Category Archives: Video Games

PC issues; Yeti sports

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A screwy work schedule and some other miscellaneous personal stuff has kept me from wrting anything here for the last few days. A quick look at my site statistics shows that both of my readers already know that, so let us assume that I added this last bit of information for later reference, like when I am an extremely successful professional selling my system for a “low, low, price” on obscure tv channels in the dead of the night/morning. At which point someone might want to buzz through the old archives to see what I had said in the past. However unlikely, I am going to go with that, so sue me.

• Work sucks, as usual. Life sucks, as usual. Possibly the reason that I have not felt compelled to type about it here is that it is all the norm. Were I in a position where work on your average day was enjoyable, you know the type of job that you actually look forward to going to, hell, even the type of job that you don’t contemplate slitting your wrists every morning before you go, maybe if I had that type of a job I would be able to write a lot of good anecdotes on some days, then bitch on others. Problem is I never have a good day, EVER.

The day in question, that being today, had this as my problem:
The PC in the back-room will no longer communicate with the cash register. A quick search of cables and other such paraphernalia that make this happen revealed that there was one of the connectors that was totally fucked. The particular item that was fucked is this guy right here. Note that this particular connector got really fucked a couple of years ago in a lightning storm that burnt out both the PC and the master cash register. I told the bosses at the time that the part needed to be replaced, but, after replacing the cable itself the problem seemed to be fixed. I told them that using the part could result in further damage, as the pins no longer had anything to insulate between them, and I didn’t have any idea how many of the wires had power going through them and how many didn’t.

The boss then said, “Does it work right now?” A question to which I had to answer YES, since it was working at that moment. He then said, “it is fixed then.” That was the end of the discussion. No matter how many times I tried to bring up the possibility of future problems he would not listen. It was working, therefore nothing was wrong.

Fast forward a couple of years. The part that is in question did completely short out. According to the guy who built a duplicate of the part, some of the wires had gotten so hot that they had fused together. Now it is possible that either the communications port in the PC is also burnt out (which really isn’t that big a deal) or the rs232 port into the cash register is burnt out, that would be a pretty big deal, they don’t use your average pc components on these type of cash registers, and they certainly don’t sell just the parts. You have to pay for the part and the installation as a package deal. If it is just a simple PC com port problem I can probably fix it in two minutes for a cost of about a dollar. If it is a problem in the register itself, the tech can likely fix it in two minutes, for a cost of about 500 dollars. One must keep in mind that these techs are getting paid an hourly wage for the time that they spend in the car on the way over, as well as charging a trip fee, then charging (way too much) for the replacement part and installation. It is practically extortion.

There still is the possibility that only the data cable got fried in the process so I will reserve judgement for a later date. I will just bring up the key points once again. 1) I told them that this part needed to be replaced or there might be future problems. 2) Once the thing was working again, even though a part was broken, I was told it was fixed, not to waste my time on it. 3) Now that it has come to be that something did definitely go wrong with the system, and all signs point to a short in the device that I told them to replace a couple of years ago. 4) It is all my fault for not fixing it in the first place.

• So I have been playing a lot more of the damn Yeti Game of late. The major reason for this was the addition of the Yeti Pentathalon. Yes, you have to do all five of the Yeti sports in succession. I assumed that this would make it so that one runaway high score wouldn’t lead the world, since that score would have to be factored in with the scores of the four other events. This has held mostly true so far, though there are a couple of scores that just seem a bit too high to have been achieved in a single session by a single person. Still I must assume that it is all legit.

The problem is that I never really thought about the possibility that the opposite would be true. That is, I never have a good game in all five events. On the occasions when I really kick ass in one event I will invariably bomb in another. Thus I am just as likely to make it to the leaderboard if I try to play one and hope for a great game as I am if I try to do all the events and pray for pretty good games. Which all amounts to a hill of 1’s and 0’s when you think about it. I am not going to get an award if I reach the leaderboard, well, unless you count the fact that I will think that wasting fifty or more hours of my life to see my initials on a leaderboard is an award. My god, now I remember why I gave up Asteroids.

Harry Potter and Diablo

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There was nothing posted yesterday. I guess you have grown used to me making a half-assed excuse why not by now that I am sort of obligated to throw one out. Here it is in a nutshell. My Parent’s-in-law have washed their hands of me since I stood up to them while we were on vacation. Neither myself or my wife have spoken to them since. My brother-in-law has had an open invitation to use our guest bedroom if he ever wanted to escape the parents, mostly due to the fact that they would not sign the necessary paperwork to allow him to take certain college courses -thus making him a grunt, despite the fact that he is very bright and could have done whatever he wanted if he had the education-. I am not sure about all of the exact details regarding why he chose yesterday to walk out on his parents, but he did, and I am not the type of person to turn my back on family.

It really is pretty poor timing for this all to happen. The in-laws have thought that I was the spawn of Satan since the day that I actually lashed out at them last week. I am sure that, in their eyes, it will seem to be a pretty convenient time for their son to go ahead and move out. My take on that is that without my wife to bitch at they focused all of their bitching on their son, who was the only one in their house that had a job at the time. I don’t mean to pretend that I know the thoughts of any of my wife’s family, that is just my best estimation of why it all went down like it did when it did. And, as I said, I am not the kind of person to turn my back on family.

The majority of last night, after I got home from work, was spent with my wife, brother-in-law, and myself discussing what had happened that actually pushed him straight over the edge. That is something that I am not going to post here since 1) I only have one side of the story, and 2) that would be airing a bit too much of the family laundry. I have no problem with talking about my life on this page, even my wife’s when I feel the urge, I do not want to try to speak for people that I don’t know all that well…Even if I have already formed an opinion that will not change unless the second coming of Christ proves that everything I believe is wrong…That seems doubtfull, but still I must have limitations to how many people I offend.

• This morning I read a bit more of the Fourth Harry Potter book. I must say that Rowling has been progressing pretty well with the whole trying to make the book a bit more readable for adults. I am not entirely sure if that was her intention but it certainly should be. The series started out talking about a little eleven year old kid, which was certainly adored by all of the little eleven year old kids of the world, but by the time the fourth book came out those little eleven year old kids would have been what, 16? 17? It is certainly seeming a lot more complex than the other novels thus far. I hope that in this one she just doesn’t fuck the whole thing up by writing a great story and kind of doing the ending in a hurry to get another check (at least that seems to be what she had done with the previous novels; the endings didn’t make sense, stuff was left out or ignored). Of course everyone in the universe has said that the books really start to get interesting in the third/fourth book so I think I will probably be pretty happy with it, maybe this will be the first time that she doesn’t fuck the ending up so badly that you wish you had never read it at all.

• I played a bit more of the DiabloII today. It was not really that I wanted to, more like the draw of an addict. I must say that I was a bit surprised with the outcome of the session. I was playing through the river of flames and into Diablo’s lair (I forget the name) and I really didn’t have any problems along the way. Hephasto the armorer went down without ever using a potion, I was able to take care of multiple blood maggots by using the Jade Tan Do on weapon switch. The only place I reall had a problem was when I cracked the first seal. The Venom-Lord looking guy (infector of souls?) killed me a couple of times before I even got in a swing, hell before I was even able to use a potion. It took a lot of artful reatreat to get my mercenary to pull them and kill them one at a time, but after a half an hour I had managed to get back my body.

I thought I was going to be in for a real rough time after that. I usually only ever have problems with “Lord de Seis” after all. When I cracked the left seals and didn’t even have to drop a potion I began to wonder. Then when I cracked the top seal to release “Lord de Seis” I was able to dispatch him and his group easily. I even killed Diablo himself without much of a problem, though I did have to go back to town once to re-belt on potions. Why was it that one of the little pit-lord/venom-lord scumbags can cause so many problems while the prime evil himself goes down faster than an intern in the White House? Was there an intentional change made to make that particular Boss harder or was it that 62 fire resistance just wasn’t enough to sustain the first blast from the guy and all his minions? Questions that will likely never be answered…

The character that I am now playing is a Paladin at level 27. Unfortunately I don’t have any gear that I can twink to him until he gets to level 45. I am not going to spend a lot of time trying to level him in act 5, I do hate doing the same board repeatedly, so I assume I will be about level 30 by the time I get to nightmare. With a bit of luck (of which I have none, unless you count the bad kind) I might find a Goldskin or Vipermagi armor along the way. That or I will still be wearing the same cracked quilted armor I have gotten by on so far…As far as you know…


Diablo; Huge hot dog; writing

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I had every intention of having a new post on Monday, but then we decided to go out to dinner and I lost the interest to write anything. Yesterday I would have posted but there was a DOS attack at the server that made it so that I was not able to check my email or view my site, not to mention killing any hopes of getting an ftp connection. So I said screw it and played some DiabloII instead.

Funny thing, DiabloII, it is just so comforting to play. I think it is sort of the way that people really long for their favorite foods from childhood when they are really starving, something familiar and comforting. Just like DiabloII. What could be more comforting than beating the ass of the most powerful beings that Hell can come up with? Nothing, damn right.

Of course I have been playing on a newer character for some time now and as I lost most of my characters to inactivity some time ago I am having to go virtually untwinked. The gear that I still do have is all of the must be level 50 or more to use variety so it doesn’t really help much on a new player. I did twink the guy an amulet (can’t remember the name, +1 to skills is basically its only real attribute), and a belt (nightsmoke maybe? 10 to all resistances), of course these are just worthless crap that I would gladly give up in favor of better resistance or a bit of life leech. I also gave him a Spirit Shroud armor that he can’t use, and likely never will since I will be into nightmare by the time he can actually wear it and it has not resistances, so it will be all but useless.

So why do I like to play this damn game again? I suppose it has been challenging to play with inferior equipment, but challenging just means frustrating. I can see why people like to get turboed past all this crap. I still have a few characters that I can take in and walk all over hell Baal, yet I have another character that gets killed in one hit by your garden variety Venom Lord. I don’t know if they actually made the resistances matter more when they put out the patch, but it sure seems like it. The first time I played the game, which was pre-LOD, I beat Diablo with almost no resistances and most all of my skill points wasted in the Thorns aura. Now I can’t even get to Diablo with 30ish resistances across the board. Hell, if it weren’t for my mercenary firing cold arrow I likely would never be able to kill a group larger than two people.

• Now on to disgusting food stories. Of course Las Vegas is famous for a lot of things, gambling, hookers, the fabled UNLV basketball team…But what they really should be getting a lot more credit for is the most disgusting hot dogs on the planet. Now I now that the ingredients that go into hot dogs should be enough to keep me from ever eating them in the first place, in fact I saw a special on PBS about how they were made when I was 15 or so and didn’t eat one for at least five or six years after. Just something about it being a dull grey paste before the coloring is added, ewwww.

Anyway, the Westward Ho casino in Vegas advertises a 3/4lb. hot dog for 1.49 and I figured I would give it a go. I did go the extra 59 cents to get them to add chili thinking that I would never be able to eat that much hot dog by itself. Boy was I ever right. The hot dog is served on a paper plate, my best guess is that the plate was of the 10 3/4in. size. The bun covers the plate from edge to edge, while the hot dog sticks out of the bun and off of the plate by about 2inches on each side. When you add to that the fact that the hot dog is about the same size as a half dollar you will get an idea of how big the thing really is. The worst part is that without the chili I would likely have taken about one bite and thrown the whole thing away. It was just so salty, it didn’t taste like a grilled stadium frank or anything of that nature, it tasted like a boiled salt lick. I guess salt is about the cheapest spice you can get your hands on and likely the only one they used judging by taste.

I did manage to eat the entire bun, all of the chili, and maybe half of the hot dog. I suppose that I shouldn’t have been expecting gourmet cuisine when paying two bucks for 3/4 of a pound of food, but I will know in the future that if the price of an entree seems ridiculously low that likely means that the quality of the entree is likely also ridiculously low. This could also be just because I am really sensitive to the taste of salt, there were dozens of other people there eating these horrendous things with nothing on them but ketchup and mustard, perhaps these people had taken in a few more cocktails than I had? In short, Westward Ho hot dog, do it once for the novelty, never eat another hot dog as long as you live.

Let’s see. I have talked about video games and huge weiners, what more must I do to attract the middle aged nerd demographic?

• In other news, I have just surpassed the $1 mark on my Amazon associates account. Of course all of the purchases were made either by my wife or myself so I am not entirely sure if that is a good thing. Hell, I’m not even entirely sure if that is a legal thing. I just figured that if I am going to buy something off of Amazon and someone is going to get a bit of money for the transaction it might as well be me. Prior to having this page I always clicked through BlackChampagne for all of my Amazon purposes. It is not like I am actually trying to make money with this site though, if that was the case it would be nothing but hardcore porn, probably have a lot of scumware and that sort of thing. This is just my little soapbox from which to say whatever I want.

Funny how it has changed. I started this site with every intention of typing all of my short stories onto it, with the hopes that people would read and enjoy them. Then I actually read some of my short stories with fresh eyes…All that just went right out the window. I do still enjoy writing the Arthur Witles stories, and people do still email me to tell me how much they enjoyed them. I think this is simply because we just don’t expect nearly as much from a story that is meant to be humorous as we do from a ‘real’ story.

I really should sit down someday and start to type up a few more of the Witles stories. As I wrote more of them I expanded on the little nuances of his character, as well as the Dr. Ampere character, and found that it was probably more enjoyable for me to write than it ever could be for anyone to read. I think the thing that makes that possible is that since it is a humorous story a lot of really absurd stuff happens, not impossible, just extremely unlikely. With paramaters like that it is really easy to surprise the reader, even make them laugh in a way that I would probably never be able to do if I were trying to cause the same emotion with a more by the book approach.

Isn’t it strange how it can take someone so long to realize the actual limits of their ability? I have a file cabinet full of absolute crap that I have written which will never see the light of day. From the time I was in my early teens until the mid twenties I really believed that I was going to be a writer, I really believed that I was going to get a novel published, I really believed that I was a pretty good writer. I have now kind of sobered up to the fact that I am likely never going to see a book in print, if I do it will likely be with my paying all of the costs of publishing for the sole purpose of gifting it to friends and family. I suppose that is a sort of pessimistic view of it, but it seems to be the most realistic. All that being said, when is the last time you saw an author that really came into success before they were in their mid thirties? So maybe I should just scrap everything that I have done previously and start with a clean slate. I had a really bizarre dream a few months ago that would make a great premise for a novel, the problem is that I don’t think I would be able to make it anything better than mediocre, and mediocre doesn’t meet the mark when you are competing against established authors.

When it comes right down to it, I will never know if my writing is any good unless I try. I know that my grammar is far from perfect, but as for my ability to tell a story how will I know unless I actually complete something and test the waters? If I do try, and ultimately fail, it will at least be something to be handed down from generation to generation, that is what I have to tell myself for motivation to at least try…

Space technology fails; Harry Potter game

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I just don’t know what the world is coming to, what when a site as prominent as mine can post the wrong date and leave it up for two days without anyone emailing to bitch about it. I would have expected more from you. Of course, the “you” in that statement is mostly me at this point, and I didn’t even notice the mistake until just now when I was adding the page to the daily archives. I will hold myself to a higher standard in the future, or not, depending on my mood.

• Something that I have been hoping to write about for a week now still has not seemed to happen. I am talking about that multi-billion dollar device that is now in orbit around Saturn, and the spectacular images I was expecting it to be sending back to earth. After a week in orbit this is the best it can do? I have seen better images of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. I was expecting images more like those that are being sent back by the Hubble Telescope, which, while beautiful, are hard as hell to find a hard link to, I have linked to a half a dozen so far but the links just never work when I try to click them. If you really want to see some unbelievable images of space just do a quick yahoo image search for Hubble Telescope, simply amazing.

Shouldn’t technology have advanced at least some since the ’60s when we first started shooting crap at the moon? How is it possible that something that was sent into space only six or seven years ago can be sending back images that look like they were done on a Spirograph? Sure they have to travel millions of miles and the such, but come on! If we were going to spend billions of dollars on the technology to get this thing all the way to Saturn, don’t you think we could have gone the extra couple of bucks to get a color camera? I could take a close-up photo of the grain pattern in a block of wood and come up with images as good or better than what is coming back from Saturn.

I am just a bit disappointed with the results so far, that’s all. Perhaps it will be like what happened with the initial launch of the Hubble Telescope and there will be some minor problem that can be repaired to make the images more vibrant. I sure do hope so, I have been waiting to see these images ever since I heard of the launch all those years ago. Not that I am a space-nerd so much, just that the images captured in space can be so far out of the ordinary that they really seem to be more a fine work of art than something happening randomly…The current photos are also art I guess, just art done by blind people with only one crayon.

• Today was the first day of the new grocery ditributor era at work. The truck showed up an hour and a half early, which is a major plus, as the old distributor always showed up late, or later, if at all. The only problem with that is that I was just stepping out of the shower when I got the call. I do hate to make their drivers wait. I got there as quickly as I could and the two of us had finished unloading the merchandise in about thirty minutes. That is about how long it always takes, unless the load was particularly large or small. It didn’t seem so different at all.

Then something strange happened.

The guy gets off of the truck, comes onto the landing, and starts helping me check in all of the perishable items one at a time. This was something that the other company Never did. The new company requires it. I love that all the way around. There was a mispick (just like it sounds, wrong item) in the frozen and a short (just like it sounds, not there) in the dairy, and he gave us an immediate credit for them. He went further to give us the immediate credit for a bag of dog food that was torn and a case of condensed milk that had been damaged. Wow.

Here is how that last paragraph would have gone down with the old company. The driver leaves the second the stuff is off the truck. I find the short in the dairy section and call it in. The boss finds the mispick in the frozen section and calls it in. We put the damaged dog food and condensed milk off to the side and call that in. I write down everything that is wrong on a piece of paper along with case costs and item codes. The next week we should have a credit for the short, but often didn’t and would have to call again. The mispick and damaged items would be returned, though no paperwork ever changed hands (which is why we had to keep a running tally of it all), and within three weeks or a month the store would get a credit for it.

Being a small business it is difficult to keep track of all of this in the first place, but even worse is having the money already paid and having to wait for them to issue a credit. It often took three or four phone calls over the course of a month to get the money back. The system protects them as well since a case of cheese can easily cost $70 and if it is there it will have been checked in by one of their guys and one of ours, hard to dispute that. When you factor in that it only took the two of us about five minutes to check in all the perishable items and find the mistakes I just don’t know why the other company never did it.

One thing that was a bit irritating about the new company is that they had some of the profit margins all out of whack on the invoices. I should mention that the old company did not even tell you the unit cost on the invoice, let alone a suggested retail price or profit margin, so this was a small inconvenience. One that is also easily overcome with the boss figuring out what he wants to sell it for and me typing upc’s into the computer and changing retails. I am going to consult the company tomorrow to see if they can send us shelf tags of the items that we change the retail on, if they can’t I can still print our old tags out for the items, but, I think it would look a bit tacky to have two sets of tags going.

I am sure that talk of this is monumentally boring so I will move on.

• I have mentioned my newfound interest in Harry Potter in a couple of recent posts. The wife bought the first PC game based on the novels about a week ago. I started to play it on Sunday and had reached the final battle on Monday. It is a kids game, so I wasn’t expecting much, which is why I was so sorely disappointed.

I am about to do battle with the final “boss” in the game and I am missing half of the things that can be found along the way. To be fair, to myself, there were a few places that I was pretty sure that I needed to go, but the linear gameplay makes it so that if you go the wrong way first you can never go back the other way. If I were to play it through again (I say again as if I have ever beaten it) I am sure that I would be able to find more of those damn little cards that you are supposed to be collecting.

The thing that I really hate about the game is Quidditch. I am not horrible at games like F-Zero, I can do pretty well in flying simulation type games, but this Quidditch just kicks my ass. I think the biggest reason for that is the controls are on the keyboard and my old pc joystick won’t connect to either of the computers that we currently have. If you had the speed up/slow down buttons as well as all four direction keys on one of those it would be pretty easy I think. Even after having set the motion keys to “WASD”, like the old pc games I used to play, it still took me a lot longer than I would like to admit to win the damn matches. Mind you, they won’t let the other guys win, they will just wait forever if you don’t win.

Beyond that, the game is pretty fun for what it is. It is cute in places, makes you think a little bit, and could probably be completed perfectly by any six year old in the entire world. Let those little bastards try the original PitFall with an old Atari controller and we will see how good they really are. Of course they are releasing all of those old games for the hand held gaming systems now, but I doubt that any of those kids will ever be able to top my best of flipping the counter 4 times on Asteroids before my mom made me stop to come and eat a sandwich.

Steakhouse and Deadly Rooms of Death

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As anyone who has read this site at all would expect, I went ahead and played some more of that silly DROD game, both yesterday and today. For similar reasons you would also know that whatever board was just “absolutely impossible” yesterday was easily overcome with a bit of thought. As well as a couple of other boards that I had been stuck on for a while. It is for that reason that I will not go into any detail of the particular board that has me stuck currently, since that will be a non issue by the time I post again, at least to follow the trend.

• The wife and I went out to dinner tonight, which is kind of unusual on a Friday night, but not unheard of. The place that we went to was “Yolanda’s Chuckwagon”. I would love to give you a link to a website, but the place doesn’t even accept credit/debit cards so it is probably unlikely that they have a website. The steak was excellent. If you ever happen to be somewhere between Phoenix and Tucson I would highly recommend stopping by for a taste of their Sirloin. Unfortunately there is just the one location, and it is a long way from damn near anywhere. Well worth the drive from where I live, maybe not worth the drive from upstate New York. I must say that it is the best steak that I have ever eaten in a restaurant though, far better than what passes for steak at the Outback Steakhouse.

The only problem that Yolanda’s has is the location. I think that they probably get a lot of traffic from the people who work at the prisons but live in Tucson, those people would have to pass the place twice a day on their commute, and it is the only thing resembling a steak for fifty miles in any direction. The fact that the Steak is extremely good and the portions are simply huge just makes anyone who eats there tell their friends. I would do the same, if I had any friends, instead I will tell you all about it, just in case you ever happen to be in the area. They do offer non-bovine meals as well, but only chicken as far as what I could tell. There were options on the menu for shrimp and lobster but they did not list a price and just simply said ‘varies by market, when available’. You could also just indulge in the salad bar, 6.25 gets you that in unlimited quantities and there are enough things to put on the salad that you certainly would not be disappointed. (unless, of course, you are that one asshole that wants fresh-steamed pumpkin on your salad, even though pumpkin is way out of season).

I sure do wish there were places to eat around here that had more than just one location as I am sure that it is pretty boring to read about a restaurant that you will never dine at. Of course lots of people read about Mc’Donald’s in the news and would never dine there either, so perhaps market saturation alone does not a restaurant make.

For some reason continuing on the restaurant thing, why I got no idea, I began to think about the place that we usually eat our mexican food. I have spoken about the place in at least a few posts, which I am not going to look up currently. L&B has extremely good mexican food, and I suppose it is not a real big surprise that the people who started the restaurant were hispanic. They were serving the chips and salsa prior to the meal long before someone figured out that if you did that you could have smaller entrees. L&B serves huge portions that are far better than any chain restaurant could ever do.

It was only when I started to think of the two local places that I realized why the Denny’s and JB’s of the world do so well. If you roll into a town you have never been to and see a Denny’s sign you kind of know what to expect, while when you see the sign for “Pete’s Good Eats” you don’t really know anything about it. While every town likely has a couple of eateries with wonderful reputations, most also have that one place that no one ever visits. How are you to know which is the one that has a golden reputation and which has recently reopened after bribing the local health officials to hide their insect problem? I guess that is why the Denny’s and the JB’s will spring up on every corner while the local place will get shut down; people would rather eat mediocre food than gamble about whether it will be great or garbage -I am not going to exclude myself from this group of people-.

That is why I find it such a wonder that McDonald’s is as big as it is. We know that the food is mediocre, at best. We know that the food is going to lead directly to obesity and heart conditions, yet we continue to eat it. Subway has started to expand rapidly in the last few years as well, but seriously, if you are eating a 12″ sub sandwich for lunch everyday, and then layering it with mayonaise, cheese, olive oil and the such, you would be better off with a big mac.

There is no way that anyone would mistake me for someone who lives an ‘active lifestyle’, but I was trying to get an estimate of how far I walk in an average day of work. I tried to face it like the way one would try to determine the word count on a thesis. I simply counted my steps during one-minute time-frames (randomly, you know, like when I remembered to do it again) over the course of a day. I averaged the number of steps based on the eleven one-minute examples, then multiplied that by the number of minutes I was at work. Then, assuming that each stride is about (I said 24 inches, since there are a lot of corners and the such that can not be compensated for otherwise) I calculated that I walk just a bit over eight miles while I am at work each day. That might not seem like much, but I also do not have the opportunity to sit down and the motion is pretty much constant. To someone who didn’t do what I do it would be a real cardio work-out. When you add to that the fact that I have to move around boxes of beef (average weight about 70 pounds) in the walk in every day, I think that I probably get more excercise than the majority of people in my age range. Now if I could just quit drinking all the beer I might be able to reverse the nine pounds that I have gained since the neck injury I had earlier this year…

Deadly Rooms of Death; Politics

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So yesterday brought about another late day at work, thus nothing new posted here. As usual I was not aware that it was going to be a late day until halfway through my shift. Since that is normally the case I guess it would be a bit senseless to bitch about it. After all, I have been working there for damn near ten years, if I were that annoyed by it I would surely have found a different job by now, right?

As for the day at work today, it sucked and I hated it, thanks for asking. Not that it really sucked, or that I really hated it, but that I spent the extra hours at work last night using a scraper to remove excess was and dirt build-up from the edges of some of the tiles on the aisles that get a lot of traffic. I was pretty impressed with how good they looked, so was the boss, as she suggested that I spend a bit more time today working on it. Problem there is that I have a huge blister on me knee from having spent a good couple of hours kneeling on it during the process yesterday (as well as sliding on it, as it was quicker than actually standing up and taking a step to get to the next tile) so I was in pretty serious pain while I continued the process today. I understand that work is meant to be work, and that it is often uncomfortable, but man that hurt. I tried to be smart and use the other knee while I was doing it today, this lead to the denim on the blistered knee getting stretched really tight over it, which hurt more than actually kneeling on it, but that is all over now. On to the animal porn!

• I don’t know why, but I have taken to playing that silly little Deadly Rooms of Death game again of late. The reason that I stopped playing it originally was that when I got the new computer I didn’t bother to swap my player file from the old machine. I thought it may be fun to play through the first few levels again, see how easy they were in comparison to the level that I was at now. That was all true and such, but I got stuck on exactly the same damn boards for exactly the same reason. The drod forums were down at the time so I couldn’t even get a hint as to what I was doing wrong, that mixture of frustration and anger is not what one is looking for when they try to play a game then, is it? Since having recently started playing again I have managed to defeat all of the boards that I had been having problems with on the old machine, but still can’t seem to make it all the way through the 8th level. I know that I can do it, so I guess maybe a more accurate statement is that I don’t have the patience to do it. All of the monsters in the game act in very predictable ways, so you know what every action will result in, yet, in haste, it is easy to overlook some of the consequences to a certain action. When tar is involved it is easy to overlook a lot of the consequences. The way the tar, in particular, acts makes you need to take at least a few seconds to think about your next move, else you could block your escape, box yourself in, or end up with a tar baby in a position to kill you.

The problems that I am having with the tar are easily overcome if I just think for a few seconds before I slash, but where is the fun in that? I guess the fun may be in actually conquering the boards, I wouldn’t know. Honestly, I know that I could beat each of the boards if I were to take my time and think through each move, yet that seems really tedious at times. If I wanted to spend that kind of time on a game I would just find my copy of Pandora’s Box and give it another go.

I suppose I really shouldn’t bitch about freeware though. I didn’t pay for the opportunity to play it, and I enjoyed it, at times. Not to mention there seem to be legions of followers of the DROD game. I suppose that means that there are legions of people with a hell of a lot more patience than me. Hmmm, who knew.

• The last couple of days have been littered with all sorts of news. The problem with the so-called news is that it has all been about the 9/11 commision’s ruling that Saddam Hussein, and therefore Iraq, were not in any way involved with the attacks on 9/11. This is SO not news. That is exactly what everyone in the free world, with the exception of the current U.S. administration, has been saying since long before Bush was able to start a war with Iraq; A war based totally on the absolute lies that he and his administration fed to the American public.

I do not like to talk about politics, I do not feel that I am informed enough to do so. There are, however, some things that are just so obviously lies or ‘mis-truths’ that it doesn’t even take a three-year-old’s intellect to discern the truth. As is the case here. Much like the following quote, which I gleaned from Reuters (I think) where Bush tries to clear this all up:

“This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaida,” Bush said. “We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. For example, Iraqi intelligence officers met with (Osama) bin Laden, the head of al-Qaida, in the Sudan. There’s numerous contacts between the two.”

Now isn’t that kind of the polar opposite of what he was saying to get us all drummed up to go into a war with Iraq?

To use the logic in Bush’s statement, wouldn’t it be true that the U.S. was also pretty directly involved in the 9/11 attacks? We did supply arms to Bin Laden in the eighties. Certainly giving them weapons would be worse than a hand-shake somewhere in the middle of Sudan, right?

To follow that same train of logic, everyone that has ever spoken to Bush must also be 100% behind the invasion of Iraq. If that is not the case then even his (Bush’s) latest cop-out isn’t going to hold any water. How ignorant can one be and actually make it into the oval office? Ask Dubya.

That is why I do not like to write about politics. I am too inclined to NOT believe what I see on tv. I am not very good at being an American since I like to form my own opinions as opposed to having them spoon-fed to me…Or, at the very least, put into the ‘mad cow burger’ that I am eating, while the government turns a blind eye.

Appliances; Feedback; Pogo

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This is going to be a pretty late post even by my standards. To the point that it will likely no longer be the 12th by the time I get it finished and uploaded. Not that I think anyone reading my site is actually looking for late breaking news or anything, just that I was going to skip the post today, but decided to go ahead and type something up shortly after 10p.m. That being said, this might not live up to the high standard of journalistic integrity that you have come to grow and love…somewhere…definitely not here, but it likely won’t even hold up under my, much more realistic, ideals concerning site content. Reading further will be your choice, not mine…

I got some feedback about the site today, but not in the typical fashion. Someone actually came into the store to tell me that he had felt exactly the way that I did when I took customer service to a whole new level. This was not a person who happened upon the site by accident of course, I had given him the URL a couple of weeks ago but had no idea that he was actively reading what I was posting. While I did enjoy the fact that he could relate to the story, I now understand why it is better to let people that you don’t know read the posts if you are going to be getting into stories regarding your work or other personal affairs.

Not that I am going to let that stop me from bitching about local events or anything, just that I am going to make sure that the actual names of the persons involved are not used. I mean if I were to quit bitching about the idiots I have to work with where would I find the same quality of idiot stories to tell? Dubya is too easy a target, btw.

The reason that I was going to be skipping the post today was two-fold. The first reason is that I have been playing yet another silly game over at Pogo.com. The game that I was playing tonight was ‘Tri-Peak Solitaire’. I think that every gaming site out there has a version of the game, I chose to play this one since it adds to my total token count. I have played the game extensively in the past, but rediscovered it after I got tired of Phlinx. So I had to clear the board six times to get the ‘bonus spin’, and I proceeded to do that about 4-5 times. It took a bit of time, time that could have been better spent doing other things, but then again that is true of most endeavors.

The other reason is certainly not something that I would care to go into in this venue, but something that was far more important than the silly game that I spent so much time playing. The immediate concern was for the happiness of my wife, which is priceless, but also shattered today by conditions that were ‘kind of’ beyond her control, but that she should have seen coming. Much like standing between two railroad tracks, you may not see the train when you take that position, but a train will eventually be going that way. There likely aren’t a whole lot of options if you are the one between the tracks either.

Sure the reference is pretty vague, but that is all that I am willing to commit to at this time.

So we got our new washing machine today. It sure looks nice, all sleek, like something that is very sleek, and white. It is much more streamlined than our old washer, but then one has to ask one’s self if they are going to base a washing machine purchase on said machine’s aerodynamic qualities. I am not going to throw the thing out the window, I doubt that my wife is either, even as sleek as it looks I don’t think it could fly. Even if it could fly it is not sapient and would likely just sit there in the laundry room, hovering. That would be pretty cool though; view the amazing, flying, washing machine.

I suppose the “Consumer Reports” mag. has been a bit lax in the last few years. I mean what, they didn’t even test the aerodynamics of large appliances? If and when I do decide to throw my refrigerator at the kids in the lawn, I want to know how well that sucker flies! If it is going to fall after ten or twelve feet based on the fact that that was the height of the window it was thrown from, that is stuff I need to know! If no refrigerator can be thrown that distance with a man of average strength throwing it, that is something that I also need to know. If two of the top body-builders in the world can not make the thing get air-borne, that is something that I should also know. Every appliance does what it is supposed to do, if they didn’t they would never be sold. I want FEATURES, like the refrigerator flying around and smacking the heads of kids who piss it off. Damn it, Features.

Also, I have taken the liberty of ripping off the latest “Guadalupe Squares” from 98KUPD. It seems that they get less and less funny the more that you listen to them. By that I am not meaning to listen to one over and over again, more that the originality of it is totally gone and they are redoing stuff they did only weeks before. It still is pretty funny, and you can hear the latest one by downloading this file. I think this may have been their longest game ever, and while it was humorous, I would not recommend you waste the tiem on it if you do not have a cable modem.

The ultimate in customer service; silly games

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My wife and I went out to dinner yesterday, and it was nice. There was a bonus in the fact that the establishment did not have any grenadine syrup, which is one of the three ingredients in a Tequila Sunrise, which was the drink that my wife ordered. So the guy who was tending the restaurant’s bar (who actually runs the joint) gave her the unfinished tequila sunrise (which was just O.J. and tequila) and a different drink that he thought she might like, which was just coconut rum with pineapple juice, at no charge. Aside from the that the food was quite good, as always, the service was great, it usually is, and I likely gained three pounds by eating all the food.

The reason that I bring up the dinner story is that I wanted to talk a bit about Mario. I am not sure who technically owns that restaurant at this point, but I do know that Mario is the guy that handles all of the day to day operations of the place. In addition to that he also runs a bar at the other end of town, again handling everything on a day to day basis. Can you imagine how many hours a week he must spend at one place or the other? That must be a tremendous amount of work and stress, I don’t know how he does it. When I say that he is running the place I don’t mean like a supervisor, he actually does whatever needs to be done. Last night he was tending bar while also dealing with customer complaints and the such. That is a level of dedication that I don’t think a lot of people really ever have, though it is true that the more money the places make the more money he makes, but at some point you would think that he would just get tired of being there eighty hours a week.

His dedication to both of the establishments is probably a huge factor in why they both remain busy all year while other restaurants and bars end up going out of business the first slow season (which is now). I am sure that like any good P.R. Guy he knows just how to talk to each customer to make them feel like whatever problem there may have been it had been completely resolved. To the point that they will not only leave happy, but recommend the place to friends even after a potentially bad experience that was taken care of. Whatever good fortune comes his way it is going to be based 100% on his dedication and understanding of the customer. I know that I could never do that.

There was a particular incident where I am working now that would prove that, or at least it did at the time, though I have gotten a lot better at keeping a level head when people are being belligerent since then. Without going into too much detail I will just say that there was a guy who was screaming like we had shot his wife when he was overcharged by six cents for something. He would not accept the six cents in return, he would not accept a full refund for the item as a courtesy for our mistake, he just wanted to yell about the damn six cents. He wouldn’t leave the store, there were a lot of people watching, I was barely 21 I didn’t really know how to handle it. I explained to him that all I could do was refund his money, he would not take it, he just wanted to yell. After ten minutes or so of this I told him I was going to call the police to have him escorted from the property.

This was the exact moment that I got really, really pissed off. When I went for the phone to call the police, the man in question made a very quick, very quiet exit. In fact when he saw me reach for the phone, he ran out the door. I proceeded to NOT call the police, I gave my name tag and apron to the cashier, reminded her that I was not actually on the clock (which was true, I came over since the boss was on vacation and someone needed to make this guy go away,) and chased after him. When I confronted him out front he seemed a lot more agreeable than he had been while he was inside the store and for some reason that just pissed me off even more…

The actual details get a bit vague at this point. I remember a bit of very stern dialogue, I remember giving him five dollars, I remember punching him in the face so hard that it probably ruptured his appendix, beyond that I remember nothing. He apparently never called the police on me (I thought he wouldn’t since he bolted when I tried to make the call from inside the store, that was likely why I did what I did) and I never heard another word about the entire thing again. Well, truthfully the cashier did ask what happened when I went back into the store and I told her what happened, but I never said anything to the owners, nor has anyone come around looking for the guy that punched the guy in the parking lot all of those years ago. I never saw that guy again either, which was unfortunate since I really would like to have apologized for what I had done, either that or I really wanted to see how bad a shiner he had, I mean I hit him hard.

Now that I am a bit older I know that I would not have handled that situation the way that I did then. When you work in customer service or retail for any amount of time you simply learn to mask your emotions with a happy smile, while you are thinking about doing something like that. I guess it takes a lot of years to develop sufficient patience to handle people like the guy that I dealt with that day, but I would also think that no matter how patient you are there has got to be a limit. Fortunately I have not found occasion to actually bring a fist against anyone since then, though I have really wanted to a few times.

For the record, that story was just that, a story. There are only two people in the entire world that know the outcome of that particular altercation, if you happen to find the other guy, please kick his ass, he deserves it.

• There is a game that I have been playing a lot of recently, it is called “Phlinx”. It is one of the games on Pogo.com. I think that you have to be a “club pogo” member to play it, but as I recall there is a free trial period for the club if you really want to give it a try. The game is very similar to Snood. It is also very similar to Dynomite. I am not sure why I have such an obsession with this one, but it probably is due to having high scores by the hour and by twenty-four hours that you can check after every completed level (a level being four games).

The graphics and sounds in Phlinx are a lot better than the ones in Snood, while it doesn’t have an actual puzzle mode like Dynomite. Also the different difficulty levels in the game actually make a difference in your ability to solve it, as opposed to just having more blocks to start with. You can not necessarily ever “win” the game since it will just load up and start over, but you can marvel at getting ever higher scores, particularly when you set it on expert mode, to see how many of the day’s high scores you can get.

The game certainly isn’t for everyone, yet for some reason I play it a couple of times before I actually get into playing any of the actual games that I have installed on my system. Why? I guess to just make sure that I can still at least get on the top 5 high scores in the last 24 hours. I know that is a pretty empty goal, but it is all mine.

Zelda; Diablo

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I actually did write a post yesterday, and somehow when I saved it it just disappeared. I don’t know where it went but when I opened the index.shtml file again it was the previous day’s post. I could not find the other one anywhere on my local machine, and I know I didn’t upload it so I will assume that I have somehow mistakenly saved it as a different date in my archives folder. That assumption doesn’t make any sense for a lot of reasons, most notably that would require me to use the ‘save as’ command and also to verify overwriting an existing file, unless I just somehow invented a date for it. The real reason that this theory doesn’t hold water is that my ftp client allows me to view files by the most recently modified and I could not find anything in there with the correct date on it, I searched through all of my documents and there was nothing.

That all happened last night as I was trying to ftp the file to my server, I could have written a pretty good copy of it yesterday while it was all still pretty fresh in my mind, yet I didn’t. Today I barely recall the topics that I discussed. I know that I made mention of our puppy’s condition, then I talked a bit about diablo, after that I am blank. Probably better that way I suppose, since today I have no more to talk about than I did yesterday and the same two topics are still on my mind.

Our Zelda puppy seems to be getting better for the most part. She is able to walk in limited doses, though she does strongly favor her driver’s side leg while she is doing it. Whatever pain that she is feeling isn’t bad enough that it is causing her to shake and breathe hard like it was when the injury first occurred. I think her progress may have come along a lot more quickly had it not been for my mother and father in law stopping by the day the injury happened, which led directly to her getting up and running over to them since both of our dogs get really excited when they see new people. Then yesterday my brother in law stopped by to pick up an old dryer, which again made her get up and frolic more so than a dog in her condition really should. I can’t fault the relatives for stopping by, nor can I fault her for being a happy little puppy, I do hope that she can just get a lot of rest over the next couple of days and hopefully get better. I just took the above photo and as you can see the dog does not look particularly happy. As you can also no doubt see, we are in serious need of new carpet (though the stains are not nearly that visible to the naked eye. I think my digital camera may be just a bit too good for my purposes; especially considering that the image size is one third of the actual photo, and it has been compressed insanely to make it viable for internet viewing).

• On the up side I was able to expend a bit of my time in mindless gaming yesterday. Why that is an up side? I got no idea. I played a lot more diablo. Not that it was my intention to play a lot more diablo, more I was hoping to get through the first couple of quests in act 3. What happened after that is the strange Diablo Time Warp that I have previously discussed, only about ten-fold.

There have not been that many changes to the normal difficulty since the recent patch, at least not many that I have found, but the ones that I have found have irritated me on a lot of levels. Act 3 is the most univerally hated of all the acts in the game to begin with, so hated that few people actually waste their time doing it. Knowing this, Blizzard went ahead and made it ever harder and more mundane even for the beginner. WTF were they thinking?

I wandered out into act 3 thinking that I would do the first quest pretty quickly, that didn’t happen at all. When the first couple of super-unique monsters didn’t drop the jade figurine I assumed that this was to keep people from doing only that quest for the +20 to life and the getting turboed to the next act, which is a good idea I think. After I had been playing for about an hour and had mapped the entire zone, not to mention clearing the false spider cavern near the waypoint, I still didn’t have the figurine. When I went into the real cavern (I always get the names confused) the figurine was dropped by the super-unique spider that guards the chest holding Khalim’s eye. I grabbed the figurine and went back to town completely forgetting to get the quest item from the chest. This would have been a very minor problem had I realized it at the time, unfortunately I didn’t realize it until I had gotten the Gidbinn and cleared the Flayer Jungle as well as the Flayer Caverns, where I got Khalim’s brain.

The only reason that all of that was bad is that I had to map the entire Great Marsh before I found a way into the Flayer Jungle. I dropped many Town Portals along the way and when I finally got the part of Khalim’s Will from the Flayer Dungeon (or whatever it is called) I just ran as fast as I could into Lower Kurast, hit the waypoint, went back to town and exited the game so that I could write yesterday’s post, which is lost. When I logged back on after having written yesterday’s post I looked in my stash expecting to see two pieces of the Khalim’s Will quest, but there was only one. This meant that I had to remap the zone (from the waypoint) to get back to the real spider cavern and get the damn eye. Once I had done that I just quit for the day. As a matter of fact that was when I realized that something had gone wrong with yesterday’s post, that is when I just gave up on anything related to the computer for good.

I am likely going to play a bit more of Diablo tonight, still in the act 3 area, but if it starts to piss me off like it did yesterday I may just have to but a real sword so that I can straighten out a few programmers over there at Blizzard. –Not that a situation like that would be likely, since it was my own haste that made me miss my quest item in the first place, and it is possible that it was just a strange map that made me have to clear every zone along the way, but My Random Fluctuations of Time and Space (God, for the religious) that was irritating.

If someone happens to car-jack me tomorrow, I may have some content that is a bit more interesting. If that fails to happen, you should expect the same dribble that you are getting now.

Car; Diablo; Barber; Baby story

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Well, I skipped yet another post yesterday. No real reason for it, I just didn’t write anything. Sure there were external factors that controlled it, such as wasting my time in numerous ways, but as writing anything here is not really productive in any way it is hard for me to gauge which action would have been more productive.

I actually got off of work early yesterday, (well, I got of at noon, which is when I am supposed to get off, but it rarely ever happens) and after also just picking up my pay, I decided that I may as well go get the oil changed in my car. I did not know until I got to the oil change place that it had not been done in fourteen months, but that is another story. Anyway, after an hour, and dropping $105 dollars, I walked out of the local grease ‘n go joint with fresh oil and a flushed cooling system. It kind of made me grit my teeth to have to pay for them to do it, but I just did.

There was a time, say a year ago or so, when the thought of simply letting someone else change the oil in my car was laughable. I kind of let go of that foolish notion about the time that it cost the same or more to do it myself. That really only started to happen when someone decided that you couldn’t just dump used motor oil on the ground anymore, which requires that you haul your used motor oil to a place that has the facilities to recycle it, and you have to pay them. So, if you don’t buy the oil on sale (or if you buy a really shitty brand, the type that I wouldn’t even put into my neighbor’s lawn mower) you are out ten bucks for the oil, say five for the filter, then three bucks to dispose of the oil, add on the gas to drive the oil to the nearest recycling center and you are at about twenty bucks; that is assuming that you have all of the necessary tools to do it in the first place. When you can get it done at a shop for 25, without getting your hands dirty, and with the airing the tires and vacuuming and the such, I just no longer see the reason to do it myself.

The cooling system flush, on the other hand, was something that I really hated to pay for and wish that I had done myself. I believe that the manufacturers recommend that you get it done every 50,000 miles, though I could be wrong on that. The truth is that it doesn’t really matter all that much how many miles are on the car when you do it. If you have a car with 300,000 miles on it, and the water in the radiator is still clear, well, green Kool-Aid colored, but without a lot of rust or gunk in it, then you don’t need to get it done. My car has 105,000 miles on it, and it has never been done, so I went ahead and let them do it. I don’t know how they can charge you 60 dollars to do it with a clear conscience. I figured they would drag out some big extragavent device that would send little robots with scrub brushes into the motor to clean it out, but no, they did it just like I have always done it. Only they did have a machine that took out the human effort. All you have to do is run clean water through the engine and radiator. The way I have always accomplished that is to drain the radiator completely, then hook my radiator hoses to clean pans of water and let the engine run for ten or fifteen minutes, pumping the clean water in through one hose and the dirty out through the other. No real science to it, it sucks the water in clean and pushes it out dirty, when the engine is clean the water is pushed out clean. After that I would just use a sprayer nozzle to blow all of the gunk out of the radiator. Total time, about 25 minutes, depending on how dirty the engine is. The same amount of time it took them to do it, but for only the cost of water, Not the sixty bucks they charged.

• The other thing that happened yesterday that directly contributed to my not getting around to doing an update was Diablo. I hadn’t played the game since the last time I mentioned it here. I was worried that my on-line players may be getting near the termination date, so I logged them all on to make sure it wouldn’t happen. Then I noticed that I had a Paladin that was just starting act 2 in normal, I hadn’t played in so long… What could 30 minutes hurt, or so I thought. Radament was gone in ten minutes or so, so why not go get the cube? Of course since the map doesn’t save in on-line play, I also wanted to get the waypoints for the other two staff quests. About thirty minutes into it I had the cube, so why not just run and get the staff, I never have any problem with the worm pit (or whatever they call it). I don’t remember them having those lightning beetles in there before, but anyway, I mowed right through it. Might as well go ahead and complete the staff quest, only one item left. I found the temple, got all the waypoints along the way, and got the headpiece. I then stopped, since the rest of that act can be done as a stand alone. It only took me about forty-five minutes…in my mind…In the real world it had somehow just consumed almost three hours of time. That damn Diablo time warp is a very strange thing. I bet there are physicists out there that wish they could explain how it works and harnass the power…

• As for today, well nothing happened of note. I got up in the morning and went down to the barber. I have been in desperate need of a haircut for a couple of months. The barber shop was, of course, closed, so I came back home and jumped into the shower. –That is something that I have always thought was a bit odd. If you go to a barber they prefer that you have dry hair for the cut, while if you go to a salon they prefer that your hair be wet. I don’t have any idea why that is, but it is.–When I got out of the shower and looked in the mirror, my bangs were hanging to my bottom lip. That is way longer than I have had my hair for about a decade, so I took matters into my own hands. I have never used scissors on my own hair, at least unless there was a big wad of chewing gum involved, so I was a bit apprehensive. It turns out that it is not that difficult to cut two inches off of one’s own bangs, at least if they are long enough that cutting two inches off of them still leaves the hair pretty damn long. No one at work noticed, and it kept my hair out of my eyes, so it will do until I can find the barber shop open. Though I am now developing a theory that he hides when he sees me coming. He is the only game in town, and charges a flat fee for all haircuts. It usually takes him three times as long to cut my hair as the other guys that go in, so I can see why. Fear not, I have developed a new strategy. The barber shop has windows on only two sides of it. I normally approach from the main road, where he can see me coming. If I just use some of the back streets to get behind the shop, park in the alley and crawl past the one window to reach the front door I will be in! Though that seems like a hell of a lot of work and planning to go through just to get an eight dollar haircut that looks like an eight dollar haircut…

• Now a quick story about the least intelligent mother in Florence:

Have you ever seen those wide, white stripes that are painted on the ground next to stoplights? Sure you have. Do you know what they are for? Sure you do. They are cross-walks. Those are the places that are designated for pedestrians to cross busy streets. Now I am not sure how the laws work in all states, but in the state where I took my drivers test, “Pedestrians have the right of way in all cross-walks, marked or un-marked”. I take that to mean that you can cross the street anywhere you want to, and you will have the right of way, as it should be, but use some discression for your child’s sake.

In case you are really bad at picking up on fore-shadowing, there was an incident that happened to me today that directly relates to this all. You see there are only two stoplights in this whole town. Neither of them is ever very busy. Cars will usually stop for anyone crossing the street on North Main St., which is the historic part of town, regardless of whether there is a cross walk nearby. The thing that one must consider, especially one pushing a baby carriage, is that if you are pushing your baby across the street, behind a huge SUV, and only the SUV’s length from the cross walk. The driver, that is turning left, not being able to see past the SUV, is not going to see you pushing your baby across the street only 10 or 12 feet from the cross walk.

Follow me here. I had full view of the sidewalk on the other side of the street, there was no one on it. I had full view of the cars in front of me and no one turned down the street I was going to go down. There was no indication that there would be anything but clear pavement there. I made the turn and had to lock up the brakes when I saw an obese woman pushing her kid out from behind that SUV. Honestly, in the entire time I have been driving I have never seen anything like that. That was more like the scenario that they put on the driver’s education videos. Why didn’t she walk the additional ten or twelve feet to get to the cross walk? Why didn’t she wait until there were no cars coming? Why did she give me the finger after I locked up my brakes to keep from hitting her and her child, without even honking my horn?

I was not going fast enough at the time to kill anyone, at least I don’t think I was, but had I hit her and the little stroller, I would likely be going to jail for manslaughter. Not because I was drunk, not because I wasn’t paying attention, not because I was talking on the phone, but because this little fat mom pushed her baby into traffic only a few steps away from an intersection. Though I don’t suppose she got fat by walking all the way to the intersections.

I must note that had she not flipped me off, I would not be writing about this now. I must also note that had she not been wandering into traffic behind an SUV I would have seen her before I rounded the corner. I must also note that if it had not been be (or another responsible driver) rounding that corner (someone in an SUV on the cell phone, for instance) this would likely have a vastly different outcome.

Now the question. Would you risk the life of your child to save yourself taking three steps?

Stupid Bitch.