Posting this link to explain to people why I detest the Red Cross and their business practices. Have you noticed how, if you are a blood donor, that they call you constantly with the zeal of a deranged telemarketer? You think they do this because for some holy, altruistic drive to help people?

You are delusional. They are doing it to make money. That’s their drive, to fill their pockets.

I could go on and on about this topic but I think you should do the research yourself. Spend 5 minutes with Google and see if you don’t come to despise them as I do.

To get you started I will list a few links for you to peruse at your leisure.

Bad Blood

Billion Dollar Greed

Ok, this is going to sound a tad cynical but for the life of me I can’t figure out why some people do this. Before Christmas I didn’t notice this but since, I got both Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World Tour over the holidays,  I can now tell the difference between someone who is just checking the game out at one of the demo units in stores and someone who is apparently trying to show people their “mad video game guitar/drum skills!”

Now, for the younger generation I’ll cut them some slack. They’re young and excited about the game and I don’t see anything wrong with that. Now for the the older crowd, those 18 and older, you just seem like a huge tool sitting at these demo units and playing some Bon Jovi or eighties metal song like you own it. I watch these people and I feel like they really think they are the original bad ass because they can play a video game representation of a song using a toy guitar. Don’t get me wrong, the games are pretty fun but there is a difference between having a little fun at home with your friends and putting on a concert for the public at your local Best Buy. It’s even worse, like the goof ball in the picture above, when you set the difficulty level up a notch or two and then play the song like so badly you start looking around to see who is watching and then set the game difficulty back to easy so as not to blow your cool image.

Seriously folks, save it for your living rooms.

Well, I learned a couple of always valuable lessons today. Always, always, back up your WP tables. Second lesson learned, while posting from your iPhone may be convenient, managing your WP blog from your iPhone not so much. While attempting to get the WP iPhone app to work I made a test post. After a few unsuccessful tries and a little tweaking, I got it to post to the blog. However, when I tried to deleted this test post from my blog using the browser on my iPhone, I deleted all the blog entries I have made since the end of June.

How did I manage to do this you ask? Well, when you’re not zoomed in on the page on your iPhone and try to click a link, you’re liable to click just about any link. First I inadvertently clicked the “select all” radio button and then when I attempted to uncheck it I hit the delete button that is just above that. It then deleted all the posts there were checked. Typically delete conformation buttons annoy the hell out of me but this one time I think I wouldn’t have minded it.

At first I was extremely irritated but then I tried to remember what I had blogged about in the last three weeks and other than the post I made yesterday I couldn’t remember any of them and figured if they weren’t that memorable then I didn’t really lose any thing now did I? If I don’t remember them then whom ever might be reading this blog surely wouldn’t so the world was no better off than before.

Lessons re-learned.

Oh please, let Saturday be the last I ever see of this crank. Things are looking up already.

Well, I finally got tired of Internet Explorer. So I blocked it from viewing my site at all. That’s right, IE users will have to find some other site to visit and to be honest I won’t miss them at all. When someone using the IE browser attempts to visit RoamingGecko they get redirected to a page that lets them know that they will have to use another browser if they want to view content on RoamingGecko. I got tired of having to design my site so that it displayed correctly in IE when it displays just fine in everything else. And I mean everything else! It’s basically about numbers. The statistics tell me I am blocking 30% of web surfers from my site, well so be it. It’s downright ignorant to shackle yourself to designing a site because one browser refuses to adapt current web standards. I’d tell Billy where he could stick his web browser but I am trying to keep this site one that you don’t have to read after 9 o’clock at night.

]]> http://www.roaminggecko.com/2008/05/20/internet-explorer-no-more/feed/ 0 http://www.roaminggecko.com/2008/05/12/wow-new-low-for-clinton/ http://www.roaminggecko.com/2008/05/12/wow-new-low-for-clinton/#comments Mon, 12 May 2008 23:55:18 +0000 Gage Gecko http://www.roaminggecko.com/2008/05/12/wow-new-low-for-clinton/ I’m not making this up, you can check it for yourself. In her latest Obama bashing campaign ad, her campaign has just pasted their own title over a news article that is about something entirely different than the headline suggests. Of course, here is the link so you can check it yourself.

http://www.hillaryclinton.com/video/182.aspx

Check this one out fast, as soon as this gets around I am sure she will have it taken down.

clipped from journals.democraticunderground.com

Ok, someone give me their take on the whole “Big Box Debate” because from my perspective it just seems like a bunch of selfish property owners and their “not in my backyard” attitude. I find it very hard to believe these people have never shopped at Walmart and they were fine with it being near someone else’s home in Christiansburg but now that someone wants to build it near their homes here in Blacksburg, suddenly it’s “Walmart is the Evil Empire” and “they will destroy our town!” Very convenient, is it not? I love that about these armchair activists. They were completely content to do nothing until it personally effected them. I never heard these people talking about the evils of Walmart before they decided to build one here in Blacksburg.

Another thing. Has anyone in Blacksburg taken a minute while in this part of town and stopped and really took a good look at this project? It’s huge! I took some photos this afternoon and my first thought was what difference did one big box store matter in the grand scope of things when it would be next to this sprawling complex? Take a look at the site plan above and the pictures I put up on Flickr below.

So, I ask you? Is this about Walmart being an evil corporation? Is this about allowing a big store into the town of Blacksburg? Or is it something else entirely that I am missing? Personally, I don’t have a problem with big box stores. They sell me products I want or need at a cheaper price than smaller “Mom & Pop” places can. If I save more of my hard earned money do you really think I am going to miss the Mom & Pop stores? Here’s a prime example. Across the street from the proposed Walmart site is Eats Natural Foods Co-Op, the classic Mom & Pop operation. They will sell me a bag of pre-popped popcorn for $3.30. I can get the very same bag of popcorn across the street for $1.00 from Kroger. Where would you buy the popcorn? Granted, organic food store prices are ridiculously high, but that’s another story. To some degree it still comes down to the size of their respective operations.

To offer us these cheaper prices Walmart outsources to third world countries because they employ a cheaper work force and people say this is bad for the US and the Chinese worker. Has anyone asked the Chinese worker their opinion? They just might like their new factory job making dust pans and it wasn’t a job I was doing here in the US. Yes, I know. Now I am being selfish but then again I aspired to a little more than a factory job making dust pans when I finished my schooling.

Ok, I have been ranting long enough. I want to hear someone else’s opinion. Please enlighten me to the real story behind all this hub bub. “The Great Big Box Debate“. I’m all ears.

You could paint Jesus as a homosexual and I would be a little irritated but I wouldn’t use it as an excuse to kill you. There is something fundamentally wrong with that part of the world. Some times I wish we could just build a wall and not have anything to do with the middle east. Before you criticize that statement, keep in mind they would probably welcome the wall.