Past Residents Say They Thought Concrete Looked Like Body

TheMilwaukeeChannel.com

So these guys lived for several years with a dead body in their basement, but apparently never experienced any ghost aparition nor anything like that that scaremongers love to talk about.

TV kingdom

This weekend I spent it enclosed in my beloved new apartment.  Just watching the telly and trying to recover from some mysterious headache.  I'd never had cable before, this is wonderful!  Last night's two highlights:  "House of Flying Daggers" and "Pterodactyl".

I wasn't much interested in watching Pterodactyl, as it didn't look very promising.  I only watched it in wait of the other one.  As expected, Pterodactyl didn't fail to underwhelm.  I hadn't seen a movie with such unimaginative dialogue lines for quite some time.  Then came House of Flying Daggers.  Unfortunately this was dubbed into the local language, and didn't even come with English subtitles.  But even then, this film was so visually glorious, that I watched it almost until falling asleep (it was very late into the night) even though I couldn't understand the dialogues.  Ah, I hope someday I get the chance to enjoy it with the storyline.

By the way, I'm starting to miss my Australian TV.  In my previous apartment, I could watch an Australian satellite channel called "ABC Asia Pacific".  Wow, those guys really have quality programs!  And as a plus, I even learnt to distinguish Australian from British accent!

Dilbert.com

Jan 29, 2006

Today's episode captures the essence of an incident I faced with a moron about six months ago! This guy came very thrilled to me telling me that we were going to make plenty of money by him selling a piece of software I was going to make for him.

This was the first time I'd heard I was supposed to write software for him, and other than the general purpose, had little idea of how this thing was supposed to work.

I already know this guy's working style, so my approach was to reply to him: That's super cool! Now all I need from you is a complete and detailed list of all of the data fields you want to manage. This list must include specifications of what kind of data each will be (numeric, text, etc.). If the data is numeric, I need to know what's the maximum value, if you'll be storing decimals, if you'll be storing negative values. I also need to know what's the formula to calculate those numeric values, and a throrough list of behaviours each time a certain value is reached for each of these items. In case the data is text, it need you to tell me...

And so on and on and on... and then this guy's thrill quickly transformed from eagerness to boredom and uninterest. Funny, if the work is all mine, then he's thrilled, but if he has to give input, then he's not.

Precious treat spoiled by National Geographic

I haven't had ice cream for quite a while, so tonight I thought I'd have a nice chocolate, luscious chocolate, ice cream cone while watching the telly.  Flipping the channels, I bumped in to this very fascinating National Geographic documentary about withcraft in India... when suddenly they started showing a guy explaining how he can cast a spell against his neighbor by grabbing a piece of "human faeces", putting it into a clay pot, and then inserting a scorpion.  The scorpion was dark brown before going inside the bottle.  When it came out, it was yellowish, like mustard.  Arrrghhh!!!  I wasn't able to enjoy the chocolate, and I can't put it back in the freezer.

In other news, when I came back to my apartment this afternoon, I got a nice surprise.  I found my first bill for my high speed Internet since I moved here.  The ISP now is the same I used in my previous apartment.  For my previous contract, at the moment I signed the contract I needed to pay upfront one or two months.  This time when I applied anew (rather than simply transferring my connection), they didn't charge me anything at the moment of signing the contract, so I thought they'd hit me hard with the first bill.  But no!  Today I opened the bill, and it was only one month's worth!  No extra charge for setting up the new connection nor anything like that!

Ignorant journalists

Today I'm browsing again the newpaper I was commenting about a couple of days ago and found yet another marvel of South American intellect.

They talk about a tsunami drill.  Obviously, they're talking about it taking place along Province X's coastline, but the retarded writer specifially mentions the province's capital city as the place where this drill will be held.  Dude, the provinces's capital is like 6,000 ft above sea level and famous for its mountain landscapes!!!  Fucking moron.

With such a poor education, their living conditions shouldn't come as a surprise...

I was reading some news from South America, and although the final message is nice and stuff, soon after I started reading I saw two blatant math mistakes that made convinced me it was a waste of time to keep on reading:

First, the writer was trying to express the dramatic change in the life of these ladies who have engaged in coffee bean production.  He (or she?) said that "their lives have taken a 360 degree turn" so now a days blah blah blah...

A few lines further down, s/he added that these ladies used to produce 750 units of whatever weight meassure they use there.  But in one year they increased their production by 400%, and so they reached 3000 of the same measuring unit!!!

I wonder how many more wonders I would've found had I continued reading the other two thirds of the article.

Amazing mosquitoes

I don't know what to make of this.  I'm getting bitten by mosquitoes almost everynight even if I burn mosquito coils with the highest concentration of active ingredients available.

This is what I did last night:  I closed the window to my bedroom, lit up one mosquito coil next to my bed, and closed the door.  Then I was minding my own business just outside the bedroom for a couple of hours.

When it was finally time to sleep, the coil wasn't completely burnt yet.  I let it keep on fuming, left the door closed, but opened the small window (may I remind you, I live on the 18F, and there's no puddle of water nearby) because this coil smells too strong for me.  I went to sleep in peace, but then by 5:00 I woke up with at least four mosquito bites!  The only explanation is these bastards came throught the window!  This is astonishing.

Okay, so what I'll do tonight is the samething, except I won't open the window when I go to sleep.  But I thought these things are supposed to be used in well ventilated areas.  I hope this coil really kills the mosquitoes and only mosquitoes!

Western style justice

Last night I was flipping the channels at home, and bumped into a program in the History Channel about secret passages in old buildings.  Very fascinating.  They explained why some medieval castles and buildings in Europe sport such things.

This is what amazed me, some of these were part of incarceration systems, and they continue explaining that in those times (in this case 17th century England and 18th century Venice), you could be accused of "something" and you don't know what it is you're being accused of; by "someone", and you don't know who are you up against; you are not allowed to attend your own trial; you are imprissoned somewhere while your trial is happening sometime, but you don't know exactly when is it taking place; and if they find you guilty (under these conditions, how can you possibly defend yourself???), they put you in jail, but they don't tell you for how long!!!

What kind of twisted mind could've created a justice system like this?  I wonder if even during those old days, people honestly believed that such a system can bring justice to them.  If yes, then good for them.  But I just can't imagine anybody believing so.

Spam, spam, and more spam

I don't know how come I never use my Gmail account address for suscription to anything, yet I get plenty of spam there.  On the other hand, I do give my humble Yahoo! address any time I'm required by some website to register for something, and right now for the past 30 days I have 10 times as much spam accumulated in my Gmail account than in my Yahoo! account.

I don't think there're a lot of people spamming me because I can see clear patterns in the messages I get, but definitely it does look like they're more people now a days than a couple of months ago.  One or two months ago, for a few days all of the spam I'd get was from a single named sender (rather than first name, space, surname), and the title was a two word phrase in the lines of "Press Release".  For a few days also, usually around holidays, I'd get noticeably less spam.  Now a days I get even some spam in Portuguese and Spanish.

I bet some of those guys got my address from those freaking chain mails some bitch used to send me.  I asked her politely and with good humour to please not send more, but that fucking moron didn't understand.  She probably thought I was just blabbering, and ignored my requests.  She kept sending instead more and more chain mails but only the ones she considered "really urgent", such as religious (or supersticious) messages, and even mails with "useful" information on how to protect myself against new viruses.  All of these always ended with "please pass along this message to as many people as you can because it's so urgent".

Mashed potatoes & mosquitoes

I like to put lots of garlic in my food whenever possible, but I'd never tried that with mashed potatoes before, so tonight I gave it a shot.  In short, don't do it!!!  It just doesn't contribute anything to it.  It doesn't make the mashed potatoes unpalatable, it's just a waste of time.

The best mashed potatoes I've ever tried though were made by a friend from Puerto Rico.  But you can't go telling people what's inside cause the long list of extras he puts would make you feel kind of guilty.  After mashing the potatoes, aside from the traditional salt, milk and butter, this guy puts a lot of mayonnaise, Velveeta cheese slices, and I think even white pepper and nutmeg.  Truly mindblowing, but not something I could eat everyday.

Unrelated to the mashed potatoes, when I moved into this new apartment I thought I'd have little or no problems at all with mosquitoes because it's on the 18F.  But soon afterwards, I started to get bitten.  I couldn't see them, but I could feel them biting me and sometimes even hear them.  Some friend came one night for dinner, and she said she saw one flying.  So I bought mosquito coils.  I was careful to get the one with the highest concentration of active ingredient.  It even had a drawing of an upside down mosquito, rather than a mosquito flying away like the other boxes.

When I started burning it, it smelled terrible, gosh this gotta work I thought!  Yes, I didn't get bitten, but the room would end up stiking, and the following day if I don't burn another coil, I get bitten again; which means the mosquitoes were only hiding somewhere until the fumes dissipate.  Gee I tried that for so many days, and I really hate the smell of these coils.  And the manufacturers (Bayer) even have the nerve of claiming their coils are lavender scented!  Yeah, lavender my ass!!!

Tonight while I was doing the dishes, I was lucky enough to finally get a good glimpse of the damned mosquitoes, and slapped two of them with my bare hands.  I don't have puddles of water nor anything near my 18F apartment, so maybe this is the end of the story for quite some time!

Odd flying bugs

Gee, tonight I was having a nice dinner in my 18F apartment with lots of lights on and the glass doors to the veranda open cause it's so damn hot.  Then for the first time since I moved in here, suddenly several flying insects came in and were insistently hovering around the lightbulbs.

I don't know what they were, looked like winged termites.  That, plus the fact that I've noticed several places of my wooden floor damaged by termites, makes for a good reason to try to get rid of them as soon as possible.

These guys really find the light irresistible, so it's really not as big of an annoyance as say mosquitoes are.  But still, I don't want to share my living quarters with those guys -I don't want more termite damage in this apartment!  I sprayed them with some insecticide I've used before extremely efficiently with cockroaches, ants and mosquitoes, but these guys didn't seem bothered at all.  That's very puzzling, and I'm sure I didn't miss them with the spray.

Okay, so the next thing I tried was to turn off all of the lights inside my apartment, and instead turn on the single lightbulb I have in my balcony.  This worked like a charm!  Very quickly all of these guys rushed to the light outside and left the interior of my apartment in peace.  The problem is, now I can't open the sliding doors at night.  I wonder if mosquito coils would work with them?

Republicans discuss ethics rules

Chicago Tribune

I feel disgusted by all these strong evidences of corruption. In America it really looks like money can buy you practically anything. Yet, this is the party of George W, who claims that God is on his side (rather than him being on God's side).

Freakish discovery

Like I said the other day, this country doesn't have a toilet paper culture.  One day I happened to walk past the restroom of my office when I heard the guy inside was using some water to wash his ass with his bare hands.

That was quite gross to begin with.  I wanted to forget as soon as possible...

But today I noticed him licking his fingers while going through a wad of papers.  Huh, oh, yuck!  I hope he uses antibacterial soap!  But certainly the soap we have in this office isn't antibacterial!

Funny trick from my telco

A couple of times a week I like to enjoy a good voice chat with friends abroad and I use Skype for this.

Last night I checked for updates, and found that version 2.0 is now officially released (rather than being just a Beta), so I tried to download it from the Skype website.  Strange though, I could only get a download speed that is little more than what I'd get with a dial-up connection.  I checked my ADSL's bandwidth, and it was as good as usual, well over 2 Mbps.  In theory, I should be able to download at about 270 kB/s, but I was getting like 8 kB/s.

I tried this many times cause the 9.5 MB download was even failing in the middle of it as if I was really using a plain telephone line for this!

So after a while of this useless charade, I tried to find some mirror site or something, and bumped into softpedia.  When I gave this one a shot, I got my new Skype download at a speed of aroud 15 kB/s.  This, in combination with a good download manager, got me my brand new Skype!

This customer service is a joke

This is not the first time I experience this.  I'm at the office and I need to be constantly connected to the Internet (not one minute now and then one minute more one hour later).  In the last couple of days I didn't have any problem, but today I noticed that my Yahoo! Messenger, my Skype, my FTP client, etc. were disconnecting and connecting, disconnecting and connecting every few minutes.  It was a pain even to use the web browser.

Since it's also a bit of a pain to call our ISP's customer service, I waited for two or three hours, hoping that the problem would disappear by itself.  Sometimes in the past, it has indeed disappeared by itself.

But today I ran out of patience and called the customer service.  The guy who answered was very polite, but still made me a bit angry as obviously he didn't know what he was talking about.  But while I was on the phone with him, magically, these disconnections stopped happening.  Yet the guy said he didn't change anything!!!  He suggested that maybe I got a virus or some spyware that was causing this disconnection.  But he didn't even bother asking if it was my computer directly logging on to their network or my wireless router cum modem logging on to their network.  Yeah, he didn't change anything my ass!!!

This is not the first time either that I'm having some problem for several hours, and when I talk to the customer service the problem disappears, but they insist that they haven't changed anything on their side.

Is this finally settled?

Since I moved I've been fixing and settling little details regarding the apartment where I live now.  Each time I do something, I do it believing it's the last thing to finally get everything done, but over and over, I'm being proven wrong!

Last week I changed my address in my driver's license and advised my embassy too.  After that, I had to change some freaking lightbulbs which in this country are of poor quality and burn out after only one month of regular use (in my experience).

Then came the electricity non-payment notice!  How come I just moved in and I get this?  Surprise surprise, the previous tenants didn't pay their bills for who knows how long, and now it was the last notice before they actually shutdown the electricity.

After I got that solved, again some more lightbulb problems!  And when I tried to change by myself the lightbulb, the socket broke (never seen a lightbulb socket break, but in this country, it happens).  So I need the building's technician to fix it for me.

Okay okay, so fiiinally!  Everything is settled, right?  Wrrrooong!!!  A few days later I get my first electric bill, but the measuring cycle spans only 10 days that I've been there, and 20 days that belong to the previous tenants!  And the grand total is a fucking sum that those jerks must've had the aircon constantly running... I can't believe it, especially when I only use the electric fan!

So I went to talk to the girl in the management of the building.  Unbelievable they didn't take note of the gauge's reading for the day I moved in!  So what am I going to gain by getting angry?  She proposed we split the bill half/half.  But hey, I've been here only one third of the billing cycle, and even then, I only use the fan, not the aircon!  At the end, we split the bill 1/3 and 2/3.  It took her forever to understand the logic (she wasn't trying to cheat me or anything).  She's got good intentions, but she really is in urgent need of math classes.

Three Stooges all bundled into one single guy

Today I saw in my office a scene that's right out of the Three Stooges series.

Some really stupid guy (thankfully, he quit our company a while ago) came to visit our office.  Our second floor door is a glass door which you have to open by hand and hold it open while you come in.  If you release it, it'll very quickly spring back into the closed position.  That's the way it's always been.

So this guy comes up to the second floor, and instead of doing like I just said, he just pushed the door once, let the door go and do one local traditional greeting from the door opening.  The door doesn't make any distinctions between smart and dumb visitors, so it inmediately spang back to the closed position hitting the idiot.

This door, though inanimate, sure conveyed my idea of how welcome he is.

By the way, this visitor guy is so odd that when he came he called on the mobile of yet another visitor to get the first floor door open for him, rather than calling one of us.  I wonder, if he's coming to visit us, to do some paperwork with us, why doesn't he call us to open the door for him?  Why does he call the other guy who is also just another visitor?

There is such a thing as "Samford University"!

Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama

Unbelievable. This is in the same league as "Casiko" watches and "Mike" sneakers.

Maybe I'll repent later, but this is what I have in mind right now...

Our MD brought one of his "friends" to put him in a rather high position in our little company.  He said that he's known him for more than 10 years, and was always talking wonders about him.  He put so much trust in him that he even gave him his own private office while at the same time giving me a shared desk with another moron that I'm thankful is no longer with us.

After a few months, I don't see that the "friend" did anything.  We always have to spoon feed him.  He really didn't produce anything, anything, anything.  Yet he even wanted the company to pay for his lunch(?).

Later he quit from the company in a rush, and he even sneaked into the office on a Sunday to retrieve his own things, plus some company property, which he "borrowed" to use as a "guarantee" that the guy who brought him onboard would pay him back his debt worth a total of about $12.

What kind of moron brings in a "friend" like this?

Fatal Attraction

Just finished watching Fatal Attraction on cable.  Even though it's such a famous film, I'd never watched it before.  But two things puzzle me about it:

Fist, I know this film has been rated R in several countries, yet here the cable channel offers it in mid-afternoon, and it's not even one of those expensive channels like the porn ones.  I wonder though why was it rated R.  The only thing that one might object to is seeing Michael Douglas' ass.  Yeah, not even one female nipple, just Michael's ass.  And even this scene was quite odd.  He was taking a shower but the shower curtains were not completely closed, so you could get a peek of his bottom.  But who takes a shower like that?  I don't know anyone who doesn't mind splashing water all over the room.  I think everybody is careful for that reason to completely close the curtains.

Second, at the very end they finally get rid of Glenn by killing her in their own bathroom.  Next thing you see is probably the cops in front of Michael's house giving him a handshake and leaving him so he can go take a sleep (by the way, Michael is now wearing completely different clothes).  I mean, isn't this odd?  There has been a violent death in the house, yet the people of the house aren't taken to the police station for questioning?  It's just like cops dropped by the house as if they were pizza delivery boys?  It doesn't make sense.

Ah, but all in all, it was quite a good movie.

I want my ...TV

Gee, the apartment where I live now is a bit more expensive than my previous one.  But this one came with cable TV, and the plan they put for me included several good documentary and movie channels!  If I watch 10 movies in one month I more than offset the price difference:  10 movie tickets + transportation + eating out + laundry >>> price difference in the apartment's rent!

Our MD is Dumb with capital 'D'

Our small company's Managing Director is such a case... full of good intentions and very religious, but dumb like I don't know what.  Instead of spending so much time in his superstitions, how about spending a little more time thinking analytically?

We have a small advertising project in cooperation with another company.  We were going to help find the customers by managing the salespersons and the reservations for the advertising space.  The other company was going to take care of the accounting, printing and distribution.

Our part is not so complicated, but our MD took forever to put his head together on this -it was all kind of complicated for him.  I'm not sure I should write here all of the details cause it just infuriates me.  But two days ago, he tells me rather happily that our partner company has found another company that already does some similar advertising campaign, and they'll probably do us the favour of finding the customers.

At the moment I heard this I thought it was kind of strange he was upbeat about being off the hook on this.  So I waited several hours to watch him... maybe I missed some detail and that's why I'm missunderstanding him?  But late in the afternoon I'm too bothered by this and ask him directly:  So now we don't take care of finding customers, we don't prepare the printings, we don't distribute the flyers, we don't do the money accounting; we don't contribute anything to this project.  Do you still think that we'll get a 30% slice out of this advertising campaign even if we didn't help in anything?

He looked at me for a few seconds thinking very deeply, and then he came back to his senses:  Oh, I see what you mean.  No, but I think maybe...

Duh!

They should've used something different

True Corporation

I bumped into this Flash animation, and think it's utterly tacky. Instead of showing this girl with a doughnut in her mouth, they should've given her some spaghetti with plenty of tomato sauce dripping from the noodle tips.

Toilet paper

This country definitely doesn't have a toilet paper culture.  The previous apartment where I lived, although it was kind of nice, inside its restroom, it didn't have the thing to hang the roll of toilet paper!  And now in my new apartment I notice that although it has the thing to hang the roll, they put it much too far behind!  So whenever I want to grab a piece of paper, I really have to twist my body backwards.

I wonder how do the local people clean their asses.  I just can't fathom it.  Yes, they use their bare hands and some water.  But my point is, right after they have wiped their asses with their hands and used some water in the process, their hands are still wet, but their pants are down.  So, how do they raise their pants without leaving wet marks on them?

This firmware upgrade is too suspicious!

Linksys.com Downloads/Firmware

Now that I have finally moved, I'm checking for software updates and so for my electronic goodies that I haven't been able to connect yet (I don't have ADSL at home yet)... and I bump into this:

This is the firmware download page for the wireless router I've got. But it's so strange how come the latest version is only 1.61 MB, but the previous one was 13.0 MB?

This kind of stinks.