Things That Just Piss Me Off

McCain’s big plan to embarass Obama about not having visited Iraq to see how the war was going seems to have backfired and made Obame seem even more presidential. All it did was give Obama a chance to look good.

The Boston Globe gave McCain the headline story though and put the story about Obama in Iraq below it, but the imagery was perfect. The top picture was McCain standing with Bush and the picture below that was Obama looking presidential in Iraq.

The message is McCain is no different than Bush while Obama is out there making on-the-ground assessments in Iraq. Great strategy McCain. Dare your opponent to do something that will just end up embarassing you.

And one more question . . . John McCain, what is up with all the blinking? Do you have a disease we are unaware of? I mean who blinks with every single word they say unless there is a medical condition causing it? They say people blink a lot when they are lying. So is it a medical condition you have not revealed or are you blinking because you are lying?

I’ve used a lot of payment processors online in various business ventures. I have never seen a worse payment processor than Moneybookers. Some people really just do not have a clue about how to operate a business.

If someone sends you a payment request through moneybookers, it takes no less than 30 minutes to send them that payment. I can do it through paypal or google checkout in a click.

Moneybookers first sends you an email to let you know someone is requesting a payment. In that email, there is no clickable link. They tell you to copy and paste a url into your browser to get to their website. What is this? AOL of the 90s coming back to haunt us?

Then when you finally get to their website, you must register with them in order to fulfill the payment request.

Then you give moneybookers your credit card info so you can make the payment. Easy right? Wait! Now you have to go to your credit card statement and hope the transaction processed already because moneybookers has made a charge to your card and you need to verify the amount they charged you before you can make the original payment request you went to moneybookers to do in the first place.

Let’s just say the transaction does show up right away and you don’t have to call your credit card company to find out what the moneybookers deposit was.

Now you are ready to make that payment through moneybookers right? You need to verify your birthdate before you can complete the transaction. In the US we enter our birthdate by month, day, year. If you did this while setting up the account then you likely have the wrong birthdate entered because they like it day/month/year instead.

So to verify the transaction for “security” purposes you have to enter the wrong birthdate again.

To top it all off, moneybookers also asks your client if they want to put the money into escrow instead of sending the full payment. Let’s say you already sold the product or service and the payment is supposed to be in advance as discussed with the client. Moneybookers wants them to reconsider it again because they make more money if escrow is used. Thanks moneybookers.

I left a penny in my moneybookers account because they need it to help pay for someone that knows how to set up a system properly. I’m setting up the moneybookers rescue the idiots fund right now and ask that everyone reading this post send moneybookers a penny so they can hire someone to replace the idiots that built their system. I urge you all to send that penny and rescue these moneybooker idiots today!

I manage a lot of blogs for companies. Some of them come to me and their website is on godaddy hosting. I have to tell them that godaddy hosting is the worst place for their blog. Why?

One of the most important things to do for a blog that will help you with seo is to use a custom permalink structure. In order to do so, you write something like /%category%/%postname%/%monthnum%/%day%/%year%/

That means the exact url to a blog post will read like http://www.thingsthatjustpissmeoff.com/ categorynamewhichcontainskeywords/ blogposttitlewhichalsocontainskeywords/

It add a mod rewrite to the htaccess file on your server to make this happen.

However at godaddy hosting, this never works. I called their tech support to get their assistance. They tell me mod rewrite works fine but maybe it won’t work on their version of apache. After an hour back and forth on this, the final verdict was “There is a lot of documentation at apache.com about our version of apache and you could try to figure out how it all works there.”

Lets see. I can show initiative and go to apache.com and learn all about godaddy hosting’s version of apache or I can just tell all my clients to go to another hosting company. No skin off my back if it won’t work on godaddy hosting’s version of apache.

I just can’t believe that since millions of people use wordpress that godaddy would not be a little more helpful in trying to resolve this issue. They are the ones that will lose clients because of it. My clients will host somewhere else is I ask them to so it doesn’t hurt me either way. I’m just pissed off because I tried for over an hour to work with them rather than just tell my clients that godaddy hosting sucks and they were not willing to help find a fix for me.

So from now on I will just recommend that people who want to use a wordpress blog and rank well in the search engines that godaddy hosting is not the best place to be.

Those Born 1920-1979

READ TO THE BOTTOM FOR QUOTE OF THE MONTH BY JAY LENO. IF YOU DON’T READ ANYTHING ELSE—VERY WELL STATED

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s!!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.

As infants &children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts, or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread, and real butter and drank Kool-aid made with sugar, but we weren’t overweight because,

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes. No video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD’s, no surround-sound or CD’s, no cell phones, no personal computers! no Internet or chat rooms…….

WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment.

Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers, and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

If YOU are one of them… CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good .

While you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave (and lucky) their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?!

The quote of the month is by Jay Leno:

‘With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?’

For those that prefer to think that God is not watching over us…go ahead and delete this.

For the rest of us…pass this ON!

This post is pretty much for anyone in their 20s or younger but may also apply to you if you are over 30 depending on how you were raised. Our society has gotten so weak. We are becoming pathetic.

Here are a list of things I point to that proves that we are becoming a bunch of pathetic losers instead of the strong nation of people we once were.

1. Political Correctness - Everyone has to watch what they say because they are worried they might offend someone. OMG. Someone could be offended? How will they ever survive that. They will likely need counseling for life is they are offended by what someone said. OMG. We used to be able to handle being offended and we could get over it. How did we ever do that?

2. Winning and Losing - Today there are schools that have sports and other activities where there are no winners or loser. “We are all winners, no reason to keep score.” Because if there are winners, there must be losers and we can’t have anyone thinking they are a loser. OMG. If a child loses at something they will need counseling for life! It used to be we had competition and you lost or you won. It taught you to try to succeed. It taught you to be a winner. It taught you to be competitive, which now they call a bad thing. Our greatest leaders were people who learned to be winners, now we teach our children that there are no winners or losers. This way everyone is equal so no need to strive to be better. No reason to improve yourself because everyone else is just the same as me. Awww, can we just all sing Kum Ba Yah now?

3. Playing with toys - Now parents don’t want their children to play with certain toys. If boys play with toy guns they are bound to turn out to be violent. If girls play with dolls it stereotypes them that women should only be moms and not be independent or equal to men. Parents are being told by psychologists that they can shape their children’s lives by the toys they buy them or by teaching them that there are no winners or losers. But it doesn’t work. We just end up with a whiny crybaby society and just because you buy your girls a doll will not make her believe that she can only be a mom. And when did only being a mom become a bad thing? I think we need a few more “just moms” out there. Our kids need them. If you buy your boys a toy gun, it does not mean they will grow up to be a criminal. Get over it.

4. Work Ethic - Nowadays bosses have to be extremely careful not to yell at anyone or stress anyone out or they might be sued. Bosses who yell are said to create a “hostile working environment”. OMG! We can’t have bosses yelling at people and telling them to get any actual work done! They will need counseling after that! It may scar them for life! Bosses used to get mad and yell at people. If you didn’t like it, get another job. The boss is the boss. Not anymore. The lawyers have become the boss. You can’t say this, you can’t say that. You need to have this policy in place and you can’t make them do any extra work that someone in the next office who is a different gender or race didn’t also have to do or you are sexist or racist and you might be sued!

As a result we are less productive as a society, as a country. We have a workforce of a bunch of whiny crybabies who played sports where there were no winners or losers and where no one says anything that might offend anyone. How nice. How utopian we are becoming.

Meanwhile in places like China, people work hard, they get yelled at by bosses, they have winners and losers, and they are beating the pants off of us economically. But it’s ok. We are all equal. It doesn’t matter anymore that other countries are beating us in education, economics, and other areas because there are no winners and losers and it would be too stressful to compete with these other countries. We would all need counseling.

Please don’t be offended or stressed out by this post. See no words with all caps?. That proves I wasn’t yelling at you while I wrote it. There are no winners and losers on my blog. The lawyers are reading my post now to make sure I didn’t offend anyone that might sue me so there may be revisions made later and it will end up being a kindler, gentler blog post. The kind those of you who are to blame for the whiny crybaby society, those who sue people for stressing them out, those who think having winners and losers harms children, and those of you who believe political correctness is important, can deal with.

Ahhh, screw the lawyers.

I hope you are offended by something in this post.

There are winners and there are losers and only losers want it any other way.

Men are men and women are women. We are not the same no matter how much cross-dressing there is and how many NOW members there are.

Involving our children in non-competitive sports or that there are no winners and losers is creating a loser society.

Teaching people not to ever offend anyone makes them weak and makes those who might be offended even weaker. If you get offended, suck it up. Get over it. You don’t need counseling.

If your boss yells at you or makes you work harder than the next guy, suck it up or get another job.

Go to work on time. Do a good job. Beat the other people who work there and help the company you work for beat their competition.

That is how our society got strong. All of this whiny crybaby crap pisses me off.

Ok, now this is just wrong and it pisses me off. All of the credit bureaus will accept any negative reports on your credit. Even if it is just one report. Yet, they will not accept positive reports to your credit unless the reporting agency or company submits the reports in large batches.

Experian only accepts batches of over 500 reports, while Equifax (ticker: EFX) and TransUnion accept batches of over 100.

“It will take us several years to reach that number of borrowers, and it seems unfair to those who have repaid fully and on time not to report, so we are baffled,” said Ms. Jacobs.

Yanki Tshering, the director of the Business Center for New Americans, echoes Ms. Jacobs’s sentiments. The Business Center for New Americans is a department of the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA) and provides financial education and assistance to refugees and émigrés.

“A few years ago, we worked with Equifax,” Ms. Tshering told SocialFunds.com. “‘If you don’t have 100 accounts, you cannot report electronically,’ they said. ‘You have to do it manually.’”

“When we submitted data on our borrowers manually, we noticed that the credit bureau accepted the negative data. But since we didn’t have 100 accounts to report on, they returned the rest of the forms with a small note saying, ‘We only accept negative data,’” said Ms. Tshering.

So, let’s say you have always paid your rent on time. Your landlord cannot add a postive credit report to your account. But if you fail to pay your rent on time, your landlord can report that.

It’s the same with smaller lending companies. They have to wait a long time to have more than 100 reports to submit. In the meantime, all those who paid their loans on time do not get the positive addition to their credit score.

Totally unfair system.

A guy named Bob is travelling by Amtrak with two strangers sitting close to him.

He is trying to sleep, but those guys were speaking loudly for a very long time heavily criticizing George Bush, the war in Iraq, corruption, unemployment, etc.

So Bob, in an attempt to force the guys to stop talking and let him sleep, tells them as a joke, that there is a new total control system developed by the FBI that spies upon all citizens, and there are lots of listening devices everywhere, so that anyone criticizing the government would be severely punished.

This didn’t have any effect on those guys, moreover they just laughed at Bob, and carried on and on, saying even more rude jokes about George Bush and the government.

Finally, close to 3:00 am, Bob goes to the restroom, and runs into the train conductor.

Bob asks the conductor to bring him some water and sleeping pills at exactly 3:00 a.m.

He goes back to his place and says loudly into the base of his seat, so that talkative guys could hear him:

“If the FBI director can hear me: could you please bring me a glass of water and some sleeping pills at 3:00 a.m., because there are some idiots here who are speaking too loudly about some political issues and won’t let me sleep.”

The guys continue talking.

Exactly at 3:00 am, the door opens and the conductor comes out, and gives Bob the water and some sleeping pills.

The guys are shocked and finally stop talking. Bob is happy and manages to fall asleep.

When he wakes in the morning, the talkative guys are nowhere to be found.

Out of curiosity he asks the conductor about them, (also remembering that there shouldn’t have been any stops at night).

The conductor replies that some people in black suits stopped the train and arrested those guys.

Bob is completely shocked and surprised and asks about why he was not arrested.

The conductor answers that he doesn’t have a clue but one of the guys in black suits said that the director of the FBI liked Bob’s joke about the water and pills.

Never buy a samsung cell phone. They totally suck. You have to go through 3 buttons to do any task that usually only takes one button on any other cell phone. I paid over $200 for a samsung cellphone and i’m still throwing it in the trash so I can buy a phone that makes things easy to use. It seems that whoever designs the samsung cellphones also worked for microsoft at some point because of all the extra steps you have to go through to do simple tasks.

Samsung cellphones suck.

The government loves the phrase, “it’s for the children”. They know how to play on your emotions to get the laws passed that they want passed. They can now invade your privacy, because it’s to protect you from terrorism. They can collect your DNA now without even charging you with a crime to protect you against terrorists.

Now Joseph Biden believes the government should spend a billion dollars to monitor all file sharing traffic on the web. He says it’s because he wants to fight child pornography. And many people will all applaud him for it and say it’s a great idea because as we all know child porn is bad.

This law will also be used to find people who are illegally sharing movies and music. The RIAA and the movie industry lobby congress. They want to monitor all file sharing. And now people will let them do it because Joseph Biden says, “it’s for the children.”

A prominent Senate Democrat on Wednesday said federal and local police should use custom software to monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity, and he wants to spend $1 billion in tax dollars to help make that happen.

At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it’s “pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation” simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders.

Based on Waters’ statements to the committee, the system appears to work like this: Investigators log onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks as any other person would and search for files containing certain keywords that are likely to indicate child pornography is involved. Then they download the files–frequently videos, sometimes as long as 20 to 30 minutes, with names like “children kiddy underage illegal.mpg” and much more obscene–to their own machines. They’re able to use the Fairplay software to obtain the IP address of the file’s sender and, in some cases, display its geographic location in map form.

Once armed with an IP address and date and time of the download, investigators can subpoena the Internet service provider for more information, such as name and address of the subscriber who was assigned it at that moment. “It’s not necessarily the suspect but it tells us the physical location to start,” Waters said. (He didn’t say whether any wiretaps were conducted to monitor ongoing file swapping.)

And since it is also illegal to share movies and music, as soon as this law is passed the movie and music industry will push and get it adopted for that as well. Watch and see.