One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Earlier today, a Philadelphia court awarded the parents of a Marine who died in Iraq $2.9M in damages. Not from the feds, but rather, from the Westboro Baptist Church, who you probably know as those “God Hates Fags” cocksuckers. They protested his funeral.

I got this news (pathetically, I know) from the Something Awful forums, where a rather spirited discussion (that’s goon for “slapfight”) has broken out over this issue. The debate is, in a nutshell, whether the Phelps’ family’s ability to protest should fall under free speech grounds.

The court’s decision was that the Church couldn’t hide behind their right to protest given the circumstances - mainly, the inflammatory and outrageous nature of their protest got them into this trouble.

A couple weeks back I had occasion to watch Louis Theroux’ BBC show, The Most Hated Family In America, about Phelps and Westboro. (Watch the whole thing here.) I’m actually not that impressed with Theroux as a documentarian, but he does a fairly decent job, and the thing that really surprised me so much was that even though Louis really didn’t come off as that hostile (he came off a little stupid, if anything), Phelps treated him like total shit. I guess that really shouldn’t surprise me, but I guess I figured that if they were willing to give Theroux the free reign they did inside their ‘compound’ that Phelps might be willing to at least talk in a civil manner to him.

One thing that was clear after watching the BBC docu was the absolute brainwashing that has taken place inside the WBC. I mean, this tiny church with a few dozen people really believes that they have some sort of exclusive license to Heaven. It’s so mindbending, so utterly fucked up that you really have to see it to believe it. Even after seeing it, it still feels like TV. Doesn’t seem real. But it does illustrate how easy it is to convince people of anything once you can somehow manage to convince them that they are special, better than everybody else.

At work the standard management line is that we can’t do X, because if we do X for you, we’ll have to do it for everyone. But sometimes, on rare occasions, a decision should be made regardless of whether it is in conflict with the letter of the law.

And as my friend Jeff has been known to say, there are times, albeit rare ones, when “he just needed killin’” should be a valid defense. And while it does bother me, in part, to hear that the Phelps family has finally discovered that it isn’t always possible to hide behind the letter of the law while blatantly violating its spirit, that same realization gives me faith in the law (as well as a little bit of hope) at the same time.

I really should stop watching documentaries.

If you’re one of a zillion or so people on the Net you may have recieved an email that looks an awful lot like this today. Apparently Sara Cho and Michael Lazar, two really dumb motherfuckers who can’t understand the difference between base-2 and base 10, and who, it seems, don’t do any research before buying a product (thus making them typical ignorant American consumer whores,) filed a lawsuit against Seagate. Because of their inability to perform simple calculations that one learns in primary school, think that somehow they are entitled to more drive space than they purchased.

They are wrong.

Continue reading “Money-grubbing greedy fucks will be the end of us.”

Here’s a short little documentary of sorts, approx. 18 minutes, about how the Amen Break affected music, creating a sampling staple and an entire subculture.

It is likely that these thousands of creations would not exist without the freely-available break.

You’re an EFF member, right?

Official: I am not fired, I am not going back on the phone. I will remain in my current position. What happens to my current position remains to be seen. It is functionally impossible for the job to continue in the same way it did with half the staff, so change, in this case, is a given.

Our old model is dead. Long live the new model. Everyone is nervous and management, as usual, isn’t fucking talking. This is the way it’s done even though I don’t know why.

Since I have been given a bit of a reprieve, I am going to attempt to get ready for RHCE in April, and work toward getting the job I actually want.

I got the evil genie-ized version of my wish about my boss today. Because it’s still going on it is bad to talk about it, but suffice it to say that there are 2 things that can happen to you when you work for a call center, if your management decides you have outlived your useful purpose:

• You can be fired
• You can be put back on the phone

I know that I am not fired and will not be; others were not so lucky. However, the decision has apparently yet to be made whether or not I will be subject to the latter fate. My fate will probably be determined by my usefulness, and considering the fact that I personally feel I’m about as useless as a screen door on a submarine, it seems apparent to me that my self-evaluation of my own worth is so inaccurate it’s worthless. Since I have no other assessment of my own value with which to operate, it’s completely up in the air. I should know my fate sometime this week, though.

I am currently entertaining any or all of the following

• serious offers (means $20K+) for my car
• serious offers (means $85K+) for my house
• job applications, especially if you’re looking for an enthusiastic but undertrained Linux admin
• advice
• beer

Not that it’s a big step. Googling this error returned no hits so I thought I would blog this here, in the hope that anyone else who gets the error would see it.

If you recieve an error “Cannot locate card for backup.” from NVbackup, check the write protect switch on your goddamn CF card, don’t be an idiot like me and put up with that shit for two days before you figure it out.

I’m such an idiot.

it’s still a bucket of shit.

In a move sure to inspire me to say “Naah naaah naah, I was right you suckers” way too damn much, Microsoft removed the WGA check from IE7 today.

Why, you ask? Because Microsoft has always (and continues to now) depend on piracy for marketshare. Casual piracy of Microsoft products has always been a win-win for them, increasing market share with every Office.2007.Pr0P3r.1337D00DZ.part01.rar. Vista is falling into this trap, as it’s so damn difficult to copy (not that I’ve tried, but seriously, it’s not a huge secret) they are depending on, instead of piracy, new system sales to spur their shit-covered OS on to victory.

But there’s one problem - the PC biz is declining right now. People aren’t replacing their PC’s as often because Office and internet apps aren’t causing the kind of massive slowdowns they did in previous years. Systems are ridiculously fast. And gaming is moving off the box into consoles.

I hope this idiotic move isn’t enough to convince people to actually use IE7, but it might be. Although I really doubt it - those who couldn’t get it before probably moved on to a real browser, like Firefox or Opera, so I don’t know what they really have to gain with this move other than giving me fodder for my crazy conspiracy theories.