Quick Hitts

Three governors have wisely turned down federal money for High Speed Rail projects.  They know accepting it will cost them billions, and probably tens of billions, in cost overruns for a project that will create enormous, but speedy, white elephants.

Progressives (i.e. socialists)  all pissy about these decisions.  But then, the left has always been ga ga about mass transit.  They insist that everyone riding together like sheep, following someone else’s schedule is far superior than people going where they want, when they want, in their evil evil private vehicles.

Mass Transit makes perfect sense in densely populated areas.  The higher the density the better it works.  But with the exception of a few major cities the US is very very spread out, which makes travel by those evil, individual cars the best way for most of us to get around.

I’ll support high speed rail, or regular speed rail, or even a bus, when it offers me the following features I currently get from my 11 year old car.

• Pick me up at my doorstep at the exact moment I’m ready.  I don’t want to wait in the rain or the cold or the heat or the wind.  Not for ten minutes, and certainly not for an hour when they screw up the schedule.  If I want to go somewhere, or leave somewhere, at say, 1:21 AM, it should be waiting for me at that exact time, at my exact location.
• After picking me up I need it to go directly, non-stop, to my endpoint as quickly as possible.  That means it can’t stop every block to pick up other people.
• Along the way I want to listen to the music or podcasts I choose, at whatever volume I like.  I should be able to sing along to my favorite tunes as loudly as I wish.  Sometimes I will sing on key.  Other times I will not be even close.   I don’t care, and no one sharing the ride is allowed to either.
• During the ride I will not have to listen to the inane (and often insane) jabber of annoying people sitting near me, unless they’re friends or family I’ve willingly let join me.
• During the trip I may decide to smoke a cigar. It may be a fine high quality smoke or a cheap stinky dog rocket.  This must be legal, and I will not tolerate anyone bitching at me about it.
• I should have lots of room for groceries, coolers, and anything else I want or need to bring with me.
• My dog must be welcome.

None of these requirements are negotiable.  Give me mass transit that meets all these criteria and I’ll happily give up my car.  Until then, I’m keeping it.  I’ve got places to go and things to bring there, and nothing will do the job nearly as well as my own vehicle.

A new Quick Hitts podcast, Remembering Ronald Reagan, is available.

The left are completely wrong about his role in ending the cold war.  On the flip side, the right is also wrong about it.  You can get smartenized on the subject, as well as understand the historical context for the hero worship, in a mere 15 minutes.

http://www.davehitt.com/podcasts/

Feel free to use the comments section to, well, comment on it.

I’m now working as a pitchman, doing shows at Sam’s Clubs and BJs Clubs, demonstrating and selling this.   (Warning: the web site automatically starts playing sound.  Not my design, folks.) There’s downtime between shows which I often spend wandering around the store.

It’s cold here in the Northeast, so one of the more popular items this time of year is space heaters.  They come in all shapes and sizes.  One of the most amusing is a four hundred dollar model whose primary feature, compared to the $30-$50 ones that do the exact same thing, is Bob Vila’s picture on the box.

Some of the expensive ones feature a fake fireplace.  Most look really, really fake, but some might fool you for a second or two if you weren’t paying attention.

The other day, in my wanderings, I was standing next to one.  I could see it out of the corner of my eye while I was looking at something else and felt one side of my body getting warm.  I didn’t think much of it until I realized I wasn’t standing next to a heater, but large hi-def TV that was displaying a picture of a fire place, complete with the sounds of the flame and popping, crackling logs.  The moment I realized what it was the feeling of warmth vanished.  I tried to get it back, but once I realized the fire was a fake, the sensation wouldn’t return. Yet it had felt very real just a few seconds before.

I laughed.  It’s good, every once in a while, to be reminded that no matter how carefully we tweak our bullshit meter, no matter how diligently we try to apply a skeptical approach to everything, we can still be fooled pretty easily.  It doesn’t even require someone else trying to fool you – you can do it to yourself.

You’ll appreciate this post more if you read this first.

Publish America is a vanity publisher who takes their scam one step further than most by saddeling authors with outrageous contracts.  The contracts have varied a bit over time, but often contain a clause that requires authors to buy a butt-load of their own books to terminate the contract.  I rather liked the final letter author Matt Murphy sent them, especially his last two paragraphs,  and am reprinting the exchange with his permission.

Darcy,

I wrote 2-3 months ago requesting contract termination and received the form-letter reply. I want the rights to my book back and I don’t want my name associated with PublishAmerica. I will not make a 50-book order to terminate the contract, as it feels like paying a ransom. I have no intention of ordering another copy of my book, nor do I encourage others to purchase this title or promote the book in any way.

Please terminate my contract, as the continuation of my contract through its term will be in no way profitable for PublishAmerica but early termination will grant me peace of mind. Had I known in 2004 what I know now, I would have never signed a contract with PublishAmerica in the first place.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to your reply.

Matt Murphy

– – –

Dear Mr. Murphy,

In that case, your contract remains in effect, as we have preferred all
along.

Also, please note that you transferred your literary rights to PA so that itcould sell your book for a profit. By dissuading others from purchasing thebook, however, you are actively interfering with PA’s ability to exercisethose rights. Your conduct amounts to a breach of the covenant of goodfaith and fair dealing implied into every contract.

Thank you,

Darcy

– – –

Darcy,

Finally!!! A personal response! Darcy, either you have a way with words or I’m just overwhelmed with joy because I didn’t get a form-letter response this time.

PublishAmerica…
…increased the cover price of books
…began charging $3.99 shipping for each book even on multiple orders
…failed to send my final review copies before selling and sending my book to customers
…called itself a traditional publisher when the industry considers the publisher an abomination to the written word
…repeatedly failed to capitalize on web traffic I generated by having a poorly-maintained website that often would not load its home page and more often would not open my book’s page
…and continued its rich tradition of scamming authors.

I’d say that amounts to a breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing. There are thousands of other authors who agree (see: Absolute Write Water Cooler).

To clarify, “dissuade” means to persuade a person or persons against taking a certain course of action. As stated in my previous email: “I have no intention of ordering another copy of my book, nor do I encourage others to purchase this title or promote the book in any way.” I stated that I do not encourage others to purchase this title, not that I discourage them. Dissuasion requires action and I stated a lack of action. I’m no Philip Dolan, but I am attentive to detail most of the time. Just thought you’d like that clarified, so save your legal jargon for somebody who might be intimidated by it.

Had I known that a successful author would tell me to never mention the fact that I published with your company during a writing discussion because it’s better to be self-published than to be a vanity-published scam victim, I would not have signed the contract.

Had your company accepted Atlanta Nights in 2003 instead of 2004, I would not have signed the contract.

Had I known of your company’s no-return policy that turned off every bookseller who did not receive a specific request from a customer, I would not have signed the contract.

I have a child who will one day develop his own opinion of the life I’ve led and the choices I’ve made. This is something I consider every time I look into the mirror. The PublishAmerica staff must be a poorly groomed bunch, as it’s hard to imagine a whole office full of people who feed their children by earning scam money being able to look into the mirror before leaving for work. It’s no surprise that some hack author figured out a way to scam other authors and started his own publishing company, but what does surprise and disturb me is that there are people out there willing to be accessories to the crime. And every one of them–yes, even you, Darcy–is a bad person for taking part in it. If you had any regard for the overall good in this world you would stop reading here and begin typing your resignation. Better yet, don’t bother giving a notice. It’s not like you’d have a chance at working for an honest publisher (though I’d probably pay the 50-book ransom to be a fly on the wall during that interview). Having PublishAmerica in your employment history is marginally more honorable than having worked in the coffin-recycling business.

The hell with my book. You can keep it for two more years. Enjoy. It’s a decent read if you’re into an under-edited memoir of a man who accomplished more before he turned 24 years old than you or the swine in the cubicle beside yours will in your lifetimes. Take notes. Imitate. I can’t promise that it will make your parents regret their Pro-Life stance any less but it should keep you occupied while you drink away the sorrows of a meaningless life one box of red wine at a time.

May your next diarrhea discovery come with a sneeze.

Pleasantries,

Matt Murphy

– – –

You can find more of Matt’s writing on his site.

I had some good friends visiting, a couple I truly loved.  I told them, “You can eat anything in the house, anything at all, except the apples in the fridge.”  Then I left them alone for a while.

I came back to find they’d eaten the apples, and were hiding from me in my wife’s sewing room, where they had quickly stitched together some new clothes.

I could have forgiven them.  Perhaps I should have.  But instead I kicked them out into the winter weather, and cursed them, and condemned them and their children and their children’s children to lives of misery for thousands of years.

Now the only solution is to kill my kid.  Who is really me.  It gets so confusing.  But this all makes perfect sense, right?

Despite the problems I’d had with Mozy, I kept using them because I was lazy and never got around to switching to a better service.  They were taking their monthly payment out of Paypal, but when that account got depleted they notified me I needed to give them a different card to continue using their service.

I’m leaving town in a few days and didn’t want to mess with finding another service. I figured I’d just give them a different card for now, then replace them when I got around to it, which would probably be never, because I’m still lazy.

I went to their site, entered a different card and received a cryptic error message about a portal error.  I was instructed to contact support.  Heh.

I clicked on support, and selected the chat option.  Nothing happened. So I called their phone number, which wasn’t easy to find, and was asked to put in my client number, which was displayed on the web page as all zeros.  It didn’t work.

The e-mails telling me my account was about to expire came from  support@mozy.com, so I replied to that address and said if they gave me a call within the next 24 hours I’d renew.  I got an auto-reply saying no one read e-mail from that address.  Silly me, thinking I’d get help from a Mozy mailbox named support.

I couldn’t put it off any longer – I had to go shopping.  A friend on Facebook suggested myotherdrive.com, and it looked good, so I rather foolishly blew past their free sample offer and signed up for a paid account.

I found the software fairly confusing and non-intuitive, but would have figured it out if it weren’t for the error messages that kept popping up.  No problem, I thought, I’ll just call their support line.

There was no phone number.  There was no online chat.  There was nothing but a form to fill out to send them an e-mail.  I filled it out, asking them to cancel my account and issue me a refund.

I continued my search.  If a service got good reviews I checked it out and looked for support links.  Most offered nothing but an e-mail form, and they were often hard to find.

After rejecting a half dozen services, simply because they had no live support, I visited iDrive, and was happy to see they had a phone number prominently displayed.  But phone numbers don’t mean anything if no one ever answers them, so I gave them a call.

There was no robo-voice pretending to carry on a conversation; no list of nine different options, described in great detail, with the one I wanted at the end. I was given the choice to press 2 for sales, 3 for technical support or 4 for billing. Nice.  Simple.  I pressed 2, then wrote down the time, intending to see how long it took to get to a human.  As I set down my pen a woman answered “Hello, iDrive technical support, can I help you?”  As an added bonus she was American.

After a quick test of their client software (which was straightforward and intuitive) I became a paying customer.

I’m a computer geek and can usually figure things out on my own.  But when I can’t I expect fast, competent support.  (As an ex-support guy myself, I have pretty high expectations from support people.)  Even though I seldom use it, support is a major factor in deciding who gets my money.  Mozy, you didn’t lose me because of your clumsy software and lousy restore process. You lost me because your support is non-existent, even when my question was “how can I pay you money?” iDrive, you got my business because you answered my call in a few seconds.  (I would have been happy if it had taken four or five minutes.)  You had me at Hello.  (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Speaking of support, it’s been a while since I reiterated how much Startlogic sucks.  They really, really suck.  Just in case you were wondering.

The massacre in Arizona is the fault of Fox News, Bill O’Riely, Glen Beck and Sara Palin according to every lefty on Facebook and various prominent idiots.  Hey, here’s a thought – why not blame it on the ONLY person responsible – the whack job who did it.

Naw, too easy.  We must blame politicians and pundits we don’t like.  Ok, I’ll play along.  Let’s blame the politicians who have made it is impossible for anyone to get elected unless they’re a Democrat or a Republican. Let’s blame those who, through gerrymandering, election laws and media manipulation game the system so thoroughly that incumbents get re-elected 95%+ of the time.  That would be, let’s see, approximately, all of them.

Political writer Claire Wolfe said, “America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.” She said that fifteen years ago, before the TSA,  before Real ID, before the PATRIOT act, before extraordinary rendition, before the militarization of the police, before the thousands of big and little laws and regulations that are relentlessly driving us toward becoming a police state.

We shouldn’t be surprised that some people are so incensed at the impossibility of change through established channels they resort to shooting the bastards. We should be surprised (and grateful) it doesn’t happen a lot more often.