• Bearing false witness

    Lying is bad. It is deceitful, it can catch up with you, and it is just plain not nice. Having said that, there is a certain amount of pleasure in fibbing for sport. There is a little game we engage in at the office. Someone uncorks a whopper and someone else is supposed to call them on it. The sport is in trying to come up with the most outrageous lie without being called on it.

    “No, I could swear that the forty-third amendment to the US Constitution allows the President to declare war without the approval of congress.”

    “Have you heard that the noise associated with vacuuming has been linked to the onset of gout?”

    “Did you hear that before someone is released from prison, Florida convicts have to place their hand on a bible, admit to their wrong doing, and promise ‘to be a good citizen and never do it again’.”

    “They said on the radio this morning that the President wants to sever diplomatic ties with Canada over their lack of support in Iraq?”

    “Did you know that in 1815 the British parliament passed a resolution stating ‘we were tired of those damn coffee drinking yanks anyway.’”

    You should never be surprised by what others will characterize as “fun”. My name is John and I am a little strange. Aren’t we all?

  • What to choose?

    I think the biggest scam going in the tech world isn’t the Nigerian email con – it’s ink jet printers. You can buy a new printer for about the cost to replace the ink. No, I’m not kidding. To replace the two cartridges in my Epson printer will cost me $48.00. The price of a low end HP color printer is $49.99. Apples and oranges, you say? True, the HP replacements would be less. They would only come to $40.00, but that’s still about eighty percent of the cost of the printer. OUCH! Maybe they’ll sell me just the printer for nine bucks? The printer I have now is the king of the con. The documentation says I should get hundreds of prints, even at the highest quality. Yet I couldn’t even get through my Christmas cards without having to change cartridges (at less than the highest quality and only 80 pages of output). Doh!

    Any way you look at it, they’ve got me.

    I’ll show them… I’ll stop printing things! Yeah, that’s what I said two months ago. Now I find my self pacing the isles of CompUSA like someone granted early release from the coo-coo’ nest, doing the single player debate to it’s full effect. It’s the age old question that has plagued mankind since the advent of “instant credit”: do I try to milk more value out of a product that I’m unhappy with, or do I bite the bullet and try something else?

    I wonder what stone tablets go for nowadays?

  • Rumors of the sun’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

    The sun is shining, the wind is not blowing and the rain is not falling. Did you ride your bike this morning?

    When you play the averages game there are times when you beat the odds, and other times when the odds beat you. By the way, I took my car this morning.