423 - Dealing with the public

Ran across this site about dealing with the public. There's some pretty funny stuff here. But one thing that caught my attention was the 'cluster maps'. It's practically all red. When I clicked on it, it shows nearly 21,000 hits from the day before! Holy Moly batman!!! Anyway, here's the link and a sample of what's on the site below.

Link - Not Always Right


Why Catch-22 Needs To Be Required Reading
Tech Support | California, USA
Customer: “I bought a computer from you guys not 3 weeks ago, and my internet isn’t working.”

Me: “Well the computer itself seems to be operating perfectly…”

Customer: “It is NOT working perfectly. I cannot get on the internet. ”

Me: “I understand that; I just mean while the internet itself isn’t working, your computer is functioning properly.”

Customer: “My computer is worthless without internet.”

(Company policy is to direct her to her ISP for further assistance. So I try to get that info from her so I can give her a proper phone number.)

Customer: “Why don’t you just fix it?”

Me: “I’ve run out of things we can try.”

Customer: “What is the ISP going to do?”

Me: “They’ll walk you through a few things or at least tell you if there is an outage or other problems in your area.”

Customer: “I bought this computer from YOU and YOU should be the ones fixing it.”

Me: “It’s not the computer, it’s the internet. Unfortunately we’re not your internet provider. There’s really nothing more I can do for you.”

Customer: “How much do you charge for internet?”

Me: “We do not sell internet.”

Customer: “Than who do I buy my internet from?”

Me: “I don’t know. Verizon, perhaps?”

Customer: “I suppose I should order some internet.”

Me: “…you haven’t even signed up for it yet!?”

Customer: “I wanted to do it on the internet.”

Me: *head explodes*

422 - Cartoons - on Saturday

Don't you just hate it when a kid points out the obvious?


Link - Baby Blues


And sometimes the obvious isn't so (obvious).


Link - Cornered

And this is just a coincidence Bilbo.
.

421 - Deal or no deal

Here was the deal on Sellout Woot yesterday.

HP Pavilion Athlon Dual Core 5600+ Desktop PC - $429.99 + $5 shipping
CONDITION: New
PRODUCT: HP a6330f 2.8Ghz Athlon Dual Core 5600+, 500GB HDD, 3gb RAM, SuperMulti Drive w/ LightScribe

Look at the specs and think about what your getting compared to what you would get even a year ago. Computers are getting to be throw away like so many other electronic gadgets. I would have bought one except for the fact that I don't need another computer sitting around here.

420 - Make your eyes crazy

Here's a link to a youtube video. You can make the video full screen size with the option in the lower right corner of the little screen. The ESC key gets you back to the regular screen.
Before you watch this make sure you have some objects to look at afterwards, not a flat blank wall. Don't watch it to many times. If your like me (like now) your eyes will hurt. But I seem to be getting over it.
There are other illusions to look at but I thought this was the best one.

Link - Crazy eyes
.

419 - Quotes

They Start off mellow and go into a touch of sarcasm. Then finish with some good advice.

Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.
The best vitamin for making friends is B1.
The happiness of my life depends on the quality of my thoughts.
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
Hard work pays off in the future ...... laziness pays off NOW!
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
In the choice of two evils, I pick the one I've never tried before.
Life is like a box of chocolates. It's full of nuts.
Make friends before you need them.

418 - URL Ranking

Where do you rank? Well if you're a blogger you don't. Unless you have your own domain name. This site is a marketing site that tracks over 215,000 participants. So the results can be slightly skewed depending on how they get their surfers. But it's fun to go look and see where some of your favorite sites might rank.

Blogger.com 161
Woot.com 1,768
Stldrunks.com 231,971
Misscellania.com 924,596
The last site listed is number 1,065,313

Somewhere a little over 300,000 they go to an alphabetical listing. So misscellania may actually be higher. Probably the top 10% might be accurate but past that the data probably gets a little fishy. And I can't remember how I found Stldrunks.com. Probably some other blogger ... that's a drunk ... but not me!

Link - Ranking.com
.

417 - Monday extra

Obviously with nothing better to do, I have more "extra's" for today.

What?

Link - Grimmy

Simplicity always works.

Link - Pearls
.

416 - Raining cats and dogs

It's raining cats and dogs. What does that mean? Click on it to find out. But when you read it you might want to take it with a grain of salt. But this is mostly a free site so don't look a gift horse in the mouth.  Gee wiz, I'll bet John doesn't even know some of these.

So don't peter out on me. Check the site that will help you figure out what all those little strange sayings mean.
.

415 - Sunday extra

What is the question?

Link - grimmy


I hope he smelled them first.


Link - duplex
.

414 - Quotes?

Are these quotes? Who knows. I didn't bother looking them up. These are from t-shirts and plaques in a mail order catalog. I haven't ordered any yet but there are quite few good one's here.


I’m confused … wait … maybe I’m not.
I have multiple personalities and none of them like you.
I smile because you’re my sister. I laugh because there’s nothing you can do about it.
Jesus loves you, but I’m his favorite.
Remember, as far as anyone knows, we’re a normal family.
I used to care. But I take a pill for that now.
Manure Occureth
I’m not stubborn. My way is just better.
Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.
Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit. Look who’s here!
I didn’t say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame you.
(old squirrel) I’m so old I can’t remember where my nuts are.
I feel a SIN comin’ on.
I don’t have ADD. It’s just that … OH LOOK! A bunny rabbit!
I live at the corner of “kiss my ass avenue” and “no friggin way”.
Put on the big girl panties and deal with it.
WARNING – I have gas and I know how to use it.
I tried being good but I got bored.
I’m OCD – Old, Cranky, and Demented
Lord, keep your arm around my shoulder and your hand over my mouth.

(too late for the last half of that last one)

413 - Got ya

A friend recently was online buying a plane ticket from American Airlines. She pulled up a price and the screen asked 'do you want to proceed'. She said 'yes'. She fills out the information, inputs her credit card number and got this back - "I'm sorry but the ticket price has just increased by $50. Do you still want to buy the ticket?" She was sort of stuck so she had to buy the ticket at the higher price. But it's a wonder that the scum bags that came up with that idea didn't try to hit her up for even more money.

Oh, and she did call and complain and got, "to bad, that's the way the system works now".
.

412 - Uncle Jay

I finally looked at Uncle Jay this week. (I been slackin') And there is a portion of this weeks segment that goes right along with the new gas symbol below.

Link - Uncle Jay.
.

411 - New international symbol for gasoline

.

410 - Inspirational message

This was sent to me and I pass it on as an inspirational message to all.

If this doesn't touch you, there is something wrong...

I seldom pass along inspirational stuff, but this one got to me.

I believe, in these difficult and mean-spirited times in which we live,
there needs to be a message of 'Hope.'

We can all use a single image that speaks to us of love, harmony, peace, and joy.

An image that suggests the universality of us all.

I have been sent that 'image,' and I want to share it with you all.

All I ask is that you take a moment to reflect on it.

409 - EOL

No not AOL - EOL. I've been watching PBS again. They had a NOVA show about "The Lord of the Ants". E.O. Wilson has been studing ants his whole life and transformed that study into an insect 'theory of everything'. (poetic licence there)
But one thing that has come out of his studies is the site EOL - THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE. It's a site set up to catogorize ..... well just go to the site. The first page tells all.

link - EOL
.

408 - Where are they?

Here's a variation of the sex offender data base. It's called Felon Spy. It supposedly gives you all the felons that are living in your neighborhood. It brings up a limited search area so you can't just scroll all over the place and see who's in the whole area. You have to put in another address if you want to stray to far from your original search.

Link - Felon Spy
.

407 - 2 Toons - 1 EMJ

So this is why there's an illegal immigrant problem in the US. All the roads are leading HERE now!
Link - Grimmy



I'd like to help with this cause but I'm way to busy.
Link - Nonsequitur


Then there's the EMJ, 'email joke'. I thought this was a pretty good one.
----------------------------------------
One day God was looking down at earth and saw all of the misbehaving
that was going on. So he called one of his angels to go to Earth for a
time.

When he returned, the angel told God, “Yes, it is bad on Earth; 85%
are misbehaving and only 15% are not.”

God thought for a moment and said, “Maybe I had better send down
another angel to get a second opinion.”

So God called another angel and sent him to Earth for a time too.

When the angel returned he went to God and said, “Yes, it's true.
The Earth is in decline; 85% are misbehaving, but 15% are being good.”

God was not pleased. So he decided to e-mail the 15 % who were good,
because He wanted to encourage them, give them a little something to
help them keep going. Do you know what the e-mail said?

No? <<<
.
.

406 - The recent visitor side bar

Interesting tidbit about the recent visitors sidebar. I was at my sisters house and logged on to see if or how her computer would show up on the sidebar. At her computer the generic grey and white face showed up with the phrase "You, join now". Now that I'm home looking at my site nothing like that shows up at all. So in the past if I was logged off for whatever reason and got that generic face on someone else's website, they never saw it.
(I think) (I'm adding this later) Apparently if there is a BlogLog profile set up you will see the face, if not, not.

405 - Keep yourself busy

Need something to keep yourself busy this weekend. Here's a site with so much stuff you'll need two weekends to do all the stuff you can do here. If you just go to the main page and start looking at the drop down boxes it will keep you busy for a while.

Link - Mike's main page
Link - Quiz page
Link - Test
.

404 - John Danforth

I saw retired Missouri Senator John Danforth speak last night. He was pushing his new book "Faith and Politics". The main theme of the book is how the two major political parties have been ignoring the middle of the road undecided voter and focusing on their "core" constituents and thus dividing America into to polar opposite camps. The "us or them" mentality. My wife bought the book so we now have an autographed copy of it. Now all I have to do is read it.

Link - John Danforth
Link - Faith and Politics: How the "Moral Values" Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together
.

403 - It's a trick

Well microsoft is playing a big trick on us. With no good reason to buy vista they had to come up with a spiffy new program that doesn't run well unless you have vista. It's a sky watcher program called world wide telescope. You can zoom all over the sky looking at galaxies and other objects. But you need some good specs on your computer to get a good resolution. It's still worth playing with. Here's the link to the site to download a whole bunch of stuff to your computer.

Link - www.worldwidetelescope.org
.

402 - Colors on the ground

You look at the ground and see a white X, or an orange line. What in the world do they MEAN?! So you whip out your handy dandy Underground Color Marking Code Chart and presto! You know just what's going on down there. Don't have a handy dandy UCMCC. Now you do!


.

401 - quotes

One thing you can give and still keep...is your word.
--- Speaking of words, go to the last post.

You lie the loudest when you lie to yourself.
--- Say to yourself your going to go.

Your mind is like a parachute...it functions only when open.
--- Learn some new words and save the world.

The pursuit of happiness is the chase of a lifetime.
--- Learning new words is happiness, chase some down.

--- I don't know where the previous quotes came from other than an email. But the following one came from 'Jane Howard'.

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
--- That's everybody out there reading this. I declare you my ... 'tribe'.

Jeez, I almost forgot to warn everybody today's Friday the 13th. It can sneak up on you when it's on another day of the week.

400 - Do a liberal thing

Donate some time and some rice. – Go to Free Rice.

Keep track of how long you were on the site.
Then post -
1. Your time on the site
2. Your vocab level
3. Your best level
4. How many grains of rice you donated

You can use Dictionary.com if you want. I can get up to level 50+ using the dictionary. (to pump up the rice count) Usually 35+ with out it. Sometimes even the dictionary doesn’t help. The little speaker symbol will pronounce the word for you.

1 - 30 minutes
2 - 50
3 - 50
4 - 1780
.

399 - The JPEGs that went with the last post

I know it's cheating to stretch an email joke out to two posts, but .... hey LOOK, the goodyear blimp!!!!











.

398 - ID ten 't' error

I found a tidbit for Saturday after all.

Techie John
I was having trouble with my computer.
So I called John the computer guy, to come over.
John clicked a couple of buttons and solved the problem.
He gave me a bill for a minimum service call.
As he was walking away, I said, "So, what was wrong?"
He replied, "It was an ID ten T error."
I didn't want to appear stupid, but nonetheless inquired, "An, ID ten T error? What's that ... in case I need to fix it again?"
John grinned .... "Haven't you ever heard of an ID ten T error before?"
"No," I replied.
"Write it down," he said, "and I think you'll figure it out."
So I wrote down: - I D 1 0 T
I used to like John ............
.

397 - To tired

My mind is a blank after yesterday. I was way to busy from early in the morning (I actually had to get up before 10) until 11 last night. And today doesn't look any better. I can't even get up the gumption (had to spell check that) to steal somebody elses stuff.
.

396 - Toilet Humor

Literally.

I got some pictures in an email yesterday. I'm putting them on my aux site because there's to many of them and I don't want to take up the space on this page. So off to Toilet Humor to look at toilet pictures.
.

395 - WOOT OFF!!!

It seems a little early for another woot off but here it is. The last one was a two day event. Hopefully this is only 24 hours. They're starting off with a slow seller so it will be awhile before something else shows up. I don't think I can stay up all night for this one and I've got a lot of stuff to do tomorrow so I'll miss the good stuff that disappears in minutes. Such is life.

Link - woot
.

394 - Look out girls, the guys are listening

A woman's voice becomes more attractive when she is most fertile. That's according to Nathan Pipitone and Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany. The pair recorded women counting from 1 to 10 at four occasions during their menstrual cycle. They then replayed the recordings at random to male and female students and asked them to rate the attractiveness of the voices. Both males and females judged the women's voices to be most attractive if they were recorded during the peak fertility period of the menstrual cycle, and less attractive if they were recorded during non-fertile periods.

The results are in line with evidence that the female voice box, or larynx, is under the influence of sex hormones, says Gallup. He says the changes in the female voice during peak fertility support the view that women are "different" at that point in the menstrual cycle - in other words, that they experience estrus. “Changes in the attractiveness of a woman's voice during peak fertility support the view that women experience estrus”

The theory of human estrus remains controversial because its effects are subtle; human females show none of the distinct genital swellings seen in other female mammals "in heat". But there is increasing evidence of more subtle changes. "Other differences include changes in sexual receptivity and odor sensitivity," Gallup says. Martie Haselton and Greg Bryant at the University of California, Los Angeles, say that vocal pitch plays an important role in judging fertility. "We have found that voices are higher in pitch on high-fertility days of the cycle," says Haselton.

The fact that men notice the differences in vocal attractiveness suggests that there is a subtle evolutionary battle of the sexes going on, says Gallup: as women evolve ever more efficient ways to conceal fertility - to avoid unwanted attention - men become increasingly sensitive to the tiny changes that do occur. Other women also pick up on the changes, perhaps to keep an eye on the competition, he suggests.

Geoffrey Miller at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, showed last year that women lap dancers earn more tips during their fertile days. "The voice changes might explain some of the shift in lap dancer tip earnings," he says. "Dancers certainly chat with their customers." But Miller points out that there is also evidence that visual attractiveness changes during the menstrual cycle. "Voice quality is unlikely to be the whole story," he says.

Link - NewScientist

I'm trying the 'post at a later time' option. It's really 11:20PM.

393 - Staying in touch

A friend of mine who lives in California was in town recently. We were out with a group of friends talking about staying in touch because you never know when someone will be gone. She then told us about a friend of hers in California that was killed by a falling branch. This friend was putting her dog into her car when a branch of a tree behind her fell on her. She had just seen her a week or so before and along comes this freak accident and poof, no more friend. I found the following story.


Woman hit, killed by redwood limb in San Francisco park
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
San Francisco, CA
A heavy limb falling from an otherwise healthy redwood tree is being blamed for the death of a 50-year-old woman in a San Francisco park. Authorities say Kathleen Bolton was putting the dog into her car at Stern Grove when a limb measuring 10 inches in diameter fell on her a little before noon Monday. Bolton was taken to San Francisco General Hospital, where she died at 12:14 p.m. A spokeswoman for the city's Recreation and Park Department says the tree is about 40 years old and appears to be healthy. Winds were gusting at more than 25 mph Monday, but it's unknown whether the strong winds had anything to do with the incident.

392 - Corny

I saw an Independent Lens show on PBS a little while ago about how we are eating basically corn. That means just about everything we eat and drink can be traced back to corn. From corn feed for animals to corn sweetener in everything we drink or eat. Here's a link to the PBS IL site. The whole film is not on the PBS site and there is a link to another site that will sell you a copy. But there is a lot to read and some video on the PBS site. If you haven't seen it I would just keep a eye on PBS for a repeat.

Link - PBS ILens about film
Link - Film preview
Link - King Corn site
.

391 - 3fer

Not me bubba.


And these are the vacations I'll take to make sure it's not me.



OK, I first looked at this and said, what? Then I realized the king was talking to the last guy, not the first. Then I slapped my forehead and went DOHHH!


Link - Mike Peters

390 - It works!!!!

Well I did it and it worked! In post 374 I told you about reading that the way to get past the automated phone systems was to scream f&*% into the phone. It works! I was ordering some medicine over the phone and remembered the trick. So rather than typing in numbers for the next 15 minutes I just did a little hollering and presto, instant service rep.
Link - Post 374
.

389 - Back to quotes

After the rousing response to my last post I think I'll go back to some quotes. These quotes are to get you going. And as I sit here and look out the window thinking about starting something, I'm not really sure if I want to put the time in on something I'm not sure about. I think I'll sleep on it and start it later.


If you want your dreams to come true, you mustn't oversleep.

If you lack the courage to start, you are already finished.

Your ideas won't work unless you do.

One thing you can't recycle is wasted time.

It is never too late to become what you might have been.
.

388 - Who's version of normal?

Are you XX or XY? Here's an article about gender confusion. Try to read it with an open mind. Then check out the wikipedia links.

-----------------------------------
Between male and female
There was a 19th-century "pint-sized, squeaky-voiced" British army surgeon who was discovered after death to be a woman - or so the woman who prepared the doctor's body for burial claimed. If the claim is true, Barry's story represents one triumphant response to the sexism that kept women out of a profession which had once been exclusively theirs. Women were the chief deliverers of care in illness, injury and childbirth in Europe up to the 17th century and have been in most societies for most of history.
Quite a few women have dressed as men to escape the social disabilities of their sex at the time. Some enlisted as soldiers - Ann Mills was a dragoon and Hannah Snell a Royal Marine, both in the 18th century - and journalist Dorothy Lawrence joined up in men's clothes to fight in the first world war. Others did it for reasons unknown: a career in jazz was not closed to women on the grounds of their sex, yet 1930s jazz musician Billy Tipton, who married five times, was only discovered to be a woman after his death, as was also the case with singer Willmer Broadnax.
Some of these cross-dressers might also have felt themselves to be male in gender, although anatomically female, just as some individuals who are anatomically male feel themselves to be female. The distinction now made between sex and gender is a helpful one, because it allows us to accommodate the fact that humankind does not divide neatly into male and female, but in its protean diversity admits of a spectrum between.
Only recently has the fact become well enough understood to challenge the often harmful medicalization of sex ambiguity and gradation which began in earnest in the 19th century and culminated in the 1950s with the "optimum gender of rearing" system developed at Johns Hopkins University. This system encouraged "gender assignment" of those with ambiguous genitals, including surgical intervention, at the earliest possible stage in life to encourage the effective socialization of the resulting individual into their assigned gender.
The sheer complexity of sex and gender is now well enough understood for the Johns Hopkins optimum gender system to be no longer acceptable. Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University studied the literature on sex variations (Sexing the Body, Basic Books, 2000) and found that as many as 1 in 100 people have bodies that differ from the male and female standards, if one includes XX and XY chromosomal abnormalities such as chromosomal mosaicism and the Klinefelter and Turner syndromes; conditions in which the gonads or genitals fail to develop properly (including those caused by the abnormal production of, or response to, the hormones that direct sexual development); and problems caused by medical treatment (including mistakes during pregnancy).
The fact that there is a spectrum of sex identities was brought home to me by a brilliant pupil I had at Oxford, who after studying philosophy there as a Dominican monk in the 1980s came to realize that she was not male but intersexed (in other words, neither male nor female but a third gender which she and others in the intersex community wish to have recognized). Not only could she not achieve recognition as such, she even had to struggle to be redescribed as female for so mundane a purpose as getting a passport. On being informally advised to undergo "genital disambiguation" surgery to solve the problem, she realized that she had in effect ceased to exist in law as a person. She resolved to fight for the rights of intersexed persons to be recognized as such. Her brave endeavor - she is Sally Gross, founder of the Intersex Society of South Africa - like that of the members of the Intersex Society of North America, promises to change the simplistic stereotyping that hides from view the realities of life for one whole tranche of humanity.
Link - NewScientist.com

----------------------------------------
Wikipedia links to some interesting articles.
Link - X0
Link - XXX
Link - XXXX
Link - XXXXX
Link - XYY
Link - XXY
Link - XXYY
Link - Failed XY
Link - Normal XY and XX
And it's not just humans.
Link - ZW
.