Much as I’m enjoying watching Alberto Gonzales go down in flames, the rabid scenes in the Senate last week were quite tiresome. Seriously; Nancy Pelosi with foam dribbling from her jowls is incredibly unappetizing. All these donation-collecting suit monkeys crawling around Washington are the same: they only show some stones once it becomes clear that the only idiot in town bigger than Gonzales is Bush. I’m sick of hearing them all talk, from both sides of the aisle. And I have a proposal to fix this:

If I can find a quote from a mob movie that fits the situation, the quote shall serve as hearing, trial, verdict, end of story. No op-ed pieces, no press conferences, and for damn sure, no Hillary. And so, here we go:

In the matter of All Concerned and Even Remotely Intelligent Citizens of the United States of America versus Soon-to-be-former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, I, mob movie buff Rob Guglielmetti, refer this entire dealio to a single quotation from the film “Casino”. I will make the opening statements, in the form of a scene synopsis, and then hand it over to Robert DiNiro, playing the role of Casino Manager Sam “Ace” Rothstein, who shall preside over this case.

The scene in question is the one where Don Ward—a real dope who was handed a job as slots manager because he had friends in town—was on-duty while three four-reel slot machines paid off huge jackpots in a matter of minutes. Mr. Rothstein is understandably pissed, feeling this had to be the result of a scam, a scam that Don Ward simply had to be in on. The People argue that this scam mirrors the firings that Mr. Gonzales is having such a hard time recalling precisely what he’s been told to say about the matter. Ace wishes to fire poor, dumb Slots Manager, and Don, understandably, resists, claiming ignorance. But all he can come up with in his defense is a simple “This is not how you treat people”. And with that introduction, I turn this matter over to Sam Rothstein. Ace?

Listen, if you didn’t know…, you’re too fuckin’ dumb to keep this job. If you did know, that means you were in on it. Either way, you’re out. Get out!

I believe this matter is adjourned. Al, pack up your shit and get the hell out of town.

Most likely by now you have heard about the idea of “carbon neutrality”, which is a happy state wherein you can say that your day-to-day existence is not resulting in any adverse affects on the environment, because your carbon emissions have been “offset” through good old fashioned moolah. You emit, so you buy these offsets, and some company supposedly plants a tree and viola, it’s as if your Hummer runs on water. Sound like crap? It is. And some very funny peopple have put up a very funny satire of the whole sham. Cheat Neutral is looking to help you feel less guilty about cheating on your partner by selling “cheat offsets”:

Cheatneutral is about offsetting infidelity. We’re the only people doing it, and Cheatneutral is a joke.

Carbon offsetting is about paying for the right to carry on emitting carbon. The Carbon offset industry sold £60 million of offsets last year, and is rapidly growing. Carbon offsetting is also a joke.

“But Rob, don’t you work in sustainable design? Aren’t you all for reducing the impact on climate change?” Well, yeah, I guess I am these days. That’s why I think setting up corporations that take your money and trade on the future of this dubious practice of washing away a climate sin with some greenbacks does nothing to change the habits or tendencies of the people causing the problem.

After having a laugh at Cheat Neutral, swing over to Carbon Trade Watch for more straight info on this little bit of nonsense called carbon offsets.

Came across this gem on YouTube, some video of a guy walking around in Section 39 at Yankee Stadium with a Red Sox jersey on, and the loving Yankee fans telling him exactly what he is for doing so. Gotta love those Yankee fans…

Sox Fan in the Wrong House

Working for a sustainable design consultant, as I do, I am continually exposed to exciting and interesting individuals with progressive views and ideas. The climate change crisis is real, and I’m excited to be helping in some small way to affect architectural design in a positive and sustainable way. But the sustainable message is bubbling over into my colleagues’ email signatures, as evidenced by a recent email, which carried the following message after the author’s signoff:

“please consider the environment before printing this message.”

What a great idea, to follow every email message with a smug, self-satisfied, holier-than-thou little dig at your own client, I thought! That’s not condescending at all! So this evening I sat down to draft my very own “green email signature”. I’m very excited about my drafts so far:

• Like, don’t print this, OK?


• Printing this message kills trees. Print is murder!


• Please consider filing this email in an email folder and refraining from printing it, since that would be redundant and a waste of space, time and paper. Just make sure you back up your hard drive, you idiot.


• Please respond to this email as soon as possible, as I am soon unplugging all my electrical devices and moving to the woods. And this should go without saying, but you should NOT print this message, since the more you print, the less woods I will have left to live in. Again, please hurry.


• You know pal, you really should think about what you’re doing there, with your mouse cursor on the “print” button; don’t you realize that trees are a precious and beautiful resource? You already have the material, right there in front of your oil-thirsty face, in digital format. You should read it on your monitor instead of wasting precious paper to print out what you already have, you heartless bastard! I can’t believe you could be so stupid, you PAPER WASTER! Of course, by reading it on your monitor you’re running your computer which consumes about 450 watts of power while it’s running whereas you could print this out on a few sheets of paper and power down. Hmmm. Let me think about this for a second. I’ve got it! I’ll just bet you don’t do two-sided printing, thereby wasting TWICE as much paper as I do when I print things duplex (even though I almost never, ever, print things, because I am pleased to consider the environment before doing so)! Oh you climate change accelerator, you! I hate you! Yes, far better that you read this on screen, especially since you don’t have a duplex printer. Come to think of it, you should really get a duplex printer; I can’t believe you don’t have one of those! Jesus, you are a resource hogging pig! Aren’t you glad you have me to help you think about these issues? By the way, how many miles per gallon do you get with you car? You DO drive a hybrid, don’t you? Put that hamburger DOWN, dammit! LISTEN TO ME!!

Good morning Rob, Outlook here. Guess what? I still suck.

This has been around for a little while, but I just stumbled across it. Very funny, if you use the crusty old vi editor in unix (as I do) and hate Microsoft (as I do).

How the vi editor would look if made by Microsoft

A co-worker forwarded me this:

*How to Make Bacon Soap*

My sister jokes that if they made bacon candy, I’d be the top consumer of the stuff, and that’s probably true. Apparently, my affinity for bacon has made its way around the office and so when my co-worker came across this little gem of baco-utility, she felt compelled to pass the tip along. The email subject line was “Since you like meat”. ‘Nuff said.

In reality, while I’m pretty sure I could easily come up with enough bacon grease to make a batch or two, the idea of lathering up with the transformed grease is not exactly appetizing. Regardless, I thought it was an interesting article.

Outlook Sucks. The reason for its suckiness is unknown. (Right click and select “View Image” in the image below to read the full error message.) It’s sad when it takes such a large dialog box to say “our software is garbage and we don’t even know what’s wrong with it.”

A little while ago I lamented the fact that my office had switched to Outlook, and I announced to the global community at large who reads my website (approximately four people) that Outlook Sucks. It still does. Along the way, I have groused about it to my colleagues here in the office, and now that one of my co-workers has fled Boulder to work at our San Fransisco office, we continue to rail against the sloppy, bloated, non-functional pile of email code excrement via instant messenger. But it’s not enough folks, it’s not enough. Now, every time something pisses me off about Outlook, it’s going on here.

And, begin:

Today I received a duplicate copy of an email forward from a co-worker, that was originally sent two days ago. This struck me as odd. Did he re-send it and forget he’d already forwarded it? He mentioned that he had problems sending it (big surprise, he was using Outlook to send it, after all) and had asked if I had received two copies the other day. I hadn’t. So I assumed this new copy was the second copy that never went through the other day. I wanted to look at the message headers to see what was up.

In my Thunderbird days, all I had to do was click the little plus sign next to the “simple header”—which only shows sender, recipient and date—to expand the header, in place, to the full email header, showing me the entire path that the email took from sender to recipient. It’s a useful diagnostic tool from time to time, and that’s why good email programs give you easy access to it.

But now I’m living in the dark days of Outlook, so here are the steps now:

1. Look all around the interface for a show headers option. Don’t find anything.
2. Pull down every menu, force-clicking on the stupid short menus that Microsoft thinks is doing you a favor by clipping, so you can see all the menu items. Don’t find anything.
3. Open up “help”, type in “headers”, and wait for shitty, slow-ass, web-based help search to come back at ya with some results.
4. Delight that four down on the list is a “showing email headers” help item.
5. Wonder what is mentally wrong with the Microsoft “Help” file editors who thought it made more sense to tuck the actual “how to show them” part of the entry yet another hyperlink away, and fill the main page with endless babble about email headers. Poor Joe Average Outlook User has no idea what the fuck an email header is, and I think most people who land on this page are looking for the how, not the what.
6. Click the damned extra hyperlink and read that you need to go to View… Options to get started.
7. Go to View menu, to find there is no Options entry.
8. Think to yourself how shitty Outlook is.
9. Return to the “Help” page, and read the note about how “if you do not see an Options entry, to make sure you are reading an email message in a separate window, rather than in the preview pane”.
10. Think to yourself how this is something you rarely do, since it’s simply a step that makes no sense in your day-to-day use of email—if the message can be read in the preview pane, why double click the message to open the same shit in another window, to be closed later?
11. Mark #10 as a key to understanding the Microsoft programmer psyche, the people responsible for making a word processor that requires gigabytes of disk space.
12. Open the fucking email in a separate window, while watching a small piece of your soul dissolve and fade away.
13. Go back to the View menu and then realize that now there’s ANOTHER View menu, in the individual message window.
14. Open the second View menu to discover the long-sought-after Options menu item.
15. Select options, giddy with excitement knowing your menial little task—previously a one mouse-click operation now riddled with complexities on the scale of the Normandy Invasion—is almost over.
16. Finally look at the message headers—crammed into a short, narrow window with a scrollbar that is wholly unsatisfying and difficult to look at, especially after the process required to get there.
17. Squint at tiny type and try to follow header lines that cannot be read all in one shot without scrolling, which is like trying to read the ticker board at the New York Stock Exchange as if it were a sentence.
18. Discover no clues in the headers that would explain the latent delivery of the email.
19. Write this post.

Good job, Microsoft; you suck.

It ain’t exactly “U.S. Marshals“.

Today, Boulder’s local paper ran a fairly well-reseached, honest piece of journalism, yet it reads like something out of The Onion. Ward, Colorado, you see, is in need of some new police. The town’s only state-certified lawman, Robert “Fuzzy Bob” Spratford, is retiring—leaving only two guys named Skinny Pete and Tiny to protect and serve.

Ward, Colorado is this quirky little semi-ghost town, a relic from the mining boom. Once the richest town in Colorado during the Gold Rush, it’s now populated with folks who thought even Boulder was too conservative and thus headed for the hills. Filled with anti-establishment types and a rather large collection of broken-down vehicles, Ward incorporated as a home-rule town and thus lives by its own rules, not necessarily those of Boulder County—hence the all-volunteer, all-hippie cop force.

I doubt Tommy Lee Jones would be cast to portray Fuzzy Bob Spratford; Willie Nelson’s a more likely candidate. After all, Willie’s already got the pony tail, and the truck that burns biodiesel.

Full Article: “Ward considers options as marshal steps down”