November 2008 Archives
In addition to some hardware juggling, I'm finally moving my blog off of my cable modem connection and onto the UFies.org server. If this is up and you're seeing it, then that means it's all over and done and DNS is updated and I haven't blown it all up :)
Few things new and changed here. If you read the actual page instead of the RSS feed you'll see a lovely grey theme (unless I change it again) picked as it's mildly pleasant and not too annoying. Note that if anyone out there wants to fix me up with something better I'm open to that too :) Also I've enabled a bunch of comment spam protection. I'm fairly sick of having to mark 30 "pending" comments as spam a day, so I setup a Captcha as well as a couple of other anti-spam protections after Dana mentioned he was moving his company blog to TypePad to save himself from the spam and attacks.
I've tested it here, seems to work, please mail me if something is broken. If you are already an "approved" commenter (ie: one of the three people that read this site) most likely the captcha won't even kick in. However if you're a bot, hopefully your crap won't hit my inbox anymore.
Only cause someone sent this to me today. My few quick thoughts on the video of Britney Spears' Womanizer.
- Hawt... Britney looks damn good, and naked, sweaty and covered in oil (or maybe sweat) to boot (yes, really). Guess when you're a bazillionaire you can get yourself a great personal chef and team of trainers.
- The actual music is standard crap, generic poppy crap. Sorry.
- Her voice is way over-produced and over-effected, goes with it being poppy crap though I guess. Especially after listening to a version of Hotel California by Don Felder at a radio show, live, just him and a guitar. Holy crap the music kids listen to these days is crap.
- Some kinda cool special affects shots... one I liked was of a guy who turns around "into" his suit. Very cool.
- The story of the video is hard to get, it's either about a slutty girl who is slutting it up with a bunch of guys, or getting back at guys who slutted around on her, or.... wait a minute, who really cares.
So yea, a naked Britney Spears in a steam room is about the only reason to watch this or listen to it. In fact, listen to it with the sound off, cause it's crap.
Dear Pizza place...
When you send people here to bring me a round pie of meaty goodness, please ask them not to sell me on their MLM pyramid schemes instead of taking their money, ample tip, and leaving me with a pizza to go with my beer and TV watching.
The conversation at the door went something like this (I answered the door while listening to a podcast):
- Pizza Guy: Hey cool, that an iPod or something?
- Me: [gives money] yea, my iPhone.
- PG: Wow, cool, I'm jealous!
- Me: Uh huh [please just give me my pizza so I can go]
- PG: So what sort of work do you do?
- Me: [go for the vague answer, instead of detailing how I'm an OS Developer for a company that does business communications hardware and software security solutions] Computer stuff.
- PG: Cool, you interested in making some money?
- Me: [oh god, he wants me to program a website for his kids soccer team or something] Not really, see, I have a bunch of stuff on the go right now, I'm really not wanting to get into anything....
- PG: No, I mean some real money.
- Me: [oh oh, I've heard that before, I know what's coming next] Ok, give me the 20 second pitch. [I'll be open to new things, just give it to me fast]
- PG: How about I just give you a card, go to this website and check it out. [pulls out a home printed card whose ink still smeared]
- Me: Uh huh.
- PG: [random mindless talk about how "it really works" and how "you have to check it out"]
- Me: Uh huh. [if you're rolling in dough why don't you buy your own iPhone?]
- PG: [more random mindless talk]
- Me: Ok, I'll check it out. [please please please let me go]
- PG: Ok, have a great night.
- Me: Uh huh. [Close door, lock door, go back to beer and TV]
Just for shits and giggles I did check out his site. It was at least a real URL (his name) but had only a picture of him, a link to a video and a link to a PDF. The video was completely content free (no shock there) and consisted entirely of people talking about how [company] was awesome, they were all driving Lexus's and their golden showers actually involved gold. It ended without any indication of what the company did, or how these people were able to pull off these financial miracles.
Oh, and searching for information on the company had the second suggestion from google as postfixed by "scam". I won't give them any juice by even linking to it here.
The PDF file consisted of two pages, one was nothing but a guy standing in front of a Lexus with a inspirational saying, and a second page with more of the same "blah blah company is awesome blah blah amazing blah financial freedome blah blah".
*Sigh*
At least I got my pizza :)
A tickle in the throat Thursday or Friday managed to make me miserable all weekend, and tonight has turned into full sneezing, sniffing unpleasantness. Bleah. Hopefully a sick day tomorrow followed by the Remembrance day off will let it work itself out. Right now I'm alternating between Buckley's, NyQuil, Fisherman's friend, vitamin C pills, and Halls cough drops. Oh, and boxes of Kleenex.
Did I mention bleah?
So long time no blog, again... Not a whole lot going on lately, other than a couple of notable exceptions. Got sent down to Florida a few weeks ago for work. They needed me to train a couple of techs at a company we're partnered with so we can make shipping within the states faster (and cheaper) by not having equipment shipped back and forth across the border.
Next time I'll either have to say "no" or look much more carefully at the travel itinerary. Apparently horribly early mornings, long days, and late nights are "normal" for business travel, but not for me again thanks. Originally the plan was I go down Monday, do the training on Tuesday, and fly back Tuesday night. I convinced them to let me go down a day early to have a day of recovery and sightseeing.
