Are You Listening, George? hahahahahaha!!

The people have spoken and their will has been done. King George's regime has lost control of both Congress and the House. Finally, America might be able to begin repairing the damage done to it by the power hungry, amoral, criminal hypocrites who were previously running the show. 

Now the Bushies may actually have to tell the truth sometimes and do what's best for the US instead of what's best for their pockets. They are going to absolutely hate that!! They might even have to *gasp* start trying to protect the planet! Oh horrors!!

As an added plus Donald Rumsfeld, architect of a failed war, has resigned. Despite all his refusals to resign and Bush refusing to toss his ass out he resigns anyway. Good riddance. His incompetence is directly responsible for the death of 4,800 of our soldiers and over 120,000 innocent civilians plus 32,000 injured US military. We'll probably never know the true scope of the psychological damage to our military and their families. Rumsfeld, I hope your nightmares are haunted by the ghosts of every single one of them you lying, murderous bastard. 

Finally we may have some people in charge who understand that when you invade a country, occupy it for years, tamper with it's government, destroy it's infrastructure and decimate it's population in an illegal war of aggression which was based entirely on lies, the people of that country are going to get pissed and start doing their best to get back at you. People who identify with them (like a few million Arab Muslims in this case) will also get pissed and want you destroyed. We'll see what the Dems do, short of handing Osama bin Laden a nuke and a plane ticket to New York it can't be any worse than what the Bushies have done.

Now there's  a chance that some much needed hearings and investigations may occur, I'd love to see Cheney squirming in front of Congress as he gets called to explain lie after lie that he and his war machine fed the American people and the rest of the world. 

Wouldn't it be funny as hell if Bush and Cheney suddenly disappeared, whisked away in the middle of the night with no warning, no rights, and no legal representation only to end up as cellmates in a nonexistent CIA secret prison where they had to endure acts of torture which our country doesn't use? Film of that would be number one at the box office for months.

The neo-con plan for world domination has just been dealt a serious blow. Cheney the warmonger lost a large chunk of his power. Rumsfeld the architect is running away from his failure and Dubya the dummy is sitting around trying to figure out where it all went wrong. All I have to say to the three of them is "Welcome to the real world. I hope you hate it as much as it hates you."

I almost forgot, Rick Santorum lost! Happy happy joy joy

Election Time!

Finally, a chance to get rid of some of our "leaders" and "representatives". I use these terms loosely because so many of them are neither. In my state for example, we have Rick Santorum as our US Senator. This man is a sheep, voting with Dubya about 98% of the time. He votes how his party and it's leaders tell him to vote.

He's a follower, not a leader. He does this while "representing" a state which voted against Bush in both the 2000 and 2004 elections, and against Bush's political party in general in 1996 and 1992. I hope his political career as a "representative" of the people of the State of Pennsylvania is about to come to a screeching halt.

For the rest of you out there in the US, use your heads and think for yourselves when you step into the booth. Voting along party lines went out of fashion when Communism fell and America became guilty of war crimes. You have a brain so use it to vote the man or woman and the issues.

Kickbacks, bribes, security leaks, theft, illegal sexual conduct with children, manipulation of facts and Intelligence reports to suit private agendas, blatant lies, mass murder, torture, illegal war, crimes against humanity, turning a blind eye to genocide, the alienation of our Allies, hatred of America spreading around the globe like wildfire, attempts to rewrite our Bill of Rights, the repeal of Habeas Corpus (a standard of Western Law for over 800 years), shifting the wealth of the nation to the richest while shifting the tax burden in the opposite direction, the steadfast refusal to start protecting our environment before it's too late, the complete and utter failure of our government to protect and rebuild New Orleans during and after Katrina, these acts and more have been committed and/or orchestrated by our current "leadership".

The millionaire's club running our country (into the ground) does not care one little bit about you or I, it never has and it never will. It's one and only concern is itself. It's high time that America stood up and showed these jackasses that this crap won't fly anymore. A government chock full of inept amateurs would be preferable to what we have now. At least then the mistakes would be honest, a word our current collection of criminals knows nothing about.

I now step down from my soap box, go vote!

Halloween Is Too Short

Ok, somebody needs to make Halloween last longer. The best damned holiday of the year and the fun only lasts about an hour and a half, maybe two hours at best? That's just wrong!!

It was another good year, I scared the crap out of a bunch of kids, a few teens, even a couple of parents. Nobody cried and nobody fell down the steps in their hurry to run. Best of all, I even had some candy left over for me! A great big "Thank you!" to all the kids that were too scared to come to the porch and get candy, those Snickers bars were tasty!

Now I have to start planning next year's scares, I've already got the idea, I bet the kids will absolutely LOVE a rotting corpse clawing it's way out of a half buried coffin and reaching out to grab them. Now I just need to make it work. Details, details, details. But first, I hear half a bag of Snickers bars calling my name and I've no choice but to heed their call. I'm weak like that.

Even Bigger F YOU!!! to HP

Okay, maybe I was a bit hasty to judge HP in my last blog. So to make up for it, take all the bad stuff I said about them and multiply it times ten, that's about what I really think of them. Today I almost found out just how far I can throw a computer. 

The piece of junk lost it again for no apparent reason. So again I give in and run the recovery discs (3 of them) which took over four and a half hours. Then I had to wait almost that long again for it to mirror all of that data to the recovery partition. This would be the same worthless, waste of hard drive space recovery partition which wouldn't work last time, causing me to waste hours of my time (again).

What douchebag engineer thought up that concept? Then I had to wait yet again until it finished installing everything at which point I could begin set-up, then the never ending list of downloads, installs and updates. Finally, some 12+ hours later I have a computer that works again. Yay me, hoo effing ray.  *yawn*

I would sooo love to shove the overpriced birdhouse straight up the overpaid ass of an HP corporate officer, then make them suffer and wait while a repetitive, ineffective and nonfunctioning "easy repair tool" takes 12 hours to get it back out. I bet none of the smart HP employees use an HP.

The cause of all this frustration and wasted time? The power went out. No surge, no flickers, no rapid off and on, just a simple power failure for a couple of minutes. Even the ancient relic which I built by myself out of old parts was tougher than that. I'm oh so happy to see that technology has advanced so far in the years since. I think HP stands for Heaping Pile because that's about what it is.

Great Big F YOU!!!! To HP

I've added Hewlett-Packard to my list of companies with products I will never buy again. If you are in the market for a computer and someone tries to sell you an HP, specifically a Pavillion a1420n, run. It's been nothing but trouble. The product is inferior, they misrepresented the Operating System version (by three years) and their version of tech support is worthless.

HP are traitors, they eliminated jobs here and outsourced their tech support to India. Instead of reaching someone you can understand and who knows the product, you end up talking to someone whom you must continually ask to repeat themselves and knows nothing about your computer aside from what he's reading from the screen in front of him. I'm sorry but the ability to perform a keyword search and read from a screen is not tech support by any definition I am aware of.

As soon as it was out of the box and running the trouble started. Every time I tried to open a web page or connect to the internet the computer would freeze completely, requiring me to turn it off and restart it. I spent close to an hour and a half on the phone with their "Tech Support" trying to fix the problem. Most of that time was wasted by me asking the poor clueless slob to repeat himself because I couldn't understand him through his heavy Indian accent. I gave up in frustration, then had it fixed myself within a few minutes of hanging up the phone. It was actually pretty simple but the "highly trained" tech couldn't figure it out.

Then came the day when I tried to assign functions to the supposedly programmable hot keys on the keyboard. These are the keys which let you open a program or go to a specific web page with just one push of a button. The option tab which would allow programming of these buttons was nowhere to be found. 

So again I call HP customer service. Once again I am on the phone for over an hour. Once again they couldn't tell me how to get it fixed. At the conclusion of the call I was informed that this was a known issue. Seriously? If it was "known" then why the f*** didn't they say that at the beginning of the call before I waste over an hour of my time? They claimed it was actually Microsoft's fault and there would be a patch released by Microsoft by the end of that month. That was 3 months ago. Can I program those buttons now? No.

Actually I can't do anything now, the computer has been reduced to nothing but an expensive paperweight courtesy of HP tech support. Even killing the computer entirely took them over an hour, I could have done it myself in seconds. It was running when I called them, dead when they were done with it. After talking with two computer techs in my area I learned that most of what I was told to do was absolutely wrong. The error message I was receiving was quite common and could be easily fixed within seconds if you aren't being directed by an incompetent twit.

Bottom line, I have to pay someone to try to save the files I need from my hard drive, losing everything they can't find or copy. Then I have to wipe it and waste an hour and a half while I reinstall the Operating System with the recovery discs, Then I can spend hours updating, downloading and installing. 

Do these stupid assholes not know that I have addictions to feed? HP refuses to reimburse me or replace the computer, claiming it was operator error that damaged it even though it was running when I called but was dead after I followed their instructions. HP had income of 86 billion dollars last year, I think they could afford to honor their warranty and do the right thing by replacing their defective junk. I hope those bastards are in the part of California that breaks off and sinks into the ocean after the next big earthquake.

Screw you HP, you can kiss my ass. I hope you get bought out by Sony you traitorous, junk peddling, worthless sons of bitches. Thus concludes another rant. Thanks for listening (or reading, whatever). I feel better already.

The Lesser of Two Evils

Which is worse, acceptance of circumstances you deplore or harboring deepening resentment toward the person responsible for the aforementioned circumstances? Can the first one exist without directly causing the second?

Acceptance seems like you're selling yourself out, or is it just a necessary compromise to help preserve the greater good? I'm sure there's a line drawn somewhere which differentiates the two but I've no idea where that line is. I sure wish I did though.<

I think resentment has it's own inevitable conclusion especially when it's been accumulating over a fairly long time. That conclusion is usually an ugly one. Sooner or later, out it comes!

I can't decide if acceptance is preferable to resentment, or not. While I know that harboring feelings of resentment will sooner or later come back to bite me in the ass I just can't bring myself to let go and pretend nothing's happened while happily accepting the way things are. Maybe that's a shortcoming of my own which I need to work on.

Some Stuff

Yes!! First I want to say I am happy as happy can be. That frigging stone is gone, I got rid of it this morning. Mostly I'm happy because all you doom and gloomers out there telling me it was going to hurt even worse then my night in the ER were wrong. I didn't feel a thing. Like rolling a marble through a firehose baby, plenty of room to spare! Okay, enough bragging now. I see a doc in a week to get the thing analyzed and find out what my chances are of having to go through that barrel of laughs again.

Next, garden pictures. Yes I've been slacking. Sue me. I think I screwed around and missed a few plants but now that August is almost here I finally got around to putting up some pictures from June. Same deal as usual, making the rounds of the yard with closeups following the wide angle shots. The combination of winter damage and a bunch of nasty storms has left some gaping holes but all in all it's not looking too bad. Most of the damage was to bigger plants and they are starting to come back, they won't be much to look at this year but there's always next year. Grow dammit, grow!

Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, I have now entered into the politics of my little town. I am the Iron Fist of the Borough on the Zoning Appeals Board. Soon I will realize my political aspirations and become Ruler of the World, muahahahahahaha! Scary, no? King Jeff? Hmmm, I don't like that one. Your Lordship? His Royal Highness? I don't like them either. Grand Poobah? Hmmm, this is tough and I haven't even started yet! *sigh* I can already hear the sarcastic comments. Bring it on, I can take it. Just remember that one day I will be your King, or something.