ThinkingSkull.com

As the midnight hour draws near on the East Coast, I am reminded by the visible clock at LHCountdown that on 12am Tuesday the Eighth of July, 2008, the Large Hadron Collider will be activated.

Now, for all you non-comic book reading, unintellectual sheep who have no idea what’s going on in your world (in which case it’s bloody unlikely you’re reading this anyway), start-up sequences are nearly complete on an underground ring about 17 miles in circumference at a location where France borders Switzerland. Using super-cooled electromagnetic rings, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator will race subatomic particles, protons in this case, and smash them into one another (hence the term “atom smasher”) in the hopes of releasing energy and discovering new or previously undiscovered theoretical particles (that all sound just like those big words they use on “Star Trek”). Detection of such things could provide insight into the origins of the universe… or rip a hole in the space-time continuum that may swallow the known universe right after letting in a bunch of extra-dimensional critters to knock humans down one step on the food chain (have you rented Stephen King’s The Mist yet?)

So, while my own clock on the right is counting down the days to the end of the Mayan calendar, remember this: if you suddenly find yourself living next Monday over and over again or realize that your spirit is no longer contained by a body of flesh, at least now you’ll have some idea what happened.

Most people who fly anywhere at all in the United States are pretty used to the new routine (laptops out, shoes off, carry on bags through “the machine,” ID and boarding pass, please). Most of the security people at each of the terminals I recently went through we’re all pretty joyless about their jobs… EXCEPT in Las Vegas!

At the ‘D’ terminal gate, a jealously-enormous television screen shows you what can and cannot taken on the plane. To illustrate the fact, “Star Trek” Federation “Red Shirt” security personal demonstrate what can happen when a Klingon tries to sneak guns and knives through the checkpoint. Hilarious, yes (especially for 1337est geeks like myself), but isn’t this clearly promoting “species profiling?”

You be the judge. Check out someone’s YouTube video of the educational film.

Isn’t it funny that a marriage license looks ready for framing as a document to endure for all time, while the divorce finalization looks like it was stamped in a post office for whoever was next in line?

We have a local coupon magazine in Jacksonville, Florida called Mint Magazine. It comes through the mail once a month chock full of local deals and such. Every local and franchise pizza place is listed, from Domino’s to Pizza Hut. The one I was most interested in, however, was a specialty pizza only available at Papa John’s and for a discounted price.

After logging onto their website, I attempted to place my order to get the deal, but unlike Pizza Hut or Domino’s, no online coupons reflecting their printed counterparts could be found. I checked again to see if their were any “promo codes” that I had simply missed. Nope, no codes, no anything, just nothing there.

I called the local restaurant that would be fulfilling the order and asked how to get the deal through the online ordering, but I was referred to their corporate web site’s help desk number (at the bottom of the screen). After a prompt answer, I was told that they had “problems with Mint Magazine before” and that these local deals were never submitted to the site, or else they’d be included in one of the “deal blocks” at the top and bottom of the ordering page. Sadly, I had to call back the restaurant to place my order over the phone (with my credit card) to get it for the prices advertised.

I’m a consumer. Ordering online lets me use a credit card without reading out the numbers over the phone while ensuring that the order placed is the total I expect. The salesperson at the restaurant threw the blame at the website, and the website threw the blame at the advertiser, and I’ll bet whomever the local owner of the restaurants are is the same person who sold the ad to Mint for inclusion. Judging from the reactions from all involved, no one felt the need to do anything (although to be fair, the website rep said they would tell their supervisor about the issue, but only when I’d asked them to).

Here’s what should happen:

1. The owner should ensure that the ad has website promo codes and that the website can accept them. If they are getting sales from the website, this is a must.
2. The company should put pressure on their franchises to ensure print ads contain the updated info. If it isn’t easy for a local franchise to add these (even themselves if they have to), something is very wrong.

Am I over reacting? Maybe, but I set up stores like this for a living professionally. Of course, I can just order from Pizza Hut and not worry about it, right?

I don’t often send packages unless it’s around Christmas time or I’m returning a item I’ve ordered online. The video contest I recently entered required me to send in a DVD copy, so I found an old padded mailer, tapped over the old info, readdressed it, and off to the post office I went.

I get to the clerk, hand her the already-addressed and sealed envelope, and tell her I need postage for it. She points to a screen with five options on it, priced from 75 cents all the way up to $16 bucks, and asks me to choose. I chose the 75 cents, to which she says, “This isn’t a letter, it’s a padded envelope.”

Okay, so I pick the next one up, for $1. “You didn’t put it in a first-class mailer,” she smiles.

I say, “I just want the cheapest one that I can send this with.”

Again with the smile. “I’m a salesperson, sir. You have to choose. I’ll recommend the 16-dollar one, if you ask me.”

“Then why can’t I see just the options that apply to what I’m mailing?”

“We encourage you to do your own research of our products, sir,” was the stupid response I got. Fine. My “research” then consisted of me reading off every option from cheapest to costliest until she at last accepted it, much to the frustration of the person in line behind me. And she just kept on smiling.

I equate this to basically the same frustration of putting money into a soda machine and pushing buttons only to find out that the machine is empty and the little “choose again” lights are on the fritz. I have no idea what options apply to what I’m sending… that’s why I brought it in to the post office to begin with. I didn’t need a moonlighting school teacher; I was looking for a knowledgeable postal worker.

I think I liked the post office better when the workers were disgruntled and carried firearms.

Sure, there were only six entires, but now “The Public” (that’s you) get to vote on your favorite video to be selected for showing at the Jacksonville Film Festival.

Now is the part where I beg; I made the “Jacksonville.com: NOT Scary” entry. Vote for me right here!!!

April 15th, 2008, Uncle Sam’s April Fool’s Day, and it was BELOW 40 degrees this morning in Jacksonville, Florida. Has anyone seen our “global warming” sitting around anyplace?

According to naked.dustindiaz.com, April 9th, 2008 has been designated “CSS Naked Day.” For those of you who aren’t web acronym savvy, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet, all the bits and pieces of code that make a website look pretty and properly laid out rather than presenting plain white page with black text and blue underlined links. The idea is that by rendering sites voluntarily without any CSS, the generic and possibly inoperable sites will help promote Web Standards, the rules that Microsoft ignores with every new version of Internet Explorer so webmasters can’t make their website look the same on every browser.

Two words: screw that.

I’m what you might refer to as a “tweaker.” I love learning a new CSS tweak or website trick to make my sites do something or provide functionality beyond the ordinary. If I see something I’d like to make better if I can, I do. New color, new font, new placement, new image, whatever. So why is the promotion of Web Standards rendering hundreds of websites virtually unusable and completely dull? Worse yet, the only people who will actually understand it are the same folks actually participating.

For everyone else out there still inexplicably reading this as if i were coming to a point, here’s your payoff at last:

1. It’s like celebrating airline travel by hitchhiking.
2. It’s like celebrating mobile phones by screaming at one another.
3. It’s like celebrating toilet training by pissing yourself.

Enough with the fake Internet holidays, okay?

What’s the big deal? Gov. Eliot Spitzer was obviously intent on pumping money into the local economy while promoting small business and keeping up public relations.

Greed, envy, sloth (laziness), wrath (anger), pride, gluttony, lust; these were the seven deadly sins. Now the Vatican has added seven new sins to the list: being obscenely wealthy, causing social ills including polluting the environment, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia, causing social injustice, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments or allowing genetic manipulation.

Having too much money is always a bad thing (especially according to everyone who is actually poor) so not a real stretch there. “Causing social ills” is so ambiguous that it could be applied to anything from housing development to bullying kids on the playground… sheesh! Drug dealing is bad (and all pharmacists are now going to hell), but doesn’t that fall under causing social ills again?

Personally, I’m pro-choice on abortion; ask the unborn kid if he wants to die (I’m SOOOO going to get email for that one, but you have to admit it nicely takes religion out of the equation, doesn’t it?) Pedophilia is out (so now priests will have to play with themselves… ewww), but isn’t this just causing social ills again? “Causing social injustice” is another extension of “ills,” and how is that really any different? And finally, manipulating genetics and morally debatable experimentation are more social ills, right?

That leaves only obscene wealth, causing social ills, and abortion (by the way, I actually think the pro-whatever issue is a personal choice for everyone and every situation, so I harbor no ill feeling toward one view or the other). Instead of fourteen, I count only ten deadly sins, which balances ever so nicely with those Ten Commandments (by the way, “Thou shalt not kill” was mistranslated from “Thou shalt not murder,” which is radically different in context).

John McCain has Mike Huckabees’ official endorsement (well played, sir) to cinch the Republican nomination. Looking less like they have a clear vision of the future, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are still neck and neck with no clear winner and only Pennsylvania out as a major source of delegates.

Now the balloon is being floated: A Clinton/Obama Democratic ticket? Hillary has mentioned she wouldn’t be opposed to it, but also reportedly hinted she won’t accept “second banana.” In other words, she requires top billing on the marquee with Obama in a supporting role or there’s no deal. Unfortunately, until this is resolved, the Republicans have a wide open field to spend money in damning the “indecisive Democrats.”

During the second season of “Grey’s Anatomy,” one of the characters threw out the phrase “dark & twisty,” which sounds a like a friendly way of saying you enjoy a bit of the dark side. A little gothic without the black fingernail polish, less “emo” than just kind of spooky. Why should mundanes (a term lovingly ripped off from “Babylon 5″) think it odd that some enjoy a good, stormy, lightning-filled day rather than deep blue skies and blinding sunshine?

To this end, I’ve been thinking of descriptive terms for these people whom choose to let in a little nighttime and moonlight, less lurking in darkness and more walking in the twilight or dabbling in shadows. I know a lot of people that fall into the category, and I dare say our numbers are growing.

Not that we’re planning to collectively blot out the sun or anything.

Is it wrong to have your divorce paperwork notarized and hand-delivered to your spouse on February 14th? In a red folder, no less? Just because it worked out that way doesn’t necessarily imply intent, does it? In retrospect, it was a considerably less expensive holiday for me this year than it has been the past seven years. Even so, here’s hoping everyone pursued that special someone to be with this year, and remember: it’s only stalking if you can’t convince that special someone to rescind the restraining order.

So here’s a few questions. If you (as a currently single person) ask a friend (who also happens to be single) to join you for a swanky holiday work-related gathering, does it count as a date or not? Does it matter if it’s a first date? If it wasn’t defined as a date before being accepted, can it be counted after it’s successfully over? If I declare it was a date without actually telling anyone beforehand and it rolls into another date, does that make me a “relationship ninja?”

In other news, my roommate flipped me off for bothering him with these same stupid questions.

NOW can they have their own stadium?!

After hearing about my own family members suggesting that I’m depressed and in need of prescription drugs, it’s nice to see that I’m not alone in the “pick a pill, pick your mood” being a real problem and something to avoid. This article makes mention of it, and the last line is my favorite.

He does acknowledge the need for medication in the hardest cases. Just like cancer, severe mood disorders can be life-threatening and should be treated as such, Barber says. But we need to distinguish between real depression and just being bummed out.

The vast majority of the 227 million prescriptions for antidepressants in 2006, he notes, were for people in the second category. Barber lambastes the drug industry for its attempt to turn “the worried well” into customers; he also takes aim at the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for according disorder status to conditions like social anxiety and adjusting to a cross-country move.

“Nonsense,” Barber writes, “anger, greed, laziness, impulsivity, as well as jealousy, lust, anguish, and so on, are simply part of the human predicament. They are not medical conditions.”

I own an iPod Touch, specifically the 16GB model. No, I didn’t buy it ($400 is expensive for a multimedia toy when cheaper, easier to replace alternatives are available) but I won one at my company Christmas party (Christmas, not “holiday.”) To make a long story short, there’s a feature upgrade available from Apple.com as of yesterday, but they want $20 to provide features the thing should have anyway.

An email client? Google.com is two touches away. So is Google maps. Widgets are okay, but there aren’t any must-have widgets listed (weather? Two touches to weather.com.) So other than the ability to actually add additional functionality right on the iPod Touch screen instead of clicking a Safari bookmark, I have to pay an additional $20 bucks? The last time this happened, Apple lowered the price of their iPhone by $200 and gave credits back to all the poor suckers who didn’t wait.

Lessons learned: if I (and everyone else) waits and complains long enough, you’ll give us the upgrade for the unit you’ve already made money on. Oh, and last time I checked, I got all my operating system upgrades free for Windows XP.

We’re waiting, Steve… have your iPhone call our iTouch and we’ll do lunch (but only when it’s free).

UPDATE: My little brother says I should bite the bullet and plunk down my $20 because it’s worth it and because it’ll actually work (unlike, say, shareware from a Palm). He does have a point…

So Hillary Clinton and John McCain came out on top in New Hampshire, the two people I like to call the “danger” candidates. Here’s why.

If Hillary makes the Democratic nomination, it’s going to feel like putting Bill back in the White House (Bill has probably already reserved “First Man” on MySpace). Isn’t that kind of like rewinding the clock 8 years? Didn’t the last two attempts by Ms. Clinton for universal health care die horrible deaths in Congress? Hillary doesn’t feel like hope or progress as much as she does eerily familiar. It doesn’t mean she wouldn’t win, however, depending on who’s she’s up against. With any luck it won’t be…

John McCain has a history, folks. While being a POW (for what, four years?) makes him sound like a promising president, it also screams “Manchurian Candidate.” Assuming he’s not a preprogrammed counter-intelligence agent, the other irrational fear is that he’s going to go post-traumatic stress syndrome the moment he gets the launch codes from the Book of Secrets (it’s real… there’s a movie.)

But what am I worried about? It’s only one primary with more to come. Sleep tight!

I love finding little secret symbols throughout the world and, on occasion, I personally adopt one as a sort of signature. In my younger years, I was enthralled with the British metal band Iron Maiden (and still retain all of their original ‘heyday’ posters from “Powerslave” all the way to “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son”). For those in the know, in addition to the skinless character of “Eddie,” there was a hidden little alchemical-like symbol on every poster. It later turned out be little more than a clever signature design by cover artist Derek Riggs.

Thinking it meant very little other than that (but still overjoyed that I had “discovered” it on my own), I started including the doodle design in the margin of homework papers and exams until one of the teaching assistants at my college started discovering them, too, and became convinced I was into worshipping the devil. This prompted a discussion with the instructor of my course, with whom I shared a laugh about the entire thing once I revealed the symbol’s source and intent, but the assistant was apparently genuinely frightened at the prospect. Interestingly, there are still people that contend that Riggs is a Satanist and that somehow his exploited signature logo is somehow a legitimate symbol for true Satanists. Funnier still, the band Iron Maiden itself wrote the song “The Number of the Beast” as an answer to critics that termed their self-involved heavy metal “The Devil’s Music.”

It was interesting to see that the power of symbology (or iconography) still persisted in the imagination, especially the ones who imagine a meaning rather than doing the research to discover the truth. I still have to laugh at the “professor of symbology” that Tom Hanks portrayed for the Ron Howard film The Da Vinci Code, but it did renew public interest in the thinking that went behind certain images. For my RPG project Kindling Moon, I designed an entire alphabet set and six elemental symbols to help define the look of the game and world setting and give it a fantasy Arabian flavor without simply stealing an established language.

For my movie review site MovieCrypt, I added an inverted star symbol behind the logo to give the word design a little extra styling. Why did I choose an inverted star? Hollywood has always depicted a five-pointed star as synonymous with celebrity (just look at the Hollywood Walk of Fame), but the horror genre has always been treated as the seedy underbelly of the industry (even lower than porn, but that’s a different story). Now, a pentagram (which is five interconnected lines and not merely five points) is considered a blessing or symbol of protection when upright (one point up) and a symbol of destruction (or “Satanic”) when turned down. So what better symbol for a horror/thriller review site than an inverted Hollywood star? Being as there’s no such thing as bad publicity, I like to ask people who point out the Satanic possibilities of the logo, “Don’t you have to sell your soul to make it in Hollywood?”

This brings me to my current pursuit. Writer Nancy Kilpatrick recently authored a book called “The goth Bible” (little ‘g’ in goth, and the book explains why), a work that goes a long way toward answering the question “Am I goth?” without merely resorting to the canned answer “If you think you might be goth, then you’re goth.” Among compilations of dark and twisty music, comics, movies, and other media, I came across, well, crosses, and lots of them. As it turns out, The Da Vinci Code left out a few dozen factual symbolic images that I’d imagine only the most devout Catholics are aware of. Apparently, the image of a crucifix as a symbol of Christianity is by no means the only cross in existence and, point in fact, the Vatican has a separate cross design representing their entire hierarchy, even a “Cross of Keys” representing the Vatican itself.

In this listing of crosses, however, I came across one particular image that stood out labeled only “Death.” Had the Vatican assigned a cross specifically to the Angel of Death, or was there an older meaning behind the image? Most crosses are viewed on horizontal and vertical planes, but this cross, like the St. Julian cross known more commonly as the symbol for multiplication, is a diagonal cross but with markings that look representationally like two crossed swords. The image of two crossed swords (hilts down) has also had historic meaning, specifically on the Jolly Roger, the infamous pirate flag, and the symbol for poison, being a Skull and Crossbones. Is it possible that the origin of the embattled crossed swords and/or the crossbones are actually a bastardization of this supposed Death Cross?

I haven’t found the answer yet, but the hunt is on!

Update: the hunt is over! Yep, “Death” has his own little representation as illustrated at Symbols.com, a very cool website for this kind of research. The Jolly Roger reference may be distant, but is certainly a close cousin since there is mention of the crossed swords and battlefield death associated with the emblem. Fortunately, no monks in robes have made an attempt on my life since the confirmation of this emblem, but then again no one had died in The Louvre after hours, ether…we think.

How long should an employee wait to act if they suspect that their job is in jeopardy? What are the warning signs? Support workers (human resources, upper management) cleaning out desks? Supervisors mysteriously absent? Available time off suddenly exceeding all queue limits? An active lack of denial (or confirmation) of an impending layoff? Rumors circulating of what was heard or who said what from an private meeting that everyone saw but no one talks about?

In order to survive, a company must first and foremost meets the needs of its business; if it cannot, it fails while someone else succeeds. That means changing to meet or beat the competition and increase revenue either by selling more product or services, convincing consumers to pay higher prices for the same, or lower costs at all costs. Unfortunately, sometimes lowering costs means laying off people.

Customer support is a skill based in tolerance, a talent for dealing with complete strangers on the company’s behalf and acting as its voice. Like any profession, suspecting that your days are numbered adds an entirely new dimension, a hanging sword that a company (in its best interests) dares not to confirm too soon. What hurts is when happy employees that inexplicably enjoy their stressful jobs and have historically sung the praises of the company they work for suddenly realize that something is wrong and, for legal and business reasons, the grunts in the trenches must be left out of the loop for fear of what might happen if they realize their goal is to be sacrificed for the greater good (aka “the company.”)

What is the real purpose of keeping employees in the dark? Is it so that they will continue to work obliviously until that final moment when its over, or is there some legal ramification that says “The clock is ticking” once an announcement is made? Obviously SOMEONE knows or has been told what’s happening, otherwise necessary preparations that must occur prior to the closure (or lack of, such as onsite food and vending services) couldn’t take place, so it must not be ENTIRELY a legal point.

Only one thing is for sure: cheese moves, and if you want it, you gotta go where it is.

AOL, previously America Online, was once THE original place for freaks and geeks to meet. Ravenous teen and young adults quickly became addicted to AOL’s mass-marketting of hundreds of thousands of free-trial disks, many of which became the target of jokes once the rush was over. But for all the newness of a gigantic interactive online community, self-imposed restrictions slowly chased away the audience as AOL was pressured to police itself.

Free-form upstarts such as Friendster networked buddies to buddies and provided revenue from advertising, but it wasn’t until the explosive growth of MySpace.com (and very public sale) that anyone really took notice. For the first time since AOL opened its doors, there was another “free” place that people could join, express themselves, then link up with friends and buddies all over the ‘net. And now, just like AOL before it, it has become so popular that self-policing has been called into question, as has pornography and other not-so-friendly content (and in some cases, users themselves).

For the last year or so, AOL has positioned itself onto the web no longer as a “gated community” with exclusive content, but open access inclusing free email and other features (with premium features for paying customers). But now rumors are surfacing of a so-called “MySpace Killer” that might combine AOL’s ability to serve tens of millions of customers with the free-form expression MySpace users crave, and it’s said to be coming soon. More interesting are the slowdowns and outages reported from MySpace users as well, including the moan that if there was anything better, they’d jump to it in an instant.

Will AOL again become the cool/hip/chic place to be, or is it all a bunch of hooey?