Okay, so I might be turning into
Foamy, but here's a couple of rants anyway.
1. People who repeatedly stick your email address into website boxes after you ask them not to should have their internet access revoked, no questions asked. Then every piece of spam you get should magically appear in their physical mailbox so they have to throw out virtual trees.
2. Spammers should be shot, drawn, quartered, disembowled, dismembered, and then REALLY hurt. They're worse than telemarketers.
3. What's with you people who ask for my advice and then go with Almost Online anyway? Are you /trying/ to torment me or what??
4. How can so many people look at ME like I'm stupid for not knowing who the Vice President is, and yet they can't even spell his name?? What's with those TV ads, anyway? Don't they show the names of the people running our country?? The public needs to be /educated/, man!!
5. I still say that seat belt usage should not be enforced. I wear them and think they're a good idea. But if someone doesn't want to wear one, why make them? First off, they aren't 100% effective at preventing death, in fact, they have been known to cause them on rare occasions. Second, if someone doesn't wear one and dies, what the hell do we care?? It's their own fault. I think education should be mandatory prior to obtaining a license, then leave it up to them. They don't hurt any other motorist by not wearing a belt. (Unless, of course, their dismembered body crashes through their car's window and into a passerby.)
6. Speaking of driving... since when does a "straight and left" lane mean that you get to take a right and cut in front of someone in the right lane??
7. AND on that same topic, since when does a "turn left" lane mean that you get to drive in that lane for several feet, drive across the white ending line, and then into the next left-turn lane, effectively almost causing an accident when you cut off the person trying to enter the left lane properly?? Hello?? RUDE and STUPID... see above comment about not having to wear seatbelts...
8. Americans generally speak and write in English, yet I know very few people who can spell in their own native language which they've known most of their lives. Yet some of these very same people will say things like this to me: "Did you put quarters in? It won't work unless you put the quarters in first." No shit, Sherlock... then when I confirm that I have, they'll say, "Are you sure? Remember, it won't work without quarters." If I'm "chided" one more time by someone like that, I'll... well, you spell it out for yourself. If you can.
9. Why are people so concerned with a child's safety on a playground? I'm not talking about the risk of kidnapping. (To me, that's serious.) I'm talking about bumps, cuts, bruises, falls. A lot of folks these days want padded playgrounds so kids can't possibly hurt themselves. When I was a kid, we had steel bars towering about seven or eight feet off a rocky or cement ground. You fell, you got hurt, you went to mommy, she kissed the fracture in your skull, put a bandaid on it, and sent you back out. Now the slightest brush of silicon on skin causes an ER visit. And we wonder why people are getting lazier and whinier...
10. On a similar note, what's up with cleanliness and sterilization? If I wanted to be germ-free, I'd live in a bubble. I don't want my keyboard sterilized of germs my body's familiar with and knows how to fight. How's it supposed to stay on top of things when some of those germs survive the alcohol by mutating and becoming stronger themselves?
11. And I'm tired of pasteurized milk, too. Companies should be allowed to sell unpasteurized if they want to. It should be up to them whether they get sued or not, and if they did, I hope they win, provided they had clean cows and weren't putting feces in the milk...
12. Suing. This has got to stop. I take great pride in the fact that I actually hold myself responsible for most of what happens to me, and I do believe in accidents unless someone is grinning when they plunge a hot poker through your belly. If I get fat from eating greasy foods, I remember my education in school (which I was forced into going to like everyone else) and think, "Oh, gee, maybe eating fat every day makes you fat like they said it would." If I get third-degree burns in my mouth from a hot beverage, I figure maybe the fact that my fingers were burning off when I went to drink it could have signified that drinking it would mean half my face would disintegrate.
13. RIAA needs to be euthanized. First off, people who can pay for their music, should do so. Second, trampling on my ability to listen to the music I bought for my personal pleasure is very, very annoying. Case in point: I downloaded music from iTunes only to discover that in order to play m4p's off my old mp3 player, I had to burn to CD, then rip the CD into mp3 format. This meant unnecessary work on my part, plus I had to rename everything if I wanted to ensure that I remembered who the artists were so I could go back and get more music from them. Stupid... AND I recall a couple instances in my past, before this even became such an issue, that I found some music, downloaded it, and discovered that I really really like Carl Doy. I'd never heard of him and may never have if it weren't for file sharing. I went out and bought a four-box set of his music, that's how awesome he is. So don't tell ME that file sharing hurts profits. I almost went bankrupt off of file sharing because I discovered so many new artists that way. (Note: I think the 30-second clips they have these days are great because it operates under the same principle - try before you buy.)
14. Why is it that people tend to think I can work on any electronic equipment just because I do computers?? I do NOT do printers. I hate printers. They are completely different from computers. Do you see a monitor attached to a printer? No. A keyboard? No. Does a printer have a hard drive? NO!! So stop asking me to put those little strips back in them and then acting as if I'm an untalented ingrate trying to ruin your fun when I try and can't do it!!
15. On the same note, computers are like cars. They're a sum of their many parts. That makes them both simple and complicated. On the one hand, you can replace stuff that goes bad. On the other, it often takes time to isolate a faulty component because there are so many, and all are integral to making the thing work. So stop with the impatience, already. Zheezh. How many mechanics will come to your house to fix your car? If they can tell you two days, why can't you cope with a couple hours?
16. Why do people hang their whole body on the word of their doctor? Sure, they know more about the body than we do. But it's been proven time and time again that doctors are human like the patients they work on, make mistakes, and don't know everything. Why put so much pressure on them? Colds will RUN THEIR COURSE, PEOPLE!! Don't tell me to visit a doctor just because I've been sneezing and coughing for three hours. If it lingers for a week, which is about the time it takes for a cold to run its course anyway, THEN I'll see a doctor. Not before.
17. And furthermore, why do sick people work at hospitals? If you have a cold, doesn't it make sense to stay the f*** home? I blame both the worker and the institution for this one. First the institution says they want you to stay home, then you do, and they demand a doctor's note. You go to the doctor in the cold pouring rain since docs don't make housecalls anymore (generally). They say you've got a cold, which you knew anyway. You give them money. Then you catch pneumonia because you were out in the cold rather than at home resting and eating soup. Hello? Common Sense? Where did you go??? And the individual goes along with this!! The truth of the matter is, Work doesn't want you resting at home, it wants you to never get sick in the first place, and only because when you do get sick it subtracts from your productivity.
Those are my rants for the day...
~nv
Whooo, hoooo! Last night Aflac created this super cool widget JUST FOR MY RSS FEED!! For this blog, no less. Okay, granted, this is my ONLY RSS feed, but still... YAY!! WTG, Aflac!! It's cool, too, with its "stained glass" effect - it looks like lizard scales!! (I've got two lizards so this is particularly neat to me.) The fiery sparky things in the background is part of Aflac's wallpaper, in case you're wondering. The photo which you can only see pieces of was taken on one of our camping trips. Me built fire. Mwah hah hah. Fire fun. Mwah hah hah. Okay, whatever got into me is gonna leave REAL soon or I'm gonna have nice young men in clean white coats show up...
Still, the widget is pretty darned cool if you ask me. Did I mention how awesome it is?? Now all that needs doing is to have it ported to Windows. (Sorry to all you poor Windows-haters out there, but believe it or not, I do appreciate Windows in its own right. Other oses may be better in some ways, but Windows /does/ rule the market and /is/ the most familiar sight you'll see right now. I just wish some things about it could be better is all.)
