AdMobile No Longer Mobile

But it still exists. Now, however, it’s called The Billboard Truck.

About four years ago, the Admobile took Knoxville by storm. Everybody was talking about it. This was long before diesel prices skyrocketed to unsightly heights.  This was before the scare tactic formerly known as Global Warming decided it wanted to be called Climate Change.  The people that were talking about it were cussing it for the most part.

The earth was in a warming phase.

Back when it was called AdMobile, it actually moved. It could be seen cruising up and down Kingston Pike every day.  In fact, my sources tell me that if a driver parked it for more than a couple of minutes the frugal owner, who was constantly refreshing the GPS position, would call them on a AdMobile cell phone and tell them to put it in gear.

As you can see by the video, the AdMobile is now parked in the Target parking lot in Maryville, and the name has been changed to protect the guilty. The ads no longer rotate, and only the ads on the side are sold, but mobile outdoor advertising lives in East Tennessee, making us all proud.

Penn and Teller Call Bullshit on Al Gore

Check out this great clip from Penn and Teller’s show “Bullshit”. Al Gore is such a clown, but the scary kind of clown. Penn and Teller, on the other hand, are funny.

Good pub for the Tennessee Center for Policy Research here, which highlights Gore’s overuse of power while trying to make everyone else in the world feel guilty about their habits.

Oh wait, he bought carbon credits (from himself) to offset his consumption.

Fair Is Fair

I just heard on Boortz that The Unabomber had a copy of “Earth in the Balance” in his shack when they arrested him.  Does that mean that Al Gore should be held responsible?

Seems reasonable using the logic that right wing nutjobs are responsible for this weekend’s shootings.

I Would LOVE to RTFM

So I’m working on a project for my job job (I’m not quite able to support a family on blogging–yet), and have been wrestling with a biggish enterprise software package.  As you’d expect, there’s quite a bit of convolution to it–things like hundreds of database tables with nondescript names like T001, T0043, H3222, etc.  (Was this thing designed to run on AS400?)  It’s actually not that big of a deal.  A part of me secretly enjoys stuff like that.  It’s like a giant sudoku, except instead of 1-9 the numbers go 1-100.  And no matter how much of the puzzle you solve, there’s still more to work on.  That means no boredom, provided you like puzzles.

Most packages of this size were designed and coded up long long ago in a galaxy far far away.  Any growth, expansion, or enhancements they’ve undergone were probably done piecemeal with who knows who taking over and steering the thing onto the latest technology at each fork in the road.  That’s bound to happen to any project this size I guess.  It’s sort of like what you’d expect to happen to a person who was reasonably good looking in their youth and, as they aged, had countless plastic surgeries performed by different doctors of varying abilities.  The individual pieces may be really nice, but put them together and you have an odd colored face mess.

Usually these type products involve a lot of RTFM.

Don’t get me wrong…I like to RTFM.  My willingness to RTFM means I’ll probably never be out of a job for long unless I want to be.  You could say I make a living Ring-TFM.  But please, large software corporations who charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for your products, make the manuals readily available.

One of the manuals I was reading this morning referred to another manual–the “Installation and Tuning Guide”.  Like any good manual reader working for a company that’s shelled out some bucks for this pricey behemoth, I used the login for our company (they don’t give the info to just any old body), and searched for this manual on their site.  No dice.  So I searched the support base to see if anyone else had trouble finding it.  That didn’t work either.  I did find two other manuals–one which whose title led me to believe it was relevant but wasn’t, and the other to the last version of the same product.

So I asked my boss if they’d provided a DVD, pack of CDs, or even physical books when we bought the product.  Nope.  But he was able to find the manual I needed nonetheless.  Guess where…

Google.

Freaking Google found it, even though their own search engine on their own site that is available only to customers who paid for support couldn’t.  Now, not only am I irritated that it couldn’t be found on their site, I also feel like an idiot for not trying Google FIRST.

Knoxville’s Miracle Mile? Huh?

Wh-wh-WHAT?  KnoxTalks has the lowdown on an NBC reporter making the statement about the stretch of Kingston Pike between Sequoya Hills and UT:

“people call it The Miracle Mile”

C’mon.  Making things up to make a news story more interesting is soooo 2003 New York Times.  But I’ll play along by making my own completely false and ridiculous statement and see if I get some play on big blogs for my nifty wordsmithing…

Big media clowns make up so much stuff about Knoxville, we call them all Jayson Blair.

Find me one Knoxvillian who has ever called this stretch “The Miracle Mile and I’ll buy you both dinner at The Varsity, which everyone knows is the place where all Knoxville locals eat.  It’s located out there in the new Turkey River development.

I’m a Big Winner

Just wanted to say thanks to the guys over at Knoxify for rigging their random number generator so that I could win their contest.  Look for me around town wearing a shiny new RootClip t-shirt.  Hopefully by the end of the summer it won’t look like it’s two sizes too small.

I’ll be repesentin’ the Westland Ghetto in style.

Church Shooting Here in Knoxville

I was enjoying a nice peaceful day with the fam and just now heard about this. Not much to say except that I’m stunned. Things like this are so rare here. We were just having a conversation last night about what a great place this is to live and have a family. I’m reading a lot of other people’s reactions right now, and I’ll update this post with links…

SugarFatPie–“That is my church”

SayUncle–“The Mrs. often asks why I carry to church. It’s because shootings keep happening at churches.”

Michael Silence–A ton of updates and links to blogger reaction

More via Michael Silence–“Jim D. Adkisson singled out the church for its support of “liberal” and “gay” issues.” Here’s to hoping someone in prison gives him some enlightenment to gay issues.

More info on Jim David Adkisson–“He disliked blacks, gays, anyone who was a different color or just different from him.”

More stuff, really good stuff, from SayUncle:

The only difference another citizen with a gun would have made in this particular case is that instead of going to jail for three hots and a cot, Jim D. Adkisson would be going to the morgue.

The people who subdued him did so quickly and bravely. And hats off to them for that!

KnoxvilleTalks:  “I finally had to turn the radio off after the call in which a man literally said that the UU church was ‘reaping what it sowed.'”  That just proves that idiots can dial a phone.

::UPDATE::

I watched the local news, and I have to say I’m pretty disappointed in the coverage. Honestly, I expected programming to be preempted and coverage to be pretty heavy on this story.

::UPDATE #2::

Hat’s off to the News Sentinel for doing a tremendous job of following this story with constant updates.

Without Being Told (or Forced)

I drove up to the boonies to help a friend move today.  Actually, I drove up through hell Gatlinburg to get to his new place on top of the mountain.  On the way back I took the backroads in order to avoid the traffic and enjoy the scenic drive.  Something really cool happened on the way back, and it didn’t really strike me as strange until a half hour or so afterwards.

A large tree had fallen across Highway 416, blocking the road in both directions.  I was about 5 or 6 cars deep in one of the stuck lanes, but several of us got out of our cars and started disassembling the tree and moving the branches out of the way.  Then a couple of guys (presumably locals) pulled up with their chainsaws and started cutting pieces for us to drag off.  We had the road cleared in less than 10 minutes, jumped in our cars, and kept going.

This is a great example of why people work and government doesn’t.  Sure, there were some people who sat in their cars and watched as everyone else cleared the road for them (“It’s not my job” types).  But there were plenty of people who would rather roll up their sleeves and do some work to get where they want to go instead of waiting around on someone else.  The guys who had chainsaws did the cutting.  The rest of us did the moving.  We didn’t have to have someone coordinate it, and we didn’t have to be forced into doing the work.

How long would it have taken for the road to be cleared if we’d all sat in our cars and waited for some gov’ment agency to take care of something we were perfectly able to handle ourselves?

We all saw a benefit in cooperating and working together to achieve a goal.  Those of us who were moving limbs sure were happy some people had chainsaws, and I’m sure the guys with the chainsaws were happy they didn’t have to drag big pieces of tree–all they had to do was run the saw.

Notice how everyone, even the people who weren’t willing to help, benefited from the fact that each of us was acting out of 100% pure selfishness? We just wanted to get where we wanted to go.

Thinking Games Useful For Corporations

Most video games hold my attention for about 3 hours. That’s not 3 hours at a time, that’s 3 hours total. The one exception is strategy games, which I can play into the wee hours of the night. Civilization is my all-time favorite, mostly because it absolutely destroys me, but there are several other “thinking” games out there, and now they are being used to do good instead of evil–unless of course you find corporations evil, in which case they continue to do evil.  Then again, that probably makes you a communist, so evil in your eyes is probably good in mine.

Now video games are making their way into corporations. These “serious games”—the term that’s been kicking around the last few years to describe games that are learning tools—use the same technology as the latest PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 titles, but they’re not targeted at Doritos-munching 14-year-olds

The Rise of Corporate Games.

Oh yeah…Rock Band 2 Comes out in September.

If You Have A Loved One That’s Been Eaten By Pigs…

TCH sent this video of a clip on Knoxville hero John Bean. This is the original “Whoop Your Ass” Jerky Boy, and in my opinion the best. One of the things I love about these prank calls is that everyone he threatens responds to his threats with “Well come on down here then!”  Gotta love K’Town.

Best quote from the video–“He sold it to one of them A-Rabs…”

And favorite quote from the tapes–“They’s s’pose to be some damn good ‘uns”

Let me know if you haven’t heard these calls.  We can arrange a listening for you!