fin

The police are the most useless fucking people on the planet. We don't need to spend a bunch more money hiring police. For every her you see on Cops there are umpteen more useless bags of shit who have nothing better to do than take out their insecurities by hassling innocent motorists. If you want to stop crime, take the lazy fuckers with nothing better to do than generate extra tax revenue off the backs of legitimate citizens, and put their asses to work actually stopping crime. Here's a rundown of the last few months for me:

September 2006
"What's the problem officer?"
"You were going 70 in a 60, do you have a reason for that?"
"Yessir, my 6 month old daughter cannot breathe, and I'm trying to get her home to her medicine."
"Here's your ticket."

December 2006
"Hello officer, is this about the headlight that's out?"
"Yes it is, have you known about that long?"
"No sir, I just found out on this little excursion from my house, and since I left after all the auto parts stores were closed I haven't been able to fix it. I'll be doing that in the morning."
"Here's your ticket"

January 2007
"The reason I pulled you over is because you have an expired registration and inspection sticker. Here's your ticket"


To be fair, the last guy was nice enough to let me off with a warning for not having my insurance on me, and he had legitimate reason to give me a ticket. Give me a ticket though, not pull me over.

I publish the following only because it's been sitting as a draft for 10 months, and I don't want to delete it. When I accompanied Robyn to court last February I jotted down a few notes about things I noticed. It's interesting to read things you've written in the past, especially when you don't remember exactly what you wrote. Ahh, dementia....

Without further ado:

COURT

Court is very long and very boring. It's similar to what I remember church being when I was a a kid. Everyone is dressed nice, it's formal, and everyone is quiet. There's a lot of waiting, so if you have to go I suggest bringing something quiet to do. (I'm doing this to pass the tme)

Robyn's lawyer is deceptively hale. He must be pushing 90. He totters about like a strong breeze would snap him, but his gaze is piercing and his handshake feels like it should come from someone 30 years younger in a time where firm handshakes meant something. On the amusing side though his ears are huge! It's like his head could take flight at any moment.

Jamie brought plenty of support, although I can't say whether they are here for moral support or just as witnesses. Phil, Kevin Roe, Busybody Lineback and someone I've never met (who could only be his brother). Robyn is stuck without the full weight of organized religions behind her. Right now she only has her mother, brother and me.

The guys in County Jail orange fascinate me for some reason. Maybe because this is family court and I didn't expect them, or perhaps maybe the lax attitude towards keeping them handcuffed. When they are sitting they are restrained , but when they walk they take them off. The one guy kept his hands twisted behind his back though. The tatoo on the back of his neck seems strangely innocent . Like the 3d beveled stars we used to doodle in elementary school in school. This one has points though. I need some county orange scrubs to wear around the house. That would be great

Tick tock... The waiting. I've been here for 2 hours now and I can’t imagine going anywhere soon.

I was pleased to see the courthouse flying both tx and us flags at the same height. Not sure why that’s so important to me but it is.

I wish the benches were replaced with the big comfy chairs they have for lawyers.

I wonder about the long line of people who sat right where I am and watched their lives
change

I wonder who gave the judge that giant boquet of flowers

Lawyers amuse me. a handfull are straight from a cbs drama, but most are great rotund gentlemen in bad suits with goofy haircuts. Its like being a member of the Bar for X number of years gets you a license for bad taste rather than a cheap gold watch.

omg I want to fucking scream.

I work in IT Security. I run the firewalls at my job. Therefore, when things that pass through thr firewalls don't work, lazy people pass the buck off to me, and it's up to me to disprove them. I'm fine with that. It's annoying, but I deal with it. What really upsets me (well, as upset as I get over stuff like this) is when I prove to them that it isn't my fault, then troubleshoot THIER problem for them, and then they still don't believe me.

That happened today. We've had a specific issue where a particular group here was doing videoconferencing across the firewalls, and it doesn't work if they have a particular address assigned to one of their machines. They have been convinced that it is a problem with my firewalls even though I've repeatedly researched the issue for them and told them, "No, it's not my firewalls and this is why. What it is is the configuration on your videoconferencing server. Your problem is problem X, and that's why it's not working." I've been telling them this for months, and they never believed me.

Today, however, it is all fixed. Their problem was problem X, and it only took the involvement of a 3rd department (networking) to actually troubleshoot the issue for them. Will I get an apology? Not holding my breath.

Well that was a first. I was just on my way across the street from the building I park in to the building I work in, and I got hit by a car. It was a little car though, so I'm ok. A Cavalier I think. Very similar to Jamie's green car.

Once when I was in my early teens my mom drove over the toe of my shoe as she was backing out of the garage. Then a month or so later I did it intentionally to see if it would hurt, but that's about it. This was the real thing. The "screeching brakes license plate to the side of the knee roll up on the hood of the car that hit you" type of getting hit by a car.

I was crossing the street with the Don't Walk light on, but the lane I was crossing had a red light. It didn't feel too dangerous because I had plenty of time to scoot across the street before the cars stopped at the light started to go if it did turn green. Except that one guy. I guess he was trying to hit the light right as it turned green because I was in the crosswalk, and the instant the light turned green there was a screech of brakes, a plate in my right knee and a clunking sound as my giant body sprawled across the hood of his car.

Wow you should have seen the look on that guy's face. I was far enough up on the hood that I was only about two feet from it, so I saw the OMG TERRAR!!! look on his (hey look at that I scraped my wrist too) on his face when he hit me. I waved at him in what I hoped was an "I'm not going to sue you" way, and continued on my way. Some guys yelled out of a firetruck (I'm hoping they were firemen and not strippers; not this time of the morning anyway) to see if I was ok, but I am fine.

Anyway. I wanted to get that down before it faded from my short term memory. I am currently in an odd state of shaky unbelief that I was actually hit by a car coupled with a strange (and false I know) sense of invulnerability.

This is genius

If this is the type of thing this magazine does regularly, I'm going to see if that thing has an RSS feed and add it to my daily reading.

I recently decided it was time to show off all the Magic sets I have, so I've been planning how to transition them from the cardboard boxes they're store in now to 3-ring binders I can put on a bookshelf. The problem is that I don't want to have just black binders; I want the binders themselves to look good. Wizards of the Coast used to make this type of thing for people who collected sets, but they stopped several years before I got back into Magic. I searched the Internet a bit, but I couldn't find anything that suited my purposes, so this left me to my own devices for getting good looking binders for my cards.

I've dabbled with Photoshop in the past, but since I gave up my software pirating days, playing with that was out of the question. For a free solution I turned to Gimp for my image manipulation needs.

Now I make no claims as to my proficiency with image editing, but I'm pretty happy with what I've accomplished so far. (happy enough to post about it here it seems) So without further ado, I give you what I've accomplished so far:

What I started with:

(a scan of the side of a box of cards from the set)

And the two pieces of art I've pulled from this:

The cool part that you can't see here is that I have both of these in high enough resolution that I'll be able to print them on a full size sheet of paper and they will still look good.

I have a long way to go, but I'm pleased with what I've accomplished so far and wanted to share.

Ok, so my blog has been reduced to a place where I just relate neat shit I find on the Intarweb I guess. Oh well, at least I'm providing No One with interesting content.

I have a new hero:

This guy makes Rambo look like a tutu wearing fairy.


In case you don't want to read the whole thing, here's a spoler:

In the mid to late 1800's, there was a trapper in the wilderness who's wife was murdered by Crow indians while he was gone one season. He made it his life's goal to kill every Crow he could find. So he did. Not only did he murder every one he found, the then butchered them and ate their liver.

That's not what makes him the hardest dude I've ever heard of. Eventually the Crow put a bounty on him. A group of some other indians ambushed our boy on the road one day to collect on that bounty. That night he chewed through the leather they had him bound with, slipped out the back of the teepee he was prisoner in, killed the lone guard with a single punch, THEN cut that dude's leg off and beat the rest of the group to death with it. FROM THERE he began the long trek back home and used that leg he'd cut off to live on until he got back home.

D=

I am in awe.

I haven't even finished it yet and this is perhaps the coolest article I've ever read.

This is funny