Back from the dead

Insert a bunch of lame excuses here. I know that at least two people come here regularly. Sorry I let this place slip. I was out of town for a week, I got disgusted with everything (forever?) my daughter is visiting. I'm lazy.

I've been working up to a full fleet rant about the state of IT today and how badly IT workers get abused. Truth is if someone replied "at least you've got a job, and a good paying one at that" I'd want to hunt them down and pummel them. Two weeks ago I put 81 hours on my time sheet, the week I was out of town I put in 62 (while in training) I'm salary. Screw that crap. If I was unemployed at least I'd get to see the wife and cats and play one of my guitars.

But since I am employed and have the occasional bit of disposable income I scored a couple of cheap additions to the guitar collection.

First up - an 1980s Fender Squier made in japan E series (serial number) guitar. The E series are sought after because of the necks and over all quality. The neck on this is very nice indeed. The picture doesn't quite capture the color which has a bit of green in it making it an interesting dark teal color.

Next we have a bit of a mess. Guy took a Fender Powerhouse Strat, which has an active mid-boost, and stuck a maple neck on it, he claims the neck is a fender that he put a "custom headstock" on. It's a decal of his name. The neck is ok but I'm going to replace it with an old warmouth ebony neck I have for now while I shop for a nice rosewood fender neck on ebay.

I'll probably put up another pic of this one soon because I'm going to change out the neck later.

So all sorts of exciting crap in the world now. Scott Brown takes Ted Kennedy's seat in the Senate. I welcome the thought that ObamaCare might have taken a heavy blow with this election but that's tempered by the realization that this guy is a Massachusetts Republican, which means he'd be a Democrat in almost any other state except California or Maine. After running a campaign that mirror's Obama's presidential campaign, where he said what he believed people wanted to hear, he immediately came out in favor of national health care, just not the current bill. This guy may make Olympia Snowe look more conservative.

Obama's state of the union speech sure was a doozy, It's all Bush's fault, his reckless spending forces me to spend even more....you can fool some of the people some of the time....

I said before Obama is working overtime to rehabilitate the Carter Presidency. I think I was correct. Expect increasingly shrill messages to come from this Whitehouse.

Pelosi is wasting our money? We're getting worked up about the liquor bill on her jaunts around the world in her transport? For Christ's sake that's only a $100K or so, every time she picks up the gavel she spends billions. Sure it's abuse but don't we expect a bit of abuse from our totally out of touch ruling class? The Republicans' can squawk about it all they like but they passed utter shite like "no child left behind" and then didn't even have the balls to fund it, sticking the bill back to the states and the local taxpayers. Repeat after me "Unfunded mandate". Remember when Newt was all the rage and Republicans were opposed to unfunded mandates? No? Well they were back in those days, the dark ages when Reagan was President. That got lost when they discovered how much fun it was to be in charge of the cash flow; everyone shows deference to the holy cash flow, it's great to be king. I have an idea that both parties could use to great advantage:

STOP SPENDING OUR FUCKING MONEY!

Especially when the most abusive spending is when they use our money to bribe each other into passing crap legislation.

So Palin gave a speech? and for the most part it's not a bad speech. At a "national" Tea Party gathering. Funny that, my local "tea party" is claiming that particular 600 people don't represent them. This is probably just an attempt to hijack the movement and bring it back into the Republican Party. Good luck with that Republicans you're 1/2 the f'ing problem. These days it seems the only thing more corrupt than a Republican is a Democrat, but that's only because with the majority comes the ability to control the flow of graft and these days it's all graft, even if it's being used to bribe the locals by building them a bridge.

Climategate continues unabated, the more people dig into this treasure trove of emails, the more we realize that the high priests of global warming were cooking the books. Much has been made of their motivation, in my opinion it was simply a fund raiser. Hansen and the rest have been rolling in funding and attention while playing their star roles in pushing for action now. Of course they may be true believers, which makes them stupid and stupid people almost always get caught...oh wait....

My wife bought herself a droid. It's pretty cool, all the cool of an iPhone without the draconian stupidity imposed by Steve Jobs and apple. No iKoolAid. I like it, if I was in the market for a smart phone I'd get one, but I'm forced to carry a Blackberry "smartphone" and I hate the damn thing. Granted a blackberry is so obsolete in comparison to the droid that they are almost not the same thing. I want a phone to talk on, and possibly text; while I'm a reluctant texter I can see the utility of it. It's like email only we call it texting because we use a phone instead of a computer to read it. Whatever. It's fast, it's beautiful, it's essentially a laptop in a phone and that's what the wife wanted because her boss doesn't have internet at the shop and she wants it to lookup stuff for work. Imagine that, it's 2010 and here is a business without a PC, without internet, and the business is doing quite well for itself. Without the intraweb! Ok he does have a website. Anyway she's delighted with the thing and that's why she got it.