Thanks to Rone, I will, as he says, say goodbye to my free time, my productivity, and my life as I know it. And say hello to a stunningly addictive game. My only hope is that they never bring it out for Palm OS.
Category: Rant
Been there, done that
Read this for a taste of what it’s like to be a maintenance programmer: Friday Feature: You’re all Morons. Read it quick, because I bet it will be taken down as soon as the honchos at Star Wars Galaxies find it.
My lusers aren’t as stupid as his, but what they don’t have in teenaged arrogance and stupidity they make up for in type-A personalities and ability to throw around purchasing power. “Oh, your last release had a bug in it? I guess we’ll take our $45 million contract somewhere else then instead. I bet your competitor doesn’t have bugs.” I bet they do, fuckwit.
This is one reason I hate using eBay
My dad gave me his old camera because mine crapped out. The lens he gave me with it didn’t include filters, and the filters on my old lenses don’t fit. So I thought I’d get the bare minimum, a 1A Skylight filter and a polarizer, from eBay. There was a guy selling a whole bunch of camera stuff, and he said in his actions that if you used the “Buy It Now” feature you didn’t have to the shipping, and if you bought two or more, you could take 50 cents off of each item as a “bulk discount”. He was an eBay power seller or whatever they call it, and he took PayPal so it should have been dead easy.
So I did the “Buy it now” on the two filters I wanted. The eBay checkout procedure would allow me to remove the shipping cost myself, but not the bulk discount. So I emailed the guy and asked him to update the price so I could send him the money. No answer. So the next day I just calculated how much the total should be and Paypal-ed him the money. But he still hasn’t answer any of my emails, nor has he acknowledged me in any way whatsoever. It’s been 4 days so far.
At what point do I say to myself that the money I paypal-ed to him is lost, he’s a fucking rip-off artist, and buy another couple of filters?
Oh, and just to make my life complete, his site advertises that he’s got “autofeedback”, so if you leave him a negative feedback on eBay he’ll automatically leave you a negative feedback.
Well, I guess I can say goodbye to that float plane rating…
Short summary – any non-citizen wanting any sort of flight training has to get TSA approval, and as well as the cost and hassle of getting the photos and fingerprints and stuff, there will be a several hundred dollar fee. Oh, and knowing the federal government, probably a 6 month wait for approval.
The forest behind the trees
In spite of the fact that the Bush camp has turned the whole debate around to be about one set of probably-forged papers, one shouldn’t forget that the basic facts are not in dispute. And those facts are that Bush received a sweetheart deal because of his wealth and status, and then didn’t fullfil his committments, and then has had his proxies and surrogates lie and dissemble about this. Why does he get a by on his obvious lack of integrity and faithfulness to his comiittments from the majority of the press?
Some highlights:
“I heard George Bush get up and say, `I served in the 187th Air National Guard in Montgomery, Alabama,'” retired Lt. Col. Robert Mintz said on camera. “Really? That was my unit. And I don’t remember seeing you there…”
“Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.” – That’s from Colin Powell’s 1995 book “My American Journey”.