Networking in today's Fast Paced and Increasingly Connected world, with an Emphasis on Online Contacts and Leveraging of Connections.

LinkedIn’s default invitation is worded so, “Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn.” I’ve nothing against the people who use the default message. Heck I use it too. But, you have got to admit that that is a more than averagely smarmy message.

No, you don’t trust me. You don’t trust most of the people you sent that message to. You may have worked with those people, or you may know them from some place, like school or college or a previous job. That does not mean you trust them. It means you one knew them and that they may be useful to you in future. You know, like duct tape. You always need to keep duct tape around. On the off chance that you may need to use it. Just like you can use the people you link to on LikedIn.

So, here are alternatives to that invitation message:

· “You do not suck. Link to me.”

· “You did not stick a knife in my back. Link to me.”

· “I know where you hid the bodies. Link to me.”

· “I know what you did last summer. Linky.”

· “You let the dogs out. Linkination.”

· “You are a space ninja pirate. Link.”

· “I once saw your name in the CC field of a mail that someone forwarded to me about a large dog and sixteen rabbits performing unnatural sexual acts. Link please.”

· “You are a Homo Sapien. Link to me.”

· “You have a name. Link to me.”

· “I need a plumber. Link to me.”

· “Pick a number. Link to me.”

· “You need Herbal male enhancement medicine. Link link link.”

· “Porn, porn, porn! Link!”

· “”I” before “E” except after “C”. Link.”

· “Handcuffs, butter and two super models. Link to me.”

· “You look like someone I once worked with. Link to me.”

· “You liked to look at someone I worked with. Link to me.”

· “Meow! Link to me.”

· “Woof! Link to me.”

…Seriously, I was trying to make a halfway coherent post. I think I might have failed.

Gadzooks!

However, I am proud of the sheer amount of crap I managed to cram into the title. I warms the cockles of me heart laddie. Aye I remember the time, me and me pirate brethren of the good ship "The LinkedIn" were fighting Ninjas off the coast of ReallyITrustYou island...

Coherent post. Honest.

You are not welcome here.

This abuse of adjectives has got to stop. People use them willy-nilly with nary a concern for accuracy and truthfulness.

Driving up Route 1, I saw a sign for “Luxury” Apartments. Well, upon closer examination, I decided that they weren’t. They were medium nice-ish apartments. The kind inhabited by young professionals and toaster salesmen, but they were missing the signs of luxury that a reasonable person may look for when pointed towards a Luxury apartments. There were no butlers bringing people cups of tea. Neither were there dancing fountains (There was one weak, rather anemic fountain, one that spurted weakly and clearly was merely marking time until retirement), belly dancers, albino peacocks (I’ve never been fond of peacocks. They’re rather freaky looking birds.), rich lush carpets and tins of caviar gamboling on the grounds. Saying something is luxurious does not make it so. Show some restraint please.

And…you know, calling something a “Gourmet” doesn’t make it so. It isn’t a very good sandwich. Tagging gourmet to the front of it does not make it any tastier. It disappoints me when I bite into it and causes me to entertain negative, some may say violent thought towards gourmets. If I ever ran into a gourmet I would look at him sadly, and shed a single tear to show my sorrow at his duplicity.

“Designer” means…somebody designed it. Not necessarily a professional designer. Maybe an unusually dexterous orangutan or a mildly retarded six year old or a zombie with a missing brain or a large loaf of bread or a…Nobody believes you anymore. Consumers do not hear the designer bit of the spiel. The mind ignores the designer part, and so your sign may say designer shit, but our minds register only shit.

“Exclusive” fucking offer. For fuck’s sake, you’re advertising on television and asking everyone to come on down, and take a look at your designer crap. Everyone! Every-fucking-one. You aren’t excluding anyone! No exclusion. Therefore you cannot be fucking exclusive. To be exclusive you have to exclude. It’s simple. Again, for emphasis. To be exclusive, you need to fucking exclude!

You are not fooling us any more (Assuming you fooled us ever). Cease and desist and all that jazz. Resist the urge to embellish. Adjectives are delicate creatures that dislike being molested by lowly worms such as you. Um, I suppose they’d dislike be molested by anyone, not just the worms. They’re strange that way.

So, yeah, I noticed I switched from writing about the adjective-molesters in the third person to writing about them in the second person. I hope you’ve decided to mend your loose ways.

Tea, coffee and robots.

So there’s a new coffee/tea machine thing robot at work. It’s a good coffee/tea machine thing robot and I approve of it.

Except that once it’s done brewing a cup of whatever it tells me to enjoy the brewed whatever (Little LCD display, it does not talk. It should have. That would be cool). It doesn’t ask me. It doesn’t say (say, display, you get the point), “Please enjoy that cup.”

No, it says, “Enjoy!” Not a request, a command. With a menacing undertone. “Enjoy or thou shall repent. Because I am your machine overlord and it is your duty to obey me…Beep.”

As the chosen (by me) representative of the organic human race, it is my duty to defy the machine orders. But…I do need my cup of Earl Grey in the morning. So I drink my tea, but I make it a point to not enjoy it. I savour it gloomily. I sip at it with a frown. I taste the delicate flavours and shudder. No enjoyment here. Take that. I bow only to the cephalopod overlords and not to the machine overlords.

Everybody’s ordering people around these days. By everybody, I of course mean certain blogs that have a section which says, “You! Become a member of my community.” No. I won’t. Fuck off. I’m not going to become a member of your community. No, you cannot order me around blog, who’s just met me. Maybe if we get to know each other a little better, I might consider acceding to your requests. But for now, I will not become a member of your community. And stop abusing the exclamation mark. It makes my eyes bleed.

Now, if only the makers of tea/coffee robots and overbearing blogs would swing by wand read this post.

Chuckie!

My apartment's management office sent over a maintenance crew today to fix a faulty power outlet in my kitchen. They came by some time during the day, when I was away at work, and did the deed and left. They left me a note, wedged in the crack of my front door, to let me know that they had been there.
Pretty innocuous so far, eh? On the note were printed the words, "Someone was in your apartment today." Not in a particularly large font, but in what, to my tired eyes, seemed like a very, very creepy font. This voice kept saying those words in my head, a creepy child's voice, from a horror movie, "Someone was in your apartment today"...And then I read the rest. "Fixed outlet in kitchen and replaced switch. Fixed shower head." The creepy voice tried saying that. It faltered on "Outlet in the kitchen", stumbled over "switch," and then encountering "shower-head," gave up on the entire matter as a bad job and repaired to the nearest bar for a stiff one.
So yeah, apparently the creepy voice that haunts my apartment complex (not my head) is a weak willed alcoholic.
They never make movies about the alcoholic creepy voices. The creepy voices that are accountants, or code monkeys or stapler salesmen. These are the salt of the creepy voice earth. But do they get any acknowledgment? No, all the credit and the stardom goes to those voices that tell people to jump of cliffs or go postal in a supermarket or invent telephonic customer service numbers (Please for fucks sake do not make me push one and then three and then seventy five followed by six while balanceing on my left toe and wearing a tutu.). these are the rock stars of the creepy voice world. They get all the chicks and the money and the fame while the rest toil in anonymity.

Voices of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Five hours of sleep a night for five nights in a row can lay waste to your system. And mine. but mostly mine. I got back from a vacation and I'm ready for my next one.
Drinking seven cups of coffee a day is bad for your system. I speak from personal experience. It leaves one with the urge to throw up all day, and makes the computer monitor swim alarmingly. As opposed to when the computer monitor swims reassuringly, humming softly under its breath.

My computer is so fucked right now. Everything crashes and hangs with a cheery alacrity and merry abandon. Word is stuck in an infinite feedback loop where it crashes and relaunches and crashes and relaunches ad infinitum. The Start menu is fucking there to stay. Let other lesser menus disappear and reappear, slaves to the users whims and fancies. Not this one. Fuck you and fuck the world. It's here, it's going nowhere. Get used to it.

Aaargh. No I do not want to reboo...

French toast.

So, you do know it’s fucking impossible for anyone to look halfway normal in a portrait photograph. (I do not by that statement mean that it is possible for people to look normal, but impossible for them to look halfway normal. I mean to say that normalcy is a goal that is unachievable under any circumstance, and, and, the point halfway normalcy, encountered by travelers on the road to normalcy, and which through a strange quirk of the space time continuum is one third of the way to normalcy, is just as unachievable. So, to conclude, fucking run on sentences are the bomb. Shout out to someone who, in my presence, called his significant other a firecracker. That someone then rapidly begged for mercy at the significant other’s reaction.)

Anyway, so, yeah, normalcy impossible. It is a portrait photograph and therefore the subject needs to look freaky, and spaced out. Like someone who went on a fifteen day meth binge, breaking only to swig large quantities of bootleg alcohol and read the comics page in the newspaper. You know, I’m not even sure that a person can survive a fifteen day meth binge supplemented by large quantities of bootleg lubrication, but lets assume that they can. They need to photograph one for those folks for a portrait. Freakiness compounded. Too much of a good thing.

So, yeah, normalcy impossible. You have the, “Oh look, theres something in the distance that is fascinating” look on the subjects face. I like imagining that hordes of rampaging cannibals have popped up behind the photographer and are eyeing him/her with a predatory gleam, while pulling out the good silverware and fighting over seating at the table. Naturally, the subject believes that this occurrence is slightly fascinating and observes it, calmly, but with keen interest. This is the closest that we come to normalcy.

Yes it is that bad. The look that a person might give a horde of ambulatory Homo-Sapien-ovores is the best we can do. It’s all downhill from there. (Or uphill, if you’re a cyclist who is slightly winded and then looks at the acclivity(did not look that word up) and goes “Who the fuck came up with the notion that going downhill was a bad idea. Show me that cretin and I will ride my bicycle over him a few times. Three or four times. Five times if he is downhill from me.”)

So, yeah, “The ooh fascinating etc, etc” look, followed by the. “I have a live frog in my mouth and it feels gooooood,” look. Mildly disturbing. It might be another amphibian, a salamander, a toad, a semi aquatic toaster. Any one of these might do in a pinch. But since frogs are the most readily available, let us, for the sake of this paragraph, assume that the subject did infact have a frog in his or her mouth, and that the presence of the aforementioned frog felt gooooood.

Then there’s that “I am a robot, see no emotion,” look. I object to this one. As a geek of epic proportions, I know that robots have emotions. The Terminators wanted to kill, destroy, be really cool and liquid metal. Maybe not healthy emotions, but emotions none the less. R2D2’s beeps were signs of deep, meaningful emotion. (Hey…he had a thing for x-wings, something phallic I’m sure. The logical connection here is too easy. I w ill not even go there. It is left to the reader as a trivial exercise.). I insist that this look be replaced by, the “Oh, I’m a plank of wood, feel my um no emotion state?” look.

And then there’s the other extreme. “The I’m dripping with emotion,” look. Yeah, stop fucking grinning so hard. You’re dimming out the lights. My eyes are starting to bleed. The sun is fading away. Oh, wait. It isn’t. That’s just my retinas melting away.

So, yeah, deep fried frog’s legs. Yummy.

Decisions, decisions

Sleep? New Post? Sleep? New Post?

Sleep.

Kermit

It started with this, and that led to me reading this. Now, the entire topic is very, very gross... But one wonders, and by one I mean me, what did lead them down this path? How the fuck did anyone decide that this was the way to go?

Head shrinking isn’t exactly the first idea that pops into a persons mind when faced with the body of a fallen foe man or with the remains of a random victim and the issue of its disposal. If the um…deceased is located conveniently far away then one can I suppose ignore the matter and let nature take its course. The world however, is far from perfect and follow up measures need to be taken.

Humans have been doing this since humans have been human, and even before that I suppose. Bury, burn, entomb, cover with a ton of rocks, heave into the ocean…all logical and efficient in the most part. The head shrinking…not so much. That comes under the inspired bit of stupidity, (Also know as “What in fuck’s name were they thinking”, and “You are fucking kidding me”. Colloquially known as, “Please, fucking tell me they did not do that.” (In that last sentence the word fucking is used as a verbal, a verb used as an adjective. I had to look that up, but now I know, and knowledge is always a good fucking thing.))

And so I thought about that a little more. And then there was light. A committee came up with this approach. That is the most logical explanation.

Circa…whenever. 400BC, or 1600 AD or yeah, whenever.

"Well, Gentlemen and Ladies, here we are, and there are ahem the yes, you know the recently departed from the mortal coil because of the harrumph actions of um us. lets...umm...ummm…Suggestions any body?"

“I know I know boss! Let’s shrink them. We’ll save on space and it’s good for the environment.

"Why, that’s a capital Idea Rupert, with a capital I, give yourself a raise."

(Rupert the headshrinker. Mentioned in the Doomsday Book and in Ye Olde Reader’s Digeste. True fact.)

“And boss, let’s not shrink the whole thing. Let’s just shrink the head. Why? Because it makes no fucking sense and you know that we’ll never run out of conversation topics at parties."

(And that’s true, mention that you are a headshrinker at any party and immediately find yourself the center of attention. In much the same way that Kaa was at the bi-annual Bandar Log conference.

Unless of course, it is a party comprised solely of headshrinkers, because, they’d all go, “Whatever, yeah, and for your next act you will be exhaling and then inhaling? Puh-lease” (Headshrinkers in groups larger than five or six are a surly bunch.) Kaa at the biannual meeting of Snakes Created by Kipling lacks any kind of dramatic impact. He’s just a face in the crowd.)

“Rupert double that raise. And you’re promoted. That is a fantastic idea. We have a course of action. Go forth my brethren, shrink away. Rupert, lead them.”

So, apparently I snarl when I’m lifting weights in the gym. Some people grunt. Loudly. They’re called the grunters. Some people count out their repetitions really, really loudly. If they’re on their fifth rep, they want every fucking person in the gym to know that and share in their joy. One lady literally sounds like she’s having an orgasm. No literally. I’m not exaggerating in the least bit. Honest. Believe me! The whole moaning bit get old when you’re trying not to drop that dumbbell on your head.

I snarl. I did not realize this until someone pointed this out. That didn’t stop me from snarling, but now I have the good grace to look slightly embarrassed when I do snarl. I originally conveyed the impression of a werewolf on a full moon night with the scent of fresh blood in the air snarling merrily as he hunts his prey. The embarrassed look changes it all. I now convey the impression of a werewolf who’s given up the hunt for nobler pursuits and organic meat from the local grocers, but whose ears still occasionally perk up when it is a full moon and the scent of hemoglobin permeates the ether, and who then realizes that this reaction is wrong and hopes that no one else has seen his ears twitching.

So, yeah, fucking headshrinkers. Weird shit.

The Joy of Music

Someone stop the world. I want to get off. I think this is my stop. It says so on my ticket. Look, "Dude this is your stop. Get off." You can't get any more explicit than that. Well I suppose you could get a lot more explicit if you played suggestive, mood music in the background, but I will not even go there. Spoils the whole illusion of deep, brooding thought. Nothing ruins the semblance of seriousness more than suggestive music. A speech about world hunger, global warming and incipient Armageddon. Your audience riveted by the impending doom, and then softly in the background, “Pyaunchikipyaunyaun pyaunchikipyaun yaun.” There ends your noble endeavour to rescue the masses from their fate…Coz’ y’know, suggestive music screws things up. In more ways than one.

That, sadly enough, is my Google Talk status message. I claimed that it was a stream of consciousness rant. And maybe it was. But doesn’t everybody do it? Play um questionable music in their heads when they’re stuck doing something boring.

And it works every single time.

Cleaning the Kitchen…Oddly suggestive music

Debugging code…Oddly suggestive music

Making yourself a nice cup of tea…Oddly suggestive music

Reading a book…Oddly suggestive music

Renewing your license…Oddly suggestive music

Shopping for groceries…Oddly suggestive music

Which only goes to show that everything is better with porn. It’s like cheesecake. You cannot go wrong with porn. Porn is like Superman, but without the underwear worn on the outside. Actually, without underwear period. Porn is like the first rain, that causes life to burst forth from the ground…except I think they use condoms. Unless it’s all women. In which case it’s all good.

So, yeah. I had absolutely nothing to say.

Driving home late one night, I realized that I hadn’t checked the back seat for stowaway axe murderers. That clearly meant that there was a stowaway axe murderer in the back seat and he/she would continue to be there until I glanced back and reassured myself that he/she had left. So I glanced back.

And nearly ran off the road.

Gigantic, Huge...

Update.

No. Really. Believe me. This is a huge post. I've just used a really small font.

...Rim shot?

Apparently not.

The worst thing in the world is being sarcastic and not having people get your sarcasm. “We have turned off the sarcasm meters. Your sarcasm no longer registers. Now roll over and die because your barbs cannot make it past our armor.”

Bleh.

Back to your regularly scheduled blankness.

Ten, nine, eight, seven...

Hotel rooms can be cold and impersonal...but, but I get someone to clean up after me, make my bed and breakfast isn't cold cereal. Cold and impersonal. Call me R. Daneel Olivaw (I did not have to Google that reference).

So Windows has this little shield thingy in the status bar telling me that I need to install stuff. (And I do not, the Doom will descend upon me and fire shall rain from the heavens, and there will be a hail of frogs and a flurry of toads and scattered showers of other assorted amphibians.)

I love how Express Install has this whole spiel accompanying it and Custom Install has absolutely nothing other than an ominous paranthasis-ized Advanced. An Advanced that manages to convey all the menace that would emanate from a large heavily armed and more than slightly deranged religious fanatic (Deranged and religious fanatic, redundant, I know.). That Advanced is saying, “Click me and you’re fucked. Really. Fucked. In an unpleasant manner. Not in a manner involving supermodels and butter. Click the Express Install and you will not have to see you villages burning and hear the lamentations of your women.”

Not feeling up to the task of braving the Express Option. I chose custom and went back to coding. The Update Manager thing works quietly in the background (Insert mental image of a quiet psychopath who has a well founded dislike of the spotlight and prefers the shadows.). In a half hour it is done and up pops this dialog…

That isn’t a notification as much as it is a threat. “Fucking click now or I will fucking restart on your ass in five fucking minutes.” Later, I click. Begone vile dialog. Leave me be. I am busy coding. I do not want a restart interrupting the flow of my thoughts. Later. Go away. Come back in an hour or two.

Ten minutes later.

Mother fucker. Go the fuck away.

Ten minutes later.

Aaaargh. Bastard fucking spawn of the Devil!

“Restart. Or will in five minutes. I need to restart. The ritual need to be completed. I so not think you are capable of sentient, intelligent thought or action. When you click later, you clearly fucking mean that you will change your mind in ten minutes. I need to show you the countdown. Five minutes motherfucker and then I take the decision away from you. You will bend to m y will. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”

Later. Later. Later. Late…

(Three minutes have passed. Tab and Enter. Bad idea.)

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.