Rants

Rebel with a cause.

by

Unfortunately I didn’t get to talk to my boss regarding the cashiering situation. However, I do believe I’ve caused a little chaos already. Had one of my bosses and a couple of my fellow co-workers come up to me today basically saying “Well, you’re going to be checking.” and I pretty much said “No, I’m not…” They tried to pressure me into it… “Everyone is going to be cashier trained, you’re making a big mistake!” Yeah I’m friggin scared too. Worst case scenario I’ll be stuck with a same pay job or better. Give me a fucking break. I know a lot of shit around that store. They’ll have to replace me with a complete n00b that won’t have the same experience. He may have the same or better after some time… But that stuff takes awhile to learn. Funny thing is, my Boss said “Well you’d better talk to Mark (main one in charge).” and I told him flat out “I was going to, but noticed he wasn’t in today… But we will talk”

If I wanted to be a cashier I would have signed up to be one from the very start. I do not. If they fail to see something that simplistic then it’s time to move on.

The Overlord is on the warpath.

by

Despite getting up early today I still had a good work day. That was until I looked at the schedule two weeks ahead and saw that they want to train me to do yet another thing. To work a cash register. This is where I draw the line.

For the last couple years we have been getting deliberately understaffed in almost every single department. Instead of keeping or hiring more cashiers they have been grabbing people from all over the store to come down and check for them. Which makes it real fun trying to get ANY work done whatsoever. Now they’re making it mandatory for every single person in the entire store. What’s funny is that a friend of ours that moved to another store in Oregon told us that they don’t follow the same rules. This is all taking place at the local level. Doesn’t seem so mandatory after all, does it?

So now I’ve once again been thrust into something that I don’t want to do, and I only know because I read the schedule. As usual my employers are failures at communicating information like this to me or anyone else. You would think after working there for almost five years I would get a little more respect than that. But then again they have made it clear that the only way I’ll be getting a raise of any kind would be if state minimum wages go up… It’s time to move on. As it is I’ve been looking at the new store opening up, plus jobs are opening up elsewhere in town. I think I can do far better elsewhere.

They have trained me to order and work bread without even consulting me, they have trained me to work bakery without consulting me, they have trained me to work the nutrition center (that one they did give me a heads up about though, and I really didn’t mind), and other odd things. I would rather push fucking carts and clean toilets than use a cash register. I’m sorry… It’s not that I don’t trust myself around money, it’s that I trust no one else. Not to mention that lately it seems like I haven’t been able to get any work done between being called away from what I’m doing constantly and not getting any coverage from other people because they’re either off doing what I’m doing or out filling in for a cashier. It’s pretty bad when one of our guys spends 5 hours of his 9 hour shift cashiering and not doing his job with the rest of us. If I get trained to cashier I already know even less work will get done. You can stretch a rubberband only so far until it snaps, which I’m about to.

And again, they don’t pay me enough to give a damn. Real cashiers get paid more than me, and they want me to get trained so they can call me out there at any given moment for minimum wage? Fuck that noise… If this is the new standard then I’ll put in my two weeks notice and go elsewhere. I’m fine on money right now, I’ve tucked enough away to keep myself safe while job hunting.

I have a good rep and a great track record. I’ll have no problem finding a new job. Plus I’ve stated before that if prompted to cashier train I would give my notice. They told me they thought I was bluffing, it’s time to prove them wrong.

Allergic to mold and stupid.

by

Work felt extremely long today. I think all the old people marinated in perfume and cologne overnight before coming in this morning. All but one woman who is aptly named “cheese butt”. Who happens to smell like rotten cheese. I volunteered to take a product she was looking at (feminine pads/depends) and do a price check for her. She said that would be a good idea because she “isn’t much of a walker”. Well no shit, she’s probably doesn’t care for bathing either. In fact I’d say she probably can’t fit into a tub or a shower stall. Her ass was big enough to be a table.

It didn’t help that my allergies were getting on my nerves today, that and the lack of sleep. Hopefully it won’t be much of an issue tonight. I’m doped up on antihistamine. A shot or two of vodka will numb up my throat too.

Now I have another shot at a 3 day weekend. I think this time I’ll just hang back and focus on recovering from black mold.

“I AM A MAAN *punch*”

by

Did more rendering/animating tonight, then I wrote another script for my next project. One more and I’ll have the entire month of February covered episode-wise.

Aside from that I took breaks to do my traditional round of reading and came across this

The group he’s talking about have been the talk of the internet the last couple of days. Basically a group of  HE-MEN have their own forum who are either fed up with women, swearing off of them completely due to one scorn after another, or insert homosexual joke here. In fact to be quite honest I thought I found the official Log Cabin Republican website. I wish that were a joke too, but what can one think when you see a bunch of dudes talking about how evil women are. Plus talking about liberal agendas and a thread or two about Ron Paul or Romney? But I digress.

Am I mad? Not really no. If anything it was a good laugh. What they’re doing is really no different from women who are anti men completely (the feminists that take it waaaaaay too far). As someone who has had my fair share in dealing with the public and having to shovel shit from both sides of the gender coin. I can tell you that stupidity and cruelty knows no gender.Both sides can be knuckle dragging neanderthals whenever they want to.  But of course it’s easier to live with eyes closed. Should I hate all men because one grabbed me and shook me or slammed a door in my face and laughed? Of course! it makes perfect sense! 😉

Another thing I found funny reading that forum, women are the ones that want to get pregnant? Never the guy? Really? Then why is it that every other month I have some old guy getting mad at me whenever I tell them no I don’t have any children or no I have no interest in getting married. Is that really something for people to concern them self with? I suppose next they’ll use the argument that it’s the woman’s fault that she gets raped because she’s beautiful and makes guys aroused just by being in the same room not doing anything. Same argument, different era.

 

But then they do say they are done with women, right? Hmmmmm are those the guys I want to date or should I just continue doing my own thing? Tough call man, tough call…

My elderly fanclub continues to thrive…

by

In case I haven’t made it obvious by now the store I work for is basically the social club for old people. I’ve been hit on constantly by old pervs for the last 4 years of working there. One of them (an arrogant asshole at that) tried to give me gifts before Christmas through our store manager who accepted them on my behalf without my permission. Most women in the store have had history with this guy, He’s rude, crude and believes women only work there to find dates. (He used to date one of the ladies and when she dumped him he would eyeball her constantly whenever she was there) He’s even tried to give me expensive valentines day gifts before a couple years ago which I politely gave back to him. What kills me is that the store manager knew I did this in the past and STILL accepted these Christmas gifts for me. He’d rather the customer be happy at the expensive of my comfort.

What was in there? I don’t know. I gave it back to the store manager and said “No thanks”. I’m sorry but I’m the kind of person that doesn’t go accepting gifts from strangers. Especially ones who are known to be total lowlife douchebags and suddenly decide to be nice for whatever reason. He confronted me tonight and acted like I got a present even though I know he got it back, people who knew saw him walk out of the building like he got his nuts kicked. So I played dumb too and it pissed him off even more “How was my present? Which one I got a bunch!” In the end I guess he got me some expensive earrings and he said something to the effect of “I know what women like and have good taste. Ask my mom”. Which is funny because at his age I’m surprised his mother would still even be alive. He can’t even afford a car, so I’m going to guess he’s yet another basement dweller that likes to hang around our store for 6 hours a day.

Now knowing that once again he got me expensive jewelery I’m even more happy I gave it back. I would have felt even more uncomfortable accepting it expensive goods from someone I hardly know and really have no interest in getting to know. Another thing I find really strange about this whole thing is that he’s a morning person. I’ve been seeing him show up during evenings now. Rather interesting…

The funny thing is that if these people knew what I was really like they wouldn’t last 5 seconds…

Certain old men can’t die out soon enough.

by

I’m not sure what it is but it seems like elderly men want to know if I’m married or have children. I shit you not. I’ve had 3 or 4 in the last year ask me if I’m either married or demand why I haven’t given birth to any children yet.  What makes this even stranger is that every single time this happens I don’t know them at all but they sure as hell have seen me for quite some time. Tonight I had my 4th encounter.

It started off normally enough. I was in the middle of looking at one of our shelves to see if anything needed to be stocked when he came up to me. He looked normal. Tall, gray hair and mustache. Said that he has moved into town permanently, seems to remember me from a couple other trips he’s paid up this way (seeing me push carts) and seemed happy to see that I’m inside out of the rain and cold. Then he asked me if I was married. When he found out I wasn’t he practically had a heart attack. He seemed flabbergasted that I wasn’t married and how dare I not have any children! I made it clear that I wasn’t exactly looking and that seemed to annoy him even more. Then he said that him and I could get married and tell everyone… Yeahhhh at that point I told him to have a nice day and I got the hell away from him. He followed me though and said from a distance that he was joking. Needless to say my bosses know what to watch out for.

Still this is something that while it’s infrequent, when it does happen it’s annoying. Why do these old farts show interest in my potential marital status or what pops out of my vagina? It’s always old men. Old women or even younger women tend to not give a shit. Young guys either ask me out or don’t care (or if they do they’re discreet) about it one way or another. It’s always single old anal retentive looking men who probably never scored because of strange questions like that.

I don’t go around asking questions like that, they shouldn’t either. End of argument.

Also too, I won Dota2. Will have to give that a try sometime.

Learn something new everyday…

by

Found out tonight I’m one of the people lucky enough to work with a zen conspiracy theorist. While talking about chi and how everything in life has energy and spirit (rocks, trees, people etc) he also told me about a conspiracy called chemtrails. Surprisingly I never heard of this and he told me to look it up.

Taken from wikipedia:

 

The chemtrail conspiracy theory holds that some trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for purposes undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.[1] This theory is not accepted by the scientific community, which states that they are just normal contrails, and that there is no scientific evidence supporting the chemtrail theory.

After reading this and finding youtube videos regarding the subject I collapsed into a state of lulz. Seriously! Out of all the conspiracy theories that I have ever heard this has to be right up there with crazy sprinkler lady. If you don’t know what that is look it up on YouTube. I guarantee you’ll have a laugh.

There are more important things in this world to be afraid of. Chemtrails have to be at the lowest on my list of things to worry about. If you want to talk about something really scary lets talk about the holy 1% and the economy. Or how High Fructose Corn Syrup and other additives are pumped into almost every single edible substance.

Nucking futz man… nucking futz.

Ever feel like you’re watching a rerun of a bad show? (Yes I’ve been reading the MOUL forums again)

by

Chogon:

Yes, the 902 update was a fluke sorta speak. A group had used an exploit in MOUL to send a covert message to people playing the game that told their computer to download a program from an outside server and execute it and run in the background, hidden. In other words, a virus. This exploit/virus was traced back to top level individuals of GoW.
I firmly believe that people should be given the chance to correct their mistakes and make the situation better – which this group did by providing a patch to close the exploit. Which I am very thankful for.
However, this incident only confirmed Cyan Worlds management’s mistrust of GoW.
So, back to the question at hand… Yes. I have received lots of emails from lots of people asking about how to submit patches to Cyan for inclusion into MOUL. I’m sorry, I was waiting until I had an actual answer but things went crazy (unrelated things).

Because OpenUru.org and crew already have a business relationship with Cyan Worlds, the best place and most likely place to get patches into MOUL is through OpenUru.org (which does include code reviews!)

Thanks,
Mark

Shorter Chogon: If you’re not part of OpenUru or can’t work with OpenUru then don’t even bother.

The hacks were later on explained:

Hoikas:

I understand that most of you will not get anything from a wiki article, so I’ll explain why the GoW “top members” would be writing a “virus.” This incident happened around the opening of the fun house. Branan had earlier stated that no one could slip a virus onto another explorer’s computer using MOULa. I was pretty certain that it he was wrong, so I spent a couple of minutes looking through the python and found a glaring remote code exploit vulnerability. So, I wrote a simple script to pop up a message box saying “YOU GOT HAXXED” and sent that to branan. From there, we wrote a program that would run silently in the background and some code to launch it. We needed something that was slightly more real world than “YOU GOT HAXXED” after all (opening a dialog box is fairly trivial).

So we had our proof of concept program, a script to launch it, but no way to automate sending it. I took care of that part. It was designed to send the “attack” when anyone on the buddies list of a certain avatar came online. I put mine and a few other “top level” KI numbers in the buddy list–we did not want to send even an innocent PoC toy to an unsuspecting Uru user (that would make us look even worse, after all). Once we proved the vulnerability was quite easily exploitable, I removed our KI numbers from the buddy list.

At the same time as all this, we were also compiling a list of Cyan avatars’ KI numbers. I mistakenly added those KI numbers to the proof of concept avatar’s buddy list, which was empty–I thought it was another avatar. After that, I closed all everything down and chillaxed. We had our Cyan KI numbers and we weren’t being sent exploits when we login to MOULa. It wasn’t until Chogon contacted us about our proof of concept getting to Cyan that I looked at the buddy list again and saw my colossal blunder.

TL;DR: We were testing the client’s security, found a hole, and by a huge mistake of my own doing sent our proof of concept exploit to Cyan. To make up for it, we patched the hole for Cyan. We absolutely were not attempting to be malicious. Whether Cyan chooses to believe or disbelieve that is up to them.

It was only a matter of time before yet another person from the GOW decided that it was time to stick a fork in the thought of working with Cyan and calling it done: Link

You have no idea how nostalgic this makes me feel. I remember that there was one place in ye olden UU shard daze where you were supposed to post code. If you were from the wrong group or very unpopular you most likely would have been ignored while they copy your code and use it themselves or even try to change one thing about it and say that they did it and have people praise them (this actually happened). If you were from the more popular groups not only would they tell you that you did an excellent job, they would actually help you fix a problem within the code if they saw something wrong! This was basically why we stopped talking to the H’uru Project Shard regarding code and kept any refined or new ideas to ourselves. I only bring this up as some of the old guard are part of the OpenUru project (big surprise).

But of course it is easier to go with one group submitting everything to you since Uru is no longer the bread and butter project. An idea like accepting code fixes from anyone in the community is best left to companies that know what they’re doing.

One of those remember 9/11 threads.

by

I remember that I was on vacation in Spokane during this time. I was sleeping off a fun night at the Spokane fairgrounds. Then my father came in and woke me up telling me that America had been attacked. Being half asleep I didn’t know what to think. I just camped on my aunts couch watching the news unfold. Changing the channel and noticing almost all the TV stations were pointed to the big news networks. I was mostly stunned now that I thought about it. Unlike most people though I didn’t go pointing fingers at what country did it…

It was a very sad day that will always be remembered. People lost their loved ones and most people became more fearful of indifference. It really shocked me one year during another vacation in Spokane when I heard one of my relatives say that we should get rid of all Arabs from the United States to make our country safer… No kidding. Of course they said nothing about certain individuals who like to blow up abortion clinics because people like that aren’t terrorists at all right?

Failures to communicate

by

It seems tomorrow I will be working someone else’s job for the first time and they didn’t even have the common decency to tell me (yet again).  On the bright side it’s a full day, but I wish they could take the time to fucking tell me that they need me, or hell… even ask me if I’m available! If I didn’t look at the schedule before leaving today I wouldn’t have known about the change and I would have gotten in trouble due to their lack of communication skills…

You know, I’m able to be put on my mothers insurance this year without any extra cost to her. I think it might be time to go find another job because I’m finding this shit harder and harder to tolerate. Now the problem is actually finding something else to do in town. If an office job opens up I’d love to jump in on that.