Stupid Evil Bastard

The blogging infection continues to spread in my family with my Dad becoming the latest member to fall victim and start up his own blog. Problem is he can’t think up a clever and witty name for his blog so for the moment it’s going by the title Jay’s Unknown Blog which just won’t do. So I’m calling on all you SEB Regulars to sit down and put on your thinking caps and help my Dad come up with a witty or clever title for his new home on the web. There’s not much on his blog yet, just a test post, but we do have some categories defined which you can see if you go there if you want to get some ideas on what he plans to talk about.

So help a guy out and suggest some good blog names, will ya?

No, it’s not Cartman from South Park. It’s Sam’s Butt Rocket. A video clip in which we get a great demonstration of why you should never try to launch a bottle rocket from your asshole, unless you’re as big of an idiot as the teenage male in this video. Warning: NSFW due to partially naked dumbass.

On the one hand it’s always amusing to watch idiots injure themselves, but on another it still amazes me that there are people out there so stupid as to think this could possibly be a cool thing to do—let alone video tape it so it can be uploaded to the net. I did some pretty stupid things in my time and I don’t think I’d want anyone taping any of them because the memories of them are painful enough without a video reminder being necessary. Especially one which the whole world has access too. Still, my mother always taught me that everyone is good for something and in this case it appears he’s striving to be the best bad example he can be.

Borrowed from PZ Myers who’s using the video to teach his daughter important lessons on why boys should just be avoided altogether. Say, that’s not a bad idea…

Anne’s been home pretty much all this week trying to recover from the sinus infection she picked up. Today she was feeling quite a bit better so the two of us drove to the Wayne County Family Services office nearby so I could apply for any assistance I might qualify for. Not something I was really interested in doing, but Anne getting sick pretty much drove the point home that I needed to at least try and get Courtney under Medicaid until I can manage to land a job. With Anne working we don’t qualify for welfare itself and only qualify for catastrophic insurance coverage under Medicaid (basically anything that would cost more than $800 to cover). Courtney, however, does qualify for medical coverage. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever applied for government assistance and it was a mortifying experience for me.

So, naturally, when we got home after some three and a half hours it only figures that there’d be a phone message from one of the EDS jobs I applied for on Monster.com. Which is great except that whoever left the phone message spoke so quickly and loudly that her name was completely garbled on the digital answering machine and the phone number she left ends up playing a recording that says to call a different number for assistance. Calling that number I tried to explain to the lady who answered that I had no idea who it was that called me, but I had the phone number she said to call. Problem is the nice lady on the phone doesn’t have any record of that phone number being part of their company. The prefix is right, but the last four digits are unknown. Being EDS there’s a lot of potential divisions that could have been calling me and the recruiting department itself doesn’t have a phone number for some reason.

Basically it boils down to me actually getting a rare call-back from a job I applied for and being completely unable to return the phone call because I don’t know who it was and the phone number doesn’t work. My only hope is that she’ll try again on Monday. So much for reducing my stress level this weekend.

Thanks to the folks at Joystiq comes word that the details on the first World of Warcraft expansion have been revealed:

• An increase in the level cap to 70
• Two new playable races (including Blood Elves)
• New starting zones
• The entire new continent of Outland (via Dark Portal)
• Many new high-level dungeons
• New flying mounts in Outland
• Many new monsters (including epic world bosses)
• Hundreds of new quests
• Hundreds of new items
• A new profession (Jewelcrafting)
• Socketed items
• And more!

The official word comes via a scanned CGW article which Gaming Steve tracked down. You can view the scanned pages here: Pages 1-2, Pages 3-4, Pages 5-6, Pages 7-8, and Pages 9-10. Now I’m all excited. Of course I still need to land a job before I can even beginning to think of playing this.

Update: The official Burning Crusade website is now online.

Anne Rice, best know for novels such as Interview With A Vampire, hasn’t published a new book since 2003 and she’s finally ready to unleash her next creation on the world. Alas it may come as a bit of a surprise for fans…

“For the last six months,” she says, “people have been sending e-mails saying, ‘What are you doing next?’ And I’ve told them, ‘You may not want what I’m doing next’.”

Seems Anne has found some of that Old Fashioned Religion™ and will only be writing for the Lord from now on with the release of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. It’s a novel about and narrated by a 7-year-old Jesus Christ.

She can cite scholarly authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. But she’s also taken liberties where they don’t explicitly conflict with Scripture. No one reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo of Alexandria, as the novel has it—or that Jesus’ family was in Alexandria at all. And she’s used legends of the boy Messiah’s miracles from the noncanonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.

Rice’s most daring move, though, is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who’s intermittently aware that he’s also God Almighty. “There were times when I thought I couldn’t do it,” she admits.

In the interest of fairness I have to admit that I’ve never cared for Anne Rice’s previous novels so I probably won’t be lining up for her Christian fiction, but other than that I don’t have a problem with this decision of hers. It’s not like she doesn’t already have more than enough money from 25 previous novels that she can’t afford to do whatever the hell she wants and I already consider Jesus Christ to be a fictional character anyways.

I’ll probably find it interesting to see how the public reacts to her novels, though, as it goes without saying that whenever Jesus ends up in fiction there’s usually someone somewhere that’s going to get pissed off with how he’s portrayed. Then at the other end of the scale will be the folks who will latch onto Rice’s novels as somehow being divinely inspired and thusly accurate portrayals rather than the works of fiction that the author intends them to be. This has the potential to be very amusing to watch unfold.

The True Believers™ are once again crowding around in public for a chance to stare at yet another inanimate object that they think they see the face of Jesus in. This time it’s a tree in front of a company in Rochester, NY that will eventually be the focus of claims of spontaneous healing and miraculous visions.

“I see it clearly,” said Yomaira Otero of Rochester, who stood in the pouring rain Tuesday with six members of her family to see the tree. She spoke in Spanish to her relatives and pointed out the facial features, including the beard of bark she saw. “He looks like he’s sleeping.”

He’s not sleeping, he’s ignoring you. He’s been trying to find a nice spot to take a break and every time he thinks he’s found it some idiot shows up and turns it into a media circus on him. Then the nutcases have to start spouting off what they think this sudden appearance means:

“It’s a sign from God that there should be peace,” said Maria Trinidad, who lives on Clifford Avenue. “There is a lot of crime here. People should have faith in God. This is God giving us a sign.”

Yeah, God wants peace… peace and fucking quiet! He’s trying to TAKE A FRIGGIN’ NAP FOR CHRISSAKE! The sign is DO NOT FRIGGIN’ DISTURB!

Fortunately there was at least one person who had the presence of mind to question what he thought he was seeing in the tree…

Jim Holtz, 54, of Greece, said he noticed the image Monday when he stopped in the Cash King pawn shop directly across the street from Hickey-Freeman.

“I was looking out that way as I usually do and saw that on the tree,” Holtz said. “I said, ‘Am I seeing things?’”

Yes Jim, you are seeing things. You’re seeing a tree with a bark pattern that your brain is attempting to make sense of by comparing it to common icons in your life and, in the great tradition of all nutcases, it’s decided to associate it with a mythical religious figure because that’s what you folks always do. If some of it didn’t resemble a beard in your mind then it would’ve been the Virgin Mary instead of Jesus.

A pic of the tree is in the upper right corner of this entry and you can click it for a bigger picture if you’re curious. Of the various examples of this nonsense this one is pretty weak in my opinion. It could just as easily look like a representation of Mario Van Peebles’ face to me. At least once I finally managed to figure out what the hell they were looking at as it’s pretty vague. If it’s Jesus then he’s got one helluva skin condition.

Go and watch this video on Google Video and you’ll see a perfect example of a kid who wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in my Mom’s house. It’s a capture from a clan match taking place in the game Rainbow Six over Xbox Live and it features a 9-year old kid who forgot to turn his headset off arguing with his mother about getting him a glass of “motherfucking chocolate milk.”

There’s lots of ways to describe this video, Strange, Scary, “WTF?!!” This video is about some 9-year-old arguing with his mother about Chocolate Milk while playing Xbox Live, and forgetting to turn his Headset off.

This video may entertain you. Plus it does make a nice topic of discussion

It starts off a bit noisy and difficult to follow until the guy doing the capture realizes what’s going on and takes the time to sit and listen to the kid rant at his mother. To say it left me aghast is an understatement. In the home I grew up in the sort of backtalk this kid exhibits would’ve been a death sentence at the tender age of 9. Hell, I don’t think I’d dare risk talking to my mother like this at the age of 38 cause my mother would STILL put my fat ass in its place! It’s not even so much the fact that the kid is swearing that’s a shock as much as it is the fact that he’s obviously got absolutely no respect for his mother and she puts up with it! Had I even attempted that sort of thing not only would my ass be too sore to sit for a month, but the game console would be disconnected and locked up (if not thrown away outright) and I’d have a lot more to complain about than not getting a glass of chocolate milk.

The kid is 9 years old and he’s playing Rainbow Six, which is rated M for Mature and not intended for anyone under 17. I wonder who bought the game for him? OK, that’s a rhetorical question. It’s probably the same nitwit that can’t be bothered to be a parent to her child and gets no respect from him as a result. Granted it’s just one video and we’re not familiar with the background of the people involved, but it’s enough to know that something isn’t being done in that household that should be. Not that corporal punishment is the only answer, but this kid makes for a pretty good argument in favor of it.

Link found via Joystiq.

I’m sitting in the front lobby of the New Horizon’s training center where my wife is taking a class waiting it to finish up. I’ve been here about a half-hour or so and probably have at least another half-hour to go, but I have my laptop and they have unsecured wireless so I’m taking advantage of it. I have to admit that this is one of the cooler things about having a laptop with a wireless card. It’s not something I do very often, but I always feel all man-of-the-world-like whenever I get the chance.

I’m only here because I had a 5:30PM job to do with the Compeople folks and by the time I got done it just didn’t make sense to go all the way home when I’d have to turn around and come back out to get my wife from her class. The job this evening was dealing with a nasty adware trojan known as Trojan.Vundo.B. This bastard is so clever that it knows the only way to remove it is to use a special program running in safe mode so it makes it as difficult as possible to boot into safe mode. It does this by trying to prevent the desktop interface from coming up when you login, but it can’t stop you from pulling up the task manager so using that I was able to get a DOS window open and run the tool from Symantec. Alas, the tool from Symantec totally failed to find the virus in question even though Norton Anti-Virus would go nuts reporting the virus’s presence when it was allowed to run. I eventually find another means of removing it that involved hacking the hell out of the registry and deleting the files by hand after killing the processes involved.

Complete. Pain. In. The. Ass. But it worked. Only took two hours to figure it out too.

Whoops. Looks like Anne just got out of class. Time to go.

The Bad News: Just talked with my old contract house and they weren’t available to get the position changed to full-time and a higher pay rate.

The Good News: The original part-time $15/hr position is still a go and they’re willing to interview me if I’m interested.

I told them I was still interested seeing as it beats the hell out of nothing at all. If I continue to freelance with Compeople then perhaps I’ll be able to keep my head above water. My lease renewal is due at the end of this week and I was kinda using whether or not I landed this job as a deciding factor on if I should sign up for another year. As it stands I’m not sure if I should or not. My rep tried to cheer me up by telling me that part-time jobs often go to full-time inside the company before too much time passes, but that’s little comfort overall when I’ll be lucky if I earn $16,000 a year if it doesn’t.

So I’m still searching for a good paying full-time job some place. Or a winning lottery ticket. Whichever comes first.

Over at Pharyngula I found out about a new service called Frappr that lets you create a map for your group using Google Maps as well as post photos of yourself. PZ is using it so readers of his blog can map out where they live in a general fashion—it only accepts zip codes, not full addresses—and the idea is so damned nifty that I had to steal it for myself.

So, if you are an SEB Regular and want to divulge your approximate location then head over to the SEB Readers Map and add yourself to the list. It’s a bit bare at the moment, but it’ll fill in before too long I’m sure.

From the land of the painfully obvious comes word of a new study by Professor Chris French at Goldsmiths College which says that folks who think they’ve been abducted by aliens are just suffering from false memories.

Many of the alien experiences could be explained by sleep paralysis, a condition in which a person is awake and aware of the surroundings but is unable to move.

Sleep paralysis often leads to hallucinations and 40 percent of people experience the state at least once in their lives, French said.

A rich imagination was also at play. Several of the alien abductees were already prone to fantasizing and also claimed to have seen ghosts and have psychic or healing abilities.

“People have very rich fantasy lives,” said French, who is due to present his findings at a public seminar at the Science Museum on Wednesday.

“So much so that they often mix up what’s happening in their heads with what is going on in the real world.”

Anyone who is an SEB regular already knows how true that last statement is as we get plenty of examples of those people in the comments around here all the time. Like must delusional people, however, it’s doubtful that the alien abductees are going to agree with the findings of this report. Which is why I’m proud to continue to offer for sale the very-soon-to-be-patented Anti-Alien Anal Probe Ass Shield. Don’t go to bed without it!

SEB regular and fellow tech-geek blogger Decrepit Old Fool has a great entry up on what a hard drive crash really is that folks may find interesting if you’ve ever wondered just what the hell it is.  The one pictured below, which I shamelessly stole from DOF for the sheer Yikes! factor it holds, should give anyone who values their data nightmares. I particularly love the two sentences DOF uses as a lead in to the article:

“Can you get my files back?”

“No.”

Neil of Neil’s World points us to the folks at PartyParty.com who produce musical mashups using an amazing number of sound clips of President George W. Bush. These guys must have a lot of time and patience to pull these off. My current favorites are Dick is a Killer and Who’s the Nigga? Interesting stuff. Go check it out.

One of my favorite things is watching old holiday specials on TV and tonight was the annual showing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!. I love catching it when it’s shown on network television, but I’m apparently the only one in my family who holds this passion. Both my wife and daughter were less than impressed when I excitedly informed them that it was on so I went and watched it by myself. The philistines.