I quit!

I've been tobacco-free for forty days now. No dipping, spitless tobacco, snuff, Snus, chew, chaw, or whatever else the hell you want to call it. I didn't use any sort of medication. I didn't take "That Pill" or the 'patches', nor did I chew 'The Gum." I actually have utilized a lot of willpower this time. Not to mention, "The Flu."

I caught that 'bug' that was going around before Thanksgiving 2009. It was a tough one to kick, down in my lungs, and pretty hard to breathe without coughing. And, as I lay there, on my death bed, I started thinking to myself how I'm probably responsible for part of the difficulty I was having in kicking the cold. So thus, that little glimmer of "I should quit smoking" arose in me. The night after Thanksgiving, I smoked the last cigarette that I had in the house, and haven't smoked another since.

With this tobacco thing currently kicked, for over a month now! I've started working on this other idea for me to quit, fast food cheeseburgers.

Yeah, I said that..."I want to quit fast food cheeseburgers." I didn't say, I'm quitting cheeseburgers. What I mean is this, I don't know where that meat came from in that delicious cheeseburger, or for that matter...how many cows are in that piece of meat!

I suppose to clarify, I watched a pretty amazing documentary the other day, "Food Inc." that re-introduces the viewer to the mass-production mechanization that is our modern food marvel. So, one realization I walked away from the film with was that in most every cheeseburger you get from any fast food restaurant will have fragments of beef from at least 1,000 different cattle.

Maybe it's just me, but I'd like to devour only one animal at a time.

I think there are surely more things left to quit.

The Smirker

Wherever there is obfuscation, confoundment, or confuzzalation, the Smirker will be there to add to the confusion.

Firefox fix for right click

I had this problem in the last several days when I did an update of CCcleaner. Somehow, the Yahoo Toolbar for firefox got installed, and I could no longer use the context menus in Firefox.

If you simply go in and uninstall the Yahoo Toolbar from the add-ons in Firefox, this will go away.

At least it did for me!

This facade of congeniality

How much longer can I go on before I drop this veil and just rip off the head of the next person that I speak with? My stomach is turning at the saccharine tone in my voice; I just don't know when it's going to happen, but sooner or later, I'm going to rip into one of these callers and spew their remote innards all over the inside of my imagination.

Cubicle Neighbors

I'm in a box. There are annoying people surrounding me. There are annoying people calling me.

I need a sledgehammer and a handgun.

This is bullshit.

I doubt that mankind was ever meant to sit still in a freaking box all day.

We're Doomed, I tell ya....doomed.

Having worked in IT long enough to realize that it sucks balls, I've evolved a couple of realizations about the whole of humanity as it currently stands. We are a bunch of lazy-asses. Why think for yourself when there's a handy toll-free number that you can call up and pose the dumbest questions that 5 seconds of logical thought on your own could give you the answers you're seeking.
But no, it's not the case...we're lazy. I'll just call this number, and let someone else do my thinking for me!

What a great concept!

Eventually, our society is going to be splintered into two groups. The intelligent people who can think for themselves, and then the hordes of lackadaisical slack-jaws with the barrage of helplessness.

I'm sure that this phenomena has pervaded almost ever strata of our society. So thusly, we're doomed.

How are you doing?

Let's face it, it is one of the most annoying questions in all of the English language. It's way overused, especially in IT, Customer Service, Sales, and other public related occupations. In a day, I quickly lose track of the mindless small talk that ensues as a result of being asked this pointless question. Do you 'really' want to know how I'm doing? Ask me again, I'll punch you in the face. I'm so utterly tired of hearing, "Hey! How are you!" That I could quite literally slit my own throat.
Why is it that our societal response to getting things done in this information rich-age is to kick off the request for action with 'How are you?" Is it polite? Is it congenial? No, it's neither, it's insidious, it's irritating, and it's incredibly inefficient.
As an IT worker, I'd much rather just be given the details of the request, leave me the sanctity of small talk for the girls at the grocery store, or some random person that I meet along the road. If you want me to fix your printer, for godsake, don't ask me how I'm doing because I'd much rather tell you how much I'd like to take your printer out in the parking lot and break it with a sledgehammer.

You bastards!

This is completely ridiculous! I was just writing a blog in this handy little Google gadget, and the page refreshed and all that post gone forever.

Yes, Kenny is dead.

Coughing excessively in public

Why is it that some people who are afflicted with a hacking cough, do nothing to silence it themselves?
All day, in the office, it's from about three cubes over. It's freaking echoing throughout the entire office.

I'm about to go buy the guy some cough drops, cough syrup, and a bottle of whiskey just to shut 'em up.

This is getting ridiculous.

Life in this hell

"Hello, can I help you?" I drone into the phone.

"Who is 'dis?"

"It's support, who's this?"

Dead air.

"Oh well."

10-Watt.

It's been months, maybe a year or more since I've been in the practice of daily writing. Why come here to expound on all things keeping me busy though? No reason at all, truly though. I'm in a lot of contact with working Americans, and I have to say there are some dim bulbs out there in America. The dim are no color, no race, no creed; they are an amorphous mass of zombies pervading our society today.
Can the dim bulbs ever get charged enough to be useful in society? Maybe, maybe not...who knows.

So; I sit and stare into the void. Waiting, for that next phone call. Holding my breath hoping that the dim bulbs of America don't call me into action.

Seriously though, haven't we as a society lost our common sense?

Welcome to inevitibility.

There's a football-sized piece of rock hurtling toward the planet Mars as I sit here and write this little paragraph. It's hard to imagine, but there are groups of people, scientists mind you, that are creaming their shorts in hope that it is going to strike the Red Planet. Yet, it sort of scares the crap out of me.
Here we are on this lush little blue marble, revolving around our little average star, pondering the bigger questions of existence when at any moment we could be snuffed out of existence by one of these rocks from space. It's really high time that it happened. If you put any faith at all in probability, chance, luck, or have any awareness of the vastness of the Universe you might think that any minute, one of the 916 KNOWN near Earth objects that NASA is monitoring might simply drift out of its orbit and smash into our idyllic little corner of the galaxy.

But wait, 916 KNOWN NEAR EARTH OBJECTS??? That's not even a grain of salt in comparison with all of the matter that is in the universe. There could be billions, and billions of these objects on a collision course with our planet at this moment that we haven't yet detected.

It's inevitable that it will happen.

If this rock, 2007 WD5, does hit Mars then it should serve as a warning and a wake-up call to us. It was only a few years ago, a nanosecond of cosmic time that the Shoemaker-Levy comet collided with Jupiter.

So, figure it out....Jupiter, Mars....and Earth is next.

916 KNOWN OBJECTS.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits/

Technology, Freedom, & Choices

Have you ever stopped to consider, where will technology really ever stop?

I was just reading about a terrible crime which sounds like it was inspired by a video game. I'm not going to rant about video games, because I love playing them. I'd be a complete hypocrite if I sat here and denigrated video games for the detriment they do versus their positive aspects. Apparently, somewhere in middle America, two late adolescents beat a young girl to death demonstrating martial arts from a video game on her.

I've read before that the adolescent brain hasn't fully developed into a fully functional decision making machine yet. So, the question is, where does the fault of the parent end and the fault of the perpetrator in such a crime begin. The establishment has chosen to lay the blame at the foot of the perpetrators, rather the adolescents, who beat the 7-year old to death. But, what blame should be placed upon the guardians of those adolescents? They are not of legal age, they were drinking, and apparently unattended by someone who could check their behavior.

I, much like you, was a teenager once. I know I made my share of terrible descisions. Heck, I made some terrible decisions even into my adult life. Yet, I always had the tools necessary to made good choices where another person's life, personal belongings, close personal ties, and basically where the "Ten Commandments" are concerned. But, in the case above, it makes you wonder who was really responsible for the outcome of this terrible situation.

You have the creator of the video game. But, blaming them is the wrong choice. Video games offer a great diversion to people who need an occasional escape. They're an artistic form created by exceptionally talented people. In some ways, no different than some of the more risque painters of the Renaissance era whose works were contrary to the social mores of the day.

You have the kids. They had very limited decision making skills. Their concepts of the durability of the human body is likely marred by their experiences with video games, movies, television, and their chance exposure to a well-informed health class in the educational system. Kids these days are surrounded by images of indestructibles. Figures who take damage after damage and prevail, characters who die and are immediately reborn, digitized moments of imagined lives with unlimited immortality.

Then, there are the guardians. Who was responsible to see that these adolescents, more so, that the seven-year old girl was being protected. Those guardians, who put that Pandora's Box of technology into the hands of the brains that were still forming, minds whose basic framework for decision-making was still being connected.

At one point in life, you start to see the wisdom behind some of the choices that the establishment makes to protect the population as a whole.

Our freedoms we experience are fleeting, while technology is expanding. If the balance soon does not reveal itself, if we don't take the responsibility for our freedoms, technology will eventually outstrip those freedoms. We shackle ourselves to machines daily, whether it is a television, a computer, a video game system, an mp3 player, or a cell phone, our interconnected, over-stimulated world hasn't got the ability any longer to make the basic choices to exist.

That seems to be a huge problem looming on the horizon for the human race.


Read the story about the Teens here..

Flotsam and jetsam

I've closed yet another chapter in this myriad of experience called life. Yet another move to a new location. It's a much smaller place that required me to look at all of the flotsam that I've accumulated in the last 5 years. It's something that all of us should do at one time or another. I mean, every day you acquire some new possession, whether it's something as simple as a piece of mail, a card, a CD, a stick of deodorant, or an iPod. The constant barrage of capitalism is sometimes overwhelming and you have to consider whether you really need 'more stuff'.
Things I had to get rid of included a dining room table, a telescope, a pile of my kids toys that he's either too big to play with or simply doesn't need anymore, clothes, books, belts, and some old chairs. There's probably a lot of things that I've left out, but I imagine that the things I've neglected to include were likely just meaningless junk that I really had no use for.

"There's going to be a lot of things in this world that you're going to have no use for. But when you get blue, and you've lost all your dreams, there's nothing like a campfire and a can of beans." --Tom Waits "The Black Rider"

It seems we are truly unique among the creatures of this planet. We acquire more pointless baggage than any other organism on the planet. We're the only thing on this rock that actually 'hoards' other animals. It's puzzling when you consider it. It begs the question of 'Why?".

I'm constantly drawn back to a statment from the film "Fight Club" and I know it's from other places as well.

"The things you own, eventually own you."

It's so true, because you acquire so much that you have a hard time letting it go. Soon, it becomes you, your width, your breadth, the encapsulation of your human experience. One day, when you're gone, all that is left is a pile of possessions that those you once loved and love you have to find new homes, new uses, or to ascribe new meanings to.

I know this fear intimately, for I am the child of individuals who are reaching their final days. They have acquired significant material wealth and I, along with my brother, will be responsible for discovering a means for their material that they leave behind when they depart this consciousness.

Do the things that they own, own them? Yes, in a manner of speaking, for they are tied so closely to the items that they have acquired that they can not move easily throughout their home. Is there value, yes, there are many things of value in the great stores of history they have acquired. But, to whom does it provide worth? No one at the moment.

I've encouraged them to dispose of as much of the flotsam that they have acquired so they can enjoy themselves in these latter years, but they are happy owning and being owned by their acquisitions. Yet, I have great trepidation for the future for what is to come when my parents are no longer around to own these things they have acquired. I fear that so much of it will mean too much to me and my brother. Will we have the strength and piece of mind to part with so many items that our parents devoted themselves to acquiring? Will the allure of assuming ownership of all of their material overcome our individual lack of material? It remains to be seen. I hope that it is many years to the resolution of the questions I have about what will become of that, yet it is likely nearer than I wish.

Meanwhile, here I am in a smaller apartment, basically 2 rooms, a closet, and a bathroom, with a meager kitchen. But, it is enough for a single man with few attachments.

Living with chaos theory.

I'm just making it up as I go along. Isn't that what most of are doing on this tiny blue planet today? We make those connections which later might be hurtful, helpful, or they simply fade away. It's all about cultivation for longevity with friendships, or any other of the connections we make. Whether those connections are business or personal.

The choices we sometimes make, as we are making things up are the mortar and pestle which grind us up into new creatures. The trials by fire, recombinations, and general discombobulations that don't make sense. The random thoughts like this one about the trout and upstream swimming.

What's the point of all of it? If we're just making this stuff up. Are we handed a script, or do we write our own lines. Even the few of us who do plan out their lives, are usually dismayed when they discover that their plans have been revised.

Maybe life is the embodiment of chaos theory. Those few quiet moments we find to ourselves, the tiny windows of order.

"Do Unto Others."

The golden rule. We should all try to live by it. But, what does it really mean?
"Do unto others, as you'd have them do unto you."

Does the inverse of that rule apply? If someone is crude or rude, do you have the right to be crude to them in exchange? I feel that it does. The scientists and mathematicians have long postulated that all forces have their inverse. If a rock is still and another rock strikes it, then it will move in response. There are billions of correllations in nature which prove the concept of reciprocation. Yet, in our ordinary daily lives, do our actions have their reciprocations in positive and negative consequence. I feel that they do.

What do you think?

Is it escalation to be crude to someone in return who has proven themselves to be crude to you? Or does another of the Christian precepts come into play, that of turning the other cheek? Isn't it a contradiction which sets the devout follower of these rules to be beaten down by life on a constant basis. Shouldn't there be a response for crudity, and rude behavior which is enacted by man upon man?