that I had sandwiched it with old desk calenders back in 2004 in some brilliant plan to protect the corkboard in transit or smuggle two foot by one foot sheets of cardboard out of the workplace, I'm not sure which now. Had I noticed these and removed them before starting out the wretched corkboard would have been about one-third the weight I carried all the way from Long Island.

And I have to stay late to make up time so I'm a bit grumpy today.

1. When we shifted from Manhattan to Brooklyn↑

How I Nearly Repaired My Airbrush

My airbrush, a twenty year old Badger model 200 that has given sporadically splendid service as a spray gun for quickly turning white primer-coated metal miniatures in my bug-like alien Wonkhammer 401K army into blue-coated metal miniatures (in my bug-like alien Wonkhammer 401K army) had broken down some months ago.

It had developed the habit of blowing air back into the paint container instead of past it¹. I had effected a repair, which - it turned out - wasn't and finally, after four or five total strip-downs, and several dismantlings of the airbrush into its component parts into the bargain I was at my wits end. On the one hand I had proved beyond doubt that none of the parts I had dropped on the floor had been caught in my clothing. On the other the bally airbrush was still not working and Mrs Stevie was growling about nudity in the basement.

There was only one thing for it: I would have to refer to the exploded diagram of parts.

After this I could see that I had in fact misplaced a couple of plastic seals. It was the work of an entire afternoon to track down and buy replacements, but afterwards I was consoled by the certain knowledge that the airbrush would once again be squirting paint out of the end like it should. This was essential, since I was halfway through turning a bunch of white bits into a towering blue menace of terrification when the airbrush started to blow³ and the novelty and enthusiasm for the job was wearing off to the point it would all go into a box to languish for years until Goons Wonkshop rewrote the rules of Wonkhammer 401K (again) to make the thing unusable.

The bally airbrush was still not working, now exhibiting a bizarre pulsating spray effect that was not fit even for the rather rudimentary purpose I had in mind for it. Action Was Called For.

A mere four months later, last night in fact, I became enthused again and so I decided to get to the bottom of things. I read the troubleshooting tips and suggestions I could find and dismantled the tip looking for damage to that new seal (a prime reason for pulsing spray, I'm told). It all looked good. I put the seal in a safe place and stripped out the needle seals, but there was no obvious damage there either. I reassembled and tested but the pulsing spray was still annoyingly present. I stripped the nozzle again and dismantled it into its teenytiny component parts. Still nothing obvious. So I reassembled the tip and fitted the seal...where was the seal?

To cut a long, tedious story unsatisfyingly shorter, I hunted for about an hour for the bloody thing but it had apparently evaporated while my eyes were off it. I did not have a spare.

I was on the point of declaring the evening a total bust when I dropped the airbrush and it naturally fell point down, bending the exposed needle into a rather nice "J" shape, proving once again that things have got to get worse before they get really terrible.

I did The Bonehead Dance then extracted the useless needle from the body of the airbrush. I had a spare, which I fitted, but I decided that enough was enough and went upstairs to order a new tip from Amazon along with two of those seals. Naturally, in the intervening years the airbrush design has changed. Not much, but the exploded diagram of my model shows significant differences in the insides of the tip assembly.

I can't wait to see if the new parts will work with the old airbrush.

1. In order to suck paint out of the container and mix it with the airflow by the so-called Venturi Effect²↑
2. OK, OK, if air is blown at high pressure across a narrow pipe one can observe that air is drawn up that pipe towards the passing airflow. If one arranges paint of the right viscosity to be in that pipe, paint gets sucked up and into the airflow. Instant airbrush! The air/paint mix is controlled on my airbrush by adjusting a narrow tapered needle inside a narrow tapered jet in the tip of the airbrush. The adjustment is made by turning a screw at the other end of the airbrush. It's dead clever. When it works.↑
3. Instead of suck↑

Bugger This Buggery-Bastard Buggering Buggery

Life has been particularly trying of late.

The Bloody Long Island Rail Road continues to degrade in performance, with train delays now so frequent that the text message alerts can run my phone battery completely flat overnight as a situation at ten o'clock gradually overwhelms the LIRR in waves of delay, dithering and dimwittery. I am not making that up. A brand-new freshly charged phone battery, dead as a very dead dead thing in less than eight hours of texting. Even better, some of the messages are so long and meandering that they truncate before they actually say what is going on.

The situation on the platform isn't much better, what with that daft sod who announces the times the next train would have arrived at stations more than 45 minutes down the route had it not been still sitting in Ronkonkoma subject to "equipment problems". Seriously stupid to talk to people who won't actually be there for another half hour at the earliest.

Take this last week. I drive to Wyandanch, Pearl of the East to discover that the entire Ronkonkoma line had been switched off thanks to someone in Central Islip who didn't understand that whole thing about not going around the barriers when they are down until he was tumbling down the track in his somersaulting car of fiery death after having been struck by a train that by a million-to-one chance was traveling right down the tracks. I mean, what were the chances of that?

So I turned around and that was when I noticed that my road inspection sticker was out of date by over a week. I drove to the place I got the Mrs Steviedad's car fixed (see below) and told them I needed to make an appointment to get an inspection, new brakes and a service. They could have fitted me in there and then but I couldn't do that because there weren't any trains running locally - I needed to drive to Babylon, nearly ten miles away, to get to work. They said "Tomorrow, then" and I drove off to the little car-park I'd found out about last month.

I parked, and as I was attempting to read the number on my space so I could pay the $2:50 it would cost me to stay there ten hours, an SUV roared into the space next to me, the driver - who was clad for tennis - threw some sort of permit against his windshield so he could avoid the $2:50 charge for parking and we both left. He to the train to the Manhattan tennis club, me to the machine for a five minute quarter-feeding session.

The trains from Babylon at that time are local and take half as long again to arrive at Jamaica as the Ronkonkoma one does, so I was late anyway.

Work is still not what it should be. I joined to be a Unix admin and have been systematically prevented from doing that in preference to working on Project Millstone, which is underfunded, has no training budget and is about as popular with everyone except the person who bought it as a dose of jock-itch. Unmotivated? Moi? I can't be buggered to be unmotivated.

The day passed intolerably and I arrived back at my car to discover I had been served a ticket for not having a current inspection sticker which entitled me to pay a fifty dollar fine. As I was reading this document and practicing some new Words of Power I noticed the ticketless SUV in the next space with its bit of cardboard in the window and I contemplated justice: specifically, the justice that could be served by stabbing all four tires of this git's brickmobile.

I didn't of course.

Oh right, the Mrs Steviedad's car episode. I forgot to blog about that. Or to be more precise, I couldn't lever myself out of the depths of my depression about the whole situation to write about it. It happened like this:
The Mrs Steviemom needs to be driven to the stores so that if she has reaction to her medication she won't crash at high speed and hurt anyone. The Stevieling needs the driving practice. "Two problems with the same answer" I hear you say, and so did we.

Two weeks ago I received a phone call from Mrs Stevie to say that the Stevieling had crashed the Mrs Steviedad's car while reversing out of a parking space by means of the old "select drive instead of reverse and smash into a light pole" error of judgment. No-one was hurt and the car had "some minor damage".
These words should send shivers down the spine of any male.

I had them send me some photos to my phone. How is it possible for women to look at a damaged car and say "That's not bad, a few scratches" and a man look at the same car and scream "Argh! That's gonna cost me at least three grand to fix!". Both have the same experience in getting cars fixed. Yet the man is nearly always right, and if he is wrong it's because he has low-balled the estimate. I gripped my head and moaned for a bit, then told Mrs Stevie to have the car taken to a body shop.

The damage was a bit over two grand to get fixed. What I couldn't understand was how the Stevieling managed to get that 1990 Ford Taurus Estate moving so fast in such a small space. The impact absorbing bumper was a total write-off, insides twisted up like a pretzel. The Mrs Steviedad loves the car, of course, so the job had to be done.

Once the job was done, each sibling and sib-spouse took time to tell me what a waste of time it was to repair a car for a man who shouldn't be driving. I told them that I had no right to remove the old man's car, though they could if they felt up to it (they didn't). I also told them that he doesn't take any notice of me, and that if the sons thought he shouldn't be driving they should visit him and tell him that to his face, then give me first refusal on buying the car. That was the end of that discussion.

There's more stupidness, but to be honest I can't face talking about it now.

Wikipedia - An Encyclopedia For The Masses: NOT

To read the blurb from any Wikipedia promotion you would be led to the conclusion that Wikipedia is in part an attempt to pitch complex material to those who need things presented in their most understandable terms (because the Wikipedia Politburo say as much - "The Encyclopedia for the Rest of Us").

Yet, examine any of the technical subject pages concerning the classical sciences or Mathematics and you will immediately be confronted with the inescapable evidence that this is simply not true.

Take this example, pinched from the Wikipedia page on "Transcendental Numbers".

In mathematics, a transcendental number is a (possibly complex) number that is not algebraic—that is, it is not a root of a non-constant polynomial equation with rational coefficients.

Here we see a problem that plagues all the technical Wikipedia pages I've ever looked at: the introduction is complete and utter gibberish to the non-specialist in whatever subject the page is attempting to address, in this case mathematics i.e. the target audience for such a page since anyone who already is a mathematician will have learned what this is about yonks ago.

It seems to have escaped the page author(s) that the opening sentence and the material that follows it closely should be in everyday language, not bleeding-edge hardsumsspeek.

Here's my version: A transcendental number is a decimal number of the form x.abcd that goes on forever or as long as you care to keep doing the division sums. Most people knock off at 4 or 5 decimal places. It is called a transcendental number because it has properties only mathematicians care about that separate it from sensible numbers like the square root of minus one.

"But Stevie" I hear you say, "surely one need only follow the rich scattering of hyperlinks in the introduction to gain the elucidation and clarity of your rather non-technical and unrigorous definition of the term?"

To which I answer that a) yes indeed you can, but that the pages linked are just as bloody opaque and unfit-for-purpose as the one you started on, 2) by the time you get the answer to the idle question "what's a transcendental number?" you not only don't care any more but have a healthy hatred of mathematicians usually reserved for dentists and income-tax inspectors and ♥) you may never find the answer anyway as a distressing number of these sorts of pages are arranged in loops of unhelpful gobbledegook that bring you full circle after an hour of headache-inducing technobabble.

I picked out a math page to demonstrate this, but in fact you'll find the same stupidity taking place on pages to do with almost everything technical, which totally undermines the whole concept of the Wikipedia's existence as an Encyclopedia for the Masses.

Bleeding Buggery Bastard

Rotted hardwood sill
Now walls must fall in the search
For carpenter ants.

The True Cost of Acquisition

I used to be a database administrator, and a fairly good one if I do say so myself¹.

For years I did the job the hard way, then a short foray into the heady bleeding edge of the dawning client-server world in a small but growing company in Greenbelt Maryland (which is in Washington DC in the same way as Kingston upon Thames is in London) introduced me to a product called ERWin Desktop Edition². It was a wonderful little tool that allowed me to array a database design as a diagram, and as I was doing it the software was sorting out the foreign keys ³ and letting me concentrate on the design itself.

It was an amazing piece of kit. I could (if I wanted) bind the various data fields in my database to Visual Basic controls so designers would be locked into my vision of how to manipulate the fields and not get creative, as they are wont to do. It came in two flavours: Visual Basic and PowerBuilder, the two most widely-used developer languages for the newly-emerging GUI-centric business world of Windows 95 and Windows NT⁴. Both flavours were made by Logicworks and I praised their product loud and widely because it was An Goode Thinge.

And it was cheap to own at $250.

It couldn't last of course. Computer Associates bought the company out and first order of business was to pull the Desktop Edition version of the software off the shelves leaving only the much higher cost Enterprise Edition. In time they reissued the product with many new features, but they never relaunched the Desktop Edition, and the entry price was around $4000 for the versions they did sell.

I recently had cause to need the product (my copy of the Desktop Edition will not run on Windows 7, sadly, coming as it does from the Windows 95 era) so I went to CA's website to scope out the latest situation vis-a-vis ERWin. There was a free Community Edition! Kudos to CA! I downloaded it and it was useful though it never delivered what it said it could on the box when it came to translating the designs into an actual database - the real point of such software is database administration on a day to day basis, not just the initial design, and to do that the tool needs to actually build the databases and read the design back. It was, however, only licensed for three months after which I would need to download it all over again.

And so it came to pass.

As I was looking at the site I noticed that there was a "Developer Edition" available. Now that sounded promising! I was a developer, sort of. Surely it would be a reasonably priced product - not $250 but perhaps not more than $450 and that might be thinkable.

Four thousand, seven hundred and some piffling number tens in small change. So, we must assume some pretty affluent developers associate in the Computer Associates, er, association. I find it difficult to see how a burgeoning market in pirated software isn't simply falling apart with these bargain basement prices making cracking the software not worth the effort.

And he best part is that experience shows that in about five years the software won't work with the operating system or the database software any more, which is where I came in.

1. And I do↑
2. It came in a variety of larger scale editions too↑
3. Which in this case are what the "links" between tables consist of which are the nuts and bolts of any database based on tables and a big part of the reason for going to the trouble of making a database in the first place↑
4. I'll not get involved in the continuing argument as to whether anyone should have gotten involved with these languages in the first place, the fact was they allowed rapid development of good-looking apps and in the hands of those who knew what they were doing both VB and PB were awesome↑

Anatomy of an Uckfup

Tax return deadline day dawned to the happy sound of my phone melting itself reporting a slew of incoming texts.

My boss has an important personal axe a-grinding, one that will mean a week of meetings, and he made it clear that I was to be at all of them and on time at all costs. Naturally he began by scheduling all these meetings far too early for me to get there, the realities of the Bloody Long Island Rail Road not being an area with which he has troubled his steel-trap mind (despite repeated explanations), and just as naturally I negotiated for a return to planet Earth, time-wise.

So, having made of myself a high-profile target when it came to prompt arrival at today's meeting, and having actually filed my taxes before today's deadline so as to clear the day of distractions, it was obvious what these text messages would be: the Bloody Long Island Rail Road crowing that service was badly disrupted on my line¹ and it wasn't their fault².

I greeted the day with some appropriate low-wattage Words of Power and leapt from my bed.

A sad mistake.

For the previous Wednesday evening I had injured my back quite severely by foolishly bending over the sink to expel the rinse water from my mouth after some ill-starred dental hygiene. I dunno what is wrong, and neither does Doc Rubberglove's partner³. I'm okay(ish) lying down, and I'm okay(ish) standing up, but the transition between the two states has broken glass in our house as I explain to the neighbours that my spine is doing unto me stuff that there are laws against even if you do pay for it and sign Mistress Alexa's release forms.

So once again the neighbours were woken by my manly falsetto shrieks, entreaties to anyone near to render aid and/or a merciful death etc. I imagine it was very inspiring if you didn't happen to possess the back in question.

Eventually I was up, showered, dressed (won't make that "save time by dressing in the car" mistake again) and on the road heading for Babylon, since the gist of the one hundred and twenty three messages I had received in the preceding half hour was "no trains at all on the Ronkonkoma branch line". Imagine my joy and that of my fellow Wyandanch-to-Babylon Grand Prix racers to be dueling for possession of the road with that most insidious of commute-ruiners, that most intolerable menace to the peace of mind of drivers anywhere, that cow-pat in the field of urban transit infrastructure: school busses.

Talk about lollygaggers. Every two seconds on went the red flashing lights and out pops the "STOP" sign that by state law has both directions of frothing, delay-maddened drivers screaming, biting the steering wheel and other stuff too horrible to mention, as dawdling kids got on the bus, sometimes got off again and therefore having to be forcibly enbussed, not to mention the impromptu parent-driver conferences, all the while the sure knowledge passing through everyone's mind that the three parking spaces at Babylon station not allocated to permit-only parking were singing their sluttish siren song to all passers-by.

Eventually the pack roared under the railway bridge in a crescendo of screaming internal combustive oomph, sped through the chicane between the pub and the florist and began The Hunt ForThe Last Parking Space.

It was long-gone.

And so began the ever-widening hunt for somewhere, anywhere, to dump the fabulous Steviemobile so I could try and arrive at work this side of September.

The problem, which may not be apparent to non-commuters, is that at Babylon the car parks are scattered around in a maze of small roads, packed in amongst residential housing. There are signs on many of them that explain that the reason this particular car-park has room in it is that each space belongs to someone who pays for a numbered permit, someone who it just so happens doesn't actually need their space right now, but they might so you can't have it and if you try you're car will be towed. The signs in question are small, often only readable after one has already begun entering the car park.

I drove in increasing spirals, occasionally encountering pedestrians who decided to liven up the process by walking into a crosswalk just as I was about to cross it, and then dawdling, pausing to admire the scenery and so forth. One guy decided he didn't like the way I had brought my vehicle to a stop and paused mid-crossing to explain the ascendancy order of traffic to me. Ha! When he caught sight of my livid visage through the windshield he almost fell over in his haste to finish crossing.

I eventually found a space in a small car park about half a mile away from the station which allowed non-permit-holding scum to park in certain spots provided they paid in a machine like the one I had so enjoyed using only last week. Not only that, I was in good time for a train to Jamaica with a connection to Atlantic Terminal. All was going to be well, it seemed.

Or not.

A sudden second sense warned me that the crowd of people milling about, shaking their fists and acting in a very disgruntled manner was a sign of possible further trouble, and it proved to be the case. None of the pay-for-parking machines was functional.

A "security guard" was paroling and we eventually managed to get him to stop and radio through the situation, after he had warned everyone several times of the $75 dollar fine for non-payment. It took forever to get this paragon of public service to understand that it wasn't that we were refusing to pay for parking, but that the car park authority was refusing to allow us to do so.

More people showed up and were warned about fines for non-payment. The mood was getting seriously ugly before a team of technicians arrived to fix the machines. I have rarely seen someone so intent on starting an unnecessary riot than the old guy in that securitymobile.

The technicians got to work, and one loud would-be parker told a gang of about half a dozen to "just go" and he would sort out the parking fees once the machines were fixed. Which turned out to be a foolish thing to do because they had all parked in illegal spaces and he only found out that was the case after everyone had left theater. Oh well.

Then the techs decided the machines would not get fixed in a timely manner and began taking parking space numbers on a pad, explaining that fines for these spaces would be waived⁴

As I write I have made my usual 9:08 am connection, so I can hope the commute horseshirt is over for the nonce.

Although there is still the subway portion to be experienced.

1. Which is becoming a twice-weekly affair for some reason which in any other enterprise would demand a draconian program of firings, demotions and reprimands to fumigate from the schedule↑
2. If it is their fault, you hear nothing other than the standard "The Train due to arrive at ridiculously-long-list-of-stations-with-now-pointless-times is being delayed"↑
3. The Doc himself was AWOL on Thursday when I begged for an appointment with someone who could command a pharmacist to sell me prescription pain killers by the handful↑
4. I fully expect to discover tonight that these men had no authority to do that and I have therefore paid $75 for parking↑

Wash Day at Chateau Stevie

People of unspecified gender who seek to do laundry¹!

Do you find yourselves trying, but failing, to achieve that blue-whiteness so prized by "Tide" spokespersons? Perhaps you yearn to sport a delightful 60s-era tie-dye wardrobe, yet own ordinary boring clothes?

Simply add one (1) disposable fountain pen (blue) to the wash and Hey Presto! Instant new wardrobe!

I was wondering where it had got to.

1. Histrionic slogan writing was so much easier in the days when you could still say "Housewives!"↑

Another Day in the Life Pathetic

The day started so well

I got up early so I could get one of the two straight-through, no-change-at-Jamaica-not-the-good-one trains that run from Wyandanch to Atlantic Terminal, the Jewel in the Crown of Brooklyn. Arriving in good time to find the car park really quite empty I realized that Good Friday had fallen on the start of Passover so my train would also be mostly empty! Yazoo!

Once on the platform I was, of course, introduced to the real reason for the lack of commuters: once again the trains had been "delayed due to a police action west of Wyandanch". Again I had to listen to the idiot in some booth announce the times that the "delayed" train would be arriving in stations over 25 miles and at least 30 minutes away on a line that would offer these poor devils quite a few alternative trains, assuming they were dimwitted enough to be standing on those platforms at this hour waiting for that train, a circumstance so unlikely as to be functionally impossible. One again the LIRR failed singularly to explain what the real issue was.

But after twenty minutes of "train delay due to police activity" messages and one presumably inadvertent mention of an unauthorized person on the tracks, I could guess.

Five minutes or so after that my guess was proved right - someone had been hit by a train and naturally the train service was now suspended indefinitely while the poor buggers in the squad cars tried to find the parts.

See, a human being is, for the purposes of collisions with fast-moving trains, rather like a kitchen bin liner half full of tomatoes and topped off with water, then sealed. On contact with the train hydrostatic forces tear apart the body and the various bits you learned about in school get thrown all over the scenery. Personally, I think that if the LIRR allowed people to see the results of this they'd find themselves less popular as a venue for drunks or suicides. Morons can't be stopped but you just know that bursting open has to hurt a lot.

My angst at this point may not be clear to the reader, so I will state up front that I do not hold the LIRR to blame for the loss of service due to idiots on the track. I hold them to blame for knowing about the situation and not telling me in a timely manner so I can make other commuting plans, like getting across the island to Babylon rail station before all the parking spaces, in short supply but long demand even on a good day, are taken. These fbleepwits knew they would be cancelling the service so why not just bloody well say so and do us all a favor?

So I set off with everyone else in convoy to Babylon to see if I could somehow park my car and arrive at work this side of Monday (it was already clear I would not be early, now the challenge was to see if I could avoid being very late). Luckily I had the good fortune to get stuck behind a car transporting two 8x4 sheets of plywood on the roof (and therefore doing 28 mph the entire way) which was also behind an Optimum Cable TV truck driven by someone paid by the hour and deciding to make the most of it. But I did get a space, one of three left in the car park.

Paying for the space was more problematical.

I a moment of brilliance I had departed work with two dollars to my name, which I had spent on coffee in Wyandanch station under the illusion I would soon be sipping it as the miles sped by. The car park has numbered spaces that you pay for at a machine to which, presumably, the traffic cop in charge has some sort of wireless connection. One simply pays and departs on one's journey.

First stop was at the Bank of America ATM, where I got two rather moth-eaten $20 bills and was charged $2 for the privilege. Bank of America, you may remember, were one of those organizations that demonstrated they had no idea how to run a bank about two years ago. Not satisfied with billions of tax dollars, some of which were from what I laughingly refer to as my pay packet, they have the nerve to assess a two buck service charge for an automatic transaction that actually saves them money.

It occurs to me that one of the terms of the "Bailouts for Bonuses" deal so skillfully negotiated by the Powers That Be might usefully have been that having funded them out of penury we would not be charged these fees for, say, ever. I digress.

So, I now had my money, albeit in rather unusable for for the purposes at hand, buying ten hours of parking at a quarter an hour. Fortunately the LIRR provides a change machine, one proudly labelled with a sign saying that it now can recognize a bill in any of four different orientations. I inserted one of my twenties.

The machine spat it back out as unrecognized.

Sighing and mentally consigning the person who suggested the sign to one of the less amusing circles of hell I reoriented the bill and tried again. And then once again, which proved to be the charm. I looked down at the small cup into which the coins would be delivered and thought "I suppose it will do five dollars worth and give me the rest in bills. I hope it doesn't give me any of those dollar coins though."

I was worrying needlessly. I looked on in horror as twenty dollars worth of quarters, a total of eighty coins in all, were vomited out of the machine and onto the floor with great mechanical tintinabulation along with a chorus of class three Words of Power from yours truly. Not only was my commute effectively fbleeped up to the nth degree, it would from now on be conducted with pockets more suited to deep sea diving than attempting to walk to the train. The LIRR, a stickler for deatil in these matters, had enhanced the affair by having one escalator out of action, which by lucky chance happened to be the one ascending to the Westbound platforms.

I arrived at the top of the stairs wheezing, blood pouring from my nose and ears, coins dribbling from my pockets¹, begging passers-by for the mercy of a bullet in the head. Sadly, since all my fellow commuters were those who had been caught in some variation of the same fiasco my pleas fell on deaf ears. "You know you dropped some quarters on the stairs, right?" said one, kindly, as I clutched the side of the stairwell, lungs roaring as my chest sucked in volumes of life-giving air.

Of course, the New York train had just left and the next one would not do so for 20 minutes or so.

During the trip it transpired that everyone capable of leaving their house had simultaneously decided to take a day in New York, and so in no time at all the local train² was jamed full of people with very young children. Those little darlings. They can make any journey seem 15 times longer than it really is, but in reality I think the LIRR was doing fine in that department without help.

By the time we finally rolled into Jamaica we had missed all the connections to Atlantic Terminal and the next train would arrive two minutes before I would be officially late for work. If the bloody LIRR had simply announced the problem at Wyandanch when they first knew about it, I would have been able to shave at least 20 minutes off my commute and would have arrived within my core time and that's why I'm livid with rage. There is no problem bad enough that the LIRR's mediation of the problem can't make it worse, often infinitely worse³.

And I just heard that Mrs Stevie's mom has collapsed with a suspected stroke, so it seems life is not done being a total jerkface quite yet.

1. Which gave me the appearance of having some sort of symmetrically disfiguring growths on my thighs↑
2. Which stopped at about three hundred stations and therefore averaged about 3.8 miles per hour for the journey↑
3. And for those who don't belive in infinity, I say ride the LIRR for a season and talk to me then↑

Incoming Clue Missile!

Today I was privileged to hear a young woman declare loudly to a friend that she couldn't sleep on trains.

This announcement was delivered somewhere west of Jamaica (not the good one) after an unbroken stream of loud conversation begun twenty minutes earlier before we set off from Brooklyn.

It was followed by a continuous stream of loud sonic infotransfer until she and her friend disembarked in Farmingdale, one stop before Wyandanch (Pearl of the East).

I should like to offer the opinion that the first step to sleeping on a train is probably to stop bloody talking for a few seconds.

I Have A Target (dot com) Painted On Me

I bought some parts for a model helicopter just after Christmas.

Mrs Stevie had bought one of those tiny electric helicopters for me as a present, but she got bait-and-switched with a cheap knock-off that would not fly at all and was, as a result, very sad.

So I pulled it apart and replaced the works with some from a more reliable brand and she was thrilled that the little thing flew. Almost as thrilled as me, but I digress.

Since that purchase, I have been plagued in my web-browsing by peripheral ads featuring helicopters to the point I'm sick to the back bleeding teeth with sub-miniature rotary wing aircraft of any sort. Well done that vendor for "enabling" the "web community" to "enhance" my web "experience". Left alone I would have probably graduated to larger, more expensive models over time, as I got caught up in the fad. Spurred by my enhanced web experience I shall probably never buy another electric helicopter as long as I live since I now associate them with boring, uninspiring repetition.

However, it has given me an idea.

I plan on purchasing a number of items of feminine undergarmenture. No, I haven't decided to explore my feminine side¹. Within hours my web-browsing experience will be enhanced by a variety of scantily clad models oozing from the sides and top of my browser in a desperate bid to enhance me into another buying spree.

If I'm going to be targeted, I'm damn-well going to be targeted by something worth looking at.

1. at least, not when there are witnesses around - that sort of thing should be done in private with only a webcam for company↑

Google Knows Where I Live

So, apparently Google has been collecting data on me since nitrogen formed in the atmosphere and plans to use it to properly tailor my web experience.

I'm not sanguine about this for two reasons:

a) I have been refusing Google Chrome since the nagware for it debuted and they haven't yet figured out that my tailored web experience is a Chrome-free one

2) Job one upon loading Google's splash page is to turn off the ridiculously nasty one-character-at-a-time attempt to jump the gun and pre-guess what I'm trying to search for while shielding my eyes from the psychedelic cascade of gibberish happening on my computer screen. If Google were the data interpretation geniuses they believe themselves to be they would have figured out long ago that this is not so much "enhancing" my web experience as "annoying the living piss out of me" and they would have stopped delivering the search page with the settings set to "stupid".

þ) Amazon's attempts to enhance my purchasing experience by tailoring it according to what they know about me is laughably off-the-mark, leading me to believe that the clever young things in charge of the web are still under the daft impression that data is information. Accordingly, I have been widening my browsing habits in order to add as much entropy to the process as I can.

Each evening I spread my search terms to land me on monster trucks, clerical garb, pony play accessories, roller derby games in Brooklyn, flower arranging supplies, hammers, male enhancement supplements, Google (for a dash of recursion), egg and spoon racing, cross dresser footwear retailers, plywood, solar power, global warming denial sites, extruded aluminum wholesalers, air bottle recharging specialists, telescope and binocular suppliers and erotic piercing forums. It's exhausting. I imagine the Google database on me must resemble this picture.

Sadly this has backfired somewhat in that when I'm signed on I can only search sites in Bellarus dedicated to nun-heavy industrial dungeon pron.

Or that is what I'm telling Mrs Stevie.

Science You Can Do At Home!

I discovered a new effect this Christmas I am calling the Stevie-Electric Effect.

In order to repeat the experiment in your home, you will need to buy these delicious chocs and eat them. No science can be done until all the chocs are consumed, and the Stevie-Electric Effect has not yet been demonstrated effectively using cheaper packages of said chocs, nor with inferior choccy comestibles so don't waste your time and funding on economy lash-ups.

Carefully remove the now-empty inner tray from the plastic box, along with the stiff glossy paper insert that lies under it. You may notice the paper sticks to the tray with a noticeable static charge.

Rub the tray against the paper using a flat hand to support the paper and gripping the tray in the middle with pinched fingers. You will notice a slight build up of static.

Now prepare yourself for the experience of the mighty Stevie-Electric Effect, which I already called bagsies and dibs on so don't try re-labeling it in the way scientists so often do to steal other people's hard work and insight.

Aligning the paper and tray so there is no overlap, gently move the tray back and forth by no more than a half inch. You should notice a rapid build-up of a ferocious static charge, far in excess of any that can be obtained by rubbing the tray on the paper over a wider path. Eventually the tray will stick so firmly to the paper that sliding the tray will become very difficult.

You have now demonstrated the Stevie-Electric Effect and should be in awe of my science powers and like that.

Harpy No Yeast!

I'm posing thistle missile bite means of my newt Kindle Fight.

A newt ear in blotting is at hound, moored sightly by the automobile spooling collection I hive nit fatigued how to tan often.

Expectorate mope of thus sight of thing as Tim goes on; one mist move whist the tomes, I almost sat.

As I Walked Out This Winter's Day

The Christmas Tree Guy
Is gone leaving just the smell
Of pine on the air

New Look

Gah!

Last week I was at a loose end, got curious, clicked something I shouldn't have and trashed my bailing-wire and chewing gum blog markup template, replacing it with a new one supplied by Blogger that has drag'n'drop gadgets, some of which actually work.

Shame I never got round to saving the original template.

I think I've gotten most of the value-added styles back in place, or rather, I've improvised several workarounds that sort of do the same thing the old styles did.

Anyway.

The new look: good or bad? Please let me know.

The Horrible Nastiness of Unpleasantness (aka Life)

So, since I last posted life has been crashing over me like cool, wild, blue surf contaminated with sharp scrap metal, nuclear reactor linings and toxic waste.

The LIRR has periodically broken down, never so spectacularly as the evening of hell when a signal outage on the lightning-prone Babylon branch was converted into a system-wide debacle by "a techie who pushed the wrong button", but once so badly I was obliged to take a train so late that I was greeted by my boss with an unironic "Good Afternoon".

Truly these people deserve some sort of Award for Dedication to Lack of Service. I'm not blaming the crews. They generally at least are in it with the rest of us and strongly motivated to Get Things Moving. I blame the middle- and upper-management who it seems cannot find their collective backsides with both hands and a map. Disasters happen, but why do the same disasters continue to cripple the service year after year?

I finally screwed up the courage to visit the skin doctor, who hacked off some of that newly mutinying organ and sent it off for tests. Specifically a skin tag that was growing under my left eye and entering my field of vision¹ and a wart on my thumb that reacted to my attempts to freeze it off cryogenically by regrowing, and the attempt at excision by the application of corrosive chemicals by springing a number of freely bleeding wounds which got infected.

There was nerve tissue in there too, as I found when I attempted a home surgery with a razor blade and a small rubber ball, which I bit in half but managed not to swallow as I hopped screaming around the bathroom/operating theater, crashing into things and begging for death's sweet embrace. One in the win column there. And the nerves turned out to be the type that don't become numb when the skin is frozen with the old cryogenic kit as a second impromptu surgery attempt proved.

Doc Hacksaw grabbed my head and, knocking my glasses to the floor with a skillful sweep of his scalpel hand whipped off the offending growth, missing the eyeball by several thicknesses of the blade. I had to admire his technique, especially when he managed to switch out the knife for a small electric branding iron and rammed it into the wound he had inflicted, all without receiving any wounds of his own from my frantically clawing hands and thrashing legs (though I did manage to bite his nurse as she applied the dressing, which mollified me a little).

Deciding that the wart called for Heroic Measures, Doc Hacksaw first anethetized me with a hypo fitted with a blunt needle, stabbing me in many places, some of them close to the area he planned to work on. I cooperated by showing him some of my very best Words of Power and attempting to grasp him by the windpipe. Then, brandishing his scalpel, so sharp the edge gave off blue radiation as it snipped the very photons of light in half when it moved, utilizing what I call a "Jack the Ripper" grip, he began to stab and slash with gusto. Naturally this produced a very deep wound in my thumb, which bled freely.

"Nurse!" screamed the crazed dermatoligist. "The cauterizer! No, the big one!"

I encouraged his efforts with manly falsetto screams as oily red steam rose from my (formerly) good hand and the delicious smell of burning meat filled the room. Then he gave me some cream to put on it and it was all over.

The Stevieling managed to infest her computer with Chechnyasoft and was plagued with pop-ups telling her she needed to buy her anti-virus software. This helpful message highlighted the fact that the still-under-subscription McAffee software she has was turned off, again.

This makes twice in about 8 months.

I was livid, so much so that Mrs Stevie told me to stop shouting at the Stevieling but became less involved when I explained that:
      a) even an administrator has to manually escalate their permissions in order to make registry changes (which had clearly happened here) so she had quite obviously clicked "yes" on a window without reading the message in the box
     2) The last time this had happened I had taken a day off work and it still hadn't been enough time to get the machine working again
     þ) I could take no time off this week and therefore the computer repairs would take time needed to put up the decorative Arch O' Festivity and get the Pre-Lit Yule Bush down from its perch in the garage² and
     ♥) That although the Stevieling had sworn to me that she was scanning her computer for infections when I asked each week, I could find no logs to prove it, and the only log I could find was he one from the scan I ran right after I fixed the damned machine eight months before.

It was five nights of pure hell getting the basted thing free of the grip of former soviet cyberthuggery. I thought I could do it in two, but the infection poved immune to the two day fix (either that or that wretched kid re-infected the machine within minutes).

So, life as usual, really.

1. I don't have enough to spare these days to allow it to be blocked by stupid growths↑
2. That more than anything served to get Mrs Stevie in the proper frame of mind re: needlessly virused computers↑

More Incompetence and Annoyance

Even though it was election day today, and many government offices were closed, we had a mail delivery.

I was impressed until I looked at the mail.

Most was for the house ten digits higher than Chateau Stevie. Some was for a house ten digits higher than that. Not a single piece was for us.

My guess is that Mr Singh got all our mail.

Pool Annoyance Rant

All the air pillows I so laboriously cleaned and inflated developed leaks and sank, so I had to buy another and deploy it on Sunday.

The hurricane had also peeled back the cover and dumped leaves in the water I so laboriously cleaned four weeks ago. I did my best to rectify this state of affairs but was so demoralized by this foul turn of events it was a sloppy job at best. There's four hours of my life I won't get back.

While lifting the pool cover, it became apparent that it was dotted with numerous holes which will let filthy rainwater in anyway. This also explains why the water level was very low - when I siphoned off the water on the pool cover I also siphoned off half the water in the pool through the holes in the cover.

So that's all right then.

Another Day, Another Annoyance

I find I have time on my hands to post to The Occasional Stevie, a now-rare occurrence up there with lottery wins, because once again I find myself sitting on a premium-priced peak period LIRR train, waiting for an off-peak train to clear the chicane caused by a rail failure.

I stand corrected: Two trains.

It's not the failures that I mind, though they seem to be occurring more and more frequently of late, it's the witless way these disruptive events are dealt with by the clueless wuckfits who are "in charge" of the bloody Long Island Rail Road. Holding priority traffic for low-priority traffic is mindless.

Yes, I know they have to get the trains back up the other end of the line somehow, but these could be deadheaded back in the relatively slow period from 10 am onward. I am sick to the back teeth of sitting in an expensively-priced peak train waiting because some dimwit dispatcher doesn't have a clue how to run a railway network.

As I just said to the conductor - this bunch couldn't get me drunk in a bewery.