New 'Girlfriend' Crosses The Line

After the first few dates, I slept with this girl I've been seeing two days ago. I am reluctant to call her my girlfriend because after the first time we actually did it, she was laying next to me and asked, "so what are we, friends with benefits?"

And I said "yes."

It didn't upset me that she said friends with benefits and not girlfriend. I had already told her that I was not looking for a monogamous relationship, implying that all I wanted to do was hang out and screw. So her guess was pretty accurate, because to be honest she's flat out loony tunes. And she drinks like a fish - and she's kind of mean on top of all that.

For instance, the other night she's laying next to me and she says, "I don't think you understand how much I like you."

"Oh?" I say. And she gets up in a huff and rolls over and says "you always say the wrong thing."

And I just laughed, "okay." Games.

After awhile she gets cuddly again. She smells like a hangover.

We start to fool around, and I do the responsible thing and get up to put a condom on. When I get back to the bed, she's froze up. So I lie down next to her wondering what the hell it was I did this time. More games.

Next thing I know she pulls this rollover move that removes the condom, and she mounts me before I realize what has happened. I pull out and push her off, and go to get another condom. Once I get back to bed she's froze up again. I go to mount her, to continue the moment and she says, "oh no you had your chance - go to bed." Crazy games.

I slept the night, left in the morning, and haven't called her since. That was two days ago.

Update Aug 5: I got a text at 2 this morning from her that said, "Hope you are having a good week I'll see you around take care." At 10am I responded, "OK you too sounds good."

Problem solved.

Hovering Blog Subscription Ads' Inevitable Result

I've noticed a disturbing trend in blogging lately, and that is a roving, hovering "ad" of sorts that is timed to enter the screen and cover, yes, COVER the words you are currently reading. Sometimes the ad is for some product or website, but more recently I have noticed that it is usually an ad for the blog itself.

Let's breakdown the scenario here. While surfing the net, you happen upon a webpage, often a blog, that contains content that you find yourself interested in. You stop to read or browse to see if you are interested further. Just as you get to the fourth or fifth sentence - which is usually still the introduction stage of most writing, before the true meat of the article, before you even know if you might want to keep reading this particular article or not - an ad intrudes your view and forces you to click it away to continue reading the article. Minor annoyance it may seem, but I say hardly.

Let's explore the logic here. You visit a website. You observe the page for, say, twenty seconds. You have stayed long enough to pass the ADD test - you MUST be dying to join the RSS feed and I mean right away! I mean, you want to join up SO FAST that you don't even want to FINISH reading this article!! You just want to join now and forget about us giving you time to decide on your own. Forget about a little TACT, say, perhaps using a more subtle technique. Something fucking polite like having your last paragraph casually mention, "Did you enjoy this article? Join our RSS feed!" But I guess genius ideas like this are too much for a blogger to manage. Instead they want to find the world's most annoying plug-in and turn their blog into a goddamn menace.

Note to bloggers: I inevitably navigate away from your website when you force feed ads of any kind, especially a subscription invite. I don't care if what I was reading was a recipe or a plan to end world hunger. I don't care if it was the cutest fucking lolcat meme the world has ever known. I don't care if you want to give me a free Wal Mart giftcard or a laptop or even a fucking million dollars. All I want to do is get away from your website as fast as possible. Forget what you had to say, FUCK YOU and go to hell.

Here's why: If you are so eager for a fan base to subscribe to your blog that you can't even give someone the courtesy of being able to READ YOUR WORK before you shove an ad in their face, then I can only respond by being MORE EAGER to get the fuck away. Sometimes I have even blocked your domain so I am never bothered by your pesky, clingy, starving for attention, loser-ass, self-worthless pathetic bloggers life again.

Fucking douchebags. Get a clue!

Landlords Display Oblivious Inconsideration

An hour and a half ago I was woken up by an argument outside my door. It was my landlords. They were arguing about whether I would be bothered by a dumpster parked in the driveway. Seriously. A dumpster. Parked. In. The. Fucking. Driveway. At 11:30 on a work night. At this moment, hypothetically, which am I more likely to be bothered by? Which is more inconsiderate: waking someone up out of a beautiful sleep, or parking a nice quiet dumpster sometime in the near future - most likely when I am not asleep?

Apparently, this one is too much for my landlords to figure out on their own.

Not wanting to get dressed just to point out the obvious to people who are at least ten years older than me - and should certainly known better - I turned on my front porch light instead. You know, in that laid-back country way, sort of to silently say, "WHAT IN THE FUCK-ALL IS THAT RACKET OUTSIDE MY DOOR AT GODDAMN MIDNIGHT!?"

To give them a moment to contemplate the effect their argument was having on their good-money-paying tenant, I left the light on and went to take a piss.

Upon return from the bathroom I realized that they were still arguing.

It is now 1 am, and I can't get back to sleep. Instead of laying in bed thinking about how much of assholes my landlords are and how I didn't sleep for shit last night and - good God - I don' t need two fucking insomniac nights in a row, I'm looking for a new place on craigslist instead.

Self Check Out: A Word to The Wise

Many grocery stores have self-serve checkout lanes designed primarily for decreasing payroll, with an assumed positive side-effect of having faster check outs for those in a rush. That is if some stupid fucking idiot doesn't get in line with a cart full of produce. Earth to dick head: LEAVE IT TO THE PROS! If you don't know the code for those vegetables, don't get in the self serve line. If you have more than a few things, DON'T GET IN THE SELF SERVE LINE.

Let's go over that for the mentally challenged dip shits I see fouling this up every day. The rules for self-service grocery store check-out lanes are as follows. DO NOT USE IF:
- you have more than a few items
- you have non-scanable items (produce, etc.)
- you have KIDS!
- you have alcohol
- you have no fucking idea what to do

Seems simple enough yet always there's some pond scum piece of shit that doesn't get it.

A Note to Prius Drivers

It could be different in your town, but where I live, drivers' fundamental personality can be categorized by what they drive. Some are evil. There are specific brands and models of vehicles that carry the most treacherous, most insipid, most dangerous drivers on the road. And as far as I've noticed, it's not what you'd expect.

You're thinking drunk drivers. Christmas In July Hyundai ricers driven 100 mph by teenage punks, or corvettes driven by middle age coke fiends. Lifted full size mud-tire pickups with confederate flag regalia, or the typical nearsighted little old lady swerving the Olds 88 who can barely see over the steering wheel - let alone reach the pedals.

No.

The drivers that leave the greatest wake of disaster behind them, the ones that have the most detrimental effect upon the flow of traffic, the ones that aggravate everyone except themselves, and ultimately do nothing but increase road rage, lowering the quality of life on the road for us all... I'm talking about the ones who leave a shock wave of blight behind them 50 cars deep.

I'm talking about the Prius drivers. Or anything hybrid for that matter. These people seem to think it's their fucking job to regulate speed, and Save The Planet from all of us having to use all that terrible evil gas. They drive so fucking SLOW. Nearly every time I am stuck in a line 20 cars deep behind some clueless bone head, it turns out to be a goddamn hybrid. Perhaps these vehicles are slow to start with, being the half-bred overpriced mercury-polluting hunks of shit that they are. But I suspect it has to more do with the mentality of the drivers in question, and more fundamentally, the self-righteous nature of the typical hybrid purchaser. In some cases, it involves their vendetta against society, which in my opinion is borderline clinical sociopath behavior.

Think about this, hybrid drivers: Momentum is the best fuel saver out there. And when you hold us all back thinking you're being all green, you're really fucking up the planet all the more, because then we all have to stop at the light that turned red because no one was coming along. Then we all have to start from a standstill instead of just flowing through the green light at the proper speed limit - had you not so conveniently been in our way for the last five miles. Then when the road opens up to two lanes in another mile, even more gas gets guzzled because all of us are like, "FUCK gotta make up for that lost time!" and we floor it to get around your dumb ass and finally get up to the speed that we were all supposed to be in the first place. Using up tons more GAS in the process. Way more than if we had just all been allowed to cruise the proper speed. I'm not gonna speculate the math, but it's reasonable to see what I'm getting at here. Okay let's speculate 20x more gas used.

This message is not just for the hybrid drivers, because there are a few more of you out there who drive what you drive and you are a fucking scourge to the roads for the same reasons outlined above. Let's recap: your Goodie Goodie Two Shoes slow-ass save-the-world driving is actually fucking up the world. Okay?

Here are the other offenders and suspects, and why:

With the exception of the WRX model, all Subarus young and old. These tree hugging self- righteous uber liberals have no idea what their boxer engine and drive train are capable of. They take turns as if they were afraid of their "SUV" rolling over. It's a shame that they are completely ignorant of the grip through turns that their drive train gives them. Fucking clueless. Add to that all the "No Blood for Oil" stickers and you've got a group that loves to dole out speed regulations, just like the hybrid driver. Automotive-activist bastards.

My next offender is any late model Toyota Corrola, but for an entirely different reason. These people are punishers, and often of the Catholic persuasion. The Rosary beads hanging on the rear view mirror are a dead give away. They drive slow, slow, slow - IN THE LEFT LANE. They are often old, and like our hybrid and Subaru friends, love to force vehicular penance upon us.

Next up? A tie between Toyota Rav 4 and Honda CRV - if you didn't know the difference you might get them confused, but basically these vehicles are pretend SUV's and the people who drive them are often of the hippie persuasion - or they keep it well hidden. They go camping and wanted a truck to take them there, but their inner environmentalist wouldn't let them.

And last we have the soccer moms and their VW Passats. Look out. They're so busy goo-gooing at the baby - or yelling at the kids - in the back seat to ever notice the speed limit, let alone traffic lights.

Other usual suspects: Hyundai, KIA - no need to comment there!

All of you please get a clue. Locate the accelerator and fucking learn how to use it. Or get out of the way! If you see even three or four cars behind you - especially that ass hole tailgater - PULL THE FUCK OVER and let the people who aren't on permanent mental vacation take over leading the pack. Christ! If you're not in a hurry then what will it hurt pulling over for a few minutes? Think, people.

(Why) Won't It Blend?!

Did you know you can spend $500 on a blender? A fucking blender. Here is a kitchen appliance that does ONE THING, blend - it should anyway, having such a short job description. Even if you spent that $500, I would be surprised if even the Vitamix could do its job properly. By proper I mean that it should bust it out - 30 seconds or less. By proper I mean if you make a smoothie it makes it smooth. No chunks. They don't call it a fucking chunkie for a reason, okay? A blender should blend. Proper blending. Is that too much to ask?

Incredibly, I have purchased three blenders in the past year. With the first two, I ended up with the same model blender, the $25 Oster 6694 (similar model). The first one I had to bequeath to my ex-roommate when we went our separate ways. When this particular blender made a smoothie, though, it came out smooth. Smooth! Granted, you had to have the perfect ingredient consistency, or else the thicker part of the mixture would get stuck above a small reservoir of liquid below, and the blades would just go and go - doing nothing whatsoever. I attributed this problem to the tapered shape of the pitcher, but a little shake (with the blender off, of course) seemed to do the trick. The design of the blades - however subtle compared to other blenders - quite simply pulverized ice and frozen fruit. Add to that the all-metal drive train and a glass pitcher, and you've got a damn good unit for the money.

But the motor was some cheap Chinese replica of a motor that would actually get the job done, were it not built as cheaply as possible by child labor. I found this out the hard way when I bought the second one to replace the first. The motor was a pathetic wimpy piece of shit right out of the box. It had a ghost high-low transmission that would vibrate, strain and stutter under even the easiest workload. To get the speeds to work at the proper speed I had to start at full power and then come down in power, which destroyed the delicacy of some recipes. Finally, one day, the excess vibration rattled the thing off the counter and the glass jar smashed on the ground. It made an unbelievable mess, and I vowed to not get suckered into Oster's veritable Russian roulette of quality again.

My third and current blender is the $35 Black and Decker Cyclone. This thing is a real POS. The Oster is just a replica piece of shit, this is the real deal! The motor is the only thing worth shit on the Cyclone, and even that isn't all that great. Best thing about it is it doesn't explode when I'm running the thing for 5 fucking minutes straight trying to get all the fruit chunks blended. You see, the shape of the pitcher creates pockets of liquid underneath suspended half-blended muck. Every. Fucking. Time. The blade shape doesn't do a good job blending any food ingredient known to mankind. I mean, this thing can't blend fucking ICE CREAM into a smoothie to save it's life. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse, run for a minute, pulse, pulse, pulse. Repeat until contemplating suicide. Repeat again. Pour out the half-mixture into a glass, pour back in and start all over again. Run for several minutes, or just give in to the fact that your drink will not be blended no matter what you do. Get ready to chew your chunkie. Were it not for the fact that I DO NOT want to buy another blender in the near future, this thing would have been put out of my misery immediately after purchase: with a trip to my private rifle range.

Another thing about blenders, the names of the different speeds, for the most part, are just ridiculous. Rare is the blender that has a logical speed indicator system, such as, I don't know, NUMBERS?? Instead they have to come up with 14 synonyms for blend. Jesus fucking Christ. A convenient example can be read right off of my Cyclone blender. In order the exact speeds are: Stir, Aerate, Puree, Chop, Blend, Clean, Grate, Grind, Liquify, and Smoothie. Are you fucking kidding me? GRIND!? What about crush, shred, mince, beat, whip and cream? What about masticate? Pulverize?! Pulpify!!! Good Lord. Numbers would be just fine. Am I supposed to believe you simply cannot grate something on the grind setting? Fucking ridiculous. Who ever heard of a blender beating, grinding, grating, mincing or shredding anyway? Blenders can't do any of that, let alone blend.

If I can get the Cyclone POS to break (God please if only that fucking motor would die!) then I'll have to buy another blender. I'm a big fan of multiple speeds and glass jars. As far as I know, even the Blendtec - star of the Will It Blend meme - has only Lexan (polycarbonate) pitchers. Which is a shame because Lexan scratches and harbors bacteria, and also is suspected of leeching PBA's. Gross! Waring Pro has a one speed blender that reportedly kicks ass, but the pitcher is small and is stainless - cool, but not see through. And the one speed is a deal-killer for me, so the glass models are out. There are mid-priced blenders like the Cuisinart, but these are usually just sheep in wolves clothing: you pay double for the name and get a stylized version of a piece of shit.

Will even the $350 - $500 "professional" blenders give hope for a good blend? The only experience I have with these is at Keva Juice, where they use Vitamix brand blenders. I have noticed that if the bananas are green, it throws off the consistency/ratio, and even the top of the line industrial Vitamix has to be run through two cycles to get a good blend.

At this point, considering the five minutes until not blended performance I'm getting now, the $500 two short cycles of the Vitamix sounds pretty fucking tempting.

There is no price you can put on the frustration of a whole year of using shitbox blenders.

Stupid Things You Always Hear

Why do cashiers say, "did you find everything OK?" It's such an exceptionally stupid question. It isn't even entirely clear what they are asking. Do they mean did you find everything you were looking for OK? Or do they mean was everything you found OK? Either way, the fact is they don't fucking CARE if you found anything at all, OK or not. They're a fucking cashier. Since it's such a dumb question, I like to use my superior intellect and make fun of them: "Yes, everything I found seemed to be OK." Best part is they never get the joke.

Just for fun, to prove my theory to myself that this is a worthless question asked without the slightest tinge of sincerity, sometimes I will say, "no." Take for example, today. I was at K-Mart and couldn't find black socks in the brand I like. They had white all over the place, and even in the boys section they had black and white in that brand but only white for the men (moron alert: shit-for-brains in purchasing!). So when I checked out, naturally the cashier posited her superficial question of pretending to give a shit. I explained the situation, and she goes, "huh that's weird," and just continued to check out my things.

OPEN QUESTION TO ALL CASHIERS: Why do you waste everyone's time asking a question that we all know - including you - that you aren't going to do shit about no matter what the answer is? WHY?!?!

I'm so fucking sick of that question, I feel like going postal next time someone asks it. Fucking pain in the ass mother fuckers.

Untold Music Sharing Success Stories

The music industry with all their petty DRM bullshit... they are so shortsighted. They think every time someone adds music to their library without paying for it, they lose a sale. What they don't see is the sales they gain from having that music out there.

Between web radio, satellite radio, Amazon and iTunes - the amount of music commercially available is staggering. And the competition between artists is fierce on labels both big and small. How is anyone to sample all that music and find what really suits them best before buying? They rip a copy from their friends, that's how. Then through a process of immersion they discover which are worth buying, and many actually do end up buying. Some even buy other releases from the same artist. This equals sales for the commercial outfits that complain about illegal downloads. SALES.

The blockheads at the record companies should be delighted they get free marketing from illegal downloads. People and all their friends are doing the record companies a huge favor. Can they reasonably expect us to BUY every bit of music we are the slight bit interested in? Do they realize how much MONEY that would take us? Of course they do, buy what they fail to realize is that WE ARE SPENDING AS MUCH AS WE CAN on music legally now ALREADY. It's not like huge sectors are holding out on the record companies IF ONLY they were forced to pay for all this music they have.

Fucking idiots.

When I worked in retail, employees got to play their CD's on the store stereo to help the day go by. Believe it or not, this is illegal. Stores are supposed to pay for the right to play that music commercially. Yes. Yet at the store I worked at, we witnessed a different phenomenon. Rather than have corporate-feed DRM radio on all day playing easy listening morphine-drip elevator music, we would instead have customers say, "my God, what is this music that is playing? I love it, it fits my mood exactly, who is it?" and the retail clerk might say, "John Cockburn" or whatever, and - I shit you not - an hour later the person would come back in the store after having gone to Borders and BUYING THE CD. They'd say, "thank you so much. I had no idea this [artist/band/singer] existed, now I have a whole new world of music open to me."

This scenario happened to me with many, many CD's that I had burned off my iMac G3 from shared music. Yet there is no way to record or verify this type of interaction that led to sales, therefore the music industry is blind to it. It's no wonder they think music sharing is so bad. Morons.

A friend and I recently traded iTunes libraries. I gave him all of my non-DRM music and he gave me all of his. 14,000 songs. Most of the stuff he gave me sucks, in my opinion, and much of it got thrown in the trash. But there are a few good ones in there, and because of the nature of websites like Pirate Bay where he got them from, many of them were incomplete albums or have songs with poor quality, or worse, songs that cut off half way through. (Tangent Rant: don't the music execs know their enemy? Pirate Bay and Limewire have mostly shit quality - if anything that my friends' who rave about it gave me is any indication.)

But the best ones, the new discoveries for me, the artists forgotten or not yet explored - they got my attention. And I've bought several of them to complete the album, or improve the quality, or others in an artist's collection that I have wanted to buy. Sales from music sharing that would have never happened otherwise. Artists I never would have known existed without music sharing.

The music industry needs to wake up and smell the CD's burning.

MacBook Pro: Art Meets Technology

So far, I don't have anything critical to say about my new MacBook Pro. Coming from me, that is quite an endorsement. Very, very rarely am I not able to pinpoint design flaws, shortcomings, lazy engineering, or just general levels of SUCK in most things within the first two seconds I spend with them. Even the iPod is on my list of things that suck: crappy interface, Sound Check doesn't work for shit, the earbuds are supreme torture devices - designed neither for looks, nor comfort, nor function. Considering my contempt for the iPod, Apple's most successful product ever, one cannot write off my infatuation with my new computer to Apple lust.

I don't want to try to compete with the myriad reviews out there, because I'm basically agreeing with them. Consumer Reports ranked this computer right up there in the top. They hit the nail on the head.

The machine simply screams quality. The feel of they keys, the multiple function trackpad, the solid aluminum body, the fit tolerances and tapered shape, incredible battery life, more portability and less weight than my old PowerBook Pro... and on, and on, and on.

Worth every penny, and the best part? I don't have to use Windows, making for a purely enjoyable computing experience.

Beautiful!

New Computer Ordered: Will I Rant or Rave?

Last week I got so fed up with the slow performance of the internet on my computer, I went directly to amazon and ordered a new one. Even though I can't afford it (my credit card company thought it was fraud). Even though I just spent, in the last year: $150 for a new battery, $300 for new hard drive installation and data recovery off the old one, and $200 for an upgrade in RAM. Even after all that, the fucking computer still can't play an online video smoothly. It can't load and play at the same time whatsoever. If I want to watch a choppy video, I have to wait 3x as long for it to load as it does to watch. The only videos that play smoothly are the ones that are so compressed, you can't make anything out anyway. Now I ask you, what is the point of paying $70 a month for so-called high speed internet if your computer can't even play an animated GIF in anything but super-slow-mo?

Side notes: My current computer is 6.5 years old. The specs are 1.33 GHz, 2G RAM. I know that the battery and hard drive have nothing to do with internet. I know I spent a lot on upgrading an old computer, enough that I could have just gotten a new one. But for that amount all I could get is a PC, which in my opinion stands for Piece of Crap. Just know this, I would pay double, triple, ten times more for a non-windows computer. I hate Microsoft more than anything in the world, and I will go to great lengths to avoid using their products. But I digress...

The new computer arrives tomorrow. It is a MacBook Pro 15" and will replace my PowerBook G4 17" which has been too big for my tastes. The thing is downright ungainly, and I'm really looking forward to cutting back on bulk and weight. The new battery supposedly lasts up to 10 hours (I'll believe it when I see it) and it has the machined billet aluminum body. Fucking sweet!

I anticipate writing a review on my new laptop. Let's hope it is a Rave.

Down With Flash Ads!

Fucking Flash ads. Annoying, distracting, irritating, ubiquitous Flash ads. Mother fuckers. I wish it was possible to disable this experience-killing menace. If there is a way, PLEASE leave a comment and tell me how -- besides just removing Flash because it's good to have for the enjoyable aspects of the internet, few as there are left now after the bombardment of commercialization.

Aside from the fact (or opinion) that Flash is an antiquated, performance-sucking piece of shit for a codec... But what do I know? I'm only the one that has to wait for what seems like forever for all the Flash ads to load the page before the content shows... Then once it finally does, there's all this stupid shit going on: flash flash, flick flick, some dumb bitch dancing, some actual COMMERCIAL FROM TV, or some ridiculous sound effect, and the worst offender of all... "Congratulations, YOU WON!" Like I truly believe I am the millionth visitor so just *click here* and I win a laptop. My ass. Even if it was true I still wouldn't click because that means some transaction, however small, is going on somewhere and it contributes to the scourge as a whole. I simply refuse to participate.

Then the Flash ads are all loaded up, and you're frantically searching for that one that has a prticularily annoying video playing, in hopes that there is a pause button, but by the time you've found it the ad is done playing and you've ruined the sanctity of the Dark Side of The Moon that you were listening to, which now you have to start the CD all over again because some Flash ad disrupted the intro to Run. My point? You can't always just hit mute to stave off the onslaught of Flash ubiquity.

No Sympathy From Nazi Cop

Today I ran out of gas. Pathetically, yes. It was ultimately my fault, but several events conspired to make it a reality. And it happened. I had even been to two gas stations just before I ran out! Broken card reader at the first one, and a line at the second. I was on my way to the third gas station-- kaput.

I was glad I had just gotten Platinum Triple A, and called them posthaste. They wanted a street, I gave them the street. They wanted the cross street, I gave them the cross street. They put me on hold and called a "service provider" who got on the line asking for an exact address.

You see, the way my town is built, there are some sections of street that have no development, and therefore no address. I was stopped at such a place and told them so. The service provider said no address, no service. So I said fine and fuck you, got out and just walked to the nearest gas station. It was less than a mile, and they happened to have a gas can. So I bought that, filled it and started back to my truck.

About 500 yards before I got there, a cop pulled up behind my truck and put the lights on. Once I got to about 50 yards away, she (yes, it was a ladycop and she was still a dick) saw me walking up with the gas can, got out of her cruiser and yelled, "THIS YOUR TRUCK?" I waved and said yes. And she goes, "COULD YOU HURRY IT UP PLEASE?!" -- and I just fucking laughed. Here I am walking up in a damn suit and tie with a gas can -- and Officer Fuckhead wants me to, what, RUN?! You've got to be kidding me.

Then she goes, "You could have pushed it off the road."

To which I pointed out, "It's uphill, officer."

Dick.

Limited Broadband Options Leads to Near Insanity

I live somewhere in the Western mountain states, and we've got SHIT for internet options here. Not that there isn't a lot to choose from, but more that they all suck. Dial up sucks. Qwest sucks. Comcast sucks. Wild Blue Sucks. Hughesnet sucks. They all suck!

None of them deliver the speeds they advertise. None of them has the customer service they claim. None of the prices they quote end up being what you pay - most notably qwest because you've got to pay for the phone line too. Oh - and not one of them gives a shit.

I just called qwest customer service and asked them how to get the 1.5 megs that I'm paying for because I've never seen it. That's when the unintelligible fellow from Calcutta informed me that 20% less than advertised is normal. So I had him put me through to the billing department, and when he did I asked for 20% off my bill. After some flummoxed bullshit, the customer service representative did the only thing he could do: terminate the call.

I must be going crazy.

Opera Browser Review

I gave it several months, and despite some really cool features, I have concluded that the Opera web browser is a piece of shit. I just uninstalled every trace of it on my machine. Why? Because more than half the time I used it, all hyperlinks were disabled. You'd hover the mouse over the link and click but nothing would happen. Click click click click click... nothing. To get to a link you'd have to right click and select from the menu to get it to open. Ridiculous.

No solutions or even a mention from a Google search, either. Apparently Opera is waiting for me to do free beta testing on their product, because no one else out there appears to have run across this problem. I find that hard to believe. The only explanation is that everyone else got so fed up with how much Opera sucks ass, that they just threw it out rather than try to get the company to do a decent job at developing a product. Ah, the Microsoft business model: release half-assed shitbox products, let the consumers mire through the problems, and then don't do shit about it.

To be fair, Opera has two very cool features that make it suck only a tiny bit less, and they are worth mentioning here:

Speed Dial feature opens all new tabs with hyperlinks to 9 websites of your choosing. Fucking way cool.



It also has convenient task buttons, most notably a sign-in button that works for all saved passwords. It's the button shown below with the key on it. Very convenient because no matter what site you go to login to, if it has the password info saved, your login is always in the same place, one click away. You don't even have to find the place on the page to sign in.



Oh, one other thing i just remembered about Opera, and it's probably the most blatant shortcoming. According to my online banking, Opera is not a 128 bit secure browser so they won't allow me to login while using it. I don't know a whole lot about online security, but this last tidbit put me over the top.

Bye bye Opera, go suck on someone your own size.

Irony Happened On The Way to the Tea Party

I was glad my alarm clock went off on time, being plugged in to power supplied by the government regulated monopoly that is the power company, delivered over power lines which remain intact because of government regulations. It’s a good thing the government maintains the official US time and broadcasts the correct time to the entire nation, otherwise my automatic clocks (good Lord we live in a convenient time) may have been incorrect this morning, and I might not have been able to get up in time to take my son to his government run public school.

On the way there, we drove on public roads, maintained by public works and paid for by public dollars. While waiting at one of the traffic lights, supplied and maintained by the government, we almost got clipped by a fire truck – purchased with tax payer money and operated by the local government – while speeding on its way to rescue some family (they better be citizens) from a house fire. Good thing they were following the government regulations regarding the use of sirens. Phew! Once the road was clear, and being pretty sure that no one else was going to blow through the light because of laws put in place by the government detailing the regulations for emergency vehicles driving through traffic lights, we proceeded into the intersection.

As we did, I noticed a manhole cover that concealed a network of sewer lines – built and maintained by the government – that carries away storm runoff and keeps the roads from flooding. Good thing, I thought, because the safety of my tires might come into question in standing water were it not for the government standards regarding passenger tires.

Next, we passed by a municipal park, beautifully maintained by government workers being paid with my taxes. Once we got close to the school, a flashing School Zone road sign – paid for and maintained by the government – informed us that we should slow down to 15 mph, a law passed by our insightful government representatives to ensure the collective safety of our children.

Once I dropped off the boy, I waved to the police officer employed by my local government – and paid by my taxes – to watch over the School Zone and help keep our children safe from harm. Boy it sure is good to live free in America, I thought as I got back in my government sharehold GM automobile.

On my way home, I noticed the tank was low, so I pulled into the gas station to buy subsidized gasoline at $2.89. Thank God we don’t have to pay the real market value for gas! If it weren’t for the government subsidies, I don’t think an honest, hard working American like myself could make it… come to think of it, at least I have a job! …unlike those welfare bums. In fact there was one begging at the door as I went in to the convenience store to pay for my gas! LOSER, I thought as I bought myself a corn dog – I certainly trust the meatpackers to not only follow government regulations, but also to roll the dog in corn supplied by a properly subsidized American farmer.

After a stop at the ATM to withdraw some cash from my government bailed-out bank, I finally got back home. It was time to get ready for the rally! So I went online – DSL connection using phone lines once regulated by the US government – to check the weather supplied by the NOAA governmental weather agency. So glad I can trust the competence of those meteorologists employed by my government, so much so that I am sure I can wear shorts and a T-shirt to the rally without fear of encountering a thunderstorm.

I took a quick shower with my government facilitated water supply, heated by gas lines that I know won’t blow up because of strict regulations put in place by my government. I can be confident that the water heater was installed properly by a government licensed contractor who followed proper safety regulations, keeping my family safe from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Now it’s time to write up a protest sign on poster board that is made out of paper from trees grown in our National Forests, run by the same government agency that issues the hunting tags that I get every year to legally harvest a deer from the same forests to help feed my family. In making my sign, I used a permanent marker that I can be sure doesn’t contain banned substances like lead or mercury, or any harmful contents that aren’t clearly marked as per government regulations. Thank God for government oversight making our everyday world safer!

At first I couldn’t figure out what to write, but I knew it would be about the damn overreaching government we’ve got in this country ever since that socialist Obama stole the Whitehouse. Then I thought, no that’s too obvious, go with something more subtle. So here’s what I came up with, I think it summed it up pretty well:

"GET A BRAIN! MORANS"



PS - My kid was pissed I didn't let him play hookie like other tea baggers.

Thank God For Commercials

If it weren't for commercials, I probably would not have quit TV. I wouldn't have quadrupled my free time. I wouldn't have been able to double my reading list. My life has improved SO MUCH since I quit watching TV, and it all started when I realized that commercials were killing me.

The abuse of fallacy, shameless mind control, subliminal techniques, and downright stupidity of it all was driving me insane. I found that even when I could find an interesting program to watch, the commercial breaks were so frequent, the duration so long, that I would put on the mute button and go find something else to do. Sure I could get TiVo, but to be honest, the shows I was watching weren't much better than the commercials.

The realization came one day when I surfed channels for EIGHT HOURS STRAIGHT trying to find something to watch. Flipping channels to avoid the commercials whenever they came on, losing track of the show I was watching, finding another show, watching for the three minutes before the next commercial break, and then I was off searching channels again, desperate to find even five minutes of no commercial break. I did not find it. So I quit. Told Comcast to discontinue the service.

It was a wonderful day when I realized that I had forgotten all about the stupid commercials that used to annoy me so. The commercials I used to spend hours on the I Hate Commercials forum complaining about, gone from my life. I had two TV's and I sold them both at a garage sale for $15 and $20. Good thing those Mexicans wanted those TV's (no one else was even the slight bit interested) because otherwise they were headed for the shooting range for a meeting with my 12 gauge.

Spam Blocker Fail

If you got an email with the subject heading, "Best Prices on Viagra and Cialis," could you guess if it was spam or not?

Earthlink's spam blocker can't figure that one out.

Facebook Rant

What the fuck is wrong with facebook? A couple of things have been REALLY pissing me off lately, and of course since no one understands or cares or wants to hear about it -- and because, ultimately none of us can do jack shit about how much facebook SUCKS -- all I can do about it is post a rant on this goddamn worthless blog.

First of all, what the fuck is up with this "News Feed" and "Most Recent" crap? It makes no damn sense whatsoever. Why are there posts on "News Feed" that never appear in "Most Recent" and vice-versa? Why do posts 9 hours old appear ahead of items 3 hours old? Why do posts show up on both? The whole thing is just beyond any comprehension. It was a stupid change they implemented a few months ago and in doing so they fucked up the whole experience. Not to mention all the goddamn clutter now made by all the news of who friended who and who became a fan of what -- all right in the way of everything. Fuck, it would be SO MUCH BETTER the old way, where all that incidental crap that I don't give a shit about was off to the side. There's enough stupid posts to have to weed out from friends, why they'd go and add all that bullshit? And they couldn't put useful bullshit in the middle like when my friends birthdays are, they have to keep that off to the side? What the hell.

Secondly, half the time I post a link to a picture, it shows a thumbnail, the rest of the time nothing. Then sometimes the thumbnail is intermittent, showing up only every so often. Don't know what the fuck is going on, but it seems when my friends post a link to a pic, it shows a thumbnail 100% of the time. Those kind of numbers would indicate pilot error, so does anyone know how the FUCK to thumbnail a picture in a post (status update -- whatever the crap they call it) on facebook? What's the trick? Cos I haven't figured the motherfucker out.

Finally, the facebook iPhone ap just totally sucks ass. I'm fed up with it. The whole thing is a piece of shit. Some posts don't show up, it's missing all kinds of stuff I facebook for in the first place, and finally, the download said "free" but a $1.24 charge showed up on my iTunes receipt. Getting anything done about that would be an exercise in futility, and would cost way more than $1.24 of my time. Troubling thing is that facebook undoubtedly knows this, and has been making millions above and beyond the farmed demographic and trend data they sell to huge companies for untold billions.

Fucking facebook. Riding the trend of wildly popular things that inexplicably suck.

Cragslist Prank Reveals Spam Level

Just for fun I posted a sarcastic ad in the missed connections section on craigslist. Something about how her perfume obscured all other sensations... I was simply making an anonymous joke about women who wear too much perfume, I expected no response.

Instead I got a ton of emails. And all the same ones you might get if you had posted a true personal ad, too! "Hey I liked your ad" and "looks like we have a lot in common" and "here's my pic hope you like what you see" and all kinds of painfully obvious bullshit. Their responses inevitably had nothing to do with my ad, and the pic included was, inevitably, of some hottie with big tits dressed in hardly anything. How can I take something like that seriously?

Who the fuck are these spammers, anyway? Why do they send false pics and even bother to answer the ads? Even if they are just using bots, is it really worth all that effort just to farm a couple pics and email addresses? More importantly, do enough people fall for their scams that they can keep doing it? Incredible to think of the answer of that one (yes) but what's more incredible to me is how much of a shit dump craigslist has become.

Quite simply, spammers have destroyed craigslist. Come to think of it, I cannot recall one instance in recent memory, that is to say, within a year, that posting or answering a craiglist ad has resulted in anything but spam. No, in fact, not one ad or answer in the past year has resulted in anything except time lost to spam or mystery postings.

What I don't get is how can spammers have let themselves ruin the internet? Scum of the earth is too kind a term...

Earthlink Storage Almost Full

Since my last hard drive crashed and ended up a smoldering pile of unretrievable data, I haven't been able to get my email client to work. I know all the settings, or least know how to verify that they are correct. And they are correct. But still the damn thing won't go and get my emails for some odd reason, and I am forced to sift through various webmail programs to get my email and take care of maintenance duties such as sorting and cleaning out my inbox by hand. Frustrating enough.

To make matters worse, some of the email accounts come with vast storage, others with limited space. And here lies the crux of my complaint. The ones with limited space always send you HUGE emails warning you that your email storage is almost full. It's like they want to fill it up and start deleting your data. It's bad enough that I get ten thousand viagra-cialis-work-from-home/regarding-your-inheritence-dear-kind-sir emails a day to fill up my minuscule storage space. But to get a 10MB (<-- admitted exaggeration) file to let me know my space is full? That's like chopping off my finger to tell me I have a hangnail!

Update: I re-entered all the fields for the email client set-up and it still wouldn't work so I called tech support and waited on hold so long I tried it again and all of a sudden it worked.

Qwest Fail

Waited nearly all day for Qwest to come and hook up the phone/dsl line. They finally showed up around 2:30 and hooked up the phones in about 15 minutes. On the way out the dude goes, "okay you're all set, the bottom jack is good to go." Shit. "Um, dude, the bottom jack is a LAN line, not a phone line, bro." (Dumb ass). "Oh my," he says, "that is a little loose, give me a minute and I'll fix it to the top jack." Yeah. Good idea, buddy.

So he does that and pulls away narrowly averting a stupid mistake that would have cost me countless hours of headaches on the phone with tech support. I seriously doubt that in their little techy manuals they've got there at Qwest you're going to find a chapter on poor suckers who have had their LAN jacks hooked up to phone lines. Jesus.

And now I've got a DSL line! But no modem. Qwest, in their infinite wisdom and customer service expertise, has decided not to have the installer carry a few modems along to give to the customer all at once. No. That would make far too much sense. The big business geniuses at Qwest have decided it better for UPS to deliver the modem separately, and hopefully on the same day. Grrr.

To the veritable singing of angels, up drives the UPS truck with my modem before too long. Excited, I tear open the box and find my shiny new $90 modem/router (more than I've paid for any of the other four modems and/or routers I already own, all in perfect working order but not 'compatible' with Qwest's *NEW* all-in-one wireless modem -- don't get me started -- I don't have the energy for a tangent rant) and the glossy instructions. The first thing it says is "DO NOT PLUG IN MODEM BEFORE SPECIFIED START TIME: SEE ENCLOSED LETTER FOR TIME AND DATE."

Rummaging through the box I find the letter that says that I must wait until 5pm before plugging in the modem. The letter might as well have said, "Now that you've waited a week for your Qwest appointment, and nearly all day for the installation, and then even longer for the UPS delivery, now that your DSL line is installed and your modem IS HERE you must now only wait ANOTHER TWO HOURS to access your precious high speed Internet!" My God. Get me the suicide prevention hotline: NOW!

Naturally I wait the two hours. Can't say patiently, but I waited. Then I plugged in the modem. Lights on, taken to ridiculous website for registration and all kinds of BS, another user name, yet more friggin' passwords, another login bookmark, fucking hell. A page is stuck, open up Live Chat and ask the bots how to avoid all this shit and just get to surfing. They casually inform me that I am already surfing. Just close the window and go, they say. Sweet. Glad I followed the Set Up For Dummies instructions, not like I know how to join a friggin' wireless network... done.

The first thing I do, of course, because I like to torture myself, is go to speedtest.net and see what kind of throughput I've got here. A big 1.27 megs the results say. Wow: Dial-up on drugs!

Damn, Qwest.

Craigslist Twighlight Zone

I have no idea how it happened, but I answered the wrong craigslist ad and ended up going down a very strange road.

Yesterday there was a Strictly Platonic ad in craigslist that said, “C'mon guys no takers? See March 27th post.” There were only two posts on March 27th, one older guy looking for a woman friend, and one post from a 23 year old female looking for hiking partners. So I replied to the ad figuring it was the female, and was psyched when I got emailed back. They even had an androgynous name to make the joke even more cruel: Alex.

Then after three or four emails back and forth of 'getting to know' they mention, “I used to be a Boy Scout,” and I was like… wait, WHAT? What the fuck happened? I went back and looked at the 27th ads but there were no clues there, I had not misread the ads. WTF? So I emailed back and said, sorry for the mix up, dude, but I’ve got enough guy friends already. He understood, but I still don’t get how the whole thing happened. Had it been a joke played by him? Had he forgotten that he had removed his March 27th post? Was it flagged and he didn’t know? Did he get his dates mixed up? All I know is that no March 27th post added up to this guy's story.

Whatever the reasoning, I learned my lesson: 99% of craiglist personal ads are SPAM, so if you’re going to be a fool enough to answer one, be sure to answer the ad itself and not an ad that mentions another ad. Dumb ass.

False Advertising

So I move into this place for lots of dollars a month. The ad says it comes with internet. Turns out it comes with intermittent, weak signal, 57k wireless from Qwest. Those of you lucky enough to live anywhere except where Qwest is the phone/internet provider, believe me, you don't know how good you have it. Qwest customer service is even worse than Comcast. But at least they don't have commercials that make me want to kill myself, so that's one point in their favor.

Anyway, I complain about the Internet signal sucking ass and the landlord just smugly says, "well my brand new laptop gets a full signal..." Great. Insult my computer equipment and how I don't happen to be able to afford a shiny new computer with 802.11Z wireless right now. Sweet. The ad should have said "includes Internet if you are up to date with your computer equipment because our router is only 802.11g and has a range of about three yards."

Knowing that the landlord's Internet is worthless, despite it being included in the rent, and having pulled all my hair out waiting 30 minutes for a 2 minute you tube video to load one too many times, I finally gave in and ordered Qwest Internet for myself. Last week. Costs more than Comcast and is approximately 1/4th the speed (that's 75% slower for the math challenged) despite what their commercials try to feed you as far as bundling your services and fast speeds and what not. Problem is they don't have high speed lines in place everywhere, so there are more homes (here) that cannot get Qwest Internet than those that can. How's that for customer service?!

And lastly, a complaint that is not at all rare. Qwest said they would be here to hook up the Internet sometime between 8am and 6pm. Awesome!! Only a ten hour window to wait for something that will take, literally, one second! Wouldn't it be great if I could tell them, "My payment will arrive sometime between before the due date and after the due date. Please make sure someone is there in case you decide to open the envelope and accept the payment which will not be considered late under any circumstances."

Google Rant

My intro post mentioned that I forgot my password for my other blog. I know that sounds ridiculous. Pilot error, right? But I could rant forever about this because last time I tried to reset my password with blogger (google), I just wasn't able to do it. The reset email never showed up -- yes I checked the spam folder -- so I tried again and got nothing. Emails to google help didn't help. They sent a link that I had to check all of the google services I had with that account to get in, but wouldn't you believe it? One of the services I had, Maps, wasn't one of the choices! So of course it said that I didn't answer the spot question right and shut me out. Emails to google got the same no-one-is-home response. As in none.

I was so pissed off about it I boycotted google for as many weeks as I could stand. Switched my searches to yahoo and said fuck it. But of course, here I am, back again to google. The microsoft of the internet.

What Is This?

I’ve done this blogging shit before. Got a lot off my chest when I did, but I guess what I had to say was interesting, so naturally there ended up being a bunch of followers, and with it the natural tendency to feel obligated to my subscribers. Soon the blog became a burden and began to soak up my creative time and energy. So after six months I left it to rot forever on blogspot. Probably a bunch of people still reading it and commenting on it to this day, but what could I do even if I cared? I forgot my password and wasn’t able to navigate the reset process, so there it sits. I couldn’t even delete it if I wanted to. And there’s some seriously personal shit on there.

So just yesterday I get the urge to blog again. Just post random thoughts and writings, nothing serious or demanding, just a place to take the proverbial mental dump every once in a while. And so here we have this post.

This shit will get personal too. Sometimes it will be lucid, abstract, sometimes obscure, sometimes perverted, poignant, preposterous or positive. Always verbose cos no dude, I’m not into the whole brevity thing. And I probably won’t hold any punches or grudges, for all the trolling crazies out there who love to try to tear people down. Let them be and let me be me. I’ll keep writing and churning out creativity while they go on to surf a thousand other blogs and sites with their venomous intent.

My intent is to ruminate and postulate: Rants Raves Can'ts Craves.