As I get older, I find that I am less forgiving. Just now, reading over a friends status update, I noticed that someone called the President of the United States, “Odumba.” I know that passion tends to cloud judgment, but it pains me to see people this violently uncouth. Passion without understanding is a dangerous thing… If you can’t argue your position intelligently and without resorting to childish name calling, you really shouldn’t display your lack of intelligence for the world to see.
I’m not a democrat, nor a republican… and even though there were plenty of opportunities to call the former two presidents any number of names, I didn’t simply because there were better ways of displaying my frustration with their policies and missteps than by calling them names, including word play on the dumb.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but GW2 flew a F-102A… ever seen the inside of this aircraft? You can’t be dumb and fly a jet. If you meant that he made some questionable decisions based on his advisory group’s intel? Yeah… sure… but calling the sitting president of the United States names doesn’t sit well with me even if I disagree with his politics.
I consider myself a comparatively smart guy and I couldn’t fly a jet like GW2 did, mostly because my grasp of avionics is suspect at best. I just think that the former and current Presidents of the US deserves a modicum of respect… at least the amount of respect necessary to avoid calling them childish names. I’m a firm believer in taking the higher road… and while I enjoy making fun of people, probably more than most do, I still consider it bad form to call people names when I am trying to argue politics.
One of the most aggravating things about being a private contractor, or owning your own business, is dealing with clients who tend to put your invoices on ice. Over the last six or seven years, I’ve had to put up with the usual set of excuses and promises clients make about their outstanding invoices.
I can’t begin to count the number of times clients have told me, “It’s in the mail!” only to discover, weeks later, that the client did NOT in fact put your check in the mail. It’s aggravating for a number of reasons the least of which is that your client is LYING to you. It throws off accounting, makes you have to scramble to cover third-party contract invoices, and is just generally stressful.
In the past I’ve toyed with the idea of penalizing my clients who do not deliver on their promises, but being a private contractor means having to cut people A GREAT DEAL of slack because you want their business. For 2012, I made the decision to completely do away with paper of any kind in my business practices.
What this means is that aside from saving a few trees, my clients can no longer write me a check. All payments must be submitted electronically. If the payment doesn’t show up on the date it is due, I put a hold on the clients project, or take it down from my servers for failure to pay.
Now I am sure some of my clients will be unwilling to adhere to the new practices, but in those cases, they are clients I am willing to lose. On December 28th, all my clients will receive an email that informs them of the new business practices. They’ll be required to log in to the secure area of my website and digitally sign a document saying the understand and accept the new terms. If they don’t, they will receive an email the following week explaining that I’ve decided to void our contract (if any is currently in place), and that they can download their files from the server over the next 72 hours, after that time the files will be archived on CD/DVD and be sent via postal mail.
It may sound crazy, but ultimately I’ll be a lot happier and a lot more flush with capital.
A quick note on the whole occupy movement:
If a bunch of people with arguably lower than average IQ were camped out on your property, non-violent or not, how long would you tolerate it before you started macing the morons? Protest? Sure… within reason and within a reasonable time frame.. but any protest longer than say 72 hours is no longer a protest, but an attempt to FORCE authorities into actively removing them physically.
One of the articles covering the occupy UC Davis situation had this tidbit:
“”I had my arms around my girlfriend. I just kissed her on the forehead and then he sprayed us,” he said. “Immediately we were blinded. … He just sprayed us again and again and we were completely powerless to do anything.”
Here is an idea.. you COULD have walked away when they asked you to leave… course, that means having to think rationally rather than emotionally. Most of these idiots are wasting their time.
Here’s the thing… What caused the pepper spray incident in the first place? Did the campus police simply walk up to random people and spray them? No. The people were asked numerous times to vacate their tent city. They refused. They collectively ignored the requests from lawfully appointed representatives of the property to disperse. They were warned that they would be arrested and steps would be taken to remove them physically, again they ignored the requests. Any REASONABLE person would see that there was an escalation of their methods to end the protest. The low IQ protesters ignored all signs that bodily injury was possible. Was the campus police reaction warranted? It is arguable since I wasn’t there and the only media reports seem to ask people who are associated with the protest. A reasonable person doesn’t expect to be maced obviously, but a reasonable person can be expected to follow the law as well as those trying to keep it.
I am all for peaceful assembly. What I am against is a military occupation of property. I think it really all boils down to common sense. These idiots are no better than the facists campus police who used mace to deal with peaceful protesters (though again, seeing video I can see quite a few protesters who were ANYTHING but peaceful).
I’m pretty liberal… but i just think there are more constructive ways to change the system. Most of these geniuses staging protests would be much better off using that energy and passion to get involved in government and change it from the inside than sitting with a bunch of slackers wishing things were different.
I’m pretty confused… when the whole same sex marriage stuff was happening across the nation… so many devout (fanatical) christian talking heads were up in arms about preserving the sanctity of marriage… yet, Kim Kardashian, a buffalo-assed media whore, is married for 72 days, making the institution of marriage a punchline to her reality show joke, and NOT ONE of those devout christian pundits calls a press conference to denounce her sham marriage. It really shows how hypocritical most of these christian blowhards really are…
I know that a lot of women need to feel beautiful. I know that a lot of women believe that plastic surgery is the best way to feel beautiful.
I also know that any woman who subjects herself to plastic surgery has bigger problems than getting older or fatter. When I see a woman over 40, I often find that the most beautiful of them have not had any surgery or augmentation.
Very often, when I see a woman over 40 who has had plastic surgery I see desperation not youth. It gives me the screaming heevie skeevies. It has become the standard belief, mostly through celebrity reinvention, that plastic surgery is normal and necessary. In my humble opinion though, plastic surgery should only be the last resort for the heinously maimed…I figure if you’re gonna look like you survived a chainsaw accident, you might as well have actually survived a chainsaw accident.
It seems everywhere I go, I’ll inevitably meet someone who claims to “really fucking” love movies. They drone on and on about this movie or that movie, but as I listen I generally come to terms with the fact that the person doesn’t truly love movies as much as they like pop culture and the movies allow them the opportunity to keep up with it.
In those conversations, I often ask them if they have ever watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Every so often someone says, “Yeah! That movie was weird…”
More often than not, they’ll also say, “Stupid movie… I didn’t get it!”
And immediately I discount that person as being only an IQ point above invertebrates.
That movie is fucking genius. Someday I’ll meet someone who will mention they have seen the movie and they’ll offer their opinion of what the movie means and I’ll know I’ve found a kindred spirit… and someone who really fucking loves movies.
I can remember that 10 years ago today, though I had spent two days watching the news reports and seeing the video of the twin towers collapsing over and over, it dawned on me what I had witnessed on 9-11. Beyond the terrorism, beyond the grief, shock, and incomprehensible violence, I witnessed a total collapse of the American belief of invincibility. In just 102 minutes (the time it took from the first plane to the second tower collapse) everything every American believed to be true about their safety went out the window.
10 years later and I still think people are expecting the other shoe to drop. Just about everyone I know believes that something worse will happen in the coming years… and the sick part is, they’re probably right.
I read a great deal. I enjoy all different types of books, from historical fiction to instructional manuals to science fiction to children’s literature, I don’t discriminate. One of my all time favorite authors though is Stephen King. I really enjoy the way all his stories, no matter the subject, are all part of a mythos he created from whole cloth.
My all time favorite Stephen King story though is the Dark Tower, which is composed of 7 books (an eighth is on its way), detailing the quest of Roland Deschain to reach the Dark Tower, a fabled building thought to be the nexus of all universes.
Recently Ron Howard announced the was making the Dark Tower into a movie and television show… he also said that Javier Bardem was in talks to play the lead character, Roland Deschain. I was not amused.
I don’t know about anyone else, but for my money, only Timothy Olyphant would fit the role of Roland Deschain as I pictured him in my mind’s eye.