p e n g u i n d e v i l

I guess I’m not watching enough movies lately, as I seem to feel the need to fill this space up with general complaints. Today I picked up the current issue of Street Roots (for non-Portlanders, it is the local “street newspaper” sold by the homeless) and while I was reading the article about how Oregon landlords can refuse tenants solely on the basis of them using Section 8 vouchers (that seems like it should somehow be against the rules), there is a review of a new movie that is another one of those “things you know about, but don’t really want to know too much”. The film is “Taxi to the Dark Side” and it’s by Alex Gibney, who made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.. This one though is about the subject of Detainees.

The article states that there are 83,000 of these people, which I found to be a surprisingly large number. Probably 10 times what I had assumed. And it also covers the always charming subject of torture. Now, while I doubt that many Americans (though I tend to be proven wrong in these things) support the practice of torture (After all, even convicted felons are “protected” against cruel punishment, so why would people who haven’t been found guilty of doing anything wrong receive cruel punishment). But I wonder how many support the notion of detainees. I tend to assume that the vast majority of the detainees have done nothing wrong, otherwise, why would they need to be secretly and illegally detained with no legal recourse? I realize that most of these folks are “foreign” (though I imagine that some are US citizens) and it reminds me of what I think the low-point tends to be for American administration’s. Yes, we can complain about how bad the president treats the economy or health care or the middle class or the lower class, but the people who really suffer from American presidents are foreigners nationals. It seems like every administration kills (or is involved with “standing by and letting die”) thousands of foreign civilians. Yes, the Republicans tend to kill more (and I doubt that even the well-thought out and highly successful road to riches and power laid out by this 5th term of the Reagan Administration [aka GWB] has killed as many as did Nixon/Kissmyassinger with their “extend the Vietnam war trick), but all the president’s get involved in that dirty business… I guess it’s just part of being the chief of the worlds self-appointed fascist police force. It is funny how it works that even if you aren’t completely fascist in your homeland, you can still get away with being that way in other peoples homelands…

Here is an area where Obama could really show that he is a positive force for change.

What is that strange language of “distance support”? Sometimes it seems as if they don’t really pay much attention. This morning I woke up to a screen from my dsl box stating that my password and email do not match anything on record. Of course they do, as when I went to sleep they did. After some minor fussing, I rebooted the computer, reset the dsl box and went in via dial-up to the “set-up your dsl” page to ensure that all of the settings for the DSL were correct. After all of that failed, I logged into webmail and my account homepage to ensure that the credentials I was using were fine. Then I made the always lame mistake of going into a support chat session. I was wondering if there was an unreported outage or some kind of problem with my account.

Sometimes it seems like I’m talking to myself on a bad day when going through things like this. I basically stated what had transpired. They said they would walk me through resetting my password. I said that my password is just fine, as I have just logged into to the account portion of their website with it. They asked me to login into webmail to make sure, so I logged out of webmail and logged back in and all was fine. They then asked me what the status of lights on the dsl box was. I said that I had power, ethernet and dsl, but no internet light. They gave my a link to the “set-up your dsl” page. I said that I already went there all the settings were correct. They said good.

Then they asked what the status was of my “internet” light. I said that, as I had just said, it was off, that was the problem. They then said, “Well, your PPPoE isn’t setup, this page has the instructions on how to set you DSL modem.” and directed me to the “set-up your dsl” page. I said, yes, I had already done that.

Sadly, as I needed to go to work, I had to sign off. I assume that whatever the problem was will fix itself today, as these tend to anyway.

Anyway, it’s 9:00, and I should clock-in and get to work… Luckily it’s “speaker Saturday” and not one of those “headphone weekdays” here…