The Pale Blue Spot

So, I didn't see anything in the news about it anywhere, but I was stuck in what became the worst traffic jam of my life on Friday. I went up to Sunnyvale (a few miles north of San Jose) to work in our office there on the laptop that the VP of Sales is using. My employee came with me in his car with the intention of meeting his wife there and then going on to San Francisco for the weekend. I wasn't able to leave until 3PM, which is right at the cusp of when you would normally want to get out of that area before hitting bad traffic. Many people know that there has been some construction going on south of Gilroy where there is a turn-off of the 152 that leads to Hollister. Although it usually doesn't happen to me, I got stuck in traffic there for about 20 minutes. I was a little frustrated, but okay. I drove past the Hollister turn-off and accelerated back up to about 80MPH, went about two miles and noticed a CHP car leading a group of cars in front of me. Before I knew

[This was first published on 07/30/08 - It's now 03/12/19 and I think it's safe to say that the person I'm speaking of below was Brian Gardner:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianjgardner001/ ] Alright, this will probably only make you laugh if you work with me at Yosemite Technologies (or if you have ever worked with the person that I'm quoting). I've compiled a list of snippets from emails that I've received from everyone's favorite VP, none other than 'The Doctor' himself- you should recognize who it is right away: "I don't remember agreeing to this, so I'm assuming there is some mistake on my part." "I had to simplify your slides both for compatibility and readability reasons. But we're going to need to move off of Powerpoint soon to avoid these issues as well as the risk of corruption you run with a frequently edited ppt file. " "I looked at what you wrote about the Watchguard option and am not comf

Is fucked and going nowhere fast. I'm beyond the point of being upset and now I've just come to accept the fact that things will never change. People think that just because it's time to elect a new president that one of these schmucks is gonna save everyone's ass. Well, news-fucking-flash, when has that ever happened before? All of the people that might have actually been worth voting for were blotted out by the corporate-controlled media and have dropped out, so we're left with this group of douche-astronauts. How the hell do can you believe that fake-ass smirk that's always on Hillary's face? And do you really think that even Barack Obama truly has your interests at heart? People act as though once he gets into office he's going to pull a magic wand out of his ass and there'll be money raining down from heaven... all of a sudden global warming will be solved and we'll all have free health care. Wake up. It's been said that the Amer

Yesterday morning, my mom forwarded this video to me of Newt Gingrich speaking on the upcoming horrors of the War on Terror. If you don't feel like watching all 6 minutes of it, I'll give it to you in a nutshell. He basically says that he is really worried about the future, in that the Muslim extremists are going to do whatever they can to attack the United States on its home turf, and that we can't pull out of Iraq because we would be opening ourselves up to a world of hurt. He also says that we need to be more aggressive in going after countries like Iran, who 'have a great desire to acquire nuclear weapons and use them on us'. Below was my response to all of this. You'll see that there were some things that I agreed with that I didn't mention above: Right, I think I do agree with a couple of the things that he is saying, but he (like a lot of other people) is missing a big point. I'll get to that in a second. First, I do agree with him when he tal

Here is an email that I sent to everyone in my company this morning. Subject: Justice is Served, although Revenge would have been sweet... Body: I just thought that everyone who had one of those HP ZD7000 laptops that died over the past couple of years would like to know that a settlement was reached in a class action lawsuit against HP. I haven't completed an official count yet, but I know that we've had nearly a dozen of those laptops (or more) that completely failed over the past two years or so. I had diagnosed all of them as either having defective power connectors on the motherboard, or a faulty graphics card- either of which were fatal to the health of those machines (which cost us about $2000 each when they were initially purchased). In court, HP continued to uphold their argument that nothing was ever wrong with any of these machines and that they shouldn't be held accountable… …Corporate swine. The bottom line is, I have already found 6 of these machines that are

These days, there are too many voters out there that are more like "meat with eyes" than living, thinking human beings. We're supposed to be an educated democratic society, yet it seems like more and more people know next to nothing about the issues or the candidates that we are involved in voting for. Maybe I sound a little harsh when I refer to people as "meat with eyes", but it really urks me whenever I heard someone say that they voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger just because they liked his movies (or that they're voting for Hillary just because she's a woman, Obama because he's a black man, etc.). Of course, many other people just don't have the time or the interest to really pay as much attention to politics as they probably should- and that's not always their fault. One major problem is that it's not very easy to get good information about what's really going on these days. The corporate-owned news media contributes to this i

So, I walked in and sat down at my desk this morning to see a link to this article sticking out at me in an instant-message from my friend Jason. First of all, it made me laugh my ass off. But after all of the laughter subsided I damn near started to cry, because there is a lot of truth in this article. Maybe not about Jimmy Carter being the answer to all of our problems (although it doesn't sound too bad at this point), but it definitely reminds you that the slate of candidates that we have to choose from are mostly full of shit. I only say "mostly" because I think that the usual "second tier" candidates offer the most amount of hope for the type of radical change that we need- namely, either Ron Paul in the Republican party or Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic Party (unfortunately, neither fared to well in the last primary: Paul=8% and Kucinich=1%)... apart from them, the other candidates talk a lot of bullshit but I don't think that things are really g