So, I asked the salesman, “What E46s do you have on the lot?”

He asked, “What are you looking for, a 335i?”

The 335i is an E90, dumbass, not an E46. Now, I don’t expect most of the snobs and yuppies who buy BMWs to know the difference between an E46 and an E90, but some of us actually care about driving rather than posing, and we know the difference between the two. Is it too much to ask for the dealer to know the difference?

Subject of the hearing: Steroids in baseball.

As a country, we must be in pretty good shape if the Congress has nothing better to do than yammer on about steroids in baseball.

I have a humble suggestion to my elected representatives: If there’s nothing important to do, GO HOME.

Of course, this being a Democratic Congress, “important” could mean something like more gun control, more spending (not that the Republicans have been helpful in this regard), raising my taxes, destroying the health care system, or surrendering to the barbarians. Maybe it’s good for the country that they spend their time talking about steroids in baseball instead.

A few days later, the timer started acting up: the cycle would end, or end prematurely, but the timer was still in the middle of the cycle. Then the timer would continue to advance, right past OFF, and continue to spin slow circles until the dryer was unplugged. This time, I used the fairly slick Schedule a Repair service on the Sears website. The tech came out, ordered a new timer, and took more of my money.

On Wednesday, he was scheduled to install the timer between 8am and noon. These four-hour repair windows are a pain, since you’re basically trapped at home, hoping for arrival closer to 8 rather than noon, instead of doing something useful, like, say, going to work. At 11:45, I got a call: he won’t make it until 2:30.

I realize this isn’t his fault — sometimes shit happens with other appointments that screws up a tech’s entire day. That said, I am now sitting at work on a Saturday to make up for the time I was trapped at home on Wednesday.

I’ve also spent a significant fraction of the dryer’s original purchase price on these repairs. There was even a class-action lawsuit about the reliability of these dryers: www.evenheatsettlement.com. Unfortunately, my Evenheat dryer held on until past the compensation deadline. Asshole.

This morning, sunrise was at 7:19am. I’ve been waking up in the dark for the better part of a month, and now I’m waking up a full hour before sunrise. The problem is Daylight Saving Time — it’s moving daylight from when I need it (morning) to when I don’t need it (evening).

Don’t get me wrong: during the summer, DST is great. Sunrise is still early enough to wake me up, and I get the extra hour of light in the evening. The problem is that it isn’t summer anymore! We’re more than a month into Autumn.

When Congress adjusted DST in 2005, they went the wrong way. DST should have been made shorter, not longer. I would say that the last Sunday in April to the first Sunday in October would work well for DST.

There is an interesting article today at NewsBusters about two “journalists” attempting to justify this discrepancy in reporting.

This question was posed to Robin Wright: “Robin Wright, should that decline in Iraq casualties have gotten more media attention?”

Not necessarily. The fact is we’re at the beginning of a trend — and it’s not even sure that it is a trend yet. There is also an enormous dispute over how to count the numbers. There are different kinds of deaths in Iraq.

There are combat deaths. There are sectarian deaths. And there are the deaths of criminal — from criminal acts. There are also a lot of numbers that the U.S. frankly is not counting. For example, in southern Iraq, there is Shiite upon Shiite violence, which is not sectarian in the Shiite versus Sunni. And the U.S. also doesn’t have much of a capability in the south.

So the numbers themselves are tricky.

Don’t want to jump the gun, huh? Right. What about an increase in casualties?

KURTZ: But let’s say that the figures had shown that casualties were going up for U.S. soldiers and going up for Iraqi civilians. I think that would have made some front pages.

STARR: Oh, I think inevitably it would have. I mean, that’s certainly — that, by any definition, is news. Look, nobody more than a Pentagon correspondent would like to stop reporting the number of deaths, interviewing grieving families, talking to soldiers who have lost their arms and their legs in the war. But, is this really enduring progress?

We’ve had five years of the Pentagon telling us there is progress, there is progress. Forgive me for being skeptical, I need to see a little bit more than one month before I get too excited about all of this.

So, casualties going up is “news”, but casualties going down is something to be skeptical about. It’s almost as if they want us to lose.

As always, read the whole article.

The user manual — a 410 page PDF file, yuck — contains this nugget of wisdom on page 228:

When you have finished reviewing performace data you can save the session file.

1. Close the session file window in Visual Studio. DevPartner prompts you to save the session file.
2. Click OK to accept the default file name and location.

DevPartner saves session files as part of the active solution. They appear in the DevPartner Studio virtual folder in Solution Explorer.

Telling the user to close an unsaved file in order to save it is very bad advice! Closing an unsaved file is a destructive operation, i.e. it will blow away your unsaved data. Just because most well-behaved programs will prompt the user to save first is no excuse for telling the user to close a file in order to save it.

So, what happened when I closed my profiling session without saving it? Mind you, this was done as an experiment, purely in the interests of science, or something. BLAM! Visual Studio and DevPartner dutifully vaporized an hour’s worth of work without a single hint of a save dialog.

Way to go, Compuware.

First, the definitions:

Loose
Adj:

• Free from restraint. A loose dog roaming the street.
• Not fitting tightly. Loose clothing.
• Not bundled together. Wearing your hair loose. Loose computer parts in the bin.

Adv:

• In a loose manner or loosely. Loose-flowing hair.

Verb:

• To free from restraint; let loose.
• To shoot (a weapon). Loose the torpedoes!
• To make less tight.

Lose (lost, losing)
Verb

• To find yourself without something by accident. Don’t lose this card. I lost my keys.
• To suffer the deprivation of something. To lose one’s savings.
• To get rid of. Lose weight. She “lost” the nerdy guy’s phone number.
• To not win a game, contest, or conflict. UCSB lost to Cal Poly.
• To cause one to lose a game, contest, or conflict. Hitler lost the war the day he attacked the Soviets.

Usually when I see this error, the word loose is used where lose would actually be correct:

• Don’t loose sight of him. WRONG
• He always looses his keys. WRONG
• The Dodgers should always loose to the Giants. WRONG (syntactically, anyway)

These should be:

• Don’t lose sight of him.
• He always loses his keys.
• The Dodgers should always lose to the Giants.

Then there are the cases where either word is syntactically correct, but the sentence is given a very different meaning:

• Lose the dog. The dog has been lost. Where’s the dog?
• Loose the dog. Release the dog to attack the bad guys!

As you can see, these two words have very different meanings. Let’s try not to mix them up.

This is a nifty feature, except for one problem: during Daylight Saving Time, it calculates the time at foreign locations incorrectly. For example, the two locations I entered were “California” and “Hong Kong”. During Standard Time, Hong Kong is 16 hours ahead of California, but during Daylight Saving Time, it is only 15 hours ahead. But while it is 6:08pm in California, the iPod is displaying 10:08am in Hong Kong. It is actually 9:08am in Hong Kong — 15 hours ahead.

The same error is made with locations within the United States that do not observe DST. For instance, it is currently 3:08pm in Honolulu, but the iPod displays it as 4:08pm.

The iPod and the Mac it’s connected to both seem to be configured to observe DST, so I’m pretty sure this isn’t a configuration issue. My conclusion is that this is a bug. A rather annoying and obvious bug that should have been caught before release.

BTW, I like the keyboard on this MacBook. I’m not typing double characters like I often do on other laptops.