I don't know if my immediately prior post, plus the fact that I decided the answer was YES, have anything to do with it, but I was told today that I was "doing a great job". I take that with a grain of salt, as I don't trust the two account management colleagues of mine who said that farther than I could throw them. In fact, it actually made me suspicious. Between them they had my predecessor ousted, just to give you an example, and I have a nagging suspicion that they fired the guy who hired me precisely for having hired me. I know they had a candidate already picked and I was chosen against their wishes because the account manager, fired a couple of months after this, preferred to have someone independent take over the infrastructure and operations and not someone who would toady to these two guys.

Do two wrongs make a right? If I can be sneakier, ornier, nastier and trickier than the customer's techs are when they do shit and keep quiet about it hoping the blame'll be placed on my team, would that be justified?

Please vote, is Nicholas justified in outsneaking the customer?:

YES / NO

I am at a complete loss when trying to understand why someone would be running a search on "Grandpa's peepee", and even more at loss at comprehending how that would point them to this page. Well, now it would since I used that phrase. I mean why it would have pointed them here before now.

And who would be conducting a search with that phrase??? And what the hell for???? That's plain sick!!!

My blind spot is women. I just don't understand them. No matter how much I try I am always astounded by their unpredictable reactions and behavior... Thankfully, as with other phenomena I enjoy immensely, it's not necessary to grok completely in order to engage*...

* I was originally going to go for the verb use, but that sounded hideously offensive, even to me. And I certainly didn't mean use in that sense.

Just had lunch with an old friend of mine... Cuban restaurant, awesome food... And just in case anyone's keeping track of this sort of stuff, I said Grace before eating, out of respect for my buddy, who is a fervent believer.

Anybody want to go look and see if Hell froze over?

Lord, deliver me from fools...

But.

Don't stop delivering fools to me, Lord, as it's still the easiest way to make a living...

Looks like another winter is over, although the weathercritters do predict some light snowfall later this week. Ah, well, sooner or later it will be Fimbulwinter for real. I can wait. It rained most of yesterday, and the fog this morning was glorious. The rain melted the almost 2 feet of snow left from last week, which is sad. 50 mph winds today made it fun to drive around.

With Spring will come the necessity of renewing certain spells of a, well, sexual nature, which is always fun... And then there's Walpurgisnacht to look forward to, but that's still more than 2 months away... Come to think of it, from the look of the news, it looks like somebody has already started doing some fertility and/or virility spells. Otherwise, why immolate 96 people in Rhode Island?

Or is it simply one more sign that the Gods are angry at us, for not choosing a proper leader this time around?

"Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil."

That's a quote from Stranger in a Strange Land, by R.A. Heinlein. Incredible how a man who died in 1988 seems to have been able to perfectly predict Dubya way back in 1961.

I confess I never watch shows like this, but I will most definitely make an exception and tune in tonight at 8pm to Michael Jackson's rebuttal interview. Pitiful little fruitcake that he has become, it will still be interesting in a morbid, hideous sort of way to see what possible justification he's going to use to brush away his earlier admission, and I paraphrase, that 'it is alright for him to sleep in the same bed with 12 year old children unrelated to him'.

An unbelievable stack of mainstream CDs was just placed in the freebie cube*. Soft rock, hard rock, heavy metal, even Santana who doesn't do it for me, but I know is very popular. Days like this one make my job go from major pain in the neck to slightly tolerable...
* Go read the archives, I'm too busy looking at the 50 or so CDs I grabbed, so I'm not going to post a link to where I first used the term freebie cube.

Blog birthday coming up (on Saturday)... Damn... A full year has gone by... Have I bored everyone to tears in this year? Is anybody reading this? Do I care? Have I ever cared? Stay tuned for another year and you might find out the answers to these questions, and many more...

I will buy a keg of beer and toast the blog, and maybe I'll run into some unwitting fool that I can sacrifice to the bloGods...

Customer is so clueless they submitted an order today for Magic Self-Healing Server Pixie Dust. It seems the CIO caught the first half of an IBM commercial on TV and thought that it would solve some of the problems they've been having.

No, not really... But believe me, it's sheer good luck that it hasn't happened yet...

Near as I can tell, 15 inches of snow and counting. Delightful... I really wish it would snow and never stop... Fimbulvetr is an end I would be overjoyed to experience. And it still is snowing, but it has let up, leading me to lose all hope that Götterdämmerung was upon us...

I spent the day reading Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, the uncut version they finally published a few years back. Definitely the restored passages are well worth having to reread the whole opus. This version is much easier to grok than the censored version that was originally published, so if you haven't ever read it, get the complete one... I don't see it in Amazon, but the SFBC carries it, and that's where I acquired mine.

I'm of two minds on this whole Saddam/Iraq thing...

Mind Number One: Dubya is a moron who is so clueless that he still says 'nukular' instead of 'nuclear'. He is the leader of a country of closeminded (albeit well-intentioned) bumpkins who think their way of life and their moral code is the only right way to live, and that they have a God given right to determine how the rest of the world has to live and behave, regardless of any objections the rest of the world might have. As such, Dubya has already made up his mind to attack Iraq, even if the U.N. inspectors find nothing (and apparently they didn't). Dubya and his people (of which I am one) are completely oblivious to the fact that this behavior breeds resentment in anyone we force to behave as we would have them behave and since no one is stupid enough to think they could win a conventional war against us, will turn to unconventional means to educate us. This on top of the fact that most of the rest of the world would resent us regardless of Dubya, just because we have more commodities and freedoms than they do. Saddam, even if he had the stuff Dubya says he has, is no threat to the US. Just too far away. And even if he is a threat, there are far bigger threats right now, like N. Korea, Osama, Israel (who has done more to foster hate for the US throughout the Middle East than anything Dubya has done), Microsoft, Global Warming, AIDS, Common Cold, etc... Actually, Saddam is more of an annoyance than a threat.

Mind Number Two: Yeah, Dubya's a moron (common thread), and he goofed. But we can't back down now, because then no one will take our threats seriously next time we have to use them. Also, Saddam has been stupidly belligerent, I'm sure he has a martyr complex. Besides, we've already spent tons and tons of money getting all our soldiers over there, and the equipment, it seems a shame not to use them, and very unfair on the soldiers, to make them go through all that hassle for nothing.

I guess my vote is to attack, since we're already there. But also, let's try to curb Dubya so we don't follow this clusterfuck with yet another one and another and another... At the very least, let's send him back to High School and see if we can give him a real education. Oh, and while we have all our stuff there in the region, would it be morally bad to just wipe out all the other Arab countries? Let's face it, Dubya is a perfect excuse for anything. We can later say we were totally against it, but had no way of stopping him. Let's consider it, hmmm?

Doctors found a penis inside a girl... I know that's not unusual, per se, but this doesn't refer to them having found it while engaged in sexual intercourse with her, so it is newsworthy... LOL

My company's upper management has achieved new heights, or would that be lows? On a conference call where we were asked to (again) reduce our budgets, and where everyone made it very clear that they were already critically low, and that reducing them further would cause us to breach contracts with our customers, which would subsequently cause penalties to be assessed against us, said penalties to be way higher than any possible cost saving at this moment, with the added possibility that we would lose some of these contracts altogether...

Upper management's response? "We prefer a good, final year of profits in case we go belly up, than a year of low profit."

I fucking kid you not... Even I had to laugh at the criminally obtuse chutzpah of it all...

I seem to be coming down with a cold, blast it all. Doesn't seem to be a particularly nasty one, so I should be over it by tomorrow. I rarely have colds that last more than a day or two. I rarely have colds, period.

In other news, I saw a couple of good, foreign movies on cable this weekend, which just underscored the fact that American cinema is just another area where the US has totally lost it. American movies are plotless, inane drivel, at best, and apt material for torture in most all cases. The few good "Hollywood" movies one can point at in the recent past are almost all, when you delve in a bit, really foreign stuff done with US budgets backing them and Hollywood actors working for peanuts, if necessary, in order to not be in Halloween XXXVII. Thankfully, it looks as though foreign films are taking up the slack without a problem.

Also, a particularly nasty carbomb attack in Colombia on Friday laid waste to a club where many fond memories were made (i.e. good place to pick up Aristocratic ass) and several milestones in my recent career took place... Loss of life and limb was pretty heavy, too...

Snowing since last night... This morning I started off real early. I have a more or less long commute, had an early am meeting and expected the roads to be bad and the idiots to be out in force, so I decided to give myself enough time. I wish I had thought to bring popcorn, as I like having it along with a movie...

A few miles out from the NecroManor, with snow and slush all over the road, I was cruising along at 50 mph. Keeping an adequate distance between myself and the car in front. Behind me, at what seemed to be a prudent distance, another car. I noticed the cars in front of me were slowing down. You all know that when the road's slippery, you don't just hit the brakes, right? You pump them, or slowly ease down. Well, I slowly eased down on mine. The driver behind me must have seen my brake lights come on and immediately gone into panic mode. I could see in the rearview mirror as the car behind me started to fishtail. And behind it, three 18-wheelers bearing down. That's when I would have loved to have the popcorn. as near as I can tell, when my brake lights came on, the driver behind me just hit his brakes, slammed them home. Then when the car started fishtailing, he slammed them some more. By this point the car was just swerving all over the road, spinning like a top, and the 18-wheelers had, unfortunately for my amusement, managed to stop completely and were sitting like giants on the road, watching a toy spinning round and round before them. I kept on going, of course, but a mile later, I could still see the amusement behind me...

God damn... I'm envious... I can't for the life of me understand how I didn't think of this first... You'd think it'd be right up my alley, no?

Well I'll be damned... My flabber's been well and truly gasted this time... Thank you, sweetheart...

Why is it taking so long for Bush to bomb Iraq?

Why are the French suddenly so involved? Is this the new thing with the French nowadays? I mean, instead of surrendering, which was the old thing?

And why is Tony Blair so godawful anxious to be our running dog? Is no one wondering what he's going to ask for in return? Maybe we'll be forced to give back Canada for Blair's services?

And how about the Aussie govt? Ruining their chances for re-election over there but looking very good here in the USA. Heck, they'd be shoe-in candidates for many an office here...

Looks like the dilithium crystals could nae take the strain, Cap'n... If you go by CNN, anyway...

Watch out for those speed bmups... They're killers...