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I really freakin’ hate California.

The other day Miss Lisa was watching Easy Entertaining with Michael Chiarello. There’s a running argument between Lisa and myself over whether Michael Chiarello is gay (my position) or whether he’s just “from California” (Lisa’s position). But for some reason, I just kept getting more and more angry as I watched his show last Sunday. Why does California have to ruin everything? Why would someone in California take something as magnificent and glorious as the New York pizza and think “Hmmmmm.. what this needs is goat cheese, Thai-flavored chicken and organic Crimini mushrooms!” Blech! And why would they take something as unhealthy for you (yet delicious) as French fries and coat them with “a fine, light extra virgin olive oil” and bake them? Dude, newsflash: French fries are supposed to be bad for you. The rest of us still rue the day that McDonalds stopped cooking their fries in beef tallow… ‘cos that’s what made them so damn tasty!

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You know what really pisses me off? Two things this week:

For starters, don’t you hate when one simple organizing task blows up into a 14-hour cleaning marathon? You see, Lisa once kept her CDs in a nice wire rack in a corner of the living room. One Christmas, she decided that she’d rather keep her discs in DJ cases instead, so I got her a nice case from Sam Ash. And so – the wire rack just kind of sat there for a while looking for a home. Now me, I’ve kept my CDs in some stolen Dr Pepper flats, the heavy plastic kind that the 20oz. drinks used to come in. And while the flats are functional and cheap (free, even!)… they’re just not that pretty to look at. So I decided to move the now-unused wire rack to my room and put my CDs in there. The only problem with that is that I have far too many CDs for the rack. “No problem”, I’m thinkin’, “just put your 100 favorite ones in the rack and stash the rest in the closet”. Which is a great plan, only my closet is the greatest example of entropy there is. There was junk crammed all over the place. Hell, I once sent a team of Swiss hikers into my closet to find something, and I never heard from them again. So – just to make my room look a little nicer, I pulled the 14,591,278 items I had on the closet’s floor out and trashed half of it and reorganized the rest. It needed to be done, sure… but what a pain in the ass! What should have been a nice little gesture took me all day and part of the night.

Continue reading “RANT: Lost Stuff”

Here’s this week’s rant: who the hell still writes checks?

I own a Windows Smartphone – a Samsung i600 phone – and enjoy using it as a portable media player thanks to The Core Pocket Media Player. I have a 512MB SD card, and usually have several albums as well as a few podcasts on the card. The problem is, the phone doesn’t have a very powerful speaker (compared to a car stereo) and I usually have to listen through headphones. Wouldn’t it be more fun to listen via the AUX input of my car stereo or the cassette adapter of Lisa’s stereo?

And so – earlier this week I went to Radio Shack to buy an adapter that would allow me to connect a 3.5mm input to the standard 2.5mm output on my phone. It’s a simple piece of plastic and wires that I would normally buy online if I weren’t so hesitant to pay $6.99 in shipping for a $1.99 part.

And so – I walked into the empty store, and within five seconds I made a grievous mistake: the saleslady asked me if I needed any help, and like an idiot I told her I’d be fine on my own. Of course, I had no idea where the specific adapter was located, so whilst I was searching the store’s cramped racks, an elderly gentleman walked in. The poor guy was as old as the hills and has some sort of ailment that rendered his thick Southern accent almost unintelligible. If you wish, imagine Boomhauer from King of the Hill with a nasty case of emphysema.

Continue reading “RANT: Old People Writing Checks”

This week’s rant – or, more accurately, “this month’s rant” or even “this quarter’s rant” – is an old one to IT support folks. Part of it is Microsoft’s fault and part of it is your fault. But whatever the case may be, it’s worthy of a rant, even if it’s an old complaint.

Microsoft makes two programs for getting email. One is Microsoft Outlook. The other is Microsoft Outlook Express. Outlook was created by the Office team; Outlook Express was created by the Internet Explorer team. Outlook is part of Office and costs money; Outlook Express is included with Windows and doesn’t cost extra. Outlook has many features that businesses like, such as task lists, calendars and sticky notes; Outlook Express is mostly for home users that just need to get email. Outlook can connect to Microsoft Exchange servers; Outlook Express cannot.

Continue reading “RANT: People Who Call Outlook Express “Outlook””

OK, so this week’s rant is hardly new, but it still gets my craw anyway. Lately I’ve been completely disgusted with the state what passes for English grammar and usage in Internet communications. How often have you been on an Internet message board and seen sentences such as this: “The MPAA can take all there DVD’s and PC’s and cram ’em up you’re ass! I will hate them until my dying breathe!”

My God! If the Queen were dead, she’d be rolling over in her grave!

So let’s review some basic English grammar rules, OK?

Continue reading “RANT: Crappy Grammar on the Internet”

What the hell happened to t-shirts?

Now I know that back in high school I weighed about 70 pounds less than I do now, but still… back then an XL t-shirt fit me like a potato sack. And these days, an XL shirt will barely cover my gut comfortably. I am 5 feet 9.921 inches tall and weigh 190 pounds… Am a pudgy? Yep. Could I stand to lose a few pounds? Sure. Am I – by anyone’s definition – fat? Not hardly. And yet, so often these days I hesitate when buying a t-shirt because I’m afraid that it’ll be too tight across my belly – or will look fine the first time I wear it, then shrink something fierce after the first washing. In any event, I’m hardly a “big” guy – I know several men that are “bigger” than me – be they fat or simply broad-shouldered – and looking around I wonder who on earth is buying the “small” and “medium” shirts. It must not be too many people, as Old Navy always has a large number of small and medium shirts on their sale racks. And I also know that it’s not just me because “large” Old Navy proper shirts – turtle necks, Oxford shirts, etc – fit me just fine. It’s just t-shirts that I have to buy in what should be “Fat Albert size”.

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When it comes to this week’s rant I’m really pissed off. It seems that there is a rash of Charlotte nightclubs and bars padding people’s tabs. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that the missus and I don’t even start tabs and buy drinks “by the each” with cash if possible. Now, it might be one thing if Charlotte was a large as say, Atlanta or Chicago, but the simple fact is that there aren’t that many bars in this city. So “our people” are a sort of captive audience as it were, hustling back and forth between four or five places depending on how bad the padding is getting at one particular place. But it’s simply outrageous.

Continue reading “RANT: Charlotte Bars Padding People’s Tabs”