Spooky Box Woman

Happy Holloween everyone!

I have always been a big Halloween fan. Alas, this year, I find myself just chilling out today and waiting for the 2 or 3 children of the night to come by and demand candy. Which is fine, cuz of course bought all candy I like with the ultimate plan of it being left over for me. If I don't eat it all before tonight, that is. Mmmmm, Reeses....

I don't even have a costume this year! Damnit, I am getting lazy. But ya know, sometimes, lazy feels good! Anyways, my woman has an emergency costume she keeps on hand just in case. Maybe she will wear it tonight...

Mat of purpose & Pumpkin of Doom

Today was amazingly slow at work. When you can sit around and stare at the walls for an hour or two between customers - that is damn slow!

I am taking a personal day off tomorrow. Kind of an extra "gimme" day before the holiday craziness starts up. Plus, my woman is off, so we can spend some time hanging out together.

Myself, the woman, and her folks got together this past week to carve pumpkins! The woman wanted to drive north two hours to a pumpkin farm to acquire said pumpkins. Fortunately, she came to her senses and we just drove down the street to the local Fry's and picked em up This not only saved us a massive amount of time but also gave us a smoking deal. Those "pumpkin patch" places are always such a rip off.

Anyways, here is the end result. The pumpkin in the middle is ceramic, so that don't count. Of course, the bad ass pumpkin on the right is mine. Pumpkin Carver Extraordinaire, thats me!
Some, alas, chose not to carve their pumpkins, but paint them. PAINT THEM. Yes. What is this world coming to when we resort to painting pumpkins?

Beyond all that, I finally found out what the previous mentioned "Mat of Bewilderment" is for. Like this damn cat need any more places to rest/sleep/shed/puke on...

New item: Bitch repellent

Yesterday was one of those rough work days that you end up dealing with one asshole customer after another.

It started at 9:45am. Now, mind you, we don't open till 10am. Normally, most people are too stupid to realize not only do we have a "closed" sign on the door but we also have a BIG metal chain fence that closes down behind our glass doors and front windows. So, what is the result? Dumbasses who try to open the door and look shocked that it is locked. GOD you people are STUPID! But this morning, I get some old hag that continued to yank on the door as if she thought it was stuck! People kill me.

Little did I know she would be an omen for the rest of the day. As it ended up, the majority of the folks that walked in the door were assholes. The two BIGGEST bitches of the day ended up being the old bat with the door problem and some other wench later in the day. To my complete embarrassingly, both ended up being from my home town of Chicago! God, you people are just miserable!

In retrospect, I think maybe I was a miserable bastard when I lived in Chicago too! Must be all those dark, damp, cold days!

So, what have we concluded from this? Yes, that is correct. Chicagoans are assholes!

On the flip side of things. I am off today with my woman to purchase some pumpkins of the season and head over to her folks house to carve them and have some dinner. This will be MOST amusing as the last time my woman "attempted" to carve a pumpkin, her father had to take over the duty. I will make sure I bring the camera this time...

Mat of bewilderment

It is about noon and I have completed all of my errands for the day so I can now enjoy the rest of my day off! whoohoo! Even better, the "PMS shitstorm" seems to have passed and my woman has returned to her normal self. Yay for her.. and me!

Speaking of the woman, she recently brought this item home and plopped it in front of the kitchen sink:

Not exactly sure what to make of it. I am told that I can not step on it with my shoes on. So, that is kinda unfortunate, since the kitchen is small as it is. Now I have this "no fly zone" in there if I happen to have my shoes on. Since it looks like a floor mat that you would normally wipe your shoes on, the fact that I can not step on it with my shoes perplexes me.

What is it's purpose?! Perhaps a subliminal advertisement to get me to drink various coffee drinks? I am not sure. It remains a mystery for the moment.

Ah, and the Parents Television Council has dissed one of my favorite shows - Family Guy. They stated: "The top three worst shows all contain crude and raunchy dialogue with sex-themed jokes and foul language. Even worse is the fact that Hollywood is peddling its filth to families with cartoons."

Oh, the humanity! "raunchy dialogue and sex themed jokes" .. in animation no less! Shocking! Please folks, get over it. Family Guy is one of the most original and funny shows to come along in a while. If you are worried about sex in animation, God help this group if they ever check out any Japanimation.

Uh Oh, it's Holloween again

Hmm, my woman has been acting a bit grumpy this week. I thought she might be getting a head start on her persona for Holloween.




But then I figured it out...

Smurfageddon

I tried out Firefox for a few days this week after my disgust with Internet Explorers lack of security. Unfortunately, while Firefox is definitely a more advanced browser with newer and sleeker features, it still lags behind in compatibility. Two things that I found in the first 5 minutes of using it were the fact that it can not deal with rich text/special options within Yahoo Mail and that it could also not even display the simple rollover links on this webpage. So, back to IE for me. Hopefully Firefox will address these compatibility issues in the near future.

Oh, and hats off to Unicef (morons) who produced a video ad of the Smurfs (remember them?) getting the shit bombed out of them! Anyway, some bright person over at Unicef thought it would be a great analogy for "don't let children get caught up in war" to have a "Smurf bombing extravaganza".

The video "opens with the Smurfs dancing, hand in hand, around a campfire and singing the Smurf song. Bluebirds flutter past and rabbits gambol around their familiar village of mushroom-shaped houses until, without warning, bombs begin to rain from the sky. The Smurfs scatter and run in vain from the whistling bombs, before being felled by blast waves and fiery explosions."

Now, while one part of my weird mind sorta of enjoyed watching those damn smurfs get nuked, what a damn stupid advertisement to use to make a point! I am sure all the kiddies who caught this ad on tv will be appropriately scarred.

Yay, Unicef.

The irresistible button

As most of you know, the woman and I have been getting heavily into World of Warcraft. I built her a sweet computer rig last year. It can run WoW well, but it really needed a video card upgrade from the below average Geforce4 I had in there. For some damn unfathomable reason, the system would ONLY work with that card (or lower grade cards). I tried other higher end cards and the system just puked with them in there. Oddest damn thing.

Well, screw that action. So, I just built her a new rig! I know she is having a lot of fun and I wanted her to get the most out of it. The new rig rocks (cuz I have mad skills).

Anyway, on the front of the new rig there is a power button, reset button, and a big blue light behind what looks like a big button. I figured I would mess with the woman a bit when I showed her the new system. I pointed out the power and reset buttons. Then I pointed the big, blue glowing "button" saying "OK, as for this button - never touch it".

What does she do? At the friggin speed of light from the moment I ended my sentence, she reaches out and promptly touches it!!

I was like! Hey! What are you doing? I said NOT to ever touch it!!

"But, what does it do?" she asks, looking at me quizzically. After about 10 seconds of silence go by she reaches out and touches it AGAIN!

At this point I am floored. What if the button had actually been the "emergency delete hard drive button" or some shit like that? So I ask her again, trying to hold my laughter back. "Why did you touch it? I told you not to touch it?"

"Well, I didn't touch it hard" she says.

I didn't know that I had quantified the amount of pressure anywhere in my statement. Damnit woman! I said not to touch it! I said nothing about "OK, if you touch this, touch it softly!"

*sigh*

As for something new. This blog has been getting automatically spammed as of late. Basically, as soon as I enter a new post, automated systems somewhere are adding an advertisement to the comments. This does not happen all the time but it's obviously fucking annoying as I have to take the time to delete the post of some asshole bastard somewhere pulling this shit. Apparently, it is pretty common, so Blogger has an option for defeating this issue. So from now on when you post a comment, you will be prompted to type a word in that is show on the screen so the Blog site knows you are human and not a PC program.

Just gotta love the jerks out there. Making the damn internet a mine field.

Firefox take me away

Well, this has been one hell of a stressful week.

On the work end, the ultimate big shot was coming out this week to visit the Phoenix area - David Ritz himself, owner of the company. A few stores, including mine, were slated for the visit. Since I am a damn merchandising genius, I was asked to help another store get ready. Actually, it was put to me as "We need a favor. Do us this and we will owe you a favor". Being Italian, I am well familiar with this concept and promptly took them up on it.

Little did I know that it would be a whole store rebuild in terms of merchandising - in only two days. Got it all done though, looking like the hero. Good place to be.

Today, David Ritz stopped by with the usual entourage and checked the store out. All good. Funny though, so much preparation for the visit - not only my store, but all the others in the area - and the dude stays 20 minutes and jets. He was cool though and complemented me and the store, so no complaints.

On the home front, some suckage. Got hit with a Coolweb/virtual Maid trojan/malware hijack the other day - fucking insecure Internet Explorer. Hijacks absolutely suck. They muck up everything and take hours to clean up. I have cleaned various version of Coolweb off others computers previously. I managed to get the latest and greatest variant. Yay for me.

This one was an absolute bitch. I swear, the things these asshole people think up to screw with people. It's really all about money, cuz the damn things are designed to take you to certain websites, download programs, steal information, throw ads at you - it's a fucking joke. Yes, I am pissed. This particular variant took me 8 God damn hours to clean out. I can handle such issues calmly - except when it is my own rig. Screw these people!!

Big thanks goes out to my woman, who knows now to leave me to myself when I'm dealing with crap like this.

Since I have had enough, I am going to try out Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is a new browser that is suppose to be assloads more secure then Microsoft's internet Explorer. It is no where nears as susceptible to all of IE's flaws. Hopefully I will like it, because I never want to spend 8 hours cleaning up an issue like that again.

So, my week is done. Thank God. I am off tomorrow and plan on enjoying it by, well, sleeping a lot.

Have you met my son, Asshat?

I just caught this on the news. It involoves Nicolas Cage, movie star, and apparent goof. Cage's wife just gave birth to their first son. Who Nicolas, an avid comic book fan, promptly named: Kal-el. Sound familiar to any of you? Hmmm. Well, if not, here is the low down. Kal-el is Superman's birth name from Krypton. Yes, Cage named his son after Superman's Kryptonian name. Uuummmhhmm.

Really, did he even think of his son at all during this? You might as well have named the kid "Asshat".

"Hi, have you met my son, Asshat? Please beat him up."

This kid sure has a life of torment and beatings coming up. I mean, what kid is not going to resist being able to boast to his friends: "Hey! I just kicked Superman's ass!"

Perhaps Cage's "enthusiasm" in baby naming comes from his current film deal. He will be playing the lead character in Marvel's Ghost Rider.

You have forgotten something

Wow, that was a lightning jump into October. Not even sure where the last week went to. Damn work! I need a bumper sticker that says "I'd rather be playing WoW"...

I would definately like to get a few good days off this month, before the holiday rush hits. Cuz once that comes, it's non stop crazy action. Off today though, though I did not sleep too well last night, alas. Not sure what is on the agenda for the woman and I yet. We wanted to go catch Corpse Bride, but I am feeling a bit off this morning. Hopefully it will go away (something I ate, no details required).

On the funny side of things, a while back I downloaded the "Family Guy Movie" and burned it to CD to watch on the DVD player. I attempted twice to watch it with my woman, who promptly fell asleep both times (even though she really likes Family Guy). So last night, she comes home all excited from shopping.

Her: "Look what I bought, honey! The Family Guy Movie!"
Me: Blank stare.
Her: "Look, they have a movie!"
Me: (after a longer blank stare) "Honey, that's what we have been trying to watch on DVD already - we have that"

Suffice it to say, it took a good five more minutes for me to convince her that this was the case. Apparently when she falls asleep at night, she loses a good 30 minutes to an hour of memory of the events before hand.

I must remember this as it may come in handy for possible future exploitation.