I am stupid people

Every day I hear "I hate stupid people". I work in a tech environment with smart people, and nothing pisses off a smart person like a stupid people.

Stupid people don't get it. They may use a pc every day but aside from the rote actions they preform, the PC is a foreign object. When something "new" happens, the freak the hell out and dive for the phone. They punch in random numbers and often they get connected to me. Then I walk over and show them what they need shown and they say something nice about me and or my well-ironed shirt.

Sometimes I'm the stupid people. I hate my new laptop which is about the size of a secret agent briefcase and twice the weight. I developed a hump lugging it around a conference earlier this year, and we've been on the outs ever since. I called one of the network guys over to see if he could confirm my suspicions that it is running slower than molasses in January, which is a technical speed.

Anyways the friend from network comes by and asks if it's time for lunch yet. I say no, can he check my laptop out because it's running really slow. He steps into my office (wellll cube, but it has an office-like feel) and stands over my shoulder and says check this and check that. I'm a programmer, not a windows guy, so I'm slow on the clicking and mousing when it comes to getting around all the settings and such. It's not long before I finally relinquish control and have him drive. It's at that moment that I realize I'm stupid people. He finds nothing wrong, just a little slow but no reason he can see.

I tell him I like his shirt and know that lunch is going to be a little awkward.

Fly You Crazy Bastard, Fly.

Somewhere in the flurry of Britney Spears head shaving and the crying Anna Nicole Judge, other news was overlooked. Like this gem:

Man thankful he can't remember 16-story fall (link to story)

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AP) -- Just a month after his 16-story fall and merciful landing onto a hotel overhang, Joshua Hanson is off crutches from a broken leg, mostly healed from his other injuries and thankful he has no memory of the plunge.

"I feel really lucky I don't remember it because I probably would have some pretty serious nightmares," said the 29-year-old bar owner from Blair, Wisconsin, who crashed out a hotel window January 20 after a night drinking with his friends.
This guy makes my friend Stinky look like a Trappist Monk. I regailed a few stories of Stinky and my brother, some which may or may not have included RCMP officers and handcuffs. None have included diving through a double-pane window 16-stories up. Now that's hard-core.

Asked if he could explain why he survived, Hanson said: "I wish I knew, for real I do. Somebody had a plan for me." He added that one reason he survived is his 8-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn.
Mythbusters had a show about movie stunt myths, including falling off a building into an awning and surviving. They showed that you can walk (or limp) away from such a fall. This guy landed on an asphalt-covered overhang one floor above the street. Damn.

The fall has made him more contemplative and given him a fresh perspective, he said, though he didn't know whether it would cause him to drink less.
I applaud the dude for not slagging alcohol. He must realize that the fact he was trashed is the only reason he survived. Plus he works in a bar, so it's how he will continue to survive. Plus he'll drink for free the rest of his life as folks come in and set him up with a pint so they can hear the story of his brief flight. Plus, beer always sheds a fresh perspective on things.

Neighbors Up In Your Grill

I've had some classic neighbor situations.

After college I lived above some girls who had extremely loud and overly descriptive sex. Since there were three of them, and it was a small place, they had a schedule worked out. On a certain night, the other 2 would go out and leave the 3rd home for her "fun time". It was really only one of them that was super loud. She was a DJ for a local classic rock station and from her vocalizations she appreciated her boyfriend as he rocked her like a hurricane.

She also had a thing for having him dress up as a plumber and making a nasty house call. There were a lot of references to pipes and wrenches that must have been visual because they didn't make sense through the thin floors.

Old Hickory Lane was another story. My roomate and I dealt with the "soup people"downstairs, who stunk up the halls with a pervasive and horrible soup smell. How much soup can one couple possible stand? Quite a lot, it turns out. It so was odorous that even the mailman made a comment to me one day.

"Soups on!" he said as I came out of the door one afternoon.

"Soup is always on." I responded wearily. That conversation inspiried me to leave a note on the soup people's door with the mailman's quote. That didn't stem the tide of wafting watered-down smells. I had that aroma in my clothes for months after moving out.

This guy has a very chatty neighbor who intrudes on his life by way of letters left for him. I thought he showed remarkable restraint. I would not have been so nice. Big surprise, eh?

One Horse Open Sled

We finally have snow! Last week we had 20 inches dumped and the kids were in paradise. School was canceled, and the inner tubes and sleds came out of the garage. They were outside all day building forts and making snow angels and all the great things that a large amount of snow makes possible.

With the first snow comes the first argument over the use of the term "sledding".

I say, "Who wants to go sledding?"

"You mean sleigh riding." my wife, who grew up locally, interjects.

"No, sledding. We don't have any horses." I say. "You need horses for sleigh riding. Like 'a one horse open sleigh'."

"You don't need a horse, just a sled."

"Right. A sled. Hence sledding! You don't go sleighing."


So which is it?? Settle this for me people.

Performance Evaluation

The final installment in the music week entries is from a bizarre dream I had a few weeks back. It involved going to a job interview where the panel of interviewers consisted of the American Idol judges.

Under their judgmental gaze, I described a database project. Randy, Paula and Simon start peppering me with questions. For some reason, I didn't feel it was weird that Simon was querying my new intranet framework.

"You're telling me that this new design will serve up agent content faster? I just don't believe it."

I patiently described the benefits and improvements and I think I had Randy and Paula won over when I woke up. The images were still fresh in my head so I jotted it down on a piece of paper I keep by my bedside table. What I wrote was "Idol - hammer my code". That sounds like something way different.

From that I thought how great would this be as a setup for annual performance reviews? Forget objectives and goals and describing your accomplishments in writing. You have 5 minutes in front of the Idol judges to describe what you did during the year, and then they grill you with various questions for a half hour. That's it. Done. If you fold like a pup tent in a stiff wind, then no raise for you.

In rare occasions, the judges may request you to sing a song. This would be a final chance to redeem yourself if you really haven't impressed them with your job performance. In very rare cases, they will even bring in a guest judge.

Describe how good you are at your job and see if you can make him cry. Apparently, it's not too hard. What the eff happened to you, Dave?

Everybody Wants Some

Today's contribution to my music week is a true story of pain, deciet and anguish. Oh, and rock and roll.

A guy at work (I'll call him Bert) is a big fan of all things rock. His music collection is vast but contains nothing past 1991, save for a few box sets and random new albums from bands from an earlier era. He has a ZoSo jean jacket that he wears September through May. It's his winter jacket. He's not big on authority, so not even the weatherman is going to push him around. Bert has limited time for people who irritate him. In short, he's hilarious and he rocks.

Bert has been emailing me updates about the new Van Halen. It looks like they will be re-forming for a tour this summer, with original singer David Lee Roth, but without Michael Anthony. MA had a little run-in with Eddie and so he was replaced by Eddie's son, Wolfgang. Like me, Bert holds the original VH lineup in high reverance as one of the most influential rock bands ever. So it goes without saying that he is looking forward to the rumored tour.

Being the tech-savvy dude that he is, Bert decided to check the web for tour dates/cities, in case there might be some advance notice out there for the venues. This what he typed:


Several links came up. He clicked on the first link under the "sponsored links" and, to his great surprise, saw this:


He quickly clicked on the link and his eyes nearly popped out of his head when this came up:


This is an unaltered page. It clearly states that tickets were available to see Van Halen perform at the BB King in NYC in July.

Bert couldn't believe his luck.

He started to order the tickets, and decided to take a look at the club layout to see where the seats where. So he pulled up another window and searched for the club and then drilled down to their schedule and found that Van Halen was indeed on the schedule for that day.

Clicking on the date, he saw this:



DOH!

Talk about false advertising. Shouldn't the google search, the ticket vendor and the purchase screen ALL contain the words "tribute band"? Damn skippy. How bad would that be, showing up ready to see David and Eddie and instead getting this.

Damn.

The Sound of Your Voice

It's a music week. Rock on.

Good to have you back...

They looked like they were having fun, and no fights broke out, so maybe the tour will happen after all.

I'm there.

Cigarettes and Olives

My friend Iain and I hatched some great schemes in our teens. By great I mean stupid, but funny when I think about them now.

We went through a phase were we experimented with smoking. It was something we saw the older kids doing and had some kind of danger involved with it and there was the hope that it would make us cool and maybe even impress chicks. Something about blowing smoke rings working as an aphrodisiac or something.

The problem with smoking (aside from the health issues, which we didn't care about at the time) was getting the cigarettes. You couldn't just go in to a store and purchase them if you were under 18. The Mounties had been cracking down on local store owners for selling to underage kids, so some craftiness was called for.

Our first attempt was a bust. We presented a fake note to the woman behind the counter at the Korean corner store that said "Please sell my son one pack of Players Light. They are for me. Signed, Mrs. O'Drunkahan".

She took one look at it, then at us, and said. "You forget it." She wadding up the note and tossed it in a garbage bin all the while leveling a severe gaze at us that sent Iain and I running for the door.

Unfettered, we brainstormed a new plan of attack. From that session we hatched two good ideas. For one thing, go when her husband was running the register. He was more keen on making a sale and should therefore may be lenient to the rules. Second, instead of a note, we needed to IMPLY we were buying things for our mother. So we planned on selecting items that no kids would ever want.

We executed the plan on a Saturday. The man was working behind the counter which was our "go/no go" signal. We made our way in to the small store crammed with flowers, groceries and trinkets for the tourists. We roamed the isles looking for THE item that would convince the man we had been sent by our mother. Iain suggested cleaning products, which was a good idea but most of the stuff was expensive. Plus, what would we do with a can of Comet?

I reached up and grabbed a jar of green olives. "Wicked." Iain said, approvingly.

As soon as I set the olives down on the counter, the Korean man said "Niney Five!". He always sounded like he was yelling, and we were used to it.

"Oh," I said, turning to Iain. "Wasn't there something else we were supposed to get?"
"Yeahhhhh." Iain said. "Um. Cigarettes."
"That's right." I said. "Players Light, please."

The man reached back and snagged a blue flat pack and put them next to the olives. "For Oh Five!" He never needed the cash register to calculate his totals. Looking back. I realize now he was probably shorting the till of sales. Tricky bastard.

I handed him a five and kept a bored look on my face. Inside, I was doing the happy dance. Hold it together man! I didn't look over at Iain. Once outside we calmly boarded our bikes and rode across the street to Crescent Park.

Only when we were safe inside the park did we celebrate, congratulating ourselves only to realize we didn't have matches. DOH!

We figured going back to the store would be pushing our luck, so instead we rode to the gas station down the street and picked up a pack. The guy behind the counter asked, "You need cigarettes as well?" The sad thing he wasn't kidding (as he proved a few weeks later when he hooked us up).

Still flush from our success, we rode back into the park to have a smoke. As we sat on a large redwood log under the canopy of the peaceful ocean-side forest puffing on our cancer sticks I opened the olives and offered him one. The tart taste of the treat was an interesting contrast with the tobacco flavor.

We only finished half and buried the jar behind the log. I'm not sure if we planned on returning to our smoking spot to enjoy the olives another day, but we never did. The smoking ended soon after as well. It wasn't helping me with the ladies, so what was the point?

I still like olives.

Hmmmm. Delicious Filler!

Seems like you can't go to a party (even a SuperBowl Bash)without the following question coming up:

"Do you watch '24' ? How about 'Lost'? 'Heros' is the best!"

The shows are good, and all have an excellent premise to them. in each case, I was into them their first season big time. But all three suffer from the same scarry disease, which is called FRANCHISE.

What is Franchise? It means you can't have a popular one hour show that has a beginning, middle and end. You have a kickass start, lots of suspense, great characters and promise of cool action. When it hits big with a great first season, the tv execs rub their hands together and say, "OK, now make it laaaaast. You can have 6 or seven more seasons!" The begin planning DVD boxed sets and collector edition designs.

This is when things start to go bad. Plots slow down and go off in confusing/boring directions. Annoying, minor characters appear. Seasons become chopped up and spread out over the entire year (al a the Soprano's) so you get 6 episodes then wait 2 months before you get 6 more.

It's called filler, folks. Filler protects the franchise.

This is all pretty new. Until recently a series produced episodes that were, in and of themselves, a complete story. The episodes move the characters in a direction, but you can miss one or two and be able to keep up with the story. Just try missing 15 minutes of "24". You'll be wondering who is shooting at Jack now and where did that bomb come from?

Which is why I loved "Magnum PI". Every episode was a complete play (aside from a few cliff hangers, which is ok).

I used to watch the show in re-runs, and every day was a new adventure. If they hatched some lame plot for the episode (like when Higgins' Irish half brother showed up) you can skip it but not be asking questions the next time you tuned in. BTW, there is a Magnum movie in the works, and it will never be good for the same reason the movie versions of 'Miami Vice' and 'Gilligan's Island' blew chunks. The tv show characters were just too strong.

On the scale of sophistication, '24', 'Lost' and 'Heros' kick ass, no question. They are, for the most part, filming half a movie every week. But here's where I see this going. Both the 'Lost' and '24' producers have hinted that a feature film is in the cards, most likely to serve as the series finale. So you will invest 3 or 4 more seasons of the story to get to a final movie that should wrap things up. Anybody remember 'The X-Files'? They tried the same thing.

The point is that you have stick to the formula that has been around since before Shakespeare. have an opening Act, a few middle acts to build the story and set the drama then boom, the last act that wraps it up. Done. Even George Lucas followed this when he broke up his vision of Star Wars into 6 seperate movies that all stand on their own.

So when people ask me if I watch '24', 'Lost' or 'Heros', I say I'd like to watch them regularly, but life intercedes. I catch them when I can, but not with the same dedication of a real series like 'The Office' or 'Grey's Anatomy'. OK, so I'm kidding about GA. That's a soap opera, aside from the brief moments where hot chicks talk about banging. Or so I've heard.

I'm Unique

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

This only covers the US, and only those people here "legally".

Otherwise there would be a few more Shamus O'Drunkahan's showing up on this survey.

In the News

This struck me as strange, so I took a screenshot.



Who asked that rodent for his political views anyways?

See For Yourself

In reference to my earlier posting, Sgt reminded me the clip of the band performing is online, so I don't even have to try and describe how crazy they were.

Check it out for yourself.

Sadly, it starts after the classic "It's rock o'clock!" line. But you'll get the general idea.

Gigantic Sing Along

When it comes to a rock band, can it ever be too big? The UtraSonic Orchestra would say, "No way!"

This was the band that warmed up the crowd at a technical conference I was at last week. Imagine this scenario: it's 8:30 on Monday morning and you're in a large ballroom with 6999 other attendees when the band is announced. "Ladies and Gentlemen... the UltraSonic Orchestra!"

Then this guy takes the stage and appears on the giant screens around the room. "It's not eight o'clock," the creepster bellows into the mic. "it's rock o'clock! C'mon!"

The line failed to energize the room, but not because it wasn't a kickass hook line, but more because he looked like an extra from a vampire movies. And did I mention it was 8:30 in the morning?

One by one, the voluminous band joined Uncle Fester on stage while the 3 musicians played on a stage adjacent to where all the singers were piling up. The diversity of the crooners was impressive, I have to give them that.

They had the Elton John-looking guy, only he didn't sound like him, as far as I could tell. I kept waiting for him to start performing magic or something.

I mean, c'mon. A top hat? I guess he's ready if a game of monopoly breaks out.

And did I mention David Bowie was there? Or so we were led to believe with this stylist frontman.


Imagine Billy Joe Armstrong of Greenday after a year-long pasta binge. Then add another 50 pounds and you'd have this guy.


This hipster was rocking out in a pirate shirt and a brown leather cab drivers cap. I suspect he was their bus driver who they just pulled on stage just to see if anyone would notice.

I noticed.

I don't even remember this dude. And yes, I would have.


There was also about 10 women singers or all varieties, but they didn't look as weird/funny as their male counterparts.

None of the band had outstanding voices, it was more of a pleasing choral effect. The music was a mix of Beatles and Who, and technically well played. I just don't think you need 20 singers in your band. How about just 5 really good ones? And forget the costumes.

By the time all the singers were on stage, this is how it looked.


All those singers, and not one cowbell among them. Damn waste.