So, while I was out to lunch today I drove past this dog boutique (yes, dogs are special too) and I noticed that they had covered up a bigger than usual fake dog out front with a brown sheet, put garland around its neck and attached antlers to his head.  It was pretty cute, festive to say the least.  That's when I had a GREAT idea.  I know, odd place to get it, they usually come in the shower.

Ok, bare with me here.  So I see the mocked up reindeer/dog and think right away of deer.  Then I think of people hunting deer (I affectionately call these people redneck-dumbasses).  Then I think of the poor deer just foraging for food out in the woods one day when BAM (add a few more BAM's for the drunk redneck-dumbass with bad aim) the deer's life is over.  Out of nowhere.  Just like that.  I mean, what the fuck. 

And the thing that gets me, EVERYTIME, is the reasoning for hunting deer (or any other animal); "population control", "they'd starve to death without us thining the heard".  *cough-bullshit-cough*

Minus the trophy hunters of course, which is a whole other rant that I can't even begin to tap here.

So, my IDEA.  Thought I didn't have one eh?  We continue to allow drunk redneck-dumbasses, or hunters if you want to be all PC about it, to control deer populations with high-powered rifles and six-packs of Miller High Life.  But, in turn, we allow Fish & Wild Life officers and Park Rangers the right to randomly shoot hunters!  It's perfect when you think about it.  Hunters are doing it for the meat (well, we'll assume most do any way) so that must mean that they're starving.  And if they're starving, one could deduce that their population is getting out of control.  So, logic dictates that we need to thin their heard.  Irony dictates that process.

So, who's with me?

Thank you!  Thank you to the person who completely circumvented a built in .NET function for creating new Guids.  This was so bad and frickin unbelievable that I actually stopped my work to post this because of my complete disbelief. 

First off, here is the CORRECT way to create a new Guid:


That's it!  Easy, right?  Uses built in functionality.

But here is the ingenious way I found this morning that completely wowed me:

Yes, you are seeing this correctly!  The programmer who wrote this thought that going thru the business & data layer to call a stored procedure would be the best way to create a new Guid.  I'm in complete shock. 

My apologies to my handful of readers, it seems that an IP switch on my part yesterday took down xerratus.com.  Because of the nature of the switch and the fact that I did it locally fooled me into believing that everything worked out just fine.  The truth was I managed to isolate my server to within my network thus making it seem like everything was working fine, until I got to work and noticed that outage.

My dumbass stamp has bee properly affixed to my forehead.

That is all.

Damn!

For some reason, I woke up thinking today was Wednesday but I just realized it's not; it’s only Tuesday!  For 2 hours I've been thinking that it’s the middle of the week and that the weekend is just around the corner.  

I need to go back to sleep.

Funny... I could've sworn that the end of the world was supposed to happen 6 years ago (5 actually for those extremists out there).  Where are all of the people who said the world would end in 2000?  Are they living in caves or have they finally come to the realization that perhaps they were wrong.  Wonder if their rations will run out soon prompting them to leave their bomb shelters?

Dumbasses!

For the record, lets get one thing straight.  Saying the world will end when humans become extinct is a fallacy and a bit arrogant in my opinion.  The world was here billions of years before humans and it will be here billions of years after we're gone.  

We revolve around the earth; the earth does not revolve around us!

Why do I have to get stuck behind the guy who HAS to drive the speed limit, fully stops at every stop sign, and brakes when the light turns yellow?  The average drive to work, 30 minutes for me, turned into a 45 minute trip because this guy was apparently going the same route I was taking.  I know its raining out but it isn't that bad and the roads are not slick, you can drive at a normal pace people.

My lovely wife is a daddy's girl, she knows it, I know it, her father knows it, and I believe complete strangers know it.  More to the point, she talks to her father, who lives in Pittsburgh, PA, on an almost daily basis; the night before Halloween was no exception.  As she was talking to her father that night, he relayed a secret to her that he had been keeping for a couple weeks.  Does he have a girlfriend, my mind wondered?  No, he's going to Las Vegas in a week with his sister, my Aunt-in-law.  Congrats Ed, I thought, pull a slot handle for me.  My wife, on the other hand, had plans of her own.  Oh yes, since he's going to be near us (as if 1500 miles is near, nearer than Pittsburgh I guess) we HAVE to go, even if it's just for a day.  After some talking and a day to think about it, I agreed to it.  Now all we needed to do was book a flight and get a room.  

Using Expedia, my wife found a flight leaving at 9:30pm PST 11/9 and returning 11:30pm PST for around $474 and change.  Great!  Along with the room at Circus Circus (not my first choice but that's where the family is staying) it's affordable and doable.  So we go to checkout, give them our credit card info and submit but to our dismay, the confirmation screen said that the price had changed to around $686 and change -WTF!  Well, we figured user error so we did it all over again.  The searches yielded the same price and we checked out again but no go.  Again, it prompted us to accept the new price.  Well, perhaps its a glitch and a customer service representative can help.  As you can imagine the Expedia representative couldn't help us, she stated that the prices in the system were being updated and that the new price was the right price.  I, being a web developer, didn't buy it.  In my personal opinion, I think it was a lame excuse by a not-so-savvy person.  Honestly, I'm sure she didn't even work at Expedia.  As big corporations do sometimes, they farm out customer service calls to an outside agency where they have a list of 10 lame excuses to give people when they call so that they don't have to do any real work.

Back to the point, I immediately say "fuck that, Expedia can blow me!" and pull up Orbitz.  Personally, I like Orbitz and use it more often than not.  Through them, I find the EXACT same flight, there and back, for $471 and change ($3 cheaper, hehe), proceed to checkout and viola, we have our confirmation and e-tickets for the price quoted -the way it's supposed to work!

After an hour at the laptop and a beer-and-a-half later, we got what we were quoted and my wife and I are GOING TO VEGAS BABY!  WOO HOO!  Even if it is just for a day, it's still a needed break for us both and a full day away from our pets.

Thank you Orbitz, you saved the day. 


Fuck you Expedia, you suck!

Kind of like getting kicked in the balls, a woman in southern Oregon is finding out the hard way that a winning lottery ticket, worth about $1 million, in her possession is not legally hers after authorities found out that the ticket was purchased with a stolen credit card.  To compound her troubles, she now faces several theft-related, forgery and methamphetamine charges to boot.

After visiting the Oregon Lottery headquarters in Salem, the woman left with an annual installment worth about $33,500 (the $1 million is to be paid off in yearly installments for 20 years) which the police failed to turn up after serving a search warrant at her home. 

Without a doubt, Christina Goodenow you are today's dumbass!  Congratulations, I hope the Oregon Lottery commission uses the rest of what used to be your winnings for a nobler cause.  Perhaps 20 school districts in that area could use an extra $33,500 dollars this year.

Sitting in my office, 9 stories up, I sit next to a window with a southerly view.  For a few weeks now, I've noticed huge flocks of geese flying over our building.  Now, for the most part, they're going south -makes sense.  But every so often, I notice a flock of geese flying north.  Let me next state that it's late October.  Why are geese flying north?  Is this Darwinism at its worst (survival of the fittest).  Are these geese flying the short vee pattern to school?

I'm sure this is a normal phenomenon that I'm witnessing due to the fact that I've never sat in a position to notice the pattern.  Perhaps these are local geese that are just flying from one lake to another here in Stumptown preparing for their trek to the south.  Unfortunately, I have my doubts about this theory.  I'm thinking that these geese are being led by a male goose who just can't bring himself to ask for directions.  "Excuse me Mr. seagull, could you tell me which way is south?” asked the leader of the flock as a wide eyed seagull stares back wondering what the fuck this other bird is saying.

Who knows why these geese are flying north and for that matter, who really gives a shit?  In the end, enough will make it south to repopulate those who didn't make the trek.  Speaking of which, another flock just flew over our building, heading no doubt to Canada.

I wasn't going to blog today, but I just couldn't pass this one up.  So, I'm surfing the web - it's what I do here at work for about 7 hours out of my 8 hour day - and I come across this article posted on cnn.com.  I read the first paragraph and was shocked; Texans back the president’s nomination for the Supreme Court, Harriet Meirs.  Wow!  That my friends, I did not see coming.  What are the odds that the oil slut we have for a president from Texas would find friends from fellow oil whores in his home state?  I sure as hell didn't.  Thank you CNN for reporting this.  (Please note; last sentence is laced with so much sarcasm that I actually have to note it)

Come on people, wake the fuck up!  It's not news that Texans back president asshats nominee for the Supreme Court, they're Texans - they're obligated to.  Why on earth would they go against the one man who has brought so much revenue into their hollow, gold-digging existence.  It's not news, it's propaganda.  "Ooooh, Texans back the Supreme Court nominee, I guess president [namedeleted] is smart.  I too will back his nomination" said the dumbass.

Fuck that, I think for myself.  I'm a democrat out of necessity.

UPDATE: Not all Texans are dicks, just the oil whores.  The rest of you are cool in my book.

My wife and I were recently exonorated in small claims court from a shady collection agency called Sunwest Financial located in Portland, OR (I'd link to their site or yellow pages entry but I can't find either).  My wife goes into detail on her blog about our ordeal with this company.  If you or someone you know who has a less than perfect credit past and is summoned to small claims court (by Sunwest Financial or not) know that you HAVE RIGHTS and you don't have to take this kind of scare tactic from a collection agency.

We won our case because Sunwest Financial was banking that we wouldn't even show up to our initial hearing, thus giving them the right to start seizing our assets.  We did show up and we fought back.  After rescheduling because the plaintiff had to pick up her kids (likely story) they failed to show up again, causing the judge to dismiss the suit.

My wife and I feel that they didn't have a case and we were prepared to fight and WIN.

You have rights as a debtor.  Don't let some company like Sunwest Financial push you around.

Side note: You know you're dealing with a shady company when their representative shows up in court in jeans and a T-shirt playing scratch-it lottery tickest!  Dumbass!

I've owned the xerratus domain for a couple years now.  Prior to being my blog, it was the site that hosted our family’s pictures.  Google, doing just what they do, scanned my site and listed it's contents sometime back, no big deal.  A few weeks back, I decide to move the family’s pictures to a less public domain and use xerratus as my blog site.  All was going smoothly until I tried to remove the old content.

First, when I did a search for xerratus I got the blog home page -perfect!  Underneath were the family picture directories and I wanted them gone -expected results.  After a perusing Google for a few minutes I found that you can submit pages and/or directories to them for removal as long as they return a 404 error.  I can do this as the current site doesn't use any of the old directory structure.  Roughly a week later I get an automated email from Google stating that they removed my urls.  Sweet!  On top of that I read about the robot.txt file that you can place in the root directory to tell spiders/bots what to scan and what not to scan.  I add this, just as a precaution.

The day I get the email I search Google for xerratus again and voila, it's only grabbing the new blog content.  Google did its job perfectly, so why do you ask is Google today’s Dumbass?  Simple.  Today, I did a search for xerratus (don't ask why) and every piece of my old site is back up again and my blog is nowhere to be found!  WTF!  Do I have to submit the urls again?  Is the robot.txt file just a false security blanket to make people think that Google isn't trying its hand at world dominance?  

Fuckers!  

At least Microsoft's search has it right!

UPDATE: Well, I checked today and all seems to be back to normal.  One directory from my old site is still listed but I'm sure it'll be delisted in a few.

Well, I knew I wasn't immune to being entered as the daily dumbass but I just didn't think that it would come so soon.

This morning I added an entry about the dasBlog calendar control and a styling issue I was running into last night while working on it.  Upon reviewing the post, I noticed that I put in the incorrect css class that corresponded with the HTML example.  So, I went back and retrieved the correct version and found my problem immediately:

.sideContent
{
    text-align: left;
}

You see, my problem was with alignment and I was having a hard time figuring out why I couldn't center align it -Duh!.  To fix, I created a new css class, changed the calling <div class="sideContentCalendarControl">...</div> and viola, it worked.

.sideContentCalendarControl
{
    text-align: center;
}

So I can officially say that today, I'm a dumbass!

Today, I'd like to kick off the Dumbass section.  Hopefully on a daily basis, I'll be posting the daily dumbass to the site.  If possible, a photo of said dumbass will be included.  From famous political figures, to that bitch who cut me off the other day, no one will be excluded.  

While there is no one today that has reached dumbass status so far, let me just say that in cases like this the default dumbass will be President Bush.  Lets face it, he's fucking this country like a sheep with his head caught in the fence.  After his reign, it'll take years for the U.S. to recover from his financial pilaging of our tax dollars.  Remember when President Clinton was in office?  We actually had a budget surplus!  Now we the current deficit is growing so fast it will probably be the largest this country has ever seen once he finally leaves office.  As my friends over at Fark would say, "he's an asshat".

I'm voting for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008!