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• Why remake the Pink Panther movies, Steve Martin may be funny but there is only one Inspector Clouseau
• The people on Judge Joe Brown – yesterday a woman was writing cheques she couldn’t cash but blamed the person she gave them to for depositing them before she had the funds. And another woman trashed a car she thought was her ex-boyfriend’s but actually belonged to a total stranger. She thought she was innocent as she hadn’t meant to damage someone else’s car. Who are these people???!!
• People who buy low budget fares on airlines and expect the airline to treat them like executive passengers when things go wrong. You paid $50 for a roundtrip and now want a hotel and free flight on a different airline? If the flight was that important to you, maybe you should have bought a proper fare on a larger carrier. And don’t get in the face of the gate agent, you cheap bastard!
• American Football and Baseball. Yeah, I know 50 million people can’t be wrong so maybe it’s just TV coverage that sucks, because if I watch any part of these games I really do want to kill myself after just a few minutes.
• Why do people buy the PT Cruiser? Thanks to the Aztec and that awful Chevrolet vehicle the Cruiser isn’t the ugliest car on the road but please don’t pull alongside me and smile like our cars are kin.

I hate looking for a job. I thought the only reason to be mad at DefenseWeb Technologies for laying me off was for breaking their promise that they were not going to lay me off no matter what happened, but now I know that the real reason to be mad is that I have to deal with head hunters.

They are so upbeat, optimistic, but most of them have nothing to offer but empty statements. They want me to visit them and be ‘interviewed’, insist it can’t be done on the phone. But when you get there, its just a re-reading of the resume, most of the time with no clue as to what any of it means. It could have been done over the phone without making me drive for 2 hours each way. They put you forward for positions that I swear don’t really exist as I never hear from them again. Everyone I speak to says the same thing whether it be here or back in England.

On the positive side I think I may be close to a new position. I’m having a face to face on Friday for a job that sounds really interesting. They are looking for a boatload of developers and can’t find any; yeah, basically they’re desperate! Wish me luck.

Several calls and a personal visit to the airport lost and found have turned up nothing, looks like my bag was stolen rather than just left behind. The right words to describe the person responsible are not appropriate for this website. The cost to replace the contents is scary:

• Replacement UK Passport – $145
• Replacement iPod – $400
• Replacement PDA – $550
• Repalcement headphones – $50
• Replacement stuffed bear from my family’s childhood – $irreplacable

Thats more than the damn flight cost. I bet the thief couldn’t believe their luck when they looked inside. I am such an idiot for letting it out of my sight.

2005 was definitely my family’s annus horribilis and stayed that way right until the final hour. Obviously the lowlight of the year was my mother’s death, but we’ve also endured my sister losing her mother-in-law, having two cars smashed up within a month of each other and a whole other bunch of crap.

So we get home around 9.30 New Year’s Eve and its obvious that someone has been in the house. Fortunately, before I left I installed a couple of motion sensing cameras and so had over 100 photos of clueless teenagers enjoying our hospitality over several days. Turns out that one of my step-daughter’s friends ‘found’ a key to the house and were regularly letting themselves in to use the hot tub and who knows what else. The odd thing is that clearly didn’t care that about being caught – wet towels in our laundry room, doors left locked and unlocked, lights on etc. And these aren’t kids, they are all 18-20, and clearly don’t give a rat’s ass about anything. Well, maybe they will when the law comes knocking on the door. I did have to laugh though, two of them tried to deny it until they were told they had been on camera. Anyway when I find some decent ones I’ll post some pics of the dumbf*cks.

Then around 10.30pm I realised that we didn’t have my carryon bag at home, turns out we must have left it (or had it stolen) at the commuter terminal whilst trying to chase down our missing bags (yeah, the journey was grand too!). Contents: my passport, my video iPod, my iPaq and a stuffed bear of some personal value. So far no one has handed it in but I have my fingers crossed that at the very least someone will return the passport and the bear, even if they decide they like my ‘tunes.

So good riddance to you 2005.

Those of you with way too much time on your hands may remember some posts last year about a credit card of mine being used to rack up $6000 from Neiman Marcus, including getting the billing address changed without my authorisation.

Well, this week I noticed two charges at a 7/11 that I’ve never been too, on the same day, for a total of $300 (thats a lot of slurpees!). And since then there has been a $5 charge for an AT&T collect call. So the card has been cancelled, not liable for the charges etc. End of story I thought.

But… I go online to check the seat assignments for our trip to England next week and find they are CANCELLED!!! Wtf?? I call up and they tell me that someone called them on Dec 12th and told them to cancel the flights. After a long spell on hold they were able to reinstate the booking (but without seat assignments) but who the hell did that? And why?? I don’t really think AA believed that I never called which I understand as the alternative explanation makes no sense, but I sure as hell didn’t cancel them. I’m just glad I spotted it before we showed up at the check in desk. Holy crap, batman.

Here’s my daily evening schedule when at the loveshack – don’t you wish you led my exciting life?

• Get home sometime between 4.30pm and 5pm
• 5pm – 6pm Watch Home Improvement whilst eating turkey sandwich
• 6pm – 7pm Watch Seinfeld
• 7pm Watch The Simpsons
• 7.30pm Watch yet more Seinfeld
• 8pm Play Fifa Soccer 2005 on my XBox
• 9pm Watch CSI/Law & Order/SVU/CI
• 10pm Watch CSI/Law & Order/SVU/CI
• 11pm Watch The Simpsons
• 11.30pm Watch Seinfeld, fall asleep

The price of gas might seem to be going down but it is still a staggering $2.80+ for the el premo variety here in CA. And now Exxon Mobil announces a whopping $9.9 billion profit for the last quarter, up 75%. So the whole country is suffering, people can’t make ends meet because of high gas prices and Exxon is living high on the hog. Forget the price gouging dealer on the street corner, these are the *!%@ers who should be taken to task. Now I know this is just capitalism at its finest but there should be some moral responsibility out there, shouldn’t there?

So I come back from England, head full of great British music I want on my iPod but of course the tunes I want are only on the UK music store and not the US one. Grrr… I should have bought the CDs when I was there but stupidly thought things like the new Sugababes album would be available here.

As the saying goes, life must go on, and for some stupid dumbshits, that means spamming websites. Whilst I was gone this site and my MINI one accumulated 400 comments and over 50 pointless trackbacks. I really fail to see how any of it makes sense, that there is any value (monetary or kudos) to spending the time to do it. So time to put in place more barriers, maybe I will add one of those word icons that you have to copy when you add a comment, and I’m definitely going to close comments for posts that are old.

Well, after some playing around I’ve decided to give WP-Hashcash a try. I like the premise of how it works and I think it should be almost undefeatable. We’ll see…

Ok, looks like the plugin is interacting with this theme to prevent Firefox from displaying the comment page. Works fine in IE, and on my Flying blogpage in both browsers, so must be something funky with the comments page….

So another criminal ex-CEO gets some decent jail time today and once again we read about how they plead for leniency, complain about how unfair they are being treated. I don’t ever see these crooks heartily apologising for ruining thousands of peoples’ lives. The only thing they are sorry about is that they got caught and have to go to jail. Yes, I am sorry that for his wife and family who are no doubt suffering through all this but these a-wipes really don’t care about anything except themselves. No sympathy from me.