How To Save A Dog's Life In Chicago

On Wednesday, a stray Rottweiler showed up in our alley. Since my wife was working at home, she got involved in trying to make sure its story had a happy ending. This is a synopsis of what we went through trying to do right by this dog, and all the confusion, misinformation, and apathy we encountered along the way. Ironically, the only way to ensure the dog's life would be saved was to get it to the one place we were certain was a death sentence: Chicago's Animal Control Center.

If you find a cooperative lost pet dog in Chicago, do the following:

1. Take it to your local vet and see if it has a chip. This might give you a fast track back to the owner, who will love you forever.
2. Call 311 and request Animal Control to come collect it; if they come, make sure to tell them it's a stray, not yours.
3. If they don't come, take the dog to your local police district and make them take the dog. They will try not to take it, because they don't want to have to care for the dog - too bad, it's their job.
4. Contact the appropriate rescue agency and let them know that the dog is entering the system over the next 12-24 hours. They will watch out for it and make sure to collect it the day the dog's ownership reverts back to the city.

This is Bob

This is Bob's story.

My wife and two other neighbors managed to trap the poor scared Rottie in a fenced yard, but the owner of that yard was very uncomfortable with his presence. She has no experience with dogs, and undoubtedly felt threatened by the "vicious killer breed" prowling around back there waiting for an opportunity to tear out her throat. She called 311, the Chicago non-emergency response number, and requested that Animal Control come collect the dog. She was unconcerned with what happened after that, of course, but in any case that is standard city procedure for any stray animal, so I can't really fault her. Animal Control rolled by the front of the house and didn't see the dog (he was in the back yard), and left. Further calls to 311 revealed that they may not be back for days. The yard owner called my wife, pleading to have the dog removed from her yard, saying, "I feel like a prisoner in my own house."

You seem nice. Can I live here?

My wife discovered that approaching with a Milk Bone and a leash was a good way to make a lifelong friend, and had no trouble getting the dog into our own yard. Then began a couple of hours of neighbor discussions and trying to find out if anyone who had a Rottweiler might be missing one. No luck, so she put an ad on Craigslist in case the owner looked there. The dog was proving to be very friendly and easy to manage, so she decided to walk him up to a local vet, Mayfair Animal Clinic, to have him scanned to see if he had a tracking chip and to get some advice. There was no chip, they discovered, but they gave her what seemed like obvious advice: Don't take this dog to Animal Control whatever you do - they'll kill him for sure.


Now, bear in mind, this dog was not the stereotypical stray. For one thing, he was in great shape, maybe even slightly overweight. For another, he smelled like pet shampoo - that's not the aroma one associates with strays or abused killing machines. Finally, he would get really excited whenever he saw a leash, meaning he knew how incredibly awesome it is to go walkabout with a human. He immediately took to me, giving me kisses whenever he was able to sneak past my defenses. For lack of a better name, we started calling him Bob. He didn't really answer to it, but it beat "hey you!"

Mmm. Water.

It was warm that evening, so we set him up with a bed in the garage, and reviewed our options. We have friends who work with Recycled Rotts, a greater Chicagoland rescue agency, and we figured that unless we could find the original owner, they were the best option. Failing that, we knew about one other rescue agency (THORR), and then PAWS or even the Anti-Cruelty Society were distant final choices. Beyond that we weren't even willing to contemplate; my wife put it succinctly: No one is killing this dog. So with this priority list in mind, we called our friend "Cindy" and asked her to use her contacts to get us in touch with the right people at Recycled Rotts (all personal names are changed here in case their owners don't want their privacy violated). We also called THORR and left a message, and my wife filled out a found-dog profile at the Illinois Lost Dogs facebook page. I also sent a description and pictures to Cindy's husband "John" so he could make sure they got passed along. It was getting on in the evening, so we weren't that surprised that no one called back.

The next day, still no calls back by 10am, so she called PAWS and left a message. After still no response by anyone by noon, she decided to call 311 again and ask what to do. Note that 311 did not tell her to take the dog to Animal Control; instead, they said to call the local police district and fill out a report, since the owner might go there looking for his dog. She did, and the police took her report without telling her one very important piece of information: every police district in Chicago has the facility to safely and securely store stray dogs while Animal Control is called to come get them. That little gem would have saved us a trip the length of the city later.

By mid-afternoon, we were both getting pretty desperate to find a safe place for this dog. The good luck with the weather the previous night wasn't going to hold: the temperature was dropping fast, and was supposed to fall well under freezing overnight. We discussed taking the dog in, but he wasn't very well-trained, and we have two (spayed) females: a greyhound and a beagle. That pair would be a recipe for trouble for a fully-loaded 100lb male Rottweiler. I got in touch with John again, and started pushing him hard. He and Cindy have taken Rottweiler fosters from Recycled Rotts in the past, and I was hoping I could get him to offer to take Bob from us; he wasn't willing to cave to that, but he did agree to pull some strings and get the president of RR to call us, "whatever it takes." Just like us, he thought the only way to guarantee this dog's safety was by getting it directly from our hands to Recycled Rotts' hands.

"Cathy" from Recycled Rotts did eventually call my wife, extremely annoyed that she had to interact with us at all. My wife is a saint, and if she describes someone as "snippy" on the phone, you can bet they were snippy and then some. She asked for help, saying that we were desperate to get this dog somewhere safe and warm for the night. After brow-beating her for a while, Cathy eventually gave my wife a piece of information that would have saved everyone a great deal of trouble at the beginning: For legal reasons, rescue agencies cannot take stray dogs directly from the people who find them. The dogs must go through the City of Chicago (Animal Control) first, so that ownership of the dog reverts to the City; only then can a rescue agency claim the dog and get it into its foster program.

Heck, it makes sense when you hear it snapped at you over the phone, but it sure would be nice if a single one of the agencies' websites would have that information on them. Or if 311 would have told us one of the times we called. Or if the local vet would have known and not told us to do the opposite thing. Or if one of the three different agencies we left messages at could have picked up the phone and gotten back to us to tell us this. Or if the police would have told us that, or told us to bring the dog by. But no, we had to manipulate friends and maybe damage their relationship with their rescue agency. THORR has never yet returned our call. I suspect RR wouldn't have either, without John's intervention.

I begin to see why people tie stray dogs to the door of the local doggy daycare place.

Oh boy, a car ride!

The story gets happier from here on. That evening after traffic died down, we started attempting to get Bob into the Ford Escape so we could take him to Animal Control. He made it very clear he wasn't jumping in on his own, and Bob is 100 pounds (guesstimate) of solid Rottie. He thought I was pretty cool, but he was NOT OK with me trying to grab him and lift him into the truck. Finally, I ended up reinforcing a huge piece of plywood and turning it into a ramp. A Milk Bone later, Bob was making happy slurping noises in the back of the Escape.

Bob drools a lot, and he really really wants to ride in the front seat. It was an interesting trip.

I am ashamed to admit that I was expecting a clinical bureaucratic death camp filled with jaded hateful people, but Animal Control was a wonderful surprise. They treated us with respect, they treated Bob as well as any vet would, and they explained how the system worked and reassured us that there was almost no chance that Bob would be destroyed. They could immediately tell that he was a happy-go-lucky 100-lb idiot, not a threat to society; and as long as that assessment didn't change over the next 5 days, it was a virtual certainty that he would get scooped up into the rescue system just like we wanted. Recycled Rotts and other agencies tour the Animal Control Center on a daily basis, it turns out, looking for candidates. If they see a dog like Bob who fits the bill, they will either make a note of him and his release date or ask ACC to put a note on his cage to call them when he comes up for grabs.

So Bob is in jail for the time being, but we're confident that his life is about to get much better.

What could be done to make this process easier on people who want to do the right thing and want to make sure a sweet dog like Bob has a fighting chance at survival? I have a few suggestions:

1. PAWS, Anti-Cruelty Society, THORR, and RR all have websites primarily designed to get people to take a dog. I understand that: they have more dogs than people to take them. But they, like us, are in this to save the lives, right? A simple How-To page on their website telling people what to do (and why) when they find a stray would go a long way.
2. The Chicago Animal Control website talks about how many strays they take a year, and gives hours for dropping strays off, but doesn't explain how the system works. Every pet owner knows that Animal Control is a kill-shelter, so we assume it isn't safe to take someone's pet there.
3. Every agency I called has a long outgoing answering machine message designed to discourage voicemail. It gives various tidbits of information so that most people will get their answer from the message and hang up. Add, "if you find a stray dog, we can't take it; take it to Animal Control instead." Is that so hard?
4. It would be nice if the cops had been a little more service-oriented. Instead of, "yeah sure we'll take your report and file it under 'hopeless'," it would have been much better if the officer on the phone had said something like, "oh, you found a stray dog? if you can transport it here, we can get it into the right hands for you." Or even, "we'll send a car over to pick it up." Yeah, I know: fantasy.
5. The Animal Control responder shouldn't have rolled by the house and left. If given an address and told the animal is confined, ring the damn doorbell.
6. When vets in Chicago give out incorrect information, they cause a lot of harm. Mayfair Clinic was trying to help, but in the end they hurt the process. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect a vet in Chicago to know how the stray dog system in Chicago works.

I hope someone in our situation, searching the web for clues like we did, might stumble upon this blog post. If they only get as far as the "what to do" section at the top, then I have served my purpose. If anyone reads the story and gets a few chuckles picturing Bob's antics in the car, even better. And if the real message reaches even one person with the power to achieve one of the items on the list above, then I will be truly satisfied.

Good luck, Bob. I hope you find a wonderful home.

Applications: Kontact

See Time For a Change for the first in this series, or check out the index for all the posts on Arch Linux. Today I'll finish getting email, calendar, and contacts working, which I started last time by working with the Arch User Repository.

Kontact, and Some Light Ranting
Kontact is the Personal Information Manager (PIM) that comes with KDE. If you've ever used the full version of Microsoft Outlook before, you've used a PIM. Kontact is actually one of the reasons I wanted to give KDE a try, because from everything I've read, it is as well-integrated with the operating system as Outlook is in Windows, and has better extensions for synchronizing with information sources like Google. As an Android user, Google integration is a key feature for me - I find it frustrating that keeping contacts and appointments synchronized seems to be so difficult for the big boys (Microsoft and Apple) to handle correctly. I realize this is by design, of course. Outlook has no revenue value to Microsoft without a big Exchange Server license, and Apple wants your eyes on iTunes, not Google services. Too bad. This is my computer, and I'll make it do what I want. And that goes double for my phone.

Installing Kontact isn't necessary, since it comes with KDE. But getting it to integrate with Google information services takes a little more work. I installed those extra things last time, and now it's time to get them configured.

Even before I get started, I can hear you thinking, "geez, this is a lot of work, why don't you just use Microsoft Outlook?" And yes, it's a bit of work. But it's worth it to me to have all my contacts, email, and appointments synchronized across my phone and computer without having to run a big wasteful server in my house. Besides, the Exchange Server at your office that provides all these services is just as hard to set up and maintain (maybe harder), and it doesn't even integrate with anything other than Microsoft Exchange! Try this little experiment: call your IT department and tell them that you want all your Google contacts to show up in your address book in Outlook, and insist that you want to be able to edit them within Outlook or on your phone, and have the changes automatically show up in the opposite location. Now, while you deal with a very annoyed IT department, I'll go ahead and set this all up for myself with no dedicated hardware and no capital expense... in a couple of evenings.

Configuring EMail
KMail is the email component of Kontact, and configuring it is just like configuring any other IMAP client. I added accounts for each of my main email boxes, setting my login and password for each. I set up an outgoing persona and hooked it up to my primary email box with authentication so that my email provider would forward my mail out to the world for me. And then I selected the inboxes from each of my email accounts as "Favorites" so I wouldn't have to search through all my folders to see what spam I had. KMail is not as easy to use and customize as Thunderbird, but I can get used to it.

Here's a screen shot, in case you've never seen an email client set up before.

Configuring Akonadi - Contacts
Akonadi is the KDE information service, providing contact, calendar, and general file-indexing services to all KDE applications via a unified API. If this sounds complicated and error-prone, then you are very perceptive. I want to set up Akonadi to use my Google contacts and calendar, and I have two calendars I want to access: my personal calendar, and the shared calendar that my wife and I use to track our joint plans. In my previous post, I installed the pieces necessary to make this happen. Now I need to configure them.

I start by going into the Contacts section of Kontact (anyone else see the naming oddity here?), and deleting the empty local-storage contacts list that Kontact provides by default. Having that will just lead to confusion later. Next, I right-click in the same pane that the contacts list was in, and select "Add Contact List". At this point I'm offered a choice of what kind of contact list to add. Since the installation of akonadi-googledata went smoothly, the first one on the list is "Akonadi Google Contacts Resource".

Clicking on this asks for my Google email and password, and after supplying that, all my GMail contacts download into the contact manager, as simple as that. Since my Android also uses my Google contacts, any changes I make in Kontact will show up on my phone automatically.

Configuring Akonadi - Calendars

Contacts were the easy part - now for the calendars. As with contacts, I start by switching over to the Calendar (not Kalendar, that would be silly) section of Kontact and delete the local calendar defaulted for me. Then I right-click in that now-empty pane and select "Add Calendar", which greets me with a similar Add window as before.

But this time, instead of selecting the Google Calendar Resource, we want the choice labelled "DAV groupware resource." This is a standards-based interface, and actually works better with Google Calendars than the other, more intuitive choice. But the setup isn't intuitive at all: the next dialog that pops up is a Logon Credentials window, which I have to Cancel to proceed. Yes.

Next is the configuration window for this new DAV groupware resource, which I'll show after I populate it with some stuff. The initial tasks are to choose a name (I chose "Google" because I'm very creative), and to click the Add button under Server configuration. Each Google calendar I want to see in Kontact is a line under the Server configuration section. I'll start with my personal one:

The Google instructions for DAV integration say to use the URL "https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/XXXX/events/", where XXXX is replaced by:

• your gmail address if this is your primary personal calendar, or
• a special identifier on the calendar settings page if this is a shared calendar

Once I put in this URL, and my gmail account and password again, I clicked Fetch and the stuff in the bottom list populated. I repeated this process for the shared McHouse calendar, and that resulted in this nice fully-populated DAV configuration window:

Click OK, and all my appointments download into the Calendar. It's a pretty light week, thankfully.

There's still a ton of look-and-feel setup to do, but the important part is that it all works and it's all integrated. The little customizations and tweaks can be done as I use the software.

Just three left!

PasswordSafe for secure password management

Moneydance for personal finance DONE!

ThinkOrSwim for option trading DONE!

Minecraft DONE!

Dropbox for cloud storage DONE!

Kontact for e-mail, contacts, and calendar DONE!

Choqok for micro-blogging (following and posting to Twitter) DONE!

NixNote for notes/personal organization

Okteta hex editor DONE!

Bacula for automated backups

An Open Letter to Metra

Dear Metra Customer Service:

I attempted to board outbound train #2101 at the Grayland stop with a bicycle this morning at 6:50 AM.  According to your schedule, this train permits up to 15 bikes per train.  I and another cycling commuter were turned away by conductors with whistles, shouts, and hand-waving.  He and I both asked why, and were both told "no bikes!" as the doors closed.  Now destined to be late for work, my best course of action was to return home and drive, which I did.

At just after 8:00 AM I called your rider services line to complain about being denied service, and was treated very rudely by Gloria.  She raised her voice and interrupted me multiple times on the phone call, despite my attempts to simply lodge my complaint and move on.  It was during this unpleasant conversation that I learned that the reason I was denied service by Metra was because the Taste of Chicago was going on at the Lakefront, and Metra will allow no bikes in either direction on any train during that festival.  I was also told that I should have known this because "it's on the website."  By the end of the call, I suspected that my concerns were being ignored, so I asked Gloria to read back my complaint, which she refused to do.  I asked to talk to her supervisor; Hersey (best guess on his name) got on the line and implied that I was the one being unreasonable, but did eventually have Gloria read me back my complaint.  Whether it went anywhere from there, I have no idea.

I pointed out to Hersey that I could find no mention on the Metra website that I could not bring a bicycle on an outbound train at 6:50 AM because of a festival downtown (behind the train) that starts at 11:00 AM (4 hours after I would have disembarked). After 2:00 PM, I received a voicemail message giving me instructions on how to find the information - apparently it took Metra employees six hours to find the information on your own website!

And where can it be found? On the front page, which shows important service announcements that might affect your customers' commutes as well as "News" about Powerpoint presentations from your CEO and updates about how you are trying to designate some cars as "quiet"? No. On the schedule of my train line, the page most likely to be bookmarked by your customers, and the page that states that 15 bicycles are allowed per train? No. On the Service Updates page, which duplicates the service announcements on the front page? No.  In fact, there are no links on the front page that take me directly to a page stating this policy.  The only page that I could find that stated that bikes were forbidden today was your Metra Bicycle Policy 2011 page.  The most direct route from your front page to this page is:

1) Click on Service Updates on the top menu bar of the front page.
2) Click on Bikes On Trains on the left menu of the Service Updates page.

Your level of customer service when I called was not great, but Hersey did a competent job resolving the situation; that is not the reason for this letter.  However, I have two issues with your Bikes on Trains policy:

1) The policy is illogical and arbitrary, making it impossible to use common sense to follow, and making it necessary for me, your customer, to memorize this policy so that I can jump through the scheduling, logistical, and procedural hoops.

2) The policy is very poorly communicated, being tucked away on your website in a place where common sense would not dictate I look while planning my commute.  One would think that if there was an exceptional situation that might result in your customers being stranded at the station, it would be good business to highlight that information to prevent letters like this one from being sent.

In the end, one thing is clear: I cannot rely on Metra for transportation.  If I am to commute from my home in Chicago to my work in Glenview, I must rely on my own transportation or experience an unacceptably high risk of not getting to work.  Metra clearly does not want bicyclists as customers, despite paying lip-service through your confusing and discouraging policy. As one of the millions of Chicago citizens that supports Metra through my sales taxes, this saddens me.

Sincerely,


Mark McCracken

P.S. This open letter, delivered to you as an email, has also been posted to my public blog at http://riskofruin.markmccracken.net.

CS|MACO... Finally!

Mea Culpa

First, I need to relate a painful but valuable lesson I learned last week.  In my previous post, I said that the CiG trade had fired a Buy signal on S&P Futures.  As a fade strategy, the CiG trade frequently signals trades that I view as bat-shit crazy.  It takes some teeth-gritting and reminding myself that this is fake money in order for me to be able to enter the trade sometimes.  Last Wednesday was one of those times.

I dutifully entered the trade, but I put a $500/contract stop-loss order in, instead of the $1000 that the script calls for.  I congratulated myself a couple of hours later when my stop-loss was hit, closing me out for a $500 loss, on saving the other $500 dollars.  Well... go look at a chart for S&P Futures.  My max unrealized loss that evening would have been about $700, and over the next two days we had a sizable rally.  By the time the exit signal arrived, the trade as designed would have been up over $2000/contract, a big return.  Instead, I was sitting on the sidelines with a $500 loss.  My "judgement", in this case, cost me a total of $2500/contract.  Ouch.

So why did I go against the trade as back-tested by NeighborTrader?  My rationale at the time was that this was a fundamental market move, and we were in uncharted territory that couldn't possibly be handled by back-testing.  OK, fair enough, and that's what judgement is for.  But I took the wrong action based on that judgement: instead of tightening my stop, which cut my max loss by 50% but increased my probability of experiencing that loss by far more than 100%, I should have opted not to place the trade at all.  If my comfort level with the risk is insufficient to execute the trade as designed, I should avoid the trade entirely - not cripple it and damn it to fail.

My conclusion was invalid, even if my assertion (these unprecedented times are likely to cause the trade not to work) was valid.  But what about my assertion?  If we want to look at unprecedented times, let's look at May 7, 2010, the day after the "Flash Crash" (I hate this term, by the way).  CiG would have similarly fired a Buy signal at the end of the day that day, and the exit signal would have come two trading days later, for a profit of over $2200/contract.  And here's the thing: NT back-tested this trade before May 7, 2010.  That's out-of-sample data, and thus can't be discarded as sample bias in his back-testing.

So my assertion -- unprecedented times invalidates the trade signal -- was invalid, and my conclusion on how to act on it -- tighten the stop -- was invalid as well.  Look, I'm not perfect, but if I had gotten either thing right, I'd feel a lot better about it.  Anyway, $2500 lesson learned: either follow the trade, or don't do the trade - don't adjust the trade on the fly based on my gut.

Oh, and you may recall me mentioning that "by rights, I should be short Ten Year Futures, too". That trade, if entered, would have made another $1250/contract over the course of three trading days.  Sigh.

CS|MACO

Last Wednesday night, not long after my stop-out, AAII's sentiment survey for March 17 was posted, and those inversely prophetic investors had some pretty negative things to say about the market.  Bullishness dropped all the way to 28.5%, just below the CS Buy signal level of 31.5.  With SPY trading between its 25SMA and its 200SMA, the MACO component was giving a hearty "meh" signal.  Buy + don't-care = Buy.  So I bought a unit of SPY the next morning... at 128.  SPY is still in MACO's "meh" territory, but up 1.66/share from my buy price; AAII publishes another weekly survey overnight tonight.  If my individual investor peers recognize the cessation of the downtrend last week and get more bullish ("bullisher"?), I might find myself selling SPY on the open tomorrow morning.  But they'll have to get a lot "bullisher" - 41.5% or more - for me to take my profits and go home.  We'll see.

General Thoughts

As regular readers of this blog know, I run multiple trades in my paperMoney account at ThinkOrSwim.  Besides the ones mentioned above, I also have a bullish NDX option vertical spread on to simulate a collar, a bearish SPX option vertical spread, an Iron Condor in RUT (Russell 2000) and naked-long SPY puts.  I'm also looking for a dip in gold to buy back some GLD calls, after having exited my March calls before expiration.  The problem that I am starting to run into is that I have too many trades on the stock market - and many of them are nearly perfectly inversely correlated.  The worst offenders are the bearish SPX and bullish NDX spreads.  CiG and CS|MACO only hold positions once in a while - but the option spreads are there all month long, every month.

This false diversification doesn't benefit me at all - if they were real trades I would be spinning my wheels spending commission on an expectation of about 0 profit.  In a paperMoney account, this isn't so bad, because I can use the excuse that I am looking for profitable trades: the unprofitable ones will never "go pro" into a real money account.  But this is kind of a hollow argument, because any of these trades can be profitable or unprofitable, depending on the market conditions.

This issue bears more consideration.

And a Micro Rant

"They", whoever they are, changed the Nasdaq-100 ETF's symbol from QQQQ to QQQ last night.  WTF???  Didn't they just change it from QQQ to QQQQ a few years ago?  Make up your minds!

Happy 1976

I first wrote in November, 2010, about my Year-a-Month project.  It all started when I found vast holes in the McHouse Worldwide Music Library, especially from my childhood before I knew what was cool.  For example, calling myself a heavy metal fan without any Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, or Iron Maiden in my collection is a tad on the naive side, if not downright hypocritical.

January would have been 1976, but I ended up skipping last month because by the time I had recovered from my sinus infection, returned from Utah, and resolved the NAS hard drive scare (hopefully the hard drive scare of 2011), it was late January already.  So, no big deal, we push everything back a month.

In 1976, artists on my list released the following albums:

Technical Ecstasy, by Black Sabbath - I couldn't find this one available in MP3 downloadable format, so it is on its way from Amazon on a CD. 

Rainbow Rising, by Rainbow - This is a tiny little 6-song album wherein the first song didn't thrill me, so I just picked up 2-6.  I discovered Dio about the time of his death, and realized that his voice lurked in many of my hard rock memories.  Although Rainbow is a little (just barely - nothing like Deep Purple) on the 70s-pop side for me, it's still worth picking up for the music history if nothing else.

Presence, by Led Zeppelin - yet another Led Zeppelin album I'm shocked that we don't have.  It absolutely rocks, and I'm glad I found it.

Sad Wings of Destiny, by Judas Priest - I really only am familiar with the very biggest of the Judas Priest hits, but I'm finding a lot of things to love in these full albums from the early years.  It's almost an early groove-metal sound.

Free-for-All, by Ted Nugent - the physical CD was cheaper than the MP3 download, go figure.  This one is also on its way.

A Mini-Rant
OK, Amazon, I get that you like money, and I have no problem with that.  But when you sell a 7-song album for $9.99, and then hold back one of the 99c-each songs so that I have to get the whole album to get it at all, it seems petty and money-grubbing.  7 songs for $9.99 is a lot like $1.43/song, so make the songs $1.45 and let me download any and all of them.  Oh wait, if you did that you couldn't advertise that you sell songs for 99c each.  Right, so obviously the right thing to do is bundle them and make me rant (if this weren't a family-friendly blog I would point out that this is called "bundle-fucking me").  My blood pressure thanks you.

Ranty McRant, volume 1

It's 7am on a Sunday, I've been up for 2.5 hours, and I'm feeling ranty.  The bintgoddess is very familiar with this situation, and I think (I hope) she finds it adorable; but this is the first time I've allowed my rantifications an outlet into the blog, so it feels a little special somehow.  This will be a little less researched than my other entries, and a little more free-association.  You've been warned.

Today's topic: hardware vendors and their sycophantic adoration of Microsoft Windows.  Yes, I realize I'm a Microsoft shareholder, and you'd think that it would make the most sense for me to support the obligatory installation of Windows on every machine created, since doing so would increase my shareholder value.  But let's face it, they don't need me.

My birthday is coming up, and that seems like a good excuse to replace my aging and case-cracked Toshiba Satellite laptop.  It's a ponderous beast, weighing in at about 75lbs and boasting a clock speed of about 15Mhz.  It's so old that it sports stickers that say, "Designed for Windows XP (Windows Vista Capable)", and "Intel Celeron M inside".  That's really something to be proud of, right there.  Sometimes the power cord gets tangled and I have to unplug it to untangle it.  Depending on how many seconds it takes me to do this, the laptop might stay on, or it might go into what I call Dirt-Hibernation mode.  In this mode, it thinks it's hibernating, but it never comes out (making it more like a dirt-nap).  It's a fun and useful piece of technology, especially for testing the effectiveness of rage management techniques.

I've been considering replacing the (no exaggeration this time) 40GB 5400rpm laptop hard drive with a 100-160GB SSD, figuring that doing so would still give me benefits when I eventually replace the thing.  But SSDs aren't that cheap, either, and I hate the thought of buying more hard drive storage... didn't I just wipe 21 HDs so I could dispose of them? I think I did.  What I really want is a sexy new laptop, something lighter, faster, more powerful, with a holographic screen that projects out to a 40" 3D image that hangs in space and lets me interact with it via telepathy.  Failing that, maybe one of those HP Envy notebooks.

So after doing about an hour of research, I flopsied over to the HP Store to configure a notebook just to see what I could expect to pay for the closest (albeit very distant) approximation to awesomeness.  Hoofah, this thing is pricey:

• Long string of i5-Qwhatever-the-hell processor - god, Intel, SERIOUSLY?
• ATI Mobility graphics - my only choice
• 6GB of memory - upgraded from 4GB
• 500GB 7200 HD, because this was the cheapest option and SSD was both $525 (omg) and whiteboxed (so it sucks)
• No office software at all
• Cheapest battery available
• Several lines of "options" which were the only "options" available, including the screen, the DVD drive, the webcam, the wireless card, and (yes seriously) the keyboard.
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium - cheapest option
• Adobe Suck-It We Own You Shop 8 Premiere

Total price: $1300.

Now, I'm a Linux guy.  I run Ubuntu 64-bit on my desktop machine, and the current doorstop-I-mean-laptop has just had its Ubuntu replaced with Mint this morning.  At the office I run a real-time variant of Red Hat Enterprise, and the file server in the house is running FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD).  Why the HELL would I want Windows 7 on my new laptop?  Is it because I like ad-ware like Norton Trial Edition popping up every few minutes to tell me that since I chose the most vulnerable operating system on the planet, I should pay an expensive subscription to protect it?  Is it because I like bloat-ware like Microsoft Office that lets me do really complicated things like write text for the low-low cost of almost 500 dollars, and several GB of hard drive space, and several hundred MB of memory?  Or is it because I want to respond to the daily Adobe pop-ups telling me I need to upgrade Flash, Streak, and Fondle, because this computer belongs to Adobe, after all?

No thank you.

I build my own desktop PCs so that I can put exactly what I want INTO the machine, and exactly what I want ONTO the machine.  When I boot it up, it does what I tell it.  I'm not naive enough to think that it does ONLY what I tell it - even Ubuntu has marketing-related goals that are not completely in line with my own.  But the "partnering" level is low enough that I view it as an acceptable trade-off.

Let me get this clear in everyone's heads: Linux is like over-the-air PBS.  It's mostly ad-free, although it has a few "brought to you by"s.  It costs nothing to enjoy, but it's considered good form to donate time/money/experience to help others enjoy it too.  And it gives a different, somewhat less accessible, experience from Windows; but for some people that experience is far better than Windows'.  On the other hand, Windows is like Cable.  It costs money, it has lots of options that all cost more money, it has a LOT more commercials than PBS, and the cable goes out a lot more than the transmitting tower fails.  You can find the same level of programming on cable/Windows as on PBS/Linux, but you have to look harder through the gunk.  It's extremely accessible - you can surf for hours without asking yourself a single thought-provoking question - but some people actually like thought-provoking questions.  I don't know any people like that, but I hear they exist.  They probably vote Green Party or something.

Anyway, I prefer Linux, and this is what I install into my home-built desktop machines (unless the bintgoddess requests otherwise, obviously).  But a laptop is tougher to build.  To make it all work together seamlessly, to keep it light, and to keep it from overheating, a lot more engineering goes into it from the hardware integrators.  I can't go buy a bunch of laptop parts from NewEgg and end up with my perfect laptop, so that means I have to go to the car dealership - er, I mean, computer retail channels.  There, I assume the position and start sucking down the "partnering", the "up-sells", and the "value-adds", just like everyone else.  Ugh.

My first action with this laptop would be to wipe the hard drive of all the crap-ware, and to install a nice clean Linux variant (probably Mint, since that's what I'm playing with at the moment).  Of course that means if I ever need service, I'll need to reinstall the Redmond Mothership because, obviously, anyone using Linux must be crazy.  But let's face it - the probability of being able to get laptop hardware serviced WITHOUT losing the contents of the hard drive is about 0.00004% (this is an actual statistical figure based on 15 zillion studies, not an exaggeration).  And barring actual hardware failure, there's very little that an HP-authorized service technician can do (other than screw up my computer) that I can't do just as well.  On second thought, I can screw up the computer about as well as him, too.  You're not skiing hard enough if you don't fall, and you're not really using the computer if it successfully boots every time.

But on a $1300 laptop, WHY am I being forced to get Windows?  I know it isn't free - Microsoft is charging HP a super-low OEM price, and HP is wrapping a profit-generating higher price into the price of my laptop.  Accepting a laptop with this operating system on it feels to me like taking out a $100 bill and setting it on fire.  I don't like that feeling when I'm in a casino, so I play poker, and I don't like it when I'm configuring computer hardware. 

Let's be really clear here: I am being charged money for something that I actively do not want.  I do not want it so actively that I am willing to spend my own time and effort to remove the offending product, assuming risk of loss (via supportability) in the process.  What kind of reasonable consumer would enter into a transaction like this?  What kind of reasonable retailer would EXPECT a consumer to enter into a transaction like this?

Wasn't there a big lawsuit recently about hardware vendors being required to give rebates to consumers that chose not to have Windows pre-installed?

My coffee is running out and my rant is running down.  Let me close with the chat transcript from my Live Chat support session.  It's not that exciting, but I feel like I need to have something other than my own prose in here to liven things up.

11/07/2010 04:56:09AM	Session Started with Agent (Rachel P.)
11/07/2010 04:56:09AM	Mark: "Configuring an Envy 14 notebook"
11/07/2010 04:56:15AM	Agent (Rachel P.): "Thank you for contacting the HP Home and Home Office Store Chat. My name is Rachel."
11/07/2010 04:56:20AM	Mark: "Hi Rachel."
11/07/2010 04:56:37AM	Agent (Rachel P.): "I'm sorry. Can you please elaborate on your question so that I may better assist you?"
11/07/2010 04:56:38AM	Mark: "I'm planning to replace Windows with Linux on this machine. Is there any way I can avoid buying Windows?"
11/07/2010 04:57:32AM	Agent (Rachel P.): "I understand that you want to take out the Windows 7 from the configuration on the HP Envy 14 notebook, right?"
11/07/2010 04:57:41AM	Mark: "right"
11/07/2010 04:57:49AM	Mark: "I intend to install Linux."
11/07/2010 04:58:02AM	Agent (Rachel P.): "I am sorry, Mark, but there is no option for you to take out the OS."
11/07/2010 04:58:23AM	Mark: "OK, thanks. I will look at other companys' notebook options, then."
11/07/2010 04:58:46AM	Agent (Rachel P.): "Do you have any other questions that I can help you with? I want to make sure that I have completely addressed your concern today and are satisfied with my service."
11/07/2010 04:59:10AM	Mark: "Well since I am no longer buying an HP notebook, I can't imagine what you could help me further with."
11/07/2010 04:59:20AM	Agent (Rachel P.): "Since you don't need any further assistance, would it be okay if I close this chat?"
11/07/2010 04:59:26AM	Mark: "yes, have a nice day"
11/07/2010 04:59:28AM	Agent (Rachel P.): "Thank you once again for using HP Home & Home Office Store Chat. Please sign up for our award-winning e-newsletter which features the latest products and promotions for our store. Visit our website at: www.hpshopping.com/newsletter"
11/07/2010 04:59:29AM	Session Ended