Lick my stinking asshole, S.C. Senator Ford

***Note to newcomers: What follows is intentionally hyperbolic and over-the-top in vulgarity, and was composed in the hopes of provoking a response—ANY response—from Senator Ford's office. So far, as of 18 Mar 2008...nothing. I guess that means I get to hold on to my insignificant jerk status just a little bit longer.

Slashdot clued us up today about South Carolina senator Robert Ford's effort to get an amendment passed to his state's penal code which would make it a gowddammned felony to express profanity, obscenity, and outright blasphemous bullshit orally, electronically, by motherfuckin' smoke signals, or otherwise. Punishable by up to a US$5,000 fine and/or 5 years in the big house.


He can go rim-job Gawd's ugly-ass kitten for his ridiculous proposal, and I told him as much. After the jump, my email to his office.

Warning, for the prudes: Vulgar as your sister with her panties down and legs up in the air, and possibly NSFW, if your boss is a pussy jackass...

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Dear Senator Ford...

Fuck you.

I mean that both as a personally-directed invective and as a wish for you. You need to relax and get some fine sweaty lovin', and quit worrying so much about things over which you can't possibly legislate control.

That, and everything that follows in this email are my opinion, and I have the right to express my thoughts in this way. I gently suggest you go stick a hot poker up your wife's cunt if you disagree.

It is my opinion that you are a crazy dumb fuck, a drooling priest-fucking cocksucker jackass that has no clue about what it means to protect the 1st Amendment. Protecting the 1st amendment MUST go beyond protecting only that speech we agree with; it must also protect those communications which make us uncomfortable.

I'll bet you believe in some supernatural sky-king god, too. I think that's a bunch of idiotic crap. There is no such thing a a mysterious sky-dad that knows and guides everything we do. If you truly believe that in your heart, you're a lame-brained stupid fuck, and if you base your governmental decisions on that ridiculous faith I have no respect for you at all.

NONE. YOU, SIR, ARE A BRAINWASHED FLUNKY.

That's just my opinion, and how I choose to express it at this time. If I were to meet you in person, I might possibly find you a perfectly lovely gentleman around whom I would choose not to use "bad" or "obscene" language, as I do with most people I communicate with. I have plenty of friends and loved ones who believe in god, and know that I think it's crazy...but we get beyond that. I don't tell them what to do or how to behave, and they treat me with the same deference and respect.

But what you propose to add to Article 3, Chapter 15, Title 16 of the 1976 Code of Law for South Carolina is patently absurd, and it could be argued, clinically crazy.

Making these things a felony!? You MUST be fully BULLSHITTING your constituency to make some misguided personal point. How do you propose the administrative costs for these breeches of law be paid for? And who gets to decide when the laws have been broken? And how are the claims—especially when orally disseminated—going to be verified in a way that passes judicial muster?

There are no "BAD" words, and people are not harmed by hearing them or reading them. Read a fucking report or two, you asshole dog-fellator. If anything, they provide a linguistic balance, and an opportunity for individual citizens to decide whether the context is worth the content. I am a 50-year-old writer and a lifelong student of the grace and fire and evolution of language, its uses and its power. To deny any words is to deny language itself. And if you deny language you deny communication in its most robust and inclusive forms.

To legislate the abrogation of ANY speech is to governmentally oppress the thoughts and ideas of people who may have no other way to gain a fairer foothold in American society. I suggest you not forget your own heritage in this matter, for it is an issue that transcends religiosity, or moral indignancy of any kind.

I suggest you instead work toward putting programs in place that educate people in matters of language, tolerance and understanding.

Cock-suckingly yours with greatest respect,
Phos....
[Real name and actual home street address redacted to stymie the jackasses].

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If you readers here at The SparkBox want to reply to this, I will engage you in debate for the next 100 years. You may feel free to do so here, and to say any motherfucking thing you like, but i don't care for you to know where my house is. If you're that fanatical, submit a FOIA request for the full, unredacted content of my letter to Senator Ford's office.

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RogueAmoeba disses users, kinda—but appeases me

I have a question about one of the little freebie software items by RogueAmoeba, a little menubar utility called SoundSource that should make it much easier to switch between audio source inputs and outputs, faster than going through the Mac OS's System Preferences Sound panel. The thing just doesn't do what I'm lead to believe it's supposed to. I find scant little info on their site about SoundSource, so I post my questions in the comments section of a blog entry dedicated to it.

Somebody who has access to the blog admin panel has been exercising some strong douchebaggery-fu, and has been deleting my questions. So I sent them (the CEO and The CTO) an email, as they request, asking about the deletions, and about their reasoning for doing so.

More will be added to this entry when—and if—I receive a reply from them.

1 July 2008 - received reply and explantion from Quentin Carnicelli. Click link for full story ⇒

Anyway, just for posterity's sake—and for the joyful consumption by Google-Spiders, here's the full text of my email to them:

Subject: Regarding SoundSorce UI and behavior...
From: Phos... <email address redacted>
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:49:48 -0400
To: Paul Kafasis <email address redacted>, Quentin Carnicelli <email address redacted>

Riddle me this, Paul & Quentin...

First off, please understand that I'm not usually an obsessive stalkerazzi when I feel my usually-intelligent dispatches are ignored. I'll generally assume that the recipient is busy, or that what's important to me may not seem as imoprtant to them. So be it, and so it goes...that's my usual reaction.

But in this case—where I see a utility that looks to provide me with a function that would make my workflow so much more efficient—How am I being SOOO out of line by asking for some open clarification about the functioning of SoundSource that you or one of the RogueAmoeba minions has continued to remove my posts from the blog entry dedicated to it?
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2008/03/03/soundsource-2-has-arrived/


I'll reiterate (edited for clarification):

===================================================================
What the heck is wrong with you people?

You removed my first questions, posted to this page on 28 June, and offered no answers, nor an explanation for my initial post's removal.

Then you removed my post bringing the deletion into question.

And YES, I see your request for direct contact . I'm not asking about a bug, because I had no problem installing, or accessing the SoundSource menulet. I was asking about why your software doesn't do what it says on the tin. Or, if I'm expecting a behavior that hasn't been built in to it, then why don't I see any info about that fact on this site?

Do you NOT realize that by addressing questions on an open forum you may save yourselves the hassle of answering the same questions over and over and over again? I looked for FAQs pertaining to SoundSource, and I used your site's search function. I came up empty, except for the product page and the blog entry.

If you addressed my questions within the comments of the blog entry, the next person coming along who is experiencing the same thing might be able to find their answer WITHOUT having to contact you directly, thus saving you time and effort.

Or are you worried about bad mojo surrounding SoundSource showing up in Google searches or permeating the net via RSS feeds?
===================================================================

Granted, SoundSource is "merely" a freebie, and I can understand not dedicating a whole lot of energy toward it compared to your other, commercial products. But to go out of your way to DELETE the questions, rather then address them seems like a rather silly way to waste energy to me.

If someone took the time to delete my initial post in which I laid out all the pertinent details—along with providing a screen dump—then I'll assume that info is already understood. If you need me to provide that info again, I will. But I'll wait to see what kind of response I get from this email.

I'd welcome any commentary and/or insight—both on SoundSource's behavior and my own. You can even call me an asshole for my presumptions if you'd like. It's OK, I'm a 49-year-old big boy and I can take it. ;-) :-D

1 July 2008 - UPDATE: What follows is the reply I received from Quentin Carnicelli, RogueAmoeba's CTO:

Subject: Re: Regarding SoundSorce UI and behavior...
From: "Quentin D. Carnicelli" <email address redacted>
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 00:03:03 -0400

You are not missing anything. This is a bug in SoundSource or MacOS X (depending on ones perspective of things).

Some background: On MacOS X, each "Audio Device" can be comprised of multiple "Sources". For example on your eMac, you have a "Built-In" audio device that has an "Internal Mic" and "Line In" source.

The problem is, sometimes these "sources" are to be displayed as individual choices (as in your case), and sometimes they are to be treated as a single unit whose choice is determined by the audio hardware (for example the new dual Analog/Digital input jacks on MacBooks). MacOS gives us no way to determine which is the correct choice, displaying all the Sources, or displaying them as one big merged Source. This is especially troubling on G5s, as they have a Built-In device which has 2 sources that are to be merged and 1 that isn't. But again, the OS provides us no mechanism that we know of to correctly
display them.

But you say, the Sound Preference in System Preference displays them correctly! And we believe Apple has hard coded logic on a per-machine basis to make this work. We've sent requests to them asking how they do it, but have never heard back (and at this point, don't really expect to). So we are kind of stuck, we can't correctly display the list of audio devices without making compromises we don't want to make.

The real downside for you is, this problem only affects PPCs. On Intel everything works correctly out of the box. So we have declining incentive to bang our heads against the problem to figure out a solution (doubly so since it is a freebie).

If Apple ever addresses the problem, we'll put out of a fix, but in the meantime we wait...

-QDC

Well, it's not a happy answer, but at least it's more info than I was able to find on the RogueAmoeba website. Hopefully, they'll add this info to some FAQ section on their site, because I surely can't be the only one who has run into this brick wall. I really kind of surprised the info isn't there already.

Oh, and their crappy little character "icon" for their freebies still looks like it was done by a 6th-grader. YUK! Full Story & Permalink

Good Old-Fashioned Paper-Flavored Spam!

★ Greetings to visitors from Alan Yu's "al6400.com" blog. Please leave a quick message in the comments area so I know you were here! Thanks, and enjoy this ridiculous tale! Cheers! —Phos....

Cripes, I loathe these sleazy, greasy rat bastards.
(Hello to GalaxyMall. I see you peeking in from Orem Utah!)

Maybe they figure now that we're all becoming more savvy about how to recognize and summarily ignore and trash spam email, they'll revert to the old tried-and-true: Sending out junk mail come-ons through the USPS. Cool Old Hippie Bud—my favorite mailman—delivered a beauty today.

It's an earnest solicitation to attend a conference at one of several local hotels about the secrets of making a gazillion dollars through internet marketing. The copy on the envelope and its contents is fully buzz-word compliant, and replete with plenty of bold, italicized and underlined phrases. It's an exclamation point lover's bit of printed paradise.

The first thing I notice—and what made my spidey-sense tingle like I was whizzing on a 440v line—was that this doofus-bait was addressed to my Dad. I've lived at my current address since the weekend after September 11th 2001. Dad has never lived here.

Dad has been dead since the Summer of 1994.


The front of the envelope has a crappy stock photo close up of a linen-swathed table—forks, wine glass & bread basket—with a place setting card. Within the blank area of the place card is a tiny version of the marketing company's logo, and below that it reads:

Dinner Table For:
My Dad's Name
& Guest

Of course, I immediately know that whoever sent it is marketing to a badly erroneous and out-of-date mailing list. This tells me they're not too swift about the very subject of the conference they're desperately trying to con people into attending. Either that, or they're just too damned cheap to buy a recently confirmed list of prospects. Idiots.

So, let's forgive them their little addressing glitch for a moment. Flip over to the back of the envelope and the first thing you notice is one of the by-now very well known silhouette pictures that Apple uses to market iPods covering over 46% of the available space (It's pictured above, and yes, I measured it). Next to the picture is a box promising a:

Complimentary Lunch or Dinner and
FREE MP3 Player For
My Dad's Name & Guest

Hmm...maybe I'll go. Who wouldn't mind sitting through a 90 minute pitch in order to walk away with a free iPod? Plus get some free grub? I could deal with that.

Upon opening the envelope and looking at the contents I see logos for ebay, Yahoo, Google and MSN. I see a toll-free phone number, hotel locations and the date, some bullshit testimonials from people who allegedly attended a previous conference. I can envision these drooling paste-eaters leaving the conference they attended, whipping out their cell phones in the hotel lobby, calling their boss at home and telling him to go get stuffed, because their get-rich dinghy has just docked on the rickety pier that juts out into the creek running through their back yard.

And yes, dear readers, there's another immediately identifiable blue and black silhouette picture of a guy with an Apple iPod. And right next to it—in big red type—FREE MP3 Player!

Oh...wait. What's this? There's another picture of a couple of odd little items that look a bit like Swiss Army knives with warts. Ahhh-HAH! Now I get it.

It's a picture of a pair of the actual MP3 players they're giving away. Near as I can Google, they were made by a Hong Kong company named HY Techno, and they're called Fish. Not only are they not Apple iPods, they're WMA players ("Windows Media Audio"...ohhh, big fun!), and these old versions aren't even anywhere to be seen on the HY Techno website. Hell, I'm a damned fine Googler and I couldn't even find a picture matching the ones being given away.

OK. Let's say we forgive these people for trying to save a few bucks by giving away outdated, low-capacity, no-name mp3 players (Edit for adjusted thinking: Considering the manufacturer specs them as WMA players, they might not even work with standard *.mp3 audio files). I can kind of understand; lots of companies give away cheap tchotchkes as a way to draw attention to their main product.

But who are the people throwing these little shindigs? Poking around the ’tubes for a generic combination of words like "Internet Marketing Conference" brings up a steaming dog pile of irrelevant results. Even when I added bits of the return address ('seattle' , 'christensen rd.') from the envelope to my search string, I didn't find any info about the company. On a whim, I decided to add the name of the person who "signed" the letter addressed to dear old dead Dad—'sanderson'.— and whaddaya know!? I got what I was looking for.

But things don't look too rosy in InternetMarketConferences-ville. According to RipOffReport.com, these lovely folks have a long and storied history with dissatisfied bait-takers. Further, government action has been taken and adjudicated against them (under any of several DBA names, including "GalaxyMall", "StoresOnline", and "Imergent, Inc.") in California, Maine, Texas, Washington, their home state of Utah—shoot, even Australia got in on the fun.

After seeing those reports, it all became clear to me.

Back in the Spring of 1998 or so, I attended one of the seminars given by GalaxyMall. I had only had my own computer and been online for about 9 months at that point, but even then—after witnessing their pitch—I realized that these assholes were only in it to take money from the pitiful-yet-hopeful souls who thought the end to their financial woes had just sauntered up and smacked them in the back of the head. The organizers at the seminar I attended put more pressure on the attendees to buy in than a used Yugo salesman looking to commish some fresh Pabst Blue Ribbon for later that day. And I was truly saddened to see some retirement-age folks—and others who were clearly internet-ignorant—actually stuck around after the presentation so that they could hand over their hard-earned money.

And yeah, they gave away a little goodie at that seminar all those years ago, too. It was a cheap ballpoint pen with the GalaxyMall web address on it. I had to laugh, for when I returned home and went to the URL, GalaxyMall.com looked for all the world like the online version of a hastily-built slipshod strip mall that just couldn't find tenants to lease space to.

Serves the bastards right.

Die, DIE! DIE!!! you opportunistic jackals! And have fun fending off Apple's attorneys for using their iPod marketing images to promote your scam, because as soon as I post this, I'm sending them a sweet little email.

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