JoeBeaudoinDOTnet

I’ve noticed something interesting about BlogRush, a service I use to syndicate the RSS feeds of the blogs I run for my own sites, including Battlestar Wiki and Frak Media!

They don’t syndicate things with vulgarisms in the title (which isn’t a bad thing, in and of itself) or, in fact, technical terms for genitalia. Like the “penis lantern“, which happens to be the 3,000th article on the English-language edition of Battlestar Wiki. I noticed this because the two blogs I’ve posted on BW and FM weren’t syndicated, which kinda pissed me off, seeing as “penis lantern” is a benign term and should have been syndicated, regardless.

I should also note that they didn’t syndicate my blog on Best Buy fucking over their employees by forcing them to off-the-clock searches or working through mandatory lunch breaks. This is because of the word “fuck” in the title.

Of course, it’ll be hilarious if this blog post gets syndicated, despite the use of the word “penis” in the body of this blog. This would only prove that people can manipulate BlogRush as so long as their blog’s titles are innocent and uncontentious, but the content is anything but thus.

To much fan fare from the Wikipedians and Wikia, the for-profit service, launched their vaunted human-editable and maintainable search engine a few days ago. Essentially, the philosophy behind it is the same as it is with Wikipedia in that you can create and edit what search engines spew out whenever you search for a term.

Of course, having just tried it, I am wholly unimpressed. Then again, this is the same group of people who are involved in MediaWiki development who can’t give us an internal search engine worth a damn… I have to use Google to look up terms on Wikipedia! Bah!

I know that it is a beta, but there are several concerns which ring the alert klaxons immediately.

The more immediate one for me is this: I don’t trust Jimbo’s Jabronis to tell me what I need to know. Just look at the watchdog group Wikipedia-Watch.org and what they’ve dredged up over the years about so-called power-tripping Wikipedians in high powered positions. Frankly, I find the most ardent Wikipedians to be blood-shot eyed liberal extermists who believe in raping and pillaging information to suit their worldview. It really is like the concepts laid out by The Party in 1984 are coming true! “Neutral Point of View” my ass. It is more a case of “Might makes Right Point of View”.

Now, I must note that the ardent, outspoken bloodshot eyed liberal extremists who comprise Wikipedia and some of Wikia are a small minority of their contributor base. However, they are in positions of power, and thus explains my “might makes right” comment. (Axiom of the day, courtesy of Shakespeare: “There is little choice in a barrel of rotten apples.”)

Secondly, there is a reason why search engine algorithms are hidden from the public. If they were released under GNU or other open software license, spammers and the like would easily be able to manipulate search engine results to produce more garbage. Wikia, which says that it’s search engine code will be revealed to all, will be exploited ruthlessly by spammers and scammers wanting to make a buck because they know how it works. It’s like telling a thief who wants to steal from Fort Knox everything about the security setup!

To summarize, it’s really simple why Wikia’s Search will fail, and it all boils down to these tried and true axioms:

1. Money talks, bullshit walks.
2. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
3. History is written by the victors.

I’ll leave you with this tidbit from 1984:

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

This is the future. Fight it ’til we can’t.

To be blunt, I’m mentally exhausted right now, to the point where my drive is severely inhibited. I’m mainly on auto-fucking-pilot, and it sucks.

Most of my problems originate from the shit employer I work for (as you might have already guessed) which doesn’t surprise me anyway.

Fortunately, I have a vacation coming up in March and will be out of the damned state of Florida for one week. So I hope that the vacation revitalizes me.
And then, barring any additional curve balls life throws towards my groin, I’ll probably leave Worst Buy by March. Woop-tee-fuckin-doo.

Went out to the Post Office in Zero Beach today to pick up the Mooby’s shirt I ordered from Jay & Silent Bob’s Secret Stash. (I wasn’t around when they delivered it, as they needed my signature.) Now I have a costume for that “Octoberween” party at work. Fuckin’ A.

In addition, I have a Technoranti listing, which is here.

Also, I’ll be updating both the Battlestar Wiki Blog and my own personal blog with the new WordPress. Boring, eh?

Woulda had a great day if I didn’t walk into that shithole today to give money for the walkathon. (It’s a walkathon on muscular distrophy and altzheimers. It’s supposed to happen on November 4th or something.) No good deed goes unpunished.

Oh, BTW, if you see me on GTalk and you don’t receive a reply from me, don’t get offended. I often leave my gmail/gtalk window open, simply because I’ve been really run down lately and I’m running around trying to juggle my online life (read: Battlestar Wiki), work life, and my own godsdamned life.

I’m also feeling like I’m getting sick: I’m hoping its not a damned cold virus; I don’t need it now.

While at work yesterday, I get a call from my brother, who is bitching about the LCD monitor my parents bought with their new computer. Anyway, this phone call nearly resulted in telling him not-so-politely to go fuck himself… in the classical tradition, of course… as I was in the middle of helping a customer.

However, I was in the midst of helping a customer, so that wouldn’t have been such a wise move.

Bear in mind that this is the weekend and I am starting to feel the onslaught of the holiday season.

So when I went home I simply unplugged the power cord and replugged the cord; it suddenly worked again. Something that took five seconds to fix resulted in a nearly three minute, one-way bitch-session.

The reason I bring this up is because this kind of thing reminds me why I don’t fix people’s computers any more. I don’t care to hold people’s hands when it comes to this sort of shit. Also, what spurred this entry was the fact that I’m going through and cleaning out the hard drive of my Powerbook, and came across this document. It’s a mockery of the “lifestyle sheets” used in some Best Buy locations — though I haven’t actually seen one, since my location never used such a thing, and I find such a thing idiotic beyond my ability to eloquently comment. Apparently, the “lifestyle sheet” is a cheatsheet for sales people who can’t actually sell.

It’s really rather funny, and I’ve uploaded it for your review, since it primarily deals with selling computers and what the Worst Buy people view as “non negotiables”. I don’t know exactly where I got this from, but I believe it was a LiveJournal user who used to work for BBY.

Went back to hell today. It turns out that my own department was hit for $150+ worth of CDs just yesterday. (11 CDs at around 13 bucks… you do the math. Please.)

Anyway, I needed to vent because that pissed me off greatly. I was ready to yell, scream and pontificate in a vulgar matter at the morning meeting, prior to opening the store. Fortunately, someone else broached the issue, but I’ll hear about this shit from my discipline manager again on Tuesday when I go into work. And I was really looking forward to going back to work too.

Ah, well, reality check. Dee dee dee.

So here’s what I am going to do:

If I catch the fucktwit who is stealing from my domain, I will fuck you up so badly that you won’t even realize you’ve been fucked up. I imagine golf clubs covered with blood and your ability to procreate damaged beyond repair — we don’t need your kind contaminating the world, after all — however, sadly, that’s only in my imagination. Instead I’ll leave that to the inmates when your ass gets arrested and sodomized by your fellow scum of the earth; nothing like honor amongst thieves after all.

What I will do to facilitate this: I will be there to publicly humiliate your ass with my camera. I will take pictures of you and your accomplices being escorted out of the fucking building. If the police are pussy-shit and let you go with a slap on the wrist, I will humiliate you in the court of public opinion. Call it a public execution, if you will, because that’s what it’ll be. I will post a page on my website with your picture and what you stole.

Nothing like humiliation to correct deviant behavior.

Hence the reason why I ask that anyone in retail (or anyone seeing theft occur), to take a picture of the thieves and publicly humiliate them vis a vis the Internet. Expose them to the light, because if we leave them to fester in the darkness, then this shit will only go out of control.

So, the ultimate question is, how much is your pride and dignity worth to you? $150? $13? $1?

Today’s my last day of vacation and I really feel like that fucking whiney-ass bitch-kid who is getting dragged to school. I can literally feel the heels of my feet being dragged along the asphault as someone has my collar bunched up in their hand, screaming and whining with arms outstretched. Tomorrow, I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a red-line across my neck from the collar’s tension, when I wake up at 6 A.M. and work the 10 hour shift I’m supposed to pull on Sunday.

JOE
(little kid voice)
Oh boy! Yipee!

And I don’t want to be feeling this way. I want to just enjoy my last day of vacation before the Hell known as the “Holiday Season”, “Merry Fucking Festivus”, or whatever politically correct terminology we’re supposed to use descends upon me and drowns me in its shit-storm. (It’s bad enough that the name “Black Friday” has been perverted into terminology like “Blue Friday”, “Green Friday”, et al. To me, it’s Black-and-Blue Friday, because I will be black and blue after that day. Or at least the remnants of my thrice-damned soul.)

Ah well, Hell’s worse I suppose…

Now back to my regular scheduled vacation.

My mother bought these fortune cookies from some store (probably Publix). As a snack, I had one.

Now the problem with having fortune cookies as a snack is that my brain is programmed to believe that fortune cookies should be devoured only after eating a Chinese meal.

But I had one anyway. And it pissed me off.

You see, in a normal Chinese fortune cookie, you have a slip of paper with a fortune. The fortune is typically written in a serif font, not sans-serif. It is usually written in red and, on the back, you may find lotto numbers and a Chinese word (with the appropriate Chinese spelling and punctuation for said word).

On this fucking excuse for a fortune cookie, it has a shitty fortune. That’s it.

Here’s the kicker that really did it: the wrapper has nutritional facts! Why the hell would I want to know the nutritional value of a fortune cookie?

Next thing you know, there’ll be a warning message on the fortune cookie that reads “Paper included on inside of cookie. Remove paper before eating.”

Well, why bother ranting about it… It’s not like there are signs that inform you that your coffee may be hot.