I was checking out some story on CNET the other day when I scrolled past an ad inserted in the body of the article. I tried to ignore it, like we all try to ignore advertisements, but I couldn’t help but give this one a second scan. I found it deeply worrisome.

Initially, this one got my dander up because I have a particular antipathy for spoiled children. I hate the sort of advertisements that insist that the solution to your kids’ incessant whining about not having Product X is either buying their Product Y, or perhaps buying Product X from them at a cheaper price than the next vendor. Excuse me, but in my house, "no" means "no". The response to whining is a stone wall. I don’t give two shits about the cheap plastic crap they’re trying to stuff down my throat through my kids.

That’s just a garden-variety irritant, though, easily shrugged off and quickly forgotten. What truly troubles me about this AOL advertisement is the weird pedo vibe this ad is sending out. Usually, advertisements depict teenagers as hip, perky, or cool, depending on the target audience. Not this one. This "teen" is sleazy.

First off, the kid looks slightly too young to be a teenager (about ten or twelve by my reckoning). By itself, this isn’t a big deal, but the tinted sunglasses, which carry a definitely precocious subtext, along with the jaded, pouty look on her face, create a disturbing implication of sexuality. Such messages, I have it on good authority, are entirely malapropos when combined with images of barely-pubescent children.

The "my teenage daughter" caption was probably inserted in a ham-handed attempt to reinforce the old cliché about teenage girls and telephones, but still manages to come off as supporting the whole Lolita context instead. Maybe Dad is swapping her photo around his alt.binaries.images.creepyfuckers newsgroup for some images of their own kids. The more I look at it, the more unsettling the semiotics become. Who are they trying to target with this ad? Is the AOL profit model of "pedophiles will pay us money to set up their chat rooms" being carried over into mobile phones? The mind reels as the gut churns.

Whether you’re staying at home to watch the tired (but still charming in a kitschy way) Charlie Brown special and whatever other nostalgia-in-a-can your local TV will be serving up, or tuning into "the game" of your favorite overpaid bunch of prissy atheletes, or braving the highways or airports to revel in societally-sanctioned gluttony with relatives in a far-off locale, enjoy the holiday.

I’ll see you all afterwards, assuming I live through A) my self-induced tryptophan overdose, B) the terror of the onion dip at my sister’s house, and C) the soul-draining stultification of the endless football games on the TV over there.

Have a good Thanksgiving.

All Hail the Steve. With the coffers of the empire fattened and fortunes continuing to wax, he hath righteously loosened the shackles of the wage-slaves; most of us have the entire Thanksgiving week off, with pay. The problem is, I’m not adjusting to it very well.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the sort of person who feels guilty for not toiling away in my cubicle, or spends time at home thinking about or working on my corporate assignments. Hell, I barely give them a passing thought when I’m at my desk. No, the problem is that I don’t seem to be relaxing at all. Do you ever get that feeling on Sunday afternoon? You know, the one where the thought of the impending workweek and your descent back into bondage is hanging over your head? It usually strikes me around noon every Sunday, when the awful realization that the fleeting remains of the weekend are slipping inexorably away.

Well, I’ve had that feeling since Sunday around noon, and it hasn’t left. Monday, the first day of the holiday, came and went, with nary a dent in that "you’ve got to go back to work tomorrow" feeling. Even today, I can’t shake it, even though I know there’s another five days of indolent bliss ahead of me. I guess my brain has, over many years of moil in the cube farm, developed a sort of twisted quasi-circadian rhythm — two days free, five at work, and anything different just doesn’t feel right. That’s messed up. Maybe I should call in sick for the next week, too. You know, just to cure myself. I’m sure my boss would understand.

It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes Google gives me some weird results. It’s probably not Google’s doing, since their spiders are only reporting back on things that other people have marked up incorrectly, or perhaps deliberately, in an effort to attain some element of surrealism.

Sometimes the culprit is meta tags that are too generic, and other times the results are bizarre because the content has been deliberately constructed to mislead spiders and draw hits. Porn sites seem to be the biggest perpetrators of such trickery, which has always seemed odd to me, since consumers of pornography tend to seek out such material instead of having been nefariously tricked into viewing a thumbnail gallery of quintuple penetration images.

Anyway, the other day I searched Google for "botulism poisoning". I was amused by the results of the fourth hit, as shown here:

Funny, to be sure, but not as weird as the results below. Obviously, conservative fears over alleged liberal bias in the public broadcasting industry are misplaced.

I wonder what other strange search results lurk in the bowels of Google.

"For every good day, there is an equal and opposite bad day."
- Newton’s Third Law of Karma

I had a pretty good day at work on Friday. I got just about everything done that I wanted to, everybody in our section of the cube farm seemed to be in pretty good spirits, and the next version of our application is coming along quite nicely.

So nicely, in fact, that the powers that be decided to hold a barbecue, and hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and potato salad were in abundance for all and sundry. I sat at a table on our upstairs patio happily munching on this unexpected repast surrounded by happy, chatting colleagues as clouds scudded across a relatively warm November sky. It was a good day. Alas, nothing good seems to ever come without a price. Why the hell is that? Can’t the Universe throw us a freebie every now and then?

It was almost enough to make me forget that my wife had called earlier to inform me that the water main into our house was leaking. When I arrived home, I saw that the soil under our front deck was sodden. I figured the leak was coming from an old, disused sprinkler system that I’ve been capping off wherever new leaks crop up at old couplings, and as such, not a big deal. I turned over a few cursory shovelfuls of earth, but found nothing conclusive, and decided to attack it on Saturday.

Saturday morning, my wife noticed that the water seemed to be flowing from underneath the deck. Dismayed, I pried up a few planks in the afternoon and tried to see the source of the flow. My initial estimations proved incorrect, and not only was the sprinkler system not the source of the trouble, I wasn’t looking in the right spot. Again, my sharp-eyed wife spotted a tiny burble in the water that seemed to indicate where the break in the line had occurred. At that point, however, I realized with dismay that there was no way to fix the leak without dismantling the entire deck; even with all the necessary planks removed, the supports were going to be in the way of any repair work. The lazy little fountain was right underneath one of the central beams.

To be honest, we’d talked about removing the deck anyway; we really only used it to as a platform for potted plants, and the prodigious amounts of water that were therefore dumped on it were contributing to a several major points of rot on both planks and beams. On Sunday morning, I went to the hardware store and returned bearing a shiny new sledgehammer, and, additionally equipped with my trusty crowbar that I call "Gordon Jr.", tore the deck down. My wife’s Norse blood could not resist the hammer’s song, and she joined in the destruction, lusty daughter of Thor that she is.

Finally, the deck was demolished and piled in a nail-studded, spider-ridden heap on my lawn. The digging commenced. This was a major pain in the ass. The deck was nothing.

The soil where I live is entirely composed of clay. When clay gets wet, it creates a sticky, gooey, squelching substance that can easily pull the boots right off your feet if you’re not careful, and temporarily immobilize you completely if both feet are ankle-deep in the stuff. To make matters worse, the clay also readily sticks to shovels; sometimes you have to scrape the shovel clear after every scoop. My boots quickly became so caked with mud that there was literally two inches of clay on the bottom of my soles. Nature’s elevator shoes, I guess.

Eventually, I struck the pipe. We checked to confirm the leak by turning the main valve on at the street. Sure enough, the leak seemed to be coming up right underneath it, right at a coupling at the edge of our exploratory hole. Joy! All we have to do is dig it out a bit more and — *CLANK*. Clank? What the hell is this, a rock? Our shovels hit something hard and gritty.

No, not a rock, it was a huge concrete pour right at the edge of our hole. Directly above the pipe. About two feet deep and almost as wide, a big lump of concrete. What the hell?!? We sat in the mud, dispirited, wondering about how we were going to move the stupid thing. A neighbor, out for a stroll, came up to check out all the destruction, and, after some deliberation, left, then came back with his boots and another shovel. The concrete proved surprisingly light once we’d dug around it, and the two of us heaved it out of the pit. Now, finally, we could excavate the pipe. We got to digging through the glutinous muck.

At long last, we’d excavated the pipe, and saw that at some point the pipe had been patched with a section of slightly larger pipe and a pair of couplings. I sent my wife down to the street to turn on the water once again, and we watched expectantly as we heard the pipes pressurize, half expecting to be sprayed with muddy water as the leak, finally exposed, could freely vent. Sure enough, the water came up. From the mud. Under the pipe.

Fuck. We’d only reached the sewer pipe. More digging. Another eight inches down we finally found a split copper pipe that a growing root had pushed aside, causing the rupture. Another turning of the valve at the street sent up a shower of mist and water that left no doubt we’d finally found our culprit. The leak, while significant, was not enough to really drop the water pressure into the house, so we let the water run and the whole family quickly hosed down and showered as the sun set, then we shut it off.

Not wanting to take any time off from work, we had a largely waterless Monday, only turning the main valve on for the wife’s morning and the kids’ nightly ablutions, a rented sump pump the only thing between us and a completely flooded front yard, which looks like hell.

The plumber arrives today.

I’m sure many other people have been down this road before, but I can’t hold my peace any longer. Microsoft Word is driving me absolutely crazy. It’s almost impossible to use for anything fancier than a goddamned grocery list.

Nested lists are a complete nightmare; one wrong move, and not only is your current list completely screwed over, but any subsequent lists are in grave danger of carrying the same oddities. It’s like a metastasizing cancer. God help you, too, if you need a list format that doesn’t conform to the standard A, B, C, or 1, 2, 3 defaults. It took me a solid week of struggle before I finally beat Word to my will.

I’m convinced that somewhere, buried deep within Word, there’s a preference setting called Cause Random Woe, which is of course turned on by default. I just haven’t found the damned thing yet. Even with Word being set to display all the hidden formatting characters it uses behind the scenes, there’s always something they’re not showing you; why else, for instance, would removing a page break have misapplied a paragraph style to all the following text in the document, turning my nice manual INTO SCREAMING CAPS? The mind boggles.

The standard explanation is that Microsoft is evil, but I’m not sure I buy it. I mean, they’ve spent a lot of money and time on Word; usually, that much effort is better spent on more effective methods of delivering evil to a large cross-section of people, like genocide, terror bombings, and McDonalds value meals. To me, the ripe whiff of incompetence is in the air. Have you ever worked with someone who, while not actually retarded, is deeply stupid and vomits on your desk at random intervals? That’s what working with Word is like.

I’m confident that after having to grapple with Word, which is a $500 dollar product, to get it to perform basic layout functions, I would think more highly of Bill Gates even if he were to masturbate into a sack of drowning kittens, wipe his ass with the flag, and sodomize a morgue full of dead nuns for his finale, as long as he got his numberless minions to get Word to play nice for once.