Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

And Then There Was One

Posted
The Bee Gees (courtesy WikiMedia Commons)

I am man enough to admit, publicly, that I am a big Bee Gees fan. And when I say I’m a big fan, I mean that I have every Bee Gees studio album, every live album, most of the solo albums, and even a couple of unreleased bootlegs.

They got pigeonholed as a disco group in the late 1970’s, but they were much more than that. Their musical career spanned five decades and produced 22 studio albums. Besides their contributions to the Saturday Night Fever film soundtrack, only two of those albums are really disco albums: ‘Children of the World’ and ‘Spirits Having Flown.’ Even those have a healthy melange of other styles mixed in—pop, soft rock, funk, and a bit of country and R&B. Many also count ‘Main Course’ as a disco album, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch . . . three (arguably four) disco songs on a ten-track album doesn’t really make it a disco album.

The Bee Gees were a trio composed of brothers—twins Maurice and Robin Gibb along with elder brother Barry—born to English parents in the Isle of Man but raised in Australia. The group’s name derives from ‘The Brothers Gibb.’ Their first international success came in the late 1960’s, just around the time that The Beatles were disintegrating. While not wholly dissimilar from other ‘British invasion’ acts at the time, the Bee Gees’ music had a unique vocal harmony and an unusual, sometimes-haunting kind of melancholy behind them.

Read more . . .

Strange Voicemail

Posted

So, I was out of the office for a couple of days with a bad cold. When I got back in this morning, I had a voicemail on my office phone—a fairly rare occurrence, since phones are now about fifth in the office order of communication priority (after email, IM, face-to-face, and carrier pigeon). Usually when I get voicemails at work, they are nothing but a couple seconds of silence, or a recorded spiel for some product I don’t want.

Today, however, I got a mostly-unintelligible message from somebody who identified himself as ‘Christopher Pasquale.’ He called from a California area code at 2:58am ET on Thursday, and slurred something about how “I don’t know what to do with these crazy white people,” and that he didn’t know “where you are in DC, or Arlington, or Langley.”

Anyway . . . here’s the recording (MP3 link). Maybe you can make more sense of it than I did. Note that I have redacted the phone number by changing area code to 555; the original recording contained the actual area code. This guy seems to have enough problems without a bunch of Off on a Tangent readers calling him. That’s the only edit I made, other than snipping out some silence from our voicemail system.

Share to:

Send to:

Posted in: Humor, Life

TSA Agents: Just Following Orders?

Posted

I usually have some sympathy for people who are required by their employers to do distasteful things. I doubt, for example, that the customer service representatives at Cox Cable really enjoy wasting half an hour telling you to reboot your computer and router when they (and you) already know they are having a service outage. I doubt that credit card company operators really enjoy trying to up-sell some kind of useless debt protection service to everybody who calls. I try to give these folks the benefit of the doubt.

In these cases and others like them, I place most of the blame on the company that implemented the bad policies and procedures, not the individuals who dutifully perform the task they’ve been assigned. But this benefit of the doubt only goes so far; once you pass into illegal or immoral activity, ‘just following orders’ no longer passes as a valid excuse. Every individual has a personal responsibility to do the right thing in their dealings with others, even when their superiors order them to do the opposite. Maybe you risk being fired for making a moral stand. So be it. It is better to be unemployed with your honor intact than to debase yourself to keep a job.

I know taking this kind of a stand isn’t always easy. It seems like most people, when faced with these situations, take the path of least resistance and simply comply with the unjust orders. Understandably, they don’t want to deal with the loss of income, the hassle of finding a new job, and so on. I’ve seen it countless times. At one of my previous employers, questionable employment and contracting practices were commonplace. All up and down the chain of command, most people just shrugged their shoulders and did as they were told. Their willing compliance made them just as guilty as those at the top who issued the questionable orders in the first place.

Read more . . .

The New Car: Mini Countryman

Posted

So, the follow-up to our recent barrage of test drives is this: we bought a ‘cosmic blue’ 2012 Mini Cooper S All-4 Countryman last weekend. They had one on the lot that was very close to our ideal specs, and were able to give us a bit of a deal (though not much, since Minis are all in high demand).

The Countryman, while still fairly small and Mini-esque, has four doors, four real seats, and all-wheel drive. And it drives like a charm, even when you keep it under 4,500 RPM (as recommended during the break-in period). More details and photos will follow later, but for now, enjoy this handful of shots from purchase day:

Saving Windows 8

Posted

So, I’ve been playing around with the Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview, a pre-release version of Microsoft’s next flagship desktop operating system. The pundits and techies seem to be very critical of Microsoft’s direction, and with good reason, but I don’t think it’s quite as bad as it’s been made out to be. In fact, with a handful of relatively small changes, Microsoft could make Windows 8 really great.

Actually, Windows 8 already is really great . . . on tablets and small laptops. Oh, it has its rough edges (what do you expect from an early preview?), but on the small screen it’s a real pleasure to use. You see, the biggest change to Windows 8 is that Microsoft has made its ‘Metro’ interface—the tile-based system used on its surprisingly-good Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system—the primary way of interacting with the machine. When you’re navigating with your finger on a tablet, or even with a touch-pad on a notebook, Metro gives you a quick and easy way to move back and forth between apps, see an ‘overview’ of your incoming emails and schedule, and then move into an immersive single-app experience.

The included Metro apps—for email, calendars, weather, etc.—are obviously unfinished, but as the universe of Metro apps grows this will get better. It is obvious that the system has a lot of potential to give Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android a run for their money in the tablet space, if the hardware is up-to-snuff and if the development community rallies around the platform.

Read more . . .

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.