I hate thinking up title names because I always want to be witty.

May 13, 2004

I’m getting close to the 300-post mark. If you think about it, I’ve been writing now for four and a half years, and so 300 entries over that span of time really doesn’t sound like much, but if consider that for many of the months I was writing I would either post a single update–or none at all, in some of the olden days–I think that 300 is a good number to be getting to. I’ve certainly done a lot more writing in the last year since I switched over to Movable Type than I did with my old manual system. MT’s auto archiving feature among others makes my involvement with the backend of my website almost an afterthought. Essentially, once MT is set up I don’t have to do anything except write–everything else is done for me.

Except, of course, putting up with comment spam advertising the same crap that my email provider filters out most of the time. Thankfully, MT’s next version will have a more robust system in fighting comment spam, and so I won’t have to deal with as much of it. Right now, my current system is to check every time I update and see if there are any new ones. If there are, I ban the IP address from posting again and delete the spam. I noticed that one entry in particu;ar kept getting comments added to it, and so I just denied the ability to post comments on that one. When I wrote it, I wasn’t even using a system where comments could be left, so there’s no point in anyone leaving a comment there. No one’s gonna see it unless they decide to go back and read all 300 entries I’ve posted. Well, 299 right now.

The new guy here at work (not me, but the one who started this week) seems to be picking things up a little more slowly than I did, or so says the lead tech. I did find out, however, the the end plan is going to be to set up both the room I’m in now (with a door! and a window!) as my work area and the empty room next to mine as his, so we’ll both have our own personal “offices”. Personally, I think I want dibs on the other room. This one is full of computers already, and I don’t really have much room to expand beyond my desk. The frickin’ monitor and computer to a test PC that’s on my desk in addition to my LCD doesn’t help matters, either. I think I might actually propose to my boss that they implement a KVM switch in here–that is, to have mutiple computers hooked up to a single monitor, keyboard, and mouse. There are five test computers in here, and having two KVM swiches would be perfect so that two people could use them at the same time. One step at a time, though. It depends on where I end up. Oh, and I also found out that my job title will ultimately be “Lead QA Tester” or something of the sort. I like having “lead” in my name. Makes me sound important.

One thing that’s interesting about work, though, is that we have train tracks practically right outside the office that run parallel to I-5. When the trains go by–and they do at least once a day–it sounds like I’m working in an airfield. RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE for at least ten minutes. Earlier in the week we had a train moving out there for what seemed like close to an hour. It must have been changing engines because it kept going back and forth, back and forth, and truly, I felt sorry to the traffic waiting out there at the stop signal. It sure makes working here interesting, though, especially when I’m trying to hear the phone ring. I’m no longer second in line to answer the phone, though, and the lead tech wants the new guy to start taking more calls. So she picks up the first line that rings, then him on the next one, then me. So really, since most of the time we really have only two calls at once, I won’t be taking nearly as many from this point on. Sounds good to me!

I decided to start trying to save money at work by not going out to lunch every day, and so I bought a bowl at the store and hauled out a spoon from my college days, and I brought a box of Total and a half-gallon of milk to keep in the fridge here. Cereal is my normal lunch food when I’m at home anyway (unless of course, I meet my sis for lunch, which I guess I won’t be doing anymore), and so despite the high price of boxes of Total (almost $5 for a 18 oz box), that $5 and the price of milk will get me through at least a couple of weeks of lunches where I would have dropped at least $7 each day. There a decent Teriyaki place down the street that has good food, plus a Big Town Hero sub place close by, a Sweet Tomatoes, a Burgerville, and of course, Mcmenamins, but so far I’ve been spending between $6-13 on lunches, depending on where I go. Eek! Too much. Even if I were to buy the exact same thing for lunch every day, and call it $6 from the Teriyaki place, that’s at least $30 a week, $120 a month. On lunch. And that’s not counting the liter of Diet Coke I buy every day at lunch for $1.64. Yeah, too expensive for all that. Lunch will be had in my office for awhile. $5 of Total, a couple bucks of skim milk, and a $3 bowl are all I need. And hey! It’s Total! 100% daily value of 12 recommended vitamins and minerals means I’m getting the nutrition I need, too! Or so the box says.

You know, I’ve deliberately tried to bait people through my website into certain reactions because frankly, it’s what I’m good at. Sometimes it’s done just for humor’s sake, very, very rarely is it done maliciously (and even then it’s not a matter of doing it for their sake since I probably wouldn’t do it maliciously to their face). But I tried to bait someone through my website recently and I didn’t get a single bite. It’s nothing that any of you would have noticed, but I thought that it was worth a shot. Hmmmm. Guess that means that my target either doesn’t read my site anymore or wasn’t paying attention. No big deal, I’ll try again later, I suppose.

I’ve been following this whole issue of abuse in the Iraqi prison with one eye, and frankly, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. American soldiers commiting human rights abuses against Iraqi prisoners? Did anyone NOT see this coming? Please. Government officials are acting all surprised and saying that Americans are above that kind of thing, but I think we all know that’s crap. Especially since it’s captured in photos, dumbasses! What do you think people would be saying if there weren’t any photos? “These unfounded allegations against the fine members of the United States military are baseless and without merit!” Hell, the Red Cross knew about what was going on months ago, and no one believed them. My general rule is that when a non-profit NGO starts screaming about something, most of the time they know what they’re talking about. I haven’t gone and read their website lately, but I’ll bet Human Rights Watch is sick to their stomach. As I said, I’m not surprised at any of it, and frankly, I expected it sooner. Mostly, I’m disappointed in the idiocy of our military or intelligence organizations, whoever ordered the photos, at ordering them in the first place. If you’re going to do something patently illegal and against documents signed by most states in the world (or does the U.S. even follow the Geneva Convention anymore…?), don’t take frickin’ pictures of your crimes. Isn’t that like the stories of stupid teenagers going on vandelism sprees and taping it on a camcorder while they do it? Dumbasses. At least there’s plausible deniability without PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE of the crime.

“I did not do anything such as what you’re descibing!”
“And these, pictures, sir?”
“Oh right, THOSE pictures. Yeah, that was me. But it’s not my fault because someone ordered me to do it.”

Now all they can do is fall on their swords for their superiors like good little soldiers. The old expression “the buck stops here” is certainly a good thing to have on your desk, but when blame is getting passed around, make sure that the blame goes as high as it should. When I think of the Watergate scandal, it actually gives me a good feeling that even the President was ultimately held responsible for his actions at the time. No man is above the law. But dammit, let the right people get blamed. Can you imagine how the Nuremburg trials would have been different if only the concentration camp guards were put on trial and not the Nazi Party members who thought up the blasted things in the first place? Mind you, I’m not comparing the severity of what’s going on in Iraq to the horrors of the Holocaust, but frankly, human rights abuses are human rights abuses, in my mind. They both deserve punishment, and so I’m sure we’ll see about a dozen service members dishonorably discharged, a couple of officers taking punishment and remaining in, and one mid-level officer (perhaps a Major, even?) taking the ultimate responsibility and retiring with full pension. Yeah, like HIS superiors didn’t know what was going on.

I’m sure that you all forgot to go to Long John Silver’s on May 10th to get your free giant shrimp in the promotion they set up for when NASA discovered evidence of water on Mars! Well I didn’t forget! I just didn’t go. A single giant spring isn’t enough to lure me into a fast food place. Free Burger King fries? Sure, why not. But not a single, deep-fried piece of seafood. Frankly, I have my fill of oxymorons already. Plastic silverware. Military intelligence. Postal service. I didn’t need to add a giant shrimp into the mix. My two favorite oxymorons are still Microsoft Works and Power Mac. Hehehe. But really, while there is a LJS that’s fairly close to the apartment, the place has always seemed pretty sketchy to me even though people say their fried chicken is good. I just don’t trust a parent company called Yum! Brands Inc. They own Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC, as well. I don’t think I need to say any more about the sketchiness of the other places they own. When I still worked at Papa Murphy’s (the first time), we hired a manager from a Pizza Hut, and I got the lowdown on their processes. Did you know that the cheese they use isn’t, well, real cheese? It has a shelf life of like nine months, unlike real cheese which has a tendency to go bad at some point. I believe that when the revolution comes and the world ends, all that will stand the test of time are cockroaches, Twinkies, and Pizza Hut’s cheese-like substance. You can tell it’s not real cheese by the way it melts. That is, it’s not as greasy, it stays soft instead of hardening as the pizza cools, and it HAS A SHELF LIFE OF NINE MONTHS. So if you leave you pizza out for nine months, there’s a distinct possibility that there won’t be anything growing on it. It’s not an experiment that I want to do, though.

If left with a choice between Pizza Hut and Dominoes, I choose Dominoes every time. That’s how much I dislike Pizza Hut. I like to avoid the Noid AND fake cheese whenever I can. If I have a real set of choices, though, it always goes: my pizza > Bridgeport > Pizza Schmitza > Pizzacato > Papa John’s > Dominoes > Pizza Hut.

If I keep this up much longer, my entry will go on forever. Don’t want you people that are either short of attention span (I won’t name names, too many to list) or who see a block of text and decide to skip over it (Dad) to miss too much of what I say. So I’ll leave you there. Oh yeah, and I slightly changed my blog title again because the Latin word I found made me think of “potassium” every tiem I saw it. I didn’t want people to think my blog was about bananas. Oh yeah, and I’m back in the number one spot thanks to my naming shenanagins. Go me!

Posted in Beer, Geekery, General