I received a letter from my bank today. Before the fold, it contains this simple text:

Matthew—We’re writing to remind you it’s important for us to receive the missing information indicated below by November 5, 2009.

“Oh no,” I thought in a panic. I’m in trouble with my bank. I must have missed something important.

I then unfolded the rest of the letter.

It’s a promotion for Accidental Death & Dismemberment insurance. It’s important that I sign up soon if I want to receive their promotion.

This is one of those things that really bothers me. I’m used to companies playing dirty tricks, but my bank—not just any bank, but DCU, which is usually above these things—trying to fleece me into believing that they’re sending me an important communication about my account, when it is actually a promotion? It left me somewhat upset.

I plan to write a letter to the bank. But in the meantime, I decided to engage in a bit of petty, passive-aggressive protest. I wrote a quick one-paragraph e-mail expressing my resentment for their practices and stuffed it in the Business Reply Mail envelope they sent along.

But then I got to wondering: just how much was my protest going to cost? And how are they billed? Will taping pennies as I’ve heard about drive up their costs?

I went to the source, and the answer is kind of depressing. The “Basic” plan costs them 74 cents per parcel. Score! But if you read on, it’s not nearly as fun. If they receive a lot of replies (891, apparently, not really that many) the rate drops to 8.3 cents each. If they use “Qualified” mail, which seems to consist of setting up a virtual ZIP+4 ZIP code and using barcodes for faster routing, the rate is 5.2 cents. If they receive more than 42,778 cents, they should go for the “High-volume QBRM” plan, which, after an outlay of about $2,500 to set up, costs them a mere seven-tenths of a cent per reply.

It does seem that there’s a weight limit of 2 ounces on the cheaper “Qualified” BRM, but I don’t know how it works. I can’t imagine that the USPS actually weighs every incoming message to make sure. So I don’t know if my fantasy of an envelope weighing more than 2 ounces actually gets me anywhere. If it does, note that there seems to be no reason to go beyond 2 ounces, so don’t waste your pennies.

I simply wrote them a concise letter and stuffed it in the envelope. While I’d love to think that I’m sticking it to them, odds are that I’m costing them 0.7 cents. The greater cost is probably in the 20 seconds it will take someone to open the envelope, glance at the letter, and throw it in the trash. But I don’t really care. I feel like I’m sticking it to the man.

Unfortunately, the reply goes to the insurance company, not my bank. I plan to write an actual e-mail to my bank, intended more at expressing my disappointment, and less at wasting their time and money.

A lot of times I see a headline and jump to a conclusion. I think that makes me a typical American. Or probably just a typical human.

But sometimes I actually think about the news and read the whole article. And sometimes I find that it’s actually very important to read news instead of forming strong opinions based on the headline alone.

For example, in Massachusetts, prisoners will get H1N1 vaccines first. My first thought? That’s absurd. Long before any long-abiding, hard-working people can get the vaccine, we’re going to give it to crooks and felons? Except there’s a perfectly-good explanation. If a couple people in prison got it, the entire prison would most likely end up with it. It’s the same reason college dorms are so fanatical about everyone having lots of shots. People live in closer quarters than usual.

But at the end, I was still angry. Except I’m not angry that prisoners are being given the vaccine first. I’m angry that it was on the news. When you understand why, it’s an utter non-news story. The only reason I can see to run the story is to hope to generate outrage and controversy.

I saw a handful of news articles about the Sidekick. Basically, all T-Mobile Sidekicks apparently store everything–contacts, texts, photos, etc.–in the cloud. If the device is hard-rebooted, it doesn’t bother saving them, since it can just pull them back from the cloud. No one was ever really aware of this, it seems, since it worked so well.

Until, last week, the service went down across all of T-Mobile. Minutes (it’s a smartphone. It’s like crack.) turned to hours, which turned to days. Finally, it was announced that anything that wasn’t restored was probably irretrievably lost.

An additional, confusing detail: T-Mobile runs the network, but Danger, who created the phone, runs the servers that this all runs on. Except Danger was bought by Microsoft, so Microsoft is essentially at fault. (Which explains something that confused me greatly at first: why Microsoft was being blamed for a failure on a non-Windows phone.)

A few coworkers and I were talking about this at work. It boggles my mind that the data is just gone. Take, for instance, our database at work. For reasons that irritate me, our site runs off of a single server. But we have enough copies of it, including multiple hot spares, that I don’t feel like counting them to tell you how many we have. They not only span different storage mediums and switches (so that, say, a SAN failure, or an Ethernet/Fibre switch failure would be inconsequential to our operation), but they span physical locations, although only our “real” data center is online. You could detonate an atom bomb in one of our cabinets and we’d still have all of the data available offsite. The other side of things is that deliberately-deleted data (“DROP DATABASE master_database”) would be merrily replicated across most of our servers. But we have enough backups (again, spanning both physical locations and storage mediums) that we would probably only lose a few hours’ worth of records.

Our site is probably considerably smaller than Sidekick’s setup. They apparently ran an Oracle RAC setup, for example. So it should be next to impossible for all that data to just disappear.

AppleInsider completes that sentence with an “unless…” that many of us probably didn’t even consider: unless it was internal sabotage.

For reasons I can’t quite articulate, I have an irrational phobia of poison ivy. I’ve never had poison ivy, which means that it’s theoretically possible I’m not even allergic, though I doubt that. It’s just that poison ivy and its toxins seem terrifying to me.

So I always assumed it was just my paranoia when I noticed that poison ivy is everywhere, and in a bad way. While it’s not that uncommon to see it as a short plan with three leaves, I’ve noticed that the entirety of the Interstate Highway System, or at least the 50 miles I spend on it, is covered with a mass of poison ivy that is overtaking rocks and vegetation, and, in places, growing as tall as I am. (“Growing as high as I am,” as I initially wrote, seems to lead to a different conclusion about why I’m terrified of poison ivy, incidentally.)

BoingBoing posted in April that poison ivy really is taking over. With increased CO2 emissions, Satan’s plant is able to not only grow more quickly and larger, but also to produce more toxins. In other words, it’s bigger and badder.

Their most recent post about this mankind-dooming discovery includes something that looks like it’s straight out of a mad scientist’s laboratory, or perhaps a science-fiction horror movie about super-fertilized poison ivy. CO2 seems to be a sort of catalyst to poison ivy, the sort of unfair advantage you might read about in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. The higher levels of CO2 help the poison ivy grow larger leaves, which, in turn, allow it to process more sunlight, which, in turn, allows it to grow even bigger.

The Forestry Service has an interesting page on poison ivy, too. Poison ivy seems to be a favorite food of white-tailed deer, for example. They’re not affected by it. (If we prohibit hunting white-tailed deer for a few years, is it possible that they will become plentiful enough to eradicate poison ivy?) It’s deliberately planted in the Netherlands to keep dikes from eroding. (And here I thought I wanted to move to the Netherlands…) It’s supposedly planted in gardens because some people find the leaves, with their red color in the autumn, to be pleasing to the eye. (Others of us find it horrifying to the eye.)

The Forestry Service page also mentions that “[i]ngested leaves do not confer immunity,” debunking a myth that I’m pretty sure does not actually exist at all. Other studies have found that, when it’s soaked in wastewater (i.e., sewage), the growth of poison ivy was not affected. It is also somewhat tolerant of floods. It even seems okay with fires, because its roots can extend deep enough to not be considerably affected. They do note a perhaps-unsurprising conclusion, that burning poison ivy after it has already been treated with an herbicide will decrease the odds of it returning. In other words, if you kill it and then set it on fire, there’s a chance that it won’t regrow. (But note that setting it on fire is generally an awful idea, since the oil can be turned into a vapor; also, fire-damaged poison ivy seems to grow back more densely, according to the Forestry Service. Ergo, you may apply poison-ivy killer, and, when it’s dead, set it on fire. But then you’ll breath in the vaporized oil, getting poison ivy in your throat, and the poison ivy will just grow back stronger next year.)

There is hope, however. The Forestry Service mentions Pileolaria shiraiana, a parasitic rust affecting poison ivy. Hopefully, President Obama will take this up as one of his next priorities.

I’m a pretty big believer that team-building is important in any group that matters. Not necessarily doing corny “fall backwards and I’ll catch you” drills at a camp, but just having a good time with your coworkers and getting to know them. At work we stay late Wednesdays to have a company dinner, which also allows us to leave a bit early on Friday. Wednesday nights look more like a big family at dinner than a company dinner. Rather than timidly fearing committing some sort of faux paus in front of the boss, we’re cracking jokes and talking about each others’ personal lives. The executives consider this time so valuable that the company picks up the dinner, even though they’re paying both for the food and our time as we engage in frivolity. It helps to keep us a very tight-knit team.

We also have a ping-pong table. It’s kind of absurd, really. We’re in a small office, so the ping-pong table is out front. We have a little lobby area with a couch and a few chairs, and then a ping-pong table. (Sometimes this results in important business visitors coming in and nearly being hit by a stray ping-pong ball.) One thing I’ve noticed is that the ping-pong table’s use seems directly proportional to the amount of work we have. On the surface, this seems like a really bad thing: when we should be working the hardest, we play ping-pong the most? But I think it’s actually a good thing. After a couple hours of intense concentration, I find myself somewhat burned out. I can feel my productivity dropping. I look up and find a coworker who doesn’t look immersed in his work, and we put aside our work for 20 minutes or so. While we think we’re just having some fun, I think there’s a good business case to be made for what we’re doing. I know that if I’m really burned out, I have the potential to coast for a couple hours, doing work but not really having the energy to do it really well. But I also know that if I’m really burned out, a couple short but intense games of ping-pong will pick me back up.

So this not-a-news-story article about a basketball game in which Obama and some of his Cabinet faced off against each other brought a smile to my face. Things like this make for outstanding teams. And when you’re playing for fun, playing “against” someone, trash-talking the President or not, you’re really playing with the other team.

The one thing I regret is that it seems to be comprised mostly, if not exclusively, of Democrats. Not that basketball can solve all our problems, but if you get a few Congressional Republicans to play on Team Congress, I really think you’d be laying the seed for a bit of bipartisanship. It’s just a baby-step, surely, but you’d look across the aisle and see a few basketball buddies in a sea of what was formerly “them,” the “opposition.” You’ll be just a bit more willing to step across and try to work something out.

I not only voted for Obama, but I even spent a month campaigning for him full-time. I still give him high marks.

But I had the following conversation today:

“Did you hear your buddy won the Nobel Peace Prize?” “For what?” “Peace!” “Where is there peace?!”

Seriously, can you name one place? We’re currently waging two wars, plus there are myriad minor conflicts at home. Not to mention the threat of a nuclear Iran, crazies at the helm of a lot of other countries, and the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian saga.

Sure, it’s great to see Obama trying, but I really have to agree with the pundits saying it’s kind of absurd. Let’s wait until I can think of somewhere that’s actually at peace. Though I’ll agree with Obama’s statement, who, CNN reports, said he “viewed the decision less as a recognition of his own accomplishments and more as ‘a call to action.'”

A lot is being said these days about how incredibly nasty Americans can be. We’re seeing it in politics, the media, and really, everywhere. Most people are nice, some people are a little grumpy, but a very small minority seem to be full of seething rage. Not ticked-off rage, but foaming-at-the-mouth, screaming-at-the-top-of-your-lungs rage.

I’ve noticed this first-hand, as lately I’ve been more involved than usual in handling comments from our users. I should note that the community I refer to is a completely free online service, so it’s not as if people have the expectation that they’re paying us big bucks so we’d better cater to their needs. Not that it would excuse some of what they’re saying, but the point is that, really, we have zero obligation to do anything at all. We’re a free service that we graciously allow them to use.

One person didn’t receive a periodic newsletter from us. She sent us an e-mail that intermittently ventured into ALL CAPS WITH EXCLAMATION POINTS, and started issuing ultimatums. While it would still be inexcusably rude if we had, say, lost years worth of uploaded content and double-billed her credit card, I’ll reiterate that she didn’t receive a newsletter from our free site, which is what set her off. We recently conducted a short survey of some of our users, and, while a coworker was going over the feedback we received at a meeting, there were some that she refused to read aloud because of their contents. Another coworker today received an e-mail calling her an ignorant C-word, and it wasn’t even in response to any sort of problem we caused or confrontation they perceived.

What is up with people? I tend to be nice for a few reasons. The first and most important is that I’m not a giant douchebag. My parents raised me so that I would at least pretend to be nice to people. And then there’s the time I spent working with customers all day long when I worked at the bowling alley, when I realized that most people would merrily take out their frustrations with my employer’s policies or with credit card companies or gas prices on me, a poor high-schooler. (“Gas prices?,” you might ask. Yeah, I don’t understand, either.)

And there’s a little bit of cold, calculated game-rigging going on with how I interact with people. Somewhere in between naturally being polite and having dealt with lots of people, some polite and some not, I’ve come to realize that, even if I’m actually angry, pretending to be an easy-going nice guy practically guarantees that the person I’m talking to will come to see things the way I see them.

It’s to be expected that some people will periodically be a bit short with someone in conversation. But what’s with all of the unreasonable levels of rage? Your newsletter is delayed so you send us eight paragraphs of all-caps text? You misconstrue something in a paranoid fashion and call my coworker a cu**? Is this what we’ve come to? Is someone pumping steroids into the water supply?

I’ve ranted about burning the flag before. While I find it offensive, I tend to view the flag as a piece of cloth on a stick that implicitly has “America” written on it. I don’t care about the piece of cloth as much as what it stands for.

So I find it mind-bogglingly contradictory that anyone would propose banning the burning of the flag. If you burn the flag, you’re a jerk. But the First Amendment grants you the right to do so. Those that seek to ban flag desecration, in my opinion, are trampling the Constitution instead of the flag. The flag is ultimately just a piece of cloth, while the Constitution is the fabric that built America. This is one of the comparatively few issues where I just can’t fathom the other side of. Abortion, gun control, taxes, health care, wars, airport security, domestic wiretapping… I can understand why someone might weigh in on the other side. But this isn’t one of them.

OKCupid is one of the largest free dating sites. (Bear with me. I’ll tie this together in a minute.) Besides all the usual dating stuff, they have a lot of polls. In addition to lots of polls and lots of users, they also have some people who are as obsessed with extracting interesting statistics and trends from all the stuff sitting in their database. The survey questions are user-generated, and they’ve found that the most controversial ones tend to bring in the most responses. (This isn’t really surprising.)

So they started generating reports, state-by-state, on the answers to a lot of these questions, and posting them on their blog. [Be warned that the subject matter involves a question on rape. Not really NSFW, unless you’ve got your laptop out at a company-wide meeting and someone mentions the OKCupid blog and its data.] Most leave me feeling pretty good about living in the Northeast. There’s a question about how often you shower, and it blows my mind that anyone wouldn’t shower every day. But what really fascinates me was the question about flag-burning. There are small, dense pockets of blue (“don’t outlaw flag-burning”) amid an enormous sea of red. It’s hard to gauge actual proportions, though, because there are giant clumps but enormous numbers of scattered answers.

Actually, a second thing fascinates me about that graph. Very indirectly, it’s a graph of population density. It might not be representative of the whole US population (it’s OKCupid.com users who answered a question about flag-burning), but I’d tend to think that the results are at least fairly representative. It doesn’t surprise me terribly that some areas are more dense than others, and I’m only mildly surprised to find that America’s borders are practically drawn on the map by increased population. Look at Florida or the Great Lakes. The sparsely-dotted terrain gives way to a nearly solid line on the oceanfront.

But what fascinates me most is that you can see the vast falloff in population density, and that it occurs nearly dead-center in America in a straight line.

In the unlikely event that I should meet an untimely demise, I hereby request that no signs, painted blankets, etc. which may be produced in my memory, be affixed to any bridges or overpasses. Furthermore, I request that no stickers or decals making reference to me be affixed to vehicles.

While I’m being half-facetious in drafting a will dealing with minutia that probably doesn’t belong in a will at all, I’m also completely serious.

A lot of people are picky about computers. It’s gotta be a Mac, or it’s got to run Windows 7, or it’s got to have at least 6GB of RAM, or the motherboard needs to support hardware RAID…

But there are lots of times when all you really care about is having a computer to surf the web and check your e-mail. It doesn’t really matter if it’s running XP or Ubuntu or what, and you don’t care about RAM or disk speed. There’s really a lot of times when this is all you need, and I think there are even people who never need anything more. They’re not going to try to play Counterstrike or use Photoshop to edit high-resolution panoramas and apply complicated filters.

And that’s why things like the Lenovo IdeaCenter C300 or even the Acer AspireRevo are so cool in my book. Both will work fine for basic usage. Surf the web, check your e-mail, or even watch TV on Hulu. And they’re only a few hundred bucks.