Author: Wil

When I was in Vegas for the WPT Championship, my iBook completely crashed, and made me very unhappy. If you’d like, you can refer to the Audioblog or moblog entries, and relive all the excitement for yourself.
When I got back from Vegas, I had a few e-mails from people who worked in various capacities at Apple. They all suggested I talk to different people in Customer care, and they were all optimistic that my problems with my iBook would be resolved. I was still pretty pissed about losing my laptop when I needed it most, so I was less inclined to expect the best, but I figured it would at least be worth a call to see if they’d be interested in helping me get the damn thing fixed.
So here’s the deal with Apple Customer Care: before I could even call one of the numerous people I’d been referred to, one of them called me!
He never told me how he knew, and I didn’t think to ask, but he said that he understood that I was having problems with my iBook. He listened patiently as I recounted my woeful tale, and he apologized that I’d had such rotten luck with my two iBooks. We talked for a few minutes, and though I’m legally bound to keep the details of our conversation confidential, I don’t think Apple will mind if I reveal that the Apple rep who helped me was patient, understanding, and completely helpful.
And late last week, my faulty iBook was replaced with a shiny new Powerbook. And I mean shiny. It’s all silver and tough.
So looking at the scouting report:

iBook: 0 for 2.
Powerbook: 0 for 0, but it looked great in Spring Training.
Apple Customer Care: 3 for 3.

Put another way . . . Will definitely do business with again!!!11 TOP RATING!!! A+++++++++!!!!!!!
Har. Har. Har. Gods, I slay me with my funny.
If you’ve ever had a problem with a huge company, you’d probably agree that (in most cases) customer service has all but ceased to exist. I can’t speak for all their customers, but it’s supermegaawesome that Apple cares about this particular customer.
. . . afterthought: In comments, Starkman says:“. . . you cannot even talk about the experience because you received free stuff in return.” I want to be clear: I can’t talk about the details because I signed the same NDA everyone who replaces a product signs, and I didn’t get anything for free. I don’t expect, nor would I ever accept, something for nothing.
Apple is a HUGE corporation, and I’m sure the problems of one user aren’t going to make a dent in their Big Picture, but they’ve always made me feel like they care about me as a customer. I appreciate that, and I wanted to share that appreciation in a public forum.
. . . one more thought: If you’re so invested in cynically believing that this wasn’t just good customer service, nothing I can say will change your mind, so don’t waste our time reading the rest of this.
Quite a few people think that I got some sort of special treatment because, they say, I’m some sort of big celebrity or something. Newsflash: I’m not.
I’m sure experiences at the genius bar vary from store to store (I’ve always had a fantastic experience in Pasadena), but my experience, at the corporate level, is the same as I’ve heard from countless other Apple owners: if a problem can’t be solved at the store-level, and it’s properly escalated, Apple takes care of it. That’s awesome customer service. I got called because I was already in the system from my previous problem, and that’s just Apple CS protocol.
So why did I write about this? I didn’t have to say anything, but I wrote about it when things went wrong, so I thought it was only right to write about it when things got fixed.

Even though I felt like total crap (that’s better than a pile of ass but not as bad as complete and utter crap), the Midi-clorians that make me an actor took over just before showtime, and I had a great show last night. I had as much fun and felt as relaxed during and after the show as I did last week, which means that the performance last week wasn’t a fluke — this show really is as good as I think it is.
In fact, that’s the whole point of this entry: I want to make sure that everyone who reads my blog knows how honored and proud I am to work with the amazing actors and writers who are in ACME: A Day In The Life. I didn’t think there would ever be a show as much fun as Love Machine, but it turns out I was wrong.
I wish we could extend for another ten performances, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen; with ten actors, many of whom have families, it’s just too hard to commit to that long of a run, especially through summer.
The run ends on June 18th. Please, please please come out and see ACME: A Day In The Life before it’s just another poster on the wall.

I think I have 81 cubic feet of solid mucous in my head. When I blow my nose, it’s thick and dark yellow — that means I have an infection, right?
Note: The preceding two sentences were awfully gross, and shouldn’t have been read by the squeamish.
So I never got around to watching Star Wars yesterday. Instead, I read about half of Aces and Kings and studied Harrington On Hold’Em. Aces and Kings is really fantastic, man. If you liked Big Deal, Biggest Game In Town, or Diary of a Mad Poker Player, you’re going to love Aces and Kings. And Harrington on Hold’Em is officially the most useful and easy to understand poker book for advanced players I’ve read. If you’re serious about winning tournaments, it’s totally worth the investment. (Winning Low-Limit Hold’Em remains the best for beginners, if you’re keeping score at home.) In fact, I like these books so much, I think I’ll write reviews of them at Amazon when I reduce the mucous in my head to a more manageable 11 cubic feet.
Note: The preceding sentence was awfully gross, and shouldn’t have been read by the squeamish.
When I finally did watch TV, I watched this fantastic old movie called Fail-safe, and some episodes of Futurama. Speaking of Futurama, what the hell is wrong with [adult swim]?! They took Futurama off to run American Dad?! Are they high? Worst. Cartoon. Switch. Ever.
Today I think I’m doing some more Cold War thrillers: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and the original Manchurian Candidate. Then I’m loading up on cold remedies and sleeping a whole bunch, so I can hurry up and get better.
I have to be well by tomorrow, because we’ve got a couple of reviewers coming to see ACME: A Day In The Life, and a head filled with mucous really interferes with my funny.

When I was a kid, and I or my brother or sister would get sick, our mom always dropped everything and took care of us. We’d usually spend a day or two on the couch, where mom would bring us all sorts of herbal teas, feed us massive amounts of vitamins, and let us watch whatever we wanted on television. Before VCRs, when I was sick, I’d watch game shows until ten, then whatever was on PBS (usually Electric Company or Zoom) until noon, then Twilight Zone until one. After that, TV pretty much sucked for the next two hours, so I’d read a book or take a nap, depending on how lousy I felt. After we got our first family VCR — a top-loading monster with digital numbers and woodgrain accents that weighed about 70 pounds — I would spend the day watching Star Wars (taped from ONTV) over and over again.
Without fail, when the illness passed, Mom would get sick the very next day. I remember thinking that it was like she’d used all her energy taking care of us, and when she realized we were fine, she didn’t have anything left to take care of herself. For the next few days, Mom would take my place on the couch, but she watched soaps instead of Star Wars — I never understood that.
This is, of course, a long-winded way of saying that as Nolan got better yesterday, I noticed a scratchiness in my throat that turned into burning in my sinuses by late yesterday afternoon. I’m not coughing, yet, but boy do I feel like shit.
Looks like I’ll spend today watching Star Wars on DVD.

Everyone who is upset about the REAL ID act I mentioned on Monday needs to immediately head over to ArsTechnica, and read this story, written by Hannibal:

The big news of the past two days is the impending passage of the Real ID act. I’m going to spare you any kind of detailed analysis of the ID and database aspects of this bill for two reasons a) they’re already covered very well in sources I’ll list below, and b) this bill contains a truly bizarre provision that caused a run on tinfoil hats in the blogosphere when it was first introduced, but has now dropped out of all coverage of this bill that I’ve read so far. (You’d think a clause that uses an obscure and never-before-invoked part of the Constitution to place the secretary of DHS above both the Supreme Court and the Constitution itself would get more coverage, but more on that in a moment.)

More on that, indeed.

Section 102 of H.R. 418 would amend the current provision to require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any law upon determining that a waiver is necessary for the expeditious construction of the border barriers. Additionally, it would prohibit judicial review of a waiver decision or action by the Secretary and bar judicially ordered compensation or injunction or other remedy for damages alleged to result from any such decision or action.
To understand what this business about prohibiting judicial review means, you have to know two things. First, you have to know a bit about the contested history of judicial review. Depending on who you talk to, the Federal judiciary’s power to overturn a law or to put a stop to an official act of government on the grounds that the law or act is unconstitutional and/or a violation of basic rights is either a core constitutional principle that ensures the rule of law and protects the rights of minorities from the “tyranny of the masses” (e.g. from Brown v. the Board of Education to Roe v. Wade) , or it’s an affront to democratic governance and the chief enabler of left-wing “judicial activism.”

Okay, prohibiting judicial review of anything is absolutely insane. Without judicial review of laws, how to we have a balanced government? How do we protect our constitutional rights when unconstitutional laws are passed? How do we prevent the tyranny of the majority? Does this mean that the United States ceases to be a nation of laws, and becomes a nation of men?
Let’s look back at what I wrote on Monday:

The US Congress, the lawmakers who derive their power from the consent of the governed, are about to take a huge step toward turning our country into a police state, and they’re doing it without any debate at all.

It’s bad enough that Congress passed legislation which fundamentally changes our right to privacy, and possibly violates the Fourth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution, but they’ve also taken away our access to the courts (right now it’s just in cases related to this loosely-defined “expeditious construction of the border barriers”, but don’t think for a second that it will stop there) and they did it without a single word of debate. That these provisions — which are overwhelmingly opposed by the a vast majority of Americans — were snuck into a must-pass bill, and passed without debate is irresponsible at best, and criminal at worst. This is not democracy. This is fascism.
You should really read the whole story, where Hannibal sums it up for us:

Congress has crafted a completely unprecedented provision that guts the principle of judicial review by granting the DHS secretary complete and total immunity from the courts when it comes to the construction of “barriers and roads” in this one specific geographical region, and they’ve buried this provision inside a national ID card act which is itself attached to a large military appropriations bill that no Congressperson in their right mind would vote against (money for the troops and all that).
[. . .]
As a postscript, the icing on the cake of this whole thing has to be the way that the Republican sponsors of the bill actually voted down a proposed provision in the national ID card part of the law that would prevent the government from using the Real ID database as a national database of gun owners

Of course. Why am I not surprised? The Republicans in Congress don’t care at all about upholding the Constitution. They have abandoned their traditional belief in limited, non-intrusive government. They are the collective bitch of the Extreme Religious Right and groups like the NRA. They are tyrants, and Democrats who allowed this to pass without discussion or debate are cowards.
As I wrote on Monday, the leadership in this Congress is out of touch and out of control. If this doesn’t call for a general strike, I don’t know what does.