Category: Rants

Those of you who regularly read this blog will not be surprised to learn that I feel disappointed with Bush winning the presidential election. I could spend pages on that topic but won’t as there are others out there who’ve done it better than I could. Instead, I have a few other words to say.

To Senator Kerry

Thank you for your effort; while you were not my first choice for president, I believe you would have fulfilled the duties of the office honorably.

To those Americans who voted

Whether you voted for Kerry, Busy, Nader or one of the other third party candidates; you decided that your voice would not go unheard this year. For that I applaude you; the single most important reasponsibility we have as American citizens is to tell our government what we think. Yesterday, all of you did just that.

To those Americans who did not vote

You owe every dead American soldier an apology. One of the things our country has fought for has been to maintain our democracy; so that we have the ability to choose our leaders. By failing to follow the issues and vote, you insult the memory of every American soldier who ever died for us. For those of you who protest that you were too busy with work/family/whatever; just remember those soldiers had their own families and their own jobs that they gave up to defend your rights. They never got to go back to their families and jobs, but you can every night.

Try thinking about that next time.

Today is November 2nd and that makes it the day that America goes to the polls to pick our leader for the next 4 years. As an American citizen, I’ve already cast my vote and I’m hope all my fellow Americans will do so too. If you’re still thinking about not voting, take a look at this article. Below are some quotes from the article:

3. Because you’ll make your sixth-grade social studies teacher happy.
…
7. Because there are no television sets in the voting booth, which means the odds are great you will not hear the phrase, “. . . and I approved this message.”
…
14. Because even if it’s only an illusion to think you are making your voice heard, that’s still better than knowing with absolute certainty that you remained silent.
…
20. Because of United Airlines Flight 93. An amazing thing happened on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, on that hijacked airplane. The 33 passengers knew, from cell phone calls to loved ones, that two other hijacked planes had struck the World Trade Center. Unless they acted, they realized that they, too, were doomed. And do you know what those strangers did?
From the 9/11 report: “According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane. They decided, and acted.”
What a remarkable act. With their lives at stake, with their country facing peril, these 33 men and women of diverse backgrounds did a most American thing: They took a vote. They decided to rush the cockpit. And a plane that might have destroyed the White House or U.S. Capitol crashed instead in a Pennsylvania field.
Why vote? Choose your reason.
Honoring their sacrifice will do just fine.

Oh and just for the record I voted for Kerry, via absentee ballot weeks ago.

Today was a brillant example of why management sucks. I was working merrily along1 testing a particular area of the software. Then I had to teleconference –he said with extreme venom and hatred– into a meeting for a testing project that I’m not currently working on but that I would much, much rather be on. For extra fun, that teleconference –again said with extreme venom and hatred– call was taken at my desk. A desk which I might add is in a cubicle, a private office. A cubicle which happens to be located next to the loudest @#%&@(^&!#($)^*^()#$^#%&^@$(^#$(^#)(%*@&($#^ f’ing support group in our building. They’ve got email; they’ve got phones; they’ve even got IM but when this group wants to communication; they just scream crap out.

Anyways, I took the conference call and listened in watching my clock count away the wasted minutes of my life. When the meeting was finally over; I got back to working on the @#(%@ project that I am currently assigned to. I’d only gotten a few minutes into working when I get a meeting announcement for another meeting today. In fact, just 20 minutes away but the only information that the announcement gives me about the meeting is a subject line of “Test”. WTF?

It’s coming from one of my managers2 and he’s sent out dozens of meeting announcements before without any problems; so why would he be trying to test the system out that way? 20 minutes later, I got the answer.

Apparently, UPPER management decided that everybody in the company is going to have to take this general aptitude test but had told middle/lower management that they weren’t supposed to say anything yet. Then Human Resources started sending out meeting invitations to schedule people for the test. So our managers were pulling an emergency meeting to do spin-control and fight the rumor mill. There was one problem with that plan.

Some of the team I’m on –including me– work out of a different building, in a different state and we’re not scheduled to take this stupid test until next week. As such and as our HR person isn’t a complete f’ing idiot; she didn’t send out the invites yet because she wasn’t supposed to. So the only thing that the emergency meeting occomplished for me was to start freaking me out instead of helping me stay calm. I hadn’t heard a word about this test until I went to this meeting and then I got treated to roughly an hour of how they couldn’t tell us yet because management said they couldn’t and you have to do what management says and they won’t use this as the sole factor of whether or not you keep your job as that would be nuts and I’ll fight against that thing I said they’d never do tooth and nail. Riiiiiiiiiight. Like I’m going to believe you’re going to fight that hard for me when you just got done saying you didn’t already tell us because management said not to and you have to do what they say.

I feel sooooooooooooooo reassured. *sigh*

1 As merrily as I ever get at work, first thing in the morning.
2 Work isn’t quite as bad for me as it was for Peter Gibbons; I’ve only got 2 direct supervisors instead of 4 (or was it 6?).

Apparently Jon Stewart recently went on CNN’s Crossfire show but didn’t have somebody to debate but was on to talk to the hosts about how he thinks they’re failing to do their jobs properly. It makes interesting watching how the host representing the right keeps comparing Crossfire to the Daily Show and basically interrupts Jon everytime Jon tries to make a valid argument. From what I could tell, the hosts of the show basically spent the entire time Jon was on proving Jon’s exact point. I highly recommend everybody watch the video (requires Quicktime, Realplayer or Windows Media Player).

If you’ve been involved in the WP community at all for the past couple of months; you couldn’t have missed that Root and Michael Heilemann have been… bickering back and forth about Kubrick and designs and usability and whatnot. From what I saw in the various threads on the WP Support forums, on both’s blogs and elsewhere they both need a good smack to the head. I’m too tired of the whole deal to really care who started it or who’s currently at fault.

Why bring it up then? Michael’s got a thread up that’s continuing the spat. Normally that wouldn’t be enough for me to bother putting a note up here but one of the people commenting on Michael’s thread said:

Quoting Root:

IMHO that is going to make WP less accessible to the self design end user than it is now. Some of us are quite interested in these things.

That means they’ll have to pay a designer to do it for them, hopefully. To that I say, “Bravo!” (There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.)

Another person commenting replied:

There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.

Hear hear

And that just pisses me off. I’m not a designer and make no claims to be one. I do have a very rudimentary grasp of CSS and a slightly better one of HTML. I’ve borrowed a book from a friend of mine and am learning a bit about PHP/MySQL. I do all my coding either in Bluefish1 or Notepad2. I looked at the template WP shipped with in v1.02 and realized it was beyond my skills to really modify at the time. So I grabbed a couple of styles from the Alex King style competition but I saw that under some circumstances they’d break. I wasn’t happy about that and I didn’t like that my blog’s style wasn’t something I’d crafted. I kept looking around for something better to use and then Root came out with his Trident template. I was able to drop that in and make a few modifications so that I had a style that’s my own. It’s ugly as all get out but I could alter it as I need it without having to shell out more money to indulge in my blogging hobby. And the idea that just because I’m not a designer that I must be using a pirated copy of Frontpage3 in order to work on my site is insulting! I also think that if WP v1.3 does make it substantially more difficult to create new themes for my site then I will have to an alternative platform.

1 When working on my desktop and booted into Linux.
2 When working on my laptop, whose CD-ROM drive sucks so bad I can’t get windows off the machine.
3 Frontpage is a piece of crap! I’ve had to use it at work a few times and it writes the most horrific code! If you’re going to claim that people are pirating web design software; why not credit them with pirating something that’s actually useful.