K’s story about her run-in with the law reminded me of my own.

About two years ago, my buddy Ron and I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. Ron had gotten our company to sponsor a bunch of us from work, and bought several boxes of pizza for all the volunteers. By the end of the day, there were a lot of half-empty boxes, so Ron decided to take them home.

So we plop into the car for the drive home, me with my baseball cap turned backwards, Ron, many boxes of pizza on his lap. As we’re approaching our exit on the freeway, I notice a cop car behind us. My immediate thought was “I bet you he’s going to exit with us” and, sure enough, he does.

But then, he pulls ahead of us several cars and I think, hey, it was just a coincidence, no ulterior motives.

We turn onto Ron’s block and park, Ron is getting out and I notice, hey, there are flashing lights behind us. Ron looks back, his hands filled with pizza boxes and asks, somewhat incredulously, “did he just pull us over?”

Yep. He sure did.

The cop gets out of his car, strolls over to us and asks for license and registration, which I hand over. A well-trained question crosses my lips.

“What seems to be the problem, Officer?”

His explanation will go down in the annals of justification: “I noticed your front license plate was missing.”

“I know. Is that a problem?”

“There are people who steal the front license plates from cars, and put them onto similar vehicles. If you do a plate check, it seems to match.”

“So you wanted to warn me that my front plate was missing, in case it had been stolen and used on another stolen car?”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, I only have the one,” I lied with a smile, knowing full well the second one was on the back.

“Sometimes they come stuck together from the DMV, and you end up with both on the back.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that. I’ll have to check that when I get home!”

At some point during this conversation, I’d gotten out the car and was standing with Ron. I don’t remember why, but somewhere in here I felt compelled to explain to the cop, in my best “I’m your worst nightmare: an educated black man” voice, that we’d just come from volunteering at Habitat for Humanity, that we’d bought a dozen pizzas for the crew and were taking the rest home.

I thanked him for his concern and assured him that my front license plate hadn’t been stolen, and that I’d be sure to check my rear plate for a second one stuck to the first. I asked if there’s anything else we can do for him, and bade him farewell, and watched as he returned to his vehicle and pulled away.

There we were, two intelligent, well-paid, well-spoken black men, in somewhat shabby clothes and several boxes of pizza, pulled over by a cop because my front license plate was missing.

If only we didn’t have those pizzas.

George Carlin died this weekend.

If you know me, it probably doesn’t surprise you to learn that George Carlin was a major influence on me. His acerbic and well-crafted wit, faculty with words and staunch outsider stance proved irresistible to a reserved, introverted foreigner just finding his way in the world.

One of my favorite bits is “Euphemisms”. It’s Carlin at his verbal, thoughtful and politically (in-) correct best. He describes the “softening” of the American english language, going from “shell shock” to “battle fatigue” to “operational exhaustion” to “post-traumatic stress disorder”, all describing the same condition.

This language softening is still going on today. “Used cars” became, as Carlin noted, “previously owned transportation” and are now “certified pre-owned vehicles” (”one less syllable, but we gained a hyphen!” he might proclaim). And our soldiers in Iraq aren’t being killed by “bombs” set by “terrorists”, they’re being killed by “improvised explosive devices” used by “insurgents”. 

You owe it to yourself to watch the YouTube video of “Euphemisms”.

This bit also contains some of his best-known observations, things I’ve heard myself repeat many times, like

Contra killers are called “freedom fighters”. Well if “crime fighters” fight crime and “firefighters” fight fires, what do “freedom fighters” fight?

or, the one that springs to mind every single time I fly:

Like on the airlines they say they want to “pre-board”? Well what the hell does “pre-board”… what does that mean? To get on before you get on?

“Euphemisms” comes at the end of Carlin’s “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics”. It’s totally worth the $10 at iTunes or Amazon.com. (I currently have five of his albums¹, and they’re all worth it.)

Of course, not everything Carlin did was beautifully offensive, some of it was just well-crafted humor where the punch line is never obvious, but always satisfying, like his “Good ideas” piece, where he suggests, among other things, “a diet salad dressing called 500 islands”. As he says about himself in that bit, “I’m a visionary, I’m ahead of my time. Trouble is I’m only about an hour and a half ahead.”

Jerry Seinfeld wrote an article for the New York Times about Carlin’s death (he didn’t “pass away, or expire, like a magazine subscription”), and gave a perfect description of why I love Carlin:

He worked over an idea like a diamond cutter with facets and angles and refractions of light…. everything he did just had this gleaming wonderful precision and originality.

As a kid it seemed like the whole world was funny because of George Carlin. His performing voice, even laced with profanity, always sounded as if he were trying to amuse a child. It was like the naughtiest, most fun grown-up you ever met was reading you a bedtime story.

Thank you George Carlin, for making me laugh and think, and aspire to precision, originality and naughtiness.

1. Back in Town; The Little David Years: 1971-1977 (a 7 disc retrospective including his classic albums FM & AM, Class Clown, Occupation: Foole, Toledo, An Evening with Wally Londo, On the Road, and a bonus disc; Napalm And Silly Putty (his audiobook); A Place For My Stuff; and of course Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics. I suppose that’s technically eleven albums.  ↩

You know, we seldom write about our good experiences with companies, only the shitty ones. Whether it’s stupid “security” questions or being unwillingly opted-in to a mailing list, we read and write about the bad things a company does.

I should have gone in sooner, before I lost eight weeks of data. (And, with 802.11n on-board, I can finally buy a Time Capsule.)

Amazon

In May I bought Sex and The City (The Complete Series) for The Girl’s birthday. By some strange quirk, she never got around to watching any of the DVDs until this weekend, when she plucked a disc at random from the set and started watching through. After the third (or fourth, or was it fifth?) episode, the disc started to skip.

It was scratched, and pretty badly too.

We looked through the entire set, and of the 20 discs, 14 had scratches, ranging from minor to significant. Plus, two of the five discs in Season 6 were a completely different shade of pink from the other three.

I immediately emailed Amazon.

Ten hours later, they responded back:

I’m sorry for the problem you experienced with this shipment.

I’ve placed a new order for the item at no charge. 

And then they topped it by sending it out via one-day shipping. I sent the email on a Saturday night about 10 pm, and on Monday evening I had a new set, no questions asked, no “you already opened it”, no “how scratched are they”. Just “we’re sorry, here’s a new one”.

(I do need to ship the damaged ones back, of course.)

Amazon and Apple aren’t perfect, but they make up for their imperfections by providing the best customer service in their industries. An article in the New York Times earlier this year reflected on Amazon’s devotion to customer service. The author closed with a quote:

[Amazon CEO] Jeff [Bezos] used to say that if you did something good for one customer, they would tell 100 customers.

Customer service works again.

Six years ago, I didn’t have a driver’s license. Today, I hit 100,000 miles on my Nissan Altima.

My friends in New York are probably thinking “you drove 100,000 miles? Where the hell did you go?!”

My friends in California are probably thinking “you didn’t have a license six years ago? How the hell did you get around?!”

What I find interesting about this milestone is how quickly it came. I bought my Altima in November, 2002. Two years later, I’d put on 30,000 miles (I complained about the cost of maintenance at the time). A linear progression should have me around 80K today.

Where do those additional 300-miles-a-month-on-average come from? Probably from my habit of weekend driving, where I hop in the car with Ying, and drive somewhere “interesting” (which might mean Danville as easily as Napa).

And considering I lived a dozen miles or less from work for 4 1/2 of those 5 1/2 years, that means I drove about a thousand miles a month that aren’t work related.

Six years ago, I could never have imagined driving that much. Now I can’t imagine not driving.

Sigh. I’ve become a suburbanite.

(In case you’re wondering how I managed to snap a photo at 100,000 miles, I went out with about 50 miles remaining, and drove 25 miles, and turned around. No way was I missing this milestone.)

Losing data from your hard drive is easier than you think. You can delete it, run a magnet over it, drop it from great heights or just have a bad drive from a manufacturer that won’t admit a problem.

Here’s how I lost eight weeks of un-backed up data in about 20 minutes:

1. Start a MacBook, with a Seagate drive with firmware 7.01

2. Ensure  your MacBook’s sleep indicator light is busted, so you can’t tell when your system is safely asleep

3. Work late one night, and be in a hurry to get home

4. Close your MacBook, wait about 15, 20 seconds, and slip it into your bag.

5. Toss it into your car’s trunk

6. Drive home, about twenty minutes away

7. Open MacBook, notice it’s not sleeping, in fact it’s shut down

8. Power it up, get flashing question mark folder, and a whining drive.

Sigh. Dead drive, lost data.

When you close the MacBook, it writes out its memory to the drive. After it does that, it goes to sleep and flashes the sleep indicator. At this point, and not before, it’s safe to move the MacBook. What I think happened:

Since my sleep indicator was busted, I learned to either squeeze the case to try activating the light or, when that stopped working, waiting until the fans went quiet (about 30 to 45 seconds on average). That fateful evening, I must have not waited long enough, and the system was still awake when I slipped it into my bag, tossed it into my car, and drove home with it bouncing around in my trunk.

Add to that the apparent problems the Seagate firmware 7.01 drives seem to have and, well, dead drive.

Oh, I got a price quotes from two data recovery services. DriveSavers offered $500-$2,700, with an expected price closer to $2,000. Burgess Forensics offered $700-$1,750. I’ll be getting a quote from Seagate also. (I think it’s ironic that the drive manufacturer offers drive recovery services.)

This is the second Seagate firmware 7.01 drive I’ve lost. The first one was several months ago, when I first heard about these problems with this firmware. Being the paranoid type, I started backing up regularly, and sure enough, just a few days after a complete drive backup, the drive died.

Apple disclaims responsibility for data loss, and Seagate hasn’t shared its policy yet (their response to my inquiry was “we can try to recover your data” not “we know this is an issue and we’ll try to recover your data for free”).

I’m still deciding if I should go into debt to recover the data. While there is no single set of data that’s worth $1,800, I lost eight weeks of iChats, blog drafts, OmniFocus entries, music, photos, and, worst of all, the data I don’t even remember I had and lost.

If I knew what I lost, it would be easier. Not knowing makes it much, much harder.

I regret not paying better attention to my backup regime. Six years ago I wrote

[Y]ou might pay as much as $8,000 to get your data back. Far cheaper is a reliable backup. Start by deciding how much work you’re willing to re-create after a data loss, and back up at least that often (I backup twice a day). You don’t have to get elaborate; even copying to a CD-ROM or another hard drive manually will suffice in a pinch.

I take responsibility for not backing up as regularly as I used to. I plan to rectify that by adding a Time Capsule to my network. How protected is your valuable data?