My view of the world

On a brighter note.
Christmas Day was in the high 60’s with no wind, and you wonder why people come to Las Vegas for Christmas.
Yesterday the wind kicked up and the temperature got all the way down into the 40’s with a high in the low 60’s. There is some small chance of rain in the next couple of days, but the only thing the news seemed to notice was that if the wind exceeds 10mph New Years Eve, they won’t be able to set off several million dollars worth of fireworks. The way I see it, the entire fire department is on O.T. that night anyway so….

I just stepped out the back door, which I’ve had open all day, to start the barbeque, I have the old fashioned kind that uses charcoal because I prefer the flavor cooking over coals gives you.
I’m indulging and having a Porterhouse with corn on the cob and baked potato.

I’ll loose weight after the 1st. Really..what do you mean you don’t believe me? Just because I have failed every other year doesn’t mean I’ll give in this year, some people have no faith, either that, or they’re playing the odds.

I just turned the steak and checked the corn, I baste the corn with butter and put it directly on the barbeque, so I have to keep checking it.

Quite obviously my problem is that I like food and I hate exercise, but this year I have to lose some excess bagage because of my blood pressure and my knees.
It’s hell not to be 20 and indestructable, but I wouldn’t have missed this trip for the world. It’s been an intensely interesting ride so far and I’m just getting my second wind.
I got rid of that 20 something I was knocking boots with, now I think I’ll take some time for myself and then find a thiry or fourty something that’s not a complete hose-monster and that might want to see a movie or shoot some pool, and not try to drink the entire bar under the table, I’m just getting too damn old for that life.
My life sometimes reminds me of a song by Apache Moon called “12 Year Old Whiskey and 20 Year Old Women.” Logically I know I’m too damn old, but when that 20 year old heart stopper smiles, my mind goes on vacation and I’ve just got to try.

In the mean time the steak was just right, the corn was great and the potato is sitting here with butter and sour cream, maybe I’ll have to wait a bit for that last piece of key lime pie and a cup of strong black coffee. I’ll probably put off dessert until I close the backdoor, about 7 or so.

I was expecting a package that was shipped via DHL.
They made one attempt and then evedently left it at the office. The slip they left on my door said I could pick it up at the address on the back, which was blank.
DHL has a web site that said it was going to be delivered “next business day”, the people I talked to on the phone swore it would be delivered “next business day”.
Well, after the long xmas weekend they shipped it back, stating that it had been refused by the recipient.
There’s a reason they’re used by First Data, DHL was the low bidder for the contract, and you get what you pay for.
Back in the day, I ran package stores, shipping, mail boxes and a contract station for the Post Office. We gave up on DHL and Airborne because Fedex and UPS were more efficient / cost effective, three guesses who merged.
It’s strange, but out of the thousands of packages I’ve shipped over the years, I’ve never had Fedex lose one, while it would appear that the people over at DHL are incapable of completing the simplest of tasks, you know, like keeping track of the packages they’re supposed to deliver.
I was told at 7:30 this morning that the supervisor for the Henderson office would call me within the hour, it’s now 2:06 and I haven’t heard a sound. I didn’t really expect to, after all, what are they going to say? “Hey our TV ads are bogus, because we can’t be bothered making an extra trip, much less doing what we told you we’d do”. They will never admit that this is their fault, everyone will get their bonus and not one of them will feel bad about their give-a-shit attitude.
I looked in the phonebook and there’s no street address for DHL, and if you complain they send an e-mail to the supervisor to have him call you back, yea-right, if I ran and operation like that, I wouldn’t want anyone to know where I worked either.
I repeat, I use Fedex, whatever happens they can at least tell you where the hell your package is.

Well, tis the season and all that B.S.
Tommorow is Christmas…..whoopee.<sarcasm>
It seems everyone in the known universe is on the road or in the stores, looking for that last gift, they should have bought a month ago.
The only things good about this time of year are the food and our weather.
Here in Vegas it should be in the mid sixties with clear skies and no wind…..I love our version of winter.

If this is “the season to be jolly”, how come everyone drives like they are on some kind of personal crusade to destroy every other driver on the road and how come the suicide rate goes up?

Pretty much everyone I know is on a very tight budget and the cost of toys and food are going up faster than wages.
I know a person who had to wait ’til this last payday to try and buy a Robo-Raptor($99.95 at Target) for her oldest son, who’s maybe 5 or 6.

Is it just me or are the advertisers winning? The cartoons are nothing more than long ads for whatever toys they’re marketing, interspersed with commercials. They no longer entertain, they give the kids a fantasy line aimed exclusively at selling cards or action figures, and the commercials all seem to go way beyond what could be considered “legitimate puffery”. They market their product to kids who are too young to understand the lies and leave the parents to listen to their children whine until said parents buy the “latest and greatest” just to shut them up.

I guess I’m getting old, but it used to be that a hula hoop was a hula hoop and a bike was a bike. You knew what they could and could not do, and maybe you couldn’t jump hilltop to hilltop like they did on tv, but at least you could try, now they sell the fantasy with no hope of magical monsters appearing or the child suddenly being able to fly.
<geezer mode> Why back in my day…etc. etc. etc. </geezer mode>
Yup, I’m gettin’ old and crotchety, but when they get the bugs worked out I’ll probably buy myself an X-box 360 and maybe I’ll buy a Robo-raptor for myself.
(Yes dear, I know. Like most men, I never bothered to grow-up, I just got older)

I was looking at my stats and discovered an average of 45 hits a day. This is weird when you consider that I don’t push this or try to get links or even have pagerank, (according to google I have a page rank of 0). I guess if you have enough people wandering the net you will get hits even if you barely exist.

Some of the search terms are interesting:

urban farmer in china guestbook 2005
pagerank 5 deal
this world is temporary so relax
personal sailboat rent my
rank of seaport
heidi Fliess
wsop bracelet
WSOP bracelet pawn
riding mechanical bull topless <—– personal favorite
hualapai skywalk
sold 1999 wsop bracelet
frosty the snowman truth
mediteranian seaport
mediteranian seaport
google selling jewelery at pawn shop
wsop bracelet jeweler

The variants on Heidi Fleiss were expected and I guess my comments on Dubrovnik caught some attention, so would anything on the WSOP bracelet, but where the hell did “frosty” come from, search engines are so weird.

I built this site because I had the name and it seemed to be as good as anything to do with it, besides it gives me someplace to ramble on aimlessly without have people tell me to shut-up.( it’s good to be the king)
I doubt I’ll ever have anything interesting, much less important to say, but someone will always be bored enough to read it.

In the mean time, I’m writing a bit of code for someones’ website, and while I don’t believe in curses, kizmet, karma, etc. I’m getting twitchy about the code. It’s simple, just a pull from the database, a sort alphabetically, display the results and do some simple pagination.
The code I based it on I’ve used before and it worked, with this site it doesn’t work consistently. It’s not the server, I’m testing on my laptop and the original code works fine, it’s not the database since it uses the same db, I’m becoming convinced it’s the person I’m writting for. She’s another of those people that can make the computers cry, everything is as it should be and when I try to actually use it I get no errors and erractic results.
A four hour project has turned into a 5 day project with me throwing away everything I’ve written and starting from scratch.
I give up, where do I go to surrender.

I read a few blogs, some are well known others, are like mine, only found by accident. I read the Pioneer Loan and Jewelry pawnshop blog, because I know the people, another is The Overnighter over at Martini Republic and of course the Las Vegas blog.
Once in a while I find an interesting blog, invariably by accident, and then I either forget to bookmark it or the people quit writing.
Writing a blog takes a lot of time, you need to find something to talk about and you have to type it out in a manner that others will read and hopefully enjoy.
“You should choose your audience and write to please them.” This is advice I read somewhere, I think it was in a book for prospective authors, you know the ones. “How to get published without getting rejected” by some author you never heard of.
In real life, I think you should write whatever you damn well please, in whatever style you damn well please and if somebody likes it great, if not they’ll go somewhere else. You probably should use a spell checker so when you annoy your readers there’s no misunderstanding about what you wrote.

Some of the best bad examples of blogs are over at Pioneer Loan, Landy kinda-sorta makes sense (this is as good as it’ll get for a while, he’s 16), Michael doesn’t come with translations into any language known to man, and Sara ran out of things to say.

I just noticed the article about the Grand Canyon Skywalk the Hualapai Indians are building. I agree with the author, if I’m out on it and somebody decides to jump up and down, I’m gonna bitch slap them all the way back to the parking lot.
And guys, it’s several articles down from the Pamela Anderson picture, not bad for a girl who had a breast reduction.

Pioneer Loan put up a comments page and I got to leave the very first comment, I was helping them troubleshoot it. I told them “nice site”.
After all, what do you say to someone, your site sucks? Their’s isn’t that bad, it’s just, rather mundane. (They are, however, starting to put more information on their site about the pawn business.)

This brought up the question, is it better to tell someone, especially a friend, that whatever they’ve done needs to be redone or to let them show the world just how bad their wonderful site or latest painting really is? Especially when they’ve been bragging on it.
Personally, I just let someone else tell them, unless it’s a close friend, in which case they’d rather hear it from anyone but me, I tend to be “brutally honest”, which may explain why I have so few friends.

The cold hard truth is that most people don’t want to hear anything but soothing noises, regardless of the subject.
I’m one of the other types, I’d rather hear the truth and deal with it, just as long as it’s an honest opinion and not just sour grapes or someones mean streak showing.

A reminder:
To a mother, her children are, if not brilliant and beautiful, at least cute and not as dumb as a lot of other kids, with her you should never be “brutally honest”, because no jury with a woman on it would ever convict her.

Well, it’s Christmas, the crowds in the stores and the traffic are making everyone nuts, and I should be allowed to hunt down and kill whoever decided that frosty the snowman should be played at least once an hour.
Christmas music hasn’t changed in the last hundred years and it sucked then.
There is hope, if you’re a Lovecraft fan, here’s music with a different point of view .

BTW:
Did you know it’s illegal to drive your camel on the highway in the State of Nevada.

It figures, They sold the bracelet, just when somebody contacted me to ask about the condition

I just caught the blurb over in the Pioneer Loan and Jewelry’s pawnshop blog, about the 1999 world series of poker bracelet that they have.
It turns out that someone actually wants to rent the bracelet for a fashion show in N.Y., the first question is how much do they want to pay and the next is how are they going to transport it?
After all this W.S.O.P. bracelet may or may not be worth what they’re asking, but where would you find another one if this one gets lost in the mail?
If I were them, I’d ship it registered mail (and insist on a cash deposit for the full price and some sort of credit during the show).
Registered mail is as slow as you can go because everybody who touches the package has to sign for it, but it’s a secure as you can get without transporting it yourself for the same reason.

On a different note: I was just over at the Las Vegas blog and read about Sapphire hosting the 2nd Annual Topless Bullriding Contest, and no, you can’t volunteer to be the bull.
I’ve ridden mechanical bulls and when I think of some chic with double d’s riding one without the support of some kind of bra, it even hurts me, but, of course I’ll have to go watch, I mean, someone needs to be there to catch the ladies if they fall.