OwlManAtt’s Blog

Over the past fifteen years, various people have decided that it would be a good idea / funny to fuck with OwlManAtt. Generally speaking, this is a really bad idea.

Why? Because I’ll ruin your life. Like your job? Tough, because I just got your ass fired. Happy with your fortune? Oops, did I just send the SEC after you because you’ve been fucking around with insider information? Heh, guess I did!

You get the idea.

Now, the latest idiot to try and shaft me was a CT Transit bus driver. For those of you who don’t know, CT Transit is the company that operates the public buses.

You see, the bus that I take, the G, is supposed to stop at the airport on request. This adds about two minutes to the total time to get from one end of the route to the other, so it’s no big deal. Myself and two to three other people get off there daily, because it’s closer to where we live.

Now, this week, some woman was driving. Just another driver, whatever, right? Wrong.

On Tuesday, I went up to her, and very politely asked her to stop at the airport.

What does she do?

She proceeds to flip out because I have enough balls to make such an outrageous and totally unreasonable request. She bitches and moans about me ‘being too loud’ (which is laughable, because I stood in front of one of the cameras for the entire trip, so if I had wanted to press the issue and had the tape pulled up, she would have looked pretty stupid), and that we couldn’t get off there unless we were taking a plane. So I said whatever, got off, and went home.

At this point, you’re probably gasping. Owl let something like that go? Nay, I had a plan for vengence. I should execute you for doubting me.

So, I get home. The first thing I do is pull up the CT Transit customer support form. I fire off a request for information regarding that airplane requirement she pulled out of her ass. About an hour later, some high-ranking bus official responds with a request for information about the time, date, and driver. I provide it, but by then the bus company is closed for the night.

So, during Algebra on the next day, I check my email. Sure enough, I’ve got a reply.

————-Begin Paste————-
Dear Mr. Evans,

Thank you for providing the additional information.

We will speak to our operator informing her of the correct route and
schedule for Tweed upon request. Taking a plane is not a requirement for a
request stop. We will post a notice for all bus operators clarifying this
situation.

We do apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you, and again
thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.

V. Ferguson
Asst. Supervisor,CSC
———End Paste———-

PWNED, BITCH! Armed with this information, I board the bus half an hour later. The bitch driver is there and looking daggers at me and the others. I sit down in front of a camera and stare at it for the next twenty minutes with a cheshire cat grin. I was scaring the living shit out of people, but damnit, victory was at hand.

So, we get to Townsend & Fort Hale road, which is where I normally get up to ask the driver to stop at the airport. I stand up, still grinning ear to ear, and approach the driver. Our conversation went like this.

Me: Excuse me mam, will you please stop at the airport?
Her: You takin’ a plane?
Me: No, mam.
—She is quiet for fifteen seconds. Her last question was probably her trying to determine if I knew I’d won or not yet. There was a chance that I hadn’t heard back from CT Transit yet, and she was banking on that. During these fifteen seconds, I stand silently, grinning at her.—
Her: They told me I had to let yalls off at the airport. But if yalls get blowed [sic] up or somethin’, it ain’t my fault.’
Me: Thank you.

And with that, I turn and return to my seat amongst cheers from the crowd. Check and mate, bitch, looks like I won.

When it came time to get off, I made sure to give her a hearty wave and a loud ‘Thank you!’, just to rub salt into the wound.

Hey, I never said I was a nice person.

And that, readers, is why you do not fuck with an Att. They never lose.

Ever.

No kids, this isn’t an update. I’m just tossing down a link to help the googlebombing against online poker.

So, here it is: Online poker.

What the fuck? OwlManAtt is looking into a mp3 player? Has the world gone CRAZY?

Why yes, the world HAS gone crazy, and I AM looking into mp3 players. It was quite nice of you to ask.

As odd as it sounds, I have finally decided that I have enough music to justify buying one of these little bastards. However, I still don’t need all that much in the line of storage space.

So, I pulled up Amazon.com, and began browsing. I noted that Amazon sorts the music players by storage capacity, so I sized up my music folder. It comes to a grand total of 207mb, meaning a 256mb player would be perfect for me. I probably won’t carry all of the songs, but if I do, I’ll still have room for about a dozen more songs.

Originally, I was looking for a player that supported Ogg Vorbis. These seem to be few and far between. It won’t be much trouble to re-rip/encode the twelve or so songs that I have as .oggs, so just mp3 support is fine.

I looked through the choices for awhile, and narrowed it down to two players. Both seemed to be perfect. One was from Creative (the guys behind the best damn soundcards in the universe. Soundcards that I’ve been using since the days of doom2.), the other from SanDisk (they’re famous for making little memory cards for cameras).

They were both sleek looking, and (as it seems), both are supported under Linux as an every-day mass storage device. So I took a look at the price.

The SanDisk beat out the Creative easily. A twenty dollar difference is A LOT when you’re piss broke. So I now want the SanDisk thing, it’s only about seventy bucks.
See? Woohoo. I want one.

The worst decision of this decade has just been made by the marketoids at Microsoft HQ.

Microsoft to Offer Patches to U.S. Govt. First.

That’s right kids, read it and weep. Microsoft is either putting our national security (think nuclear missile systems, communications, etc) at risk by giving the Air Force UNTESTED, ROUGH BETA PATCHES, or they’re giving them final patches and then delaying them FOR ONE MONTH (30 days!) before giving them to the rest of the world.

You know, the rest of the world. The bot-netted zombie boxen. The spyware-riddled Aunt Elane’s box. The boxen of forigen governments. The majority of the world.

Yes, folks, that very same majority that needs the patches a HELL of a lot more than government security specialists who harden their systems and prevent them from sending spam to everyone and their dog.

And if they’re giving the government patches a month before other governments get them, they’re giving the US plenty of time to develop exploits to take advantage of the patched holes. This decision THREATENS THE SOVEREIGNTY OF OTHER NATIONS.

I ph33r.

Uberuser moves into a new house. Hilarity ensues.