Major Irritant

What goes:  “Fuck. Double fuck.  Double-doublety-double fuck”?

That would be me.

When my Logitech mouse starts randomly double-clicking when I tap the key once.

Yesterday I tried to see whether it was a software or hardware issue, so I tried going to Logitech’s “Customer Support” site (okay, you can stop laughing now).

  1. Tried blowing compressed air under the key, as helpfully suggested by Rajib “Logan”  — didn’t help.
  2. “Enter the serial # of your mouse, then we’ll know exactly what it is”  — fucking hell, I could barely read the thing with a magnifying glass, and every time I turned it over to read it, the cursor wandered out of the chat panel, never to be seen again.  Eventually, after uttering Sentence #1 of this post a few times, I managed to get the thing entered.
  3. “Do you have another PC or laptop where you can test your mouse?” — good idea.  Then we can see if it’s a laptop software issue or a mouse issue.  Hopped over to New Wife’s PC in the next room.  Once I’d called her to get the login password — shuddup — I connected it up and… nope, still doing it, the little fucking fucking double-fucking piece of shit.  Go back to laptop.
  4. “Session has timed out.  Do you want to log in again?” — where’s the 1911?  Oh yeah, in pieces on the table waiting to be cleaned. So I log in once more.
  5. “We’re sorry, but your warranty expired on 02/22/21.  We cannot replace your mouse.”

So I shot bit the bullet — not literally, ammo is spendy — and ordered another one.  From Amazon.

“Your order may be delayed as the product is on back order.”

            

[several lines of cursing omitted]

Want Ads With That?

How nice:

Amazon Prime to streaming customers: pay $2.99 per month or go back to watching commercials

Streaming services are in a heated tug-of-war over viewers and users are growing more adept at jumping in and out of those services, often depending on price. The platforms risk losing customers with price hikes, but they could lose them if they don’t generate new content that wins over users.

Disney will begin charging $13.99 a month in the U.S. for ad-free Disney+ in mid-October, 75% more than the ad-supported service. Netflix already charges $15.49 per month for its ad-free plan, more than twice the monthly subscription for Netflix with ads.

Amazon said limited advertisements will be aired during shows and movies starting early next year so that it can “continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.”

I haven’t seen much evidence that Amazon has created much in the way of “compelling content” (i.e. stuff that we actually want to see), so I’m not sure how I’m going to respond to this new little bit of Shylockian chiseling.  We don’t buy that much from Amazon anyway, unless there’s absolutely no local shopping alternative or the products’ manufacturers don’t offer online sales, so our shipping costs aren’t that high to begin with, ergo  there’s not much in the way of saving through Prime.

And am I the only one who spends almost as much time looking for something decent to watch as actually watching a show?  (Ditto Netflix, by the way.)

I understand the business model — there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch TV show — but included in the business model is the fact that some consumers won’t go along with the latest pricing structure.  And in fact I don’t really mind if ads play before a show, even though they’re irritating.  But during a show?  Forget that shit.

What I’ll most probably do is suspend our Prime subscription altogether after Christmas, and if we absolutely must shop through Amazon thereafter, wait and consolidate our purchases into one delivery.

I guess we’ll see how all this plays out.

Broken Neighborhoods

I was interested, although not surprised, to see this development:

High-end retail shops in California’s iconic Beverly Hills have reportedly begun to shutter their doors amid an epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies.

To be fair, a whole bunch of them had already closed because of California’s stringent WuFlu lockdown a couple years back.  But this latest “epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies” is absolutely the fault of the politicians and the voters who put them there.

Yup:  being soft on crime, whether allowing overt riots of the BLM genre or having the “shoplifting isn’t really a crime” mindset, can only lead to more and yet more lawlessness — something you’d think would be blindingly obvious to the dumbest of the dumb.

Clearly, Californians fall even below the above definition.

Let Beverly Hills sink — and the rest of that poxy state along with it.

Oh Boo Hoo

Once again, we have handwringing when some young asshole, as the saying goes, “fucks around and gets found out”.  In this particular case, we’re supposed to get upset when a drunken college kid gets shot because he thought he was trying to get into his own home at 2am, but it wasn’t;  and the actual homeowner shot and killed him.

That’s how the media paints it, of course, but that’s not actually how it panned out:

Nicholas Anthony Donofrio, 20, died early Saturday after knocking, banging, and kicking on the front door of the man who shot him when he broke the glass window and tried to manipulate the doorknob.

Frankly, I’d have done precisely the same thing under the circumstances — and I bet there are more than a few of my Readers nodding in agreement.

Anyway, sanity has prevailed:

A police news release added that the investigation determined the shooter – who legally owned the firearm – was covered by South Carolina’s so-called ‘Stand Your Ground’ law and no charges will be filed.

I don’t know what this “legally owned the firearm” business is, unless that’s some South Carolina thing I’m unaware of.

Whatever, it’s a tragedy;  but when you’re an underage drunk trying to bust into a house, there might well be a shooting.  The kid thought he was trying to get into his own house, but that’s not how it appeared to the actual homeowner.

And if the kid’s family wants to sue someone, they should start with the booze company (just kidding, they shouldn’t be thinking of suing anybody).

Scumbag Ban

Here we go again.  Executive summary:  asshole loser shoots three people dead for no reason other than, apparently, their race.  Doubleplusungood:  with an AR-15.  Tripleplusungood:  AR-15 had swastikas painted on it.

Before the Weepies and Gun-Fearing Wussies get going with “Ban all eeeevil assault rifles NOW!”, let’s just face a couple facts.

  1. Said scumbag was 21, so no age ban would have affected him.
  2. The AR-15 was legally purchased (as was the Glock the asshole was carrying).
  3. Had the AR-15 been banned, and assuming he couldn’t get his hands on one illegally, he could have used the (legally-purchased) Glock to do the same job.
  4. Had he preferred to use a non-AR-type semi-auto rifle instead of a Glock, he could have used one of these (which would never be included in an AR-style ban) because hunting rifles (as evidenced by the wooden stock):

    …but which function identically to the AR-15.

Listen, I don’t want to downplay this tragedy.  Society has no place for scumbags like this, and had I been there and in a position to intervene, I would have shot this little cunt in the back of the head without a second thought, before he had a chance to off himself.

Maybe his parents (with whom he was still living) could have done something ahead of time to prevent this, and maybe they couldn’t.  There’s not much a parent can do with grown kids — they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do.

Sadly, freedom does not come without its abuse, and the Second Amendment is no different.  But nothing we do can prevent them being abused, and that’s just the tragedy of it.

And just to be clear on the topic:  there neither is nor could be any new law which would have prevented this.  Random assholes will always find a way to do their evil deeds, and that’s the truth of it.