Brainsprain.net

We got to the airport at dark-thirty Monday morning, and, because we had PAPER TICKETS (which we bartered for with chickens and marked their sale on a clay tablet) we had to wait in Southwest’s long line to exchange them for paper boarding passes per the TSA.  The security line was really long, which is to be expected for a Monday morning and then we all sat down together to eat breakfast.  Some of us opted for boring old breakfast tacos, while others of us opted for the ingenious Mangia breakfast pizza.  Instead of pizza sauce, they use frickin GRAVY.  It was devine.  We got on the plane and split up into our respective middle seats.  Yay.  The flight was uneventful, which is my favorite kind of flight.

We arrived, grabbed our bags, and hopped a shuttle over to Treasure Island, which was now known as TI, and had been almost complete de-pirate-ized.  That makes me sad.  You’d think with Johnny Depp’s latest string of blockbusters, they’d be more into the whole theme.  We lined up at the buffet for second breakfast (the most important breakfast of the day), and April scampered off to her room, looking a little green.  We ate, and then retired to our rooms for a nap.

Colleen and I went down to the pool for a bit after our nap, then we met up with everyone (including a recovered April) for dinner at Kahunaville, a restaurant/bar which was very tasty.  Everyone but Colleen and I had gotten tickets to see Mystéré, so off they went, and we waited in the bar to meet up with Dawn, a friend of mine from high school who now lives in Vegas.  She and her husband took us to dinner down the way at Palm Steak House in Caesar’s Palace (YUM!) and we met some of their friends.  After the show, Shane and April joined us and William (Dawn’s Hubby) drove us to a club where they comped our entry cause it was almost my birthday.  We drank too much and had lots of fun, and then took a cab back to the hotel and passed out.

So I work for a Software as a Service company, and the product I support is designed to contact users by phone, email, SMS, fax, etc., in the event of an emergency or disaster. It is very, very powerful. So a guy gets a genius idea, as an April Fool’s Joke, to have the system repeatedly call a colleague with several silly messages. The problem was that he didn’t know when enough was enough, and didn’t understand the system. He accidentally set it up to recur, which meant the message went out over and over. He also didn’t understand how to stop the recurrence, so he couldn’t cancel it.

Moral of the story: If you’re going to play an April Fool’s Joke, make sure you understand what you’re doing, otherwise an entire company may be laughing at you while your boss is screaming at you for misuse of a very expensive notification system.

Just got home from a week in Vegas with some of our very best friends. We missed everyone who wasn’t there, but we had a blast. There is a ton to blog about, and I’ll get it done this week, as pictures are circulated, I’ll be sure to post them here. In short, we drank too much, ate too much, gambled too much, saw too many shows, sat in the hot tub way too long, and definitely overstayed our welcome at Star Trek: The Experience. We have set the bar very very high for great awesome vacations.

So why can’t this guy be mayor?  Bush really lowered the bar for public office, huh?

Saying this here so I don’t have to admit I’m wrong to anyone, but can merely claim “I blogged all about that!”  In short, I mistakenly listened to a colleague who claimed that Ryan Reynolds was actually Burt Reynolds’s son.  I claimed this myth as truth, and it’s not.  Teach me to not look stuff up on IMDB…

Congress is finally holding the Bush administration accountable for its warrant-less and unethical (if not outright illegal) wire taps.  Congress also shunned Bush’s suggestion that telcom companies should be immune from lawsuits for their complicity in these wiretaps.

Bush said, “The American people understand the stakes in this struggle. They want their children to be safe from terror.”

It’s nice to see that Congress wants our children to be safe from Bush.

I’m getting an average of a call an hour reminding me to vote.  In the primaries.  It’s pretty much going to determine whether Hillary or Barrack becomes the Democratic candidate for President.  So they’re asking me to choose between two people who have almost no discernible differences in platform when compared with the evil imperial incumbent party.  Besides, after the utter sham of the last two presidential elections, I’m wondering if I have any say anyway.  I one of very few people outraged when Bush stole the first election, and we see how well that turned out.  I’m bitter about our broken electoral process, and doubt our elections would withstand the scrutiny of the auditors we send to other countries to oversee so-called free elections.  Nope, I’m sitting this one out.  Good luck with that.

I lose again.  Every year, Colleen and I have a running bet on who can go the longest without knowing who won the SuperBowl.  I hate working with football fanatics.  I lose again.

I got another of those emails about how much illegal aliens are costing us, the subject line of it was actually, “More Costly Than Iraq.” It’s been a while since I’ve posted a political rant, so…

For my tax dollar, I’d much prefer paying for welfare, food, education and medical attention for people — regardless of citizenship status — than perpetrating an illegal war creating more and more hatred for the United States abroad.

So people saying that war is a great way to spend my money as opposed to blowing it all on food will never have my agreement. War is never the answer. War brings more and more fighting, hatred, and pain. Have you seen gas prices lately? If that were merely supply and demand, oil companies wouldn’t be posting obnoxious profits. We sacrifice American children to kill foreign children over money via oil.
What that article doesn’t comment on is how illegal aliens contribute to our economy. Like the fact that honest, hardworking Americans just don’t show up to do many of the jobs they do. They pay sales tax. They contribute to local economies by spending the paltry sums unscrupulous American business owners get away with paying them — precisely because they are undocumented. You don’t blame mold for growing on bread. You blame the person who left the bread out, right? So we’re going to punish the undocumented aliens for being brave enough to leave their homes, take crappy jobs in circumstances no American would tolerate by throwing them out? Who will mow our lawns? Clean our rooms? Pick our fruit? Americans? Think again.
In short, I’d rather feed them than kill them any day.

It saddens me that so many Americans are so jaded about death and killing that they look for misdirections such as the illegal immigration issue, abortion, gay marriage, and gun control rather than focusing on the fact that we’re facing another quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the Darfur genocide continues, but Darfur doesn’t sit on an oil field, so we decide we’re suddenly not world police.
Politicians keep misdirecting us, and like sheep, Americans follow the bouncing ball.
Like John Lennon said, “War is over. If you want it.”

I know you already know.  That’s what I’m really writing about.  I found out less than half an hour after he was pronounced dead, and I’ve never even met the guy.  They say bad news travels fast, but with the advent of the Internet, it’s downright CREEPY when news like this is old before the body gets to the morgue.