Coolness

I just got a pretty cool call. I finally sent that thank you letter I’ve been meaning to send to TD bank about their talking bank machines. They called to thank me for sending the letter! Not only that, but they told me that if I had any further feedback about the machines, I have the number of the person who did a lot of the work for these suckers to be put in place. So if anyone uses them and notices something, let me know and I’ll let them know.

Plus, she said she wanted to keep my number and contact me from time to time, I guess if they implement something new or whatever.

Isn’t that cool? One little letter, and I got their attention! They’re about as happy to have gotten the letter as I was when I found out the machines talked. I love making other people happy, and maybe, just maybe, helping to make things better.

Saving Some People Some Time

Wow! I never know what people are going to choose to search for and come to our site. Ever since I wrote the post about the herbal king, we’ve had at least 5 searches for this king, some seeming to wonder if it is a scam. Let me save them some time and say, make that scream, YES!

The offer came in a spam, it is a scam! Your wife didn’t go tell the herbal king about your inadequacies. Even if this herbal king ends up selling you something, who knows what’s in it?

Now start using your bullshit filter, and your delete key, more liberally on spam. No good can come from responding or buying things from spam! Steve has already yelled about this, I don’t think anything more needs to be said.

Ploughing Down the Stupid

Ok, any way you slice this story, it’s stupid.

At 2:00 a.m., a bunch of people were milling around downtown looking for rides. They started banging on random vehicles asking if they’d give them a drive. Now here’s where it gets confusing. The radio said a woman pounded on the window of a pickup truck which had the snowplough attached and asked for a ride, the driver said no, and then when he tried to move on, she either bent down to tie her shoe or fell in front of the truck’s wheels and was hurt. The paper says almost the same story, minus the plough part.

Either way, why in hell would you bang on random vehicles’ windows? Better still, why would you choose to stand in front of a pickup truck of all things demanding a ride? It’s even more stupid if it’s the truck with the plough! Get out of the way! Strange drunken fools I tell ya.

Sue! Sue! Yes I’m Gonna Sue!

I don’t quite know why this bugs me, but it does. Here’s a quick rundown of a story I just read in the Guelph Mercury.

Old man gets on bus. Bus goes back into traffic before old man is seated, old man falls, breaks a hip, an arm and gets heavily bruised, old man can no longer live on his own due to his injuries, old man dies six months later from prostate cancer, family is suing city for ruining the last few months of his life and allegedly bringing on his death. They were originally suing to pay for medical expenses, but now that he’s dead, they’re suing anyway! Why? I’m not quite sure.

Ok, I agree that it was unfortunate that he fell on the bus. I agree that maybe the driver should have checked that he was seated before taking off. I agree that it’s sad that he had to go into a nursing home at the end. But it! Was! an! accident! I’ve had them take off before I’m seated. You grab the pole and hang on until you can get yourself into a seat. If I fell because I didn’t make it, I wouldn’t think of suing the city. Shit happens!

Hey family of old man. Let me tell you something. Your dear old papa was…old! He could have broken his hip when he slipped on some ice when he went to check the mail. Don’t believe me? That’s what killed my great grandma. You get old, hips break, and that’s pretty devastating. But that is not worth suing over!

And last time I checked, falls didn’t create prostate cancer. The bus didn’t shoot him full of carcinogens, he died from something he probably already had.

Ug greedy money-grubbing pigs piss me off.

Wow, Just…Wow!

I mentioned earlier that it’s getting harder and harder for me to find things in the news that I truly consider weird. Well, that bar is about to be set even higher. Observe.

A man who was found dressed in latex and handcuffs brought a donkey to his room in a Galway city centre hotel, because he was advised “to get out and meet people,” the local court heard last week.

Thomas Aloysius McCarney, with an address in south Galway, was charged with cruelty to animals, lewd and obscene behaviour, and with being a danger to himself when he appeared before the court on Friday. He was also charged with damage to a mini-bar in the room, but this charge was later dropped when the defendant said that it was the donkey who caused that damage. Solicitor for the accused Ms Sharon Fitzhenry said that her client had been through a difficult time lately and that his wife had left him and that his life had become increasingly lonely.

“Mr McCarney has been attending counselling at which he was told that he would be advised to get out and meet people and do interesting things. It was this advice that saw him book into the city centre hotel with a donkey,” she said. She added that Mr McCarney also suffered from a fixation with the Shrek movies and could constantly be heard at work talking to himself saying things like “Isn’t that right, Donkey?”

Supt John McBrearty told the court that Mr McCarney who had signed in as “Mr Shrek” had told hotel staff that the donkey was a family pet and that this was believed by the hotel receptionist who the supt said was “young and hadn’t great English.”

Receptionist Irina Legova said that Mr McCarney had told her that the donkey was a breed of “super rabbit” which he was bringing to a pet fair in the city. The court was told that the donkey went berserk in the middle of the night and ran amok in the hotel corridor, forcing hotel staff to call the gardai.

McCarney was found in the room wearing a latex suit and handcuffs, the key to which the donkey is believed to have swallowed. He was removed to Mill St station after which it is said he was the subject of much mirth among the lads next door in The Galway Arms.

He was fined €2,000 for bringing the donkey to the room under the Unlawful Accommodation of Donkeys Act 1837. Other charges were dropped due to lack of evidence.

You can find the original story as well as updated information about what these people are up to now as it becomes available here.

Wouldn’t You Give A Hand To A Friend?

Here’s an update on Ahmed Rashed, the guy who stole a human hand and gave it to a stripper friend of his as a gift. He has been sentenced to 15 months of probation and fined $5000. If he breaches the terms of his sentence, he could wind up spending up to 5 years in prison.

Linda Kay, the dancer who was keeping the hand which she had apparently named Freddy in a jar in her home, was charged with unlawful disposal of human remains and enrolled in a counseling program. If she follows the program for a year, she will be let off with no criminal record.

Even with all of this new information, I still have no idea what the hell is going on here. It’s hard for me to find truly weird news anymore since I’ve seen so much of it over the years, but this definitely qualifies.

Fume Fume Rage Rage Spit Spit Sleep!

Ok, I think my lack of sleep has given me a little unexpected venom, which has unfortunately found its mark on three programs that pissed me off today in quick succession.

Lets’ start with that stupid HP Software update thing. It comes up about once a month, but it doesn’t just come up, it comes up singing. This wouldn’t bug me, except it chooses to come up singing between midnight and 2 in the morning. So if I leave my computer on, I get an ugly wake-up call. Then, when I choose to acknowledge it, there’s usually no update! In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever actually gotten an update through that blasted thing. Piss off! If you must start singing in the middle of the night, make it for a good reason.

That’s mild compared to the rage caused by the stupidity of Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall. It’s very good. IT’s so good that sometimes it starts whining in the middle of an install over every detail that the program wants to do. I authorize a program, and then when it does something slightly different, there the firewall is again, screaming screaming screaming! it’s so good that I think I don’t spend the time I should reading the dialogs because I have to approve so many of them. Plus, these pauses don’t sit well with some programs who want to get their stuff done now now now and don’t want to wait for me to aprove them every step of the way! How many MSN and Winamp installs have I buggered up because of Kerio?

And then there’s the stupid web-filtering. Sometimes, I have to knock down the whole firewall just to visit a site that is harmless but it doesn’t like, and try as I might, I can’t convince it to like it. I’m replacing Kerio with something much easier to deal with real soon! Arg!

I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. Some people install it and soon find their computers speechless because it has a battle royale with their screen-reader and the screen-reader doesn’t win.

And the biggest pile of rage goes toJAWS, my screen-reader. Hey folks at Freedom Scientific. Not all of us blinks are dumb as posts and need to be led by the hand. So, when you design an updater, make it give more information than “Please wait while your system is being configured by JAWS.” Click…click…click. How about some percentages? Those clicks mean nothing, as proved when Kerio put a nice stumbling block in front of JAWS, and JAWS kept on clickin’. I could have sat there all day whistling a happy tune if I’d relied on those clicks and gotten exactly nowhere. Seriously guys, everything else in the known universe lets people know how it’s doing as it installs things. Why not join the club. You used to do that.

and, at the end, when it’s time to restart, give me a choice to restart now or later. When I hit escape, the universal cancel command, respect that that is my choice and don’t reboot my computer! Maybe I wanted to save something! Maybe I wanted to turn something off! Maybe, just maybe, I have a clue better than you! Can you read my mind? Nope! Didn’t think so! So stop trying!

Ok, rage over. Until something else pisses me off. Aren’t I pleasant?

Sleep? What’s that?

Really, someone should call me a waaambulance for this post. but I don’t care.

I can’t sleep. It’s 3 in the morning. I wake up. Ever since I’ve gotten the doggy news, I’ve been lucky if I’ve slept past 4 a.m. For the first couple of nights, I understood why. I was excited. I had a lot of things to remember. But I wrote a list so I *could* get some damn sleep. It’s not working. I’m not thinking about stuff, I just wake up ungodly early and can’t go back to sleep no matter what I do.

Last night, I was really tired and decided to go to bed at 9. I’d been awake sort of since 4:30, I figured it was ok. I lay down, and bang! I was out like a light!

Fast-forward to 3:00 a.m. Boing! Guess who’s awake?

The first thing I do is open the window a little. It’s cold, but sometimes that helps. Not tonight, sparky!

I’d decided last night that, in an attempt to coax myself back to sleep, I’d get out one of the books I got for my birthday and put it on. Hell, I fall asleep when I don’t want to while reading books, why couldn’t I use this to my advantage?

Sound that big gameshow buzzer! You lose! You’re wrong! That’s not what your body had planned.

I looked at the two books. One was by Lewis Black, and I was sure that if I listened to him long enough, it would rev me up. So I chose the other book. The narrator’s voice sounded soothing, I thought it would put me out. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I grabbed the book, and put the first CD in my stereo! It refused to play! What the hell? Is my stereo now broken? The tape works, the radio works, but now the goddamn CD player won’t work! Damn damn damn it!

I got out my diskman and settled back in. I figured I’d have lots of battery power. AT least the book wasn’t broken, I was worried I’d somehow scratched the CD on my trip to Ottawa.

The book, called “The Devil Wears Prada”, was all about this girl’s job as this superbitch’s personal assistant. If I wanted a book to put me out, this wasn’t it. I don’t know how the author can make me hate this girl’s boss so fast, but she succeeded.

I power through the first CD. Awake! I put in the second CD. I’m almost done it when my diskman makes that buzzzz click noise it does when it’s out of juice! Gaaaaa! Looking at the diskman, wanting to scream, I see the AC jack. AC!

I grab the AC adaptor and try to plug it into the outlet at the foot of my bed. It has to share it with an extension chord plug, which it just won’t do, the damn thing is so big! Seriously, must adaptor boxes be so goddamn large? Explain to me why it’s necessary to make them so fucking huge? It can’t be the voltage this thing has to carry, hell, the damn thing is powered by two double A’s if not by AC. People people people!

I go over to the power bar by my computer, thinking maybe I can still reach the bed if I do this. I have to unplug my cell phone charger just to fit the fucking box in, even though there are several free slots. I reach the bed, I finish the CD. It is now 5:48 a.m. am I going to get any goddamn sleep?

What is my body trying to do, curse this guide dog thing into not even being a possibility? If I’m worn out *before* I go, I won’t make it through a month of what seems like boot camp! I can’t live on fucked up sleep for that long, it’s physically not safe to do, I’ve learned this before, I don’t need a refresher!

Anyone got any tips on getting a body to go back to sleep. I’m willing to try anything!

Please don’t let me snap before guide dog school. Please please please! Ok I’m done ranting. Feel free to call the waaambulance now.

Why Can’t all Spam Be This Funny?

Every time I look at this, I start laughing again.

I don’t know why I even read this message. It was in my spam folder, and something about the subject line caught my attention. I figured it was probably a steaming heap of bullshit, but I wanted to read it to make sure. Am I ever glad I did. Oh am I ever.

The subject line was “You have Mail (1 new)”. Because I was curious, I decided to read this little gem. And here’s what it said.

Confidential Messages:

We were contacted by someone you know very well. This person has asked us not to share their identity.

We specialize in helping people with many problems, and are looking forward to helping you. 

It may be embarrassing having a small penis, but it doesn’t have to be this way.  You can disregard this message if you are over 5 inches in length, if not then you have a problem. Not only are you leaving the ladies unsatisfied, you are being laughed at in the locker room too. We get several men with these problems everyday, and we direct them to the “Herbal King”, who has been the king of enlargement for over 10 years.  After you have received help we can release the identity of the person who sent us your information.

I checked, the subject wasn’t ” you have male.” So let me get this straight. If I were a man, and were to believe that this was not a spam, but a legitimate company who wanted to help with penis enlargement, I would have to fall down and hang my head in shame because someone who knew me well enough to know the size of my genetalia informed the Herbal king of my, um, deficiency. Now I’d have to kneal before the herbal king and ask for his services so I could find out who this so-called close friend of mine was and kill…er…have a talk with them about the way they feel about my parts. Yeah, that’s it.

Sometimes spam can be entertaining.