Category: Uncategorized

hey wearescott! Your town gets another honor!

They’re the first town in the U.S. to get an official Wal-Mart dating night, which has already been some type of success in Germany of all places.

The program was hatched by Michelle McGenity, an inventory associate at the Roanoke store, who read an online story about a similar program at a Wal-Mart in Germany. She proposed the idea to her manager, and they devised a plan to publicize it on fliers around the store and even turn it into a charity event. Participants have the option of making a $1 donation to the Children’s Miracle Network.

via robotwisdom

not the weakest links

Scratch and sniff WHAT?

Pay me out for my Nazi iconography, bitches!

The problem with productivity nowadays.

You can find out where the cellphone towers are near you and map them on a Google map.

There’s a documentary out about the Minutemen. They made life liveable for me in the first half of the 1980s, and miss them terribly. There’s a trailer on the site that catches a little of what turned me upside down at age 17.

Cogito emo sum

I saw someone I have a lame crush on today. Later on she was in the same area I was, but kind of away and behind things with her friends. Every time I looked over there the sun was hitting her only and making her all shiny, because she was the saint in the painting.

vickajew and I gave friendly_bandit a short walk through the geopolitics of the last 25 years, but I don’t think he was grateful. In fact, he looked like he wanted to go live under his bed afterwards, which is sort of understandable considering the material at hand.

DZ came and talked at me for a bit. He claims his health is good and he hasn’t had a seizure in over a year and a half but he looks like a corpse. He sort of talked around the huge fights he’s had with his property manager, and the fact that his aunt and uncle bailed him out of his trailer purchase. He mostly made sense but sometime the digressions were pretty hard to follow. I seriously wonder how long he has on Earth, looking at him and hearing him talk. It’s hard to watch.

When I watch a Hollywood movie, you know with a hero and heroine and villain and sidekicks., I can never put myself in the hero’s role. Even as a fantasy, I haven’t cast myself as the lead before. I’m no villain either, because Evil is just lame, nor can I be the wacky sidekick for longer than about an hour. I think I’m the sacrificial guy who eats it in the last reel so that others may live. I always sympathized with that guy, the one who gets to say “It’s too late for me. I’ll stay here. RUN!” Even if he doesn’t get whacked, he has to stay behind and deal with all the bullshit. I am Claude Rains in Casablanca, or if I’m feeling especially butch maybe Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles. No ride into the sunset, but if I take one for the team people will think highly of me later.

Joan.

Joan Didion is taken to task here.

When she isn’t telling us all about her childhood in the California white-shoe aristocracy or orating about the extreme importance of the events of the 1960s as experienced by privileged college kids, Joan takes time out to give moral instruction to the lesser classes. She’s Gore Vidal without the humor, or Lewis Lapham without his pithy talent for the short sweet essay. She writes with a heavy didactic tone and a dramatic sweep; the heroic novelist/journalist is always on the scene of tremendous events with her trenchant and outraged prose. Her typical gesture is to detail some nasty business in politics that’s very well-known and then draw herself up to her full height and say “What everyone seems to have forgotten, and only I can testify to, is…”

For the last ten years, since she moved away from California, she’s been writing about California from New York. When she’s not re-telling the stories about wearing hats and gloves to the California Club in 1950, and how that world has gone the way of the Raj, she occasionally notices that there are a lot of Asian people here now and that we’re short of water.

The latest set of tablets to come down from her mountain addressed the Terry Schiavo case, and Joan got the science, the politics, the morality, and several of the facts completely wrong. I’m glad someone took the time to detail her failures, because so many people seem to swallow everything she writes.

The baby boomers won’t all be dead until I’m at least sixty. I can’t wait.

Today’s recruiter email

This is unedited with the exception of removing names and adding a few [sic]. Note to recruiters: If you’re copy/pasting the same thing to 200 people you’re shotgun-emailing, try spellchecking at least first. Measure once, cut twice, and all that. Quadruple-spaced semiliterate notes with bad spelling and technical errors and four or five exclamation points at the end of each phrase give people the creeps.

My name is [redacted] and I am a senior technical recruiter with [redacted]. I was contacting you today in regards to an exciting opportunity that I have for you.

Linux Administrator

HOT OPPORTUITIES!!!! [sic] High profile company in the financial industries!!!!! [sic] HOT TECHNOLGY!!!![sic] LARGE IT BUDGET!!!!

Experience administering Red Hat Linux in an enterprise environment

Must have expereince[sic] with PERL[sic], Borne[sic] or Shell Scripting

Team oriented, flexible, Subject Matter Expert in some Linux area

Must have experience supporting database applications

Must have a background in Oracle on top of Linux

Red Hat Certification is a HUGE plus

Will be responsible for OS level support

Please contact me when you get a chance, I would like to find out more about your background and experience.