We interrupt this Family Law is FUBAR series to point out something else that is now FUBAR: my employment situation. If you have any leads for an attorney position, especially any combination of corporate / regulatory / insurance / commuting distance from the Triad, please let me know.

We will return to the original bitch session shortly.

Last night someone called me on my Droid, but I missed the call because the instant I picked up the phone, the window to answer the incoming call went away, and I was back at the default screen you would see if no one was calling. I then had to push the phone button, then navigate my way back to the call “in progress,” by which time it had gone to voice mail and the caller had hung up. I never saw this weird behavior prior to upgrading to Froyo, but it seems to happen rather frequently now. Anyone know what causes it, or how to disable this dreadful “feature?”

Now that Blogsplat won’t let you comment the old fashioned way, I’m pretty much shut out of commenting on any Blogsplat account as “Xrlq.” Can anyone suggest a simple solution? I do not want to post under my real name, as would occur if I used my GMail account. I do not want to create another GMail account, especially if doing so would require me to log in and out of my real account just to post an occasional comment on someone’s Blogsplat account. And of course I don’t want to move my blog to another domain like WordPress.com just so that someone’s stupid blogging software will let me comment. Any simpler solutions I missed?

1. Here’s a question for those more knowledgeable about the military than I (and that ain’t sayin’ much). Assuming an otherwise clean record, if a gay person in the military does ask and does tell, and gets booted out as a result, which of the following is he most likely to receive:

1. Honorable discharge.
2. Fabulous discharge.
3. General discharge.
4. Big gay discharge.
5. Other than honorable discharge.
6. Red Badge of Gayness discharge.
7. Bad Conduct Discharge.
8. Hella-gay discharge.
9. Dishonorable discharge.
10. Other (specify).

2. Same question and same possible answers, only this time assume that rather than simply admitting out loud that he was gay, it came to light because he was caught doin’ the nasty with a dude. Assume the other dude was not in the service, and it didn’t violate any other law.

3. Same as #2, only this time the other dude was in the service, same rank, but the deed did not occur on a military base.

4. Same as #3, only this time it did occur on a military base.

5. Same as #4, only this time he outranked the other dude, who was not in his chain of command.

6. Same as #5, only this time he outranked the other dude, who reported to him indirectly.

7. Same as #6, only this time he was the other dude’s C.O.

AntiVir sez it’s the TR/Crypt.XPACK.Gen trojan horse. Is it, or is AntiVir full of crap? And if the latter, is there some way to decrapify AntiVir and allow it to run?

Everyone from the corporate execs and the regulators on down seems to agree that credit default swaps like the ones that sank AIG are “like” insurance, but technically aren’t insurance, and therefore cannot be regulated as such. I can’t for the life of me figure out why. Section 1101(a)(1) of the New York Insurance Law defines an “insurance contract” as:

[A]ny agreement or other transaction whereby one party, the “insurer”, is obligated to confer benefit of pecuniary value upon another party, the “insured” or “beneficiary”, dependent upon the happening of a fortuitous event in which the insured or beneficiary has, or is expected to have at the time of such happening, a material interest which will be adversely affected by the happening of such event.

Paragraph (2), in turn, defines a “fortuitous event” as “any occurrence or failure to occur which is, or is assumed by the parties to be, to a substantial extent beyond the control of either party.”

My question to those wiser than myself, and to any other readers who may care to speculate, are as follows:

1. If I purchase a credit default swap from you on a mortgage note I own, how is that different from an insurance contract?
2. If I purchase a credit default swap on a mortgage note I do not own, how is that different from gambling?

This puzzled me when I was a kid, but I never knew who to ask at the time: what is up with the “heat miser” who melts everything he touches and the “snow miser” who freezes everything? Aren’t these two about as un-miserly as it gets? They should be called the Heat Philanthropist and the Snow Philanthropist, or something. Or if they must be called misers, at least they could trade names, on the theory that anyone who freezes everything he touches isn’t really dishing out coldness, but withholding heat.

Any suggestions? The ideal aggregator for me would be one similar to Bloglines, but one that doesn’t (1) show me a shrugging idiot who’s supposed to be a plumber half the time I try to use it, (2) launch the wrong browser when I click on the notifier, or (3) shove some crappy software like Skweezer down my throat every time I try to access it from my Crackberry. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Has anyone gotten this feature on WordPress to work? I’ve set up my account on Bluehost for that purposes, with login “foo+xrlq.com” as Bluehost requires, but every time I try to input that into WordPress’s settings it changes the name back to Xrlq or foo, depending on the mood it’s in, and helpfully colors its wrong answer in green as if to rub in the fact that it knows I asked it to do one thing and it’s doing something else, anyway. I posted the same question to WordPress’s “support” forums a week ago, but apparently no one reads those things anymore.

As it looks like I may be having to move again, possibly to the Triad where land is reasonably priced, I’d kinda like my next place to be rural enough that I can “go to the range” by walking out of the house and into my own backyard. As a rule of thumb, how much land do you need for that to be realistic, safe, not a nuisance, etc.? 5 acres? 10? 100?