My view of the world

Something scary for halloween.
   
      
I just received these pictures of a place where a friend works.
And you thought your server room was tough.

The racks are every bit as close to the wall as they appear, the mess is much scarier in person, just try to figure out how anybody who’s not built like a spider monkey could possibly get behind there, and it was deliberately laid out this way by the sysadmin, at least that’s what he calls himself.
In my none too humble opinion, anybody who would put equipment racks within 2 feet of a wall couldn’t properly administer asprin.

I’ve got a friend over at Pioneer Loan Center who works around bunches of women. This means that sooner of later at least one of them will get pregnant.
Well, our boy Rich really caught the brass ring on this one. There are at least three who are currently working there who are getting larger by the minute.
One is due to go on maternity leave soon, and the others are due to leave around the first of the year.
The one who left a couple of months ago used to simply sit and moan and groan, the one that’s due to leave next is getting so cranky that some customers have complained about her. Evidently, with her other children she felt sick the during the entire pregnancy, now she’s sick and with having to work, she’s distracted, so she makes mistakes, she gets sharp with the customers and she complains endlessly.
As a side note, her hubby has never been around a pregnant woman before, so he’s getting finchy.

I got to thinking, they’re a bit shorthanded, so while he doesn’t see the others very often, the company is going to have to juggle where and when people work.
This should be interesting, here’s a poor guy who has trouble dealing with relationships at best, of course if he wasn’t attracted to psycho-bitches, his life would be simpler and calmer, less interesting, but calmer. Now he has to try and deal with a continual series of pregnant women, complete with mood swings, morning sickness and the endless bitching that comes from not feeling well for months on end.
With that number of fertile, young females around, the possibility of this to becoming a continual thing is damn near a lock.

Run boy, run. I’ve got a couch you can borrow and I’m perfectly willing to deny I’ve ever seen you, but if three pregos show up all at once, you’re on your own.

Rich I’m sorry it’s happening to you this time around, but, to quote you. Neener, neener, neener.

They put up a new Welcome to Las Vegas sign on the Boulder Highway between Tropicana and Flamingo.
This one’s a bit smaller than the one on the strip, but I assume that this is also owned by YESCO, now I wonder how much it cost the taxpayers, and how long before it’s completely lost in the underbrush they’ve planted.

I ran into a guy in the bookstore today, who was going to start blogging in order to promote a website he’s building, to sell something or other.
A friend of his makes $50k a year selling online, and since they’re both full time RVer’s the web is the perfect sales place, they don’t need a storefront and as long as everything is dropshipped, they don’t need inventory.

While I was talking to the RVer, I got to thinking about the way I pay bill, order stuff and generally take care of day to day business.
I pay my bills online, and I get mad because I have to write a couple of checks a month.
If I planned meals I could grocery shop online, if I want take out I order my food online, and a great deal of what I need to do for work, I do from home at 2 in the morning.
At this rate I’ll never have to talk to anyone face to face ever again. This is not a joke, I spend a lot of time sitting around in my underwear(this, by the way, is not a pretty sight), doing my work, and I like leaving the house less and less.
The traffic has become the traditional big-city mess, people in general are rude, the people who work in the stores, know less and less and speak less and less english, and those that do speak english tend to be so poorly trained, as to be useless, and so poorly paid, that you almost never see the same people twice.

I spoke to a friend via the telephone the other night for a bit over an hour, I’ve known him for years and yet, because of other commitments and work related silliness we only get actual face time a few times a year. His is one of the few non-business calls that I don’t generally consider an intrusion, mostly because if I told him I was busy, he’d hang up without feeling insulted.
This also got me to thinking, I know a number of people quite well, but I couldn’t pick them out of a one man line-up.
I wonder how many people know me by way of email or news group postings, who think they actually “know” me.
Take a good look at myspace and ask yourself how many of these people are really as they appear and how many are just a persona that has little if anything to do with the real person. (ouuuuuh, that’s deep.)

As far as I have been able to find out, Walmart is the largest employer of illegal aliens in the country. This way they don’t have to worry about benefits or o.t.

China is enlarging the Panama Canal so they have room for all those boats carrying Walmart junk to the east coast, and more importantly, so they have room for all those boats carrying U.S. greenbacks back home.

Yes, I’m in a crappy mood and No, I don’t care what you think, that’s why I have comments turned off.

Aleksey Vayner sent a video resume to Swiss bank giant UBS in hopes of getting a job. Instead it showed up on a couple of blogs, and while it did get him a spot on the Today Show, it’s caused him more embarrassment than good.
In this video he demonstrated his ability to break stacks of bricks, he claims a 140 mph tennis serve, and claims to bench 495lbs. Yeah, right, just take a look at him in the dance photo with a tight shirt, the only way he’s going to bench 495 is with a floor jack.
Now he’s whining about how everybody’s picking on him.
Guess what, the original recipients of the fanciful resume, were probably rolling on the floor, which is probably the reason somebody thought of posting it.
Here’s a link to the NY Times article.

Simple rules, if you’re going to talk the talk, you’d better be able to walk the walk, and if you can’t take criticism don’t make your BS public, not even to a small number of people, you never can tell who they might tell the tale to.
I know a guy who claims to be ex-naval intel, strange, there’s no dd214. I guess that he figured the fed we both know wouldn’t bother checking, he was wrong, and yet he occasionaly brings this up.

People are so dumb.

I was browsing thru eweek when I came across an article on a new trojan. This is the spam-thru trojan and it comes with a pirated copy of Kaspersky AntiVirus. Instead of shutting down the antivirus, it runs it’s version of Kaspersky, and scans for competitors, and by shutting them down there’s more bandwidth available for itself.
I like that, it’s sneaky, underhanded and devious, it’s everything one could hope for in a piece of malware.
This one spams for a bump and dump stock.

While there’s no way you or I can keep ahead of the bad guys, but if you don’t try, things like this will get you blackholed and you won’t be able to send email to anyone.

I was looking through my stats and found a couple of new inbound links.
One is a libertarian site, the Rebellion Coffee Company, and the other is Treducks, which is a personal blog written by someone who used to live here in Vegas.
The Libertarian site has lots of good links for people who want to know about their views.
The Treducks site is strictly personal and to my mind, more interesting.
They’re both intersting enough to be worth a look.

Rich over at the Pioneer Loan blog, has posted a few pictures of the girls that work there.
His latest is Yami, she’s one that left and came back, she’s about 5 foot nothing and skinny, but she sure does photograph well.
The shot he used on the blog isn’t very flattering, but he includes a link to her myspace and the shots there are a lot more interesting.
I’ve seen the girls at his work and for cute, Sarita wins hands down.
I decided to post the links to their respective myspace sights.
Yami
Sarita

I got fired from my part time second job, again. Some people I work with and I got caught in a boardroom battle, I was told I’d never work for them again, the in-house I.T. people got written warnings and another conslutant was told he was going to lose his security clearance.
Now that the smoke has cleared and the dust has settled, I’m going to bed early tonight, my primary contact in the company is probably going to move to another state and take a job that he’s been declining for several months, and the other conslutant is taking a job with the D.O.D, so much for losing his clearance
My real objection, isn’t that they say they won’t use my services anymore, it’s that the person who called, acted like it was the end of the world, and insisted on calling at 0:dark hundred.
I hate mornings, but not as much as I hate morning people.

I got a Fedex package just before I walked out the door. It contained an invitation to a wedding in Israel.
This is cool.
Out of the blue, my ex-girlfriend dumped me for a former fiancee, now she would like me to fly to Israel, put up with all that airport security, in not just one, but two paranoid countries and give her and her soon to be husband a wedding gift.
Now, just how a I supposed to get hold of a tac-nuke, much less find a way to sneak it through customs, on such short notice.
I’m not mad, really, I’m just deeply, deeply hurt, but, if I could just get the device, maybe I could do a Chill Wills (Dr. Strangelove), I’d even wear a cowboy hat.
Her grandmother called me Sunday, so I knew about the wedding, I just didn’t expect my lovely, darling, very, very ex-girlfriend, to have those kind of balls.
Someday women will make sense, but not until I quit being attracted to psycho-bitches.

Sure does feel like a Monday.

I re-read an article in the NY Times, titled “liquid as a weapon.” A friend’s distant relative was mentioned, so when he called, I went on line and looked it up.
After a bit of conversation I got to thinking. Nitroglycerin, in it’s purest form is barely yellow and a mixture of nitroglycerin and ethylene glycol dinitrate freezes at -29 °C, that’s -20 °F. Just the thing for a double walled thermous.
Why yes officer, it’s a container, you put in the freezer to keep your water cold.
I’m not certain how it could be detonated, but I am quite certain someone could find a way.
There are inumerable things that can be made to cause damage ot an airplane. Compressed air would be a good example, have you ever seen what happens when the valve gets knocked off a high pressure tank, think rocket.

The point is, there’s no way to protect against all the possibilities, and air travel is still much safer than driving. The reason I try to avoid flying (my arms get tired) are airports, with the associated, security, ala the three stooges, and parking problems, not to mention the long ass time spent in customs.

For those of you who are worried about a bunch of lunatic, ragheads, might I point out, our very own lunatics, Tim Mcveigh and Terry Nichols.
The Oklahoma City Bombing -A few barrels of fertilizer and some racing fuel. (Tim Mcveigh, by the way, was a registered Republican.)

Or how about, David Earl Burgert, from Flathead County, Mt. who was the head of Project 7, which consisted of between 1 and nine people.
Back in 2002 the police raided a trailer he owned and found 30,000 rounds of ammunition, body armor, plastic explosives, machine guns and other weapons, including anti-personel mines.
(The 30,000 rounds isn’t all that weird for that part of the world, but claymores ruin too much meat to be good poaching tools.)
Burgert’s plan was to kill all the local law enforcement personel, including judges and the local dog catcher, yes, even the dog catcher.
Also arrested was Tracy Brockway, 32, who was charged with obstruction of justice for harboring Mr. Burgert. Officials said Ms. Brockway used her job as a cleaning woman at the Whitefish Police Department, to gather information for Project 7 on police officers in the area, she used to go through the trash cans and read the memos that had been thrown away.
Law enforcement officials kept the arrest a secret because they hoped to gain access to encrypted files in a computer owned by Mr. Burgert that might lead to more arrests.
But information about the plot became public at a bail reduction hearing for Ms. Brockway. Officials said the computer code had still not been cracked.
The whole theory seems to have been, if you kill off the cops, the national guard will be called out, more separatists will join the revolution, and help wipe out the guard, so by the time the federal government steps in, all the separatists in the country will join in, the army can be wiped out and the revolution will be a success… OK, now that we have that out of the way.

The point is, while we are in danger from outside sources, we have our own collections of nut jobs.

Kids carry guns and knives to school, and think it’s all right, because that’s what they see on TV.
Amish kids get killed by an outsider, because of something he said he did many years ago.
The cops are shooting people at a record rate and more planes fall out of the air do to shoddy maintainence, pilot error, and bad airtraffic control, than will ever be blown out of the sky by any number of terrorists.

JFK said that if a man was willing to trade his life for the life of the President, nobody could stop him.

This is our problem, the world is full of psychos, incompetents, people who will let others die to protect the company’s bottom line, and people who think that killing other people will get them into heaven.

You can’t save the world, all you can do is try to make your little corner of it a little more pleasant.
As Ben Franklin put it, prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.

I’m not paranoid.
They are out to get me, and if you say you can’t see it, you’re lying, you must be one of them.

Former HP CEO has been charged with at least four felonys, but don’t worry, even if they go to trial and convict her, instead of just making a deal, she’ll go to Martha Stewart jail, not real jail. Real jail is for us peasants.

The staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission has notified Pequot Capital Management, a prominent hedge fund run by Arthur J. Samberg, that it will not recommend an enforcement action against the firm or its employees relating to an insider trading investigation.
The investigation was going along fine, until Mr. Aguirre wanted to get a statement from John J. Mack, now the chief executive of Morgan Stanley and a friend of Mr. Samberg’s. Instead of getting a statement Mr. Aguirre gat a pink slip.
The S.E.C. reversed its position and took Mr. Mack’s deposition in the case in July. Details of his testimony have not been disclosed.
Now with statues of limitations in play the SEC has decided not to prosecute.
“It’s exactly what I expected,” Mr. Aguirre said yesterday. “The S.E.C. has been pretending to conduct an investigation over the last few months and now they’ve stopped pretending.”
I knew I should have learned to play golf and joined one of those elite clubs in school.
The trouble is, golf is too damn expensive and those clubs have a selective door policy, no working stiffs allowed.

Top employees of a city-financed Bronx charity diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars for personal expenses like home renovations, furniture and the purchase of a Volvo and a BMW, a city investigation has found.
Mr. Rosen took $69,216 from 2001 to 2004, investigators said. (He was paid $249,611 in wages and bonuses in 2004.) Some of the money went for home furnishings, renovation of a beach apartment in the Rockaways and the purchase of a Volvo convertible. One $3,200 invoice for the renovation was billed to the city as payment for a “gang prevention workshop.”
Mr. Aulenbach improperly received $87,371 from 2000 to 2004, investigators found. (He was paid $185,218 in 2004.) The money paid for renovations of his apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens; a personal car, insurance and residential parking; and tennis expenses.
Mr. Rosen and Mr. Aulenbach agreed to make restitution of $38,575 and $32,363, respectively, and to pay a $5,000 fine each.
Let’s see, you steal $70k and you pay back $44k, you steal $90k and you pay back $38k, there are no criminal charges filed, and you get paid a godawful lot of money to do it. And they say crime doesn’t pay.

Integrity Security & Investigation Services and its owner, Edmund Edmister, will give up $2700, the entire amount the company earned from selling phone records and credit card transaction reports, the FTC said. The settlement also bars the company from obtaining and selling confidential phone and credit account records unless authorized by law or court order.
Ok, so crime doesn’t always pay, but evidently, you can commit a felony without being arrested, if you give the chump change back.