Category Archives: website

Feedback; Terri Schiavo; Dinner

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The screwy work schedule went about as predicted in the last post. However, it was my wife’s birthday yesterday, so even though I was off work at a very reasonable hour I was not able to post. Her parents, her brother, and her brother’s significant other took us out to dinner. More on that later.

•I got an actual email! An email based on the content of the website, praising the site, and most of all completely unsolicited! I will quote it in its entirety, suppressing the name of course:

I like your site! I have spent much of my work day trying to read as much as I can. I really enjoyed Meeting Arthur Witles! Can’t wait to read more!
Keep up the great work!

I know that my wife played a role in getting the web address to this person, but still, isn’t it this type of simple praise that keeps me typing away? Well, of course it is, else I might have just skipped out on posting tonight. I do appreciate any feedback, as I am sure anyone with their own webpage does, but it seems that few people ever actually take the time to send an email whether they agree/disagree with what you are saying. In my case I know that I usually just never send emails to websites assuming that they will never be read, responded to, or taken seriously. If that is what is keeping you from emailing me, I can assure you that I read all the email, respond to all of the email, and take all praise in stride. I do assume that any criticism is coming from completely whacked out psycopaths (if you think my opinions are wrong then you are obviously clinically insane), but I answer them as well.

There was a bit of a mistake in that last paragrah. When I said that I read and respond to all emails I forgot to mention that I don’t really read the ones that come in with subject lines that read like V|I|A|G|R|A.

(A lengthy phone call from a friend ended the post here yesterday. I am going to continue it today on the same page, if I can get back aboard the train that my thoughts were riding yesterday).

•The wife’s birthday was on Wednesday and her parents had arranged for us all to go out to dinner. We just went to the place we always go to, only this time we, or I really, opted for the outdoor seating since it was a pretty warm evening, not to mention that it put us in the section of our favorite server. The food was excellent and a good time was had by all.

At the start of the dinner, I asked the waiter to bring me a beer, but to put it onto a separate ticket. I was not entirely sure who was going to be paying for the meal or how it might be split up, so I didn’t want anyone else to have to pay for my beer, when the beer is four dollars a pop. When it came time to pay I looked at the check while everyone else was talking and decided to pay for it myself, both everyone’s meals and my beer tab (as the meals added up to about sixty dollars, which was just what I had gotten paid to install a couple of sinks in one of the rentals that my boss owns). I asked my brother-in-law if he would cover the tip if I paid for the meal, and while he offered to split the meal many times, he finally agreed. I did force him to tip a full 20% (which seems excessive to a lot of people, but you must understand that servers in the state of Arizona get paid less than minimum wage and have to claim that they were tipped at least 10% by every customer, lots of people don’t tip even 10% which really screws the server over. When I get good service the tip is always 20%).

The thing that I found funny about this was that then the parents-in-law offered to pay for the meal. I remember a Father’s Day meal that I had planned to pay for, but when I returned to my seat from the restroom, they had a calculator out to figure out who owed what (which was why I bought the beer separate this time, makes those calculations easier). This time I didn’t decide I was going to pay for it until right at the last minute, and, as I found out later, my wife’s parents really did want to pay for it -both because it was their daughter’s birthday and to thank me for fixing their pc several weeks ago. Oh well, I decided to use the money I had made on the side to pay for the meal and I feel pretty good about it. There will be many other opportunities for someone else to snatch the check away from me in the future.

It seems that paying for the dinner was observed by the gods of monetary karma. The next day I bought a lottery scratch ticket, something I do maybe once a month or so usually and purely for entertainment; I really don’t consider it my retirement plan. The ticket I bought was of the three-dollar variety, going by the name of Slingo(on the occasions when I do buy scratch tickets I usually always buy the two or three dollar ones since there is so much more to scratch off, some like crossword puzzles, some like bingo, it takes you a few minutes of anticipation before you eventually lose your money). I scratched that ticket off a little bit at a time while I was reading web sites, it was a twenty dollar winner. Soon after scratching the ticket I realized that I had forgotten to buy cancer sticks while I was out earlier, so I took that scratch ticket and another ticket that I have had laying around for months and went to a different store than where I bought the initial ticket. I tucked the twenty bucks from the ticket into my pocket, but used the three dollars from the other ticket to buy yet another Slingo ticket. Which turned out to be a ten dollar winner. It seems that the gods of monetary karma really did want me to split that dinner bill with someone since they gave me back half of the money the next day. At any rate, it sure was nice to scratch off two tickets and end up with actual cash. Usually I just end up saying “well there went three bucks”.

•The aforementioned lengthy phone call, the one that cut yesterday’s post so short, was with a friend that I talk to kind of infrequently, yet who is the closest of all of my friends. What made the call go so lengthy was our discussion of the Terri Schiavo fiasco.

I had my mind made up on this a long time ago. The woman had been immobile and virtually brain dead for a decade. Let her die for God’s sake. I know that I wouldn’t want to be kept alive in that state, and certainly not to be paraded around as a political wedge tool. Of course the only person in the entire universe that knew of her actual wishes died when she did. The whole issue just seems such a non issue to me that I couldn’t understand why any rational human being could oppose letting her die. Then my friend brought up a few issues (a couple of which I don’t want to get into) that I had never actually thought about.

The first issue is that maybe she never told either her husband or her parents anything about what she would want if she became so horribly disabled. I can see that as a possibility. Then each side invents conversations where her will was spoken when it never actually was. While I see that as a possibility, I still think that it would be more humane to let her die than to fight about the legalities of it, especially since her conditon hadn’t improved in a decade.

The second issue is one that is extremely complex, far too complex for me to try to delve into, but I will just scratch at the surface. My friend’s contention is that the brain damage had completely wiped out any memory of her former self; that she was alive without knowing that she had ever been an active, walking, talking, functioning person. She is alive, she is not in pain, she has no memory of a “better time” in her life, this is her reality. This could all be completely true, the only way that you will ever know is to end up in the condition that she was in. Perhaps you really do have a mind like a newborn child where everything seems so new and wonderfull, unfortunately you will only know this once you get to the state she was in and at that point you no longer have the capacity to make a decision about your life or death.

The third issue is about moving on. My friend’s assertion is that since she wasn’t in pain it was doing no harm to keep her alive. Her husband had finally given up hope and started to move on with his life, while her parents had not yet made that decision. Again, this is a pretty deep philosophical issue, but, on the surface it is a selfish issue on both sides. If the husband has truly come to terms with the fact that his wife is never going to get better, that she is going to be in this state until her life is taken by some process of aging, why doesn’t he stand by her side and let her live? On that same note, if her parents have reached that same conclusion, why not just stand by her side and let her die? In the case of the parents I am sure that the reason they want her to live is simply love; they love their daughter unconditionally and want her to be there as long as possible (regardless of mental or physical capacity). In the case of the husband I am pretty sure that the reason he wants to let her die is out of mercy; he knew her when she was a vivacious young lady with a thirst for life and simply can’t stand to see her like this. The husband was able to make the decision to just let her go, the parents can’t. Does that make either of them right or wrong? If so, who should be the judge of that?

The fourth issue is where my mind started to itch a little bit. Have you ever read a “living will”? I have, my mother made one when she saw her mother slowly dying in a hospital room, and gave copies of it to all three of her sons. While I am sure that there are no surviving copies of that sheet of paper, I am pretty sure that we will all remember exactly what it said. One of the lines in it read, roughly, “In the case of serious injury affecting brain or nervous system function no extraordinary means should be used to prolong my life.” That line is saying, in effect, that if she is ever in a coma and not able to live on her own that she doesn’t want a bunch of machines hooked up to her to keep her alive. But, should a little tube that gives you food and water be considered extraordinary means?

I am currently not sure just how to judge this one. Making a person starve to death/die of thirst over a 13 day period seems inhumane, but, keeping that person alive for a decade without any sort of cognizant existance seems wrong also.

Meta; PC; Games

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Okay, so just an open question here. Please do respond if you have any personal knowledge on this issue.

Since the problems (conveniently discussed below) with my old PC continue, I decided to try to find some other sorts of malware/trojan/virus removal programs. Most of which I got from download.com. Here is the problem: They all give you a ‘free trial version’ which will show you all sorts of malicious crap on your machine, but not a damn one will actually remove it unless you pay for the program first. But, you see, I wouldn’t be looking for a new program to remove this shit if the current programs I have could do it… Currently all of the programs that I have to remove this sort of thing completely freeze the PC when the trojans in the registry are being removed. They simply will not do it. How in the hell does a company expect me to pay 30 bucks for their product when they won’t even let me see if it will actually do the job that it was designed for? It is like I just said to my wife, no one would ever expect you to buy a pretty new car just based on looks, they always give you a test drive.

I do understand that in the world of computer software it would be far too easy simply steal the products, hell I have a copy of Paint Shop Pro that is on something like day 1246 of my 30 day trial period (I actually did buy the license for it, but lost it on a system restore and never bothered to register it again). Isn’t there some way that they can make it possible to actually use the software before purchase? I was thinking that maybe it could quarantine all of the objects, even if only for 24 hours, to let you run any system scan you want to make sure that it actually got rid of the crap. Then, if you don’t purchase the license, it just reinstalls all the crap that it got rid of. There has to be some way that you can actually test this type of software before laying out cash for it.

The open question is: Do you know of any programs that will actually remove the trojans from the registry before making me pay for the program? Or, failing that, a program that will simply give me the actual path name so that I can do it manually?

Any help would be appreciated

It is Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Well you may have noticed that it has been quite a while since I posted anything here. No real reason why, well I guess there actually are a couple of reasons why, just they aren’t very good reasons. The main reason is that I just really didn’t feel like it. The other reason is just a lack of interest stemming from very little response to what I do write. I never expected that I would be getting hundreds of emails every day, but I would have thought that I could have generated a hundred in the course of a year, which did not happen.

As the anniversary for my site approached I briefly thought about not renewing the domain and giving up altogether. Why I decided against that is something I may never know. I guess I really do enjoy having the site when there is something on my mind that I really want to bitch about. It is a pretty liberating feeling to know that you can throw all your opininons out there for the world to see, regardless of the fact that only a handfull of the world ever actually read them.

This is all self-inflicted of course. If I had chosen to do something other than feature a couple of stories that I wrote a long time ago, like, say, have an actual theme, or actual content, it might make the readership swell a bit. Unfortunately, my only expertise is in the butchering of deceased bovines, I doubt that this would make for very stimulating reading for anyone who was not in the industry. I could spend more time commenting on news items, but that has been done to death IMHO and done far better than I could do it anyway. If I was really interested in generating some hits I could simply feature a Porn Pick of the Day, as it seems that the only search strings that result in hits to my site have the word porn in them.

When I made my decision to keep the site open, I made another decision at the same time. I am not likely going to ever be back to doing a daily update. That being the case I am going to quit wasting the time to save each page individually. I am going to start having a weekly update page with any posts made during the week separated by Horizontal lines. The latest update will always be at the top, and if the page seems to go too long I will add handy linking to the particular days (not that I forsee this as being necessary at my current posting schedule). This will have the added benefit of making it easier for me to set up an archive system, if I ever get off my ass and try to get caught up with that. The major benefit of this (for me) will be to have multiple posts on the same page, thus people who only visit once a week (and never click any links) may actually find something worth reading and, hopefully, commenting about. It’s my fantasy damn it! I can pretend to believe anything!

• Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. I treated my wife to dinner at a local place and we exchanged cards. Of course we actually exchanged gifts on Friday night, as we both bought each other computer software, and they were both newer titles, and we didn’t expect that either of them would work correctly on the old PC. Boy were we ever right, but more on that later. The games that were exchanged were Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 , which she bought for me, and Leisure Suit Larry – Magna Cum Laude which I bought for her.

If you have never played any of the Leisure Suit Larry titles, you should know that it is not exactly the type of gift that you should buy for a woman unless you are very sure that she has the sense of humor to appreciate it. The entire premise of the game is that you are a guy, a real loser, and the entire game is spent trying to get women to have sex with you. This lends itself to a lot of hilarious situations, and it is one of the most entertaining series of games I have ever played. The wife also loves the humor and situational comedy, that is why I felt confident to buy it for her, as a Valentine’s day gift no less. I even went so far as to pay extra for the uncut and uncensored version, just to gurantee the most humorous gaming experience. Yes, it is fun. I would highly recommend it.

The latest Roller Coaster game is pretty sweet as well. They completely changed the interface and I have been having a hell of a time learning the new commands, but it has so many more options that it makes up for it all. The single best part of it is the option to ride the rides. That lets me actually get onto the roller coaster and see why the people don’t like to ride them. It took me a while to figure out how to import the roller coasters I designed in the other games, but once I did I was easily able to see why no one wanted to ride them.

One of the coasters that I built has an intensity rating that is about 24 (which the game calls ‘ultra extreme’) and having seen it run through on the pc screen, I can see why. There is probably not a span of more than a half a second where there is not an inversion, there are so many loops and corkscrews that I lost count, and it is a launched coaster; launched directly downhill. I can see myself having a lot of fun with this game just trying to make the most fucked up riding experience (for me at the monitor). The strange thing is that when you sit down in the chair and watch the ride, you feel yourself leaning into the corners (at least I did, but that may have been just since it was such a new experience). Definitely a very enjoyable game. I will probably write more about it later, after I have gotten a bit more used to the interface and all of the available options.

Getting back to the issues with the old PC. The old PC only has a 466mhz processor, but it does have 256mb RAM, a 64mb 3d video card and a 40gig hard drive. It meets most of the requirements for games that are coming out today, the only one that it really lacks is the processor. The thing is that all of the titles will install and run on it, then randomly freeze. Not like just run really slow and choppy, but complete lock up. It didn’t seem to me that it should do that if the processor was just a bit slow…

I spent quite a bit of time on Friday night trying to figure out just what the hell the problem was. I found that by running Ad Aware from safe mode I was able to remove a lot of crap that I wasn’t able to do while in normal Windows (98) mode. Then, via AntiVirus.com, I found that I have two Trojans in my Registry. The unfortunate part of that is that it doesn’t actually tell you anything other than a name (which a search of my pc did not find a match to). I downloaded a Registry Editor from Download.com and got the same result. If you know anything about computers, you should see where this is going.

The only way that I am able to get rid of the trojans (which are both just spyware, but they are memory resident) is to boot into safe mode and run Ad Aware. Then I have to go to either a normal or clean boot, either options is going to load the Windows Registry, thus reinstalling the damn spyware. If I knew the actual command lines for the damn things I could just go into the Registry and delete them myself. Problem is that if the trial version of the Registry Editor told you the command lines you would never need to actually pay for it. I am certainly not going to pay the $29.95 to buy the Registry Editor for this PC, since it may or may not actually be worth that much at this point, but I sure would like to be able to get rid of those damn PC slowing trojans.

I actually have a ‘rescue disc’ for the pc in question ( the one that I am typing on right now, as it were) which could restore the entire thing back to factory settings. There are many problems with that option, most of which are not all that serious, but one is horrible. I could get past any of the problems with most of the after market stuff, like the cd burner, the video card, all of that. The problem is with the hard drive. When I bought the 40gig hard drive for this pc, it took me several hours of fucking around in the BIOS to get it to work properly and recognize the size of the drive. The drive did not come with any sort of an instruction manual, so I had to do a long guess and check game to get it to work in the first place (not to mention that I had to modify a cable to get the thing plugged into the motherboard, since the motherboard did not support this type of drive). That is something that I am really not planning to do again, unless it is obviously necessary.

If you happen to be privy to information about removing trojans from the registry of a windows 98 system without simply wiping out and re-installing the software, please do tell.

That is all for today. Tune in at some future point for more…

Meta blogging, Homosexuality

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The last two missed posts were for the following reasons. Saturday I just never got around to it, I was watching some of the South Park marathon on Comedy Central. Sunday I decided that I needed to take care of some long overdue archiving around here, when I say long overdue, I mean like six months or more.

I managed to finish updating the April, May and June archives, which can be seen Here. I would like to say that I just finally decided to get off of my lazy ass and start catching up on things, but the truth is that some of the pages contained in those months didn’t upload completely, so I had a bunch of pages that had no links on the bottom. This only came to my attention as I was wondering why things that I had written about six months ago could not be found by search engines, even when I specified my own site and searched for a very particular string of words.

I would also like to say that the reason that I did it was so that someone searching for a particular topic through google would be able to happen across my site. That is at least partially true. The real reason is that I got tired of having to read through every post for the last six months when I was trying to link to something that I had said previously. Hopefully, I have at least fixed the problem with the partial pages, as this is the second time I have tried to remedy the problem and it is getting very frustrating.

A rather unexpected upside to being so lazy is that I didn’t have the slightest idea what I wrote all those months back. I remember having written some of the personal anecdotes from my youth, but as for the off the cuff, day to day bitching I just had no idea. It was as if I was reading something that someone else wrote for the most part, which was quite odd since I was able to find tons of grammatical errors that I never saw when I originally wrote it. Of course I have the grammar prowess of your average third-grader so I guess that is to be expected.

Most of the posts I just skimmed over to get a basic idea for a brief description, while there were a few that I read completely. The most amazing thing was that there were a couple of times that I actually laughed at something that I had written, the amazing part is that it was obviously meant as a joke.

• It turns out that my mother gave the URL of this site to the partner of my eldest brother (the homosexual one). I am not the type of person to hold back thoughts or words, even when I know that if I ever decide to go into politics they will sting me in the ass. The thing that I find very strange/amusing/comforting, is that the guy went ahead and read that particular post, which was on October 14. In that post I make a very feeble defense for homosexuality, why my brother’s partner found it to be good escapes me. Yet, then I realize that damn near half of the world, and probably 80% of the U.S. is against them, I can kind of understand why any endorsement of homosexuality is a good thing.

I think that what pisses me off the most about America is that we are so fucking stupid (as a whole). Men having sex with other men has been the norm since at least the time of the Greeks. All through history there has been homosexuality. Do you honestly believe that the men who came across the Atlantic Ocean to discover America kept it in their pants for four months? Do you really believe that men in prison simply abstain? If your plain crashed on the top of the mountain, no food, no water, would you start to look at the dead people as nourishment? While the last example is something that you certainly would do in the interest of self-preservation, the other two are stone cold facts.

• If it is my fault that everyone in the world except for me really hates homosexuals, all I can say is that I am sorry. If it is the fault of everyone in the U.S. for being intolerant…That sounds about right.

Site stats; ALCS

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My infrequent posting pattern continues, some may even say that it is becoming the norm. I dunno, I would like to think that there were pressing, real-life issues that kept me from posting, but no, nothing like that at all. You see I got caught up in another one of those silly Club Pogo challenges. The challenges are little more than a digital pissing contest, but I just can’t stand the thought of failing at any challenge that I begin. The problem with that is that I often start challenges (in life as well as that game site) that involve games/things that I am not very good at, or at least not familiar enough with to try.

This time, the game ‘Dominoes’ was the source of my problems over the last few days. It turns out that there is a use to them beyond just lining them up and knocking them down. Which is good, I suppose, as I always wondered why they went to all the trouble of putting numbers on them if their only purpose was to be stood on end and knocked over. Actually, I have played dominoes in the past, used to be passable at it, but the version that they offer on that website doesn’t use the same rules that I played by. In fact, a quick look at Dominoes.com shows that there are at least 68 different domino games. Of course I know how to play exactly one of them, which was very different than the online version that I was offered as a challenge.

If I were able to take the hours that I spent trying to win those 65 games and funnel them into a good cause, I likely would have gotten a lot more Diablo playing done. I did win the 65 games in the challenge, albeit only an hour before the expiration of the challenge. Considering that they give you seven full days to do each challenge I would say that I cut it pretty close.

• While perusing my site statistics today I noticed a couple of interesting search strings that resulted in hits. Those particular searches were for ‘free sixteen porn picture’ and ‘watch free little girl porn’ (both without quotations, of course). I will readily admit that I changed the title of my page to say, “Still Porn Free”, as a ruse to see if I could get a few hits just because it had the words free and porn in it. I never had any idea that it would result in pedophiles clicking through to my page. Curiosity drove me to do a Yahoo search for those exact strings and I found the reason why.

When I ran a search for the first string (free sixteen porn picture), I was indeed near the top of the list. What is worse is that the quote about the first fifteen words of the header, then quote a little snippet from somewhere on the page that contained one of the search terms. The actual part from my page that was quoted said, “I know that it really did sound fresh, but I was also about sixteen, and I didn’t really know anything about anything …”. Now I was talking about a writer at that point, yet I could see how that particular line could be taken out of context. So Mr. (or Ms.) pedophile was thinking that it was a child getting fresh with someone…I can accept that, a simple misunderstanding.

The second search string really has me baffled. I did searches on Yahoo and Google for ‘watch free little girl porn’, and my site does indeed come up. Unfortunately, for porn seekers, the ‘watch’ in question is a wristwatch. It is even stated in the little description of the site that Mr. (or Ms.) pedophile clicked through to get to my page. What I wonder is, did they really think that ‘Armitron’ and ‘Rolex’ were code words for child porn? I don’t know, I think that said person was just clicking through every link looking for a picture of a naked child, and man that is sick.

I have been trying to get my father’s side of the family to let me put a directory, on this site, that has all of the photos and history we can find about our ancestors. I thought that it would be a great way to get names and photos out to try to find some other branches of the family tree. One of my Aunts had misgivings about posting that on the internet, and I wondered why. Now I know. The last thing that you ever want to think about is the possibility that there is some sicko, somewhere, looking at an old, black and white photo of your mother bathing you in the sink…And jerking off…That is just wrong.

• In sports news, what the hell is going on in baseball?

I grew up in Oregon, and as such we didn’t have a local baseball team to root for. What we did have was a WGN station on our local cable service. I became a Cubs fan, since that was what we had. When I moved to Arizona, and shortly after the Diamondbacks became a franchise, I rooted for them as well. The Diamondbacks did win a world series in my lifetime, while I still somehow doubt that the Cubs ever will. Last year it was a possibility that the Cubs and the Red Sox could have met in the World Series, but no one ever really thought that was going to happen since Boston has the curse of the Bambino and Chicago has the curse of the goat (sorry for the sparse info link there, gotta get back to the game).

Unless the Red Sox find a way to fuck up a seven run lead in the seventh inning, they will be the first baseball team to ever come back from being down 3-0 and win the series. Of course the Yankees and Redsox are only playing the ALCS and the winner must go on to play the winner of the NLCS series, but I would venture to say that whoever wins this game will win it all (which is not much of a venture statistically).

This all meshes nicely with my theory that the Cubs are going to be the first professional sports team to go exactly a century between championships. Look for them to be on the first platform in 2007, go Cubbies! This talk is a bit premature, as the game is still on. Probably in the seventh inning stretch judging by the sounds of it. Still, happy thoughts.

The problem with baseball, as everyone except pretty die-hard Yankee fans know, is that there is absolutely no equality in the game. Every other major sport puts limitations on how much you can spend to make the ‘ultimate team’. The Lakers (in the NBA) have done a great job of winning within those constraints, as did the previous San Francisco and Dallas dynasties (in the NFL) of years past. I don’t follow hockey closely enough to make a reference there, but it seems that the teams are basically pretty evenly matched (within reason).

The Yankee’s are able to buy every ‘free-agent’, every year, and give them more money than anyone else ever could. I do understand that the Yankees also make the most money, but come on. The Yankees will regularly have half of the top 10 highest players on their team, while the worst teams will have a couple of decent players, but no one that really stands out. It is not because the shitty teams don’t want to win, not that they don’t want to be competitive, it is just that the Yankees have more money. Speaking of that, You have to have a bit of respect for Curt Schilling who chose to go to the Red Sox to try to dethrone the Yankees in the American League, after having beat the Yankees in the World Series with the Diamondbacks. That is a hatred/desire to dethrone a team that I have yet to see in any athlete.

Seriously, though, I am going to go watch the end of this game…I think we may be seeing history here…

John Saul; Watches

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Well, Yesterday’s post actually resulted in two emails. While I would like to think that it was all a result of myself writing better, or perhaps more controversial, things, that is certainly not the case. Both of the emails were asking me the same question: If you don’t really like John Saul, why have you read so many of his novels?

I expected this question to come from Flux at the BlackChampagne website when I originally wrote the message to him. When he didn’t actually ask the question, I kind of gave up on looking for an excuse to give him. Then, when two people emailed the question that Flux never asked, I was forced to start to try to come up with a reason why. I have found that reason, basically put, I don’t know.

The year was roughly 1991, I was riding with my oldest brother from Oregon to Arizona. Speed limits at the time still being in the 55mph range on much of the road, while being 65mph on others, it was taking us a while to get there. The only tape that we had in the car, at least the only one that I would agree to listen to, was Europe: The Final Countdown. That was what we listened to for about 20 hours of driving time and it really, really, really got old.

My mother, while we were at her home in Arizona, offered us a book-on-tape version of Saul’s first novel “Suffer the Children”. Being that myself and my brother would rather die than to listen to that godawful ‘Europe’ music again, we took it and plugged it in as we were leaving Phoenix. The strange thing is that I am not able to find anywhere on the official John Saul website that there was ever a ‘book on tape’ version of that story…ever… I know that this was the story that I listened to, and I know that it really did sound fresh, but I was also about sixteen, and I didn’t really know anything about anything. Of course that knowledge (the knowledge that you never knew anything in your teens) really only starts to come to you much, much later.

Probably about four years after the previous incident, I realized that I actually wanted to read the works of Saul. It was certainly not an ‘epiphany’, or anything of that sort. I just happened to check out a book at the local library, by Saul, and read it. The book-on-tape versions of the books are either far better, or I have really low standards. At the time I was living with a dear friend, and we would kind of juggle the books to make sure that we were both able to read them before they had to go back to the library. It was during that period that I read every novel that Saul had ever written.

There are certain requisites one must reach before becoming a ‘good author’. Saul, in my opinion, did not meet a single one of those requisites. What Saul did do was keep me reading his books.

So, here we are, many years later. I have read every book that Saul had written, prior to the “blackstone chronicles”, of course I read that all as well. The thing is that some combination of age/experience in life tells you what is going to happen long before the question ever comes up. I, now, have an autographed copy of Saul’s latest novel. I will read it, every page. Not just for the story, but for the fact that a very dear friend bought it for me.

The other question, via email, was regarding the dual watch photos that I placed in yesterday’s update. The question was; “are you sure about the prices you attribute to each watch?”.

The answer is pretty simple, “NO”.

I have never bought a Rolex, ever, and I don’t plan to…

This person’s issue was with my saying that the ‘armitron’ was under a hundred dollars, while the Rolex was over a thousand… Well, it turns out that I chose the wrong ROLEX to pick on. The Armitron watch in the photo is still under a hundred dollars, the ROLEX watch is (prior to my previous beliefs) only about 800. Thank you for clearing that up. So that, the Rolex, watch will keep time only 8 times better than the three-dollar watch that you can get at the local 7-11. To follow that up, your average cheap-ass-watch can keep time, being off by only thousandths of a second, for years. The more expensive watches have to be repaired by ‘jewelers’, the name itself cost money.

Buy the cheap watch and there will be no need to negotiate later,.

Meta Blogging; Politics

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Strange how time seems to move so quickly isn’t it? I just updated the dead link at the bottom of this page (you know the one; it entices you to click on the next update, regardless of the fact that I have yet to write it), I have thought to change that link so that is just text, but then I would not have all of the personal satisfaction of knowing that someone, somewhere, is actually trying to click on it. At any rate, It was during this little process that I realized that it is going to be October pretty soon, within a few hours in fact. Seems like it was only last week that I was thinking I needed to get the damn archives around here up to date, of course that was while I was on vacation in July, so you should see what I am getting at with the movement of time.

The real problem with updating the archives isn’t about actually spending the time to do it, since it honestly only takes me a few seconds to scan each update, write a very brief description and slap it on the page. No, no, the real problem with it is that it requires me to read all the dribble that I write. Did you think that the lack of proofreading was due to my integrity? No, nothing like that at all. People say that you are always more critical of your own work, but come on, some of this garbage is just, well, garbage.

When I initially set up this site it was due to a free site having deleted my page and all of its content. Paying a few bucks a month to keep the content online didn’t seem like a bad idea, so that is what I did. I am not sure if I ever had the intention of setting up a daily journal/blog -type thing, but that is what happened. While I do enjoy writing all of the stuff that I post here, I don’t really enjoy reading it all that much. The writing of it is quite theraputic, while the reading of it is boring to me, and hopefully no one else.

It is with those beautiful, self-deprecating thoughts that I go into todays post..Be Warned..

• I, and I alone, have taken it upon myself to declare today “National Stand Out On Your Lawn Holding A Large Metal Pole While Praying For Ligntning Day”. Possibly not the whole day, but certainly for the two hours that the presidential candidates are going to be on television. I am not one to be cynical, oh wait I guess I am, but the simple fact that the online games I like to play have flooded over with players since the start of the ‘debate’ just makes me think that no one really cares which party has the better control of their puppet.

I am actually going to go watch the debate to see if I can be so ‘Un-American’ as to try to form my own opinions based on what the candidates say. Of course the debate is all but scripted, so good luck to me.

I hope to pick this up after Survivor is over, but no gurantees.

The debate was all that I expected: Bush said the phrase “war on terror” at least a thousand times (and I only watched half of it), while Kerry did his best to bring the facts into view; The fact that Iraq was less of a threat than at least four other countries (as far as ‘weapons of mass destruction’), the fact that we invaded Iraq on our own (no help from the UN on that one), the fact that the deaths in Iraq have been steadily going up since the war was ‘over’ (deaths being both the U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians). For some reason you can’t seem to hammer a fact into the head of George W. Bush…No, seriously, I bet if you had a fact that you wanted him to hear, then listened to how the ‘key part of the war on terror’ that fact was, then you became agitated and grabbed a hammer….You know where this is going.

The really unfortunate thing is that I don’t think that Kerry really did all that well at the debate. I could be wrong, or cynical, but it seemed that Bush was able to make his little eyes very steely when he looked into the camera and said “terror” or “war on terror”. I think Kerry had a lot more facts than Bush, possibly a better way to achieve the goals (though that would require looking at each candidates website to find out), I just think that Kerry might have been able to sell himself a bit better.

One thing, in the debate, that I found to be a bit surprising was that Kerry actually brought up the subject of ‘stem cell research’, and Bush’s policy against it. It was a bit of manuevering that Bush had to do to get that subject changed back to the ‘war on terror’, but he did it. He never once mentioned his staunch opposition of it. I tell you, if Bush is not re-elected he could certainly make a good spin doctor for someone else, someone else who likes to not hide facts, but change subjects, that is.

This year’s presidential debates are going to fall into the next trivial pursuit game, I am afraid. The only people that are watching them are steadfast supporters of one or the other of the candidates. The ‘undecided’ people are all playing on-line games, much like I should be, but my ‘journalistic integrity'(hehe) keeps me from doing so.

Here’s to hoping that the presidential candidates sober up…

9/11 anniversary; Disturbing email

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Well it is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, so I figure I might as well make a post. The first thing that I would like to say is that I do truly feel for people who lost loved ones on that day. I know what it is like to experience the death of a close member of the family long before his/her time (which was my father, who died at only 38, and on Christmas Eve no less). The fact that so many thousands of people had that happen to them, all on the same day, and all at the hands of terrorists who just wanted a good ‘death count’ probably makes it worse. Especially since no one saw it coming.

When my Father died, as callous as it sounds, a lot of the family had been seeing it in the near future for a long time. He was not taking care of himself, not following his scedule for the insulin shots that he had to take for diabetes, in the midst of a court case that might land him in jail for a bit, not to mention having just gone through a nasty break-up with his girlfriend. Yeah, I guess it didn’t really surprise anyone when he died, even though he did die quite young. The thing is that I was still grief-stricken for a very long time, even though I knew it was going to happen, and knew that the choices he was making were only making it more likely.

The Families of the people who died in the 9/11 attacks didn’t have anything like that. There were husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, that simply went into work one day and never came home. People who were likely in good health, people who were going to do their job to support their families. Then a bunch of malicious people with razor-blades took the lives of thousands of them, and with that, took part of the life from everyone related to any of the victims. It was such a horrible, sickening thing for any being to do, that I can not believe that the attackers truly thought that what they were doing was in the name of any so-called God. Can I possibly be so naive?

Let me posit this: Most all current religions believe in a single God, sure there are other religions that still belieive in multiple gods, but for the purposes of this discussion I will say that it mostly focuses on one per religion. So, what if you get it wrong? Say you worship the father of Jesus, but it turns out that Allah is the real god, boy howdie, you would certainly be fucked then. Of course if you don’t believe in any god it is easy to make the call on your death bed, that is what I am banking on. I may make a quick 180 from my current postition when it does appear that I am dying, yet, I am not willing to kill myself in an attack on the world in general.

• It is not my goal to try to cheapen the anniversary of the death of thousands with a few words, nor is it my goal to try to do it with absolute silence. The thing is, the important thing is that people do move on. The families of those who did die in the attack on 9/11 are, likely, just starting to realize that they have to live without them. No amount of mourning will ever bring them back. People died, it was a tragedy for thousands of families, those lives are gone and will never come back. Just as the people who are coming to terms with their loss are starting to forget the pain and anguish, Bush decides to have a moment of silence for them… Way to bring up a really bad experience and make people cry…Now why don’t you call the parents of all the 1000+ soldiers that have died in Iraq, get them to go to a single location and have a moment of silence for them?

Do not scroll down

I don’t know if you are like me, but I skim my emails and open the ones that have only a single name (when it is the name of someone I knew ‘back in the day’). When I opened a particular email, which said it was sent by ‘Steve’, I thought that it could have been any of a dozen people that I knew, some of whom I would really like to get in touch with again. It turned out that the email was not from the ‘Steve’ that I knew in high school, nor anyone named steve that I have met after high school. Which sucks.

What followed was the most disturbing picture that I have ever seen.

The only way that I can justify this to myself is to say that ‘grandma found the machine that ices the donuts’. Any other explanation is simply unacceptable. I don’t really want to know why or how that photo was taken, what I want is to have it erased from my memory for all time. That is something that will sicken me every time I see it.

Unfortunately, the photo in question came with a little message that said, “want to see more photos like this, click here.”

I think I may quit looking at emails that have a friends name as the sender. That image is simply Burned into my mind.

The image of Granny finding the machine that puts the icing on donuts, that is.


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.

Links circa ’04; D-day; Puppies

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First I just want to mention that I updated the music lost to history feature on the side bar. The previous song that I had on there just went so extremely long with my comments that I felt compelled to write more than I wanted to to try to make the actual text of the site at least as long as the side bar. That led to a lot of half-assed stuff towards the end of the posts. Sort of like adding the “very, very, very, very much” to your report to make it meet the minimum number of words. Also I recently listened to the Megadeth song Hook in Mouth again recently and it was not nearly as cool as I remembered it. Not that the Alice Cooper one that replaced it has been nominated for any awards either.

• When I log on to the internet I go through a little routine. First to check my local email, then to check the website email. After that is done I go to BlackChampagne to check for updates, as he can be as erratic as me when it comes to a posting schedule. The next click is only a few days a week that I go and check out DiabloII.net the frequency of my visiting that site has dwindled down to almost nothing as the content no longer seems to matter by the time it is posted, I do still enjoy the guest articles on occasion. Once I have done all of that, I start to do my “real reading”, that is reading for the sake of finding things to spark my interest and make me want to write a post. Political Animal is the next site that I visit. It is a liberal political blog that often has a lot of interesting information both on it and linked to from it. After that there are numerous news sites that I will hit looking for something to set me off. By now I am sure that you are wondering what the hell all of this has to do with anything. I will get to it soon enough.

Today on the aforementioned political blog site, I saw this particular headline, “CLICK THIS….Via Unfogged, Microsoft has been granted a patent on double clicking.” Now that really seemed to be just a tad unbelievable, and as I found out with a quick news search, it was. Not that I can fault anyone for linking to sites that don’t quite have the whole story, especially when the story is just breaking, but in this case it just seemed wrong. From what I was able to understand about the actual patent that was issued it was about portable devices, such as PDA’s and the software’s ability to recognize very specific actions done with the user interface. It seems to have absolutely nothing to do with a mouse, as the headline would lead you to believe, whether that was the intention of the author or not. That is exactly the reason why I mentioned that I do go and read news sites before I post anything here, I do not want to go into a rant about a half-assed rumor, as I certainly would have done on this issue had I not educated myself a bit about it before I started writing a post.

• Tomorrow is the sixth of June, besides the obvious reason that people will remember the date, that being that it is the date in the fabled song Convoy by C.W. McCall, it is also my other brother’s birthday. No, they were not twins that were born an agonizing 48 hours of labor apart, they were actually born three years apart, the fact that their birthdays are only two days apart just means that ma and pa were often frisky in September, while my birthday is in july it seems that the friskiness kept on for a month or so. In the interest of journalistic integrity (or something), I just called my mother (at damn near ten p.m.) to ask if the september date might coincide with their wedding anniversary (a fact I would likely know had they not divorced when I was like seven) and it turns out their anniversary is actually in August. So my next assumption was that September was when children go away to school, but as the oldest brother would only have been two when the other brother was conceived that theory went down faster than Monica Lewinski.

Also, the sixth of June is the anniversary of “D-Day”, when the beaches were over-run at Normandy and the tide of WWII began to change, thus leading to the eventual defeat of Hitler. All that is fascinating reading, and likely great for the world as a whole, but had it not been for C.W. McCall’s song “Convoy”, we likely would never have had the movie Smokey and the Bandit. Now you just have to ask yourself which was more important, the fall of Nazi Germany and the end of World War 2, or the release of Smokey and the Bandit. I have made my choice…

• Now that I have exposed myself as the trailer trash that I am, which is unfortunate as I never really called a trailer a dwelling for long, I guess I must move on to bigger and better things. Of course having nothing bigger or better to move on to, I will just continue with the same mindless dribble you have grown accustomed to. That being puppy stories.

Now that the Zelda puppy has overcome her previous problem, she has gone right back to the intimidation/ass-kicking thing that she is known for. Yes, she is constantly whipping Warlock’s ass, despite the fact that he outweighs her by a good twenty pounds. Of course he doesn’t have any testicles, but still, he outweighs her by like 1/3rd. He is about fifty-sixty pounds while she is in the 30-40 pound range. I suppose if Warlock had some male dogs as peers he would be a bit more interested in trying to win the fights as it would look really bad for any male entity to get their ass kicked by a girl that is smaller than them (unless they know martial arts), but man, it is usually ‘no contest’ type stuff. He will just admit defeat and run away. He then will lay down to sleep in a closet or under a desk (as he is currently) so that mean old Zelda can’t come and beat him up again. Of course after the death matches (where no death is involved, so that might not be the appropriate term), they can be seen licking tongues within five minutes. Strange thing the differences in interaction between humans and interaction of animals.

Java game; Dog toes;

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As stated above it is the fourth of June. This is my eldest brother’s 34th birthday. Though I do not have any way to contact him, nor do I know where he is even living, I will say Happy Birthday here. Just in case he has caught word of this site through one of the relatives that actually know the URL. However unlikely that is, I made the gesture. Fifty years down the road, you know when I am dead from stress, smoking and alcoholism, he will be able to read through the stuff that is saved to my hard drive and see that while I don’t know where he is, or how to contact him, I actually thought about him on his birthday. Of course in that scenario it would be his 84th birthday when he reads this and the odds of him making it to 84 are no better than mine. Perhaps this entire paragraph is a moot point?

This is just a random curiosity that I have. Why do the colors of a dog’s toes dictate the color of the toenails? I am sure that I could google around a bit and find a very scientific response to that question, I am just wondering as a layman without so much desire to know the answer as to go and look it up. I mean sure the skin pigment would be passed to the nail, since the cuticle is what actually makes the nail grow, right? If that is the case, why don’t black people have black fingernails? As I said, that is just a curious thought that I had today and am not so intrigued by that I actually want to spend the next hour reading articles about cell composition and the such. If you happen to have the simple answer, in layman’s terms, you know what to do.

• There is a bit of trouble brewing on the home front. I am not going to discuss that here because, 1) I do not have any intention of airing my family’s dirty laundry on this site, and 2) You would only be getting my side of the story. As with everything there are at least two sides to every story. Perhaps you are better than I am at separating fact from fiction, but I tend to believe the story that I hear first. I suppose that I would be bad in a jury for exactly that reason. The prosecution gets to go first, they make you believe that the guy did it, then it is up to the defense to make you switch your opinion. If this country was truly based on the legal ‘innocent until proven guilty’ premise, shouldn’t the defense go first? Paint the guy as a simple painter who got flim-flammed into something that he didn’t understand…Not that the trouble on the home front involves anyone actually being put on trial or going to prison or anything, just that it would be a bit unfair for me to put my side of the story here without giving the other people involved equal time to voice their view.

This damn democratic society has infected me!

• I wrote about the popularity of the little java game Lightz Out back on March 19th. I am still getting emails at my old email address requesting the source code for the game. I really wish that I had known what I was doing as I programmed that game, as I think that everyone is going to look at that code in ‘what the fuck’ mode, but I am still getting requests for the code. For my ease I am going to go ahead and link to the file that I uploaded to this site previously, just in case someone searches for it. That will happen when I get around to it of course. Until that time, you can find the link to the source code Right Here. Just keep in mind that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing when I program Java. I know some of the basic arguments and I use them and guess and check until it works. Why the damn Lightz Out game has such staying power is totally beyond me.

• The little puppy Zelda seems to have overcome her malady. She is running and barking just like she did before she was stricken with the…problem. The thing about her little problem is that it may have been caused by the fact that she lays on the floor with her hind legs in very odd positions. My wife and I have talked frequently about how they seemed to be out of socket (some of her joints I mean) while she is casualy laying on the floor. She is back to laying in exactly the same manner now. My wife wants to give her Glucosamine for joint flexibility, but I am starting to think that we probably shouldn’t do that since she likes to sit in postions that would likely break the legs of most canines.

The Glucosamine, as well as children’s aspirin, helped her to get past the pain of her injury, but giving her the drugs to promote joint flexibility will only make her lay in ever more awkward positions. The fact that you only have ten or twelve years to live with a dog should really make you want to make sure that they are happy and playfull for the entire time that they are with you. If she(Zelda) thinks that she is flexible again, she might injure herself again. There is no worse feeling for a pet owner than to see their pet suffering, and she did suffer considerably when she was stricken with her…problem.