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Showing posts from November 4, 2007

Last time up Wolf Creek for the year.

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The weather today was bee-yoo-ti-full, so I took off on the Tiger to go up to the top of Wolf Creek, probably for the last time this year. The shadows are getting long, the winter sun is getting lower, and the snow is persisting on the side of the road now. We're only one good storm away from this little gem being closed for 4 months. 120 mile round trip later and I'm home again with a mile-wide grin. This Tiger is the dogs bollocks. I love it. Best motorcycle I've owned so far and it's still giving me the grin factor.

Speak English

Our local Fox affiliate have been running a story at the moment about Mexicans who can't get help when they need it because the emergency services don't speak enough Spanish. I've got to side with the majority on this one - if you move to a new country, make the effort to learn the bloody language. Since when was it our responsibility to learn their language? When I lived in Holland, I had to learn Dutch - I didn't expect to be able to speak English. Shit - I figured that out when I was 4 years old - you don't have to be a genius. England is having the same problem right now with Paki's and Indians. They're refusing to learn English, only in their case, the overly politically correct government is caving in and going to force the English to learn Paki and Indian. That's absolutely unacceptable and the wrong way to solve the problem.

Propaganda Remix

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Brilliant! www.antiwarposters.com Micah Wright has taken old WW2 propaganda posters and updated them to reflect the current anti-Bush thinking. They're amazing. Well worth a visit.

Becker, no vouchers, no bond

Good news - the $192M bond for new police and fire HQs was voted out. It was tight - 50.4% against to 49.6% for. Now maybe they can force the church, the businesses and specifically the big box stores to chip in instead of making homeowners pay for all of it. The school vouchers program was voted out, which is a shame, because it was the only logical choice for decent schools. I guess the empire-building teachers would sooner have ridiculously large classes instead of actually educating the kids. The 50/50 vote for me is Ralph Becker as mayor. He has a lot of grand plans but hasn't followed through on any of them in the past. His nickname was 'blueprint man' for a reason :(

Bank card services - clever, but wrong.

As I'd secretly suspected, the woman I spoke to at bank card services on saturday after discovering my bank card had been cloned, was wrong. Their system is clever enough to figure out that the 15 transactions in Georgia weren't me, but when she told me that the transactions wouldn't clear because I'd reported them as fraudulent, she was wrong. This morning, I'm $1500 out of pocket because of it. Not good enough. When I report transactions as fraudulent, the should block the transactions. They didn't, and worse, they lied about the fact that they could. This isn't going to end well for Zions bank.....

Another reason not to shop at SprawlMart

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I called SprawlMart's credit card fraud department this morning to get some info on how my card had been used, and it turns out that they don't particularly care about credit card fraud involving other banks - they only care if it happened with a SprawlMart own brand card. In other words, they're quite happy to take money off stolen cards and not give a damn, and then they're quite happy to be totally unhelpful about the situation. Quality. Honestly I don't understand why that place exists. They spread like viruses, paying off planning departments, paying off councils and cities so they can put huge (and largely useless) stores in the places guaranteed to most piss off local residents, which in turn makes the housing market in the area plummet. They sell the cheapeast, lowest quality shit I've ever seen. Their stores are filthy and full of half-dressed white-trash. They barely pay their employees minimum wage and the they cost regular tax payers up to $2.5billi

Terminator 4 / The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Colour me excited. I just saw an advert on Fox with a pair of terminator eyes and the flashing image of Sarah Connor. It seems Fox are doing a TV show come 2008 with Terminator 4: Salvation following in 2009. If you go to takebackthefuture.com, there's a countdown timer which is counting down. Currently it's at 1261 but I can't figure out if that's days or hours. Whatever - the date on the trailer was Jan 14th 2008.