Clancy and I went to Oasis on the Hills, the local water park over the weekend. We had an absolute blast. We also got distinct reminders of how out of touch we are with the population as a while.

The big one was tattoos. When looking at 18-30 year olds, people without tattoos were almost the exception! Ever since my straight-arrow brother Mitch got a tattoo I’ve stopped thinking of them as rebellious. Besides, if someone wants a little private emblem of self on them, who am I to say anything?

But it wasn’t just an emblem or a design. It was entire arms and huge intricate drawings. I knew these things existed, but I really hadn’t realized that they’d become as common as… I don’t know, something real common.

That tattoos are but one example of something that bothers me for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s some variation of this, though: our bodies are not Christmas trees to decorate. The tattoos and the piercings and the boobs hanging out… good golly what has this world come to?!

Theoretically, as something becomes more commonplace we become more accepting of it. It used to be that long hair on a man was a sign of deviancy, now it’s a common thing. Ear rings in the right year used to signal homosexuality, now they’re common. Skinheads in long sleeve shirts are indistinguishable from a lot of young high-schoolers these days.

It really doesn’t work that way for me, though. I still haven’t come to terms with fingernail polish and honestly find a nose-ring less distracting. In fact, things that didn’t bother me before are starting to bother me a lot more now. I never really cared one way or another about tattoos, but as they become more common I’m becoming less rather than more agreeable to them. They’ve moved from signaling actual individuality to being another ornament on the Human Tree. And to get back to individuality they go further and further and get more and more tattoos and pierce more and more body parts.

What’s wrong with human ears just being ears rather than shiny silver repositories? Why make our bodies the (permanent!) landscape for someone else’s usually unoriginal art?

I guess I’m fortunate in that I married someone that doesn’t even wear make-up. While I wouldn’t mind if she wore make-up, the fact that that aspect of her personality keeps the nail polish, piercings, and whatnot is a godsend. I can understand make-up that accentuates the positive and I can understand trying to make yourself look as good as you possibly can, but why make yourself look like something that is less human, not to mention less attractive?

I recognize that this is an aesthetic preference. I’m actually a big sympathetic to less attractive people that figure if you can’t be better looking be different looking, but honestly I think it does more harm than good. Unattractive people look less attractive with tattoos and piercings. They’re hurt by it (in my eyes) in ways that more attractive people aren’t. For the guys the tattoos on their arm just drew attention to the flub on their arms. For chubby ladies the navel rings drew attention to their bellies. For the attractive people, it didn’t really make a difference except insofar as I didn’t like them. If a guy was toned it didn’t matter so much whether there were markings. If a girl was hot who the heck is looking at the ten earrings in her ears or the over-sized rose on her ankle? Or, if they see it, why do they care?

Tomorrow I will write about another observation at the Oasis.

It’s been a year or two since my high school reunion, but recent discussions have put it back in my mind.

I did not particularly enjoy my high school experience and (unlike my junior high school experience) I have no one to blame but myself for it. I was always a poor fit temperamentally for Mayne {pronounced to rhyme with “maybe”} High School. It was filled with people that had money and seemed to care most about those things that people that have money care most about. It was loads better than middle school, but it wasn’t for me. I never dated anyone from my high school and my picture appears in the yearbook only once because I never did any extra-curricular activities.

As such, I probably never would have attended the reunion at all had it not been for the chance to be reunited with my best friends Clint and Dave. Dave and I flew down from Shoshona and Deseret respectively, met with Clint in Ephesus where he was living at the time, and then drove to Mayne. Even if there hadn’t actually been a reunion, it was great to hang out with them even if much of that time was spent driving. Much to my surprise, the reunion itself was a blast.

Oddly enough, or maybe fittingly, I did not spend all that much time talking to people that I knew from high school. I spent it talking to people that I didn’t know at all or that I knew in elementary and/or middle school but not high school.

I went to West Oak Elementary School (WOES), which is about as middle class as you can get. We were looked down upon by the people that lived in Mayne, but were better off than those that lived in working-class Southfield and Larkhill. For middle school, West Oak and Larkhill Elementary School (LHES) fed into Larkhill Intermediate School (LHIS). Larkhill was much more working class, so working class that it’s actually mentioned in a Bruce Springsteen song. Larkhill Elementary was significantly larger than West Oak, so the average economic status at Larkhill Intermediate was not good.

The same sort of thing in reverse happened when Larkhill Intermediate fed into Mayne High School with upper crest Mayne Intermediate School*. As with before, the school we were merging with was considerably larger than the one we were coming from. Not only did they have a lot more students, but their students were wealthier, more achieving, and better behaved. Almost all of the “problem kids” from high school I knew from junior high and they were weeded out, dropped out, or farmed out to a correctional institution. So what I ultimately saw happen a lot was that instead of people hanging out with the people they hung out with in junior high we Larkhillers would gradually ingratiate ourselves into an existing group of friends from MIS (and Airfield, see note below).

So all of this is the long way of saying that the people I talked to were in three distict groups: people I was friends with in elementary school (who I was not friends with in junior high because they started going to advanced/honors classes), people I was friends with in junior high (a fair number of whom were weeded out or reinvented themselves into some other group in high school), and people I knew from high school.

Here are some observations that I recall (after looking over some emails that I wrote at the time) from the reunion:

• There were almost no Asian-Americans there, despite their presence on campus. I can literally remember two that I think are more of Pacific Islander descent and they were twins.
• The people I was most anxious to talk to were the ones from elementary and intermediate school. Particularly elementary.
• Once they started tracking us into regular and honors classes I lost contact with a lot of them. I hung out with the smart kids in elementary school, but didn’t get into the smart classes in high school.
• The Mayne/Airfield contingent was over-represented. The number of people I knew from Larkhill Intermediate but not West Oak Elementary (read: those that went to Larkhill Elementary) was nearly non-existent.
• I spent the first hour or so talking to someone that I didn’t even know in high school. After I got my food I needed a place to sit down but none of the tables had a friendly congregation. I decided that sitting alone while eating was one high school memory that I was not going to relive, sat down at a random table and made some friends. When we finally parted, our last words to one another were, “I wish I’d known you back in the day!” “You, too!” I wish I’d made more of an effort to get to know people back in the day.
• A couple of the guys did not really think that it might be inappropriate to talk about all the girls a guy “banged” when his wife of six months is sitting right next to him at the table.
• There was only one awkward instance of a guy that I knew that didn’t know me. I knew him in junior high and we were actually pretty good friends. It did not occur to me that he would not remember me. I guess it’s understandable, though. He was a nerd when I knew him but he became an ROTC nut in high school. he’s probably blocked out his nerdy years.
• The reward for the coolest guy goes to Jesse Brooks. I remembered him as being a really cool guy for a goth/punk/industrial dude. He ended up going to MIT, flying jets for the Navy, and working for a venture capital firm in Ephesus. Unlike the ROTC guy, Jesse remembered me despite having done a lot more in the meantime and more genuinely reinvented himself.
• While smoking a cigarette I had the obligatory conversation with a girl that I never, ever could have mustered up the courage to talk to back in the day.
• All of the cheerleaders and drill team members I saw there had engagement and/or wedding rings. Every last one. Only one that I saw married her high school sweetheart.
• Two Larkhill classmates had four or more children. I was not surprised by either of them.
• The girl that Clint obsessed over and Dave’s serious high school girlfriend both had kids. I missed out on any of that since I never dated anyone from my school and besides I was rarely interested in people my own grade. I wonder if I can sneak in for the reunion of the Class of 1999, wherein I could see the fate of the girl that I obsessed over.
• I don’t know what the jocks made of their lives since I didn’t really talk to them at the reunion. They didn’t look like they’d completely wasted away like I might have hoped once upon a time.
• High School reunions are great places to meet people romantically if you’re still single. None of the three of us were, though, so that was sort of a waste. On the other hand, the fact that we weren’t single may have made it easier to go. In fact, I considered my wedding ring a giant shield. So long as I wore it, I was impervious from female rejection.

* – It’s actually a tad more complicated than this. In my 8th grade year they built a new middle school, Airfield Intermediate School (AIS) and my 8th grade class was smaller than my 7th grade class with a portion of the wealthier students siphoned off. Most of the students at Airfield had previously gone to Mayne Intermediate, so they essentially had the same experience we did with the integration of the snobs, they just had a year sooner and on a slightly more limited basis. As such, I’m counting both the Airfield and Mayde students in a single group since they were both (at one point or another) dominated socially by the same people.

At the anime convention that I recently attended, I ran into an unexpected friendly face. Marianne Silbet and I went to the same school from about the seventh grade onward. She moved in from parts unknown. Marianne and I were never friends. The only real memory I have of interacting with her was when she went to the prom with Scott Sanders and the two of them plus Julie and I left the prom together and walked on the beach together.

The thing I remember most about Marianne, though, was that she was very, very unpopular in junior high school and I never remember her having very many friends at all. Marianne was sweet as sugar cane, cute if not hot, slender, acne-free, and at least after those awful junior high school years a smiley and pleasant person to be around. For some reason, though, she really, really got it bad in junior high school. And for prom the date she mustered up was Scott Sanders, one of the friends I was most ready to get rid of when I graduated from high school. The thing that I noticed then but struck me now was how completely, totally unfair that was.

I’ve mentioned before that I slummed around amongst the socially marginalized class of high school. I got to know a lot of them quite well. The guys, anyway. Some of them were a lot of fun to be around and I light up when I think about them. Some, like Scott, I would talk to only if there were absolutely no one else around and maybe not even then. But whether I personally liked them or not, I could easy tell you why they were unpopular. They were socially inept, they were fat, they were awkward, they were anti-social, they were smart-asses they were consumed with bitterness. The reasons go on and on.

I’m not saying that the criteria that found them lacking was a good one. It was stupid and superficial I am so glad to be away from it now. But at least I understood it. I knew what was hurting me and I could try to change it or I could accept the consequences of it. If they were to ask me and I were feeling particularly honest I could have told them ways that they could have improved themselves. It was warped and twisted, but it had its own little logic that if one could step away from themselves just for a little bit they could decipher.

But thinking about Marianne brings to light another observation: I have no idea at all whatsoever criteria, if any, the girls had for sorting themselves out socially. I have no idea what precisely it was that made Marianne so reviled and she’s not the only one. I knew a girl in elementary school named Louise that was dreadfully unpopular. As far as I could tell I was the only nice person to her. Then in the fifth grade her family moved and she went to another elementary school. Both our grade schools fed into the same junior high and apparently at the other grade school she had made quite the splash and when we ran into each other in junior high she had a lot of friends. Even though I was the only one nice to her in grade school, she was unusually cruel to me in junior high perhaps because she did not recognize me or perhaps because I was a throwback to an unfortunate time in her life. Other than the sudden cruelty, though, there was no big difference in her behavior to warrant the reversal of fortunes and I don’t think cruelty alone did it (there were a lot of cruel girls that were very unpopular).

A little closer to home, I understand why my wife was unpopular in K-12. I love her but she is stubborn and has unusual tastes and is not socially gifted. But the ferocity with which other kids went after her completely baffles me. I get angry just thinking about the things that she’s told me and there are things that were so bad, so much worse, that she refuses to tell me. When it comes to the guys that got it really, really bad in K-8 I understand why even if I think that the reason is dumb. But when it comes to Clancy, Louise, and Marianne I am completely and utterly baffled at the degree of derision they got.

My inclination is to say that the female social structure in schools is random and illogical, but it’s quite possible that I just don’t understand the logic because it was all in a world that I was not a part of. There were some that I understood. She was unpopular because she was fat or abrasive or socially awkward. But there were a number of them that I didn’t understand at all. I don’t understand either why they were unpopular or why they were as unpopular as they were. If I have a son like me, I’ll have an idea of what to say or what advice to give if they ask me why other kids don’t like them. If I have a daughter like Marianne, I won’t have a clue.

A case of banning the flag:

On the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, students at one high school were not allowed to wear clothes with an American flag.

Under a new school rule, students at Hobbton High School are not allowed to wear items with flags, from any country, including the United States.

The new rule stems from a controversy over students wearing shirts bearing flags of other countries.

I have difficulty figuring why exactly students wearing flags of other countries is such a problem that it requires this solution.

Back during and after the Gulf War, there was a student of Middle Eastern descent that was a vocal Saddam Hussein supporter and actually had an Iraqi flag pinned to his bag. It was a bit of a distraction because a lot of people took great exception to someone wearing the flag of a nation that we were at war against, but teachers were unusually capable of alleviating the conflict and getting on with class discussions. It seems to me that the ability to express oneself, even if it causes some conflict, was worth the minor distraction.

The superintendant explained it thusly:

The superintendent of schools in Sampson County calls the situation unfortunate, but says educators didn’t want to be forced to pick and choose which flags should be permissible.

Even if we make a different judgment in the above case of an Iraqi flag in a time of war, it would seem to me that there is a substantive difference between wearing an American flag and the flag of a foreign nation. We are, after all, on American soil. I don’t think a “home rule” exception to the flag ban is wholly inappropriate, on 9/11 or any other day. Even if we don’t want to leave judgment in the hands of educators (heaven forbid), that seems like something of a no-brainer.

Sure, if one kid wants to wear a British flag and another a Sudanese and we allow the former but not the latter, that can become problematic. I could see how banning both might be preferable to making those distinctions. But we’re in America and an American flag ought to be uncontroversial.

The only gray area I see with the home rule exemption is if an exchange student says that Americans can fly their flag but he is not allowed to fly his. As such, maybe make the rule about flying the flag of the nation they come from. If a young Mexican or Canadian going to school hear wants to wear something with a Mexican or Canadian flag on it for Cinco de Mayo or Canada Day (or any other day, for that matter), that too is substantively different from some kid just deciding to wear some other nation’s flag cause he likes it or he wants to register his protest somehow.

These do not strike me as terribly difficult distinctions to make. They are pretty clear (American flag or flag of a nation that you have citizenship), easy to state, and not too difficult to enforce. I find it odd that the school district declined to make these distinctions and must attribute it to either some sort of transnationalistic thinking (we should want to be citizens of the world!) or, more likely, schools being terrified of making any distinction, no matter how unsound, that might come across as unfair to somebody, somewhere.

Either way, from a PR standpoint it almost never makes sense to mess with the red, white, and blue.

It’s generally been my belief that people that hold public office should be given the respect of the office, even if I don’t care for their politics. I never referred to Bill Clinton as “Slick Willie” or “Billy Jeff” and I refuse to refer to our current president as Dubya (much less “Shrub” or “George Dubya/W”). I opt for Clinton, Former President Clinton, Bush, President Bush, or least formally GWB. The only time I may use a first name is if I am differentiating Bill Clinton from his wife or George W. Bush from his father. Even then I will often opt for The President for GWB and President Clinton for Bill Clinton. If referring to Former President Bush I opt for “Former President Bush,” “George H. Bush”.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do when there are two people that are Former President Bush. I might go with the technically inaccurate Jr vs Sr, Bush 41 vs Bush 43, or George H. Bush versus George W. Bush. Here’s the thing, though, I don’t like saying the letter “W”. It’s three syllables for one blasted letter and I hate it. I don’t know why he couldn’t have simply gone by George Walker Bush (fewer syllables)or why his parents couldn’t have given him the Herbert name too so that it would be George Herbert Walker Bush and I could use Junior and Senior accurately. I say this as someone that is the fourth in the William _______ Truman line, but at least we all go by different names — William, Allen, Bill, and Will. If I have a son named William, you can bet we aren’t going to call him “Will” or any of the above names. Why make it so blasted confusing? They can go to the trouble of giving John Ellis Bush the nickname Jeb but nothing except that blasted three-syllable letter?

All of this brings me to the woman most likely (in my estimation) to be the next President of the United States, Hillary Clinton. It’s not always easy to differentiate between Clintons so there is the natural tendency to want to drift towards refering to them by their first name. It’s a tendency that I avoid for the aforementioned reasons, going instead for Senator Clinton, Hillary Clinton, or HRC.

Some people are concerned that people are calling her Hillary because she’s female and there is an implied familiarity or lack of respect. I think that it’s mostly a matter of their being two relevent Clintons. If Jeb Bush were running, he’d likely be Jeb (but not to me! Jeb Bush is two syllables, one fewer than W and easily shortened to Jebbush in my mind… kinda like Jackbauer whose names are almost always both said on the TV show 24 in the first couple of seasons). Ironically, her main defense against too much implied familiarity (and thus lack of formality and by extention respect) is that she doesn’t come across as a particularly warm person.

On the other hand, her likely opponent is almost certain to have a first-name friendly name and style. Mitt Romney is generally referred to as Romney rather than Mitt, but I could see people opting for the quirky familiar name rather than the less usual last name. But Rudy Guiliani is very frequently referred to only as Rudy even though there is little confusion over who you might be referring to if you say “Guiliani” (though it’s not necessarily easy to pronounce and whose name I had to look up the spelling of). Fred Thompson doesn’t even have the odd last name, but like Guiliani his website mentions his first name but not his last.

The only national campaign I can remember in my lifetime wherein the first name was so emphasized would be that of Lamar Alexander’s “Lamar!” campaign from 1996, which was ditched with his flannel when he ran again in 2000. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kennedy brothers relied more on their first names than their last, though the rationale for that is pretty obvious.

Prior to that, though, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt are more commonly referred to by their initials than their first name, even though the former has a very unique one.

If marketing is often geared towards the least common denominator, I suppose that retail politics is the same. Clinton and Bush both got by with their folksy charm. I wonder if the future beholds parties looking for candidates wherein you do want to call them by their first name because they come across as so familiar. Me? I’d prefer a president wherein my instinct is to refer to him or her as Mr. or Madame President rather than Bob or Jane.

Addendum: I forgot about what should have been an obvious example. If I recall, one of Harry Truman’s slogans was “Give’em Hell, Harry!” It was said by people too Truman, but even so that counds as an informality given that he was the President of the United States.

I would be surprised if Spungen agreed with Ann Coulter on… well… anything. But this excerpt of something that Coulter wrote for George in 1999 actually sounded like something Spungen might say:

Boys in Washington don’t know how to ask for a date. What they do is try to trick you into asking them for a date. They say, “I know you’re really busy, so call me when you’d like to go out to dinner” or “Call me when you’re back in Washington” or, my favorite, “Are we ever going to get together?” What are you supposed to say to such completely insane things? I’ve never figured that out, which is why these conversations tend to end in hostile silences.

“Call me when you’d like to go out for dinner” isn’t asking for a date; it’s asking me to ask you for a date. For male readers in Washington, asking for a date entails these indispensable components: an express request for a female’s company on a particular date for a specific activity.

Not that anybody asked me, but I still believe that bin Laden is dead

I think he’s been dead for some time now.

I’m not sure precisely how they’re doin’ what they’re doin’, but hat’s off to’em for making my belief in this a crackpot one.

Addendum: {link}

The US government is analysing videotape that appears to show Osama bin Laden in a false beard, marking the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. {…}

“It does look oddly as if he is wearing a false beard,” Richard Clarke, a former White House counter-terrorism official, said. “If we go back to the tape three years ago, he had a very white beard. This looks like a phoney beard that has been passed on.”

Intelligence officials are saying it’s genuine, but they do have some incentive to say that the big, bad, bogeyman is still alive, no? No doubt if we killed him they would be throwing parades, but if he died of kidney failure, that would be kind of anti-climactic and a conclusion best avoided. Not that I think it’s necessarily a government conspiracy, but incentives are important.

Shortly after I first arrived in Estacado I got a temp job helping the state’s Child Protective Services move their headquarters from one location to another. While doing so I found an immense amount of respect for the horrors they hear day in and day out. Most of the people I helped move were first-respondants at the phone bank. Just the things I overheard sent shivers down my spine.

“Is she expected to be able to see out of that eye again?”

“Did he threaten to burn your apartment down with you in it or while you weren’t there?”

“How long did he hold her hand on the stove? How severe are the burns?”

And over and over again: “Have you informed the police?” and “Do you have a complaint number?”

Talking with them on break and whatnot, I could sense the frustration of their relative impotence over the situation. At least in Estacado it seems that it’s not very easy to keep an abusive parent away from his or her children.

Apparently it’s not quite so difficult in Britain:

A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of “emotional abuse”, even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way.

Social services’ recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met. {…}

Under the plan, a doctor will hand the newborn to a social worker, provided there are no medical complications. Social services’ request for an emergency protection order – these are usually granted – will be heard in secret in the family court at Hexham magistrates on the same day.

From then on, anyone discussing the case, including Miss Lyon, will be deemed to be in contempt of the court.{…}

Miss Lyon came under scrutiny because she had a mental health problem when she was 16 after being physically and emotionally abused by her father and raped by a stranger.

She suffered eating disorders and self-harm but, after therapy, graduated from Edinburgh University and now works for two mental health charities, Borderline and Personality Plus.

Maybe there is a side to this story that I am not seeing (the article does seem somewhat slanted), but this is some pretty disturbing stuff. Here is a woman that has turned herself around and now her child might be taken from her because of speculation that she might be a danger to it.

If mental health care professionals want people to seek help when they need it, they need to stand up for their success stories and prevent organizations from using unfortunate pits in their youth against them in adulthood. The result is that people will not seek help when they need it. This is even worse than preventing them from joining the army or even hassling them over getting their medical license: this is sending the message that if you seek help, it may be decided that you can never have children.

Who knows, maybe Miss Lyon is a threat to her child. Maybe there is something significant that this article is leaving out. If anyone has more information, I would love to hear it. I don’t want to believe what I am reading. It’s unfortunately hard to make any determination because everything is kept so secret. Despite the understandable frustrations of the heroes at the Estacado CPS, it ought to be a lot more difficult to take a baby from her parents than is portrayed in this article.

There was recently a discussion here and there about whether one should or should not date across ideological lines. James Kirchick complains about how difficult it is being a gay libertarian-conservative when so much of your dating market is some degree of liberal. Ilya Somin comments on Kirchick’s piece with a list of reasons that people often overestimate the undesirability of cross-ideological dating as well as a list of more defensible concerns.

I think that Somin has it mostly right.

I believe that the people overestimate the importance of ideological harmony in relationships is because we invest far too much of our self-image into our politics (or maybe vice-versa). Somin believes that we too often confuse what we believe with how we behave. I would say that we are more likely to confuse what we believe with who we fundamentally are. When I hear people say that they would not date someone that voted for the other guy (and I have heard it), the underlying reason does not seem to be so much that they believe different things, but that their beliefs make them different kinds of people.

I’m not going to get on my high horse about how we shouldn’t make judgments about people based on their political beliefs. To be honest, a lot of the time you can. But those tend to be the loudest ones and not usually representative of the whole. Most people I meet don’t know what my political views are or how I voted (indeed, most seem to think that I hold whatever views they do and voted however they did). But that other guy that can’t shut up about America is a rogue nation or that a lot of our nation’s problems can be traced to liberal-supported minority groups? Yeah, you know exactly where he stands. It’s not hard to start getting the impression that everyone that votes the same way as he does thinks the same way and is the same way.

There are times when it is better not to become intimate with someone from the opposite side of the political spectrum. I had one non-relationship in college that couldn’t take off because she was an activist for causes that I did not believe in. It’s really, really hard to make a relationship work when you oppose their goal in life. There are also other factors that inform our political views that should also inform our dating habits. For instance, religion significantly influences how one votes and how one socializes and otherwise lives their life. Sometimes a philosophy can cause problems wherein one partner believes that the other is missing that last sense of enlightenment and is somehow on a lesser philosophical or spiritual plane. Or people think about things in a particular way. For instance, I have a number of rather unconventional ideas of the way that the world is. Not radical, just a bit unusual. You might be absolutely, positively amazed at how some people react when confronted with ideas that they’ve never really heard before. Some people get excited, others look at you like you’re the antichrist.

These are relatively minor exceptions, though. On the whole it is beyond foolish to try to go out and find someone that thinks exactly like you do. In fact, if you do find someone that does it probably means that neither of you are thinking individually and are both getting your thoughts, word-for-word, from a third party. And you should be afraid.

The most common cross-ideological relationship is the conservative guy and the liberal woman. That’s because men are on the whole more conservative (as defined by contemporary politics) and women are more liberal (ditto). In fact, one of the reasons that cross-ideological dating is so important is that without it we have a lot of conservative men that can’t find a woman and a lot of conservative women that can’t find a man. Market inefficiencies that we just cannot have.

When did software update releases get out of control? Was it the Internet that did us in? Was the ability to disseminate a new patch everywhere in the world all at once with relatively minimal fuss get to the heads of software companies and give them the idea that they didn’t really need to have everything right before the release because they can keep shooting out updates as they fix one glitch after another? More likely, I suspect it’s that most of these updates are required because the Internet has made it easier than ever for someone else to access your computer against your will through someone else’s software. It’s probably no coincidence that the worst offenders are web browsers.

Whatever the case, it’s irritating as heck and I wish that they would stop it.

Stop what? Stop all sorts of things, including but not limited to:

• Stop sending me updates every few weeks. If I only use your product that often, that means that every time I use your product I have to go through a long installation procedure. I have a fleet of computers, each containing your software. Do you know what a pain in the posterior it is to have to install the program every time I use it? Offenders include Avant Browser, WinAmp, Firefox (though they’ve gotten better), and DivX. Even though I really like to use Avant Browser from time to time, I am considering deleting from my computer because the updates have made it a hassle to use and they have no opt-out, which brings me to…
• Stop forcing me to upgrade and stop forcing me to hear about it. I don’t want to have to say “No, thanks” every time I open an application and your software asks me if I want to upgrade. Some applications have a nice little check box I can uncheck so that I don’t have to hear about your latest release. Give me that and I can tell the software to shut up so that I can shut up. But astonishingly some software companies, like Avant Browser, don’t see this as desirable, while others, like Firefox 2.0 try to update before you can locate and uncheck the check box (if it even exists). Maybe they can’t understand why I wouldn’t want their latest software patch. Why would I? You didn’t get it right on the first 41 builds, can’t I just wait until I next install it so I can get the fixes on builds 42-86 all at once? The answer is no. Worse yet is when an application will not let me decline updating. One such example is Rhapsody, though I understand that they have to apply new DRMs to appease the record labels and few people are going to volunteer to upgrade to a more crippled version of their software. Firefox 2.0 does this, making it difficult to backtrack to 2.0.3 or 2.0.4. That brings me to…
• Stop releasing software that is inferior to its predecessor. Though Rhapsody has to cripple its software for DRM reasons, they also change the layouts and because I can’t go to previous versions I have no way of going to a previous layout that I liked better. The least they could have done was have a “Classic View” feature. WinAmp has a classic view that I always use. WinAmp used to fall into this category wherein I had to keep a special copy of WinAmp 2.08 because 2.64 was insufferable, but they cut it out. The biggest offender has only started this recently and has nothing to do with DRM. It has to do with software that adds functionality that I don’t need and takes up resources that I do. My Athlon64 4400 with 2GB of RAM and my Athlon64 4000 with 1.25GB of RAM slow down to a near halt when performing certain Java applications through Mozilla Firefox. I can literally watch a video, burn a CD, and transfer files all at the same time, but I can’t run certain Java applications and surf on Firefox at the same time even when doing nothing else. So not only is it taking sometimes minutes to perform the task, but it’s locking up the browser while it’s doing it so I have to twiddle my thumbs or switch to (and reinstall/upgrade) Avant Browser. Speaking of inferior upgrades…
• Stop telling me after an installation that my favorite plug-in isn’t going to work. Firefox did this and I’m still angry about it. Lastly…
• Stop screwing around with how I set up my Start Menu. I am organized with my Start Menu organized in a way that I am not organized with anything else. When updating software they naturally drop it back with the stupid default wherein it’s organized in an arbitrary manner (some have a folder for their company and then a subfolder, others make a folder for each app, some just stick shortcuts to the executables in the main area). I would be more understanding of this if there were no way to find where I put the icons, but with some (Avant Browser… again) if I tell it not to install the icons it will actively go out, find, and delete the icons wherever it is that I’ve put them. If it can find them to remove them, it can find them to know that they aren’t being placed in their insipid directory structure.

So now that I’ve stated what I don’t like, let me tell you what I would like to see: I would like to be able to tell it how often I am willing to update a software package. I would then like to be notified that the updates are ready and I can install them manually or have them reinstall. That way I can set aside half an hour (or more) once a month to be updating software. That way I can schedule it in rather than get a rude awakening when I’m trying to access the durn program.

PS I couldn’t find a way to fit this into the flow of the post, but the worst as far as updating goes is not actually Avant Browser. At least I know what Avant is trying to do. The worst is Adobe Reader, which if opened within a browser will stick the update window behind it. So we can’t see that it is asking us a question about updating the software, but it also doesn’t load the document itself, thus making it appear as though Reader is broken. My employer has lost not insignificant man-hours at work investigating what we thought was a problem with Adobe Reader on a software release but was instead a matter of it finding an update and wanting to update it.