Is Something Out to Get Me?

Does anyone remember the myth about the fates? This is the way I remember it. They are 3 stone-faced old women who sit on a mountain knitting a quilt. Each thread represents someone’s life. If they cut a thread, that person dies. If the fates really exist, one is bent on cutting my thread, and another one is having a tug of war with her over the scissors.

Here’s why I say that. I have been almost hit by a car 4 times in the last two weeks. Once, it happened as I walked through a parking lot. Once it happened when the walk sign was up at a busy traffic light, one of the ones that chirps for us blind people to tell us it’s time to go. Once some moron decided to not look where he was driving and just plough out of a driveway towards the street. And the last time, I almost got creamed by a giant truck. This is not the usual for me. I swear someone really wants me to die by getting me hit by an automobile of some kind.

And that’s not all. I went to get money out of a bank machine. As I was finishing up, I heard, “Could ya spare a little change? I’m looking for a job with no success.” Since I have no change, I sheepishly say no and leave the bank. As I do, I think, “Do you realize how close you came to being mugged? Here you are getting money out of a bank machine and someone’s begging for change.”

All I can think is I must have a reason to be here because so many times I came close to meeting some kind of unfortunate fate, and all those times I’ve been rescued. Or, if there are a bunch of unseen beings up there controlling things, one of them is trying to scare me, or the one chosen to do me in is super-incompetent at it.

I’m going to Ottawa tomorrow. Hopefully I make it back ok, with only more adventures to talk about. I just hope these are the good kind.

I Hope He Can Hear Me Say Duh

Apple sued over overly loud iPod

I shouldn’t be surprised about this, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be annoyed, and I am.

Let’s forget for a moment that this lawsuit is completely stupid and baseless, which it certainly should be to anybody who takes 30 seconds to think about it. I mean for Christ’s sake, Apple tells you not to turn the things up too loud or keep listening to them if your ears start ringing right in the books that come with them, which should, in a perfect world, be enough for this suit to be tossed out before it makes it out the door of the lawyer’s office. But since we don’t live in a perfect world, there’s a chance, albeit a small one, that this goof might actually win and maybe even get some money out of it.

But that’s not even my biggest problem. What I really want to know is what ever happened to personal responsibility and good old common sense? And where do logic and reasoning come into play here? Seriously, think about it for a second. Maybe you use an iPod or something similar. Lots of people do, and every one of those people has to use some sort of headset. I’d like to think that most if not all of you would then be well aware of what happens when you turn up the volume on something. But obviously not everyone is, so here’s a tip for you if you are in fact smart enough to read. If not, get a big person to help you out here. When the volume goes up, the sound gets louder. And when the sound gets louder, you can hear it better. But sometimes the sound can get too loud, and you can hear it too well. And you’re not gonna believe this, but when you cram a fucking speaker into your head, it doesn’t take much for that to happen. that means that if you like to hear things, it’s your job to make sure that this doesn’t happen and that you try to keep things to a *reasonable* level, even if you really like the song. And if all of this is too much for you, that’s not Apple’s fault.

By the way, if I can hear what you’re listening to and sing along from 27 feet away from you over a crowd of people, it’s probably a pretty safe bet that we’re far past reasonable levels and it might be time to cut things down a little.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that what you do to your own body of your own free will doesn’t suddenly become somebody else’s monitary responsibility when things don’t turn out the way you want them to. Well that and do we really need to keep explaining the same fundamental concepts every time we change the look of something? Hearing loss has happened the same way from the caveman to the Walkman and now to the iPod. The only thing that’s changed is the means. Why do we need warning labels and lawsuits to help us figure that out?

Ads? Make Sense? Na! Never!

Man. I need to just tune out advertising. I should have a long time ago. But now it’s just getting ridiculous. It’s like a bunch of people just threw some words on a dart board and made their commercial slogans from whichever words got nailed.

Let’s take a commercial that I was half paying attention to. These are its exact words. “How do you know if food is good? Simple! It’s blue!”

Uh, has anyone eaten blue food? And survived? You tell me if it’s good. I found out that it was the President’s Choice Blue Menu, but when you’re not really paying attention, you just wanna hurl! Make that into a radio ad, and you’d be dooming your product. You think they wouldn’t do that? I remember a certain commercial for a cold medication that, on the TV, consisted of a violin song and some words on the screen spelled the way they would sound if you had a cold. So, the ad geniuses just took the violin song and threw it on the radio. Great ad campaigne.

Here’s another one that makes my head spin in complete confusion. “Lay’s. Get your smile on.” Get your smile on? It’s a bag of chips. Ya eat ’em, you’re done. I keep getting visions of either this deranged chip-lover eating a ton of chips with this maniacal grin on his face, or the advertisers didn’t think “get your gut on” was a good slogan. Come on, Lay’s, get over yourselves.

And here’s more of a trend in ads rather than a specific ad that bugs me. I’ve seen a lot of junk food ads that try and make you feel better about eating whatever fat-laiden pile of whatever they’re selling. “Now you can eat twice as much because we’ve cut the fat in half!” And then you will have bought twice as much and be just where ya were before we cut the fat in half, and with less money, you bunch of gluttonous pigs you, ha ha ha ha ha. Seriously, we wonder why we have a big obesity problem. We must have one if a big selling point on a food is, “Now you can eat more of it!”

All I can think when I see where advertising is going is, wow, it is true that our collective IQ is going down. Soon, the ads will consist of a bunch of teletubbies running around going goo goo ga ga, followed by the company’s logo. And it’ll work!

Breaking News! Some Old News!

Something came on the news the other day that caught my attention. It was a news report on a new, supposedly scary virus called the Kama Sutra worm among other names. When I say they made us feel we should be scared, we’re talking doom and gloom forecasts. The very animated reporter was claiming that droves of people were going to pay the price for an accidental click that was going to dump a horrible virus on their computer. And what was so scary and earth-shattering about this virus? Honestly, I don’t know, except it was the media’s chosen virus to use to strike fear into people. I’ll give them one thing. It does do ugly things to your files. But scary? I don’t think so.

Let me explain. The virus only comes by email. It doesn’t try to crawl through open ports. When it comes by email, it doesn’t try to exploit a windows flaw to open on its own. It doesn’t con you into opening the attachment by telling you it’s a message from your ISP’s tech support team and this file is one of the good guys. It doesn’t even use the trick of making the naive think the attachment is a safe file like .txt or .mp3 but put another extension behind that one that is the real extension. No no no. The messages crafted by this virus practically scream suspicious to me. Don’t believe me? Have a look for yourself. Here is a sample of the beautiful subjects and bodies that this worm is capable of creating.

*Hot Movie*
A Great Video
eBook.pdf
Fw:
Fw: DSC-00465.jpg
Fw: Funny 🙂
Fw: Picturs
Fw: Real show
Fw: SeX.mpg
Fw: Sexy
Fwd: Crazy illegal Sex!
Fwd: image.jpg
Fwd: Photo
give me a kiss
Miss Lebanon 2006
My photos
Part 1 of 6 Video clipe
Photos
Re:
Re: Sex Video
School girl fantasies gone bad
the file
Word file

Message bodies:

—– forwarded message —–
>> forwarded message
bye
Fuckin Kama Sutra pics
forwarded message attached.
hello,
hi
Hi. I send the file. bye.
Hot XXX Yahoo Groups
how are you?
i attached the details.
i just any one see my photos.
i send the details
i send the details.
i send the file.
It’s Free 🙂
Note: forwarded message attached.
OK ?
Please see the file.
ready to be F**KED 😉
Thank you
The Best Videoclip Ever
VIDEOS! FREE! (US$ 0,00)
What?
You Must View This Videoclip!

Now, seriously. Try and explain to me how anyone opening a file attached to one of those emails is accidentally clicking on the file. If you received any of those combos, given that you’ve probably seen a million of those in spam you receive daily, would your first reaction, without any thought, be, “Oh wow! I must open this right now!” Click clickedy click click? Even if you haven’t seen spam in your lifetime, and if you haven’t, I’m jealous, wouldn’t you wonder why your friend Dave or Uncle John was writing like an extremely formal non-English speaker? Wouldn’t you think twice when the computer said, “now chester, are you sure you want to open this?” Wouldn’t that give you time to go, “Hmm. Well that message looked weird. Maybe I should hold back a bit.” If you wanted to rip the attachment open without a second thought, I second the advice of that fictional tech support lady in that email we’ve all seen a million times. “Ok, put your computer back in its box, take it back to the store, and tell them you’re too stupid to own a computer.” I mean, think about it. Half of those subject lines were trying to convince you you were going to get free porn, and half of those bodies looked like they were written by ESL students.

And here’s another reason why anyone who manages to infect their computer with this worm is a moron. There has been protection for this worm available from most antivirus packages for over two weeks leading up to the supposed black day when it would descend upon our word files, zip files and other treasured files and eat them like a pack of ravenous vultures. Hey chief. Wake up. Smell the coffee. If you’re on the internet, you need antivirus software. This is a given. If you just bought your computer, I feel somewhat bad for ;you, but where have you been before buying your computer? Wouldn’t you ask whoever you bought it from where to go to get something to keep you from getting viruses? Any vendor of computers is irresponsible not to sell you antivirus software with your computer.

Another part of the news report that got me was when Chirpy the reporter turned to her interview subject that was supposed to give her credibility. He piped up and said that this worm was sprouting a new form of terrorism because now everybody has to be afraid for every day of the month, wondering if they had the virus lying dormant, waiting to strike. Hey Imbecile, most viruses have set dates and times when they unleash their payloads. If that’s terrorism, I have the perfect anti-terror weapon. Antivirus software. Get some, shut up, chill out.

So, after all that, tell me why the media has to start screaming like Chicken Little over this. If this virus is such a big deal, shouldn’t we have seen a complete media panic when Bagle, Netsky and Sobig broke out? Those were far more threatening than this, yet I don’t think I heard a thing about them on the news. If I did, it was a little wee five-second report.

I find this to be a problem with the media in general. They take non or close to non-issues, or subjects where nobody has a real answer, *cough* bird flu *cough*, and work people into a panic with them, and then, when there is a reason to panic, they sweep those issues under the rug. “We don’t want to cause mayhem,” they say.

It makes me sad to see their crap working on my parents. They sent me a frantic email asking if it was safe to even send emails because of this horrible worm that, in their words, was scary and even the TV said they should be worried. I don’t think my parents are stupid. They grew up in an era when the news was perhaps more believable. Now, they’re being taken for a ride. Please, everybody, think for yourselves! If the media wouldn’t try to think for us, and people wouldn’t let the media succeed, fear-mongering like this wouldn’t sell.

But Blog-spammers…suck a wang!

This piss piss pisses me off. First we got spam, then we got spim, and now we have what..splogs? I dunno what they call it, but you know what they say about a rose by any other name…except this is shit instead of a rose. What these useless bottom-feeding whores do is send their mindless zombi bots to blogs, scrawl “come see my pile of shit so I can fill with cash that I leeched from somewhere” comments and then wait for some unsuspecting sucker to click and get their computer filled with who knows what spyware/viruses/all manner of crap.

Ok, spammers piss me off enough. They clogged my university email account so badly that I have set it adrift. They made my parents’ internet experience a misery, granted they brought some of that on themselves, but still. And, they’ve made it harder for blinks to sign up for yahoo and hotmail accounts, join forums, and do pretty much anything that involves an email account because of those fucking blasted son of a bitch goddamn piece of shit graphical word verification thingies. If you can manage to sign up for an email address, some people may never get your emails because their anti-spam solution uses a method that involves, get ready for it boys and girls, fucking blasted son of a bitch goddamn piece of shit graphical word verification thingies. Can you feel the rage? And now, because of these stupid zombi bots, comment boards on blogs are starting to use the, come on guys, you know the drill, fucking blasted son of a bitch goddamn piece of shit graphical word verification thingies!

To the morons who think they’ve found the perfect gold mine by doing this shit, I say, You assholes are ruining the internet on so many levels. You’re filling it with useless crap and who knows what malware, you’re making it so that even little comment boards have to install security measures to keep this shit away, and you’re taking all the fun out of everything! Piss off! And to the equally moronic souls who buy things from these scumbags, I say, you numbnutses are contributing to the steady destruction of what used to be completely cool. If you’d just stop, the other half of the problem would magically dissolve into nothingness. You can piss off too!

I Bet He Drinks STD

So we stumbled over this site in a Sales class when trying to find easy ways to come up with company slogans without having to actually think of them. You go to this cool site and you type in your name in the box and click “sloganize”. It will then come up with a slogan (usually stolen from another company) and insert your name in it to make it your own. Some aren’t too good and wont’ make sense but if you keep clicking the button you’ll get more of them. Unfortunately it only displays one at a time. The best slogan for my name was probably “Matt really satisfies” followed up by “Matt Not Included” and “I can’t Believe It’s Not Matt.”

So we got bored of that after a while and started to search other terms.

STD – I Bet He Drinks STD
Death – Death. The Way Your Mom Used To Do It
The Clap – Give That Man The Clap
Chlamydia – Wait ’till We Get our Chlamydia on you.

Go give it a shot. it’s fun.

Pointless Bitchy Whining Of The Day

So as I said in my earlier post, one of the keys to blogging for me is to kill boredome. So this will do that for me and inflict it for you as I’m basically just going to whine like a little bitch with a skinned knee.

So I had an unpleasant laundry incident today. I was given the day off from class as my only one for the day was cancelled so I figured I would do my laundry to which I had tons. Now normally I do it on the weekend which seems to be the same time that everyone else in our building does it so it’s impossible to get a machine and you get the lovely people that will throw your stuff on the ground if you’re not there the second the buzzer goes. But today I walked in and it was empty (being a Wednesday afternoon I shouldn’t be surprised) so I thought I was in for a good day. I got 3 machines to myself which was going to certainly shorten the ammount of time I was gonna have to spend there. So I put it all through and then put it all in the dryers.
I went back to my appartment to wait and went back down to empty my 3 dryers. Still no one around. Awesome. No forced small talk and no guilt about using 3 machines. Not that that was a problem. There were like 5 more empty ones. I took all my stuff out of the first two with no problems and in unloading the third one I noticed that half the stuff was still wet. Not damp. Wet. So whatever. it’s piece of shit public machines – it’s not surprising. So I spent another 1.50 to put it through again and took the other stuff back to my room.
So I went back again and it was STILL wet. Not as bad. But still. So obviously I figured I’m not gonna pay again for it and took it back to my room and hung it up – but damn that pisses me off – especially when you’re paying out the ass to use it.
That’s it. told you it was pointless. Ha! That’s 5 minutes of your life you’re never getting back.

Steve. You Bitch

Fuck You Steve. Fuck you alot.

Seven Things I’d Like To Do Before I Die
1. 2012 London Olympic Games
2. See the Leafs win a Cup (might be the most unlikely on my list)
3. Attend a WM (had tickets to 18 but had to pass them off cuz of something I couldn’t get out of)
4. Visit NYC
5. work on the FAN590
6. Meet Justin Sane
7. Kick Steve in the stones

Seven Thing I Can’t Do
1. See the Leafs winning a cup in my leaftime.
2. stand Emo kids.
3. remember to update this page on a regular basis (luckily there are 2 talented people still doing it)
4. get too close to vomit. it creates a larger vomit problem
5. Believe it’s not butter.
6. stop ’till i get enough
7. wait to be king.

Seven Things I Like About Bloggin
1. Well with this blog in particular I can go months at a time without posting and it magically still gets updated. lol
2. it’s a place for those of us not talented enough to get writing jobs a place to still spout our worthless opinions.
3. Hate mail
4. Cures boredome
5. Somehow this has survived about 3 years now.
6. Ability to go back and see what was happening in the past.
7. It’s free!

Seven Things I Say Alot
1. No worries
2. Later dayzzzzz (don’t ask lol)
3. Steve sucks
4. Fuck Steve
5. Steve’s an ass
6. Steve the ass shoe
7. more random steve bashing

Seven Books I’m a Fan Of (this may be hard to fill)
1. Stupid White Men
2. Dude. Where’s My Country?
3. House Of Bush – House Of Saud
4. Lord Of The Flies (say what you want – a classic)
5. Go Dog Go
6. the Boy On Defense
7. 100 Reasons to hate Steve (Volume 1)

Seven Movies I Like Enough to Watch Over and Over
1. Clerks
2. Mallrats
3. Chasing Amy
4. Dogma
5. Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back
6. Clerks 2 (I assume. will know soon enough)
7. Robin Hood – Men In Tights

Seven People I Will Make Do this
I refuse to inflict this upon anyone else.

Guess that’s it. Once again. Fuck Steve.