Cigarette Breaks

You've all seen it: those several people who come into work smoking like a car on fire, complete with clothes that smell like cigarette smoke and breath smelling like ass like an hour after arriving to work, are in desperate need of a "smoke break". Are you fucking kidding me?! Seriously! You just sat your ass down and already you need a break??? From what? For what?

While these people take their break, their work stays undone, while they stand outside, sometimes in the freezing cold attempting to make smoke rings and hack up greenish colored loogies! While they say they're going to quit, us folks who decided not to be addicted to the cancer sticks, because we like breathing normally, and smelling good get penalized for being healthy! How fair is that?

Exhibit A:



This is what you might catch me doing during a "smoke break"

Sometimes, smokers have the nerve to complain that they've been addicted to cigs since they were teenagers, all while standing out side going through a cigarette each break (usually once every hour)! Smokers get rewarded for slowly killing themselves with cancer sticks; they get all these breaks while I have to be constantly working, so you know what I do? I carry my happy ass outside and break with them! I dare somebody to say something!

Friends' Lists

It seems like every time I go to a social networking site, whether it be Myspace, Facebook, Tagged, or Blackplanet, sooner or later, I encounter the same thing: people who decide to add me as a friend, and then proceed to ask that I accept their request. That’s not so bad, but what grinds my gears about it is that once you accept their request(s) and try to carry on conversation with them (you know, like a real friend should?), these people become strangely silent and unresponsive, annoying you royally and forcing you to begin purging your friends’ list(s) after only a few days’ time. What was the point of that?!

Exhibit A:



I encounter this on any given day upon signing in to Yahoo Messenger

Many times, their excuse is that they’re busy and caught up in something so they can’t talk that much at that time. Then why did you sign in to a website that is designed for talking to folks? Why do you sign in to messengers at all if you have no time to talk? I thought the point of these sites was to communicate with people you have deemed your friends? Is this what friendship has become?

Exhibit B:

I use this button a lot...it's not my fault, I swear! Unless trying to believe in folks is wrong, that is...

The definition of friend has to do with having shared mutual interests and having actual conversations from time to time. When I decide to add people to my lists, I expect for them to treat me as much of a friend as they would/should their friends in real life, not hit me up just to be indifferent about me. Shouldn’t people who hit other people up on these sites treat at least be friendly when you say hello? If you’re online just to be an online social hermit crab, it goes without saying that you’re some kind of nut that shouldn’t be allowed near the internet in any case!

My point is: if you don't want to talk to me, don't bother hitting me up; save space for somebody who wants to be there. We’re about to enter the year of 2009, and I don’t want or need people on my friend’s lists that aren’t about anything; having them excuse themselves from the lists and my life allows me to have room for folks who aren’t a complete waste of skin.I get so damn tired of firing people from my friends/instant messenger lists on an almost weekly basis. So I would say that this is actually a blessing in disguise.

To my future friends I'd like for you to: say thank all those losers who paved the way for you to come in; had it not been for them, they'd be no room for you! Although, I'm starting to sound like a retail store (or some NFL teams) having such a high turnover rate...

Windows Vista

Most everybody uses Windows, partially because Macs are too expensive to use for anything other than graphics, web, video editing, and the music industry. Because most of the software we use would have to be made specially for use on a Mac, and most people just don't have a million dollars for that, Windows is the choice. It's interesting to know that most people have the same complaints about it. But when Microsoft came out with the successor to Windows XP in January 2007, most of us were like "oh hell, no!", even before we first used it! The Operating System is pretty, no question of that, however complaints were/are many; among them being:

• General unease-of-use
• The lack of drivers and general support for programs and hardware that worked with XP
• The OS's outrageous minimum system requirements (1GB of RAM, 40GB of hard drive space just to install it?! WTF?!!)
• Buried menus and shortcuts that people were used to in XP
• DRM
  
• The so-called upgraded system security that were supposed to make Vista safer to use

Exhibit A:



What you're very likely to see every time you choose a command, tap a key on the keyboard, etc...

I will cover a couple of the issues here; hit me up later for others...

About the system requirements issue: In mid-to-late 2006, Microsoft started putting stickers on PCs, stating that the unit was ready to run Vista right out of the box. What they didn't say was that it could only run Vista Basic (the one without all the cool, see-through windows; Home Premium and Ultimate are see-though but require a much better and much more expensive graphics card to do so, not to mention more RAM memory and more hard drive space) with the minimum requirements, resulting in you giving up more of your hard-earned money to them! So like all other companies, Microsoft lied! Are you as shocked as I am???

Exhibit B:



If you bought a PC with this sticker on it, thinking you were good right out of the box for Vista, you got snookered, big time!

As it concerns the DRM: DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. What this means is that while you can use Vista to record all kinds of media, Microsoft, as well as Apple and many other companies, basically retain all the rights to tell you how you can share what you record with others, because they work hand in hand with many movie studios and TV production houses. It's also for this reason that when recording programs list their system requirements, they tell you exactly what kinds of graphics and sound cards you have to have to use the software! Pretty smart...and just a little diabolically clever!

These are among the reasons that when people got a new computer, they downgraded back to XP. Hey, why mess with something when your stuff was working to begin with, right? To be fair, Vista has fared better that Apple's Mac OS X Leopard, with Leopard having at least 255 virus attacks since its debut compared to Vista's total of 5(!), though this was probably due to all those "are you sure you wanna do this?" dialog boxes you get when you try to do something... And just try to get a LAN party going with those who play Quake III, Call of Duty 2, World of Warcraft III, Counter-Strike, or Unreal Tournament using a Mac!

As for Internet Explorer, it's only the single worst piece of crap browser ever, and needs to die! Seriously! Back in the day, it was the shit; only losers used Netscape for browsing back then. But nowadays man, it just has too many vulnerabilities and errors to ever again realistically be considered for browsing the web. I mean, every time I tried to use it, it would lock up and would have to close, so I decided (a bout 2 years ago) to "sell out" and get a good browser, called Mozilla Firefox, and I never looked back. I suggest you all do the same, ASAP!

Exhibit C:



You'll see this every time you attempt to look at anything on the web using Internet Explorer

Recently, Microsoft has been saturating my TV with commercials about something called "Windows Mojave", which ended up just being an experiment which featured various participants. They were asked about their overall perception of Vista, having never used it before, and were then shown a 10-minute demo of Microsoft's next Windows OS, codenamed "Mojave". When this experiment was over, it was revealed that Mojave was actually just Vista, with the goal of the experiment being to get consumers to "decide for themselves" rather than just outright accepting the generally negative views of Windows Vista. Basically, they lied to a bunch of people to show them that Vista ain't "that bad". How low can you get?

With Windows 7 on the horizon, I don't hold out much hope for it to not be a piece of crap; Microsoft seems hell-bent on not giving customers what we long for. I guess since they own stock in Apple, we won't be getting what we want anytime soon...

Republican Supporters

Ok, now that the election is over, I feel it's about the right time for me to tell what was grinding (and still grinds) my gears about politics: Republican Supporters.

See, Republican supporters irritate me in a way no clusters of hemorrhoids ever could. The reason for this is because they don't bother to realize that Republicans:

• Cater to big oil and the rich only; 99% of the money in this country belongs to 1% of it's population. They feel that the rich should be tax-exempt, and that the middle and lower classes should have to foot the bill for whatever war they get the country into. Also, the kids of these people never go fight in a war; only poor and underprivileged people do. While they live it up, we as the poor and middle class starve.
• Feel the best way to improve military morale (and stop soldiers' constant bitching) is to praise the them in speeches, while at the same time slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.
• Believe that health care should be privatized so the poor can't afford medication needed to get over colds, injuries, or even to stay alive.
• Thinks that a rape victim living on welfare should be forced to care for a baby she didn't even want in the first place, and that America is the only real country on Earth. Republicans are typically the first ones to protest abortion rights, and the first one willing to take a life through capital punishment.

Exhibit A:



What Republicans do in their spare time

Typically, Republican supporters are Bible thumpers; they act like they've never committed a sin, and are very much afraid of minorities, gays, and especially change. Oops, I said the "C" word! The scary thing is that some of the dumbasses who choose the Republican way of thinking are of the middle class, like me and most likely you, and believe whatever a Republican politician tells them about Democratic and/or Independent candidates, even when evidence appears and disproves what they say. This is especially true in Jesusland, where they don't read, have 3 or less teeth and hate niggers (both regular and sand), Jews, and gays with a passion!

Exhibit B:



Republican religious leader, Pat Robertson, Bible thumper extraordinaire

Finally, there are people who will do anything that is the exact opposite of what they would do, if it didn't benefit blacks, Jews, Arabs and pretty anybody that they're against on the basis that these types of people scare them. They're called Republicans (or racists) and though they tend to be your resident KKK klansmen, they can also look like this

Exhibit C:



Don't be fooled; he's probably at least prejudiced against not only "dangerous" minorities, but poor people as well

As you can tell, being a minority in this country, I don't have a favorable view of Republicans. They haven't done anything for me since Abe Lincoln freed the slaves a hot minute ago. This one time, a girl I worked with told me I should vote Republican because of the tax cuts I would get if I became rich, because I was trying to become a songwriter at the time. Well, I'm still not rich and 4 years later, this country has become a crap hole. How did voting for Dubya work out for her, I wonder? Did she use that tax cut she got for the betterment of mankind or for herself?