Things I hate

One of the smartest guys around, Robert Kirby, said this today. 

“I consider myself one of the most intolerant people I know, but gays aren't even on my "Top 500 People Whose Guts I Hate" list. I checked it this morning.

Under "H," the list goes from "Happy Birthday Songs in Restaurants" to "Hitler, Adolf" without any mention of "Homosexuals." Nothing under "F" or "Q" either.“

 

When I read that, I realized that my reputation as a misanthrope was in serious risk if I don’t have a list of people I hate.  I may not have 500 on my list, and they aren’t all people, but here is a subset of my list.

 

• Chris Buttars (and the 23,717 idiots in West Jordan who voted for him last November)

• Oklahoma
• Ham Smoothies
• Commercials for tampons
• Commercials for condoms
• Commercials for erectile dysfunction tablets
• Commercials for erectile dysfunction pumps (shudder)

I had to list these separately, because I hate them 4 times as much.

• Vegetarian chili
  
• Killer bees
  
• Bono
  
• Slutty chicks who dress up on Halloween as a sexy nurse or a naughty nun.

(Just kidding, I totally love that.)

• The French
  
• Clown cars.  Actually, any clowns.
• People who brag about getting rich on the internet
  
• Hot Chick with Douchebags  

Not the website.  In fact, not even the hot chicks.  Pretty much just the douchebags.

• Amy Winehouse
  
• Tattoos of people
  
• The idiot who cancelled ‘Firefly’.
  
• Bears
  
• Jim Cramer

That's 20, and that's a good start.  I'll have to keep a pad and pen handy by my desk so I can keep better track.  Mostly, its people that make me angry, but I don't know everybody's name, so I can't list you all individually.

I'm SIMURE

If I recall correctly, it was my innagural blog post where I said that my life is never dull.  My professional life, in particular.  In that post I told how I was accidentally hired as a Windows System Administrator.  Earily similar to how I got married, but that's another post altogether.

Yesterday, for reasons I can't quite articulate, I got dressed and went to work, anticipating a few long conversations with my boss about the possibility of lay-offs.  To my disappointment, he was working from home and I was left with the double insult of no one to talk to, and no one to go to breakfast with.  Eventually, after my first con-call and empty coffee cup, I started off to the cafeteria, on the lookout for someone to eat with.  (An increasingly difficult prospect these days, as there are usually only about 4 people in the office on any particular day.)  I bumped into 'Josh', not his real name, who is a moderately important boss.  He said, "Did you hear the news", which I assumed meant a pink slip in my future.  He continued, "You need to go to your cube, pack up everything and go home".  Well, it was only a matter of time, really.

As it turns out, I was wrong.  There has been an ongoing struggle with air quality in one of the segregated call centers upstairs which had taken a dramatic turn for the worse yesterday. Several people were sent to the nurse's office or sent home.  When I walked past, there were 5 people in the hallway outside the nurses station waiting.  The company declared a facilities alert, (which most of us didn't know existed), and decided to commandeer all of the cubicles in my area, and send us all home.  As it happens, the affected group upstairs requires secured space, and ours was the only secure space available in the building.  Of course, available is a relative concept, but they decided it was high time they kicked us all out and sent us home.  Which is good, really, because I was having a hard time keeping that pothos plant in my cubicle alive, when I only went in once a week.

So today is my first OFFICIAL work-from-home day, and now that the kids are at school, I think I will commemorate this important occasion by taking my clothes off and working in my underwear.

I'm SIMURE.

Bloggination

I mentioned to a friend a while back that I was tracking a blog with an RSS feed, and he had no idea what that meant.  So I had to write a long email explaining it all.  Since it seems to be something that a lot of people don't get, I'm explaining it again here.  

What the heck is RSS?

If you think of your favorite blog or webpage as a newspaper or a magazine, then a RSS feed is the same thing as a subscription.  (Except that its free.)  You need to decide what to read, and then where to read it.    When you are reading your favorite blog, look for this image.  Its usually a link to an RSS feed.  

(Actually, sometimes you only see text like 'Entries RSS' or 'Atom Feed')

I know.  You are asking what the heck does that mean.  Don't worry, it doesn't matter.  All you need is the URL to a feed, and if you right click on that image you will get the option to Copy Link Address.  Do that.

Now what.

Readers

I think that all of the popular email client programs now have RSS readers built in.  They show up as an additional folder, under your mailbox folders.  In Outlook it looks like this

In Thunderbird, it looks like this

Just click on the header, select Add or Subscribe, and follow the directions to paste the URL that you copied above.  

Not your blog will appear as a folder under RSS folder, and every new entry on that blog will appear as an 'email'.  These 'emails' are actually a short abstract of your favorite blog, and a link to the whole thing.

That's it.  Now that I have found this, I have subscribed to 19 blogs.  I'm blog addicted.  In truth, some of these, like Slashdot, or the Official Google Blog publish new content several times a day, and I am always behind.  (As I write this I'm 124 posts behind on Slashdot.)  But what is wicked awesome about that is that I don't compulsively open my browser every 10 minutes to see if there is something new.  I just do my work, wait for a boring conference call, and then go to the RSS folder and catch up.  Clearly, I have far too many blogs to stay current on, (although there are a few in that list that rarely publish, so I'm always caught up.) but somehow I feel more in control when *I* get to delete stuff that I know I won't read, rather than the helpless feeling of knowing that somewhere, someone is writing something funny and I'm missing it.

Now.  If only there were a way to FORCE my really funny friends to write something every day.