A Day in Paradise

It’s been a while since I have been in a blogging mood, but I want to discuss the bruhaha which “Anonymous” has made about the CoS and how they are using Digg as their HQ to get the word out.

Firstly, the Church of Scientology has been under fire for decades, a couple kids protesting outside the office does about as much good as a fart in a hurricane. Ffs, Scientology is banned in Germany that tells you something about the opposition that this group gets. This wannabe shit-storm that a couple of kids are starting will not do ANYTHING except piss of the rest of DIGG users.

Secondly, NOTHING that “Anonymous” has “dugg up” and placed on digg (pardon the pun) has been original. It has all been researched and published by people who really do have reasons to be angry at the Church of Scientology.

Anonymous, this is not your battle. If you want to be useful help the people who do have a reason to be angry and CoS and help promote their cause using them as the Spokespeople, not using them to promote your silly little group. Once you’ve lost interest and move on to other antics the real issues will still remain.

Digg, if you want to retain the attention of anyone who has a intelligence level higher than a bored 7-year-old, I would suggest you section this crap somewhere where we don’t have to be bothered with it.

Posted by mobile phone:
If you listen to the radio at all in palm beach county you will have heard the story of Shawn Anderson vs. Roxys Pub.

The reported story is that Shawn Anderson was kicked out of Roxys for having Grillz. He accused Roxys of discriminating against people of color. John (owner) stated that grillz are against the dress code and people not complying with the dress code are asked to leave.

John then proceeded to put up the “Shawn Anderson Quiz” as well as copies of Shawn’s lengthy criminal record on the roxys pub website.

The website has seen a massive spike in traffic since then. Like they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

I am on hold with bellsouth, and the longer they keep me on hold the longer I am going to rant about them. The trouble started before I even got into work, I started getting reports of “flakey internet” so when I get in and do a quick diagnostic sweep and determine that it was our DSL connection was at fault (as opposed to the shitty DNS service that we get which I can get around) I call bellsouth tech support.

That was 4 hours ago.

The first half an hour was spent with them trying to figure out how to get into our account – even though I gave them our username and phone number. I was then put on hold for 5 minutes while they got someone from billing to take care of us. Billing pulled up my information right away (with the exact same information I gave to tech). They then put me back through to tech and I was on hold for another 20 minutes.

After ever 5 minutes or so, the billing person would pick up the line and apologize for the wait. Finally she said “I keep putting you through to a tech, but they just pick up the phone and don’t say anything and then hang up”. I told her to keep trying and 5 minutes later I was on with a tech.

This tech told me that for them to do anything I had to be directly connected to the DSL modem, not any routers. I asked for a direct number which I could call when I was directly connected and they said that they couldn’t give it to me, but I would have to go through the whole process again.

I hauled a computer to the router and plugged it all in… and then called again and spent another 10 minutes on hold before speaking to another tech. This time she asked me a bunch of (the same) questions before and then told me she had to put me through to a tech.

This is the good part – instead of putting me through to a tech, she put me through to her slightly confused hairdresser.

Once I disconnected with the salon, I had to call back into bellsouth and work my way back through to the tech. Once I finally got through to a tech, they said “we can’t run a line test because you’re having an ‘outage’ – if you still have trouble in 30 minutes call back”.

So apparently we have a couple clowns working on our DSL line, and the only site I can access is my blog… oh well, sucks being them!

At least we have our TVs up

We are in the process of re-doing our office, and are going to hang three 50″ plasmas from a triangular bracket hanging in the center of the office.

After scouring the net for good deals on the Panasonic 50″ plasmas we wanted, we came up with 2 final options.

1. Buy from some online store and get them delivered.
2. Buy from an offer at costco, and pick them up ourselves.

Getting them from costco would mean paying the sales tax, but the deal was better and with the 3% we get off from the corporate card + creditcard they came out to be the same. The kicker was that Costco’s came with a 1-year longer warranty period.

The initial idea was to use my car, but since we weren’t sure that 3 plasmas would fit in it (these things are HUGE) we decided to grab a truck from Home Depot. They only had open flatbed trucks, but the sky was clear and it wouldn’t rain in the 75 minutes it would take to get to costco’s and back. Right?

WRONG!!!

As soon as we got the Plasmas and our other gear loaded up on the back of the truck and got back on I95 the sky clouded up and a storm of biblical proportions headed our way. By the time the rain hit us, the rush-hour traffic had come to a near standstill, and we spent the next 45 minutes crawling along wondering how much of the $5k worth of goodies would survive the rain.

Thankfully, by the time we got back to the office the rain had stopped and other than soaking wet boxes, the plasmas themselves had not been damaged at all. The outside of the boxes were soaked, but no water had seeped through to the inside of the box, and the plasmas themselves were wrapped in 2 layers of plastic. Not bad for having sat on the back of an open truck for 45 minutes in heavy rain.

The moral of this story is: There is a reason why an industry is built around delivering stuff. So will we get the next thing delivered? Probably not, buying stuff at costco is just too fun

A St. Cloud, Minn. woman in the middle of a custody battle is facing an unusual order from the court. A district court investigator is recommending that Christa Burton stop breastfeeding her 15-month-old child, Carter.

I guess in a custody battle everything is game…

Full Story Here

A pack of marlboro’s: $4
A venti Vanilla latte: $3.80
A group of hippies sitting outside starbucks singing songs while consuming products from the two companies that materialize commercialism: Priceless

I just wish I had a camera!

The article says:

The online site has found more than 29,000 registered sex offenders among its 180 million members, it was revealed on Tuesday. Three months ago the site acknowledged that there were 7,000 profiles of sex offenders on its site, but under pressure from legal officials in several US states it has provided a more complete breakdown of its membership.

…

MySpace’s head of security, Hemanshu Nigam, said: “We’re pleased that we’ve successfully identified and removed registered sex offenders from our site and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead.”

In other news 29,000 new accounts were opened with random fake names.

Nice move, MySpace.

Cheney refuses probe into his oriface … it’s going to be a long day

I realize this is a serious issue… but the following paragraph threw me

Drug treatment centers in Dallas say teen “cheese” addicts are now as common as those seeking help for a marijuana addiction. “It is the first drug to have even come close in my experience here,” says Michelle Hemm, director of Phoenix House in Dallas.

Firstly, there is no evidence that marijuana is addictive, and secondly this paragraph makes it sound like kids are lining up outside clinics for help with ‘marijuana addiction’.

Kids doing “cheese” is just the symptom of a much worse problem within the society. Telling kids not to do drugs is about as futile as promoting abstinence.

Americans are stupid

BERLIN (Reuters) – A naked American tourist raised eyebrows when he went for a walk through a German city and told police he thought this was acceptable behavior in Germany.

“We have been having unusually hot weather here lately but, all the same, we can’t have this,” a spokesman for police in the southern city of Nuremberg said Tuesday. “The man said he thought walking around naked was tolerated in Germany.”

Many Germans enjoy nude sunbathing which is allowed in public parks. The 41-year-old was carrying his clothes in a bag when police stopped him Monday evening after complaints from pedestrians.

The tourist was not under the influence of drugs, said police. They made him get dressed and pay a 200 euro ($269) deposit pending his investigation for indecent behavior.

ahhh, sweet stereotypes!

Reuters writes story about guy who films himself skiing down an escalator and then posts it on Youtube.

At T-4 you would think I would have better things to do… well, I pulled an all nighter last night and am about to take apart my desk.

Today is moving out day…

I too am highly disturbed by this video…

thanks ub

The best car show ever… bbc put some of them up on youtube… This series they try to destroy a toyota pickup truck. Includes parking it on top of a 25 story building and then demolishing the building underneath it. Good watch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hzRLG8dA-E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IzCg-HGgiw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwYbLThZbrw

I recently tried to find any Top Gear DVDs in region 1 but couldn’t find anything. I just wish that BBC would create a channel just for top gear so that we can subscribe just to that. Kudos anyway!

Fire extinguisher called for in lethal injections

Tennessee’s procedure manual for executing prisoners is a jumble of conflicting instructions that mixes new lethal injection instructions with those for the old electric chair, an Associated Press review found.

Before a lethal injection, the 100-page “Manual of Execution” instructs prison officials to begin by shaving the condemned prisoner’s head — as if preparing him for electrocution. They would also need a fire extinguisher nearby, it says.

Gov. Phil Bredesen suspended four executions last week, calling the document a “cut-and-paste job” that needs significant revision. He set a May 2 deadline for the overhaul.

The mistakes were added last summer when Tennessee decided to update the manual after a death row inmate asked to be electrocuted, Correction Commissioner George Little said. The state’s last execution took place in June, before the manual was revised.

George Little justified the manual by explaining that they copied the text from wikipedia.