My imaginary friend thinks you have mental problems.

Life in Sun City

I passed the smog inspection. Actually, the VW passed, and with plenty of margin in every category but one - emissions at idle. I think that's because the idle is set a little high, something I'll fix when I do a tune-up. That will require a dwell meter and timing light, two tools I threw out years ago, figuring I'd never be working on a car with points and condenser again. eBay here I come.
From the inspection station to what Arizona calls MVD, the Motor Vehicle Department, for title transfer, registration and plates. If customer service is dead, it's been lying cold in the grave for a decade at MVD. Those are not people with a high job satisfaction index.
The good news is that AZ doesn't charge sales tax on car transactions between private parties (hey, I'm not arguing) and the registration fee is based on age. In this case, a 42-year old car gets the minimum, something like $23. So I felt OK about springing for a personalized plate:
MACDNLD
It will arrive in 4-6 weeks.
And I've settled on a name. It just came to me this afternoon, and as soon as I thought of it I knew it was right:
Gerta
Don't ask me to explain. I can't. It's just the right name.

You probably read or heard about the homecoming that Danville CA gave to its favorite citizen, Capt. "Sully" Shullenberger. When it was his turn to speak he took all of 30 seconds and said "We were only doing our job." He's right, of course, but it also seems proper to give him and his coworkers on the flight a lot of credit for doing their jobs with such calmness and skill.
I'd like to think that if I were a passenger on that flight I'd thank God for their performance and his protection and leave it at that. That doesn't seem to be the case for some of the passengers. They've complained about the $5,000 check they've received from US Airways. Among those is Joe Hart who suffered a bloody nose and bruises, and says he "would like to be made whole for the incident." He also says it's too early to know what emotional distress he'll experience.
I was kidding when I said we should send the bill to Canada because it was their geese. I didn't imagine that some passengers would look at this as an opportunity to build their bank accounts.
Sometimes I don't like what capitalism has done to the western culture. Greed isn't pretty.

We have our phone, internet and cable with Cox, one of the local options for those services. I called them a couple of weeks ago because it could take up to five seconds from the time we punched numbers into the remote before the channel actually changed on the TV. The guy sat at his keyboard and remotely turned off our cable box and then turned it back on. He explained that he was basically re-booting it just like I do with my computer from time to time. It worked!
Last Saturday while I was at J&A's house they had a Cox technician there to fix some of their issues with the cable. I told the guy of me experience and he said that our box has a memory chip, just like my computer, and when it was re-booted the memory was cleared. He also said that every time I change channels a little bit of that memory is used, so that eventually things will get slow again. Sure enough, we can already see that happening. (OK, I'm an ADD husband in possession of the remote. Deal with it.)
On the way home it occurred to me that if my cable box remembers every channel change, and if the guy at the Cox offices can access my box remotely, then Cox knows everything I watch and when I watch it. I'm not worried about being outed for anything I watch unless NCIS reruns are a problem. But would Cox sell that information to marketing companies that would be interested in knowing my viewing habits so they can target me with specific advertising campaigns? Who else would want to know all about my viewing habits? Political parties? News outlets?
NPR did a story last week on GPS-enabled cell phones. Besides the advantages they provide the user they also allow the service provider to know exactly where the phone's user is at any point in time, whether the phone is on or off. This means that if you're walking past a particular restaurant, one that has paid a fee to your provider, your phone can text you a coupon code for that eatery, whether you want it or not. Junk mail for your phone based on your location.
Can you think of even more troublesome ways in which this GPS service could be used?

Not that many years ago there was a great uproar over suggestions that the govt. create an ID card for each citizen, something akin to a driver's license. Opponents screamed "big brother" and warned the govt. would use the ID card to invade our privacy.
That fear looks pretty silly at this point, IMHO. We're paying private business to do far more invasive things.
Given what it could do for issues like immigration and terrorism a national ID card looks like both a good idea and pretty inocuous in comparison to what private enterprise is doing.