Cristal Granted, I have a business relationship that makes my opinion on this a bit of a conflict of interest, but don't waste your money on Cristal unless you like syrupy sweet champagne. Finally had some yesterday and of the dozen or so other champagnes I had it was by far the least appealing. But, if you want to spend the money, go ahead.
Democrats Yapping Did you listen/watch the debate yesterday? Those spunky little democrats had their own little debate all by themselves. Awww, look at them in their cute little suits. They are the cutest things. Yes they are.
Reverened Al, say what you will about his nutty-self, but he is the most entertaining person ever. And, in reality, a great speaker. Sure, he's goofy, but he is quick with the quips and the zings and that means something. To someone. Somewhere.
I love how we all love Wesley Clark though. On the radio, callers are fawning over him and how he will save the world and impregnate our women with handsome babies. I think we are just already bored with the other guys - which I suppose is justified. They all seem nice and competent, but they don't have the same "UMPH" and dare I say, sex appeal, like a nutty war-mongering general does.
A lot of my friends (OK, I only have one friend) are a little jumpy about supporting a guy with a military background (among his other dozen backgrounds). But, ya know, we are at war. We will be for a while. Iraq and Afghanistan aren't cleaning themselves up soon (and Afghanistan seems to be getting worse). Maybe one of them fancy army types is what we need (over the not-so fancy National Guard type we have now).
Telemarketing Wow - this DO NOT CALL law is fun to watch. Legal! Not Legal! Legal! Two items regarding this:
1. Didn't the government ban fax blasters? What's the difference there in terms of free speech? Haven't there been laws against spam? Remind me why a Do Not Call list would be different? Oh, all the people who will get laid off I suppose. Sorry.
2. I was listening to a news show on NPR yesterday and they had the head of some telemarketing lobbyist group and were talking about the Do Not Call list. They opened the phones up and every call was people bitching about telemarketing. After the second or third call the telemarketing person suddenly got pulled into a meeting and had to leave. The cranky bastard in me wants to believe that her lame pro-telemarketing viewpoints were looking increasingly stupid in comparison to the caller's views. Listen for yourself.
Outlook 2003 Last night, in a fit of retarded dorkiness, I installed the new version of Outlook on my home PC ("personal computer"). I am not a big fan of Wenders XP, so I haven't even considered updating my version of Office - but I read the review of Office 2003 in the Times yesterday, and then my co-worker Eddie had installed a version of it and I found myself contemplating crazy ideas like installing it on my machine. So, I did. But I only installed Outlook. First impression? Wacky! And then I turn off some of the features and change some of the display settings and all is good. Why do I like? Here's my happy-happy list:
1. White list / Black list to catch spam. You can easily set it up to say "if this person is not in my address book, then send the mail to my junk folder". Granted, you can do that with old versions, but it's a bit kluge and has some problems. If any of you have a spam problem, I can't recommend using this method enough. It's what I have been doing for about a year and it makes spam way less annoying (and it's safer this way, too).
2. HTML images aren't displayed by default. Yes! We all love our emails with fun formatting and colors and images, but it's also a great way for spammers to see if your address is working. Now, spam comes in with no images, just placeholders. If you want to see the image you click it and it loads.
3. Auto-complete on names when composing mail. You know how in Outlook Express, if you are typing a name it does a little auto-complete thing for you? Like, if I am typing "Dan" it pops up a little window with all the "Dan"s in my book? Outlook for the PC does this now - finally! (this has been a rant of Mrs. Robots for years when I switched her over to Win2000/Outlook. She will be happy now.)
My only complaint? The retarded XP look. Sorry, even if XP was the best OS in the world and cleaned your house for you and spit twenty dollar bills out of the floppy drive, I'd still hate it because, IMHO, it looks retarded. It looks like the MS turds saw Mac's OSX and were like, "Hey Dragon Master - this OS looks cool. Let's try to copy it or something!".
I'll give up my Windows 2000 when you pry my dead cold fingers off my mouse (or when I decide to move to Mac or Linux - because that Longhorn shit looks creepy. I spoke to a guy who is working/worked on it... spooooky).
