Fucking Up a Wet Dream

Homestead is a town south of Miami (yes, there is something south of Miami) that got blasted by Huricane Andrew (the $30 Billion Blow Job). Well, if there are people dumb enough to fuck up a good thing, the good people of Homestead are prime candidates. Let's refer to the street lesson from the previous rant.

Well, Homestead decided, in its less than infinite wisdom, to have their own street layout. The county (Dade) has already numbered all of the roads for everyone, but Homestead had to have their own system. (They are not alone in Dade county, by the way, for doing this). Well, they did keep using numbers, and they kept their directionals (SW, NE, NW, SE). But they fall into the category of people too stupid to count. Here is the example.

You see, there is SW 304 St. (Kings Highway) and SW 312 St. (Campbell Drive). Now, a quick subtraction lesson tells us that there are 8 streets dividing these two roads. (Actually, 7 if you want to be really fucking picky, but let it slide, OK?) Well, Homestead, which uses the same county grid and changed the street numbers for their own evil purposes, has renamed these roads NE (NE? what the fuck?) 15 St. and NE 8 St. Do the math again, and we are missing a road.

Ask a person from Homestead why this is, and they have no fucking idea. I have asked people that moved to Homestead right after getting off the Ark, and they have no idea, either. Where's the fucking road? Andrew did not take it, because it's been that way since I can remember. So where is it? I am going to get Velda Farms to put a picture of it on their milk cartons. It has to be somewhere.....

Road Rage

No, this does not involve getting mad at other drivers, but some more shots at the Civil Engineers of Tampa, and every other fucking city that does not use numbers for their roads.

OK, I am from Miami originally (the one in Florida - the rest of the Miamis in the US are hardly worth mentioning, except the one in Ohio, but it is in Ohio), and I will almost never say a nice thing about Miami, or Dade county (fuck the Miami-Dade County shit, but that is another rant). But I will say that, for the most part, the roads go in a straight line and they are numbered. (Exceptions: Coral Gables, parts of Perrine, and the area formerly known as the Villages of Homestead.) They may be named, too, but they are all numbered.

I can hear the belly-aching now - "Numbers! It's too easy to get lost!" Yes, if you cannot fucking count. It's pretty fucking simple - we use numbers in our addresses, but for some reason we are supposed to know that Elm and Pine do not cross, but Elm and Maple do. Hmmmmm......We know that Elm, Maple, and Pine are significant for a reason - they have numbers assigned to them that are not used. Take Nebraska Avenue here in Tampa. Addresses begin withthe 900s on one side, and less than 900s on the other. That would make Nebraska (can you guess it?) 9th street. No shit. Pretty fucking simple to call it both. But we don't, so no one knows, from out of town, that Nebraska Avenue and 56th Street never meet. It is not possible to know this, without more knowledge.

Now, let's talk about Miami. All Avenues, Courts, and Boulevards go in the same direction (north and south), and all Drives, Streets, and Places go in the same direction (east and west). Therefore, there is a difference between 9th street and 9th avenue. And once you learn that you can use more than one directional on a street (like SW instead of just S or W), getting around is all that much easier.

And yes, Miami uses road names, but they use numbers at the same time. SW 216 St. is also known as Hainlin Mill. SW 232 St. is Silver Palm Drive. SW 147 Ave. is Naranja. But the names are not important. The names are not used in the actual address, just the numbers. And we already discovererd that we use numbers anyway, so why not be consistent?

End of lesson.

Parking Lots

I live in Tampa, land of the "Newly Weds" and "Nearly Deads". What this place needs is a person who can design a decent parking lot. We can't look to the Nearly Dead group - who at 75 wants to build a parking lot, and they just get lost in them with their big ass fucking cars that they cannot see over the dashboard of. So it is up to the Newly Wed category.

Take, for instance, a parking lot near USF (one of about 6.984X10⁷⁸ universities in FL). There is great stuff in the shopping center, assuming you will survive to reach the stores. Question 1: who the fuck puts curves and hills in a parking lot in a flat fucking state? Answer: Civil Engineers in Tampa! Is it too much of a fucking stretch to keep the lines straight in a parking lot? Is there a compelling reason to put buildings and parking spaces at an angle other than 90 degrees? The fuckers here seem to think so.

Question 2: Does it make sense to have two shopping centers right next to each other that are not connected by their adjoining parking lots? Answer: No, but it does in Tampa. They'd rather see the drivers pull into traffic for a 15' stretch just to jam on the brakes to turn into the next lot. And the people in traffic really LOVE that shit.

E-commerce is not all that, but at least there wouldn't be a need for parking lots here any more...

Homeless People

As Chris Rock says, "If a homeless person has a funny sign, he hasn't been homeless long..." (or something to that effect). Well, here's a story for ya...

As I was getting off the freeway one afternoon, there was a homeless person standing at the end of the off-ramp. He had his hands in the standard sign-holding position, but no sign. There he stood, just kind of watching the world go by, and holding (but not holding) his sign. THEN a guy gets out of his car and runs over to him to hand him some money, which was nice. The person, using only one hand so he would not drop the sign he was (not) holding, took the money and put it in his pocket. Then he went back to (not) holding his sign with both hands.

Well, damn near everyone in line for the light had a good laugh. I wonder if we should have...I wonder where the person is now...

Copyright Violations

Well, now it time to talk about this...

It's really quite simple. If you do not want people to copy things, don't fucking give them access to the tools to copy them. Taking pens and paper away is a little excessive, but what did you REALLY think was going to happen with photocopy machines and CDRW drives? The people who did not think these through are the ones bitching. I've got a fucking closet full of books I have photocopied because there was no other way to obtain them. And $20 for a CD? You must be out of your fucking mind.

People like to bitch about Napster, and, frankly, they are right - it is Illegal to do what is happening with Napster and the other person-to-person file sharing programs. HOWEVER, I can buy an album and make as many fucking copies as I please and give them to homeless people on the street if I want to. Stop me. The Internet just makes it easier and faster to give music (and other files) to friends all over the globe. Let's just say I can buy an album and share it with 6 billion of my closest friends, minus the lawyer bitch from the RIAA, Lars, and the group who actually made the album. With or without a program like Napster, it can be done. And it will be...

Halos, Smileys, and other Web Foolishness

Well, let's discuss the proliferation of Smileys on the internet, in chat rooms, and in email. The problem seems to be that people do not recognize the intensions of others when somehting is written. We don't have voice inflection in our speech unless we emphasize what we are saying. Even HTML has offered tags for this, such as <em> and <strong>.

Well, this takes forever to type out, especially if the emotion can be summed up in one little item - a SMILEY! Chat rooms and instant message programs have even added little icon versions of these smileys, and I swear I have seen (and BOUGHT) a book of smileys as a gag gift for a friend who, well, does not often smile...

Recently I have taken to using a smiley with a halo (O:-)) - which is just NOT the right one for me, which is why I use it. Well, now the idssue has been raised - does 0:-) look better than O:-)...

Why the fuck did I just devote these minutes of my life to this subject? Oh, what the fuck...

OK, let's talk about Email viruses.

With all the hoopla recently about how to protect yourself, it's a wonder that people still manage to infect their computers...yet they do. I used to think it was just people who were almost too stupid to remember to breathe that got them, but that is apparently not the case. When an educated and knowledgable person, one well versed in the use of computers, get a virus, what is the conclusion? That the person is a fucking moron? Well, yes, but there has to be more to it than that.

Perhaps people who get viruses are lonely. They are desperate for email, and attachments must mean the sender spent EXTRA TIME preparing their message. And hey, since it was such a special thing the sender did, the least one can do it open the attachment, right?

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph the fucking carpenter...I believe (as Leary says about cigarettes) that you could send these people a virus with a warning that says, in big RED LETTERS that clicking the attachment would release a virus that would cause the PC to animate itself and fuck the user in the ass, these people would do it.

However, it does make for some fun, finger-pointing phone calls when someone you know gets a virus, doesn't it.

Well, no rants as yet...but I am sure they will come to me often...I may just make a page of my own on my Luna site and use it for rants...

Let's try this again, dammit...

Well, if it did not fucking take long enough...Oh well. How much can one bitch about something that is FREE???????