Daily Rambling
Fat Boy Slim.  Great mix sessions can be heard here, on Real Player, but the sound quality isn't bad at all.  At least as best I can tell with my one working speaker and crackling subwoofer.  The radio.Fatboy is a great collection of his songs and some remixes, lots of the "greatest hits".  The Avalon Ballroom Live has some great mixes also, almost medleys of various popular songs and his own odd and old sound effects, all blended together seamlessly.  If you don't know from FatBoy, now is the time to learn, you can't beat the price on these.

I miss having good sound on the PC. I was going to get a new speaker set with the PC, but good ones like Klipsch 4.1 is $200 or more, and I was feeling poor.  Funny how much speaker prices scale: I got 2 speakers for $7, the cheapest ones in existence, but I needed some for my old machine, and what the hell, it's $7.  They are of course physically painful to listen to, tinny and screeching with music on them.  Meanwhile good speakers for the computer are $400, and you can pay double that if you want really good ones.  Or really expensive, anyway.

The most perfect cartoon ever.  Learn it well, young men, it's a lesson for life.  Yes, she said, "stinky rockheads".  When she's older "brutish and sporadically violent" will join the list, and they'll be well-deserved additions.

Hmm, what to bitch about... Oh, I know:

Door to door salesmen!

In my years (8 or 9) living in apartments, I've yet to ever see someone actually selling anything of use door to door.  It's not like in the comics, I.E. Blondie and Dagwood, where there's some brush or vacuum or plumbing supplies or whatever guy, with a briefcase of supplies.  I've seen 100's of people selling various crap, but it's always modified charity work, or just a scam.  Generally kids, with overpriced candy or magazine subscriptions.  Those are maybe legit and maybe scams, but at least they give you something in return, and you know you're paying 50% more than you could get Kit Kats for at the store, but at least you get a candy bar, and it's no different really than Girl Scout cookies.

The ones that piss me off are the sneaky ones, where they give you some talk about how they have a school project, have to interview people about their lives, or their jobs, etc, get you talking about yourself (if you don't just close the door and say you can't be bothered, which is harder to do face to face than with telemarketers, who are so hated that most people have no problem just hanging up, or else putting down the phone so they can talk to the counter top for 5 minutes before they realize formica has no interest in a vacation timeshare in Guam).

Then they segue into their school project, and how if they do a good job at it they'll earn a senior trip, which is where you start to get suspicious, if you weren't already.  Then they whip out their brochure of magazines, and suddenly it's just another overpriced bunch of popular magazines, and you figure all that preamble about school project and interviewing people with various occupations stuff was bullshit, just part of their sales scam/pitch. Those make you want to break their legs afterwards, when you contemplate how bored/lonely/desperate/old people probably fall for it all the time.  Someone should study the correlation between subscription sales of crappy popular magazines, like say Time, Entertainment Weakly, Redbook, etc, and how successful those little con artists are in getting people to buy their bullshit.

The guy who just came to the door today was a new one.  Black guy, early 20's short spiky braids, grey shirt and jeans.  He did the typical "crime/gang prevention" spiel, and I was waiting for him to whip out the candy bars or magazines, but no, he just showed me his "permit" which was a 3x5 card in cracked and peeling lamination that I could duplicate (or surpass) in 30 seconds at any Kinko's, and asked for a donation.  As in, give me money, a total stranger on your door, with nothing more than a quick introduction about how I used to be in a gang and want to help others to get out of them. No mention of what he'd spend it on (clothing I hope, he had a rather tatty t-shirt and jacket), no organization name, nothing.  He was friendly and smiling and non-threatening, but as I think about it now, that's quite some nerve, eh? I mean semi-glorified pan handling, but at least beggars don't come to your house, they just stand on street corners or bother you at gas stations.  Who knows if his "permit' was a real thing; I didn't know you needed a permit to beg for money, but maybe he was part of a real charity and they do good work.  After all, $5 to a kid on your doorstep certainly beats being car jacked downtown one night.  This guy just sucked at giving the intro and forgot to mention the good works part.

In any event, it once again makes me want to get a nice big "No solicitors!" sign for the door.  I hate to get phone calls selling me shit, one of the reasons I never answer the phone, but it's even more annoying at the front door.

At last, something everyone can agree on.

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