9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

I present to you Slovenka and her partner, Fedorov, world champion figure skaters!

Our judge approved of our performance.

And sent our competition packing.

For the dedication to the costume and getting our entire department involved, we won free lunch!

You have to be happy about the little things. And Free Lunch is worth being happy about.

To all… Happy All Hallow’s Eve!

Why do some people just have to be total dicks?

You have many kinds of dicks:

1. The ones that know they are dicks and are just acting as they are meant to.
2. The ones that aren’t dicks, but don’t think about their actions, therefore are dicks.
3. The ones that are dicks, but act like they aren’t dicks, but still come off as dicks.

It is the third kind that drive me nuts (pun). At least with the first two you are dealing with genuine human beings.

Oh snap.

There is this guy at where I work. Total tool. Not only does he drive me nuts, but pretty much everyone else around him too. And we don’t hide it. Whenever he comes to our department he gets looks of disgust and disdain, but does he pay any attention to that? Why, no, he doesn’t. Why? Because he is a dick. A big fat floppy hypocritical donkey dick.

As a “hypodick” (new term, coined here, you heard it first), he feels he has the right to call everyone “Brother” or “Friend”. Not Bro, like some hip slang from the early eighties (oh snap), but like he is your slightly retarded brother that can’t pronounce your name clearly and that is just his way of doing it. Oooooooh no. He calls you Brother or Friend from day one. Even if he knows your name. He must think it is his way of engendering himself to you. His “special” way to lube you up before the real dickery begins.

Because, hold onto your keyboard, this is when the mindfrak starts. He literally tries to grab all your attention by waving his hands about and ranting about how this is such a big problem, and he needed it yesterday, and his pants are on backwards and he can’t figure out why, and he had to poop out the zipper into the urinal, so that must be an IT problem right? Right? Then he asks us, you guys handle the computers and urinals around here, right?

Always an emergency, always backwards, and always just making work where work really isn’t needed. Does he bother to read a procedure manual that our company runs off of? Does he bother to talk to anyone else in his position? Does he consult his boss? Does he talk to anyone within an earshot? Nope. He waddles himself down to the IT problem and insults us with sarcasm and dull wit, and then shits all over us because he can’t figure out why we are saying no.

Well… crotchstain… let me put it to you gentle. 1. We don’t have the money. 2. We don’t have the staff. 3. You are the one making it difficult. 4. You are a floor routine short of a bronze medal.

Then he acts like he is your best friend for coming into your world and shitting on your desk and using your mouse to creatively wipe his butt. What reeeeeeaaaaaalllllly shined me on today was the fact that he felt it necessary to include the General Manager of our office in our little conversation. That is the equivalent of me inviting the President of our United States to sit in on a disagreement between me and brother. Go figure that one out.

The last three times someone thought it would help them to involve higher powers had their asses handed to them by the powers that be. Because IT actually researches problems and tells mgmt what needs to be done to address them. And every single time, they have been wilted like raisin under the biggest muttafraking laser gun you have ever seen. 1.21 Gigawatts! (insert blatant Back to the Future reference here)

I can’t wait for him to shit on my boss’ desk. That is going to be a good day… …Friend.

My gaming computer has been acting awfully strange since it’s recent upgrade. The sound card likes to take spontaneous shits all over my games and squeals like a pig getting called to the trough.

Soooooooooooooweeeeeeeeeeee!

And it squeals until I reboot the PC or turn off my speakers (which in reality, the squeal is still occurring, I just can’t hear it). The odd thing is that I have had this sound card for years, and it has been a great component. It is a Creative Audigy 2 Gamer, a decent card, a card that has lasted, and now it just up and dies at random intervals.

Sometimes I will be able to play for 2 minutes before it happens, other times 2 hours. The games change as well, it is not if I am playing the same thing all the time. The pattern is almost random.

So I decided to whip my forensics skills out and go hunting.

And what do I find?

It is a common error. Almost as well covered up as who shot JFK. (The other shooter was a Care Bear with a Springfield rifle on the grassy knoll, the blue Care Bare with a rainbow on his chest).

Turns out to be a very common error with completely random fixes. In one instance the Squeal of Death (SoD) was due to the manufacturer of the motherboard, and a bios update fixed it. In another case, the amount of pci bus (the amount of processing “room” for a card to talk to the motherboard/processor/memory) would fluctuate because of the video card, shoving the sound card off the proverbial cliff of logic error, and a new driver fixed it. Sometimes rebuilding the computer fixes it, sometimes applying drivers for sound, video and motherboard in a special order, sometimes sacrificing a chicken on the card before putting it back in.

I am stumped. The card worked great in two other computers and I have tried everything to get it working in this one. No dice.

Creative and their squeal of death strike again. I think my box is useless for gaming with it in there, so that obviously means that it has to come out.

Stupid SoB SoD.

I have to post a sentimental link everyone once in a while I guess. All slow sympathetic piano music at the end too.

God bless Netflix. If you don’t have it, get it. If you have it, I applaud you like a victorian gentleman in on the great secret.

Clap clap clap.

I watch my TV in generally two forms… one – from Netflix. Two – from a non-broadcast digital format.

Because honestly, who has time for TV schedules? Not I. And I am not even all that busy.

Content is content in my honest opinion. So shouldn’t that content be available in any format, whenever I want to consume it? I know that advertising is the big reason behind controlled content time frames, but that model is just going to die.

Two outcomes are going to occur from the struggle between content and advertising. One, we will end up paying directly for what we want to watch (in my current situation, Netflix, and in the future, slivercasting), or the advertising is going to be shoved, for lack of a better term, down our throats.

Open content versus controlled content. Both can work. And I have a feeling that Big Media wants controlled content to be the big winner. We are seeing it everywhere… we are being told what content is ok for our use, when and how. You buy a song on iTunes, you can’t play it on any other device unless you crack it (therefore making you a criminal, even though you bought it). You buy a DVD and you can’t copy it to your laptop to take on a plane. If it is your content, where is the line on fair use?

Granted, everyone is asking that question, so I know it is not some great secret or anything. But still I think the focus is wrong. Much like V said in V for Vendetta, “People should not fear the government, the government should fear the people”. I am going to paraphrase it into “Big Media should not control the content, the content should be controlled by the consumers.” After all, we are the ones buying it.

And I have yet to see a business model that can survive without customers. But Big Media is hoping for that one big savior of any market… a trust. Where every single company agrees to the same terms, thereby making a monopoly over the products of the market. Customers can’t buy the content from anywhere else, right?

But isn’t that illegal as well?

Hmmmmmm.

I wouldn’t be able to enjoy Battlestar Galactica if I had maintained strict adherence to the desires of Big Media. That is a show where if you miss one episode, you missed it all and can’t get back into it. A very structured storyline between episodes. So I watched the entire series through netflix and the new episodes from my computer and, occasionally, during actual broadcast.

There is no other way.

Isn’t that a shame?

Then there is Dead Like Me or Firefly, two series that did not last as long as they should have. But I didn’t know about them (or have time for them) until the series was well over. They failed because of the revenue model that supported them did not pull revenue from the actual fan base.

Kind of sad. But inevitable. Technology is progressing. Content has to keep up. If Big Media doesn’t get that figured out soon, their content will be replaced.

…and it is already happening. And they blame us. The consumers. Their customers. Go figure that one out.

I especially love those anti-piracy commercials in the movie theater. When would a pirate ever see (or listen) to such a commercial? Aren’t the people in the theater PAYING customers?

Hmmmmmm.