Category Archives: Goods and services

Wal-Mart; PCs

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Well Sunday has been a lot of fun, in a masochistic sort of way. I wanted to get my hands on a cheap value-priced top quality desk to set up the old pc on. I did a quick check at Walmart.com to see what was available in what price range, as the selection at our nearest Walmart is always vastly different than the Walmart anywhere else in the world. I then went to the nearest walmart and got undercharged on both a desk and a chair for said machine. Unfortunately they didn’t have the fifty dollar one that I saw on the internet, no they had one for $38.92 that was way bigger/better than the fifty dollar one on the website, and no shipping charge as a bonus. With the money that I had saved on that item, I decided I would go ahead and buy a new chair also. The chair is also not available at their website, but I got both the desk and the chair for fifty-seven dollars and change. I think that is pretty damn good for a usable desk and a chair that has wheels and lumbar support. Of course I did pay damn near the same price for my last chair alone, which I think I got at an Office Depot or a Staples, greedy sons of bitches…

The particular Wal Mart that we visited is not exactly the most ritzy one, and that is saying a lot, being that it is a Wal mart. The majority of the furniture that they had available didn’t even have sample pieces that were already constructed for you to admire. No, we just looked at the little 3X5 inch photos on the sides of the boxes to see which one seemed to be the most appropriate for the space we had, as well as the best value for the money. The one that we both thought was the best value, as well as being most appropriate for the space, was the one that I picked up…literally…

I read somewhere that once every two hours someone, somewhere files a lawsuit against WalMart. Those suits are for damn good reason, if the entire company runs the way the one I frequent does. We had made the decision to buy that particular desk, so I did the conscious shopper thing and went to the ‘layaway center’ where they generally have the large, flat carts to carryout such large, heavy items. There was a call made over the intercom for customer service to bring one of the carts to the furniture area, so I went back confident that the cart would soon arrive. It never did. After about ten minutes of waiting I was thinking, and said, something very similar to, “Fuck it, how much could this thing possibly weigh?” At that point I drug out one of the boxes, asked the wife to carry the little chair (in a box also) and headed for the register. The question of how much it could weigh is not rhetorical, I found out exactly how much it weighed. It breaks down like this; it weighed about 60 pounds for the first ten seconds, 70 pounds for the next five, and after that it just gained 10 pounds for every five seconds I was carrying it, which thankfully only took a minute and a half or so.

The evil, caniving part of me really wishes that I would have somehow injured my back in the process so that I could have sued them, while the real me is just happy that I didn’t wait for whatever teenager would have shown up with the cart. Invariably the people that they send to move large items are teens. Teens that look like it might kill them if they were to have lift anything as heavy as a bowling ball. After ten minutes of waiting for the second coming of Christ cart, I just dragged the thing to the register my damn self.

The only saving grace for Wal Mart is that they undercharged me by two cents on the chair, and by three dollars and ninety-two cents on the desk. I am an honest person and will usually point out when they undercharge me, today I SO didn’t. To further that, if I am riding a bull next Friday and I somehow get injured, I am going to attribute that directly to the terrible pain that I felt while I was having to carry that very heavy desk up to the register at Wal Mart. They could have provided me with a cart, but chose not to…

Unfortunately it only got worse from there. But, totally unrelated to Wal Mart.

You know how you have that drawer in your kitchen where you throw all the miscellaneous junk that you don’t know if you will ever need, we have expaned that drawer to occupy almost three full rooms in our house. Unfortunately, the room where we keep the computer is the one that I am pretty much solely responsible for. You would not believe how much dust can accumulate on vertical surfaces had you not been in the room that I was trying to clean out today. Sure it was all based on the ash of my cigarettes but come on. I had to take one of the shelves outside and hose it down to get it back to its normal state, and I may have to do that with the other shelf also if I ever get the inclination to spend the better part of my only day off making this room look clean.

I did, however, achieve the goal of having two working computers in the same room. I am not sure how that will ever work into my evil little plan, but it must play a role.

The immediate upside for me is that I can copy some of my web stuff over here, as opposed to having to write it all again. Also, I found a paper copy of an old Witles story that I thought was gone forever.

I think the wife also likes the idea that she will have her own computer to play with. She can play some online games while I type this out, and vice-versa. Yet I still don’t have any intention of installing the imaging software for the new camera on this machine, as I have no clue about windows XP and how to disable the software when it is not in use (which is most of the time at this camp).

The new desk lead to a chain-reaction that required me to clean the room up a bit, so maybe it was for the best. Time will tell.

Pat Tillman; New Camera

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Well, I had hoped to finish the little story regarding the Sherlock Holmes video game today, I may, or not, depending on my endurance. There are actually a couple of things that I really want to comment on today, so I will jump right to it.

• I am linking to the story here, though I had heard about it on the radio as soon as I got to work this morning. It is the story about the death of Pat Tillman. If you do not follow American football, you likely have never heard of him, but I tell you that he was probably twice the person you will ever be. Especially if you, like me, are just sitting here typing at your computer keyboard.

By all accounts Tillman was a bit too small to make it in college football, but he made it, and even won the Pac10 defensive player of the year award his senior(I think) season. Despite that accolade, he was not selected until the seventh round of the NFL draft. -I should mention that he played college football for the Arizona State Sundevils, and was drafted by the Arizona Cardinals, that is why I really feel the need to talk about this, as it is so very close to home- He had to fight his way through training camp, and eventually was given a starting position. He broke the rookie record for tackles in his first (obviously) season. He put every bit of himself into every game, even though he was playing for a losing team.

Shortly after the attacks on 9/11, he made a decision that shocked the world -the sports world at the very least- by walking away from a multi-million dollar contract, to join the army. I am not entirely sure what his official title was, but I do know that he was in the ‘special forces’ which is a position that you must volunteer for due to the high risk factor. Also I am not sure when he was actually sent to Afghanastan, or what exactly his unit was doing there. I am quite sure that I could find all of that information if I were so inclined, the thing is that I am just not.

When the story about Tillman leaving the NFL to join the army first hit the news (I think that was in early 2002), I remember thinking that it was some sort of a publicity stunt. I remember thinking that there was no way anyone would walk away from, not so much the money, but the dream of so many children to play in the NFL. I remember thinking that once he started boot camp he would quickly change his mind. I remember all that, yet now I remember that I have not thought about him at all in the last couple of years. The reason that I haven’t thought about him in the last couple of years is that he has declined every request for an interview since he made his decision. He went out of his way to avoid publicity, he didn’t want it to be a big deal that he was making the choice to serve his country.

I have typed this line about a dozen times and then deleted it. I don’t think that there is anything that someone in my position can say about someone in his position. There is one thing that I can say, he was twice the man that I will ever be. I have always though that we were all just ‘Dust in the Wind’, yet now I feel that some of us (myself included) are actually dust that gets stuck in the boots of people like Pat Tillman, and I know that his is a name I will never forget.

• I was talking about a new digital camera back on April 20. Well I got it in the mail today, very quick shipping in my estimation. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, what after my first digital camera purchase. This one seems to be, better..

This is the first image ever snapped from my new camera. This was right after I put the batteries into it and set the time. I was a bit curious about the shutter speed, as that was one of the many downfalls of my previous digital camera. It seemed to work pretty well. You should certainly click on the thumbnail to see it full size, and keep in mind that I saved it at almost half of the original size, else it would have been a couple of Megs. I think that the single most impressing thing is that the fan that you see in the photo was actually spinning at the time, but it seems to be off. Well, not only that, but also the fact that the box that the camera came in is like eight or ten inches from the camera, while the t.v. is about ten feet away, and even the t.v. is clear enough to read the station id in the bottom right. Keeping in mind that the picture looks twice as good with the full file size, I just have to say that this camera is simply amazing, and it is last year’s model.

One of the things that I really love about the camera, which may be possible on all cameras for all I know, is that you don’t have to install the software for it. What I mean is that you can simply install all of the drivers for it and then it will let you access the camera from an explorer window, as if it were a hard drive. The only problem with that is you don’t get to see the photo previews and thus have to click them one by one to open them into your photo program. I really don’t have enough information to form an opinion on this little beauty yet, but I gotta say that for 80 bucks after shipping it seems to be well worth it…Remind me of that in a week or two when I am calling it a sham piece of shit.

At any rate, this new camera will likely mean that lots of photos will ensue in the immediate future. Whether they are good or bad will certainly be all your own opinion, they will likely be of our dogs, our house (which is over 100 years old) and the decorating scheme that I spoke about without photographic evidence a long time ago.

Check back often as I am likely to be ‘snap happy’ for quite some time.

Camera; Dogs

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There were a combination of factors leading to me not posting anything new yesterday. The first was yet another silly little video game, which I may go into in some more detail at a later date. The second was a telephone conversation with my mother, which at least helped to ease a bit of family tension. The third was that I was looking to buy a new digital camera so that I could show off my handsome/pretty dogs, Warlock and Zelda respectively.

The first digital camera that I ever bought was an “Argus DC2000”, I bought that little sucker for 79 bucks a few years ago. You know, back when any digital camera started at a couple of hundred. That camera is just totally fucking useless, but don’t take my word for it, here are the reviews that it got on Epinions.com. Hardly glowing recommendations, to say the least.

I wanted to ensure that my next digital camera purchase would not just, well, piss me off, so I spent a bit of time reading reviews over at Epionions.com, as well as reviews for more recent cameras from sites like amazon.com. I read through the reviews on epinions, compared them to what I saw available on ebay at the time, and bit the bullet. The camera that I bought is a Kodak, which is a name that I am certainly more familiar with than the previous “Argus” camera that I had. The particular camera that I purchased has tons of reviews over there, the average is 4.5 out of 5 stars, yet there are a couple that just give it a 1 star rating. I think that might just be based on their inability to use it, but it could also be a piece of defective equipment. Only time will tell.

At any rate, I have not yet gotten that camera so I can’t yet voice an opinion. I am sure that it will be better than what I already have, but not sure if it will be the ultimate bliss that I am hoping for. I figure it will hit somewhere halfway between the two. If it is simply usable for taking still shots, it will be a hundred times better than my last digital camera purchase.

One humorous side-note to the whole thing. The number one ‘con’ to buying this camera was that it eats batteries, while the number one ‘pro’ was that it only takes two, while most cameras take four. Do the people that call it a pro that it takes less batteries, yet a con that it goes through them faster eat sugar-frosted lead flakes for breakfast or what? Of course it is going to go through batteries a lot faster when you are only using two, as opposed to four, the energy in the batteries is used as needed and, to my knowledge, can not be divined by simply praying over them. The camera runs on 3 volts, that means that it will operate on two AA batteries, the cameras that require 4 AA batteries last twice as long, but was there actually any savings to you?

I am sure that it is written somewhere in the fine print that the use of only 2 batteries is for the purpose of reducing the weight of the camera. I could be wrong, but it would seem too silly to think that you could get the same performance from a camera that had half the power. That is just my take on it, your opinion may vary.

• Country Thunder is descending on us like cancer. You can see signs of it all over the place, most notably the big-ass sign that they put up on the tiny little road leading into town. My wife often laughs when I say that I did not get the mail because there was too much ‘traffic’ in town. When I say that what I mean is that the drive-up-and-grab-your-mail slots outside the office are full. Once Country Thunder hits, it will be an adventure to simply make it home alive.

I said in my last blog that it is like Ozzfest, and it is in many ways, especially the drinking. People getting up at nine in the morning so that they can make the first show, taking time out only long enough to go get more beer. I have heard that they have better security and the such this year, but just imagaine trying to drive through a tiny town like ours at noon, when half of the driver’s are already drunk. I am pretty sure that I don’t want to have to be in the middle of that.

• Even as I pen (type) these lines, I may be looking at the last living moments of our older dog, ‘Warlock’. He is in perfect health, has had all of his shots, he is a good dog by the definition of dogs, but he may have to be killed. The little bastard kept myself and my wife awake all last night by first scratching on our bedroom door. She (my wife) let him go out, in case he needed to pee. He came back into the room and started sniffing at everything (you wouldn’t think that was loud, but you haven’t heard it). Then he scratched on the door wanting out, it took me about twenty minutes of laying there listening to him before I let him, and Zelda (who is the good dog at this point) onto the porch.

Dogs have nails like the talons of death, or so it would seem. After an hour of not being able to sleep because of the sound of the dog scrathing at the door, I let him back in. If the dog was intelligent, he would have noted that it gets better when he quits scratching, unfortunately, the dog is an idiot. Within ten minutes they were back on the porch. And the second he got there he was scratching at the door.

Long story short, if he does that again tonight, my wife and I will have a very beautiful stuffed dog.

I should also mention that I just got a call from my employers that will make it so that I will be able to make a post tomorrow, but not on Thursday. So Wednesday and Thursday are switching places, hopefully just for this week.

Lunch; Secret Window

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Today was a rather enjoyable day on the homefront. It is not often that my wife and myself go out and do things, which we did today. I suppose that the base reason for this is my agoraphobia, not that I think I actually have the affliction, but anyone seeing my reaction to large public places would surely think I did. It probably took me quite a while to become the hermit that I am, I don’t really mind going out in public places as such, I just try to avoid it when it is not necessary. I don’t think that it is a fear, or anything of that nature, it is more like a choice to simply avoid all the weird people doing weird things. Okay, I am going to change the subject here, as I seem to be digging myself an ever deeper hole.

The really strange thing about my not going out much is that the times we do, I really enjoy it. We never see the weird people doing weird things, we simply go out and have a little fun and then come home. Why, then, do I have this notion that I want to avoid all the strangeness out there? I gots no idea.

As sited in a Previous Blog, my wedding anniversary was last Wednesday, and it certainly did not get a celebration at all. We went out today to do something enjoyable to make up for the lack of being able to do so then. We decided on lunch and a movie, which is like dinner and a movie, minus the not getting home until midnight aspect of it.

My wife’s parents had given us a gift card for On the Border, which is an upscale type mexican restaurant that serves really yummy food. It is not exactly authentic mexican food, but the version of it that those of us who are not Hispanic have grown to love. Tasty, tasty stuff, and huge portions of it. Though at the prices they charge the portions had better be huge. The meal would have been completely free to us, had I not indulged in a beer once I had received my food. Perhaps it was better that I ordered that four dollar beer, as it would have seemed really cheap to try to put the tip on a gift card, IMHO. My wife left the tip for the meal, which was five dollars, even after I had offered to pay it, since that was darn near the price of the beer after tax. Oh well, tasty, tasty stuff.

My wife’s brother (yes, my brother-in-law, but it seems that I should give credit to my wife for having the family, since I never got so much as a call from any one of my relatives for the anniversary, let alone a gift) gave us a gift card to AMC theatres for the movie. The card did not have an amount printed on it, so my wife opined that it may not be enough to cover the tickets (her brother is only twenty, and not independantly wealthy) so I would make up the difference at the box office. As it turns out, he went above and beyond the call, giving a twenty dollar gift card. We spoke briefly of using the remaining balance to buy soda or popcorn, but eventually decided that one of us could go to the next movie for free if we didn’t. So we didn’t.

The movie that we saw was Secret Window. This movie has gotten really bashed in the ratings game, having only a 47% positive review on Rotten Tomatoes. Ebert has This to say. I think that Ebert does a much better job of describing the film than the people that reviewed it over at rotten tomatoes.

I don’t like Johnny Depp much as an actor, but he did do a very convincing drunkard in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie. He did a pretty good job in this movie as well. The novella, by Stephen King, that this movie was based on does not have really anyone in it. Just the main character, his (ex)wife and her boyfriend. Without character interaction there can be little dialogue, without dialogue you really don’t have any way to judge a character’s actions. Depp certainly made the point that the character was not ‘all there’ with his actions, most notably scrubbing his hands for way too long in one sequence.

It is hard to try to discuss an actor’s performance in a movie without giving away plot elements, that is what I am trying to do, so bear with me.

At exactly the point in the movie that I knew how it would end, they threw in the fiance of his (ex)wife. That was entirely too convenient to the flow of the movie, and thus, had no effect on the outcome. Had the editors put that scene further back in the screenplay, to give it enough time to fade from your memory a bit, it would have made the whole story a lot stronger. I think so anyway.

I am going to speculate that King wrote this little story while he was going through a little bit of a ‘Writer’s Block’. Like many King stories you simply must read the story to appreciate the screenplay. This is one of his stories (like most of his work) that I have not read. I am sure that it is extremely difficult to try to act out the thoughts of a character, yet Depp did it, and pretty masterfully I might add.

Johnny Depp just seems to have that touch, much like Tom Hanks, where he can act out any role and turn that movie into a blockbuster. Why that didn’t happen with this film is still a mystery to me. I think that the number one reason is that it is so similar to another King story called “the Dark Half”. Start telling the same story twice and even your fans may turn on you, no matter that the other film was released well over a decade ago.

The movie was pretty good on its own merits, better if you have never read any Stephen King. The ideas that he used may have been recycled, but they were recycled from his own twisted mind. Can one ever actually copy theirself?

hodgepodge

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Well I don’t have anything really planned for writing today, so I am going to go into a brief talk about the weather, and how it relates to yesterdays evaporative cooler talk. Throw up a couple of probably rhetorical questions about things that were going through my mind today, and then type just a few paragraghs about South Park. That is the plan anyway, we will see what actually happens as it goes.

The weather in Arizona is notoriously hot, most of the time. The last week has been even more than us locals could bear. This is the time of the year when the temperatures are usually in the mid 70’s with occasional jumps into the mid 80’s. That is what we call ‘Spring’, it usually lasts for about three or four weeks. This year it lasted exactly one day. I am not even slightly exaggerating when I say that two weeks ago it was cold enough overnight that it would put frost on the windshield of your car, this Sunday we broke a record high, before 11am, it was more than 93degrees before 11am, that is too damn hot! No one should have to see weather like that in March, it’s just not normal.

I am not sure if I ever actually did write about the temperature on the site ( I did email a few people about it) but I would have been wrong if I had. I thought that we had record breaking temperature all last week, and it turns out that we only tied the record on two days, broke it two days (by 4degrees on Sunday) and were just very near it all the other days. So to be technical it wasn’t record breaking stuff all week, but I am gonna call it that because it sure as hell felt like it.

When I started to write about the evaporative cooler yesterday I was going to talk about this a bit because it just sucked for me, but that is my luck. The hours that I spent on the roof working on that cooler were from 11am to 3pm, the hottest part of the day. The roof is painted with an elastomeric coating that is almost day-glow white, (very few houses down here use shingled roofs because the asphalt composition that can take extreme lows in the temperatures will turn to dust in four or five years down here. Most all of the new housing is going with those terra cotta ceramic type roofs, since they last a lot longer, while most of the old building opt to go with the ‘spray foam’ since most of them don’t have enough structural support to hold up the ceramic shingles. It is quite an odd site to look at the houses on the street, which appear to be covered in snow, then you realize that it is 120degrees, and you are in Arizona.), which reflects the sun way too well, and adds to the heat index as well. It is usually 20 degrees hotter on the roof of this place than the reported temperature, so call it about 110 while I was up there working. I drank at least a gallon of water in those four hours and ended up with a pretty severe sunburn.

This time I was at least smart enough to keep all of my clothing on while working, that usually kills me most years. When I start to get too hot I throw my shirt aside, allowing the rays to pour down on my chest and back, then the burn usually will all but immobilize me for a day or two. Sunburn only really hurts me when it is on the pasty portion of my skin (chest and back) while I can burn my arms and they will peel in a day or so and then my skin is a couple of pigments darker. Same with my face and legs. In fact the only part that really hurt about the sunburn was on the back of my neck, where my t-shirt didn’t cover, and even that doesn’t really hurt anymore. I guess it went well for what I was doing. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend that any idiot climb up on a white roof and work there for the four hottest hours of the day, especially in Arizona, especially when the heat is record breaking. So why did this idiot do it? Funny you should ask.

Every year I service these coolers, there are two of them, each has 8 grills and hold a total of 16 pads. Every year I hope to be able to complete the both of them in about ten hours, each year I also miss that goal because of unforseen circumstances (the worst was one year when I actually had to run about 75 feet of new water supply line because the old line was so horribly corroded that it was pouring more water onto the roof than into the coolers.) This year I wanted to get one of the damn things done by the day I said I would have it done, and by God I did, that is why I was up there in all that heat. I got it done on Sunday just like I said I would. That is the first time in the nine years that I have been servicing those coolers that I got either one of them done on time, that is the only positive that I can take from the experience.

Now, what really pisses me off is that I really did that all as a matter of pride, to finally get one of them done on time. Now I hear on the news that we are going to be back in the mid to low 80’s for the rest of the week. After I did all that work when it was damn near 100, that just sucks! The good news is that I only have one cooler left to service and I should be able to work on it an hour or so in the evenings this week, when it is like 80 and the sun has already set to the point that I won’t be able to get a sunburn. So I should have the second one done by this weekend and hopefully that will result in me not being so wiped out when I sit down to type. But who knows.

What is the actual point of the traffic choppers on radio stations? I am usually at work when they are on and listen to them because I don’t really have any options. The ones that I hear on the station that I listen to day in and day out are exactly the same. Something like, “Slow and go on the 60, the ‘stack interchange’ is backed up to ‘x’ point, slowing on the 202 near ‘x’ offramp”. The same every day, well sometimes the x is a different spot, but it is all the same. It may just be the station that I am forced to listen to, but I would think it is probably similar with most stations here in the valley, and probably in every major metropolitan area in the U.S. If you do that commute on a daily basis you probably know that it is going to be ‘slow and go’ at whatever point, know that the ‘stack interchange’ is going to be backed up to the ‘x’. The things that would concern you would be things like, oh accidents, cars broken down in the middle of the freeway, godzilla running amok. These things all happen of course, but it seems that they are always on surface streets (90% of the time at least according to the one that I have to listen to).

Then when something does happen, say a collision with a rollover and fatality (that is going to shut down the entire road for quite some time) they don’t go into that at the end of the song, no, they wait until they do the official: This traffic report is brought to you by ‘whoever’. Would the average person rather hear a bunch of pre-scheduled traffic updates that are the same crap brought to you by whoever, or just have the one or two that really matter, and take an extra five minutes of commercials per hour to counter that? Curious question, let me know what you think.

Lawyer’s commercials. Why is it that every damn accident/injury lawyer’s commercials all have these people in them that sound so staged? Do they really think that the average person can not read a cue card? They put things on the bottom of the screen that says “actual clients”, as if one could mistake them for actors? I could read the ingredients off the back of a shampoo bottle in a live auditorium and make it sound more like something that I had spoken off of the top of my head than the idiots that they get to try to read that crap. Maybe that’s what they’re going for though. They want you to think that if they can get 250,000 dollars for this guy that can barely read you would fare a lot better? Or maybe they are just trying to emphasize the point that the people are not actors (that certainly needs no emphasis) that they had hired? Again, I just don’t know.

In a retail situation, why do certain people think that the rules don’t apply to them? Pick any rule you want, there will always be someone who thinks that it doesn’t apply to them. I even tried that once when I wanted to return a game that I had already opened and installed, when it didn’t work I took it back. They had a policy of “no returns on video game purchases”, so I just sucked it up. I knew that that was the policy, I explained that I had not been able to register the game, so it was still brand new, they said no, I walked away. I didn’t make a scene, scream that they were raping my children by not giving me back the twenty bucks, I just walked away. I didn’t even ask for them to call a manager who could come out and clarify the store policy, then not give me back the twenty bucks, while making everyone behind me wait longer for their (possibly) legitimate claims.

I suppose that I am a bit more tolerant of people who do this, since I do work in retail. We really want every person to be happy when they walk out the door, but sometimes it is a bit much. For instance, there is a little platform at the register (where I work) for people to place their checkbook while they write the check. On top of that platform is a HUGE sign that says: “There is a $25.00 fee for all returned checks”. That should be pretty simple to understand. I believe that it costs us about $18.00 up front for the returned check, then whatever amount it takes for the time and resources to actually get the person to pay up. The number one claim is that it was a banking error that made the check get returned (that translates to, I didn’t have the money in their that day, but three days later I did), and that is not an acceptable answer. If the bank made a mistake they are always quite happy to rectify it, else you would bank elsewhere, but for some reason these people always expect us to believe it. On occasion, we will actually try to verify the funds for the check while the customer is still there bitching about it being a bank error and find that they still don’t have enough money in their account to cover it, another bank error, of course…

There was this one woman that was so brazen that she offerd to write a check for the amount from a different account, at a different bank, with check number 101, we of course called to verify funds, and there was yet another bank error since the money wasn’t in that account either. This was all over a four dollar check. It could have been a bank error, in fact I think it likely that they had pulled her monthly fee before they processed that check and that is why it bounced. It is not her fault (if that did happen) but it is certainly not our fault either. Her problem would be with her bank (if they do not cover her check when she has overdrafted by a dollar or two she probably has had other instances where she has done it. I overdrafted my account by 613.52 by mistake last month – forgot to deposit a check- and they covered it, didn’t even charge me, but I would have paid the 27 dollar fee that the company posted for returned checks because that was what I agreed to when I wrote the check in the first place).

South Park:

Just going to be a few random musings about the show ‘South Park’ here. The first is that I just can not really believe what they are able to get away with. There are many times that I am watching the show and thinking to myself “how did they get that by the censors”, but I guess the censors are a bit more lenient to shows that do not air on abc, cbs and nbc. Honestly the censors for cable networks are just about non-existent. South Park deals with a lot of issues, has very fresh writing, and can get away with doing whatever the hell they want. Must be a golden position to be in. They can do no wrong, well, they can, but the network will air the show anyway. That is why I really do adore the show so.

Point in the first, they have a kid called ‘token’ who is, of course, the only black person in the entire show, well that is not true, since they also have Chef who is played by Isaac Hayes, but token is the only black kid, and the show is mostly about the antics of the four kids. In one episode, Eric Cartman tells Token to go get a ‘Bass Guitar’ out of his basement. Token says that they don’t have one, but looks anyway at Cartman’s urging, and yes he did have a bass in the basement. Cartman tells him to “give me a ‘bass-line'”, token says that he can not play bass, and Cartman says, “God damn it, Token, you are black, you can play bass.” Token tries it, and yep, he can play bass, he says, “God damn it!” and we go to the next scene. There is no way that that would have ever aired on a network tv show.

In that same episode, Eric Cartman spoke a line that I will never forget, well sang it really, and that line was; “I want to get down on my knees and start pleasing Jesus, I want to feel his salvation all over my face”. There is no way that you are gonna get that line by a network censor.

In the most recent show, the kids all buy weapons at a local fair and think that they are ninjas. Whenever it is just the kids in the shot, it shows them all in their ninja gear and larger than life, when their parents (any parent) is around, it is back to lame 2-d animation. They certainly show with the episode that they would be able to make it a much more believable animated series if they want to, but I don’t think that they would stoop to that level. It is what it is, and it is the funniest thing that I have ever seen because of it.

The thing that I really love about the show is that in the aforementioned episode they made two referrences to the Mel Gibson movie “The Passion of the Christ”, only a couple of weeks after it came out. And, at the end, they made referrence back to the “wardrobe malfunction” when one of the kids is actually seen naked. This is only weeks after the things happened, and why I love it so. The animation may seem a bit dated, but the ideas and morals that they are using within the story just seem so dead-on that you have to watch more.

God I love South Park.

Dinner; Mad cow

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Yesterday’s update was cut a bit short because I went out to dinner, that is a pretty rare event around our house. I would like to say that it is because I am xenophobic or agoraphobic but the plain and simple truth is that I am just a cheap-ass. On second thought, I think I am gonna go with a combination of xenophobia and agoraphobia, and -hopefully- seem to be a bit less of a jack-ass.

Aside from the monetary concerns involved with eating out, the other issue that I have with the process is the servers. At a restaurant where you have never been, you may expect that there could be shoddy service, while at one that you frequent you would expect better service, or else why would you frequent it in the first place? The place that we normally eat out is local, and in a town as small as mine when I say local I mean that it is owned by two people, one is my barber and the other is his wife, who frequents the grocery store I work at. Think happy thoughts about the “Mayberry” type small town for a second, than toss that mess right out the window.

I am on a first name basis with the owners of the establishment (there is no need to include the name of the place, since there is only one in the entire world) as well as the guy who runs it on a day to day basis. Perhaps because I know the people so well, I find it very difficult to complain about anything, even when that something is absolutely terrible service that I know they would not tolerate from my store, and would not expect me to tolerate from their business. That is where it all gets just a bit tricky where I live.

The servers where I live get paid shit wages. I don’t mean like minimum wage, I mean like last I knew they actually make about three dollars an hour plus tips (some restaurants do pay base minimum wage plus tips, but they are few and far between). I am not sure if there is a law in the state of Arizona that makes this possible, or if the tips that they earn put them above the minimum wage to make it legal, however it works, it works. I am not sure about you, but if I was making three dollars an hour, I would bust my ass to make sure that I made every customer feel like he/she was royalty. Most people don’t even tip ten percent, even less fifteen percent, and if the service is bad there would more likely be a penny under the upside-down cup full of water, which I have only done a couple of times.

There is a server at this restaurant that is just amazing, knows myself and my wife on a first name basis, has our drinks on the table before we order them, always has an ashtray on the table quickly (yes, I know it is going to kill me and I should quit, but until I do, when I sit in the smoking section and do not have an ashtray it really irritates me). This server is probably the best that I have ever seen in any restaurant ever, and he, yes HE is not a young man, he has been at it for a while, and knows that the level of service will dictate the level of tip. What other job is there where your efficiency can either triple or half your hourly wage on a day to day basis? This guy always gets my highest honor, that being a twenty percent tip. Some of the other servers in the same restaurant get much less, like a dollar. On a twenty dollar dinner that would be a 5 percent tip. Servers here (elsewhere also?) are required to report 10 percent of the total from the people they served as tips received, even if they didn’t make that much. So providing bad service to everyone that you wait on could result in you actually losing money for the night. That’s some kind of incentive, in my mind.

What I was trying to get at, a few paragraphs back, is that it is hard to find good servers down here. When the base wage is so low (it may have changed since the last numbers I have, but the three dollars an hour I spoke of was when federal minimum wage was five twenty-five) the only people that really apply to that position are usually teen-agers, except, frequently there will be illegal immigrants here (there are a lot of farms nearby that rely on them for cheap labor) that use false social security numbers to get jobs. I am quite sure that large corporations do extensive background checks on the people that apply, your average family owned business here really just doesn’t. Even when I got my job down here I did not have a single photo ID, I did have a social security card, but who was to say that that was actually me? That is the same angle they are using, and quite effectively.

At any rate, back to the dinner story. I just somehow managed to spend way too long explaing that the server that was waiting on us initially last night didn’t speak english. About ten minutes into the experience we decided to switch tables, to be closer to the door the servers go through, so that, in theory, they might notice that there were a couple of people there without the requisite placemats, silverware, salsa, chips, drinks, the sort of stuff that this place is usually really quick to get to you. I spent the next ten or so minutes trying to level our table, it was a really wobbly one, by the time they came around with the chips I had nearly acieved true level (though I didn’t have a level to check, so that is based solely on the fact that you could no longer put a nickel on one side of the table, push down on the other side of the table and watch the nickel fly into the street). The woman tried to take our drink order, ‘Coors Light’ and ‘Hard Lemonade’, she did not understand about the hard lemonade. She understood the lemonade part, but not the ‘hard’ part. She went and got a bottle of lemonade and brought it over to see if that was what my wife had ordered, which it wasn’t, when my wife said, “No.” that might have been the only time she understood a single word that either of us had spoken so far. She took the lemonade away…And never returned…

We now had the chips and salsa, but no drinks, we nibbled on the chips and salsa anyway, sure that the drinks would eventually arrive. Big mistake. You must understand that the salsa in this place is considered ‘mild’, where I live fresh salsa that is called ‘mild’ makes Pace Picante Sauce that is ‘Hot’ taste like tomato sauce. So, we were both now breathing fire, no drinks to be found, and my wife said that she would just do with some ice water if we ever saw the server again. I was a bit irritated about the whole state myself, so I went to server central (inside the place, as we were on the patio) and happened to run into the guy who ran the place on a day to day basis. I simply asked him for an ice water and an ashtray, as we had been waiting at least twenty minutes at that point for any kind of actual service. He asked me if there was a problem, I didn’t want to say anything, but I did mention that they had taken the drink order and the girl didn’t seem to understand. It turns out that they no longer carried any type of ‘hard lemonade’, but had just gotten in some new type of hard raspberry drink. I left there with a glass of ice water and an ashtray, and about twenty seconds after I got back to our table our drinks arrived, carried by a different server.

I don’t think that we ever saw that original server the rest of the night, but the service certainly improved. It only took about ten minutes (maybe fifteen) to get our food, after taking longer than that to get, well, anyone to come to our table. There was a mistake with her food order, but it was an addition, and it was not charged to us, so that doesn’t really matter. The one thing that I really found strange about the whole ordeal was that the guy who runs the place day to day had said that “your drinks are on me”, since they never brought us a bill I really couldn’t say for sure, but what I can say is that my wife asked if they charged her for the item in her meal that she did not get, and they hadn’t, but they did charge here for a ‘hard lemonade’ which was the source of the entire problem in the first place. The two beers that I drank, at least, were free.

I am not sure if I have ever written on this site that I am a butcher, if not there you go. I am not the one who slaughters the animals or anything, I am the one that takes the 20-60 pound crude cuts of beef/pork and makes them into the yummy little steak/roast size portions that you see in the local grocery store. The majority of the meat that I deal with is boneless, as it is a far more efficient way to handle it in a small time operation like the one I work in. The pieces of meat, though, are also whole, like a whole striploin (muscles on the lower back of a cow/pig that are on the inside of the rib-cage), I don’t want to go into to much detail, just to say that I know where each piece of said cow/pig came from. Since the day when it was discovered that there was at least a single case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy found in the U.S., when anyone asks me which type of ground beef I prefer, I will always say that I prefer the one that I make daily from cow muscle, where the one that is called “Extra Lean Quality Ground Beef” is the leaner type of beef, it is also the type that may be mechanically stirpped from the carcass, and far more likely to have neural matter from the slain beast in it. That would make it, in my mind, far more likely to be able to cause the same disease in humans.

Looking around online today, I found this article which does not really put my heart at ease. Read the whole thing for context, I am going to take a few quotes from it.

The government last year conducted mad cow tests on tissues from 20,543 animals, virtually all of them cattle that could not stand or walk and had to be dragged to slaughter. After the case in December, the department initially doubled the number of animals to be tested this year to 40,000.

Well it is good to see that we have taken a firm stance on this. We want to make sure that animals that very obviously have serious problems are tested before they go to slaughter. Maybe they just tested the whole puddle of DNA they got by having to drag the animals to slaughter, since they could not walk on their own. I feel so much safer now.

The department announced plans Monday to test more than 221,000 animals over a 12- to 18-month period beginning in June.
Included would be 201,000 animals considered to be at high risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, because they show symptoms of nervous system disorders such as twitching.

Random tests also will be conducted on about 20,000 older animals sent to slaughter even though they appear healthy. Those tests are aimed at sampling cattle old enough to have eaten feed produced before 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration banned the use of cattle tissue in feed for other cattle.

So they have raised the bar, a bit, now testing animals that are at “high risk” of the disease, to me that means that the animals have already been privately tested and have come out with clean bills of health, otherwise the american beef industry would be ruined. I may have the wrong take on this, though, as they are not saying whether these tests will be at random. I bet the 20,000 old cattle that they are willing to test, who were sent to slaughter, were checked by the american beef farmers also.

“We want to see the U.S. government introduce the same system for beef safety, or at least an equivalent system, that we have in Japan. We test all slaughter cattle, regardless of age — not some,” he said.
Nearly 50 countries imposed bans on American beef after the first U.S. case was confirmed. Poland has lifted its ban and Mexico has relaxed its prohibitions, but major importers like Japan and South Korea have said they will not allow American beef back in until all 35 million cattle slaughtered in the United States each year are tested.

Wait, seriously, if we slaughter 35 million cattle in the U.S. every year, we could certainly do better than to check 200,000 of them to make sure they aren’t going to kill people, right, right…..

The department expects to announce soon a new system of rapid tests that will make the increased surveillance possible. The rapid tests could be done at laboratories around the nation, as well as the department’s National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, currently the only facility that can do testing.
The testing could find one case of BSE in 10 million animals, he said. It would establish whether the United States has more cases of mad cow.

DeHaven has said it’s not necessary to test every animal because the department’s targeted surveillance program system would pick up one case of BSE in 10 million animals.

Those are the type of numbers that I like to hear. So we are slaughtering 35 million animals a year, but only one in 10 million of them will kill you if you eat it, therefore we don’t need any further tests. WTF? So what comes next, they have to put labels on the sides of the containers that your beef comes in that say “Caution: eating beef has been linked to the immediate death of thousands of people, but we just don’t give a fuck.” Great advertising there, eh?

Renaissance festival; keyboards

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I was not able to finish updating all of my existing pages with the fancy new SSI thing, but I got the majority of it all working properly. At least that all went well. One of the very first updates that I did on this site said that I was sure there was a way to update the navbar on a macro scale with a micro effort, and that is exactly what the SSI does. I am still able to continue to do all of the html in notepad, which makes me smile, but that navbar thing would have been death if I had to update every single page. That was the biggest factor in why I had always used frames in the past. I just did not know that there was such an easy solution available, now that I know I don’t think I will ever turn back.

Now for some personal news. I said yesterday that I was the jack-ass who didn’t have any candy or flowers for my love on Valentine’s day, and it went over about as you would expect…Not good. The agreed upon terms for my penance were a visit to the annual reneaissance festivel where My lady and I could take in the sites and sounds of the period (which is a bunch of crap since its all normal people watching actors, but still the point is there).

Last year my wife had to literally drag me to this event. This year I was a bit less reluctant, since we had acquired a really cool picture and a nice rubbing (of the symbol for a saint, in theory, but it just looked really cool) the previous year. I was a little bit more in the mood for that sort of thing this year, and it was actually quite a good time.

The same shop that we got the rubbing from the previous year was set up again, and I went ahead and got the guy going on another of the saints (how the picture of a bull with wings and horns can be the symbol for Saint Luke escapes me) and then went to look at the other wares. It is sort of like the state fair, with all of this cheesy crap that you would never buy if you saw it in Wal-Mart, but for some reason, in the heat of the moment maybe, you will go ahead and pay three times what it would cost you online to get the same damn thing. I guess there is a bit of sentiment involved with that as well, I mean if you were to buy some trinket online that will be just a trinket that you bought online. If you buy the same trinket at a festival such as this you will probably remember things that happened while you were there (good or bad) that make it seem more like a family heirloom than the shoddy piece of crap it is.

What we bought there, this year and last, could certainly not be considered shoddy crap, but as I do not have a digital camera that is worth using I will wait until I have photographic proof to go into any more detail. Suffice to say that most people give up on their whole “gothic” point of view in their late teens or early twenties, our house has no images on the walls that are not of dragons, or fantasy (with the exception of an engagement photo and a wedding photo). We have our walls adorned with wrought-iron candle sconces, even a gargoyle on a pedastol guarding the entrance to the room where we have the computer. It is certainly not like S&M bondage type of crap, just that both of us seem to love images by Boris Vallejo Those images always have dragons and wizards and that is sort of what our home adornments look like…Almost completely forgot, we also have a queen size bed that has wrought Iron posts(about seven feet tall, and very dark green(couldn’t find it in black or navy blue) lace hanging from it(held back much like an open curtain is, with ties around the middle).

Okay, now that I have proven that I am a freak I can calm down a bit and get back to what I do best. I must Bitch On.

Keyboards:

Keyboards are a lot like assholes in a lot of ways. 1)you only like your own, everyone else’s stinks. 2)No one really talks about the good and the bad of them. 3)Once you know your way around it you would not likely trade it in on a newer model. 4)Like everything else, Microsoft is the biggest, and most useless. (take it for what you want, I am working for free).

On the way to the festival which I went on about above, I wanted to buy a new keyboard. The escape key had not worked on my previous keyboard in, oh, about three years. I had (what I thought) some pretty reasonable goals with the new keyboard. 1)it must be the split-v style. 2)It really has to have a double-sized backspace key. 3)The left, down, right arrow must all be in a row, with absolutely no deviance in the heigth. 4)The ‘insert’, ‘home’ and ‘page up’ keys must be in a single row above the arrows(and single sized buttons). 5)The ‘Delete’, ‘end’ and ‘Page Down’ keys must be in the same format directly below them. That sounds like a standard keyboard to me, but guess what?
You can’t get one like that anymore. At least not at OfficeDepot, Staples or BestBuy(which are not linked because they pissed me off). I am going to throw in a break here, before I start killing children.

It took me a long time to come up with this analogy, so please take a few seconds to read it:

There are thousands of manufacturers who make guitars. None of those manufacturers try to move the frets around on the guitar, because it is impossible. The tone can not be acquired if the fret is not in the right place. It is thankful that they are not able to do it, since, can you imagine having to learn to play the guitar again because some asshole changed the neck around? Why are keyboards so different?

Microsoft has the least logical and most difficult to use keyboards in the entire world, yet they charge double for them. Perhaps some idiots assume that Microsoft will make a better keyboard? All I know is that we had to drive around the out-skirts of Phoenix for a while to find any store that was stocking a split-v keyboard that was not made by Microsoft. When I finally found it, I paid 29 dollars for it, and will get ten back on a mail in rebate. I am not required to install any software to use it, it was just plug and play. The Microsoft version of the same keyboard requires you to use your disk space to carry their drivers for their inferior crap, and was 79.96 (sure I could have gotten it cheaper, but the name Microsoft will make me back away from any purchase).

Since I now have a site where I do not have to fear repercussions for my actions, I am finally able to say what I have said all along: “Fuck you, Microsoft”.

Meta; eBay; Paypal

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Setting up this site has been monumentally more difficult than I had ever thought it would be. I still maintain that I am a pretty good html programmer, but the thing is that the language of the internet seems to have expanded far beyond my html understanding. I have used some other stuff like CSS in the past to help me to achieve my ends, but when I started programming JAVA I just did not keep up with the evolution of things. Also, I had never tried to set up a website from a base directory which would allow the use of cgi scripts. I did use cgi on the web pages, it was just hosted through a third party that had a really user-friendly layout, as such I am stuck here in the dark thinking that I may just be the least intelligent human on the face of the earth.

In other site-related news, I am no longer going to put the actual time (like hours/minutes) in the updates. The reasons for that is quite simple 1)It is easily a couple hours off by the time I actually get this thing posted. 2) Unless you live in the state of Arizona that is not what time it was posted anyway. 3)There are roughly three people in the entire world that know the address of my website, anyone else who sees that time stamp will be seeing it looking through my archives. 4) If you really want to know what time it is you would just look at the bottom right of your computer monitor (perhaps elsewhere if you have modified your screen settings).

Finally, with the site related stuff, I am not going to update any page other than this one until I have a better understanding of the SSI that I should be using. As it stands I have about 28 pages that will have to be altered, and that seems like a lot, but if I were to go ahead and start doing some of the other pages that I want to do, that number could double or triple over the weekend (when I have a lot more free time).

Wow, I think I just managed to get the point across that you should never view my site…ever. That was not what I was going for, but damn it, I made a point!

I have taken the liberty of breaking my typing into two sections, the first being my bitching about myself and my lacking ability at webhosting, and the second being this, where I bitch about pretty much everyone and everything for no damn reason. The purpose of the first section would be to get you to send me a pipe bomb, the purpose of the second section will be to get you to go ahead and send it to someone else.

Biggest Bitch of the Day:
eBay allows people to insert Paypal logos in their ads. But the logos that they insert are all provided by paypal. The end result of this is that I received a negative feedback from ladybug3603 for a non-payment, when the truth of the matter was that she had listed a paypal logo, with the visa/mstercard/disover/american express logos. I took that to mean that the seller would accept credit cards. She didn’t. I would have left the transaction without a sour thought, then she left me negative feedback…That pissed me off…(I have like a 98.8% ebay rating with over 240 transactions, so when I get a stupid one, them is fightin’ words).

Her explanation of it was that I should have asked whether she accepted credit cards. My response was that If you do not accept credit cards, why do you place words such as “pay me instantly with any credit card through paypal” in your listing. Her response was that she had nothing to do with that being put in her listing. Now, I knew that she was lying, since she obviously did make an agreement with paypal to let them update the listings, but I took the high road and just sucked it up.

Every negative feedback (of the three that I have) is very similar. Why it is my fault that they put the quote “pay me instantly with any credit card through paypal” in the listing? And then when I will not pay any other way (credit cards limit your liability for fraud, and make it far easier to recover the money you did pay out, if you get shafted) they leave me negative feedback. I think that these sellers are all corrupt. They may not be ‘trying’ to screw you, but there must be a different motive for what they do.

Another eBay issue is the sellers that do not post feedback until the buyer does. I will not ever leave feedback for a seller that does not post feedback for me (as a buyer) when they get the payment. If they do not post feedback immediatly, that means that they are in fear that the wares that they sold you are absolute crap. They want to hold the feedback thing over your head to keep you from posting a negative for them, since they can reciprocate it. I must re-state that I will never post feedback for these sellers (even if whatever I bought was 200% better than advertised), because that is just missing the point. If you buy something off of ebay and yoy pay for it immediately, and you do not get immediate feedback do not leave that seller feedback at all. Even if you are very new to eBay and trying to get your numbers going, the only seller that you should buy from again is the one that left you feedback when he/she received your payment, all the others are either dubious or selling absolute crap that they mis-represent, don’t tangle with those folks.

Wal-Mart

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Currently, there is still no way that no one can access my site other than a direct request. That is, I am still not to be found through any web search available. I would have thought that the process would have been a bit quicker to get that all going. It does not upset me, as I do not really have a damn thing on here worth reading, I just would really like to see which ruse pulls the most traffic. At any rate, I soldier on. Why? I gots no idea.

I have said previously that I would not list any news on this site, but I am now going to officially break that promise to (me) the reader.

I have long hated Wal-Mart for their scheming business practices, and the fact that they pay their employees SHIT. They will move into a new area and spread like a virus, killing the local economy that used to be there. But, you ask, how can they kill an economy when they create new jobs? Simple math. Say that the new Wal-Mart opens up, and it is employing fifty people, sounds like a new job opportunity in that area, but when you figure in the fact that in the process they are closing a dozen or so ‘Ma and Pa’ type stores that each have many employees -who no longer have a job once ‘Wal-Mart’ hits town- ‘Wal-Mart’ is putting more people out of work than it is employing. At the same time they are driving down the wages that they have to pay their employees by only hiring High School Drop-Outs, who have no other option.

I am in the grocery business, and have been for about a decade, and I know enough to know about fair compensation vs. inflation. ‘Wal-Mart’ consistently does not give raises to their employees. ‘Wal-Mart’ ventures further into the “pseudo-slave” market by offering a health plan that will run out at 100,000 dollars -that may seem like a big coverage, but it is not enough to even cover a single heart bypass surgery… and if you had any other condition before that point that required surgery it would also take away from the total…The rest you would have to pay for on your own.

I thought that I was the extreme in this hatred for ‘Wal-Mart’, then I saw a feature in the Arizona Republic

There was one quote that I absolutely loved from that article, which was on the front page of the newspaper “It’s no different than what the Nazis did in World War II. It’s a blitzkrieg. They are doing economically what the Nazis did militaristically.”

Okay, I may not have actually equated ‘wal-mart’ with the Nazis. Though they may have been a close second. Inflation is, on average, 3% a year. If you give your employees less than that( as a raise ) , you are basically telling them to go elsewhere for work. Wal-Mart does this repeatedly, and not just to the grunts, they actually terminate employees just before they will be fully ‘vested’ in their retirement plans. Why isn’t that in the commercials about how happy they make communities?

The only prayer that we have is that someone, somewhere, sometime realizes that ‘Wal-Mart’ is certainly not in the best interest of the laborer/consumer, but in the best interest of ‘Wal-Mart’.

Take from this what you will. But, for the love of Christ (or whoever you choose as a diety), please do not shop at ‘wal-mart’.

MSN

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Yesterday sucked.

In the interest of trying to keep my mind going all in the same direction, while I am thinking about ten times faster than I type, I am going to try to be a bit more concise, while not taking away from the absolute witless -Wit’Uls…indeed…- comments that I am posting.

So, of course, nothing at all happened as I had planned it yesterday after I made my post. It was my every intention to just go ahead any sight-type another of my Arthur Witles stories. What actually happened was that I went ahead and called up MSN customer support to see if we could get to the root of the problem regarding my inability to send email through my new web site server email address.

Normally when I call tech support for any reason (for any product at all) it is because I have already exhausted all other options, as was the case here. The represenititive started asking me if I had done this, that and the other ( the kind of crap that I am sure about 96% of their calls are solved by ) and I assured him that I had. In addition, I provided him with the exact error message that I was seeing, as well as the IP address of the site that I was trying to access email through. I further offered to reset my password temporarily so that he could check and see that yes, it was not possible to send email through this server using Outlook.

The ‘technician’ that I spoke to seemed to be a bit overwhelmed by the amount of information that I was giving him. He must have known that he was way out of his league on this case, so he forwarded me to a supervisor (i.e. a different pimple-faced kid with more hours of Quake under his belt). That simply led to me telling him that I had already tried x, then y, then z, then a few things I thought may actually help to circumvent the problem. He eventually transferred me to another ‘tech’ who was using the same operating system as me (this is almost forty minutes into the call, btw).

So, damn near an hour into the call, and they finally get a guy on the line with the same OS as me? The efficiency is astounding… At any rate, this guy seemed to be another grunt. He had the same base OS as me, but did not have any actual information to offer. He basically just had the same exact tabs in the setup and options screens, but the setup and options was SO not my problem at that point. I mentioned that I thought the problem might involve the fact that I can not access MSN through another computer because the screen where you put in your username/password changes that into an incoherent string of numbers, he had no idea what I was talking about -if you have MSN internet access, give it a go, set your modem to try to dial a local access number and log in with your username/ pword, it will not let you do it.- So for checking MSN mail the Outlook will work, since you are already logged on to that account, and whatever logorhythm they are using has already been checked.

So, this ‘tech’ had had enough of me, and sent me to yet another ‘tech’. This ‘tech’ was telling me that in order to send/receive ‘web-based’ email you have to use your password for that web-based site. I assured him that I had an actual pop3 and smtp protocol on this server and asked him to send me an email, I told him that I would read it back to him as soon as I got it, since my pop3 mail (delivery system) was working properly, but my smtp (sending system) was not. When I read back the subject line to him, “youarea” and the body of the message; “loser”. He sounded to be at least a bit uncomfortable, and transferred me to yet another ‘supervisor’ (how many supervisors can they possibly have over there at MSN at 11p.m. Arizona time? At least two.)

You would like to think that this guy was the one who solved my problem, wouldn’t you? I would have liked to have thought that to, but in reality he was simply the most ‘chatty’ ‘tech-support’ guy that i have ever spoken with. 108% of me thinks that he was just another grunt that knew less about computers than I do. He was, however, the first guy who actually offered me a few options that I had not yet considered. Bonus points for that.

Now I am about two hours into this call, and the guy asks me when the last time I did the ‘critical updates’ for windows was. It was only a few months ago, but, I had since re-installed the OS because of a FUBAR on my initial hard-drive. At this point I am kicking myself in the ass for letting that fact slip my mind. I go to the site and download 14 megs of critical updates (it took hours, but I was busying myself with other things at the time). I then deleted all of my mail accounts on Outlook (as per his instruction), and set them up again. Which, of course, didn’t work.

I sit here still, with a MicroSoft Windows 98 system, an account through MSN.com, trying to use MicroSoft Outlook Express to gain access to be able to send messages through my shadowtwin.com address, and it is just not going to happen. If you are reading this, it is likely that you feel the pain that I feel, which is not really pain, but, anger at the fact that a huge company like MicroSoft can not make their new software compatible with their old software.