But Seriously, WTF?

Ok, I got this comment on my last post, and just had to re-post it verbatim. It's very long, and extremely crazy, so feel free to skip down to my (short and succinct) thoughts on this:

Here it is, verbatim:

I caught your "flying cars" post in a "Google Alert" for flying cars...

I'm one of those, "lazy bastards who aren't giving you your lovely flying cars"...

I'll tell you where your flying cars are... You already know where they aren't...

They're in my 14 cases of 75-thousand pages of notes... That's where they have always been, since 1978...

Now I'm beginning to understand why my project has and is being so stifled...
I read in a blog, that Bush recently legislated "under the counter" that Americans are banned from developing engines and powersources which might obsolete Oil consumption...
What's with that guy? Is he hellbent on tossing all of us back a couple thousand years ago.. or What?..

It's scary that one guy could stifle humanity that big, and get away with it...

Have you seen the latest "flying car" claim..?
It's a blimp, tied to a something or other.. It looks like a "floating gurney"...
Next thing yah know they'll be driving their cars off'n cliffs, claiming they have flying cars...

I have the technology for flying cars engines... I just can't find the funding..? And I sure have tried... I've been snubbed more times than I can count... Now, being snubbed is just a way of life for me... I expect it...

...1978 late Fall.. on a planned three-week leisurely cruise across Canada, along highway number-one, along as much of the scenic-routes as I could find.. just past the Ontario border into Manitoba.. I saw two large meteorites cross a huge "X" in the sky.. and thought about it with all I had.. "What makes Alien craft's engines work", I telepathed from all my Being...
...A few minutes later, I had to park, to write the flood of new data, for three hours straight.. resulting in the crude bench manual to build a liquid electricity rocket...

James Watt watched a kettle boil, and invented the steam engine...
I saw an X in the sky, and invented the liquid electricity engine...

I attempted to detail the workings of the engine to a visiting European nuclear physicist.. "mindless dolt" would be a better fitting title... 60-seconds into the description, his face when pale, his chin dropped, he struggled to speak, he accused me of "talking in the forth dimension", barely managed to stand, managed to walk three paces, and fell flat on his face...

Over the years I have contacted pretty-much every major scientific concern in the big business world, and all the powerful politicians, and even a couple of the great religions.. to no avail...
All I got was "classy" snubbing and scorn, from the mindless scientific community, governments, and religions... and a lot of "remote viewers" desperately trying to suck technology from my mind, mostly when I slept.. till I figured ways to seriously damage them upon approach...
Plus there were a lot of attempts to dig into my computers, them believing I'd put the meat in a computer connected to the Net.. thht on that!.. They destroyed five of my PC's in their desperate attempts to rob me... Seems this race doesn't want engines for flying cars, and engines to take us to other solar systems, Unless they can steal it from the inventor... It's a pity I am being forced to take all this technology to the grave...

All this engine is, is a couple simple modifications to laser... It "cracks" light... Damaged light "particles" self-heal with the nearest molecules.. thus creating raw antimatter-acids, which are saved in exhaust scrubbers, and sold by the public, to power industry... The service station pays the consumer for plugged full exhaust scrubbers.. A complete 180 turn-around for having to pay for gas all these years...

Fragmented light "particles" instantly decay into liquid electricity, which produces tremendous thrust from a tiny 14-inch long by 4-inch diameter engine... Among the 110 new-technologies in this science layer, it replaces combustion as a power source, opens the bonds of the inert elements, establishes plazma-welding of all materials to all materials, is the base to establish disintegrator trash-pails, obsoletes hospitals, gives us planetary defense weaponry and thousands of new toys, and gets us to other habitable-planets before this one shows us we've already killed it...

It's that.. or you'all can go try to find it all by yourselves, by your classic "scientific" trial and error methods...

If anyone has a clue how to get new technology funded, I'd sure appreciate hearing about it.. and I'm sure you would benefit from it greatly when I start marketing flying-cars... Do you prefer two seaters or four seaters?..

Why is it so tough to get new technologies funded?.. Could it be that mankind's intellect is devolving..? given that cell phones are baking brains.. meth, and coke are dissolving and melting brains, the drug industry's pain killers evolutions are numbing people to escape reality, dirty smallpox vaccinations are destroying brain file connections, alcohol and the prolific lack of nutrients are literally desiccating brains in their cases... Every day it seems more and more that humans are devolving into Apes... Just look at how they, you, we, treat this planet, like it's an expendable resource...


Bottom-line is, You get flying cars about five years after I gets a lab and a credit card... Simple as that... if we still have a planet left after the 13-Colonies nuclear world war three game...

I've done a life-time of work acquiring this technology.. I've taken it as far as I can without funding... If I'm not funded by my 60th birthday (10 months from now), the 75-thousand pages of notes burn in the garden on my 60th, and I'll send a video clip of the bon-fire, and a cover story, to the mindless scientific community, for their archives... and you all can get your flying cars when the next one like me comes along, in about 500 to a 1000 years...

So.. Now you know why you are not driving your flying-cars today.. and why those alive today won't be seeing flying-cars in their lifetimes...

____________


This liquid electricity emitter's raw output is a dirty-pink stationary light-cloud... which evolves into 4-D TV, and into cinema special effects breakthroughs for the next 500-years... Filmable synthetic actors.. restricted only by lack of imagination...

A little further research, this toy evolves into engines that will obsolete Fire as a power source... Fire will become illegal... The atmosphere will have the opportunity to self-heal.. and the air won't stink so bad...

This plazma engine will power all our vehicles, including moon and mars capable consumer RV's... and will provide mankind with the basic means to populate other planets in other solar systems...

This engine evolved to tools and weaponry, will do things like, "write a poem on a lunar cliff-face from earth... and drill a meter diameter hole 20-miles into the earth's crust, for us to plant magma batteries, which crystallize into crystallines, with hardnesses 14 to 28 on the Mho's scale... Thereby revolutionizing several industries: optics, bearings, abrasives, weaponry, and pretty much evolving every industry and life in many ways...

This is what our Species has been searching for... I found it, but it seems no one can even begin to fathom any of it... I tell them, and they "piss" in my face, and try to damage my life...

The usual reaction I get when mentioning any of this in various Internet forums, is verbal flame, and barrages of mindless insults, and varying religious, pseudo-physiological, and political battles, with aggressive mindless people, all hellbent on defending the insane stagnancy-quo...

I defend myself well against slanderous attacks, which have resulted in me being banned from many forums and scientific communities...
I've heard it all repeatedly, in various world forums, and from other sources.. and from the mindless scientific community, that can't even grasp the first minute of any of these technologies... It's the same "wall of fear" and insanity that all the ancient greats were confronted by... It's what trashed Tesla's lab after he plugged a light-bulb into the ground... It's what ridiculed Flemming for inventing penicillin, for claiming that "tiny invisible bugs were the cause of disease"... Then the medical scientific community tried to destroy Flemming's life.. and then they returned, content, back to their tapping wounds with filthy turkey-feathers, dipped in alcohol and various bright colored rock-powders, to frighten-away disease and infection... "ookook-eiee! Auk!"..

It's that dam wall that your devolving superstitious mindless fearful species just can't see any light nor reality through... Seems there is no secret entry-point through this Race's mindless blind insanity levels, to permit a true scientist to build new technologies anymore, to give this Race more... Seems you are all content with the fall into Oblivion.. forever numbing the discomforts of the fall, with your latest evolutions of designer drugs, and your silly interactive-cartoons, to keep your minds off your species impending demise... When then near the year 145,730AD, the last human can be viewed cracking the marrow out of the bones of the second last.. and by 155,000AD, the planet can't even support the life of one single hardy beetle...

So now you really know why you don't have your 1200mph flying cars today...
Or as that gossip-guy Paul Harvey on the radio would say, "And now you know.. The rest of the story".. why us "lazy bastards" haven't given you you flying cars...



LazyBastard Scientist DonaldJ Engel (alias "Cosmicbrat")...

Ok, first let me waste my time by rebuking the science of this.

"Damaging light particles". Ok, pal, you kinda picked the wrong person to try and sneak this by. Light "Particles" don't exist. Light is a wave. Light is also a form of energy, just like heat or sound energy. Sure, you can see the effect energy has on particles, but damage the energy itelf?

Even if you want to get into quantum physics, where the belief is that particles and waves are interchangeable (Or at least share the same properties), how do you get these "antimatter acids" from light particles? Or particles that the "damaged light" uses to "heal itself".

Acids are complex stuctures. You're essentially claiming you can get ten pounds of energy out of a one pound box.

I had to say I also love the "Stationary Pink Light Cloud".

I could continue rebuking the science of this, but if anyone actually reads that drivel, I don't actually have to. The "remote viewers" trying to suck the information from your mind" has already done that.

Do you sleep in a tinfoil hat?

As for computers being destroyed by evil government hackers, I suggest a good virus checker. I've got this strange feeling that if you protect your computer from viruses, you "Men in Black" hack attempts might mysteriously stop.

(And PS, I should inform you that blogs are NOT known for their fact-checking ability. Conspiracy theories about "under the table" dealings to supress technology that doesn't use oil might just be a little made up).

But never mind pal, I'm sure you'll eventually be able to find some eccentric millionairre who loves conspiracy theories as much as you, likes the style of your jaunty tinfoil hat, and loves conspiracy theories as much as you do.

Oh, and finally people aren't defending the "stagnant-quo" by flaming you. You see, reputable scientists can talk about warp-drive, quantum physics and people will listen. What people won't do is listen to crazy people talking bollocks.

Where's My Flying Car, Dammit!

It’s nearly 2007, a very “Buck Rogers” Sounding year to be sure.

I mean, think of all the shows that came out in the 60’s and 70’s. Space 1999, etc. Every show had the year 2000 (or round about there) as the magic year for amazing technology.

I’ll never forget watching an episode of Star Trek, only to hear Kirk exclaim:

“That’s one of the first generation, interstellar colony ships! They haven’t been in service since 1999!”

In short, back in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, we thought we’d be living in a technological wonderland.

Well, a lot of this is the fact that as soon as a new technology arrives, it becomes common place and taken for granted. (For example, with a laptop and a wireless card, you can run a video conference from pretty much anywhere in the world…if someone had told you that you could have a video chat to someone anywhere else in the world from your car back in the 80’s, you’d have laughed at them).

On the other hand, I can’ help but feel a little cheated. There’s plenty of stuff we should have now, but don’t…and because of this, I give you:

Inventions we Should have By Now, But Don’t

1) Flying Cars

I mean, seriously, flying cars have been in Sci-Fi shows for decades, those lazy bastard scientists know we want them, but they’re too busy wasting time on frivolous things like curing diseases instead of making my 1989 Ford Aspire fly.

Guys, you have until 2010, if I don’t have at least a star-wars style speeder bike by then (Preferably with blasters), I’m gonna come to your house and ruin your shit.

2) Artifically intelligent talking computers

Why, oh why am I wasting my valuable time typing? Why aren’t I dictating this blog to a computer with a sexy female voice, that warbles, boops and beeps instead of making the grinding Hard-drive sound and the microwave-oven like sound of three cooling fans running at full speed.

3) Voice operated everything.

I want to walk into the room and say “Lights” to turn the lights on, tell the TV what channel I want to watch, and have my door welcome me home, give me a list of visitors that have called in my absence before my recliner detects my unique ass-print and molds to me perfectly.

4) Email Pie

We have delivery, Direct to Drive computer software. Why the hell can’t I have pie emailed to me? Why can’t I go to emailpie.com, click a button, and have a door on the front of my computer that opens, to reveal a slice of delicious, delicious pie?

5) Stupid Filters

Know when someone walks up to you, and starts talking and just won’t go away? Know when no matter how non-commital you get, answer in monosyllables and grunts, but they just keep talking about their cat’s eating habits, or how politicians are really saucer people?

Well, I want a implant with patented ‘Stupidity and Bullshit Detection” software, that upon detection of bullshit, literally tunes it out and plays you music or an ebook of your choice (With a low ‘ping’ sound to prompt you to nod or say “uh-huh” when you need to respond).

6) Cordless Shower Heads

Ok, it completely disobeys the laws of physics, but it’s almost 2007 people! We break laws all the time! What’s so special about the laws of physics? (The arrogant, self-righteous bastards).

A shower head with no cord. That’d be AWESOME.

7) Glasses with a fighter-plane style Hud and night vision

Pretty self explanatory. Why? Because it would be PIMP! That’s why!

Ok people, that’s what I wanna see in 2007

How bout you?

What's The Average Call-Out Fee for Xmas Day?

Christmas has been slightly depressing for me for about the past 6 or 7 years.

Back when I lived in England I was always a little depressed that I wasn’t getting to spend Christmas with Sunny…now I live in the USA, I always get a little depressed that I’m spending Christmas 3500 miles away from my family.

However, today has been a much better day that I at first thought it would be. So what made the difference?

Was it Sunny surprising me with a small, but highly appreciated extra gift this morning?

Nope.

Was it the absolutely excellent dinner cooked by my wonderful daughter-in-law, Kathy?

Nope.

It was walking through my step-son’s front door, and after a carefully gauged amount of time, his letting slip that the wireless internet he got for Kathy’s laptop wasn’t working, and would I mind taking a quick look at it for him?

Ah, Christmas Day Tech support…I feel more at home already.

It was nice to find myself partaking of one of my own personal Christmas traditions, which back in England was doing a circuit of my relation’s houses and setting up anything that comes with at least one wire.

Like my Auntie Les, who swore blind she’d tried to set up the new TV/DVD player for my cousin, but couldn’t work it out. (The answer was press the “menu” button on the control and select “auto-tune” from the menu)

Tried all morning, my ass. BUSTED Auntie Les…IN YOUR FACE!!!

Or my Uncle Jim, who couldn’t work out “plug one wire into the small round hole and the other end into the wall, and connect the other wire to the only other hole on the back of the Sega and the other into the antenna hole on the back of the TV.

So all sarcasm aside, Thank you Kathy and Clay for giving me something to do on Christmas day that reminded me of home.

God Bless us Everyone!

Happiness For Me = Superglue + Your Tongue + The Roof Of Your Mouth

Dear annoying girl currently singing on my TV,

Stop trying "vocal gymnastics". You can't do it.

Vocal gymnastics only works when used sparingly, actually stays in key and compliments the melody.

It does not work when a talentless fuckwit, whose parents have assured them they have a "good voice" decides to completely ignore the beat, melody and key of the song in order to make their voice bounce up and down like a spastic yo-yo.

Yes, you've seen Beyonce and Christina Aguilera do it...but there's a difference between them and you.

They can actually sing.

The song goes "Jingle Bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way." not "JiiiiIIIIIIiiiiiIIIIIiiingllllLLLLe BEEEEEeeeeeEEEEElllllLLLLllS"

You're not being impressive, you sound like puberty is making your voice crack, while simultaneously trying to do an impression of the acne faced teenager from "The Simpsons".

So stop it.

Many Thanks,

Paulius.

PS Tell the other girl who came on after you that she couldn't hit the high note on "O Night Divine" either.

PPS Yes, I know I can't sing either, but I'm not on TV.

PPPS Before you ask where my Christmas spirit is, how 'bout you go get yourself a nice warm mug of shut the fuck up?

Spider sense tingles for a REASON

When Sunny first told me she was getting my laptop fixed for Christmas, I had one of those really awkward moments.

You know, it’s like the gift you get from your Aunt every year who’s convinced you really like something that you absolutely hate…and gets you something related to it every single year.

In other words, you’re faced with an expensive gift you have absolutely no desire for, but you can’t say anything about it, and know that by not saying it, you’re going to get something similar next year.

Basically, Sunny got the laptop fixed for one reason only, so we could both play Second Life at the same time. I had to break it to her that my laptop wouldn’t even come close to running it. There’s also the simple fact (and the reason I never attempted to get it fixed myself), that I could flat out buy the same laptop now for less than it cost to get it fixed.

For the techies out there, it’s a P3 500, 128meg memory, 4 gig hard-drive and a 4mb graphics card. I bought it second hand almost 6 years ago

Don’t get me wrong, it was a wonderful idea, and I’m incredibly grateful that she put that much thought into a gift for me. I just had visions of the fixed laptop, gathering dust on a shelf somewhere.

Then something equally wondrous happened. I remembered how great it was to have a working laptop.

Sure, my lappie might not be the fastest on the block, but it can handle general word processing and web surfing.

Part of the reason I don’t write any more than I do is because I don’t like being trapped behind this desk. Feet up in a recliner? A whole different story. When it’s a freezing cold night, curling up in bed and reading the blogs before I go to sleep is my own, personal, geek heaven.

Long story short? I love my laptop.

Now we come to the fly in the ointment.

When Sunny told me it was away getting repaired, my first thought was “There’s no way they’ll be able to fix it.”

While I don’t have much formal training in computers, I can build a computer from scratch with my eyes closed. My fellow geeks out there will know what I mean…after a while you develop an instinct which tells you whether it’s worth the effort of trying to fix it…or whether you’re fighting a losing battle.

Basically, there’s something wrong with the hardware on the laptop. Sometimes it won’t turn on at all, or will work fine for an hour or so, before the screen corrupts and it freezes. Either that, or it’ll freeze, the screen will slowly change from normal to pure white…and then it’ll turn itself off.

I had a hundred different ideas. All of them hardware. I’d ran virus checkers, spyware checkers, reloaded all of the driver’s etc. Nothing fixed it. The big downside of a laptop is you can’ even open them up and poke around easily.

I was surprised, however, when it arrived back at the house, and seemed to work perfectly. I was still dubious. It had been known to work for a couple hours at a stretch…but it worked fine for a day or so, so we forked over for the wireless.

Then, yesterday, I turned it on, and started reading an ebook. 15 minutes in…you guessed it…the screen corrupted and it froze up.

Then this morning Sunny goes to check her email…she gets the start-up screen…and the screen whites out and it turns itself off.

Bugger.

Now the guy who fixed it gives a warranty, which is still in effect, but my instincts tell me that it’s unfixable. At least unfixable without searching ebay for components that aren’t made anymore.

Basically, if the guy isn’t a dick, I sense a refund in the near future…which isn’t a bad thing…except for the fact that we also spent a hundred bucks on the wireless setup, which becomes a expensive paperweight…unless we feel that the one cable wire is incredibly unsightly, and decide to spend another fifty bucks on a wireless card for the desktop…which for some reason I find incredibly doubtful. I can think of other things to spend 50 bucks on than to hide 6 feet of cable.

Moral of the story? Listen to your instincts.

Perfection? I don't THINK so!

So I spend a few hours today trying to set this shit up, and get absolutely nowhere.

This pissed me off immensely. I paid for my own private network, so I damn sure as hell am going to get one!

Now this may not seem like such a “perfectionist” issue to many of you. After all, it’s just trying to get something to work as advertised.

But, here’s the thing:

I have absolutely no use whatsoever for a private network. If this was a new laptop, sure I’d wanna use it. My own personal LAN and a couple copies of Battlefield 2? Sign me up for that shit!

The two uses I’d have for a personal network would be sharing the printer and transferring the odd file.

The other big thing is I can already transfer files anyway. Either just email it to myself, or be even quicker and easier by using my USB flash drive.

Printing? Hmmm, this network only works within the actual house. In other words, I want it set up so I can print from my laptop, instead of having to walk the 10 feet to the desktop computer and turn it on.

So basically, thanks to a “perfectionist” nature, I really, really want something I don’t actually need…and I won’t give up until I get it.

The Wonders of Wireless

Today’s post is a very special one. It is the first EVER blog post brought to you from “on location”.

Ok, maybe it’s not that special. The location I’m blogging from actually my couch…about 10 feet away from my desk.

Sunny got my laptop fixed as a surprise Christmas gift. (Actually, she had to reveal the surprise a while ago, the guy needed my BIOS password to fix it). Then, thanks to the generosity of my parents, not only did we get the desktop upgraded, we also got a wireless router and wireless card for the laptop.

(Guys, let me give you a good piece of advice. Find an online game that you can get your wives or girlfriends into. You see, this year for Christmas I got quite a bit of computer hardware…and I can honestly say that we bought it for “us”, not “me”. Can you believe the laptop was actually Sunny’s idea?)

If you’re still shopping for Christmas, and want wireless for your own home, I can highly recommend the Linksys Boradband G Router and Wireless card. The whole set up cost a little over hundred bucks. Fifty for the router, fifty for the wireless card.

This thing is awesome, and was actually amazingly easy to set up. Networking is one of the few areas of computing that I know very little about. Setting up my wireless network was as easy as plugging in the wires (with step by step instructions on screen)…then I simply clicked a button on my laptop, then pressed a button on the front of the router.

Then everything happened automatically. With those two button presses, I have an encrypted secure wireless network. If you actually know what you’re doing, you can also set everything up manually the way you like it. As it stands with me now, every time I turn on my laptop it connects itself “behind the scenes”, but remains secure, in that no one else can use my network without my password.

The only thing that could make this setup sweeter is if my laptop was a little better. It’s fairly ancient. I have a Pentium 3 500, 128mb of RAM and a 6 gig hard disk.

I mean, it’s good enough, I only use the laptop for writing and general websurfing, so it fills my needs quite nicely.

In fact, that’s what prompted this post. I installed Skype on the laptop. I was kinda doubtful if it would actually work very well, but I’m please to announce that it works perfectly.

I told Sunny about this with unmatched glee:

“You know.” I said. “Technically, we not have a mobile skype phone. I can talk to my parents on Skype from any room in the house…even outside!”

“So?” She replied.

Is it me, or are wives just completely blind to the wonders of technology?

I have theory on this. At least how it applies to Sunny.

Sunny can work a computer easily…but when it comes to how they actually work, she doesn’t know or care. Because she doesn’t really understand just how complex it is…she doesn’t get how wondrous it is.

Sunny is the same way with computers that I am with cars. I know the absolute basics of how they run…but when my stepsons start talking about “intake manifolds” my eyes glaze over. I know I push the pedal on the right to make it go, and the pedal on the left to make it stop. I’m the guy that make’s the mechanic’s eyes light up at the garage.

He could tell my that my flux capacitor is shot and that my “Wankel Swage Armature” is out of alignment with my “Overhead rotary compensator”…and I’d nod knowledgably and pull out my checkbook.

Anyhoo…

Actually think about this.

My parents sit at their computer in England. They talk into a little device plugged into their computer. Then, at the speed of light, what they say travels through a labyrinth of computers and cables halfway around the world, somehow finds it’s way to my modem, where it travels into my router…and is then securely transmitted to my laptop. This happens in nanoseconds.

It’s a miracle, plain and simple.

Of course, if you try to explain this to Sunny, she looks at you and says:

“Ahhh, so it’s a magic laptop.”

Sigh…women.

Dumbass Training Manual

This is sort of a follow on from yesterday’s post.

You see, my wonderful parents sent me a wad of cash for Christmas, and Sunny and I decided almost immediately that some of it should be spent on more memory for the computer.

(As a totally weird aside, do you think the computer feels like Superman after having a Kryptonite necklace removed? Think about it, it’s like going to sleep and waking up with double your brain power.)

Now, I have to say that the one thing I despise more than anything else is shopping for computers and computer components at retail stores. I was lucky enough in England to live a stone’s throw away from Europe’s biggest permanent computer fair. The people there were knowledgeable as a rule, and because they traded on word of mouth, you very rarely got screwed…because if you got screwed, word spread like wildfire, and they went out of business.

In retail stores, sales assistants (or associates, or whatever they’re called these days), come in one of two flavors.

Knowledgeable, but completely willing to screw you over to get that bonus for selling the obsolete, half-broken junk that’s been sitting on the shelves for years…or completely and totally clueless, but STILL try to blind you with science (“Uh, yeah, this one’s great, it’s got lots of frames per second and two twin cooling gigs”).

However, the thing I want to talk about today is something they must cover in basic sales assistant training class.

It’s called S.H.I.T., or Stupid Highly Irritating Talk.

You see, for some reason, they feel the need to come out with the most pointless and inane chatter possible.

For example, when I bought my printer from Staples, the sales clerk asked “Oh, these are good, you gonna use it to print stuff?”

No, you cretin I’m going to use it as a toaster. I like to eat hot bagels while I’m web-surfing. Either that, or I’m going to use the guts of it to build a doomsday device, and melt the casing into a fine piece of art and go for the booker prize.

Anyway, today I was in Staples, and was shocked to actually come across a normal sales person. I don’t mean normal as in “The same as all the other sales-people”, I mean, normal as in a normal human being.

“Excuse me.” I asked, bracing myself for the worst. “Can you tell me where the Desktop Memory is please?”

“Sure, over on that wall. The shelf underneath the laptops.”

I was stunned.

Not only did the guy give me this information without having to ask someone, get the rest of the staff over for a conference, or make me wait for 15 minutes while he thought about it…the Desktop Memory was exactly where he said it would be.

I started to sweat a little. I’d obviously crossed over into the bizarro world. The check out guy was going to pay me to take this stuff away, then I’d head outside where cars drive people.

So, browsing through the memory, I found the type I needed, and headed for the checkout.

The second sales clerk gave me a shit eating grin as I handed him my purchase.

He can’t say it. I thought. Please don’t say it.

“Memory huh?” He said as he put my half-gig stick of PC3400 DDR RAM into a bag. “Trying to speed up the computer a little, right?”

“No actually, I’m trying to make it as slow as possible, that’s why I’m buying a frigging upgrade because I want my computer to run as SLOWLY as possible.”

Alright, I didn’t say that, I actually said “Yeah.”

…but I SOOOO wanted to.

...and these people wouldn't hire me.

Regular readers will know that a few weeks ago, I put in an application at my local Staples store.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, I never got a call back.

Well, yesterday, Sunny and I went to run some errands. On the way home, we stopped at Staples to price Desktop memory and drool over the laptops.

Spotting a particular laptop, I looked at the sticker to check out the specs. All that was listed was the Hard drive size, memory and processor.

Then “Confused Looking Old Guy” stumbles over.

“Can I help you?” He asked.

“Yes please.” I said. “Can you tell me what sort of graphics hardware this laptop has?”

I saw the look of terror cross his face. Obviously I’d asked something that wasn’t covered by his 8 minutes of intensive training. He looked at the laptop, and looked momentarily relived.

“Ah! ATI!” He said, pointing at the sticker on the front of the laptop. He looked at me all smug, like he’d just laid down an ace. “Anything else?”

Wondering where he’d put his “I’m dumb” sign, I said.

“Errr, I mean how much memory? Clock speed? Chipset?”

The look of terror covered his face again, and he started working frantically at the laptop, randomly clicking and pushing buttons. I’d seen this dance before. Translated from performance art to plain English, it means:

I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, and I’m hoping you know little enough about computers to not recognize this fact. I’ll keep doing this in the hope another staff member comes along and I can make my excuses and leave…if they don’t, I’ll make some shit up.

A few minutes passed and he finally gave up.

“Well,” he said, obviously in a flash of inspiration. “More than likely it shares the memory with system memory.”

“Yeah.” I said. “But how much?”

Finally, after another 5 minutes of him hammering keys on the laptop, I just had to say:

“Excuse me, mind if I look myself?”

I mean, come on people. Start, Control Panel, System.

How hard is that?

What's REALLY Important:

Sometimes, it's not whether you cross the line or not that's important.

It's your reason for crossing or not crossing it.


When fear of getting caught is the only thing stopping you from crossing that line, you might as well cross it anyway...you've already done it in your head, and decided you liked it over there.

Excuses, excuses.

Reading Ozzy’s blog recently reminded me how much I want a bike.

Now, even though technically I used to have a bike, I can’t call myself and actual biker. For some reason, I think you can only call yourself a biker, when your bike can be heard at least two blocks away. It should also have a deep, throaty growl.

The ‘tortured lawn-mower’ sound my old 150cc scooter used to make, just doesn’t have that sort of credibility.

Now, as anyone who owns a bike out there knows, the hardest step in getting a bike isn’t coming up with the cash or passing the test. It’s convincing your significant other that getting on is a good idea.

You see, there are plenty of arguments against motorcycles. They’re much more dangerous than cars, you can only ride them at certain times of the year, and taking one out in the snow is tantamount to suicide.

Then, the other day…my brother in law gave me the perfect excuse.

You see, Sunny’s car is probably gonna give up and die within the next year or so. We also really need a truck. A bike, at this point, would be little more than an expensive toy.

Then my brother in law came along.

We were talking about my difficulty in finding work.

“The other big problem right now,” I said, “is they’ve changed the rules on the driving test. You have to have your permit for at least six months before they’ll let you take the test. Even if I pass the written exam tomorrow, I’ll still have 6 months before I can actually drive to work.”

He looked thoughtful for a moment.

“You know,” he began, “If you get a permit for a motorcycle, you don’t need to have anyone with you while you’re riding.”

He made an excellent point. A motorcycle permit is to all intents and purposes, a license that you just have to renew every six months.

Unfortunately, I was out maneuvered by the missus.

“That sounds great!” She said. “So as soon as you can come up with about 5 grand, you can go ahead and get one!”

Stupid money…why can’t I just get everything for free?

I deserve it.