Maierstorm.org |

Son of a bitch. Didn’t we just do this thing? I mean seriously, we lost a whole year to this crap last time, so I really have to wonder if the owners as a group know what they’re doing. Last time we (the fans) got sold this line of Cost Certainty, and how those two magic words would make ticket prices lower, improve the on-ice product, and bring us the long-term peace we’d all hoped for.

I remember last time. At my workplace, following the lockout news as I could, all the way up until the fateful day when Bettman announced the cancellation of the entire season.

It really bothered me. But when the game came back, so did I. Life was good, even if my team kinda stunk it up. Now it just seems like we’re back on the same track again. New faces on the players’ side, but the verse from the owners sounds pretty much like the first. We’re broke, we can’t keep operating like this…it would be believable if they didn’t keep operating like this all the while crying poverty. (Oh, and bragging about record revenues.) I mean, I’ve been broke a few times in my life, and one of the first things I did when I was broke was, wait for it, I stopped spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave. I mean, at some point you gotta own that contract you signed. Owners have general managers, I completely understand that. But if your GM is doing things you don’t want him to do…you fire him, just like you would any other employee who’s not performing to the standard you set.

I guess the point in this rambling tirade of invective and bad word choice is…to the owners. This is on you.

You know…for people like me, hockey is one of the greatest sports in the world. It has to be in order to survive the people who run it. Click on this weapons-grade stupidity, and gaze upon what happens when you let a lawyer from the NBA run the NHL.

Yes, you read that right. You register. For a chance to win the ability to purchase tickets to the Winter Classic. How you get there is entirely up to you. Seriously. This is a goddamn league promotion. They’re apparently so deep into paying the bills for hockey teams in Arizona and Florida, they can’t spring for free tickets to a once-in-a-lifetime deal. Never mind airfare, hotel…seriously?

But wait, THAT’S NOT ALL! Even if you win the chance to purchase tickets, you’re still not guaranteed a ticket. That’s right, first come first served, and if you put in to purchase tickets after they’ve sold out…well, sucks to be you. But I’m sure you’ll feel better after realizing you won the chance to purchase tickets, which puts you…right in line with everyone else.

I want the genius who greenlighted this to explain what the fuck we’re actually getting out of this deal.

Okay, seriously. I don’t bitch about work much, but when i do, it tends toward “epic”. I swear, I don’t make this shit up.

So today, the headset doublebeeps. The….gentleman…okay, let’s not mince words. The little propellerhead helmet-wearing retard of an MCSE launches into a whinefest about how he’s just not being given the emotional security that he truly deserves because he’s responsible for giving us a few thousand clients this year alone. And that our ping times are high. Before he could really shift his mouth into 4th gear, I managed to get a little specific information from him. Once I was able to, he kept telling me that the ping times were high, causing calls to drop and clients to lose amounts of money roughly equivilant to my annual salary.

I check. get into the modem. Test to google. 5 milliseconds. Test to yahoo. 11 milliseconds. So I ask the mouthbreather specifically what address we’re trying to get to. I get dodged. And again. So I conclude, and reiterate that there’s nothing wrong with the connection that I can see, without adding that he really needs to look into valium.

No dice. He insists that there is a problem, I just can’t see it. I ask for his server or endpoint. He balks, hesitates, and gives me an address. I check yet again, and there’s nothing wrong. He insists there is. He also insists that we need to tell him about these problems that we’re having before we have them. Yes, you read that right. Before we have a outage, we need to tell him. Just like his previous carrier did, who were apparently the greatest thing since sliced bread. Leaving me to wonder why he left them, if they did so much.

I regretfully informed him that we weren’t miss cleo, and that any deals he had with his previous carrier were between him and his previous carrier. Our lawyers won’t let us do rollover clauses from another company. Go figure.

I also had a few techish moments. Number one. letting thousands of dollars ride on something as falliable as icmp is retardation. Number two, doing this without any apparent redundancy or network backup is weapons-grade stupid. Number three, expecting us to be psychic is just fluff and bullshit twaddle so you can feel validated by your existence. Fuck you, I’m here to fix your shit, not give hugs and tissues because your idiocy got you butthurt. Finally, expecting a level one tech to rewrite your contract is akin to requesting a grant from the Ministry of Silly Walks. You don’t do it, so shut up and go get a juicebox and a snack from mommy, and she’ll hang your certs on the fridge.

Goddamned retards.

For those of you who don’t follow sports, come back later.

Attention All Ye Broncos Players:
Sit up straight, pay attention. There may be a quiz after I’m talking. Todays’ lecture is going to be about the business of football.
Law I: You can be traded. Simple as that. Nobody is untouchable. Joe Fucking Montana got traded. For two draft picks and a safety. Think about that for a second. If you think you’re untouchable, if you think there’s no way they’ll ever get rid of you, just keep thinking that when you get told your Unique And Special Snowflake ass is playing somewhere else this season.
Law II: Crying To The Press Makes You Look Like A Baby. Again, relatively simple. I know the reporters gotta report something, but you keep your pissy mood in house. The minimum-salary-rookies in the locker room are getting paid $310,000. That’s about 9 times what I make in a year. You fuckers have a gift. Accept it as such, change your goddamn diaper, and talk to the coach privately. And don’t go calling up your buddy in the local newspaper. Don’t text your agent. Keep it between y’all, and then you’ll have something to write about in your memoirs.
Now that I’ve strained your brains enough, I’m going to turn my attention to the coaches.

Attention All Ye Broncos Head Coaches:
I know you’re new, and your new office chair hasn’t quite molded itself to your ass the way you’d like, but let’s a couple things straight here:
Section A: You were hired to be fired. Sorry, but them’s the breaks. I know you want to put your mark on the team. I know you want to make the playoffs and be the King of All Londinium and wear a shiny hat; but that’s not going to happen any time soon. It will happen if you get as much as you can out of your players. That means reassuring them sometimes. That means, that when you have a one-on-one with your spiffy quarterback, that you be honest. You say something like “Yes, we listened to people offer things to trade for your services. They didn’t offer enough, so you’re still here. I’m the coach, I want to bring in a new offensive system. More importantly, I want you to run that system while I overhaul the defense and get us to where we deserve to be.” If you can’t handle saying something like that honestly, Get the fuck out the way, because I will say it, and I’ll probably definitely say it for half what you’re getting paid. Keep this jackassery up, and you’re going to be a bungee coach.
Section B: Crying to the press makes you look like a baby too. See above, except you’re making over 2 million this year. Change your diaper, work with the talent you’ve got, and pull up to the second window. While you’re there, ask for an application; if you can’t hack it in your squishy office, you best fucking find a new line of work that’s more your speed.

Now I have to giggle a little bit. But then I found a posting about it, and oh my goodness was there badness. Once the site is actually back up, I’m going to have to check out some of the claims made by others. IE only, stating that firefox is insecure, that kinda thing. And then I’ll join the horde of angry pasty nerds who are going to have to educate the state on this travesty, and Why You Don’t Trust Your MS Sales Rep.

In a just world, they’d hire me for web development. At least I have a spellchecker.

Why do people call 911 for shit like this? Not once. Not twice. Three times. I mean it. So I did some checking. Most relevant thing I could find in 5 minutes is the Department of Management Services.

So, public safety announcement. If McDonalds decides that you need to get shanked because they’re out of McNuggets? Don’t call 911. That’s not their point. They’re not a goddamn waitstaff because something’s wrong in your world. They’re there because you need…help.

Although I’m pretty sure this woman does need help.

I know times are a little on the rough side, and companies are trying to target people with disposable income but this has gotten ridiculous. You can’t make this up. I want to, but I can’t. I wonder who decided that the gamer skin was so different from everyone elses’, that we needed our own razor.

Although the cynical side of me says that someone from the Gillette Marketing Department saw how much games cost, and said to themselves “These people are stupid! If they pay this much for a game, they gotta have some coin for a razor…now we just have to sell it in a way they’ll understand…”

So baseball really does amuse me. It’s almost comical to watch the commissioner waffle and try to bury the screamingly obvious problem of steroids in baseball. Yeah, A-rod did a bad thing. So did 103 other players. It does kinda make me glad that the NHL’s incompetent commissioner came from the NBA. So now the real question; punish the theoretically anonymous, or give them a free pass? If you punish them, then the players union has a conniption because the results were supposed to be anonymous. If you don’t punish them, then the fans get all honked off.

And of course, at the heart of the matter is money. The bare minimum salary for someone in major league baseball was $390,000 last season. That’s as low as it gets. Which can quickly become millions and even tens of millions. Seriously, the financial incentive of an 18-million dollar salary jump? Who has morals that are that rigid? When the punishment is enough to remove the financial incentive to the players and the owners, then we’ll see some change.

Brief proposal. Joe Ballplayer gets busted for steroids. His contract is immediately invalidated and reverted to a minimum salary. The team owners get fined an amount equal to the contract, payable to a local charity or a fund for retired ballplayers. Probably never fly, but hey. A guy can dream.

Okay…so today, we received letters in the mail. One was to tell me that my insurance rates are going up…based on my credit report. Admittedly, it’s going up by about 6 bucks a month. But I’m still a tiny bit confused as to the logic of this.

Also, the fastest way to make me drop a credit card is to bump the rates up about 8% without any explanation beyond “because we still can”. I can get better rates from a loan shark.

So I’d checked out a few of the stations I like, and they appear to be switching over to Silverlight. Not available for my operating system though. Which…well, is damned annoying and amusing all at once.