Month: August 2006

I’ve had a lot of mean in me lately and I ain’t proud.

Fortunately most of it is theoretical and occurs as military exercises rather than actual attacks. But my snark is at a near all-time high.

Example. My brother is in town, and we were talking about scammers and beggars. I related the story of one local addict, the kind of guy who goes from looking pretty much okay because his family has cleaned him up, through increasingly scruffy, to Gone For A While. He has a hunted look and that near-permanent sunburn of the person who has been outside not by choice. Sometimes he just bums cigs, but he usually does the “out of gas” scam, which is a script I have not seen vary in multiple cities and decades:

“Hey, I feel really dumb, can I ask you a question here? I was at a [bachelor party,picnic,church] and didn’t pay attention and I ran out of gas! I have to get back to [suburb about 20 miles away where no poor people live] tonight and I don’t have my wallet on my. So dumb. Do you have a couple bucks?”

The last time our local guy did this my answer was “This is the third variation on that lie you have told just to me. Did you know that?” He looked surprised and said “Sorry! No, I didn’t.” and left. So that was kind of snarky and unnecessarily mean, since the poor fucker is a drug addict and kind of doomed. I got my button pushed by the lie and was nasty.

My brother told me in response that he’d been taken in by a young woman who worked this scam at the college where he works. There had been some kind of kampus kop alert about scammers so he reported his misadventure to the cops in case it was someone they were looking for, etc etc. The young policewoman who took the report mocked him to no end, basically calling in the other cops to say hey look at the dumb professor who fell for the scam haw haw haw, on and on. He was pretty upset. My response was that he should have replied:

“That’s funny all right. Here’s an even better joke. Did you hear the one about the girl who was so dumb she barely made it out of high school and ended up a third-rate rentacop working for the smart people? It’s FUCKING HILARIOUS!”

I think I shocked my brother. I certainly shocked myself! Maybe I need to take up punching clowns or something.

The category “Graven Images” is filtered

I just got a recruiter call from a company around here that makes one of those internet filtering products so that schools and big companies can almost keep you from having fun. To quote her:

“We sell a lot to larger companies, school districts, etc. You know, you have to keep the kids away from the photography.”

Once they see the daguerrotypes they’ll turn from Jesus. It’s just a short step to Muybridge’s horses, Darwinian evolution, satanic worship, and HARD CORE GAY PORN.

dell.

I’m getting a dualcore pentium desktop box from them. Nice fast processor, 2 gig of ram, lotta disk. About a grand and no interest on the loan. It’s a good deal, especially since I’m replacing a nine year old computer with one that’s likely to be overpowered for my needs as a headless linux box for the next nine years. No monitor, no speakers, no “productivity software” or anything like that.

The things you can’t opt out of are funny. Everything is a part number, even if it’s just a marketing bullet point, probably because their computer system was set up to demand that, so my order included the following

Order Group Quantity Item Description
1 1 420-5769 Internet Search and Portal
1 1 420-3224 Broadband Icon for Inspiron
1 1 983-2207 Thank You for buying Dell

are this how i am buying computer machine

Dear Lazyweb:

I may need to buy/build a new linux box soon, for home server use. So, I probably need to get an x86 box because I don’t want the new hobby of making PPCLinux replace the iggy box on the blue G3. Therefore, I need either to buy a prebuilt system or all the parts in a sack so I can screw them together.

I don’t need:

great graphics
sound
gamer anything
windows anything

I do need:

hardware that plays nice with recent linux
a decent processor, preferably dualcore
lots of RAM
good I/O so I’m not always horking because the disk is running
good cooling features
expandibility for drives and cards
ports ports, ports, ports

I might end up just doing a Dell BYO box because I have credit with them and I’d never pay interest on their plan, it’s no interest for 18 months. I’m sure I’d be paying extra because brand name, but I also get 6% off and no shipping cost there because of a corporate deal. It won’t be perfect and it’ll be about $1800 for what I want to do, but it will be on payment and done.

But If someone has a preferred vendor for this kind of thing or a suggestion of how to do this way better for way cheaper, I’d be delighted. What I don’t want is to go to Fry’s, or spend six weeks nerdinating learning all about exactly the best combination to get 0.05% more efficiency. I’m going to upgrade from a 300MHz Gateway Pentium II box from 1997 that’s been doing good service for years, so I don’t need my edge to cut much less bleed.

HONK HONK HONK THE BIG WHALE-SAVING TRUCK IS HERE

FOLKS I’M SHOWING MY SUPPORT FOR THE OCEAN AND THE BEACH AND THE FISH AND THE WHALES AND THE SEA ANEMONES AND THE SURFERS AND THE LAUGHING, RUNNING CHILDREN IN THE WAVES AND OUR FUTURE ON THE PLANET BY PUTTING THIS ORNAMENTAL LICENSE PLATE ON MY PIECE OF SHIT TRUCK THAT GETS 14 MILES PER GALLON AND IS ENTIRELY EMPTY BUT EXTREMELY SHINY BECAUSE THAT’S HOW I ROLL!!!

CHECK MY SHIT OUT!