Category: Ironic

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Islam is a religion of Peace and justice?

I was willing to buy Islamic fundamentalists were giving Islam a bad name… Then I noticed that people purporting to be Islamic, are all over the planet doing the most horrific things.  

Even the worst of Christian Fundamentalists aren’t running around burning, kidnapping, killing, and engaging in the slave trade. Most of the time they’re running their mouths and nothing else.

When I see stuff like the snippets below, I have to rethink my position.

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Boko Haram kidnaps schoolgirls to sell into slavery.

What can you say?

Islam says slavery is OK. I find it ironic that 300 – 400 years after the white man was being sold slaves on the Nigerian coast.

We have slaves being sold from a Nigerian Islamic to other Islamic countries as sex slaves.  Honestly, this makes my heard hurt. 

CAIR would say; “Islam is a peaceful religion. This is a group of fundamentalists. They don’t represent the mainstream of Islam.”

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For the record, I’m opposed to the US Military becoming involved in Nigeria.

My reasoning is this; our military would be encumbered by rules of engagement.They’d have journalists, and cinematographers and cameras of all types up their asses.  I’d suggest sending in Blackwater or another Mercenary group instead. 

No reporters, no photographers, no movie crews, and nobody is going to say anything about what’s done to boko haram.  The civilized world will look the other way. So any of those crazy mercs that need to get their freak on… This is the time and place to go let their killer instincts run wild.

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Give them the simple requirement. “Get the children back.” Pay them handsomely and if they happen to run across assets of Boko Haram like gold, or bank accounts, well, nobody needs to know about it do they?

The West would be be doing the peaceful followers of Islam a favor by wiping this aberrant group off the planet.

Then everyone could get to know Islam as the peaceful and gentle religion it is. 

Crucifixions In Syria

There’s the village in Syria where the people still spoke Aramaic.

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A village of christians who were terrorized by an Islamic para military group with the threat of crucifixion if they didn’t convert to Islam. Those who maintained their faith in Christ were in fact crucified.  

CAIR would say; “Silly rabbit, that old Convert or Die belief isn’t something Islam takes seriously anymore. This was obviously a group of deranged fundamentalists.”

Rape Victim to be caned

The woman was GANG RAPED. The rapists thought she was having an affair. They Raped her to punish her and then when the justice system of her country found out she’d been raped, Allah’s infinite mercy was to cane her for being a victim.

CAIR would say; “The woman must have done something requiring the punishment of gang rape.”

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Facebook insult to Muhammed, CITY on lockdown.

Yesterday, Bangladesh had trouble because someone insulted Muhammad on facebook. Apparently a muslim mob took to the streets pillaging and generally terrorizing everyone else.

CAIR would say; “ ?????”

We won’t even talk about what most islamic countries do to gay people!

At the risk of CAIR calling me names…

This isn’t aberrant groups within the fabric of the religion. The IS the fabric of the religion. As proof I submit to you that these atrocities are happening worldwide, on a daily basis. The only common element is that the people are followers of Islam.

These aren’t independent fundamentalist terror cells. These are average people with a threshold for violence that’s set so low if they can’t find an enemy to kill, they’ll apparently kill each other at random for the slightest reason.

This behavior begs the question for me, what exactly are these people hearing from the Imams in the Mosques?

The only answer that fits behavior is something like “everyone hates you, they would deny you your religion, everyone else is evil and would eat your children, they’re coming to get you, when they do these evil people will rape you, your wife, your children, and then they’ll burn your home to the ground.” Hell after hearing a message like that all my life I’d be pissed off and ready to kill too!

(Wait, I do hear a message similar to that in this country. Only here it’s being said about conservatives and the Republican party on every news cast and Presidential press conference!) Another commentary for another time.

It’s been said, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”

I can no longer buy into the repeated lie that Islam is a peaceful, just, religion. It can’t be, at it’s foundations its a religion based on a “convert or die” philosophy.

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Peaceful religions don’t explode into violence when their prophets are; Drawn, Insulted, or portrayed in a negative light.  

If this behavior were the norm,  Islam wouldn’t be a problem at all. The West would have already nuked the fuck out of Islamic countries for insults to Christ.

Its time for us in the West to stop attempting to delude ourselves. 

This is no religion of peace.

At best, this religion will leave it’s neighbors alone.

At worst, this is a religion that sanctions violence in all its many forms in the name of God.

The question for the West, is how to handle a ticking time bomb now embedded in every city of every nation?

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Reset your Yahoo password

Here we are again folks. Yet another data breach.

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Yahoo has been hit again.

I have a yahoo account. I use it as a junk mail account. This is the email address I give if I think I’m going to end up on a mailing list or junk mail list. I’ll go for months without checking in at Yahoo. When I do finally get around to seeing what’s accumulated, It’s almost all SPAM!

I just changed the password, that was a thrill!

I’m debating if I should just delete the yahoo account entirely. This account does protect my privacy a bit.

Every time I hear about a breach like this, I’m reminded of all the companies that demand you have an account to interact with them.

It seems that no matter how zealously you protect your personal information. Somehow or another you find yourself looking at gaining access to a needed service, or doing without it.

Most of the time we just create the new account and write account name and password down on a postit that we promptly lose.

We do what we need to do, and as soon as we log off, we forget that new name and password then spend 30 minutes to an hour recovering both six months later.

I personally have a spreadsheet of 143 account names and passwords. (By the way, that 143 line spreadsheet, is trimmed! Over the past few years I’ve been killing accounts. I’m down to 143 from about 250.)

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I was inordinately excited when Apple announced that their new operating system would create passwords, remember them, and make said passwords available across all their devices.

I could hardly wait for the new era of simplicity to begin.

Sadly, the reality is that many web sites are telling the Apple browser not to store or supply passwords automatically. Which leaves me referring to my spreadsheet often.

I was thinking about the bad old days

Back in the stoneage you could have a password that looked like “blat”, then the era of 8 character passwords  dawned, so your password became “blatblat”. Not too long after, you had to have a capital letter so “Blatblat” became the norm. Then you had to have a number so “Blatblat8” got used.

Finally we were forced to change our passwords on a regular basis. Our passwords now look like “FranKen$$tein989”, if we’re lucky. More often than not a password looks like “hual38&&n3gg__7yyhaakj”

I’m far more in favor of passphrases. “I like to have my dick sucked. 69 rules!” Unfortunately many websites and even some computer programs don’t have password fields long enough to deal with a phrase. Which leaves us with a password that looks like the keyboard malfunctioned and is just as forgettable.

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Who hasn’t seen

“Your new password must be 8 characters long or greater. Your password cannot be reused, your new password cannot contain any part of your old password or user name.”

So you spend 5 minutes coming up with something clever that you’ll remember only to have the web site or computer system say;

“You password is unacceptable and must contain upper and lower case characters, at least one symbol and two numerals.”

Now you’re thinking for another 10 minutes to access your bank account because you want to check a balance.

If you are finally successful in getting the password changed, you’re likely to have written down the wrong sequence of characters because the system has forced you to try again so many times you’re not sure what the hell you entered.

I personally give up after two or three tries at changing a password. It’s easier for me to just call the vendor and ask for a human. Often, I’ll shut down electronic access when I speak to a human. Invariably I’m asked why I’m terminating web access and I say flat out, “I don’t want to deal with of your insane password requirements.”

I’ve found that I spend just as much time waiting on the phone for a human, as I do fooling around with quarterly password changes. By cutting out the frustration of password changes I’m in a far calmer frame of mind.

Recently I realized that I’m less likely to do business with someone who cannot provide paper forms instead directing me to their corporate website where I can fill out this or that online.

The odds of my doing business with such a company are further reduced if I have to create an account before I can get to the forms.

The truly ironic part of all this, is that I’m a technology kind of guy. I’ve been in the business for decades. I know and understand the need for good strong passwords.

I can’t imagine how annoying all this stuff is to folks my Moms age.

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Working on reworking my resume

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How do you take a 30 year career and convert it to a blipvert?

Blipvert is a reference to a movie called Max Headroom where a new form of advertisement in a slightly dystopian future was blasted into the general populations brains. The problem was that at some point the bombardment would cause your head to explode.

My resume is dated, to be sure. I’ve been looking at articles and suggestions about generating the attention necessary to get your resume past an idiot HR person and into the hands of an actual hiring manager.

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Apparently you need to create a resume that caters to the short attention span, so prevalent in todays young people.

I was wondering if I could create a Twitter version that might actually be read.

Exp Technical SQA prsn, no threat to your job, looking for employment. HMU if pos avail pay needed = min wge or better. Amer Citzn, Ntv Eng

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Blast it out to every single corporation with a Twitter account. Who knows, It might actually work. Maybe I could get my 15 minutes of fame and cash in like the Kardashians.

I’m half serious.

The problem is that my resume is, uh, diverse.

Hey it’s not my fault, the 80’s and 90’s were  tumultuous time in the high tech industry.

It’s not like today when everything is like the Linkin Park song “When they come for me”

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Part of the lyrics say “Everybody wants the next thing to be just like the first.”

What that means to technology is that more and more of the tech has all the originality and creativeness of building a toaster.

The diversity of my resume is seen as a demerit not a plus. Rather than an HR person looking at it and saying “Gee, this guys has been in the industry since the beginning and has done quite a bit they look at it and say why has this guy been at so many companies?

They don’t think about the mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, and “leading edge” technologies that fell by the way side.

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Most of the HR people today are barely in their 20s and they have zero clue about life pre cell phone or iPod. Most of them never consider that a lot of the technology surrounding them wasn’t in existence 20 years ago. They have no sense of history and even less interest in learning about it.

There are three contract positions on my resume that illustrate my point elegantly.

Ameriquest Mortgage, Washington Mutual bank, and Countrywide Mortgage

Yep, I worked for all three of them and they are all gone now.

Here’s some more:

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Kentek Information Systems, Peerless Systems, Konica Business Technologies, BlueKite.com, Splash Technologies

Kentek is gone and has been for a while. Peerless is still limping along, where they once had a floor and 1/2 of a building in El Segundo the last I heard they were down to just a few offices. Konica merged or was purchased by Minolta and while the office still exists it’s not the development office it once was. BlueKite.com, GONE! in a particularly ugly way, as is Splash. The remainder of Splash was absorbed by one of their competitors.

I’ve got more…

Suffice it to say that unless someone is printing a score card there is no way a 20 something HR person could come close to understanding what the business was like, or the reason that someone like myself would have such and extensive resume.

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Especially when they’re looking for the cheapest newbie out of college they can lay their hands on.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that but sometimes experienced people just want to work and they don’t care so much about climbing the corporate ladder or the money. We just want to do good work, and live our lives, and leave the ladder climbing and Machiavellian machinations to the young.

I’ve been in management, I’ve been a real manager and a manager in name only. I’m not looking for that career path right now.

If I was offered a management position where I was really a manager and not one in name only, I’d consider it.

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I don’t want to have the title and simply be the scape goat for someone above me that’s calling the shots but serving up their “Managers” when things go badly.

I’ve been there, done that and I have the T-shirt.

Of course none of this is something one could or should say in an interview. Honesty is strictly forbidden when dealing with an HR child.

Depending on the hiring manager you could get away with saying to them.

Note, the manager would have to be a guy and he’d have to be a stand up kind of guy.

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There are perhaps a few women who could take it in the spirit in which it was said, but they’d have to be from Australia, or New Zealand.

You know places where pragmatism, a “can do” attitude, and common sense are still preferred over political correctness or the fear of hurting someones feelings.

Yeah, I said it!

If I were young enough or wealthy enough, I’d try to move to Australia or New Zealand and become a citizen. I miss the days here in America when having a common sense approach at your company would get you raises and promotions.

I’d love to find a place to work in the world where that philosophy was still the norm instead of the exception.

I can dream can’t I?