good grief!

this is getting tiresome. our credit card has been compromised again.  i think the last time was last year, and the time before may have been a year or two earlier, then about 5 years previous to that it had been compromised.

i hate bad people. and i think that when you find people who take that information and steal stuff, you should execute them. no jail. just right to extermination. there are too many bad people as it is. and all those bad people have no rights. rosy-glasses and tolerance be damned. those people are not reformable and they just screw the good people over and over. i'm fed up with it.

greedy businesses

i don't quite get this article about it being illegal now, for people to unlock their cell phones for use with a different carrier. cell companies already have the privilege of charging their customers hundreds of dollars if they switch to a different carrier before their contract is up so why this deal with the phone? not that i understand why anyone would do it and it sounds like they would do it before their contract was up. i'm in the dark except it sounds like consumers are getting screwed again. and verizon's heavy hand was one reason i left them when i was able. fuckers. i am quite happy with consumer cellular -- no contract and i can use my phone right at the border. which i could not with verizon. consumer cellular may be geared toward old people, but it's the absolutely best deal in all areas, so why consider anything else?!

losing a love and learning to hate

all right, that does it. i found out the other day that my absolutely favorite listening station has quit.  yes, Groovera, aka FrostByte Groove Lounge, has called it quits. i loved that station -- specifically Low Mercury -- and it didn't have any commercials to interrupt whatever you had going. tim q. quitting, because of personal health, is a tragedy all by itself.

but now, we find out the first class airline tickets we bought for our trip to MYS's wedding has a leg which is messed up. the plane has been downgraded and they moved us three rows back. WTF??? oh sure, it's a computer system that makes the seating decisions and there's nothing they can do and no you can't have any money back.

well, i'm not in the mood. i've lost my music and now my money doesn't mean anything. after this trip i will never fly again. i don't care that it will take longer to get there. slower pace, back to the roots, remember how sweet it used to be. big business can just get along without me. and i totally do not care if they eventually have money problems, and i would help them down the tubes after experiencing their snotty/hateful attitude toward their customers. greedy bastards i can do without.

but i really miss my music.

50 years at the same job

um, well, i just read about a couple of 69-year old prostitutes. they're from amsterdam and have been doing this for 50 years. they seem very salt-of-the-earth which is a good thing to me. strange though ...

second grade??

this is too cute -- and the kid who drew this is in second grade!! for more winners, go here.

look what we can do for you

i can see it now. these space adventurers want to go out and mine for resources they can send back to earth. for the good of humanity? ha! get outta town. for the profit and power and glory, of course. and i can see just exactly what would happen. they send down some stuff from space which carries a teeny little virus which kills us all. yep. republicanism at its best.

google! of course!

have you seen this store-front-lights thing? the e-mail i got it in showed it from 1:14 on and i knew what i was seeing but wasn't sure of the purpose. then i watched it from the beginning and that, plus the end, made it all clear. it was simply a commercial.

but, whoa! what a commercial. way to go, google! (love the colored squares!!)

see the bad guys win

be careful what you eat -- it may be moldy. see this article about food companies who take food which really should be thrown away, and simply trim it up or repackage it and put it out there for purchase. it's called reconditioning.

but the thing which is really worse, to me, is the last paragraph: "The case ended five years later when ABC was ordered to pay damages to the chain because the producers did not make their intentions known, they misrepresented themselves, and they trespassed on company property."

i am so sick of that kind of response. the criminal does something bad, someone investigates or defends himself, and that poor poor misbegotten criminal gets paid lots of money.

this country is messed up.

paper, rock, scissors

it amazes me that we EVER do business with the bad guys (will we never learn?) and in the end it may bring us down.

i mean, they simply do not see things the way we do (neither china nor the middle east) so we need to quit trying to deal with them. 'but they have things we want'. yeah, and that's a big part of the problem, isn't it.

regardless, who was the idiot who decided we should be friends with china? oh wait ... the business community was a strong driving force. uh, huh ... greed is good for us, right?

poor australia -- we now are putting marines on their lands. and they don't want us there, but aren't they being short-sighted if they think that the world over there (china, the middle east, indonesia, and australia/new zealand) can get along peacefully. oh just hell. poor all of us.

bad people are out there

online shopping:

1. change your passwords regularly.
2. don't use ordinary passwords.
3. place orders on a secure connection.
4. never click on links in an e-mail.
5. keep your security up-do-date.
6. keep a copy of your order process.
7. check your credit card statements often.

go here for more info.

bond ... james bond

a tiny floating island for all you dreamers out there.

business doesn't always tell the truth

i know that the kids don't like it if i wash something (clothes) in hot water but when i was growing up, hot water was the way to go.

i found this article the other day which makes the point --

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2050239/How-washing-machines-familys-health-risk-Low-temperatures-mixed-loads-spreading-dangerous-bugs.html

it's always reassuring to be validated.

i haven't been blogging lately -- kind of have lost interest. probably because i've been playing games.

HP Games by WildTangent has been taking up my time. i played a lot of free games and finally decided (since you can't play them anymore after their one or two free times) that i would 'buy' into the whole thing.

there were several choices -- $7 for 50 coins with 12 mth subscription, etc -- but i decided to do the 50 coins for $10 with two mth subscription. after you've fulfilled the number of months, you just keep on paying them until you say stop.  i didn't really want to be tied into a yr if i got bored with it.

so i've been playing a lot -- jewel quest and its permutations -- and occasionally chuzzle deluxe.  jewel quest is just pretty good -- it forces me to think.  and chuzzle is fun.  the games i like are usually 5 coins at a time, so i can have fun for about a dollar. pretty hard to beat that! plus the two times i've e-mailed customer support, they've been great!! a business which tries to help! Zappos is another business i throw money at because they really seem to be wanting to make it right for the customer. plus it's free shipping, coming and going. pretty hard to beat that, too!!!

they always quit making the ones you like

well that sucks. i have a pair of shoes (the ebb tide slide) i wear when it rains -- they're the Mion brand -- but apparently the company is now defunct (i wonder what the story is). a website i was looking at had 5 stars on all the reviews except one, and i love them (because they're widely functional), so what happened? obviously they were popular. crap -- isn't this always the way!

little bitty baby steps

i always wanted to be a ballerina ... and now i can?

we've been blind-sided

well, this is interesting.  if you're in the habit of telling all on facebook, or in your blog, or showing all through pictures or videos, or exposing yourself somehow on some other public 'net place, even ebay, you could be jeopardizing a future job.  the federal trade commission has given 'Social Intelligence Corporation' permission to check applicant names (as well as user names) online, for those employers looking to check on prospective employees. the ftc reasons that the company complies with the Fair Credit Reporting Act even though the information is stored for seven years. yes, you can protest a finding, but by then the job is long-gone.

1984 reigns again.

drive, hover, fly ....

if you're wondering what the car of the future will look like, here's a pix:

oh good grief

i think it's curious that the new-and-improved versions of ms updates are crap. i've got this ms office suite 2010 and it's got that new-fangled 'ribbon' on it rather than the old-fashioned toolbar. horrible. it's for mutton-headed people. you have to click all over the place to find what you need,and it's a time-waster, especially if the old way suited you just fine. i figure these new things are for whiners who want everything handed to them, but it really burns me up that it throws the rest of us to the wolves. 'we're just making it easier and more attractive to you' -- no you're not.

i don't know how far back any of you remember, but the computer we had back in 1995 had an excellent assortment of fonts. nowadays it's mostly crap. i mean, who in the universe needs calibri (which is the default for god's sake), batang, dotum, gungsuh, iskoola pota, leelawadee, nsimsun, shruti, or traditional arabic? get that shit off my computer and give me decent fonts i can use and play with. what good does it do to have a bunch of foreign-sounding fonts that look a lot alike in their milquetoast way?

just more of the business people thinking they know what's best for us, and that makes for a very unimaginative nation of people. not good. not good at all.

it's just wrong

this is typical of the kind of crap that happens anymore in this country: since i lost my hard drive, i had a new one put in and a new ms office set of suites. i've always customized my programs so that the stuff i use most is at my fingertips. i also often go to the explorer tree to find things quickly or refresh my memory about something.

in this new setup, however, the 'tree' is all clogged up with crap that is simply annoying and unimportant to me. and for the first time when i look at 'properties', i can see it is set up to not let me change something. it says i need permission. WTF?!! so i asked my computer guy about it and he said microsoft got tired of people messing things up and blaming them, so they made it so you can't mess things up.

that just totally pisses me off. i've always been able to look at and change things, but overnight i can't. there's something wrong with the idea that a group of people are messing with things so everyone should be closed out. i've seen that attitude before and it's just disgusting. someone is afraid to penalize a few wrong-doers, so they shut something down for everyone. that's chicken. and lazy. and makes all of us into babies that have to be taken care of and protected for our own good.

that's a terrible paradigm and one that's frightening, too. i'm not sure where the following paragraph originally came from, but it certainly seems to accurately spell out the rise and fall of a country like ours:

The first stage moves from bondage to spiritual faith. The second from spiritual faith to great courage. The third stage moves from great courage to liberty. The fourth stage moves from liberty to abundance. The fifth stage moves from abundance to selfishness. The sixth stage moves from selfishness to complacency. The seventh stage moves from complacency to apathy. The eighth stage moves from apathy to moral decay. The ninth stage moves from moral decay to dependence. And the tenth and last stage moves from dependence to bondage.

deliver this where?

Spaceport America, New Mexico. ever been there? ever heard of it? it's a place they're building from the ground up as the facility to launch ordinary (paying) people into space. richard branson is committed to the project, but everyone's wondering if the state's new republican governor will support it like the previous democrat did. the project has run into problems, of course, and i hope that's not how things will always work with this operation. someone needs to continue forward with a space effort and my hat's off to these intrepid visionaries.