What a BuzzKill

Can one truly believe the world as it has been presented to them by their parents or the media? What about your own two eyes? How difficult is it to earnestly look at things on your own and come to your own conclusions? Why is the world so caught up with celebrity and scandal? Isn’t their own existence enough? If it isn’t, why don’t they do something about it?

Get up. Get out. Seek the truth yourself. Don’t bother spouting off at the mouth about what you’ve read and heard second-hand. Everybody lies. Find the answer for yourself.

This entry cares not for titles and accolades.; Put up, or shut up.

I just felt the need to rant about how Rece’s mom seems to have no concept of time or of how important it is for her son to have a decent night’s sleep on a school night.

Sherise asked if she could take Rece on Saturday night and have him over for the day on Sunday so they could do something fun (since the last time he was over, all they did was run errands and such). This is all well and good, as I really want Rece to have a good relationship with his mom. So we sat around on Saturday night waiting for his mom to pick him up. At around 9:30 pm she calls and says that she “totally forgot” about it and wondered if it’d be okay if she could just pick him up the following morning. We arranged for her to come pick him up around 8:00 am on Sunday morning.

I have no idea if she actually picked him up on time, as I was still asleep. I was just happy to discover that she had actually picked him up and that he’d be spending some time with his mom.

On a side note: I’ve had this on-going joke since I first got to know Sherise that there is “real time” and then there’s “Sherise time” — which is neither linear or consistent, nor does it have anything to do with how the rest of the world uses time. If she says she’s on her way and will be there in 10 minutes, she’ll show up 30-45 minutes later. If she says she’ll pick up/drop off Rece at a specific time, she’ll show up between 1 and 2 hours late. There’s always a reason, there’s always an excuse to why this happens. After knowing her for over 15 years, this is something I’ve just come to accept, as it obviously won’t ever change.

So on Sunday evening at around 10:30 pm my patience wore thin and I tried calling Sherise to see when she’s planning to bring our son back home. She said that she didn’t realize it was so late (apparently both her cell phone and computer had still not updated for DST) and that she’d have him home within about 30 minutes. At 11:30 pm he had still not arrived home so I sent her a text message that read as follows (punctuation isn’t perfect when texting):

It isnt cool to keep Rece out until past 1130 on a school night. Hes going to have a rough day at school tomorrow.

She called back and at first was apologetic, but I wasn’t going to let it slide. I just talked over her excuses and said that she needed to bring him home immediately. She hung up on me at that point.

Rece finally showed up at 12:12 am, looking exhausted. In fact he gave me a hug and said, “I’m so tired”. I got a brief summary of what happened during the day, which I found to be rather disappointing for him — but that’s another story — and I sent him off to bed.

Rece effectively had around 5-1/2 hours of sleep before having to wake up again. For a 12-year old, that’s just not enough, especially for the start of a school week. He was obviously not doing so well: forgetting a lot of the basics (like brushing his teeth, making his lunch, flushing the toilet, etc) and even took off for school without his backpack (which he’s never done before). Hopefully the poor kid manages to get through the day without too much trouble and that he’s able to get to bed early tonight.

This entry wishes Rece’s mom was a more responsible parent.

One of the things I find annoying when I actually force myself to go out shopping is for the place I’m purchasing goods from to insult me by insinuating that I’m a thief. No, they don’t ever come out and blatantly say it, but by asking to see my receipt and look in my bags that’s how I’m being treated. I bought these items and they are now my property. I am not keen on having to wait in line to get out of a store after already having had waited in line to buy something just because the business assumes that all of their customers are thieves and wishes to insult them by treating them as such.

This type of behavior is a violation of my privacy. I’d no more show these people the contents of my wallet as much as most women would allow a stranger to search through their purses. Yet time and again, businesses try to do so. If I signed a contract to do business with the company, then I don’t have a problem with it … Costco comes to mind.

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, I’m hoping that others do the same as I do: simply say, “No thank you” and continue walking past these receipt/bag checkers on their way out. They have no business snooping through your belongings, so why should you let them?

The reason I bring this up is that I read an article today that does a good job of articulating my point of view on the subject. Heck, and in the process I came across two other people that blogged about this very subject.

This entry doesn’t appreciate being treated as a
criminal simply for being a customer!

Well after my previous venting about the forced switch to Time-Warner Road Runner service, I’ve made at least a little progress with things. I sent an email to their tech support, explaining to them my problems with email (via Outlook) and webmail. This was done from the office during my lunch break. Later that same day, I get home and magically Outlook is working again. Oh wonders of wonder! No response, no confirmation of receiving my email – but hey, at least one part now works!

The situation with their webmail logon and interface seems to have improved, but it still does the oddball thing about not accepting my username after the timeout period has passed – and only letting me in if I use my email address as my username… well, not all the time, but some of the time – and never when I think it’s going to do it. Frustrating!

All right, that’s enough venting for now.

This entry wishes he had gotten a pony for Easter.

From the DUH! department:

I find it ludicrous that NASA, the central hub for probably 95% of the smartest people in the world, didn’t think to create a clock for the space shuttle that would understand the rollover of a year. We’re almost 7 years beyond the Y2K scare; you’d think this would have been addressed back then – at the latest. How long has the shuttle been around, again? Uh, yeah, thought so…

This entry just felt a little smarter.

If this guy is right, then there’s some hullabaloo going on in the ranks of folks supporting the global warming theory. This is some strong evidence that the math just doesn’t add up – and my friends know all about how I’m always doing the math!

Anywho, I found the article very interesting and hopefully it’s accurate.

UPDATE EDIT: I have since realized that my thinking on this topic was seriously flawed. Climate Change is definitely a real thing and it is for sure being made worse by human activities. I’m keeping the original posts up, as I think it’s important for people to see that opinions can change after new information is learned.

This entry still doesn’t think that the sky is falling. Ouch!

Well, it’s been about 2 weeks since the change from Comcast to Road Runner (Time Warner) took place. The connection seems to be the same – no outages so far, even with the change to my IP address (which I had held on to for over 2 years) I didn’t notice any hiccups. The main problem I’m having is with email and webmail.

Outlook is my email client of choice, as it incorporates more than just email (calendar, contacts, etc). This is a pretty standard piece of software used all over the world for email communications. The information provided for POP3 & SMTP (standard formats to receive and send email) by Road Runner don’t seem to be what I need and/or they aren’t accepting my username/email address properly. So when I attempt to check email, I get the username and password screen. What especially odd is when I use the same log-on information to get into webmail (their web-based email system) it works… well, sorta.

So I manage, if I’m lucky the first time, to get myself logged on to webmail. I tend to leave it up and check on it from time to time for new mail. Every so often I’ll go beyond the automatic log-out time period (which is normal) and it’ll require me to log back on. This is where it gets confusing. The username I provided to get in the first time (successfully) won’t work 75% of the time after the time-out period has been passed. What I have to use instead is my email address with the same password. To add to it, about 50% of those times it’ll send me to an error page that says something to the effect it wasn’t able to load the page properly. If I then click my shortcut to webmail – I’ll get to the webmail interface just fine. See why I’m frustrated?

There’s a handy link in the top-right part of webmail to “Live Support OnLine” which does absolutely nothing unless I have the Road Runner tools installed. See these tools were something I was tricked into installing when the change happened, when I thought all I was doing was migrating from one email system to another. It did the annoying “Internet Explorer – brought to you by Road Runner” crap in the title bar and changed the throbber (the icon that shows that IE is working on loading your page up on the top-right of the browser) to the face of the Road Runner character. Lovely. All I wanted to do was to make sure I was able to use the new email address I’m being forced to change (for the 4th time, mind you – MediaOne to AT&T Broadband to Comcast… and now to Road Runner). After the crap installed without my realizing it, I uninstalled it. This means that I’m limited in my support options. As if I would allow any outside company to take over MY computer!?

Okay, okay… I’m rambling a bit, I know. Call it a venting of frustration with yet another buy-out of my cable Internet service. My alternative is to start using Gmail on a regular basis, but I don’t like their email thread system of email management. Looks like I’ll need to call their support center – I hate having to do that! What to do…

This entry just wants to keep his email address, his personal web sites, and his ISP the same!

[Warning: Extremely long post…]

Being single is a strange thing. We want to meet people, but we want to meet for a multitude of different reasons – a good portion of the time not for the same reasons. So what are people supposed to do?

Dating takes time and money. The end result (hell, even the starting result) may not always be what you were looking for, yet you’re now out all this time and money. The process can often repeat itself over and over, with a wild variety of outcomes. This can become frustrating and discouraging for many people. This is especially true for introverts like me. But we still have to try, right?

We’ve all heard of these dating or matchmaking sites like eHarmony and Match.com that are supposed to help us weed out the ones that are less likely to be in sync with our wants and needs. In theory, this makes sense, but then you run into problems with people not being very honest with how they’ve portrayed themselves online. Misleading photos and bios that people post to make them look better or simply different than they really are – even if just slightly – might not be found out until later, after much time (and possibly money) has been spent getting to know one another online.

Yeah, yeah, I can hear some of you now… “but looks aren’t everything” or “what does it matter, if you feel something for them in the end?”. That’s not my point. What I’m getting at is how can a future relationship expect to flourish after the intial contact and basis for those feelings is based on a lie?

I’ll be honest with you: looks matter to me, to some extent. They’re not all that I’m looking at, but if I’m not attracted to a woman in some physical way, chances are that I’m going to pursue it much further. To some looks really aren’t that important, and that’s what works for them. Lying to me about your looks or showing me only your assets is just going to reveal itself when I actually see you – and I’ll be none to happy about it. Just put your best foot forward and be yourself!

The next two things that I find important are intelligence and logic. Contrary to what some may think, they do not always co-exist within the same person. Looks may get you attention, but you gotta have something behind that pretty face to hold mine for very long. I want to be able to discuss theories or unknowns with a gal… somebody that can challenge my mind, to stretch it further or in a different direction – and hopefully that I can do the same for them.

Humor is something that is highly subjective and differs dramatically between individuals. A gal that “gets” my sense of humor and can laugh with/at me and that I can laugh with/at (i.e., doesn’t take themselves too seriously) will likely become a friend, if nothing more is in the cards for us. Life is too short to not enjoy it!

Musical ability or interests are something that I definitely pay attention to. Music is such an influential thing. While my music interests seem to cover a very wide selection of genres and generations, there is some music that I just cannot get into. In fact, most rap/hip-hop & country make my brain hurt. There just isn’t any other way I can think to put it. A gal that can sing and/or play an instrument is a turn-on, for sure.

Dependability is a rather broad term that I could probably use to apply to many traits as a whole. People that are often late, don’t come through with a commitment (this applies to so many things), blow people off when something more interesting than what was originally planned comes along, don’t offer to help others, gossip and back-stab, like to create drama, blah … blah … blah … generally people that consider themselves the center of the universe and don’t hold true to much that they say or do. These people drive me batty – and they seem to be ever-so plentiful in Southern California these days. I don’t put up with friends being like this, which means I’m definitely not going to tolerate it in a relationship.

The accumulation of things and status don’t mean squat to me. If it doesn’t serve a useful function, if it means having to act a specific way that’s contrary to my personality in order to maintain – then it isn’t for me. With rare exception, I don’t tend to give frilly gifts. I don’t collect “stuff”. There are no “Jones’ to keep up with” in my mind. If you expect flowers and jewelry all the time, you’re barking up the wrong tree with me.

Know-it-alls and those who rest on their laurels don’t have much of a place in my life. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t go to college or if you hold multiple degrees and I could care less what your title is – demonstrate to me that you know what you’re talking about or doing and you’ll gain my respect.

Sex. Yep, I have to throw this in here. If I find a gal attractive, and I’m interested in her, I’ll get to know her. Women that invest a lot of emotional commitment into sex probably won’t be a good match for me. To me sex is a fun thing, a physical way to enjoy somebody in a more personal way. I dislike it when people put an arbitrary timeframe on when it will or won’t happen. When the mood strikes and the timing is right, why not? It doesn’t mean that I’m in love – or ever will be – just because I had sex with a woman. I’m still very good friends with some of the women I’ve been with in the past. While it was all fun and such, we just made better friends and I’m totally happy that we were able to go back to just being friends. The right kinda gal for me won’t put sex on a pedestal and make it out to be this overly important issue. It is what it is so either do it and enjoy it or not at all (and we’ll just be friends).

So there you have it, my likes and dislikes in relationships. Most of this applies to friendships, as well. I’m sure that I’ve missed something, but for the most part it’s there. Be sure to check out part 2 of this, where I bare all about myself.

Full Disclosure – Part 2

This entry got off to a running start.