I spent last weekend in Dallas, Tx, attending my sister’s wedding. I will go into more detail but first I need to vent some rage. Before I left for Dallas I had some last minute shopping to do and I ended up in Walmart. Yeah, I know! I only had 5 items in my cart and when I went to checkout, the shortest line was a 10 items or less line. Unfortunately there was an elderly lady already checking out in that line and she had to have at least 50 items in her cart. Seriously, can’t old people read? It wasn’t too bad at first, the cashier was pretty fast so I waited and then the horror really began. The old lady had a FISTFULL of freaking coupons, OMG. And of course there were problems with a few of the coupons, they wouldn’t register for some reason. This prompted a call to a manager to come over and help the cashier.

Of course it takes 5 minutes for a manager to show up to get it all straightened out. He was probably in his office tweeting photos of his penis all over the internet, which seems to be all the rage these days. When told that some of her coupons couldn’t be used she starts arguing about it, then after a few minutes finally that gets all settled. THEN she pulls out…. wait for it… a FREAKING CHECKBOOK!!!!!!!!! Ahhhh, at this point I just wanted to scream. Of course that takes another 5 minutes. Unbelievable. You ever watch an old person write a check in seeming slow motion while your life is slowly slipping away?

A few days later, I had another old person with a checkbook encounter in Dallas in a grocery store. The line was short, she only had a few items but when she tried to pay with a check it wouldn’t go through. Here we go with ANOTHER wait for a manager session to come fix the problem. Seriously, I just wanna reach over and SNATCH that damn checkbook right out of their hands, tear it in half, throw it on the floor and stomp the crap out of it and scream at them to get a damn bank card already so we can stop wasting other people’s lives.

Please old people, for the love of god or whatever the hell you believe in, if you have any shred of decency and any respect for the remaining bits of sanity of society in general, please, please, PLEASE get a bank card already.

Ok, I’m almost to the wedding part but first a warning about Mapquest. Apparently they now have some kind of helper app they want you to download to be able to use their maps more effectively. You DO NOT want this leechware on your computer. My mom got this on her pc last week. It hijacks your browser homepage and search engines to an offshoot of BING search and there is no way to uninstall it. Resetting your homepage does not work, the next time you open your browser it’s BACK. It sets everything to go through a page called Search.conduit and it’s godawful to get rid of. Even my strongest virus removal program didn’t recognize it as malware. I ended up having to go into Firefox’s configuration files and resetting everything and it was a total pain in the ass to get rid of.

Now for the wedding!! The event took place at a home owned by a relative of the groom, and they had a beautiful backyard with a large gazebo and a curved flagstone walkway leading up to it from the main house. They spent a lot of time on the decorations and lighting, the event was catered and everything went together very smoothly. She is 48 and it was her first marriage, we were beginning to think she would never find Mr Right, lol. There were about 140 guests, family and friends. In the photo below, that’s my dad walking her up the aisle. Click the photo for a larger image.

In the photo below they are saying the vows, her new husband is on her right. On her left in the burgundy dress is my sister’s best friend and maid of honor who sang a couple of songs during the ceremony. She has a beautiful voice. On the groom’s right is his brother, the best man. Again, click the photo for a larger version.

The only bad thing was that it was pretty damn hot out and we did a lot of sweating! lol. It was a pretty amazing day, I was very proud of my sister, she and her husband did most of the work setting up and planning the entire thing on their own. I know it was a helluva lot of effort but it really paid off and everyone really seemed to enjoy themselves.

That’s all I got, hope you’re all having a great weekend!!

I own a few websites all over the web and each of them display Blogger templates that I have designed over the years. All of the templates are free to download and use on personal blogs, that’s what they are there for. The total number of free templates is 68, spread across 4 websites. The issue is that they are constantly being stolen and displayed on other websites in spite of the fact that my Terms of Use explicitly states that the templates are NOT to be redistributed on any other website, in any way, shape or form.

They put my work on their websites and run advertising to make money from their visitors. The worse part is that usually they hotlink directly to my files and images on my Blogs Gone Wild! server so I am actually paying for the bandwidth so that these assholes can make money off of content that they stole from me. And it’s not just the images and files, they usually copy/paste my descriptions of each template right off the post and onto their websites. Word for word. Unbelievable.

Here’s a list of my websites that I’m talking about:

• Charmskins
• Free Blogger Skins
• Blogger XML Templates
• Blogger Classic Templates

Emailing them and telling them to remove my content has proven to be a total waste of time so what I have been doing is editing the names of the images and the links to the template codes so that the links end up broken and useless on their site. Most of the offenders aren’t even in the USA so I don’t have much legal recourse. Suing would cost money, money that wouldn’t be worth what I make from my own advertising on those sites. Fortunately they don’t seem to check their own websites very often so the links stay broken. But still, it’s a huge pain in the ass for me to keep looking for offenders and editing file names. I’m at the point now where when I find hotlinks to my images, I’ll be replacing the images with some very hardcore porn. That’s going to be my next step.

What prompted me to write this post was after looking through links to my different websites this morning, I came across a site that had copied the entire template code from my Charmskins site which runs on WordPress and they had pasted it in to use as all the web pages on their website. They just deleted the parts they didn’t like and put in the stuff they needed. I don’t care much about the code itself, HTML and CSS is open source and it can’t be copyrighted anyway. But in this case they didn’t bother with hosting the images for the template on their own server. They were hotlinking images on MY server to load their entire website! I was like WTF??? Seriously people? Give me a break. Needless to say, I put a stop to that. I’ll probably get an email from them bitching at me for breaking their website by moving the images they were stealing from me, lmao.

I know it probably sounds like I’m whining but this post is also a warning to anyone looking for free templates for their blog. In one case I found that a website had stolen my templates and modified them in such a way that they included malware and was redistributing them on another site. This included hidden links inside the code to online casinos, pornography and illegal medical and stolen software websites. And, they left the back links to my own website intact. That indirectly makes me look responsible!

If you are looking for a free template for your blog or website you really need to be careful where you download from because you never know what you’re going to get. If you know what you’re looking at you can inspect the template code carefully to make sure there is nothing suspicious or at least make sure you really trust the website you are downloading from. Here’s an excellent article on hidden links and malicious code if you want further reading on the subject:

WPMU – Hidden Malware Warning

Just beware out there!

I really, really, really hate to talk about anything to do with politics because just thinking about it makes me want to spew, since there’s hardly ever any meaningful political discussion, it always descends into name calling and blame hurling from both sides, but I’m going to make this exception. By law, we apparently have to have a budget for the government to operate at all but when it’s all said and done it’s a useless gesture. They know they are budgeting more than we will take in, it’s already a deficit the moment it’s passed. But I think an equally large problem is that no matter what they pass they will never stick to it anyway. They are completely incapable of running this country in a way that it could operate within it’s means or it’s budget.

And the problem isn’t just the Feds, it’s virtually every city, town, county and municipality in this entire country. They cannot operate within their means. They set budgets then fail to abide by them. And by them I mean us, ALL of us. At the very root is the average citizen who cannot live within their own personal and household means and uses credit as a way of life. As long as we’re ok with that we will never be able to hold our government to operating within it’s means. Borrowing against the future seems to be business as usual and until it stops we will always be in the hole. It’s human nature apparently and as long as most people have some sort of way to get credit and carry credit cards around it just enforces the mentality that borrowing is good and by extension it’s ok for the government to borrow money against the future as well. Eventually there will be nothing left to borrow.

/end rant

In case you haven’t heard, Sony is suing a guy that dared to modify his own Playstation 3 console so that he can run software of his own choosing. He then put the information of how you can modify your own PS3 on You Tube. Sony’s excuse for their ridiculous behavior is that the modification could also be used for running pirated games and software. That’s a total bullshit defense of their actions, it would be like a bank suing people for owning cars and trucks just because they might be able to be used as getaway vehicles in a bank robbery. Or outlawing bolt cutters because they can also be used to cut pad locks. At any rate, they have confiscated all of his computers and equipment and have sued him. Thankfully he’s not backing down and is going up against them in court with the support of many people that agree with him on the internet through donations for his defense.

The best part of all of this is that when the PS3 first came out it had a feature that allowed you to use other software on the system but for some reason they decided that we didn’t need it any more and removed the feature with a mandatory software update. Basically the guy modifying his PS3 is restoring a feature that was built-in when it was new. Sony did all of this is in spite of the fact that the PS3 wasactually advertised that it could be used to run other software and that many people bought their PS3 specifically for that feature. Imagine General Motors disabling the air conditioner or your radio in your car with their OnStar communication system because they didn’t think you needed it anymore lol.

And to go even further Sony demanded to know the names and addresses of any and all people that commented on the You Tube post that was put up by the guy that figured out how to do the modification. Apparently, they want to bully anyone that might have even seen the modding information regardless of whether they even used it or not. And just a few days ago they pushed the issue to the extreme by doing another police raid on a PS3 owners home in Germany and confiscated all of his computer equipment as well.

I don’t have any interest in using the mod myself but I do feel like I have the right to do whatever I please with anything and everything that I legally own. It’s MINE now and I will do whatever I feel like with it. Just as these PS3 owners do. If they use the modification for something illegal then it’s up to law enforcement to decide what should be done, NOT Sony. In case you are wondering there are many ways to use the modification that are perfectly legal. I could just imagine a car manufacturer trying to stop you from installing aftermarket parts on your car, or putting on better tires or doing any type of modifications to the engine for better performance or gas mileage. This is exactly what Sony is doing. The whole thing is just beyond silly and Sony is doing nothing but killing their reputation with their bullying tactics. I do own a PS3 and I used to have about 15 games for it, but since this has all come out I have sold off all of my games and I will not be buying anymore. Now I only use it for playing Blu-Ray dvd’s and as soon as I can I plan on selling it and getting a stand alone Blu-Ray player. Sony, consider yourself boycotted by me. You will never get another dime of my money.

A few months back I went to do some furniture shopping in a nearby town named Westwego and I ended up getting ticketed for “speeding”. I was caught by one of those hidden camera vehicles that are fully automated. It uses an aimed radar to see how fast you are going then takes a photo of your license plate. You have no idea that it happened until you get the ticket in the mail. Very sneaky.

The reason I put speeding in quotes is because I was ticketed for going 32 mph in a 25 mph zone. Going 32 miles per hour is NOT speeding, it’s more like coasting. The highway that this speed trap is on SHOULD be marked 35 mph and it is in other towns that this same highway passes through. The area is even less populated or crowded than it is in the other areas where it’s marked 35 mph and there’s also no schools in the area to justify this ridiculously low speed limit. As far as I’m concerned the whole thing is an underhanded attempt at filling the city coffers with money from the tickets. The cost of the ticket was only $40 but I intend to make sure it costs them far more than that in the long run.

What they have done is convinced me that I will never have any need to go shopping in their little town ever again. I’m taking my business elsewhere from now on. Businesses there should complain to their city hall or mayor to stop the speed trap because it’s only hurting them. If I do ever go there again it will be only to pass through to get some place else. It’s now a “no drive zone” for me lol

Hope you guys are having a great weekend!! =)

The challenges of staying warm in an 80 year old house with no insulation are wearing a bit thin. Long johns all the time, add a couple of shirts over that and a heavy flannel shirt to top it off and I feel kinda puffy. I feel like the Pillsbury Doughboy. It sure seems like we’ve had a lot more very cold days here in New Orleans than we usually do in a winter. And damp. And windy. And raining. Blah, come on spring!!

And by very cold I mean down to about 30 degrees F. What? Why are you laughing? Stop that! Sure, most of you are used to much lower temperatures, but when it’s 30 degrees here it feels much, much worse because it’s so damp. Really, really damp. And wet. Really, really wet. Did I mention damp? And most homes here don’t have very good heating, they have much better A/C. Seriously.

Ok, maybe I am just a big wuss. A big, shivering Pillsbury Doughboy wuss. =)

Sexy Sadie tagged me on Facebook the other day for a 24 question thingy. Since I am seriously Facebook challenged and couldn’t figure out how to add Notes to my page, I’ll do it here.

1. Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4 and write the sentence here:

-Always turn off the computer and unplug the power cord before installing an expansion card or damage may result. (it’s a computer motherboard manual)

2. Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What’s there?

-Empty space

3. What is the last thing you watched on TV?

-A Conan O’brien show from last week.

4. Without looking, guess what time it is: 7:30am.

5. Now look at the clock. What is the actual time? 7:38am.

6. With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?

-The gas heater.

7. When did you last step outside? What were you doing?

-I went out for a smoke about 10 minutes ago, the neighbors dog came over to greet me and get petted.

8. Before you started this survey, what did you look at?

-Looked at whether I need to make more coffee.

9. What are you wearing?

-Jeans and a t-shirt and another t-shirt and long johns and a flannel shirt and slippers.

10. Did you dream last night?

-Yes I did and it scared me into waking up, but now I can’t remember what it was about.

11. When did you last laugh?

-Last night watching Conan

12. What is on the walls of the room you are in?

I have a small non-working fireplace with a mantle and above it is a framed print of a dog painting a German Shepard portrait. Above my desk is my framed webmasters certification.

13. Seen anything weird lately?

Yes, my friend Laurie’s photo of her looking thru a hole in a door. Reminded me of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”

14. What do you think of FacebookCraze.com?

-One of the worst web site designs I have ever seen, seriously crappy.

15. What is the last film you saw?

-The Civilization of Maxwell Bright

16. If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy?

-More heat!

17. Tell me something about you that I don’t know.

-I have a quick temper

18. If you could change one thing about the world, what would you change?

-Fewer douchbags

19. Do you like to dance?

-nope

20. What do you think of the president?

-I like him and think he’s doing a great job considering that Bush handed him a pile of crap when he left.

21. Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?

-Zoe

22. Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?

-Jason

23. Would you ever consider living abroad?

-Yes.

24. What do you want to say to God when you reach the pearly gates?

-I would ask him WTF was he thinking and to stop being so damn cruel and evil.

I just did a new design for Blogs Gone Wild! with wishful thinking about an early spring as an inspiration. I also just completed a website template ported over to WordPress for Chowdaheadz so they now have a blog built in to their website. They have some pretty cool stuff for Boston sports fans, check them out!

That’s all I got, hope you guys are staying warm!! =)

I’m almost done with moving in the new house and it’s been a very trying experience to say the least. I’m elated overcome with joy that I’m finally able to get a place of my own again after nearly 5 years of illness. But there’s always something that’s gotta suck all the pleasure out of the experience. And that’s dealing with stupid utility companies!! They make you jump through hoops don’t they?

The previous tenants of the house got busted for stealing electricity so the power company came out and physically pulled the meter. How did that impact me? They wouldn’t turn the power back on at that address until they “completed an investigation” no matter that it was a new tenant with a new lease, etc. So here I am paying rent on a house for an entire week that has no A/C or lights. As hot as it was all last week, that meant no moving in! And then there was no moving in until I got my cable internet up and running, I have to be able to do my work online or the entire ordeal is pointless.

So there I sit all day long in the sweltering heat waiting for the water and gas company to come out to turn those on because you can’t get an appointment, they’ll just show up whenever they damn well please. This also meant that I was missing work waiting on these fukkers!! Grrrrr. The only ones that gave me an appointment was the cable internet and then they show up 2 hours late! As it turned out, my first night of actually sleeping in the new place was two weeks after I signed the lease because of waiting on utilities. Welcome to life in New Orleans after Katrina.

Anyway, enough with the bad, here’s the good! I love the place! It’s been great so far, the place is quiet and comfy, the central A/C will make your nipples hard as rocks, the place looks great and it’s in a nice neighborhood. I love how I have my new office set up and the small garage is a very nice bonus. So without further adieu, here’s a few photos!

Cool huh? Damn it’s expensive to set up house when you’re basically starting from scratch again. I’ve had to purchase a new fridge, a lawnmower, a washing machine, living room furniture, new desk and all the small stuff like dishes, silverware, pots and pans, cleaning supplies, etc, etc. Seems like a never ending list of stuff you never even thought of. Until you need it. LOL

I’m happy though and things couldn’t be better, this is me reclaiming my life after so many years of insane hardship and illness. It’s all finally coming together for me.

Life is damn good.

WOW, I’ve been so busy lately! I’m in the middle of moving to a new house and I’m trying to help my parents get their house back in order from Katrina as much as I can. There’s one project that’s been totally kicking my ass and that is building the shed from hell. It’s a prefab plastic 7′ x 10′ unit manufactured by Rubbermaid. It was packaged in two oversized boxes and it’s intended to replace the one that Katrina blew to smithereens two years ago.

The instructions claimed 2 hours assembly time which has to be either a typo or an outright lie. It’s more like 2 hours per panel! And there’s about 14 panels. The strangest thing is this weird looking symbol that’s been slowly materializing on the side now that it’s nearly complete, not sure what it means though…

Blogs Gone Wild has been going really strong, I recently did a complete redesign of the site and it now runs on WordPress and includes a blog for updates and site news. Something I had been wanting to do for a long time.

Free Blogger Skins has grown like crazy too, it now gets over 80,000 hits a month! It’s also in the Top 200 blogs listings on Technorati, that’s just crazy! I’ve also been doing some contract web work for a local company outside of Blogs Gone Wild, I would like to get more of that.

I just recently did another makeover for The Redneck Mommy, she wanted the conversion to WordPress that I did for her a few months back converted again into a 3 column template. I think it came out great, if you’ve never read her, she’s awfully engaging and fun to read and very, very popular.You guys really should check her out.

Here’s a few more that I’ve completed lately as well, Randy Rainbow, Sportz Chicago and Jottings From Jersey

I’ll have more on my moving to a new house next week with pictures once I get all the utilities up and running and settled in a little bit. It’s a really cool house and I can’t wait to get in.

Finally, I’ll leave you guys with a joke that made me LMAO!

I have 2 dogs & I was buying a large bag of Pal at Big W and standing inline at the check out.

A woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

On impulse, I told her that no, I was starting The Pal Diet again although I probably shouldn’t because I’d ended up in the hospital last time, but that I’d lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IV’s in both arms.

I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Pal nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry & that the food is nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again.

I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was by now enthralled with my story, particularly a guy who was behind her.

Horrified, she asked if I’d ended up in the hospital in that condition because I had been poisoned. I told her no; it was because I’d been sitting in the street licking my balls and a car hit me.

I thought one guy was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard as he staggered out the door.

Stupid bitch… why else would I buy dog food??

Hope you guys have an ass kicking weekend! =)

Anyone else sick of seeing Will Ferrell’s movie commercials every 5 minutes on seemingly every single fukkin’ channel on TV? I swear I just wanna throw something at the tube every time I see that goofy looking mug. I was practically driven insane with the Talladega Nights commercials and now it’s for the Blades of Glory movie. If I had a frikkin’ nickle for every one of those commercials I watched I would be a rich man! I think he’s only mildly funny in his movies and I actually hated him when he was on Saturday Night Live, does he really deserve so much damn promotion? Maybe they think if you’re told often enough that he’s funny, you’ll actually start believing it, like subliminal advertising or sumshit. Die bastard DIE! …or at least get off my damn TV.

Anyway, on to something that pisses me off even more! LOL I just had lunch at the local Wendy’s hamburger joint and I decided to “dine in” because I know it’s air conditioned (it’s hot as hell here) and I felt like relaxing for a few. I sit down to eat and I hear what I thought was a talk radio show on the speaker system, I know they usually play music. After a few minutes I realized I was being bombarded by a continuous loop advertisement for Direct TV.

That’s right, a continuous talk show espousing all the “wonderful” benefits of signing up for Direct TV and not only that, but how to trouble shoot your system if it ever stops working, how to use the remote, plug it in to the wall, how to clean the dish, who to call to upgrade existing service and on and on and fukkin’ ON till I wanted to kill someone. Too bad they didn’t tell me who I needed to go “postal” on to make it STOP!! BASTARDS! I started to complain to the manager but decided that it would be more fun to write about it on my blog and of course make up my own Wendys logo! Take that, bitches! Yeah, I know, griping about how lousy fast food restaurants are and how much they SUCK ASS has been a recurring theme around here. But, dammit, fast food ain’t cheap, it’s just convenient, does the service and the experience have to be so shitty?

This same Wendys had their “dining room” completely remodeled lately with all new fixtures, carpet and seating. It’s nice, but what cracks me up is they have a sign next to the building bragging about the new interior and that you should “See It Inside!” Well, DUH you stupid dumbasses, where else would we freekin’ see it, out in the damn street, …on the roof maybe? Whatever…

Now for something good! My friend Joe over at East Coast Gourmet liked his new blog that I designed for him so much that he sent me an awesome dinner of lobster tails, lobster bisque, clam chowder and crackers and even threw in a couple of desserts as a bonus! He Fedex overnighted it to me and everything was ‘tres delicious! He uses his blog to put up recipes for all kinds of tasty sounding New England delicacies, you should check it out. And of course you can order just about anything delivered from the website. Thanks Joe, it was much appreciated!

Now for something even better!! Lisa has been cracking me up for the past few weeks with a little song she sings to me, to remind me that I only have X number of chemo injections left, how cool is that! Tomorrow I take my very last injection out of a weekly series that I started last JUNE!! Yeah, this shit’s been going on forever! I guess I was whining a bit about how shitty it made me feel a few weeks ago and she started singing that I only had three more injections to try to cheer me up. Then last week it was two more, then this week it was one more. You get the picture. Tomorrow she said she’ll be singing “No More Injections” LOL Very cute! Thanks sweetheart!!

That’s all I got! Hope you guys have a killer-diller weekend!~!

I generally like Papa Johns pizza and have ordered deliveries from them in the past, there’s one just about a half mile from here. I tried to order one last week using their online service and after waiting patiently for an hour thinking it would arrive any minute, I received an email stating my order had been canceled. No explanation why, just that the order couldn’t be “processed”. I ended up getting take out from someplace else.

Last night I got a craving for pizza again after seeing a Papa Johns TV ad for some new “special” I decided to order again, this time I would call the store directly to make sure it went through. I looked up the number, called and the girl answers “Hello?” like as though it wasn’t even a business, maybe a residence. After asking “Is this Papa Johns?” She replied it was but then I got disconnected so I called right back. This time she answers “Papa Johns, can you hold?” I reply “No I got disconnected just a minute ago” at which point I get disconnected AGAIN!

By now frustration is setting in so I take a few breaths and call back, this time she asks for my order. I explain that I want that special and she tells me I’m wrong, there was no such special, the pizza I was trying to order was a few dollars more and it’s all spoken in ridiculously bad “ghetto speak” to the point where I have to repeatedly ask her what she said. She ends up arguing with me over the whole thing like I don’t know what I’m talking about. My argument got me no where.

I say, “Fine, forget it, I’ll just order something else instead” , but the moment I say the words “forget it” this stupid asshole slams the phone down on me and hangs up! WTF??? Now I was furious and I drove down there to confront someone in person, I walk in and ask for the manager. I explained to him what happened and he acted like it was no big deal! He did apologize and that he would have a “talk” with her but his tone of voice gave me the impression that he really didn’t give a shit. I was pretty angry by now, I figured at this point he would at least make some kind of attempt to please me but i got no satisfaction whatsoever.

When I got back home I decided to look if there was some way to complain online about their truly shitty services and there was a web form. A ridiculously loooong form that asked me just about everything about myself except for my frikkin’ shoe size. But what really got me was the extremely tiny space they give you to write in the actual complaint, barely room for 4 or 5 words!

Here’s my take on their stupid web form. After these 2 experiences, I seriously doubt if I’ll ever order from them again!

On the good news front, I now have only 3 more weekly chemo injections left to endure. How cool is that? I’ll finally be able to get my life back to some form of “normalcy”, whatever the hell that means. LOL After 4 years of illness I’m having a difficult time remembering what my life used to be like! I’m just happy the end is in sight and I’ll be able to move on without having so many health issues on my back! I’m not going to know how to act! Woohoo!

Here’s another one in my series on wacky statues from around the world.

Got Milk?

Have a good weekend!