This is What Panic Looks Like

From what is not-so-affectionately referred to as The Great Orange Satan by the lunatics on the far right:

Mitt Romney, today

Mitt Romney was never truly tested during the primaries. He ran an exclusively negative campaign, refusing to spend a dime justifying his own existence in the race. Rather, he had his cast-of-clowns opponents systematically felled by the Super PAC funded by his gazillionaire donors.

It is now August, and Romney tried the same tactic—over $100 million has been spent by the conservative Super PACs attacking President Barack Obama, yet the president has remained resilient in the polling. Perhaps more damaging, Romney has been stuck in the low 40s in key battleground states. His personal unpopularity has acted as an anchor around his neck, preventing him from making real gains against Obama.

Then, with the press in a frenzy over his refusal to release more tax returns, and with a conservative base ready to revolt at his convention over his sudden defense of Romneycare, it was clear that Romney was close to the breaking point. Thus, the bizarre and poorly crafted rollout of the Paul Ryan VP pick.

Yet rather than earn him some breathing room in the campaign and a nice honeymoon, the reception has been cold at best. Sure, there’s been a smattering of puff pieces about Ryan’s body fat composition, but the coverage has been more focused on the facts that Romney has moved to the Right rather than the center, that he had to pacify an increasingly hostile base, that Ryan endangers GOP advantages with seniors, that his presence on the ticket is a nightmare for downballot Republicans, and that his budget gives Democrats a treasure trove of material with which to attack.

Indeed, in the last several days, half the questions Romney has gotten have been along the lines of, “Where, exactly, do you disagree with the Ryan budget?”

Romney is on the breaking point. He’s already had to cancel campaign appearances (though not fundraisers!) because of exhaustion. He’s used to being surrounded by yes-men who tell him he’s wonderful. Now that Obama fellow (and even critics on his own side) has the temerity to talk about him!

The president’s campaign has put out a campaign that’s talking about me and attacking me. I think it’s just demeaning to the nature of the process, particularly when we face the kinds of challenges we face.

It’s so demeaning to elections to have candidates talk about each other! Of course, it wasn’t demeaning when Romney accused Obama of not being American. That part was as perfectly all right as was insulting the British prime minister, the cookies at a campaign stop, and the ponchos worn by NASCAR fans. That’s just Mitt being Mitt (IOW, a dick). But to have other people talk about you? That can’t stand!

Thus Romney is on his epic hissy fit today, frazzled and, yes, unhinged. It’s only mid-August, and he’s already lost his composure and spewed crazy shit.

People who are winning don’t act like Mitt Romney is currently acting. If you want to see how winners act, just look at President Barack Obama.

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And Microsoft Inches Further Into Irrelevancy

From MacWorld:

When Microsoft updated Office 2011 for Mac for Mountain Lion late last month, Retina display users quickly noticed that Outlook was the only app to receive updated Retina graphics. One user described the remaining Office apps as “very blurry and tough on the eyes” on the new Retina Macbook Pro. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Microsoft plans a fix anytime soon, as a response from the Office for Mac Team explained Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will continue to run in the same resolution as on non-Retina Macs:

Outlook for Mac 2011 already supports Retina Display and the remaining apps will have the same viewing quality as on any non-Retina device. Unfortunately at this time, we cannot comment on any future updates regarding supporting Retina on Word, Excel or PowerPoint… Hope that helps!

 

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It's Like Riding a Bicycle, Really

In another lifetime, before I stupidly heeded the advice of people who said, “You’re so good at fixing computer problems, you should do it for a living,” I was an architectural drafter. I’d been doing it professionally for about 19 years until one day burnout descended and I reached the point where I didn’t care any more if commercial toilets were spaced at 2′-6″ or at 2′-8″ on center. (FYI, there are whole government agencies and regulations devoted to that very issue.)  I hung up my scales, adjustable triangles, mechanical pencils, drafting brushes and electric erasers and said, “Enough.” (To be honest, at that point it was actually more of a simple matter of walking away from AutoCAD. Those other tools had been sitting pretty much unused for the better part of a decade.)

But within a few short years, I came the realization that for all my mad troubleshooting skills, my new career as a I.T. professional was really devoid of any true satisfaction. Yeah, it was fun to figure stuff out and fix the shit, but dealing with the constant whining from the willfully ignorant day in and day out has only grown more and more tiresome as time has passed.  And no matter how many times I would have to redraw something because a client didn’t know what he wanted until he saw what he didn’t, when I was intimately involved in the architectural field I felt like I’d accomplished something at the end of the day. When the fruits of my labors were finally built—even if they weren’t my own designs—I felt tremendous pride in knowing that I had contributed to something tangible and worthwhile.

There’s none of that in I.T. support. It’s been my experience these past 14 years or so that you’re viewed—and treated—as a necessary evil by most companies and I often describe my profession as changing diapers and making sure that no one’s sippy cup is ever knocked over.

But every now and then I get the rare opportunity to put my old skills back in use. The company where I’m currently working has a workable floor plan of the main offices in Visio that we use to maintain seating charts, but they had nothing for the Colorado Springs office. One of my long-term projects was to remedy this, and my daily workload has finally slowed enough where it was practical to begin this project.

To that end, last Friday I spent the day hiding out at our satellite office, amazed that I still knew how to properly measure a building.

Even more amazing was discovering yesterday that I still knew enough AutoCAD to actually translate all my measurements into a working drawing!  It really is like riding a bicycle. As long as I didn’t think about it too much, my fingers almost knew instinctively what commands needed to be entered, even if the version of the program I was using was several generations removed from the one I’d originally mastered.

And you know, yesterday was one of the best days I’ve had in years while at work.

I know my general architectural knowledge is a little rusty, and it did take me an entire day to create a single floor plan, but I’m toying with the idea of seeing what would be involved in getting back into architecture and abandoning all this PC troubleshooting bullshit.

Unfortunately, as long as the economy is in the toilet, there isn’t enough new construction happening to make this fantasy a reality.  But a boy can dream…

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Okay, Let Me Get This Straight

According to Christian mythology, God is omniscent. God created Adam and Eve (not Adam and Steve, as we’re so often reminded). Eve was tricked by Satan (in the form of a talking snake) into eating of the Tree of Knowledge.

Because of that, we lost our immortality and were cast out of the Garden of Eden to live out our lives in pain and suffering. (And apparently snakes were also stripped of the gift of gab as part of the punishment…just because.)

Let’s stop right there for a moment.

The Christians’ invisible friend-in the-sky is perfect and all knowing. Yet he created beings who—by being omniscient—he knew from the very beginning would be flawed. In other words, humans were built broken (and therefore created imperfectly) to begin with. So if God is incapable of making mistakes, that means he intentioinally created humans imperfect and subject to sin.

WTF? I mean seriously. WTF?

He created imperfect humans so they’d sin and “force” him to cast them out of the Garden.

What kind of sick fuck would do this?

Good ol’ Yaweh, that’s who.

This Christian God sounds like a real asshole.

And if Adam and Eve (and later, their two sons) were the only people on Earth, where the fuck did Cain and Able get wives? Were they screwing Eve? So they married their own sisters? Where in the Big Book of Traditional Marriage does that option appear? (Turns out, more often than you’d think.)

But hah, not this time. Instead they went east into the Land of Nod, where there were apparently already a large group of people living quite contentedly without any knowledge whatsoever this wondrous Garden and its psychotic keeper to the west.

W…T…F?  Where the hell did these people come from if there were only supposed to be four living people on the entire face of the planet up until this point?

If you ask any man of the cloth this question (when he’s not busy raping pre-pubescent boys) the answer is generally, “Some things are just taken on faith.” In other words, shut up and don’t ask questions.

My brain hurts.

But let’s back up even further.

Perfect, all knowing Christian sky-fairy creates everything—including another product of the fevered Christian imagination—angels.  But one of them rebels and is “cast out.” So once again we’re shown that God isn’t perfect, or that he just intentionally creates imperfect things that he enjoys torturing, like a kid with a magnifying glass encountering an ant hill on a sunny day.

Why does the word “psychopath” keep coming to mind?

Later on in the Big Book of Lies (aka the BuyBull), God says “Whoopsie!” and decides that humanity—after being fruitful and multiplying—didn’t turn out exactly like he’d intended again and should be killed…except for one small family who is then tasked with saving a pair of every living creature on earth. Or at least within walking distance of their home.

What’s the matter? Isn’t this God quite capable of saving all the animal life he wants on his own? Or is Norman Bates already growing impotent? And what about the plants, for chrissake? If the planet needs a reboot to rid it of the sin that Mr. Invisible created in the first place, why not just send it careening into the sun and start again from scratch? Or is that now beyond his power? I mean seriously…a flood?

And one more question: If all current humanity sprang from that one little family, where did all the races come from?

But going back to the Garden of Eden for a moment. Let’s play a little game and say that Eve didn’t eat of the Tree and humanity was never cast out from the Garden or lose its immortality. Can you imagine what a sty that place would be with fifteen to twenty billion of us trying to squeeze in there now? (Remember, people don’t die, but they sure don’t stop reproducing either!)

Anyway…

Later on, magic sky fairy realizes that he’s fucked up again and Noah’s descendants turn out just as bad their predecessors. You’d think that by now the idiot would realize this, right? (Definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.) But this time, instead of flooding the place (or sending it careening into the sun) he’s going to go down there as himself…as his son…to torture and descend into hell so that whoever believes in this ultimate sacrifice latest bit of crap doesn’t have to go to that make believe place themselves.

These fairy tales are fine for iron-age savages who don’t have the deductive reasoning—or scientific history to back them up—that modern men do, but c’mon guys…it’s the 21st Century. We’ve landed men on the moon and have just put a probe the size of a car on Mars. If ever there was a time for the “All Powerful” to come down and say “Great job, guys!” it’s now. But since he’s been conspicuously absent from the goings on of our daily lives going on 2000 years now and from all accounts is a major DICK, I think it’s high time for him to put up or shut up.

This is why I’m an Atheist. Because all these magic stories are pure, unadulterated bullshit.

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TMI, Continued…

1. You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What is that power?

Personal invisibility and the ability to turn any object I touch invisible at will. Wouldn’t you want to slip into a closed-door meeting of government officials to hear what they’re really thinking? Or expose all the religious hypocrites for who they really are? (And capture it on video!)

2. You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again?

Assuming that I retain full memory of my present life and actually go back to the age I was at the chosen time, pretty much any Friday or Saturday night circa 1978/1979 at HisCo Disco in Phoenix. I would revel in the company of long-departed friends and dance. my. ass. off.

3. You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?

I don’t know what it is with these memes and their obsession of things in the past. I’ve had unpleasant experiences throughout my life, but each of them set me on a path that brought me to where I am now. And I wouldn’t change that for the world.

4. You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your choice. Who would it be?

Ew. Why would I want to do that? I’d rather sleep with my Bubba.

5. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart immediately. Where are you gonna go?

How long could I stay in the destination? If this was just for a short getaway I’d probably say San Francisco. I could sorely use a big fat injection of that city’s energy right now.

6. Do you have any relatives in jail?

Not that I know of.

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Honey, Just Because…

…you sit on the other side of the cubicle wall from me and I can hear you bitching about your computer problems day in and day out doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it. My predecessor may have hopped up the moment he heard your whining, but those days are long gone. Get off your fat, lazy, self-entitled ass and put in a ticket—or if that’s just too difficult for you to handle—pick up the goddamned phone and call.

Otherwise, you can just stew in your shit.

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I'm Getting REALLY Tired of the Stupidity

The head of HR sent me an email this morning stating that since I use my car occasionally to travel between our two offices I need to supply them with proof of insurance.

I copied my insurance card and emailed it to her.

She wrote back and said, “That card is expired. Do you have a more recent one?”

I wrote back and told her to look again. (BTW, I’ve removed all identifying information from this screen shot, but everything was on the one I sent her.)

I WORK WITH FUCKING IDIOTS!

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