The Online Rant

Another good one from XKCD

I love my iPhone, and I’m constantly pointing out yet another cool feature to everyone around me. So when I saw this morning’s dilbert comic, I just had to post it.

The above comic(a lot like others from the same author) really hit home for me. I can tell you that the very first thing I do every morning is check on news from my friends on Facebook. Those friends happen to be all over the world.

Thursday I had a rather interesting and odd event happen to me. Something that seems rather bizzare and that reminded me of the many strange and odd people that live in our country.
I had worked late Wednesday night, and hadn’t gotten to bed until about 2 am. So Thursday morning I was kind of sleeping in. I didn’t have to go to work, until 2 pm. So there was no reason not to catch up on the sleep I had missed the day before.

Around 9 am I woke up to hear someone knocking on the door of the house. Now, I was still pretty tired and I really didn’t want to wake up. So I waited to see if Stacey(my sister in law) would get up to answer it. But after the third knock, I realized that either Stacey wasn’t home, or she wasn’t going to wake up. So I got up, pulled on a pair of pants, and rushed down stairs to answer the door.
I’m sure I looked pretty wild. Barefoot, no shirt, my hair sticking up all over the place. I really wasn’t all that presentable. And the truth is I wasn’t very awake yet either.

So when I opened the door, I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw. There was the most backwoods, redneck looking lady I’ve ever seen standing at my door. She was wearing some type of flannel shirt and a pair of old jeans. But what really hit me, was that she was missing some teeth.

The first thing she did was hand me a paper that looked like it had been drawn with a crayon. Now remember, I’m not all that awake yet. So while I’m staring rather blankly at the paper, trying to decipher the crayon hieroglyphics she had drawn on it, she starts talking to me. (Click the thumb to see the paper she gave me)

It turns out, that she wants to know if she and her husband can have an old metal cage that had been left on the property by the previous owners of the property. I had been meaning to get rid of it ever since I moved in, but never got around to it.

So, still not all that awake, I told her to go ahead and take it. She gets this huge grin on her face(remember the missing teeth) and turns around to give her husband a thumbs up. Which caused me to look out at the street in front of my house. And there I saw the oldest most beat up truck I’ve seen in a long time. Her husband was just starting to get out of the truck. And believe me, he was just as redneck as she was. He started unloading sledge hammers to beat the cage apart with, and she ran down the stairs off my porch like she was afraid I might change my mind about letting them have the old cage.

They beat the cage apart, loaded it into the old truck and drove off. The strangest thing I ever saw.

Last year I was playing soccer a lot with a group of my friends. The games were just informal pickup games, but we had a lot of fun. And it was great exercise. Then one of us, I don’t remember who, found out about a local soccer club. The club was just an amature soccer club, and the entrance requirements were pretty lax. Basically anyone who could get enough players together to form a team, could pay a fee and join up. That was it.
So we got our money together and picked a team from the best pickup players we had, and signed up. Now, none of us were really all that good. And we knew that. But the more we prepared for our first game, the better we convinced ourselves we were.
So our first game came up and we were excited. We got to the field and set up our stuff. Other friends and relatives showed up to cheer us on. We were sure we were going to do well.
Reality quickly stepped in. The other team literally ran circles around us. No matter what we tried, they kept scoring on us. And even worse, we couldn’t seem to score on them. When the game was finally over we hadn’t scored a single goal, but the other team had managed to score 19 goals! It turned out we weren’t anywhere near as good as we thought we were.
Over the course of the season, we did get better. And we never quit trying, but we also never managed to win a game. It just goes to show you that no matter how good you may be in your little sphere of influence, you are probably not as good as you think. Kind of a humbling thought, but at the same time good to recognize. That way, you won’t be surprised when you run up against a situation where that is made obvious.

I don’t often have an occasion to haggle. And that’s probably a good thing, since I don’t do it very well. But yesterday I went to a local Bazaar. A place where haggling is the only way prices are set.
Now, I wasn’t really planning to buy anything, but as I browsed through the stalls, a few things caught my eye. Specifically a set of hand carved coasters and some marble chess sets.

As I was looking at the coasters, the stall owner came up to me and asked me how much they were worth. Since I had no idea, I told him so. Then he threw out an amount and asked me if I thought that was fair. It didn’t sound bad, and it was definitely less than I would have paid back in the US. So I ended up buying them. I was happy with what I paid, but I didn’t haggle over the price at all. Which means I paid way too much.

That was really driven home by my next experience. At a stall on the other side of the Bazaar, I found some really nice chess sets. Again, the stall owner saw me looking at them, and cornered me before I could leave. he started off telling me what a great deal he could give me on the chess set I was examining. He threw out a number($150) for the set I had in front of me. I wasn’t really sure I even wanted a chess set, and that number made up my mind for me. So I told him I wasn’t interested. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. So he lowered the price. I had already made up my mind not to buy it, so the lower price didn’t phase me. But the more times I said no, the lower the price got. By the time I finally said yes, he had reduced the price to $40.

So by accident, I actually managed to do a decent job of haggling. Though I’m sure that if I tried to do the same thing again on purpose, I wouldn’t manage any where near as well. LOL

Today I was surprised by a rather nasty wakeup. I got up from my bed and stumbled over to the showers for my morning wakeup and cleanliness ritual. Now, I wasn’t really awake yet. So needless to say, I wasn’t very observant.

I turned on the shower and got undressed. Still not noticing anything out of the ordinary, I jumped into the shower and immediately became wide awake. Water was ice cold. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to suffer through a cold shower, but in this case, I wasn’t expecting it.

Needless to say, I took a very short shower this morning. So today I’m very thankful for little things. Things, like hot showers, that you take for granted right up until you don’t have them.

Thought the above comic was just too funny. Especially since I just spent a great deal of time cleaning off my parents computer. I think they had 40-50 different viruses and spyware on their computer.
I know that my parents computer is the “family” computer and consequently it gets used by my little brothers and sisters. So the people using it aren’t always the most computer savvy. But seriously, how do they get so many viruses and spyware? Do they just click on every little thing that pops up?

I don’t even run a resident antivirus scanner on my personal computer, and I have yet to get infected with spyware or viruses. And yet my parents computer, my brothers computer, and various friends, all of whom are running resident antivirus programs get infected. Please people! Don’t click on popups and don’t install shady software. LOL

Sometimes Dilbert hits it right on.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to prepare a status report on a project. And too often that status report is nothing more than a status of the missing status report because I don’t have time to prepare a real status report on the project.

Some weeks it feels like my whole week is spent preparing status reports on the projects I didn’t even accomplish anything on.

When you were little (And maybe now as well), did you ever build elaborate stories in your head about mundane locations? I know I did.

I would be some place that was boring to me, like maybe the mall while my Mom was shopping. And I would be just sitting there doing nothing. So I would start making up a story about myself in that location. It usually involved me being some kind of secret agent. And the whole kid at the mall thing was just a cover.

I would pick people out of the shoppers around me, and imagine that they were enemy agents. Then I would start constructing an elaborate fight scene between me and the enemy agents, who had somehow penetrated my cover. The fight scene would involve guns, knives, and amazing karate moves that when pictured in my head were just awesome! Often I would make it a running battle through the store using the displays and even other shoppers as cover.

It was great fun. And by using people I had picked out of the crowd around me as characters in my story, it felt more real. Of course, in real life I was actually just sitting quietly waiting for my Mom to finish shopping.

I never told anyone about these make believe stories. They were just something I did to amuse myself when I was bored. But when I saw the above comic, I had to post it. It was just too much like something I would do.

For the authors site, check out Post Office Showdown.