Month: February 2004

Renaissance festival; keyboards

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyboards:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valentine’s day; Jesus making your rental decisions

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That’s right, it’s Valentine’s day. This is, of course, the day that amatuer lovers do their best to make up for an entire year of neglect with a box of Russel Stovers. If your wife/husband/significant other is good with that, you have done well. I, unfortunately, am not in that situation. I did like I do every year. I waited until the actual day so that I could go and buy some flowers and a card at the shop down the street. I have done this every year since I met my wife and it has always gone smoothly. This year, for some reason, it all went to hell.

There was a “view historic Florence” event going on in town (Florence is where I live BTW) and that meant that there were literally thousands of people in town to visit. That is in a town with a population of like 3500 so it was a big deal. Most every business in town stays open late when they have this event, since the people are here to see the historic buildings, and almost every building on main street is over 100 years old.

For some reason the pharmacy (which is also the flower shop here in town) closed down early on a day that was both Valentine’s Day and the Historic tour of Florence day. This is the one day of the year when the businesses here in town are guaranteed to hawk their crap for twice the normal price, why the pharmacy would have chosen to close early escapes me. There are two draws for their goods. One being the tourists who will ‘literally’ buy anything that has the word ‘Florence’ on it, and the other being that people who have yet to acquire their valentines gift will pay any price for a flower (since we wait until the last minute and pay double so that we can give our wife fresh flowers).

I always pick up a card at the same time as I buy the flowers, since I would rather wait in line once than twice. End result: I have no flowers, no candy, no card, for my beloved on Valentine’s day. I would like to blame the local Rexall for not being open late enough, but, I could have picked the gifts up earlier. I mean, the best gift to give your Valentine is always flowers that you have been hiding in the trunk of your car for the last three days, right? The outside temperature here has only hit 71(Fahrenheit) in those few days, but the inside temperature of the car has made me actually turn on the air conditioning since it was so damn hot. So, that would mean that I could not have realistically hidden chocolate or flowers in my car, but a card? Christ, I am going to buy next years card tomorrow since I feel like such an ass right now.

Why is it that I can always have a birthday present, christmas present, anniversary present, hell any present at all a few weeks before the day, but when it comes to valentines I am always last second? I blame it on the flowers. This is the one day DESIGNATED to give flowers. If I give flowers on say May 7, they are easy to get, and they are far less expensive than they are this time of year. I guess I will chalk this all up to experience.

A quick note, why it is down here I don’t know. Once again Flux, has helped me overcome a few virtual problems. Well, they were real problems, but in the virtual world. My only prayer now is that he never like needs a kidney and tries to look me up to see how truthful I was about that ‘if there is anything you ever need’ statement, yet by that time I think the Shadowtwinian reign will be in place, so I will be able to pick any of a thousand from my stable and order her to donate the kidney. (pretending to be a megalomaniac is fun!)

I actually have multiple bitches today. I am torn between doing all the bitches now, or saving some bitches for later. I know me well enough to know that I am gonna do just enough bitching to really get me in the mood to bitch, then I am going to go to bed, and in the morning I will no longer care. So, I must Bitch forth.(I think that might actually be an original phrase BTW).

First Bitch

Where I work I am sometimes required to receive applications for home rentals from people. When I am the one receiving them, there are a few questions that the owner of the said home would like for me to ask the potential renters. I do ask the questions, mostly basic like; “How many in your family?”, “Do you have any pets?”, “How did you find out that this house was for rent?” it is all that sort of mundane crap when I ask the questions.

One of the people who spoke to me about the house had a wonderful response to the ‘how did you find out the house was for rent?’ question. She said, and I will quote “JESUS told me to call.”

It is not my intention to doubt any religion, but, I would think that the son of GOD had a lot better stuff to work on than making sure that you got into a house. I could be wrong, and I may burn in hell, but, MY GOD, how can you possibly believe that? So Jesus just goes from town to town trying to hook Christians up with good homes? Making sure that the people who happen to live in the United States have beautiful homes, while totally forgetting about the fact that he has left the entire population of Africa to die from a horrible disease?

Back to the original point, though, I am pretty sure that it was the ad in the newspaper that made her call that number. Whether Jesus made her read that number is certainly open to debate.

Meta; eBay; Paypal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Song remkaes

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It turns out that I had a SNAFU and a FUBAR going on the entire time I have been doing these updates. I only found that out because Flux had mentioned in an email that he could help me get my table working properly. I did not know that I had a problem with the table, so I fired up Netscape (which I rarely use) and yep, you could not see a single word that I had written. I spent the majority of the afternoon taking care of that problem on the site pages, yet did not take the time to fix the previous updates, and likely never will. Also, just because of the sheer amount of time that it will take to redo all of the poetry pages, those have not yet been updated either.

On the up side, I did add a Mission statement to the page that I feel is well worth a look. One other thing that is site related is that I scrapped the demon background that I had been using for a really long time (six years or so) on the free site. I didn’t really like the look of it for the purpose of a ‘real’ website, and I was only using it on the front page anyway. It is amazing how much your taste can change in only a few years.

For some strange reason I am feeling the desire to bitch about musical artists right now. I guess the reason is not really all that strange since I am forced to listen to K-lite while I am at work every day. I do so despise the music…

It seems to me that for the last several years there have been a lot more song remakes than ever before. I can not be sure of that, of course, since I only recognize the songs as remakes when I am familiar with the original song. There are a lot of songs that I thought were original when they were released in the ’80s that I found out later were remakes of oldies. I am no authority on the subject, but paying for this domain gives me a license to bitch about anything…The power…

The thing with the new song covers is that they are mostly re-making songs that were at least top twenty material when they were originally released. Take, as a for instance Madona’s cover of Don McLean’s timeless song American Pie. (sorry I could not find linkage for the original). I saw an interview with Madonna where she said that she really felt strange about re-making such an american classic, so I will give her props for that.

Then you have the remakes of Don Henley’s timeless song The Boys of Summer , where one of the people actually substituted their own band name where it says “I saw a Dead-Head sticker on a Cadillac”. That is just wrong!!

Then, when I am listening to “Uncle Kracker’s” latest version of the rock and roll classic “drift Away” by Dobie Gray, I just hate music in general.

Out of nowhere comes “the Counting Crows” version of Big Yellow Taxi If you have never heard that song beforehand, you are not alone. I had only heard it because I had a hippy teaching music in my school back in the day. I just give this group props for digging one out of the trash can and getting it into the adult contemporary top 40.

It is much easier to re-do a verified hit than it is to turn a folk classic into one.

Meta; Childhood anecdote

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I got an email today from one of the few people who have the address to this site. He offered me a bit of constructive criticism, he iced it over so well that I wasn’t really sure if it was actually criticism at all, but my logic prevailed and I saw his point(s). I have added them to my mental library and I will try to remember them when I start repeat the errors that I knew (even before he pointed out) I was making.

The biggest thing that I took from this email was not something it said, but something it made me remember. I have always had some pretty strong opinions on things and I often would write up rants to post on the free sites that I used to maintain. What would then happen is I would realize that some of the content was too controversial to post on a free site. The difference between the user agreement on a free site and a site like this is monumental. Here as long as I don’t post kiddy porn I am golden, on free sites an image of myself holding a cigarette could get my site banned. So the few rants that I did post were as edited as your average government area 51 files (by me for fear of retribution).

Unfortunately, I do not have anything really worthy of a rant today. What I do have is a story from my childhood that I had not thought about for about 18 years. I am sure it won’t make for captivating reading, but it is a story that I have never told anyone and for some reason I am feeling an urge to write it down. Bear with me.

I have to include a brief intro here which will really do no justice to just what my mother had to overcome to raise us as children:

My parents divorced when I was quite young, either six or seven, and my mother had never had a full time job. This was back in about 1981 I think, and the job-market for divorced mothers was not exactly booming. Minimum wage was set at 3.15 an hour and that was what she was working for when she took her first job. The only house that she could afford was one that was on the farm where she was working, it did not have indoor plumbing. Well, it did have a sink and a shower, but it did not have a toilet, we had to use an outhouse -try that in December in Oregon sometime-.

The divorce agreement between my parents was really pretty simple. She wanted sole custody of the three children, he wanted every material possession. She agreed to those terms because at the time my father was a very abusive alcoholic (later he was just an alcoholic and gave up on the abusing, but at the time I am damn sure it was in my best interest that she agreed to those terms.). Anyway, my father was on temporary disability at the time due to an injury at work, so his child support payments were set at 124 dollars per month for three children. None of this has been exaggerated, we were dirt poor.

Now to the story from my youth.

Where we were living at the time, the school did not have a cafeteria, the kids would either eat packed lunches or go to the restaurant across the street that had the $1.50 a day student special. We, of course, had the sack lunch. The lunch consisted of a sandwich (which was literally two pieces of bread and a single slice of deli-sliced meat), a few corn chips, and some Kool-Aid. That was what we could afford, so that is what we ate, but it often left me feeling really hungry by the end of the day.

I missed the bus home from school one day. We lived about a two hour walk from the school, and it truly seemed to take about 3 weeks when you were actually walking it. I was so hungry by the time I left school that I really thought I might die on the way home (in a 12 year old’s mind a lot of things can be fatal though, where was rhetrospect when I needed it). We didn’t have a phone at the time, and even if we did I didn’t have the dime I would have needed to call.

I began to trudge my way home, after only a few steps I figured I may as well put my jacket into my back-pack since I was certainly not going to be that cold after the two-hour walk. Shortly thereafter, I could see the ‘Bay’s Family Market’ IGA store approaching. My first thought was that I could go in there and see if anyone I recognized was shopping (that was pretty likely with the size of the town, like 4500 people), but I didn’t recognize anyone except for the store clerks. I hung my head down and started to make my way back to the door, when my stomach began to growl, then I passed the display of Tortilla chips. I bet you know where this is going…

I walked for about an hour wearing my jacket and a back-pack with a whole bag of tortilla chips in it. I was so scared that my mom, or the store, or anyone would find out, that I was crying the entire time I walked. About 2/3 of the way home there was an underpass (for water, not cars, only a few feet wide and a few feet high), I went into it and gorged on tortilla chips. I doubt that I even ate 1/3 of the chips, but I was so full that I could not eat another. I curled the top of the bag over, then left them there in that underpass. Feeling full, but very guilty, I managed to make my way home.

My brothers were both there when I arrived. They were both also quite hungry, but had eaten a slice of USDA cheese (which was meant only for sandwiches, not for eating plain -in our house, unfortunately we didn’t have any bread at the time) to sate them. They looked like they felt just as guilty as me, for eating a slice of cheese when they were really hungry (mind you, it is not that mom wanted us to be hungry, but we had nothing, and the little that we did have could be used to make meals, unless the ingredients were eaten prematurely). I wanted to tell them of the bounty of tortilla chips that I had left under the underpass, but I was still so in fear that I would get in trouble that I just went into my room and cried some more.

When mom got home from work, she made some ‘home made bread’ and a soup of nothing but broth and barley. It was enough to sustain us, but it tasted like crap compared to the bounty of chips that I had left there on the underpass. I wanted to tell her about the chips, I wanted us to all be able to eat them, but I knew it was wrong to steal them, and so did mom. I bet that if I had told her what I did she would have made me take that bag back into the store, apologize to the owner, and offer to work off the price of the chips. Then I would likely have been grounded.

Well, this has probably been a bit depressing for anyone who may read/have read it, so I will just say this. It was so much a part of my being to know that taking that bag of chips was wrong that I didn’t even look for them in the underpass when I missed the bus the next day. I have never again seriously thought about stealing anything because that just leads me to thinking about crying in my room when I could as easily offer the forbidden items to my family.

Long story short(er), I think that even though she had to go through a lot to raise us, mom sure did a hell of a job of putting in the morals. She also had a few great quotes; “Just because we are poor doesn’t mean that we are filthy.”, “Poor people aren’t all beggars.”, “Shut up and sit down you deviant little son of a bitch.” – I especially like the last one, since she is really insulting herself…Unless no one knows who my real mother is…

Meta

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I did upload some of the things that I was typing about yesterday. I found that, like everything else I ever attempt in life, I remember them far more fondly than they deserve. Perhaps it is just part of human nature to think that everything that you have ever created with only the power of your mind and your own two hands is the end all of human existance, but, man to find that it could be for all the wrong reasons is kind of a stab in the heart. I managed only to upload a short mp3 that I created along with one java game. The rest of what I was going through was so bad that I didn’t want to have my name on it -not that these two are particularly better, just that since I said I would add some I wanted to have an example of each-. For the daring, just click on the ‘Stuff I Made’ link on the sidebar.

Now on to site related stuff.

I really did not intend to do a daily update on this site, but I feel compelled to. The problem with that is that I really suck at it. I said yesterday that I have become a better writer without actually having written anything in a while, and that statement is true, but also that statement is in direct reference to fiction. I have never written any non-fiction in my entire life (possible exception being reports turned in at school), and I find this type of writing to be a lot more difficult to get the hang of. When writing the fiction I always have a story line and characters to work with, though they only exist in my mind, and after I type a paragraph or two I will go back and look at the actual delivery of the prose to try to keep it really fluid and get rid of excess crap that really doesn’t need to be there.

Non-Fiction (i.e. these updates) is a completely different monster. I will sit down with a pretty good idea of what I want to say, what spin I would like to put on my opinions, and a few remarks that I want to add for a bit of comic relief. What then happens is that my brain starts working way faster than my fingers can possibly type and I end up with unrelated comments thrown in all through the entire thing. I read back over them only AFTER I have posted them and find that, for the most part, I have totally underestimated the dificulty of doing this sort of thing.

I really wish that I had taken some sort of a course in journalism, I am sure that they probably teach you techniques to block out your impulses to add all of the random crap to what you are trying to make a point about. The sad truth is that I spent all of my time in creative writing classes which taught me how to deal with character development, plot lines, and the fluidity of a story. None of those traits really lends itself to trying to be coherent while rambling on about Levitra, or whatever you are bitching about that day.

I certainly hope that, if I continue to do these updates, I will get better over time. As it is I find myself not wanting to read the babbling and incoherent crap that I am posting here. If I don’t want to read it, how the hell can I possibly expect anyone else to? I think that question may have been rhetorical. I suppose that if the substance of the writing was earth-shaking then some people may look past the shoddy writing, but as I have not shooken the earth yet, with all of this garbage, I doubt that will be my saving grace.

I do believe that, like anything else, a bit more practice will result in me becoming better at this sort of thing. My fear is that I will continue to read my updates and find them utterly disappointing. If that should happen I would certainly be quite discouraged, and I might just give up the whole idea of a daily update. That is why I am hoping that this site gets found by the search engines sometime pretty soon. I know that my writing is crap, but I am very critical of my own work and I would like to see some feedback from someone who is, say, Not Me. But, that is another issue all in itself.

Meta; Witles

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Well, I uploaded yesterday’s update to the wrong folder, not that it matters with my current readership being only me. It was still accessible had one clicked the link for ‘Next Update’ at the bottom of the page. So that means that there really was a good reason why I put the link to the next update on there, even though about 99% of the time it is a dead link here on the main page.

The good news is that after uploading and reading that update, it was probably better that it not grace the front of this site for even a day. Not that I think it was particulary bad, just that I had hoped to be somewhat impartial with what I write here. Yesterday’s update was far from it, in fact I actually wanted to flame myself for some of the points I was trying to make. Let that be a lesson to me, Proof-read before posting. Proof-reading is one thing that I never do before I post, another is spell check. I would like to do spell check, but I do not have a word processor installed on this machine, so I just assume that it is good enough for my purposes. It is not like I am writing something that is going to be published in a national newspaper or anything.

I was thinking again about what else I might want to put on this site. I have decided that I am going to put some crap on here that I have done, a couple of java applets, maybe even this one piece of music that I was working on a while ago. I set about to searching my hard drives for copies of these items, but was unable to find the majority of them. I know that I have had them posted on various free sites at some time or another so I will go to search them out. Fear not, if I do not find them you will probably be better off than if I do.

As I began to re-write one of the Arthur Witles stories yesterday, I was disappointed to see that it made reference to yet another story which I do not have a copy of. I remember a few of the one-liners from it, and also remember it as being one of the better ones. I so do hate technology. There was a time when I wrote everything on paper, and never, not even once did my file cabinet say “that device is not accessable”. I guess this is my punishment for putting too much trust into microsoft based technology.

I left in the reference to the Arthur Witles story that I no longer have, and with any luck I will remember enough of the story to be able to write it again. I guess it will probably be better to just do a complete re-write anyway, as with most of my stories it is utter crap. For some reason I have become a better writer over the years without ever practicing the craft. It is strange how that can happen, but not surprising. Writing is one of the only things I can think of where you can get better by not doing it. Imagine a guitarist getting better at guitar by simply listening to other guitarists, it just does not happen. As a writer, though, the more you read the more fluent you become. I am still far from a publishable author, I might well never be, but I would like to think that I am now able to at least tell a story that doesn’t make the average reader vomit in disgust. That is, of course, debatable.

I am going to leave this where it is, there are a few files that I want to get uploaded and stories to write. If, in 100 years, someone is digging through these archives and is disappointed by the the fact that I managed to coney 0 information in this update, tough titty.

Taxes

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Following with the theme of not getting a damn thing done to get my stories posted, I decided I would go ahead and do my taxes today then get to the site work. That turned out to be a bad idea.

Taxes, in general, are not really that difficult. I mean really, it is just a bunch of numbers that one must throw into a form that looks much like a spreadsheet. I would think that any chimp could do their own taxes, unless they are one of the chimps who make a lot of money and are personally in charge of thousands of employees and the such -they probably go to H&R Block-. Though I really doubt that if you were to look at Bill Gates’ tax forms it would say that they were prepared by a glorified kiosk in a SEARS store. I guess that is why CPAs actually have jobs.

While doing the taxes this year I realized that entire point of them is to crush the ‘american dream’. I mean it is your goal to be successful and to have your worth appreciate annualy, yet, the more your worth appreciates the more taxes you have to pay. I am not talking about a billionaire who has to pay 250 million in taxes, because honestly if you have a Billion dollars you either inherited it or made it on a good idea followed by the labor of the lower class, I have no sympathy for you.

What occurs to me is that the whole taxing system is more of a direct inverse of the ‘american dream’. I will elaborate. If you make really good money (and I mean really good, like sports star, current musical artist, wealthy investor), they tax your earning to like 40% and that is just the Federal tax. That was the reason why there was such rejoice from investors when the Clinton Administration got the bill passed to make some long term stock sales only taxable at 28%. It is difficult for me to understand the way that actual law works (as their are a lot of resrictions and qualifications that must be met for it to be possible) but, I do understand the rejoice. If you had a million dollars in stock, then sold it and had only 600,000 dollars that would seem pretty harsh. If that same stock could qualify for the 28% rate, you would have 720,000 dollars. That is a 120,000 dollar difference, quite a hefty chunk of change.

Who else gets taxed at a rate of 40% -or hell even 28%- for federal tax? Only the very, very wealthy. I have capital gains that I had not yet paid taxes on and I did have to pay a huge amount on those gains, but that was not nearly 40%, were I to move up a couple of dozen tax brackets I may be in trouble. Though if I were in the league of the 40% payers I guess I would have so much money that I really would not give a damn. Actually, I bet I would be totally pissed off still, but my reasons would be different.

The cash cow of our society seems to be the lower class. Now, I know that the lower class is the class in the most need of support, but, if you make less annually than you get back on your taxes I think there may be a real problem. If you have a minimum wage job where I live and work a 40 hour week, you will make just a tad under 11,000 dollars in a year. That is not very much money at all. If you are that same person, and have a wife and a few children there would be no way that you could possibly support them on that income. So, the government steps in and puts them on programs like WIC, Foodstamps and Welfare. Then, they do not take any taxes out of their pay, to help them support their family. Then, when the tax time comes they are giddy with excitement to find that they will be getting over 2,000 dollars back (I use the word ‘back’ to mean that that is the amount of a ‘refund’ check that they are sent, but since they paid no taxes it is more of a gift).

I am not saying that we should just let poor people starve, or that we should kill the rich and distribute the money among the lower classes. Nor would I like to live in a Socialist economy. I just think that the money that the middle class puts into the pot should not be so easily squandered. The very, very rich are the only people that matter in Washington, the only reason that laws get passed is because of them. The very, very poor people get programs to pay for everything from their house to their food, their car, etc…

I am now going to go into speculation, with absolutely no proof to back it up, and no desire to actually research the subject. I am betting that a single woman with three children and a 12,000 dollar a year job actually makes more money than a woman with no children and a 25,000 dollar a year job. By that, I mean that through government programs giving her assistance for all the necessities, if you add up the total of all of the benefits she is getting and add them to the base 12,000, then add the tax check that she is going to get, I am pretty sure that it would be more than 25,000 per year. The woman making 25,000 a year will have to actually pay in taxes over the course of the year about 7% in that tax bracket I think.

This is going nowhere, as usual. This is exactly the reason that I hate doing taxes. It always puts me in a foul mood. Having a foul mood, and a forum where I can post anything I want without fear of repurcussion is not necessarily a good thing. That is, I bet it sure makes me sound like an ass.

It is not that I think that our tax money should not be used to help the poor, just that I would much rather see it being used for things like Passive Birth Control for single mothers who are on welfare. Programs to search out dead beat dads and force them to pay the child support that they are required to. Maybe even paying for daycare for the single mothers to go to school – even if only a trade school- to educate themselves so that they can get better jobs and become self-sufficient.

The way the tax money is being used now it is perpetuating the problem. The programs that are in place make it so that an uneducated single mother (or father for that matter) will never really have to go without food or shelter. If the money were used to offer programs to help the people better themselves, as opposed to just being hand-outs, it would do a lot to help stop the cycle -at least slow it down-. There are statistics that show that children who grow up on welfare are far more likely to end up on welfare, and that makes since, after all, that was the only way they had ever lived. Similarly, teen mothers’ children are more likely to be teen mothers themselves.

I better stop now, this is just a train wreck. Someone remind me never to do my taxes before I sit down to write anything again.

Wal-Mart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MSN

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Yesterday sucked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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