He got married four years ago. I was the best man at the wedding. Two daughters came in the package. I’ve become a member of the family and an uncle to the girls. Anyway, short story long, they had a baby shower yesterday for their new son who was due to be born in early Feb. I think the party excited him too much and he decided to show  up early to see all his gifts. I was at their house last night playing video games with Nick and the girls. The contractions got close together, off to the hospital they went and their son (my new nephew) was born this morning. Talk about a just in time baby shower.

Bob

As we all know many groups have / still do suffer discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, handicaps, sexual preference and of course gender identity. With all the laws that protect gays, minorities, the disabled and so forth, the transgender community seems to be the most discriminated against group remaining. A majority of those who prefer transgenders as partners are still closeted. They fear discrimination at work or problems with family, if their secret love of transsexuals is discovered.

Those of us involved in this sub-culture want to have places we can go and feel welcome and comfortable being ourselves. I believe that Jamie, the promoter of Tgirl Nights wants that. However, based on what I’ve experienced, Hamburger Mary’s in Long Beach is not such a place. Putting my incident aside for a moment, I have noted on prior occasions that the security staff there are simply nasty to the patrons. I’m not a regular there. But I am now hearing that this type of behavior (such as preventing people from using the restrooms before closing time and yelling at them to hurry up and get out) is common.

It appears that there is no management in charge and the bouncers do whatever they want. They don’t seem to understand that we the customers are the reason they have that job. There are also the basic concepts of customer service such as common courtesy and providing restroom facilities to its patrons that they don’t seem to get.

So I ask myself why should I want to spend my money and time in place in which the patrons are treated with contempt and made to feel unwelcome. I also ask why would anyone want to be treated that way? Why should anyone support a business that treats them or their friends that way? Unless some major changes are made, I certainly will not support this business again.

As before, I welcome comments. I received some interesting emails after my initial post here.

I am 49 years old and 5′ 3″ tall. I really don’t pose a physical threat. I have never been thrown out of a club or assaulted in such a way. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t start physical altercations, nor do I get belligerent. In fact, I often become friends with the bouncers at clubs because they know I’m not a a trouble maker.

The reason I’m writing this is that nightclub bouncers sometimes go too far and they usually get away with it. Some even seem to get off on it. I’ve seen it happen a number of times, but never expected to be personally involved in such an altercation. Now that I am home, I am already feeling pain from this assault. This type of thing simply should not happen. It would not have happened if the bouncers involved had any sense of humanity or even a sense of how a business should treat its customers. The club promoter apologized to me and I believe she is sincere. However she does not own the establishment and doesn’t have control of its employees. So her apology does not solve the problem. I don’t know what legal recourse I have, but I will likely have to pursue this further.

I welcome comments / opinions. If you are an attorney who practices this type of law in California and wish to contact me, please do so via email at bk_btg@yahoo.com.

So I went home and followed the genius’ instructions (which I later found out to be partially incorrect.) As bad luck would have it, by time capsule failed during the restore process. Fortunately, most of my applications were restored along with some key files before the failure. But lost a bunch.

I’m pretty anal about data security and had backups to my backup. Unfortunately I had been lackadaisical and had not updated those since March 15. So I had a big hole of missing files, which is a real bitch since I run my business with my computer. I found a data recovery business in Baltimore called Mac Medics. I had to send my time capsule to them. It took them several days, but were finally able to restore most of what was lost. They bailed me out.

I wanted to share this with my readers because data security is important. If you have important files on your computer, maintain at least two backups. I learned a few other things I want to share. One is I had a first generation Apple Time Capsule which I learned was a problematic product from the beginning. The combination of the Apple Time Machine software and the Time Capsule hardware is a great concept and has worked for me in the past, but it failed on me this time. This has caused me to change how I operate. I trashed my time capsule as it can no longer be trusted. I still use the Time Machine software, but with a standard external hard drive. I’m also going to update my second backup weekly and my third backup monthly.  This mess has cost me about $800 and dozens of lost hours. I don’t want that to happen again.

I also have some advice for those of you who have Apple computers. If your computer has a hardware failure look for a third party Apple authorized repair shop. Here’s why. Last year the motherboard failed in my Macbook. I took it to the Apple store like most people would. They can’t fix anything in the store. They wanted to take my computer and ship it to a repair facility in Texas and I would be without it for two weeks. I found a shop in my area called Comp Solutions in Northridge. They were able to get a new motherboard in two days and it was repaired the day the new part arrived – all under warranty. The Apple store is fine for configuration problems or if you simply need help with something you don’t understand. But if you need a repair and need your system back up quickly, I found the other method is much better.  Ok, that’s it carry on.