New stressors I must conquer before they become phobias

There are a few things that I have noticed make me uneasy. Borderline crazy or make me feel crazy.

 

1)       I haven’t flown for a long time and deep down I have a mild fear of flying but that isn’t what keeps me away from the airport. I am scared shitless of airport security and any interaction with the dept of homeland security. Many would say, I am not doing anything wrong, I need not worry. I worry though. I expect to be wrongfully accused. I don’t trust them. The same fear makes crossing the US Canadian border a fearful experience though I have done that once post 9/11. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t that bad. They didn’t do much but it left me with that I hope they had rubber gloves on feeling. I also have amorbid fear of being kept on a plane on the tarmac for many hours without a working bathroom

 

2)       Redlight cameras. Ever since my wife got a ticket from one, I look up at those things and my heartrate increases. Everything starts moving slowly and I am obsessed with getting out of that intersection. I also get haunted with fear of who is watching and what are they doing with it. I get that same feeling when I see a cop following me on the road. Innocent until proven guilty. YEAH RIGHT.

 

3)       Telephones. Spending years working in a help desk. Now avoiding creditor calls have caused me to jump out of my skin when the phone rings. Once I see who it is, I calm down. But I don’t answer the phone in most cases without caller ID. The feeling I get when it rings is what scares me.

 

I don’t want to be a slave to these things and with the exception of the airport one, they haven’t been crippling fears. Just more of an internal panic until I calm down.

 

Maybe I am losing my mind. Maybe the thought of a surveillance society is too much for me. Maybe I am normal and everyone feels this way about something inside.

 

 

From Boing Boing. Funny RFID Story

Dog swallows RFID, starts car

POSTED BY DAVID PESCOVITZ, SEPTEMBER 26, 2006 3:40 PM | PERMALINK

A woman in Surrey, England couldn't figure out why her car wouldn't start. An Automobile Association patrolman arrived on the scene and the two realized that the woman's dog had swallowed the car's immobilizer chip fob. The immobilizer contains an RFID chip that must be within a certain proximity of the steering column for the key to work. According to a BBC News report, the patrolman put the dog in the front seat, turned the key, and the car started right up. Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

 

Perhaps I should drop full coverage on my wifes car

I just read a disturbing article on wired that said that cars that have RFID implanted keys are stolen and insurance companies are denying the claims saying the cars are theft proof.

 

I remember three years ago the top of my key to this car broke and it cost me over $100 to get a damn working copy. Not to mention several trips to different places. All the dealer had to do was run the VIN and magically program a new key to work. So we now trust all car dealer employees. I would think they could make some extra dough on the side by selling keys. They have your personal info so they know where to find the car and how to make it work. But if they steal it the insurance company can accuse you of fraud and there are real people out there paying for cars that don’t exist because of this.

 

Our car is paid off and I only keep full coverage on it because in our neighborhood I worry about car theft. What’s the point?. Maybe I will drop it today. Since it CANNOT BE STOLEN.

 

The real stupidity is I have to keep full coverage on my 21 year old pickup that nobody would steal (but would be easy if they wanted to) because it is collateralized in a loan.

 

 

Gods Parking Space?

cascade%20lake.jpg

Right now

I am sitting in the car with my dog. I am at a college. My wife is playing capture the flag. I came along to support her but its not a spectator sport. Now I get two hours to just sit. Its actually peaceful

Today we attempted to go to opal creek wilderness but only made it to the first unpaved bridge and the road was buried with snow. It was nice out there.

We will make it to jawbone flats and opal creel when the snow melts.

Satan Device

OK so we had liquid satan now we have the satan device. The company I work for decided to buy the CEO a Zune music player to bring him into the digital world. This is Micro$ofts knock off of the Ipod. I was tasked with setting it up and ripping  about 10 CDs and copying them to it.

 

I have officially declared the Zune the satan device. This thing is from the bowels of hell. I plug it into my laptop. You cannot use it without downloading software. OK. Maybe that’s fine. I download the shitware (I mean software) and it proceeds to without asking UPDATE THE FIRMWARE on the Zune. Now as a tech I know that Firmware updates can go very bad and toast your device. At least an option would have been nice but this just did it.

 

Now my laptop is a 1.8Mhz core Duo with 2GB of RAM and XP. Not bad really. Well it took 45 minutes for this satanware to install. That seemed excessive. No progress indicators. Nothing. Then once installed it starts puking out random error messages which researching it tells me are TO BE EXPECTED. This will be great for a technophobe CEO. Finally I get the damn satanware to work and then had to figure out how to copy music to it. You would think Micro$uck product would use Media Player. NOT.. Forget about drag and drop like a normal MP3 Player. Nope you have to use the Zune satanware to copy files to it. And its about as user friendly as a nuclear power plant in meltdown.

 

Ok so I get it all figured out. All is well right. WRONG. Now every time I turn on the laptop its noticeably slower and has errors on the Zune bus enumerator. Sure I can probably disable the services or worst case reformat my laptop. But CEO with his slower system is going to expect this piece of shit to actually work and call me when it doesn’t.

 

We haven’t presented the satan device to him yet. I am going to try and talk the people who bought this into returning the damn thing and buying him an ipod.

 

Somehow I know I will get called on a weekend sometime and will be treated as if I wrote this satanware.

 

ZUNE SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. It looks cool but the software makes Vista look like something good. What a piece of shit.