So I went to the ATM yesterday, right? This is California so I fully expect to see two language choices on the keypad. Well, imagine my surprise when I see there are now FOUR damn choices. I couldn’t even tell you wath the other two were but I’m guessing one was Japanese or Korean. Swahili maybe. I can’t take much more of this sh*t.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright. This guy is a piece of work. I do think the media has portrayed him to be worse than he really is. I listened to one of his entire sermons on youtube. When you hear what he has to say IN CONTEXT he comes off as much less controversial than what media would have you believe. I still don’t have much patience for people who perpetuate the victim mentality among blacks. Nevertheless attitudes like that are still far too common in our community.

I don’t think Barack Obama necessarily shares the beliefs Rev. Wright has. He is a politician by profession. I seriously doubt he goes to church for help in formulating his idealogy. My guess is he decided early on in his political career that he needed to join a prominent black church to gain some “street cred” within the black community of Chicago. An Atlanta based politician would likely join Ebenezer Baptist Church, where M.L. King once served, for the same reason. The larger the church the better. It’s the quickest and cheapest way to get your name out there amongst the peeps.

I do think Obama should have seen this coming before his campaign even started. Nothing escapes scrutiny during a run for the White House. You have to be the biggest moron on the the planet to think this story wasn’t getting out. He should have distanced himself from Rev. Wright’s views as soon as he announced his candidacy.

Every time the story goes away Rev. Wright opens his mouth again. I wish he’d just STFU. He’s killing Obama’s chances of winning. If Obama loses either the Democratic primary or the general election 100% of the blame will be placed on Rev. Wright and justifiably so. All he had to do was keep quiet for another 6-8 months and everything would be fine…but NOOOOOOO! He’s got to tell his side of the story…as if anyone really cares. The people giving him air time don’t care about him. They’re just out for some easy headline material. He is certainly that.

There is more than a hint of racism in the way the story is being put out there. People who want to see Obama lose, both McCain and Clinton supporters, are trying (and succeeding) to instill fear in voters. Look what the crazy black man believes. Imagine what he’ll do if he’s elected president. Here’s why I say there is racism involved. Here are a few quotes from Pat Robertson.

“Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It’s no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians.
Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.”

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

(talking about apartheid South Africa) “I think ‘one man, one vote,’ just unrestricted democracy, would not be wise. There needs to be some kind of protection for the minority which the white people represent now, a minority, and they need and have a right to demand a protection of their rights.” 3/18/92

(talking about Planned Parenthood) “It is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism-everything that the Bible condemns.”–Pat Robertson, “The 700 Club,” 4/9/91

I can go on for another hour or so. Here’s the thing though. Most of us (myself included) will read those quotes and say “well that’s just Pat Robertson. Nobody pays attention to him anyway”. Well then…how about you replace Pat Robertson’s name with Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Why does Pat Robertson get away with those statements but Wright doesn’t? If Pat Robertson comes out and supports John McCain do you think the media will dig up those quotes and make him renounce each one of those? I think not.

Disclaimer - My vote for Barack Obama is actually a vote against Hillary Clinton. Obama is too liberal for me but I just can’t stand Billary. I can’t vote for McCain because I don’t like his views either. I’m Pro-Choice, against the war in Iraq and against his amnesty plan for illegal aliens. I can’t take another four years of Bush’ism.

Today is my first day back at work after a week’s vacation. I just needed some time to myself. We will be moving offices in a month or so and I know I won’t get any time off soon after that. I spent the the week just concentrating on working out, eating healthy and catching up on DVD’s. Mission accomplished.

I’ve had a long standing goal of working out 20 times per month. I rarely reach it. I usually get off to a good start then peter out toward the end. So far this month I have 11 workouts in. I’m shooting for 25 for April. The hard work paid off in spades. I lost 4 lbs just in the last week. The scale actually said 6 but I figured I’m a little dehydrated from cycling late last night. Hopefully by Friday I’ll be a firm 249 lbs. Yes, I’m a big boy. Not really fat but at my age weight is weight to a certain extent. My first target is to get down to 226 lbs. That’s what I weighed when I first moved to L.A. ten years ago.

I attribute most of my renewed enthusiasm to my new Kurt Kinetic Pro fluid trainer. It makes riding indoors so much more fun. I’m doing lots of intervals and other stuff too boring to mention. Hopefully in a month or so I’ll break out the track bike at ADT Velodrome.

I also watched Season One of The Boondocks.

So all this Obama For President talk on the forums I read online seems to have opened up the racial divide in this country even further. Yes, I am voting for Obama despite the fact that a year ago I was convinced that a black candidate with a name like his would not win the Southern vote in my lifetime. Mine is as much as a vote against Hillary as it is a vote for him.

I think he messed up big time by not distancing himself from this preacher when the campaign first started. It’s stupid to leave these things hidden so they can come out in the last few weeks of the voting. I think he’s really scaring people off who think he believes the crap that guy was saying…and maybe he does to an extent. I did meet a black woman last year who was 100% convinced there was a cure for AIDS somewhere in Belgium but they were hiding it to kill off more blacks. I’ve never been big on conspiracy theories personally and I don’t think The Man is keeping us down, although I do love to joke about it.

Anyway, I’m getting off track. There was an entire thread discussing whether white people will be a minority by the year 2050 if the borders stay as open as they are now. The conversation bordered on the ridiculous. Let’s get something straight, people. Just because your percentage falls below 50% does not make you a minority all of a sudden. Let’s say Caucasians drop to 45% while Hispanics are 25%, blacks 20% and the rest Asian/Native Americans. Until there is another single group larger than you YOU ARE NOT A MINORITY. Get it? Got it? Good!

About a year ago we decided to outsource our web site in addition to Exchange services. We had been running it on a server in our office but our building’s power supply left a lot to be desired.

Once they told us they would be doing some maintenance over the weekend. What they didn’t tell us was that power would be off for an hour, far exceeding the capacity of our UPS systems. Not only was our website down but people couldn’t work from home until I realized the problem and went in to fix it. The people that run the cafe downstairs were even more upset. They had a lot of food go bad since the refrigerators were off.

On the advice of a friend I made the switch to 1and1.com. We have a tricky setup in that our domain is registered by one company, another company handles DNS, and yet another handles Exchange services. I did not want to transfer DNS control to 1and1. This didn’t seem like a problem since they have a spot in the control panel to plug in your own DNS. In fact things worked quite well for months.

This past November we switched our phone system to VOIP, which involved getting a T-1 line to replace our DSL connection. This also meant moving our DNS services since our ISP provided that service for us up to then. Unfortunately this is where things went south with 1and1.

They started sending me emails that said the following:

It has come to our attention that the name server settings for

bristolassoc.com are incorrectly set to:

DNS1: ns0.dnsmadeeasy.com

DNS2: ns1.dnsmadeeasy.com

DNS3: ns2.dnsmadeeasy.com

DNS4: ns3.dnsmadeeasy.com

With these settings neither your website nor your e-mails can be reached reliably via the bristolassoc.com domain.

For the domain to work properly please make sure that following name servers are set:

DNS1: ns0.dnsmadeeasy.com

DNS2: ns1.dnsmadeeasy.com

Ohhhhhh-kay. They’re telling me to set my nameservers to what they already are. What to do? Well I did the logical thing which was nothing. WRONG ANSWER! After ignoring the emails telling me to do nothing for two weeks 1and1 actually removed our website automatically. I put it back up only to get the same emails again. Every time I called tech support I got a different answer for why it was removed. Tech support is in Singapore which was another problem. I’m sure the country of Singapore has contributed many wonderful things to the world despite the fact that they outlawed chewing gum, but I still don’t want to speak to any Singaporians/Singapornos/Singapornites/whatthefuckevers when I need help. They spoke English but without common sense. There was nothing I could to make them understand what I was saying. They ended up taking our site down three separate times before I finally said enough is enough.

Bottom line is I switched the web site to Intermedia and they have been spot on ever since. 1and1….I hope a meteor hits all your data centers at the same time. The most useless excuse of a company ever.

She’s always been somewhat difficult to get along with. She’s had four previous jobs since I’ve known her and she’s left every one of them because there was somebody she just couldn’t get along with. Some jobs she quit, some she was let go from but always because of a conflict with someone. It’s never a performance issue because she’s a very hard worker.

She’s like that fairy tale where the princess can feel a pea under 15 mattresses stacked on top of each other. She just has no tolerance for any sort of discomfort whatsoever. As for me if I don’t like somebody I work with I just avoid them or keep my interaction with them efficient and as minimal as possible. She can’t do that. If she doesn’t like someone she has to tell somebody about it…and usually I’m the one she tells.

Now at her current job she’s been moved downstairs away from the other administrative dept people. She’s now sharing an office one other lady nobody can stand to be around, which is probably why she got moved down there to begin with. She’s now threatening to quit if they don’t move her somewhere else. That’s probably what they want. I call it being Office Spaced because in the movie Office Space that one fat guy kept getting his office moved until he was finally in a closet or something.