my day, a perspective...

at 4 am

here it is, 4 o'clock in the morning, and i feel compelled to share a little about my day... or night, i should say.

why my night? well, faceless asker of questions great and good, it's simple. my day was acceptable, my night, however, was a literal disaster!

when i left this very blog, my day continued in an un assuming sort of way... i had some lunch, prepared for work, and by 2:30 in the afternoon, i was on my way to the store. i arrived just before scheduled, punched in and was immediatley sent to help a customer. this isn't unusal... it's the holiday season in retail.

all was alright, and i was even prepared, you see, i was scheduled to work until well passed closing, midnight to be exact, because it's easiest to rearrange entire sections of my department when not bothered with pesky customers (arguably the worst part of ANY job...).

while busy, the night continued fine, until after closing, when i began work on pulling down a display case. shortly after 11 pm, i sliced my finger open on a thin piece of metal meant to hold the front frame of the case to the shelving above.

i didn't realize the problem for several minutes, when i noticed that my finger was numb, and that my hand was wet. i looked for the source of this unusal damp / numb combination to find that i was bleeding profusely. after washing my hand, i saw that what initally looked like a mere scratch was actually a fairly deep gash on my right forefinger.

i tightly wrapped a band-aid™ around it, and got back to work. it seemed fine for a while, though numb, but after about 20 minutes it began to throb. terribly. shortly after that i began to feel a sort of vertigo, a light headedness that progressed to the point where i just fell down (well, i sort of plopped on my ass, it seemed preferable to falling on my face). this continued to come in waves over the next several hours, and then began to mix with feelings of nausea.

long story short... i got a boo-boo and it sucked.

now, the scheduled end of my shift, midnight if you recall, had long since come and gone. it was nearly 3 am when we finally left. (sarah and i). we had filled out the required osha paperwork, noting that i had not sought medical attention, but that i might should i feel any worse.

trying to fight a feeling a near drunkenness (it's the only way i can describe it). i piloted my little car home. reveling in the near desertion of roads at 3 am on a thursday morning, i moved along at a decent clip. it was the last stretch of residential street where i cross a creek (elm creek), that something worse happened.

i bumped into bambi.

no, i mean that literally.

a doe (bambi's mom), darted out in front of me, and i hit the brakes and swerved to avoid her, as i watched her gate off into the woods on my left, my peripheries picked out something else moving. it was a much younger doe (bambi, or she bambi is you will), who felt embiggened (see: the simpson for this reference) by her mother's safe passage and attempted the same feat.

instead, the front of my car impacted the middle of her body at around 15 miles per hour. luckily i was still braking, because if i hadn't, she would have most certainly suffered more than getting knocked on her side into the street.

by the time i got out of my car, she was already getting up and half limping into the same break in the trees her mother had leapt into... i can only assume that she's alright... and to my relief, so was i, and my car.

i drove home... it's been a long day.


a note on virtual taxation

this one's been floating around for a little while, but howstuffworks.com just did a little piece on it that i think has some good explanation. it helps to seperate the truth from editorial (which i'm now probably going to re-add) in most of the stories floating around this great internet rumor-mill.

Does the irs really want your WoW gold?

the short answer? probably. the long answer, however, is a little more complex. the article does a great job of explaining how we got to this point. and helps to expand on 'why' it's even being discussed:

...theoretically speaking, for tax purposes, anything that has a real dollar value is taxable once it changes hands.

basically it's like everything else in this country of ours... if it's worth something, the government wants their cut... bottom line.

the article discusses a lot of things that parrallel this phenominon and why it might be more likely than some people think. basically, they've started taxing things before that seemed outside of their perview, they'll likely do it again.

something else interesting the article mentions, and no matter how many times i hear it... if you steal something, you have to report it as taxable icome when filing for the year in which you stole it, according to IRS tax code part 525.

SONY SUCKS!!!!

alright, you may not know this, but i hate sony.

i can already hear people's heads bobbling and gears working.. the invariable sounds of 'sony... guh?!?!'

the exact reason WHY i hate sony. they truly seem to have one thing going for them: name recognition.

they haven't made a GOOD product in over 2½ decades. "but, playstation! TV's! cameras! the vaio!????" you might ask. you're right, those are things they make. that doesn't make them good.

most people, when they buy sony, do it because they know the name, and are content with owning a product that will likely fail within 2 years of buying it, because, they know the name, and everyone else knows the name, and everyone knows the name means they paid more for it.

sony does not make good products. that's the end of the story. yet, if that's the end of the story, there's a sad epilogue that accompanies it.

sony makes shit products that all but require you to buy more of their shit products just so that everything works. in terms of sheer proprieterity, they are #1, even ahead of apple (who are actually licensing more companies as third party vendors for their products), and microsoft (oh yes, i went there!). let me expand, if you buy a sony product, you are buying something that contains components made almost exclusively by sony. that means that if company X makes a component, and that's all they make, and it would be cheaper for sony to pay for the license and include it, they will almost always instead make the component themselves, thereby raising the end cost of their product, and increasing the chace that when the (not better component) fails, you will have to get the replacement from them, and likely have it repaired by them. ka-ching! sony makes the money baby!

next, they are the number one company for ridiculous trickery! i'm serious. they know something, and they knew it very early on. have you ever noticed, when driving at night, that blue glow from peoples windows? they are clearly watching a television. but why blue? it's nearly ALWAYS blue, isn't it? the human eye percieves blue more readily than any other color in the spectrum. sony's response? crank the blue levels to a near eye shattering point on their televisions and monitors, then, when am unassuming customer is drawn toward it, they'll say... man, sony makes a nice looking TV. this applies to their brightness as well... every product they offer is usually 1.5 - 2.5 times brighter than their competitor, again, so it will stand out in the show room. of course this is pointless, because when you get that tv home, you are watching under very different conditions... but it doesn't matter... they have your money now. oh, and you'll need their special mp3 player and camera that uses their memory stick products so you can see the pictures and listen to music on that tv through their 'magic gate' technology.

also... their tvs have killed more little kids than any other. (ok, i don't really know about that, but there was a point in time that a few kids were crushed by the 40" XBRs because it was a very front heavy tube (duh!) and the proprietary stand for it was VERY poorly constructed, kids died in circuit city stores people!!!)

so, their latest scam involves thinly veild group of poorly done youtube 'viral videos'. luckily, it was uncovererd quickly by the goons at somethingawful.com. and has cause many people to just shake their heads in utter frustration. of course, they'll probably still by sony products... because they know the name.

i really enjoyed tycho's well worded take on the subject, and rather than compete with his incedible skills at the wordplay, i encourage you to just read it...

so good. or bad, perhaps.

man, that was a lot of build up, wasn't it?

in conclusion

watch the latest frank miller's 300 trailer. the beauty of this thing... man, the only metaphor i can come up with is: an oil painting in action. just marvelous!

i'm very tired, and going to bed... i don't believe i will be working tomorrow.

goodnight (morning) interwebs...