Category Archives: website

Meta blogging; Ozzfest

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I spent some time today screwing around with the layout of my page. I came up with a couple of things that I kind of liked, but nothing that I was sure enough about to commit it to the internet. The thing is that without any advertising logos to put on here it just seems foolish for me to have it divided as it is, when there is so little information in the left column. I like the things that I do have over there, but on the occasions where I actually write a bit there is just a lot of dead space over there. Conversely, when I removed the left column the daily text stretched so far that it became difficult to keep the eyes on the correct line. That led to me reducing the size of the table, leaving about 40% of the screen as just background.

Once again I realize why I just ripped off this layout instead of coming up with something of my own.

Having written the previous, I went on to spend a lot of time looking for a few songs that I remember fondly, with hopes of updating my side bar. It turns out that the first three I thought of were absolute shit, and the one that I ended up placing there was not far behind. I guess that is why every generation hates the music that their parents listened to, considering that I can hardly listen to most of the hair band shit that I used to listen to. The one saving grace of my generation is that we have Megadeth and Metallica to listen to in a pinch. I don’t mean the horrible soap-opera-esque crap that they started putting out in the mid-late ’90s, I mean the real Metallica and the real Megadeth.

I am sure that every generation makes a stand like this at some point. Trying to defend the music that they grew up listening to against the new bands that are coming out. The thing that makes me think that some of the power bands that I was listening to when I was sixteen, Metallica, Megadeth and Pantera specifically, are better than the bands of today is the fact that they are being played on the radio in rotation with the new Metal. Perhaps that is just in the area I live, but the fact is that they are still being played, more than twenty years later. The only other songs that get that kind of air-play are oldies.

As I approach 30, I realize that I am no longer the kid that used to bang his head while listening to the old metal bands, but when I see kids half my age wearing ‘Master of Puppets’ t-shirts, I realize that some of the kids are still listening to it.

I had the opportunity to go to OzzFest last summer, thanks to my wife having an amazing job where she won V.I.P. tickets to the event. The one thing about that experience that really surprised me was the sheer number of old metal t-shirts I saw. I felt like I was damn near the oldest person there, but lots of the kids were wearing Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, Anthrax, Slayer t-shirts, regardless of the fact that they weren’t even alive while those bands were in their prime.

I sure hope that by the time I reach say 50 I will quit trying to defend all of the metal that I listened to when I was a teen, but the sad truth is that there is just nothing coming out today that is as heavy and even tries to tell a story. Thunderous guitar riffs are pretty easy to come up with, the hard part is making something that will last. You can have the heaviest riff known to man, then have someone just scream, “keep on rollin’, rollin’, rollin’,” over the top of it and it will be absolute garbage. Put that next to the riffs in a song such as Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”, which is basically an anti-drug campaign, but it tells a story and it sticks. I am sure you can see the difference. If you can’t then I am old.

• The aforementioned OZZFEST was by far the best show that I have ever seen. There were so many bands there that I could not possibly list them all. The ones that played the main stage, though, were Chevelle, Disturbed, Korn, Marilyn Manson and, of course, OZZY. We wandered around the festival for a good five hours or so before they actually opened the entrances to the main stage. I was able to see a couple of bands, like Voivod, on the second stage that I had always wanted to see. There was another band on the second stage called MotoGrater that I mention only so you will know the name.

I don’t remember the exact date that the show was, but it was in the middle of the summer, in Arizona. Temperatures outside that day were over 110 degrees, which led to us using our V.I.P. passes frequently to get to the only area with a misting system, and the V.I.P. restrooms, which were the only air-conditioned place in the whole venue. It was there, the bathroom, that I met the guys from MotoGrater as they were trying to wash off the silly make-up that they put on before they do a show. An hour or so later, I met the bassist for Korn in the same restroom. Keep in mind that it is tough to try to talk to someone while they are pissing in the urinal next to you, let alone ask for an autograph. I briefly thought about shaking his hand, as we were walking away, but considering that neither of us had stopped at the sink to wash our hands, I thought better of it. And NO, I didn’t look at his Johnson. I stared at the wall just like I always do. I did ask him if he was in the band ‘Korn’ and he said that he was. Then he asked me who was on stage, I told him who it was (though I can’t remember at this point), and he disappeared through a door marked “NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT”. I didn’t try to follow.

I was absolutely blown away by Marilyn Manson. I do not care for their music, but won’t turn it off if it is on the radio, it is just the kind of thing that I don’t actively hate, or like. His (their) theatrics really stole the show. To the point that I was a bit disappointed when I finally got to see Ozzy (for the first time in my life). Manson certainly took care to stage a show that would shock and entertain you for his full set. The rest of the bands, Ozzy included, just did their songs. I will give ozzy a bit of lee-way on this one, since he is no spring chicken, but the other bands, like Korn, couldn’t they have done something other than just play their songs?

Manson had choreographed marionettes (they were actually people behaving as such) that did things for his entire set. He had a little tiered stage kind of thing that they would climb. It is difficult to describe, but it was an experience. The other bands just played their songs. If you want to hear the song, you have the cd, the sound quality is going to be a lot better, just listen to the damn cd. Marilyn Manson, on the other hand, really sold me the experience. Even though I do not like Marilyn Manson, I would be more likely to buy tickets to his next concert than I would be to buy tickets for the next, say, Korn concert…Even though I like Korn a lot more than I like Manson.

That is about enough for today. Feel free to email me if you agree/disagree, that is why I put the link down there after all.

Randy Johnson; Weird search strings

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There are only a couple of things that are on my mind today, so this will likely be a short one even by my standards. That being said I will get right to it.

• Being an Arizonan, I was just as excited about Randy Johnson’s perfect game as the next guy, even more so in a lot of cases I am sure. Since it was only the 17th perfect game in recorded history it is quite an accomplishment. The fact that Jonhson was able to do it at the age of 40 is mind-boggling. Understanding that he is a major league athlete, and as such will excercise as one, his body can not possibly be in the kind of shape it was ten or twenty years ago. He does deserve all the congratulations that he is getting. Not some two-bit guy like me to criticize it, but I pay for the opportunity to bitch, so bitch I shall.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to pitching a perfect game. First and foremost you need to be a top notch pitcher like, say, Randy Johnson. Second you have to have an umpire that is a bit lenient about the actual strike zone, as a pitch an inch too high/low or too far out/in side could ruin the whole thing. The third thing (in my mind) that has to happen is all on the pitcher, and that is that he has to keep it perfect for three or four innings; if he strikes out 8 over four innings and the other three are routine flyballs and maybe a grounder to first the rest of the guys are going to start to feel the energy. Once those three things have happened it is no longer just about the pitcher, unless he happens to strike out the last fifteen guys, which is unlikely. This is the point where a lot of perfect games become ‘no-hitters’.

Having watched only one perfect game, but seeing many ‘no-hitters’, or perfect until the ninth inning games, I have worked out a theory on how one could pitch the ‘perfect game’.

While a lot of people are rooting for the pitcher, a lot of people are also rooting against him; The perfect game would be lost if you were not a respected pitcher. No one, save the fans of the team, would want to see an unknown rookie throwing a perfect game, you need to have enough respect in the baseball community that the opposing fans are even on board with you achieving this feat.

This one doesn’t carry much weight considering the Current Standings, but you must be playing a team that is not really all that good to begin with. Johnson was facing a team that had 18 strike-outs against the Brewers (of all teams) a day or two before.

Now the aforementioned team energy needs to come into play. Can you imagine what it would feel like to be the guy who bobbled the ball at second that cost someone a perfect game? I can’t, but I also don’t make a ton of money, thus insuring that I will be in the public eye for all of my life. That is why it is up to the pitcher alone to keep it perfect for three or four innings, long enough for the rest of the guys on the team to get it in gear. Keep in mind that the rest of the guys on the team play 162 games a year while the pitcher plays every, what, fourth game? The guys on the field need to realize that it is happening so that they can wake up just long enough to make it happen. If you think that it is akin to blasphomy to say that, you haven’t seen a lot of ball games. Having attended a few of the games myself, I have seen that a lot of the players (outfielders in particular) sometimes seem to forget that they are playing the game at all. One of the players (for the Reds) that was in the outfield actually took off his shoe and was shaking it out while there was someone up to bat.

Now that we have very good pitching, respect from the fans (even opposing fans), and a really bad team to play against, there is still one more thing that needs to be factored in. That one thing is the guy on the other team that is an asshole for the sake of being an asshole. This is not really a concrete term that should be attached to the guy, but I am going to use it whenever possible. The scenario would go thusly:

The opposing pitcher has a perfect game going.

It is the ninth inning.

Your team is down by two runs.

There is no one on base.

There are already two outs.

You bunt to get on base.

I don’t think that the previous scenario has ever happened, but I bet that it will if it hasn’t.

The only thing that I am intending to say here is that it takes a lot more than a good pitcher to pitch a perfect game. All of the players on a team are involved in it. From the catcher that sends the calls to the pitcher, to the lowly outfielder (who is likely bored in a perfect game), the whole team must come together to help the pitcher achieve greatness. I bet that the pitcher knows this as well and likely will buy them all dinner and drinks after the game.

• The other thing that I wanted to mention is the weird strings that have resulted in people looking at my site through Google.

Two people clicked through on “drod roaches”, that one I can kind of understand since the drod website was (is?) still down, and I had mentioned them previously.

I had one click on “emachines 466is cpu upgrade”, of course when I googled that I am right near the top, but I shouldn’t be. I was bitching about my emachines antiquity, then talking about upgrading to a new system. I guess they do have to just go by what is on the page though, as opposed to what you were thinking/writing.

The third Google search really freaks me out. Someone searched for “tomorrow site:shadowtwin.com”. I am pretty sure that the word ‘tomorrow’ is going to be in a lot of my posts. Why would someone search for that particular word on this site? If I said, “tomorrow, goat porn”. Wouldn’t you search my site for goat porn? Or would you think that I had somehow forgotten to describe the goat porn as “goat porn”? I don’t know, that one just seemed a bit weird to me.

Meta blogging; Abu Ghraib

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I spent a bit of time on Wednesday, and an hour and a half today, getting finished with the March 2004 archive page . That, of course, required reading through my posts from the month of March which, while time-consuming, was a lot less depressing than I thought it might be. It turns out that it really is better to let what you have written sit there for at least a month before you try to read it and do a short description, as it seems that you are looking at it with fresh eyes. There were a couple of essay type things that I wrote during the month of March that I think were really quite good. There may be some point later when I pick a couple of them out and post a section of ‘stuff I wrote that doesn’t totally suck’ on here, but that would make people quit reading my daily update, which usually does suck, and then just go to the link for the stuff that doesn’t suck. The inherent problem is that I do not know if what I am writing sucks until I read it a lot later than when I write it. In my mind everything I write sucks, only time can clear my mind enough to look at what I have written with a clear perspective and that does not lend itself to making sure that every word I put down is worth the paper keyboard it is written on.

The other thing that I noticed as I was reading through the old posts is that I seem to be getting progressively better at getting my idea down as time goes on. It seems that with each new post I get just a bit better at keeping all of the ideas in my head long enough to put each one down and move on, while in the earliest posts I was trying to type all of them at once and often lost most of them in the process. The result of that was that each paragraph that I had written would look like it was four paragraphs that I had taken a sentence or two from and tried to make into a single, flowing concept. It was shit, honestly. Though I am always my worst critic, I am sure that anyone reading this would really have to agree that my writing in this form has gotten better from when I started. That being said, I still have a long way to go to make entire posts that will hold a reader’s attention and not make me look like the ass that I am. But isn’t that what I signed up for when I started this whole page in the first place?

• I haven’t posted any news here for a while, not for lack of trying. I was hoping to get a bit or two up here today, but it seems that all there is to talk about anymore is the damn Abu Ghraib garbage. Don’t get me wrong, I think that what our people did to those prisoners was inhumane. From the pictures that I have seen, though, it did not seem as there was any physical abuse to the men. It was sick and wrong for anyone to even stage the events for such photos, but it happened, and we (the U.S.) did it to prisoners of war (well I guess there is a loophole so they aren’t actually POW’s, still it was inhumane). If we (the U.S.) can’t understand that the entire world has a microscope on the way we are handling ourselves in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ this is going to get infinitely worse for our brave men and women who are there actually fighting it.

Whether those photos were staged by the U.S. troops who posed in them as ‘trophies’ to take home with them, or if that is the way we treat prisoners on a daily basis seems to be a dead discussion in every nation except ours. Less than half of our country is behind the war in Iraq at this point and I don’t think we have any allies left that would actually send more troops over to help us if it came to that. That whole war has gone completely to hell. I am pretty sure that Dubya doesn’t mind, since it has driven oil prices over forty dollars a barrel, and that is extra profit for him, but now it appears that he is ready to bail out. Just makes me wonder what his reason for bailing out is, the fact that he has a financial windfall with oil prices skyrocketting, or the fact that an american civilian got his head cut off.

That is exactly why I don’t like to talk politics. I have some pretty strong views, and Dubya is such an easy target. I sure wish I hadn’t voted for him, but I did. So, please, to help clear my conscience, do not vote for him next election. We have seen the FUBAR that the country can become when being backed only by ‘big oil’, and that somehow drives the prices up. I am so sickened by the situation that I am honestly thinking about putting down ‘Reagan’ on my vote, as a write-in.

• Guild Wars

Today is the last day of the E3 trial of the aforementioned game. I played it a bit each day that it was online and it seemed pretty cool. The one thing that I question is whether the local PC crashes that I experienced were based on it downloading ever more data, or if my system just can not run the game. I am leaning towards the game downloading as you play, I have all of the minimums beat by a lot but still get weird freezes when trying to play it. I hope that they get that all worked out when they go to Beta testing, which I am sure they will, and the game could be really cool. Also, having the game already installed on your machine, as opposed to having to download each zone that you enter, would likely make it much easier to play. I am not going to throw out an opinion based on my experience as it would be quite negative, if they do have a beta test for it, though, I am going to jump all over that. It would be extremely cool to see such a game in its infancy working towards a world-wide release. I do suppose they would likely be looking for players who had cable or dsl connections though, yet, at the same time they must be trying to sell it to normal people like me who have neither., My hope is not dead yet…

Websites>Children; Sex Ed

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I got an email today from someone that I have never heard of, and have no idea how they happened upon my site. This person told me that I should stop with the bashing of MSN customer support. That is a valid argument, probably the best argument that I have gotten since I started doing this site all those weeks ago. I respect his POV and appreciate his email. Thing is that the MSN customer support is just so rich a subject that I could go on and on about it for days, if I was so inclined. They seem to have the guys that get turned down for jobs at McDonalds working there. If anyone really wants me to stop my bitching about their inept service, that person better work for them, and be in a position to hire people who have ever actually done anything to a pc other than love the monitor in a disturbing fashion…Show me just one case where MSN customer support has fixed a problem (not counting incorrect passwords) and I will quit my bitching.

Nice to know that someone happened upon my site though. Unless, of course, my regular reader actually sent them a link. I am relatively sure that I didn’t send them a link, so it must have been just a chance occurance.

• There is something that I was thinking about today that I found just a bit amusing, if not disturbing. I started to keep an actual journal when I was in the sixth grade (that would be a diary to the ladies), but gave it up after it had been found and, consequently, read by one of my brothers. I just quit keeping the journal altogether, even though it was probably not nearly as personal as some of the stuff that I post here. Why is this? I have two working theories, I am not sure which one is closer to the truth, I am not sure if either one is even close to the truth to be honest.

My first theory is that I was at that age where things start to happen for young people. Hair started appearing on my fingers, toes and elsewhere. I do not remember a word of what I actually wrote in that journal, but I could surmise that I would have written about changes that my body was going through. As I think back on it, I think that would be an interesting read for a lot of kids (more on that in a moment).

My second theory is that I would like to be remembered, long after I have died and gone into the dirt that christians call heaven. Words that you speak can often be misquoted or just ignored, words that you write down are there. Words that you write down are there forever (depending on the source of the media that you are using). What I write here could easily outlive me if I could get a relative to preserve it all on a disk. The thing is that I think a lot of people are doing the same thing.

Lots of wealthy people choose not to have children, yet have their memoirs printed. I am certainly not wealthy, I look at it kind of backwards. If I can not offer my child the absolute best, I would rather not have a child. I don’t mean toy cars and the such, I mean that if I know that I will not be able to provide the best education for a child I would rather have that child not be born. I certainly could not foot the 30,000 dollar a year charge for an ivy league college, but I would expect that my child would be capable of that level of success. Sure there are sholarships that would cover some of the cost, but the out-of-pocket cost would still be pretty high. One could only mortgage their home so many times…

Myself, as your average blue-collar worker, could not provide the correct environment for a child to thrive. I could surely provide an environment where a child could survive, yet I would feel extremely bad if the time came when he/she got accepted into an ivy league college and I had to say that we couldn’t afford it. My lack of education would then go against my child. Forcing them to work low wage jobs all his/her life, would it be better to have or not have that child? I thought that the whole point of having children was to make sure that they have it ‘better than you did’. I am sure that there would be no lack of love (site my dogs, for example), but education is everything for a child. I know that I can not afford to send a child to the best schools, and I think that is why I type here each day.

This site will likely be my legacy. The thing that is spoken of, in hushed words, from one family member to another. They never had any children, people will say, that must have been a sad existance. I don’t suppose I will really mind if I am remembered that way, I just don’t want to bring a new life into this world that can only hope to be remembered the same. I strongly believe that the goals that you have for your child/children should be to do better than you ever did, if that is not possible please use a condom…

• When I was in the sixth grade they started doing sex ed. I really think that the teachers were more uncomfortable than the class. When the movies played one of the teachers would go to the bathroom, while the other just sat reading the paper. When it ended he would look up and say, “any questions?”. Even if you had questions you would not ask them from this guy.

Totally on a side note, the latter of the teachers was later arrested and charged for molesting children in the third grade class while he was a substitute teacher at a different school. You just have to love the grammar school system here, don’t you?

I really can’t remember exactly what those videos showed, what I can remember is that it set everything to a certain age. Say you wake up on your sixteenth birthday, that means that you will have full pubic hair, even if you have never had a sign of it before. Men will have chest hair at eighteen, again, even if you had never had any sign of it before. The male penis is able to function for reproductive purposes at the age of thirteen. I assume that all of these things must happen on that particular birthday, as the video did not describe any ‘gray area’ that could explain anomolies in their system.

The thing is that I got hair on my chest before I got hair on my love-sack. A friend of mine, name of Mike W* had a full beard by the time the puberty bug got down to his cajones. Sure, it is not an exact science, so don’t try to make it so exact in the ‘self help’ videos about puberty. That just goes to make us al self-concious and really hate the guy who made the video in the first place.

Of course it is me being bitter, and I think I am really getting good at it. YMMV, but the facts will remain the same.

Site stats; Dad

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Well, I have decided that I am going to start taking wednesdays off. I just don’t have the energy in the evening to write anything here after getting off of work late. Officially, next week will have no post for wednesday, while I am putting this one up just to let my legion of fan know (no, those weren’t meant to be plural).

One thing that I did find a bit disappointing was that the things I wrote about yesterday I really thought would make one of the few people reading email about. Most particularly that I used the wrong name for who is chef on South Park (I changed it before I uploaded it to the archives). I was pretty sure that everyone who actually views this site would know his name, so I was expecting someone to correct me, didn’t happen. Oh well.

That brings me to another issue, that being the site statistics that are available through the hosting service. They give you a lot of information, but not a damn bit is very useful. Say I have 69 hits one day, but only 3 visits, and 12 pages. How does one determine from that how many people actually visited the site? Could those three visits have resulted in 69 hits? It is all a bit odd. I am going to take the time tomorrow to get a third party counter that will actually just tells me who loads the front page, it seems to be a lot more accurate for trying to see how many people actually hit the page on a given day. It is not like I am expecting the number to be over five, but something that I am curious to know.

That will be all for today. Just to take up a bit of space, I am going to throw in a picture of my father with myself and my two brothers.

That is, of course, my father in the back, he died on Christmas eve in 1990. My two brothers are on either side of him. The little guy in the front, the one with Way too much hair, and a really bad ‘bowl cut’ would be me, your humble webmaster. Possibly a lot more humble after digging this photo out. Something that I just noticed while looking at this photo, doesn’t it look a bit like all the noses in the photo are superimposed? Hmmm. maybe it is just me, but it does look a bit odd.

Anyway, that is all for today. I will be back tomorrow with more compelling reasons why you should just never read my site.

My game; news

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The first thing that I want to mention here is that the little game that I made, which can be viewed or played on my site Here. Is still also available on the internet at the JavaBoutique. As a result of that I still get emails a couple of times a week from people who want the source code to the game. Mostly they are college students that need to create some java thing for their computer science course and want to see how I was able to achieve the end result that I did. It is a bit flattering on the one hand, but on the other hand, it just sucks. More on that in a moment.

Something that I remembered while I was typing the previous paragraph was that there was one particular person who requested the source code for the game, and used it for a really great cause (if they were telling me the truth). This company (I can’t remember the name) said that they had seen my game and thought that the layout would be perfect for a new device that they were installing in Hospital waiting rooms. It was, I guess, a small touch-screen computer that supposedly would let people play various games or watch local television channels, but it was all opereated by touch-screen. The person who emailed me said that they had chosen my game for the sole reason that the way the game is played would make it easy to alter the source code to work with a touch screen instead of a mouse click. I am not sure if they ever did use the game for the purpose that they said they were going to, hell, I am not even sure if that wasn’t just an elaborate story to get me to send them the code so they could alter it just enough to claim that it was their own. Anyway, I would like to believe that there is a kid in a hospital waiting room somewhere right now playing it while waiting for his mom to come back from life threatening surgery. As I have previously stated, simple goals.

The majority of the people who request the code are students in computer science, or similar classes. I can only theorize that they go out looking for these little applets and assume that whoever programmed them must have been schooled in Java Programming. Nothing could be further from the truth, in my case. Not only have I never been schooled in Java, I have never been schooled in anything. The truth is that one of my friends was starting to learn the basics of java programming and in a juvenile type of ‘I can do it too’ mindset, I started to program java. I bought a book called, “Teach yourself Java 1.2 in 21 Days”. Lies! Here it is what six years later and though I can make a java applet, and for the most part I can make them do what I want, I would hardly say that I have actually learned how to do it. With the exception of the very first applet that I ever wrote, every one of my programs has pieces cut and pasted from previous ones that I have done. There is always modification to be done, of course, but I am not really sure if I were to sit in front of a blank computer screen if I would be able to even make a java applet simply display the word “Hello”.

When these people do request the source code I always send it to them, but I spend so long explaining that this should only be used as an example of how not to program java that it really kind of depresses me. I actually have the following phrase at the top of the source code;

This was programmed by a novice at java who was mostly drunk while doing the programming. I do not guarantee that implementing this code will not kill you, someone else, or even make the world explode. Thanks.

Hardly a glowing recommendation. Don’t take my word for it, you can actually view the source code of the applet Here if you really want to. I just did to make sure that my link worked and I gotta tell you, I am a bit amazed that the applet works at all. If anyone ever happens upon that little game and finds that some portion of it doesn’t work, let me know. I am quite curious to know if the game would actually load and play in a newer version of Netscape or AOL as I do not have either of those.

After that little bit of self-castrating, I think I will move on to happier things.

Or not.

There is just not a lot of happy stuff going on in the world, well at least the U.S. part of the world, right now. It is now pretty clear that no one supports the purported “War on Terror” that we are fighting. Fighting terror by fiercly guarding oil fields in the middle east seems to be a bit of a stretch of the word ‘fighting’, and also seems to be letting the terrorists run amok. Now that other countries are being attacked, and as such being forced into defensive measures, they are not wanting to send out their military personnel to be slaughtered like the 500+ American soldiers who have been killed since Iraq’s leadership fell.

We all know, of course, that Iraq was not involved in the 9/11 attacks, and the fact that the Bush administration decided to attack Iraq as opposed to finishing the job in Afghanistan has likely swayed the opinions of the rest of the world to think that we are a bunch of bullies. The sad truth is that I feel that exact sentiment. There are a lot of wonderful stories, and links, on the new blog called Political Animal which is written by the former CalPundit BlogMaster.

I do not like to write about politics on this site because I do not feel that I am well enough informed to make reasonable assumptions/decisions about it all. There is normally a huge difference between what the actual news is and what the American public can see on the television. Yet, it seems, myself and a lot of other people in the U.S. have given up on the televison or print news for any actual info, we now rely on the internet. The internet just doesn’t seem to give a damn where you are, or who you are, and it lets you read actual information without trying to spin facts to get higher ratings. Again, I hate to write about politics, but in a survey (I just asked people who came into the store today) most (like nine out of ten) of the people who were wearing dress clothes (suits or nice dresses) said that they would vote for ‘anyone other than Bush’ in the next election. I am not sure that the vote will actually go that way, since a lot of the elderly people just never leave their house except to vote, and they like a familiar name to vote for, even if that familiar name wants to make them homeless.

One other thing that I have to put here, just because it makes me sick. I am not linking to a news article since it really doesn’t deserve it.

Paris Hilton was thrown from a horse while filming the new season of a show, and may have been injured. She was air-lifted to the nearest hospital, probably not hurt, but as a precaution. This would likely have never been news, were it not for the last line of the news entry;

Hilton also made headlines recently when a graphic video of her having sex with her boyfriend surfaced on the Internet.

Can I get transferred to a country where showing a nipple on T.V. doesn’t shut down the entire media for a month, and amatuer porn isn’t the only thing anyone ever wants to write about?

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I did spend a lot of time last night trying to get something on this site, I made some good headway, then a freak power surge shut my pc down. I had not saved it as I was typing, as I never do, and it is lost to history even more so than the songs that I list on the sidebar with that same title. There is no way that I am ever going to get that content back since it only existed in my mind and what I typed. My mind kind of unloads and becomes what I type and after that I would not know my own writing from anyone elses unless you actually told me which was which.

I was not at all that confident that the computer shutting down was a direct result of the power surge, so I ran a few programs on it once I got it back online. I ran an anti-virus, Ad Aware, then did a scan disk to make sure I didn’t have any system problems. My system came out pretty clean, with the exception of some spyware that I got while trying to download an mp3 file to put in the sidebar.

I think that I really need to make two commitments here, the first that I should make sure that any link that you click on through this site will not result in all that spy-ware garbage. I do scan all of the files that I put up here, but the links I only click through on my own system, if they do have any garbage files like that then I have them too. The second is that I should commit myself to not try to do a blog (that is the first time that I have used the term blog in direct reference to what I am doing here, BTW) on Wednesday, since I get off work late enough that I can not really spend enough time on it to make it worth reading…Whether any of these are worth reading is certainly Open to debate.

On a personal note, the medical problems seem to continue. I have talked so much about the pain in my neck that I don’t really even feel the need to link to an instance here. Now my neck appears to be just fine, but out of nowhere I have a ringing in my left ear that I can not explain. It is constant. You would kind of have to be in my body to know what I am talking about, I can still hear out of the ear, it is just this like buzzing kind of thing going on. I haven’t been to a really loud concert in months and this is an all-of-a-sudden type of thing that makes me wonder if whatever I did to tweak my neck could be involved in this new problem.

The only up-side that I can find to this new, weird, ear-ringing thingy is that if it persists I will be able to go to concerts and just point the ringing ear to the stage. What could possibly happen? It will ring worse? No problem, I still have a good ear. I have no doubt that, like my neck, this is a very temporary thing that will soon go away, but as of today it is something that I noticed.

I came up with a new song to put on the sidebar for the ‘Music lost to history’ thing, and I went to search it out last night. That was the entire reason that I ran all of the tests on my system once it came back online. I thought that some of the crap that I had downloaded might have resulted in my pc shutting down when a minor power surge hit. That has turned out to be a completely false assumption.

Sometime while dealing with that whole ordeal, trying to get my pc going again, I thought of another song that I really wanted to put on that side bar. The thing is that I actually have the playable mp3 of this one, which must be illegal, else they wouldn’t be busting kids for downloading songs, right, right? Leave that for the lawyers. I will get that one posted within the next few days with a very modified name.

Well, I have yet to die, but I assume that people will be pissing on my grave by the end of the day. I am not trying to make it as such, I am just ‘calling things like I see them’. Tomorrow will be a day that is totally different, and not related, to today so the hope is that someone will actually read the post that I make before I change it to be more politically correct.

Feedback-PC Vs. Mac; Childhood

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Well the most unfortunate thing happened this morning, I woke up to find that Viacom and Echostar had reached an agreement and my channels were back on the air. I suppose that should have me rejoicing since I can now watch South Park, but the thing is I had another lengthy bitch that I was going to get into yesterday about the issue and now that the issue is resolved it would be a bit pointless to write about it. Fear not, I have more, even less interesting things to talk about today!

First, there was a sign on the bulletin board at my local post office that I found pretty amusing. It said, “New construction company looking for someone who can read a tape measure and not show up for work drunk or high” There were of course phone numbers hanging from the bottom of it, and several had already been plucked off. I noticed that they weren’t even saying how much the job paid, I guess that one must assume that the type of people who would apply to an ad like that would probably be happy with minimum wage, or an amount close to it. I am happy to say that for the first time in my life I actually think that I may be a bit over-qualified for that job.

Yesterdays very short musings resulted in two emails, this time with a bit of an argument regearding the Microsoft security alert that I bitched about yesterday, the first one said;

Hey. I was just reading your website and caught your quote about Windows vs Mac when it comes to security issues. I just wanted to share with you an opinion that I have become very comfortable in believing. If you think about it, the ratio of Windows users to Mac users has got to be an ungodly large number. The hackers know this as well as anyone else. When you get a guy sitting behind his desk making a malicious program, most likely the main thing on his mind is to harm the most number of people, and would therefore not even bother writing a virus for other platforms. You always hear news of MS finding this or that security issue because they most likely have a huge team working solely on security, where as the Mac guys are probably sitting back in their chairs laughing at the pains that having a monopoly brings.

Just when I logged into my email to cut and paste that line, I had received the second email, which said, in part;

There just aren’t enough OS X users around to make a statement if a virus is released. We’re only 5% of the market.
Having said that, my friend who works in Mac support for a major university says that OS X is incredibly stable and most importantly, safe. According to her, it would take years to hack through some of the encryption codes the OS uses.

I read both of those and I really think it is a bit funny at the approach each person is using at presenting the same argument. The first email is obviously from a Windows user, and his angle seems to be that no one cares about Macintosh, but they would be just as easy to hack if someone put their mind to it. That may or may not be true but the fact is that you just NEVER hear about any problems with the security on Mac machines. I mean any type of security even like stolen credit card numbers and bank info and all of those type of things seem to only happen on Windows based systems.

After reading the second email, which is from an OS X user, it seems that the mac users concede that their is such a small base of users that even if their security ever failed it wouldn’t make headlines. I am not sure if that was really what the emailer was trying to get at, but that is kind of what I got to after having read both emails. The thing is that there is nothing further from the truth than that.

I strongly believe that if a single OS X system anywhere on the face of the earth encountered security issues, Microsoft would be on it like maggots to rotting flesh. Macintosh has been a thorn in the side of Microsoft for decades and the thought of them not attacking mac if even one person ever had security issues is ludicrous. It would be in every Microsoft commercial and ad campaign from here until the end of time. If you are thinking, no, Microsoft would not attack them for something like that, since they have had so many problems of their own…Sober up…

Do you remember a couple of years ago when Macintosh starting doing those commercials where real people told the story of why they switched from Windows based PCs? Microsoft immediately started hiring actors and giving them false stories to read about why the switched from Mac back to the PC. I can’t find any articles about it right now, but I seem to remember that they got in a lot of trouble for not specifying that the people in the commercials were actors and not actual Mac users. Now if a company will openly break the law when faced with someone else talking about the shortcomings of their product, I would bet my nuts that they would take every advantage of the shortcomings of their competitor’s product. The mere fact that they have not yet been able to do so is, I think, the best advertising the Mac has ever had.

One other thing of note to put up here. I was looking through my site stats today and noticed that I have a referral from a googlebot and two search strings that led to people clicking my site. Woo-hoo google has finally found me! I feel a bit sorry for the people who searched for “comedy central is gone” and “nail gun movie -massacre” as I probably didn’t have quite the information that they were looking for on my site. But, you see, that is why I chose to name the site shadowtwin.com even though donnieburgess.com was available. I really didn’t think anyone would click on a link to donnieburgess.com since it looks like it is probably just a personal page, where shadowtwin.com could really be anything. Except animal porn.

A thought occured to me today as I was again thinking about children. More specifically I was thinking about everyone and their sister asking my wife and myself why we don’t want to have children. I had long thought that it was just some internal drive that some people have and some don’t. I don’t mean like libido, but some sort of maternal/paternal thing that some people just have more than others. I had often noticed that more affluent couples seem to have less(if any) children than poorer couples in the same area and had surmised that more money meant more joy, so they did not need children to brighten up their lives. I don’t really think that I believe that anymore.

The next series of thoughts involved a child’s upbringing contributing to whether or not they would, in turn, want to have children. I really believe that far too many people are having children because they are not happy about the way they were brought up. Like when you were a kid, and at some point you said, “when I have kids I won’t treat them like this.” to your parents -come on, you know you did- some people just seem to take that to the next level and have children so they can spoil them just to piss off their parents.

Sometime while thinking about upbringing, I think I found the reason that I don’t want to have children. Life -much like shit- happens. Most of the time you don’t have control over your current situation, it is more in the reverse, your situation has control over you. If you are buying a house, buying a car basically being a consumer, you are bound to your job as if it was your own skin. If you lose that job for whatever reason, you have to find other work. If other work is far away from your current location you really don’t have a choice, you would have to sell your house and relocate. That is why I don’t want to have children.

I really hated my childhood after about the third grade, and by no small coincidence that was when I started moving around a lot. I am sure that many people have had to experience being the new kid in school and were able to overcome it. That never really happened for me. I was always the new kid, over and over, new friends that I would lose in a couple of months, learning from different school books, it was just horrible. Here I will do my best to list my scholastic career:

1st grade: Riverside elementary
2nd grade: Fir Grove elementary
3rd grade: Fir Grove elementary
4th grade: Eastwood elementary, Benson elementary, Tombstone elementary, Benson elementary, Cochise elementary
5th grade: Cochise elementary
6th grade: Rose elementary
7th grade: Riddle middle school, Fremont middle school
8th grade: Fremont middle school, Winston middle school
9th grade: Douglas High
10th grade: Douglas High
11th grade: Douglas High, Roseburg High
12th grade: Roseburg high, Douglas High, Roseburg High

With the exception of the last two years, all of the different schools that I attened were due to moving about with my mother or father. Of course the grammar school years are when you are supposed to be developing all of your social skills, and I was doing quite well with it, right until the fourth grade. When it all went to hell. If there is anyone still reading this, I will break down why the moves were made from school to school to the best of my recollection -and, as per what my parents told me at the time.-

Riverside closed down after my first year there, it was quite close to a very busy street and a river, and the parents had a vote and it was closed. Half of the kids went to Fir Grove, half of them went to Rose, varying by region. My parents divorced while I was in the third grade and my mother drove me to Fir Grove for the remainder of the year, but we moved very close to Eastwood over the summer break, so that is where I started school the next year. After about two months of school at Eastwood, I got a note that I was supposed to go to the office and I was in horrible fear about what I had done, but it turned out that I had been pulled out of the school by my mother and we were moving to Arizona.

We found a house in a place called Dragoon and it had bus service to Benson, but the house was condemned after we had lived there for a month or so and we moved to Tombstone. Only about six weeks in Tombstone I think, and the house that had been condemned in Dragoon was repaired to where we were able to move back in, so back to Benson. Benson quit sending a bus to dragoon since they were only picking up 3 kids and it was a forty-minute round trip, so the parents started car-pooling us to Cochise. I spent a few months and then an entire year at cochise, but 1st-8th grade there were only 52 kids in the whole school, so not a lot of friends to be had.

I spent my entire 6th grade year with my father and went to Rose, some of the friends that I had had in the first grade still went there, but we knew each other only in name, and it was not quite what I had hoped it would be.

Seventh grade was spent with my mother in Riddle, I don’t remember exactly why we started going to Freemont from there (yes I do, it was because Freemont had a free lunch program and Riddle didn’t) so I spent the last six weeks or so there. Eighth grade started with Freemont, but I went back to live with dad which put me in Winston, where I graduated with my class and spent the first two and a half years at Douglas high with them. That was when it was my fault that I moved so much.

I didn’t actually move after that, it was just that I was working full time after my dad died, and I was missing too much school. If I missed more than 12 days in a semester I would not get credit, but Roseburg High and Douglas High are only about 15 miles apart, so if I got close to the 12 days per semester I would transfer to the other school which would give me a clean slate.

That is something that I would not want to put a child through. If I were wealthy enough that I would never have to worry about something like that, I would surely have a different opinion about children. But I am not, and I don’t.

Meta; Child beating

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So, I got off work late again today. By late I mean 8 p.m. which I know isn’t really all that late, but it generally does keep me from doing a damn thing other than just going to work and then coming home. Once home, I generally get on-line and check my emails and the such. Read a page or two and the next thing I know it is damn near 10 p.m. I suppose that I should have grown used to this by now, but I still haven’t.

Where I work is not really like your average job. That is, I generally know when I am supposed to show up for work, but I kind of only know ‘ballpark’ when I will be going home. Sometimes the shift is 9a.m-8p.m., sometimes it is 11a.m.-6p.m., and then just when I get used to it they change it. Frequently, people ask me how I have managed to work under these circumstances for so long, and I am not entirely sure if I really have an answer for that question. It is not like I make a boatload of money for working there, but, I do make significantly more than minimum wage. If I were to try to find a different job I would have to start back at the bottom again, and work my way to where I am now -where the chain of command goes Owner->Me->everyone else.- I will simply say that it pays the bills and leave it at that.

My site has a new reader! That reader is my wife, and I am quite happy about that, but I must admit that knowing that she was reading led me to re-read all of the past updates to make sure that I did not have too much profanity in them for her to be able to read them at work. The good news is that I can only find 3 instances where I used the ‘F-word’, I did not have to change a single past update -or I didn’t whether I should have or not- because of this, but I still have not changed the page layout on the original ten or so updates that will currently not load -or load incorrectly- on many systems. Like everything else, the more I think about it, the more I think I should. And, with that particular problem I am talking about having to change 12 or so files, though I doubt that anyone will ever be clicking back that far into past updates (with the exception of the FBI and CIA when the Shadowtwinian’s overthrow the government).

I mentioned above that I had read back through all of my previous updates, which I did, and I can tell you that I was quite happy with what I saw/read. I started with the first update, which was just all over the place, and ended with yesterday’s update. It appears to me that I am getting a whole lot better at keeping on track, and getting a point across, than I used to be. Like everything else on this site, that is open to debate.

I hope to get better at this sort of thing with every passing day. My goal is to be able to write this thing on the fly, then read it the next day, without my eyes rolling about any statement that I made. It is getting closer, but I do not know if I will ever get it just right. I guess time will tell…(I did notice that I have a habit of saying, “suffice to say”, that I found just a bit annoying, and I will try to break that habit, other than that though.)…

Child Beating

The first thing that I have to say here is that I was abused as a child, and I don’t think that any child should have to go through that. The second thing that I have to say here is that punishment does not equal abuse…If your child is playing with matches, and burns down your house, do you say, “That was bad, don’t do it again.”? I certainly wouldn’t, and I would like to think that the majority of the people in the world would agree with me on that point.

Children are literally like clay, they can be molded. If you teach them to fetch the newspaper, they will do it (even though that is a stereotypical dog’s job). Whatever you teach a child will remain with the child for his/her entire life. That has a double-edge though. If you did not teach the child something, they will do whatever they feel like doing in a situation (not having your guidance).

The first four years of a child’s life seem to be when all of these reflex responses are set, but they need to be modified with time. That is, when the child is four years old, you don’t yet need to teach him/her not to play with matches, since they don’t have the desire or the access to the matches. A few years later, however, they will have the desire and be tall enough to reach whatever cabinet the matches are in. In my experience, verbal scolding works from birth to about 5 years old, then skips a lot of years until it becomes active again in the mid-twenties -in the form of guilt-.

Sometime within that time-frame there must be spanking. If your child is seven, and has just burned down his second office building, it is time to try a tactic other than the, “I am disappointed in you” approach. The problem therein is that someone will try to say that you are abusing your child if you slap them on the ass.

Well my case study (that is, I have been watching lots of people with children whe happen into the store where I work) shows that the parents who give their children a hearty slap on the ass when they are doing wrong end up with far better behaved children. I am not talking about for the duration of the shopping that day either, I mean that I have seen them go from 5 years old to fifteen and they are well behaved.

Similarly, I have seen the parents who just say, “no, childname”, and have to do it over and over again over the course of the ten or twelve minutes that they are in the store. Is spanking better than ‘verbal enforcement’? YES. Does that necessarily equate to the child growing up to be the next GACY? Probably not, but it does equate to better behaved children, and the world is in lack of decently behaved children today.

I believe that you should slap the child on the ass on occasion, that will help the child to learn right from wrong. I can personally remember damn near every instance in my life where I got a spanking, but for the life of me I can’t remember the pain from it. I think that is the goal, to teach the lesson, and if I can remember what happened when I was 5 because of an ass-slap then I say, “Do it”.

I did open this whole thing up saying that I thought that punishment did not equal abuse. I will elaborate just a bit here. I do believe that it is okay to spank a child on the ass to teach the child a lesson. I do not believe that it is okay to bring a closed fist in contact with a child for any reason and that did happen -not to me, but one of my brothers- that is certainly abuse. Though the fist never touched me, I still feel that it happened to us all, in the form of fear. If that was what led my mother to leave my father for the sake of us I still don’t really know, but it was certainly the best thing that ever happened for Mom and us kids.

Why can’t I just have a damn happy story from my youth? First I am a thief, second I am from an abusive family. I definitely have to do research before I try to do another anecdote here.

Keyboard; Belly shirts

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Yesterday’s update was by far the shortest in the brief history of this site. There was no real reason for that, well there was, but I don’t want to get into it, so just believe what I tell you.

I thought that this new keyboard had been doing pretty well, and it has, but I am still having some issues with a lot of it. For one, my last keyboard tapered very slowly from the desk to the keys, this one is almost rounded on the way there, it forces my wrists to be higher than they usually are when I type, and it is a bit painful. Another involves the keys to the right of the letters. Instead of having the print screen, scroll lock, and pause at the same level where the F keys are, they are right down against the insert, home, and page up keys, then after the delete, end, and page down keys, the up arrow is right there touching the end key. I am sure this will not be that difficult to get used to, the only real problem is that when I try to hit the insert key, most of the time I get the print screen, since it is exactly where the insert was on my last keyboard. Similarly, when I try to page up I am getting the pause key, while when I try to page down I am getting the page up.

Makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have just gone ahead and bought the microsoft one, since if they continue to use their format, I bet all the other companies will soon start to do it as well -regardless of how non-sensical it is. As it looks now, I am literlly going to have to learn a new keyboard every time I am required to buy one. Makes me wish I had the means to just go buy about a dozen or so of this one so I would never need to, but, even if I had the means, I am sure that in two years there wont be USB ports on computers anymore so I would just have a dozen obsolete keyboards. Technology sucks.

The last thing about the keyboard that is giving me problems is that it is new. I am sure that everyone knows that when they are new you kind of have to really mean it when you hit a key. Once you have been using it for a few years just a gentle touch will get a letter on the screen, when it is new you really have to push down to get it. It doesn’t really affect my typing speed, as I am pretty quick in that respect, but it does affect my accuracy as I will often see that I am missing about every fifth letter, but by the time I see that I have missed one letter my fingers have already thrown up a few more. It is quicker for me to just backspace and re-write the few that I delete than to try to arrow key it back, then fix the typo, then arrow key it forward.
So, bear with me over the next couple of weeks as I am breaking this thing in, there will likely be a lot of typos, and as I have previously stated I do not have the ability to spell check. As I have also stated I do not proof read before posting. I fear that if I did proof read I would change everything all around, I think that would kind of cheapen the whole concept of doing this daily update in the first place. I am not entirely sure if it would actually be possible to cheapen the daily update itself, but I would like to think so.

One other thing regarding computers and this site. I keep forgetting to change my why I’m mad today, don’t care and fun to hate things. Of course this doesn’t really matter so much at this point, since my readership is pretty much only me, I just fear that I may not get into the habit of doing them every day if I continue to wait until the rest of this is written. It was my goal to make them thematically linked to what I had written here, and since I never know what I am going to write here until I sit down and get it about 2/3 of the way done I can’t really change them in advance. If I do continue to forget to update them I will likely do them first and then try to make this section relate to them, but I think that would not work nearly as well, as I seem to write better with a blank slate than I do with a particular set of topics in mind. That being said, on to the bitching!

I was originally planning to do something about Ded Bob today. That has changed due to unforseen circumstances.

Belly Shirts

Belly shirts are a wonderful thing, if you can pull it off. There is the problem. While I was out recently, I noticed a disturbing trend… Low cut jeans with belly shirts are on the rise, as well as the relative size of people wearing them…

I saw about 10-12 women with the low-cut jeans and belly shirts on the day in question, perhaps one of them had the body to pull it off. There was one particular woman (that my wife and I spoke of later) who looked like she was, or could have been, 5-6 months pregnant that was going for that look. It certainly DID NOT WORK. Another woman who was going for this look was pulling it off, kind of, from the front, but a quick turn-and-look revealed what looked like an inner-tube hanging over the side and back of her low cut pants.

Mind you, I am in no position to bitch about fitness or the state of the body, but I did quit wearing half-shirts when what used to be a six-pack had somehow transformed into more of a keg.

If one wishes to follow a trend, one should choose a trend that is more suited to them. If one is anything other than a teen-ager, one should keep in mind that the little whores like “Britney” will not be remebered in about like 11 seconds. The ‘muscle shirt’ from the eighties lasted only about three years. Spandex made their run in like two years (though to this day I would swear that every overweight single woman that goes to the laundromat still wears them). Mesh shirts have also gone the way of the “Dodobird”. Todays fashion is tomorrow’s ‘faux-pa’.

My solution for this is simple: Become one with the Shadowtwinian’s. After that you can do as you please. I run a pretty loose religion over here, I am open to any input, as long as you don’t have 68 pounds of ass and gut hanging out of a pair of jeans and shirt that fit you back when you were like seven…