What a bunch of idiots these guys are. With the Floyd Landis Show currently unfolding at Pepperdine University, complete with tales of Greg LeMond’s weenie and an obsfucatory defense that would make Johnnie Cochran proud, now it appears that Oscar Pereiro—the man who finished second to Landis in the 2006 Tour de France and the man who stands poised to claim a belated yellow jersey if Landis is proven guilty of cheating—is also mixed up in the Operation Puerto scandal, the scandal that has already forced Jan Ullrich out of the sport and brought Ivan Basso into the darkest point of his career (and hopefully will rid the sport of Tyler Hamilton once and for all).

Doping has been going on for years, this much is clear. For me, the wake-up call was in 1990 when I read A Rough Ride, by Paul Kimmage. Kimmage, a former pro, saw first hand what was going on and was one of the first to come out (after retirement) and say how dirty the sport of cycling was. But business as usual remains the order of the day, and it only seems to have gotten worse. The Festina affair and then Marco Pantani have come and gone, and then the biggest mess of all: Operation Puerto blows up the ‘06 Tour, and then Landis with the manufactured testosterone coursing through his veins.

Puerto is kicking some major ass; Ullrich, Basso, Hamilton. And now with Perriero implicated, we have the loser-was-doing-it-too scenario. Which begs the question, “where does it end?” It sure as hell seems like no one is clean in the sport. And what pisses me off is that they all take us for a bunch of fools, with their explanations for all these drug test failures. Landis has the Jack Daniel’s defense, Hamilton has the hilarious chimera defense. But so far my favorite is the latest from Pereiro:

“...if I have to use DNA to demonstrate my innocence, I will leave cycling, because it’s obvious that cycling like that isn’t worth it.”

Cycling like what? Like an honest competitor? Like a guy who has nothing to hide? Or do you mean cycling under a system that has an ironclad method of catching all the dopers? Yeah, proving you’re not an outright cheater (and a contract violator and a fraud) via a simple drug test, remaining in the sport you supposedly love, getting paid to race a bicycle—just isn’t worth it. What an ass.

I don’t know what the answer is—and cycling sure as hell isn’t the only sport that is completely suffused with drugs—but I’m just sick and tired of these guys offering lame-ass excuses for their results. In some ways, Ullrich has shown more stones by “retiring” than any of these other guys with their nonsense.

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.

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.

The other day I signed and emailed a message to Congress calling for action to solve the climate change issues facing the planet, and sent it to Al Gore as part of his presentation in Washington. Yesterday, I got this thank you email:

Dear Rob,

Thank you!

By 10:00 AM yesterday, as I took my seat in the hearing room, an incredible 519,414 people had signed our message to Congress demanding immediate action to solve the climate crisis.

All of those boxes chock full of your messages, sitting right next to me as I testified, were a fantastic show of support and one that is already having an impact as our Representatives and Senators begin to debate solutions to the climate crisis. In fact, so many people signed our message in the 24 hours before the hearing, we are still working on printing them.

Still working on… printing them.

JFC, this is why no one takes this shit seriously, even though they really, really should. Al, do me a favor, and start walking the fucking walk. You of all people can’t afford to generate more fodder for the right wing and their oily-eyed shortsightedness and agenda, m’kay?

Besides, if all you want is a big old pile of papers as a symbolic prop, just fill a box with recycling; the right wing won’t know the difference, since it appears half those morons can’t read, anyway.

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.

I came across this very interesting art piece, by way of Kottke’s website. It upset me.

First of all, this guy is essentially ripping off Walker Evans. Walker did it better, far better, and he did it seventy friggin’ years ago. But there’s more to this story.

The Walker Evans photos from his 1938 project are really haunting because they were taken with a hidden camera; they capture the very souls of New Yorkers trying to endure the daily grind of city life. These Bill Sullivan photos are more in the “caught on camera” vein, which is a little more obvious—more supermarket tabloid work than photographic art, and it annoys me that this is being peddled as the latter.

But the really disturbing thing is that all the people in the Sullivan piece look either really tired, really pissed off, really harried, or some combination of the three (Except for the dude walking through the turnstile with a brand new pair of Skyway TuffWheels (and you can’t help but feel happy for that guy (where in the hell did he find those gems, anyway?))).

Those turnstile photos reminded me of my life as a New Jerseyite commuting to Manhattan every day, and my daily experiences ebbing and flowing amidst the many different kinds of wildlife calling New York City home. Honestly, in retrospect, I hated it, and these photos illustrate quite well the mood of the average New Yorker: the “what are you lookin’ at”, the “ugh”, the I can’t take much more of this”, the “why am I doing this”, the “there’s got to be something better”; the “go fuck yourself”.

Well, after a year and a half of living 2,000 miles from New York City, I can say that there is something better, and that I wouldn’t trade this for the world, despite all the goddamned snow.

Here it is, folks. The State of the Union Address. Sadly, this is a rather accurate depiction of what we’ve got going on in Washington.

Watch: “The REAL State of the Union Address”

OK, that’s quite enough already, with the fuckin’ snow. I get it. I live in Colorado. But the shit’s only useful in the mountains, which is apparently where half my office is headed today, to ski. I wouldn’t know, but hopefully by next weekend I will understand what this snow fever is all about. Right now, to me, all it is is a friggin’ nuisance.

After dropping Brenda off at the bus and our car off at the dealer to have the damage from last week’s snowstorm(s) repaired, I strapped on the gaiters and plodded through the snow to my office. Looks like we got 8-9” here already, and it’s supposed to snow most of the day again. It wouldn’t be so bad if Brenda didn’t have to be in Denver for the next three days.

Suddenly our fun little front wheel drive, low slung car ain’t so much fun anymore.