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POLITICO
Category: Rant
Monday, June 21st, 2004 @ 09:57 am
Posted By Brent
Well, Matt just posted a link to the trailer for Fahrenheit 911 to my comments for reasons I can't fathom. Maybe he's trying to get my hackles up, who knows. I haven't really gone off about Michael Moore in a while because while I despise him, I've been trying to understand exactly why I hate him so. On one hand, the idea that so many people are getting their political opinions from a man with a very obvious agenda is disconcerting. If you're going lean to the left politically, I have no problem with that. If you're going to lean to the left politically because some dude that lives in Hollywoodland made some witty "movies", well, that's just plain retarded.

There's another point in there too. He is rich. Really rich. He's also fat and white. Last time I checked, this is why liberals hated conservatives. Hrmm, fat, rich, white, lives in a world where money and fame disconnect him from the daily life of 95% of his fellow Americans who claim he's the only one who understands the "people". Who are these "people?" Rich, liberal, media dependent douche bags? I sure as hell am not one of these people.

One of the biggest things that upsets me about this new "movie" is the fact that none of it seems too amazingly shocking. A politically powerful family from America (The Bush Family) has ties to a politically powerful family from a allied nation (Saudi Arabia). Wow, you've blown my fucking mind Mr. Moore. John Aschroft wants to take peoples' freedoms away. My God, why have you been hiding this information? People who murdered people in roadside missile attacks in Iraq are being mistreated by the friends of the people they killed. You could topple governments with this smoking gun! Rich congress members who voted for the war don't want their trust fund kids to enlist in the army. Man, you've changed the political landscape permanently!

There's nothing here except venom and an unfocused, vitriolic attack against "the powers that be", that just happen to "be" George W. Bush. Then again, I don't recall Mr. Moore being all that up in arms when Clinton got political and financial support from Red - Fucking - China for his reelection, and then turned a blind eye to the fact that they murder their own citizens on a daily basis and gave them Most Favored Nation trade status. No, the fact that a powerful family who was about to get attacked in retribution for the 9/11 attacks pulled some strings to get a plane out of the country is proof that there's a New World Order afoot.

Wake up, d bags.


9 Comments...

THE REGIMEN II
Category: Personal
Monday, June 7th, 2004 @ 05:00 pm
Posted By Brent
Well, it's been about two weeks now since I restarted my program of "less eating like a fucking pig" and "less drinking like a fucking fish" and more "doing stuff." I haven't really seen a change in my weight mainly because I haven't weighed myself in a good eight months or so. Last I saw, I was somewhere between 200 and 210 (that's pounds for you limey bastards across the pond).

I do believe I've seen a little thinning of the waist line, but there's a good chance that it's purely psychological. I certainly feel a lot better, especially during the day at work (no more dying for a nap around 1pm), but I'm sure that's from cutting all the drinking out during the week.

Of course, keep in mind I didn't start this off as some huge fucking sack of man meat; while overweight, I'm not obese, which Webster defines as "excessively fat," so I'm sure no one will be seeing major changes in my appearance. Then again, in that definition it's hard to tell where the definition "fat" ends and "excessive" begins. Guess I'll leave it up to the philosophers.


16 Comments...

FIXING STUFF
Category: Tech
Thursday, June 3rd, 2004 @ 02:13 pm
Posted By Brent

It's my job to fix stuff. Computer stuff. Sometimes at work someone will call me over to fix some stuff, and well, I can't.

"How come when I hit enter in Word, it goes down two spaces instead of one?" someone will ask.

So I check to see if double spacing is on in Word, it's not. See if there is a font size change or something else that could effect it this way, there's not. See if this is happening an any other program, its not. Finally, I just give up and blurt out old faithful, "Restart Word, if that doesn't work, reboot the computer and try again." Of course this will pretty much always work, but the feeling I get from the rube I was trying to help is unmistakable. I sense this feeling all the time. It's the "isn't this your fucking job to know how to fix this stuff, moron?", feeling.

It's an understandable sentiment. Your refrigerator breaks, you want the guy that comes to fix it to find out with the problem is, and remedy it. You don't want him to fiddle with it for ten minutes, hemming and hawwing about how it's probably some defect with the refrigerator that you can work around switching all the shit between your third and fourth shelves and then unplugging it and plugging it back in. Oh, and this isn't guarantied that it won't probably happen again the second I leave. Fuck no, that guy would be fired.

Let's just extend this analogy into the literal world of my job. I work on refrigerators that not only I can't open up the back to troubleshoot, I'm not even given the courtesy of being told how the mechanics of the refrigerator works. Could be freon compression and copper tubes. Could be fans blowing across coils that are constantly having cool river water pumped through them. Could be that new fangled Sonic Cooling method. Could be black magic, who knows? Not I, because I'm not allowed inside.

Using open source software must be the obvious solution to this tragedy, right? Of course, then I could see inside. Then I could try to troubleshoot the actual problem. Then I could dismantle everything and go through every spring and coil and bolt until I found the problem. Is this practical? Fuck no, because not only am I a refrigerator repair man, I'm also an auto mechanic, a carpet layer, a plumber, a roofer, and a few other technical jobs that require specific skills to actually get anything accomplished. Oh yeah, and don't forget that at the same time I'm building your house from scratch and expected to know every bit of minutiae about what I've done with it in case you want something changed mid-build.... and, of course, construction will never end. With that sort of depth and breadth of skill requirements, there's no way I could learn the ins and outs of your refrigerator and still stay competent in the other areas. Sure, give me a toolbox and the majority of my time with your refrigerator and I'll figure it out. Just hope you expect to walk to work because I'm not fixing your car while I do it.

So now you're probably thinking, "OK, he's just like a general computer tech." Wrong-o. Many of my duties are only loosely computer related. What my actual job is will blow your mind. I am a hired smart person. When someone asks me how to align a column in Excel to the right instead of the left, do you think I walk in with the process memorized? If someone downloads something in their webbrowser and somehow has lost the memory of where they saved it to thirty seconds ago, am I imbued with precognitive forces because I can find it? Am I some kind of egg headed boffin because I try to redownload the file and see where the "Save to" dialog was last pointed? Hell no.

To tell you the complete truth, I'm not even sure that all this is because I'm smart! I have the sneaking suspicion that it's because everyone else is so fucking dumb.



5 Comments...

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