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Saturday, February 15, 2003
...poor old Homer is, as his voice actor Dan Castellaneta once said " a dog trapped in a man's body".
I haven't watched much Simpsons since leaving Austin. I can't really say why.
.: posted by Jeremy 2/15/2003
If I default on my student loan, I will not be eligible for a concealed handgun license. That sucks.
.: posted by Jeremy 2/15/2003
Friday, February 14, 2003
.: posted by Jeremy 2/14/2003
I'm so happy that everyone is posting so much lately.
Due to a change in recipes, I now have a fifth of brandy that will no longer be used to flambe dinner. Things are looking up.
In unrelated news, you can't find canned black cherries in Greensboro to save your life, though you will try Bi-Lo, Harris Teeter, the Fresh Market, and the World Market, all to no avail.
.: posted by andy 2/14/2003
From theDevilsDictionary.com:
SHERIFF, n. In America the chief executive office of a country, whose most characteristic duties, in some of the Western and Southern States, are the catching and hanging of rogues.
John Elmer Pettibone Cajee
(I write of him with little glee)
Was just as bad as he could be.
'Twas frequently remarked: "I swon!
The sun has never looked upon
So bad a man as Neighbor John."
A sinner through and through, he had
This added fault: it made him mad
To know another man was bad.
In such a case he thought it right
To rise at any hour of night
And quench that wicked person's light.
Despite the town's entreaties, he
Would hale him to the nearest tree
And leave him swinging wide and free.
Or sometimes, if the humor came,
A luckless wight's reluctant frame
Was given to the cheerful flame.
While it was turning nice and brown,
All unconcerned John met the frown
Of that austere and righteous town.
"How sad," his neighbors said, "that he
So scornful of the law should be --
An anar c, h, i, s, t."
(That is the way that they preferred
To utter the abhorrent word,
So strong the aversion that it stirred.)
"Resolved," they said, continuing,
"That Badman John must cease this thing
Of having his unlawful fling.
"Now, by these sacred relics" -- here
Each man had out a souvenir
Got at a lynching yesteryear --
"By these we swear he shall forsake
His ways, nor cause our hearts to ache
By sins of rope and torch and stake.
"We'll tie his red right hand until
He'll have small freedom to fulfil
The mandates of his lawless will."
So, in convention then and there,
They named him Sheriff. The affair
Was opened, it is said, with prayer.
--J. Milton Sloluck
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 2/14/2003
Thursday, February 13, 2003
Apparently I've become the department racist at my company. For the past year or so, whenever we would have our weekly meeting and the department manager, my former supervisor(vietnamese joe pesci), would mention that he is considering hiring a new engineer or clerical person, the person would often be vietnamese. It got to a point where before he would laugh about it and admit that just about everybody he talked to was vietnamese. I never had any problem with it. Houston does have a very large vietnamese community, and why should I expect the department manager to not recruit from within his community. Recently at our meetings when he has mentioned he's looking at a new person, I would just smile and ask what the person's name is, knowing that he already feels kind of uneasy about the fact that it may appear to the opportunistic and shady mind that he is interviewing an abundance of vietnamese people. He would then smile and say some obviously vietnamese name. I would then smile and nod and everybody in the meeting would laugh. relatively harmless. I think he may have gotten the wrong idea somewhere along the way, because he's sorta taken the banter to another level. Lately he would bring up a new person's name, and would say "and yes/no, muammar, he/she is/isn�t vietnamese," or something along those lines. And then monday we got a new tester and joe pesci introduces me to the guy saying "this is muammar(that�s me, if you�re confused), it should make him happy to see you here because you are the first white guy to be hired by me in a while." Yikes.
And then there were the problems I was having with my new supervisor. I am an outspoken whiny bitch, as devin will assure anybody. My chinese boss is very reserved and does his best to hide all displeasure under a android-like blank expression of curiosity. I didn't respond to this very well at first and would basically say things that I shouldn't have said to get some kind of response. It never had anything to do with him being chinese, it was mostly "i don't understand what the problem here is, you need to tell me what your opinion is." And I did it in a kind of intimidating way that was mostly wrong. When he finally got to the point of confronting me about it, his interpretation of my problem with him was that I was frustrated with his lack of english skills. That pissed me off, because that�s just code for "you don't like me because I'm chinese.� He has twice tried to make this point about his �English skills� being my problem with him.
Maybe I�m taking all of this too seriously. I do think that these guys did not grow up in the US and so they don�t really have a good appreciation for how sensitive non-redneck white people are about racism.
.: posted by Jeremy 2/13/2003
Who would I be if I weren't such a whiny bitch? Maybe I'd be a better person, maybe more successfull with the girls, maybe richer in friends... i don't know. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be me, though. I didn't think I flexed that hard. After all, I did say "I'm not bitter about any of this," which is not a light statement coming from me. I think I am a little bitter about the "penis car" bullshit I had to listen to when I was living in austin, though, among a few other things.
Speaking of bitter... tomorrow is the holiday designed to exploit everyone in a relationship and designed to make everyone else feel shitty about not being exploitable. It's not news, but I felt like saying it anyway.
The Enron thing reminds me of how Stan Lee got screwed over by Warner Brothers. Every comic book geek, and everybody that sits in a cubicle next to a comic book geek(me) knows that Stan Lee is the creator of Spider Man. Stan Lee was retarded and agreed to take a percentage of the net profit of the movie as his compensation. Warner Brothers, or whoever made the movie, somehow managed to cook their books enough to show zero profit. This movie is like in the top 10 grossing movies of all time, and they were able to make their books show no profit. So now they don't have to pay Stan Lee anything. Is the studio to blame for their evil accounting techniques? or is Stan Lee's lawyer to blame for being such a flaming moron as to let his client agree to what everybody in the movie business supposedly knows, always take a percentage of the gross, never take a percentage of the net. Personally I blame the lawyer for being incompetent. So I guess what I'm implying here is that I would blame the government for creating the tax loopholes for enron.
.: posted by Jeremy 2/13/2003
I learned about a pretty cool artist today at school: Giovanni Battiste Piranesi. That link will take you to work from Piranesi's Carceri series, a group of etchings of fantastical prison scenes. Really neat stuff, and fun to look at.
.: posted by andy 2/13/2003
Enron paid no federal income taxes between 1996 and 1999. Pretty amazing. Where did all that money go? A good-sized chunk of it went to Enron's 200 highest paid employees, whose pay increased about 725% between 1998 and 2000.
Remember the story about the ten men who went to the restaurant, and then beat the richest man to death after lunch?
.: posted by andy 2/13/2003
Before I get to work, let me tell you a little story about how not to be a criminal.
Mrs. Thomas is in charge of the campus ID center. Our IDs are called FirstCards, and they have a little microchip on them that you can put money on to spend at the cafeterias, book stores, campus medical center, etc. Scattered around campus are a few cash-to-chip machines, where you can feed in a dollar and the machine will write the value onto your card. There's your background.
So at the beginning of this semester, the university had a grand opening for the EUC, which is kind of like a student union and which they just finished renovating. Any big construction job like that will have a subcontractor whose job is to come in and clean up the jobsite after the work is finished. This subcontractor, after finishing the EUC job, either fired or laid off one if its workers. Said worker then got the fabulous idea that he would get a little spending money by boosting either the ATM or the cash-to-chip machine. He enlists the help of his grown-up nephew.
At 3 am one chilly night they sneak in the back of the EUC through a door they either found propped open or propped open themselves earlier in the day. The go to the area where the ATM and cash-to-chip machine sit facing each other. They look over the ATM and consider taking it, but then decide on the cash-to-chip machine instead. They rip it out of the wall (it was apparently only secured using #10 screws and plastic sheetrock anchors) and carry it out of the building. They apparently put it in the back of their van and drive around with it while they try to pry it open. Failing in this, they dump the machine on the side of the road, having accomplished nothing but the commission of a felony.
Enter the good guys. Seeing the ATM still sitting directly across from the scene of the crime, some staffers get the idea to ask the bank for the video from the security camera that EVERYONE KNOWS IS INSTALLED IN EVERY ATM. Usually security camera video is too grainy or at such at an odd angle that it's useless. I know this from watching countless convenience store robberies on countless reality tv programs. Amazingly, we have a crystal clear picture of one of the criminals as he walks over and stares at the ATM, right before stealing the other machine. The campus police department (which is really pretty good for a campus police dept.--they're able to solve almost every crime committed on campus) and some staffers circulate the pictures, and it's only a matter of time before someone identifies the criminals. Faced with surveillance video that clearly shows them caught in the act, they confess and are both sentenced to time in prison. One of them was already on parole, so he'll have to finish his last sentence before he starts this new one. And best of all, they got nothing for their trouble.
Oh, and the police looked all over the area where the men said they dropped the machine. It's long gone, and not likely to be recovered. Someone with a sawzall or a tire jack will probably succeed where these monkeys failed so miserably.
.: posted by andy 2/13/2003
There, you're an admin. If you're going to be such a whiny little bitch about it, go and change those posts. I say don't delete them, though--just rename the company. After all, some of those are pretty good posts.
The same thing happened to me with sadmind. When I got the job with Healant, I wrote about it on sadmind. My CEO googled Healant and found sadmind, which sucked. Luckily, he said that reading sadmind improved his opinion of me; whereas he thought I was stupid before, after reading sadmind he only thought I was stupid about my job.
And by the way, some monkey bought sadmind.com and redirected it. I'm not going to link to it because it just goes to some MLM nonsense. I sure wish I still had that domain.
.: posted by andy 2/13/2003
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
I often think that I would post more stuff to this site if google didn't list my goddamn name next to nasty posts about my company whenever you search for my not-to-be-mentioned company. Actually, for a while there, those posts were being listed before the company's website when you searched for my company. My resume isn't pretty enough, and I don't have enough money in the bank to feel comfortable about that fact. Ideally, I'd like to see some of those posts magically dissapear from the archive, or at least the contributor's moniker changed, but as I don't have administrative control over this blog, I don't think that I can do anything about that myself. It appears that I can only cover myself for future posts. That's kind of a funny fact, considering that I actually own the domain and the site is hosted on my friend's server with a permanent IP that he generously donated to our sorry cause. I'm not bitter about any of this, I'm just concerned, since I am depending on others to help me cover my ass.
Oh, and i-club.com should be changed to nasioc.com. I like my ugly-fast-little-blue-car much better than I liked my slow-big-red-car-with-t-tops. Yep, it's fun, so fuck all yall haters.
.: posted by Jeremy 2/12/2003
Oh, one more story I heard about fires at work, when they hand-sprayed all of the trucks, they would just spray the excess paint into a bucket with a garbage bag in it. The paint being sprayed would build up a static charge, and every now and again it'd spark and ignite the bucket. Supposedly this was a weekly occurrence until they came up with some way of grounding the bucket. This is also why you're not supposed to put gasoline in a container sitting in the back of a truck, the container doesn't ground, and a static charge can build up between the nozzle and the container. More info.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 2/12/2003
I had an exciting day today. First, I got a ticket when I ran a stop sign and cut off a cop on my way to work. After about an hour and a half at work, a paint booth caught on fire. There is very little at the plant which is combustible, since everything is metal in a metal and concrete building. The exception to this is the paint area, where everything is explosive. So, we got to stand outside for about an hour.
Rumor is the booth was a new one that they are building right now. It shares the ventilation system with the other booths, and the ventilation system has a tendency to suck in sparks from the welders. To remedy this, they put a person in the vent area to watch for fire. Today one started that was too large for him to put out, and when he started yelling, everybody took off. Anyway, no effect on the line, and from what I understand, no effect on the timeline for the installation of the new booth. All that came of it was a little excitement, and a long break.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 2/12/2003
Monday, February 10, 2003
And here's an interview with Frank Abagnale, about his criminal past, and the movie.
.: posted by andy 2/10/2003
Beth and I saw a sneak preview of Old School on Friday. Man that was a funny movie. I laughed so hard that I popped a blood vessel in my eye, and now there's a black spot in my peripheral vision. Actually, I made that part up, but the movie was very, very funny. Beth insists that all the funny parts were in the previews, but so sorry, she's wrong. It was definitely worth paying student admission for. Not only that, but we could have stayed and seen Catch Me If You Can for free afterwards, but luckily for us we paid full price to see it at the same theater two weeks ago. That was also an entertaining movie. Here is Frank W. Abagnale's statement about the movie, from his own official website.
.: posted by andy 2/10/2003
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