My view of the world

Has anybody else noticed the increased number of people who talk to themselves out loud and continiously?
I met a woman who was a bit under 40 and talked to herself even while she was talking to me, not only did she talk to herself, while she was talking to me, the two conversations weren’t even related. She also had crank face, you know, those sores tweekers get from picking at their faces.
I saw a woman in a grocery store parking lot talking to the person next to her, the obvious problem was that there was nobody sitting in the passenger seat.
One of the people that I thought had turrets syndrome, turned out to be clinically schizophrenic, and his outbursts were caused by his yelling at somebody who wasn’t there, other than those minor interruptions, I enjoyed talking to him.
Someone else I know, will get into a fight with his wife and then go out to the garage to yell at her while she’s still in the house, this has probably saved his marrage, but, while he may find this to be therapeutic, his wife and I both think he has a screw loose.
I don’t think this sort of behavior is seen more often because we no longer lock people up just because they’re weird. I think we see more of it because we have way too many people in too small an area, which creates some of these symptoms, and the new more powerful street drugs are becoming more and more socially acceptable.

For my part, I’m firmly convinced I may well be the last sane person left in the world, after all, sanity is strictly a matter of opinion and the rest of you are crazy.

I just watched 13 police cars running code down the road.
An officer called to tell someone here that he was alright and said that a man was ramming police cars and had started to hit other cars, he even tried to run over one of the sergents.
The police think the man may be mentally ill, which to my mind, makes him just like a large percentage of the other drivers on our streets, but, that’s another story.
I don’t know how it turned out or even if it’s over, but if you ever wanted to pull a major heist this looks like the perfect diversion.
The other diversion would be the imigrant protests at federal courthouse. They had to call in every available uniform, to make sure that nobody got hit by traffic and no trouble started.

It’s strange how they don’t have enough cops to handle routine traffic accidents, but they can spare 13 cars to chase one, count ‘em, one guy, who is admittedly, a danger to society at large. But, how many does it take, and who’s taking care of law enforcement, while they all get to drive really, really fast and play with the siren and the purty, flashy lights?
No better than the cops drive and no more attention than the other drivers pay, I think, that that many cars running at high speed is a much bigger threat than a nut case with a single vehicle.

Yes, I am getting less and less tolerant of the powers that be.
I think I’ll just try and hide my head in the sand and pretend that none of this is happening.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the difference in video quality, in Oblivion, between the ATI 850 xt and the x1900xtx is phenominal, but now I really need a faster hard drive, faster cpu and more memory, Ad infinitum.

Just a note:
With the “Chuck” patch in place, you can run AA and HDR simultainiously, but if you have a machine like we built for my friend, with everything turned on, shadows, reflections and the ini file tweaked your frame rate will drop from 20fps to about 16fps, so I would suggest waiting until the official patch from ATI comes out.
We’re also waiting for the first official patch from the programers over at Bethesda.
There are a bunch of mods out, including one that gets rid of the womens bras when you take their clothes off, but I’m told that the overall effect needs work.
The only mod I’m currently running is Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, but there are several hundred listed over at the Oblivion Mod Wiki!.
In the meantime I’m running an untweaked version of Win xp pro, an AMD 4800 with 2 gig of Kingstone ram, an ATI x1900xtx video card and a 200gig sata hd.
I have to remember to turn off my apache web server and practically everything else to keep it from stuttering.
BTW: The 15k Raptors seem to make a difference.
I guess I need a faster box.

The oil companies have announced that the high price of oil is due to the threat of nuclear war from Iran and some of the press are playing along.
The bottom line is that the current collection of honorless, lying, bastards in the Whitehouse and the Congress have allowed the merger of most of the major players in the oil industry and there is simply no real competition.
(Aren’t PACs and the world of “soft money” wonderful, and yes, I know, calling politicians “honorless, lying, bastards” is redundant.)
Yeah, I’m pissed.
We have a whitehouse that allows the rewriting of scientific documents (see the EPA) to suit their personal agenda, we’re in a war that’s based almost completely on lies and the oil companies seem to own “W” outright.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, as usual, our so-called representitives are too busy being “Repuplicans” or “Democrats” to give a shit what kind of a mess they’re creating, or how many of our rights are being taken. And the list goes on.

The basic problem is simple, I don’t mind them thinking we’re all stupid, but the number of idiots buying this pure unadulterated bullshit, proves they’re right.

In the meantime here’s our thought for the day:

“Why of course the people don’t want war…But after all it is the leaders
of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag
the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a
parliament, or a communist dictatorship…Voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to
do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack
of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”

Hermann Goering

Just a note, the guy I built the machine for has, for the moment, finished tweaking Windows and Oblivion.
He’s got every setting, including some you have to edit the ini file for, totally maxed. At 1920 x 1080 with HDR and all shadows and reflections all the way up, he’s getting about 20fps.
Until new drivers come out this is about as good as you’re going to get.
On most video cards you’ll never get even close, because of the requirements of HDR. Nvidia doesn’t have a card that will do it for the moment.
Ati also says they’re releasing a driver that will support AA and HDR, sounds like he’s gonna need to add another video card.

I work around the same women four days a week and everything they do or say seems to make perfect sense to them, but obviously, I haven’t got a clue, because it rarely makes sense to me.
At any rate they remind me of an old joke:

A man was walking along a California beach and stumbled across an old lamp. He picked it up and rubbed it and out popped a genie.

The genie said,
“OK. You released me from the lamp, yadah, yadah, yadah.
This is the third time this month and I’m getting a little sick of these wishes, so you can forget about three. You only get one wish.”

The man sat and thought about it for a while and said,
“I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii but I’m afraid to fly and I get very seasick. Could you build me a bridge to Hawaii so I can drive over there to visit?”

The genie laughed and said, “That’s impossible. Think of the logistics! How would the supports ever reach the bottom of the Pacific? Think of how much concrete it would take and how much steel it would take! No, think of another wish.”

The man said OK and tried to think of a really good wish. Finally, he said,
“I’ve been married and divorced four times. My wives always said that I don’t care and that I’m insensitive. So, I wish that I could understand women. I want to know how they feel inside and what they’re thinking when they give me the silent treatment. I want to know why they’re crying, I want to know what they really want when they say “nothing”. and I want to know how to make them truly happy. ”

The genie said, okay, okay. I’ve just got one question.
“Did you want that bridge two lanes or four?”

I made the mistake of volunteering to help someone with their in-house website.
After 6 or 7 hours of build / rebuild we decided it was as finished as it was going to get. Wrong, the company CEO saw it and wanted his picture on the main page, he then wanted all the other management to have their pictures and Bio’s on the site and he wanted me to do it for free. Not in this or any other lifetime. I did this as a favor to a friend, not as an act of charity.
The gentleman seems to think, that because I occasionaly do some work for them, I should be more than happy to donate my time in the spirit of cooperation and in the name of future employment.
I’ve got bad news for this fool, I’m a mercenary, I get paid for what I do, and if he thinks that implying a loss of future work will impress me, he’s delusional.
These people are typical of the business world in general, if you do them a favor, they feel that they are somehow entitled to continuing favors.

Once in a while you meet someone at the top of the food chain that appreciates any extras you throw in. Those types are rare, but they do exist, those are the people who can get me to stay up all night so they can meet a deadline, or even so something works the way they would like it to instead of the way someone else wanted it.
The strange thing, is how often the two diametrically opposed types know each other well enough to be friends and will discuss your work over drinks or during a round of golf.
If you rely on these people to be your bread and butter, you need to keep them happy, but I have a full time job and a regular paycheck so I can be myself.
The end result is that, in that company, I’m persona non-grata, which means it’ll be months before they call me, which in turn means, I’ll have time to sleep, this breaks my heart, really it does. ..Would I lie?
I hope the Putz stays mad for at least the next month, because , as much as I like the extra cash, I currently have more projects than I have time for.
It’s always feast or famine, if you have the time you don’t have the work, etc.

We had a guy come into our shop today while I was out. He was tall, skinny and drunk, after telling one of the girls what he wanted, he wandered over and standing in plain sight, he picked up the item and put it under his shirt.
The clerk told him to put it down and he responded with “go f*** yourself”, he then calmly walked out, this really pissed her off.
In the mean time, the first clerk was calling another clerk’s name, like that person was actually going to do something.
The second clerk is about 5ft nothing and about as agressive as the average mouse. What’s she gonna do? Run out and bite him on the ankles.
Panic is fun to watch.

After the guy left, they called the owner and told him we’d been “robbed”, but after a minute or so they told him that it’d been a shoplifter and he called the location, where we were installing software and told us what had happened.
I took my time driving back, after all, it was just a shoplifter, and the odds on someone like that coming back, especially in his condition, he probably couldn’t remember where the place was, are slim at best.
By the time I got here the girls were still exited, but calmer.
I was fine until they told me that the first clerk was yelling for someone who would have a hard time punching any higher than the guy’s knees.
It only took me about 15min to quit laughing.
And, at the end of the day, the guy stole a piece of equipment that was valuable, 2 or 3 years ago, but these days its a paperweight, if he comes back I’m going to make him take the rest of the junk.