Brainwashed by movies

Sometimes you watch a movie (or tv) and you just get so entrenched in it and you start actually worrying about the people or start yelling at the screen to tell them things...and then you realize, "It's just a movie, gosh!" but is it? Are movies just movies, or are some more well-made movies a kind of propaganda, trying to get social issues across to the common man?

The other night I caught most of the movie Dirty Pretty Things. It sounded interesting in the description: "A hotel desk receptionist runs a business where illegal immigrants each exchange a kidney for a passport". It made me think a lot about illegal immigration and wonder why it's such a big deal and why do governments spend so much time cracking down on it and are they better off when they find illegals and get rid of them? I don't want to sound like Vicente Fox here, but it seems like a lot of immigrants really do the jobs that legal citizens think they are too good to do. You don't see people wanting to work at McDonald's because it's fun...most people work there because they need a job and there are so many McDonalds' around. Some people work in jobs because they have no choice, and they're doing the jobs that other people who have a choice don't choose to do. Which always makes me laugh whenever I hear that the unemployment rate is going up or something, because there are plenty of jobs out there, and people just don't choose to do them because they think they are better than that.

The movie also made London seem like a terrible seedy place. The characters in the movie were dreaming about New York City and how great it is, but wait til they get here and realize that it's the same for immigrants everywhere. It just goes to show you that people are always looking for something better than what they have. I'm not saying what they had was good, but you could have done the movie based in the US and then have the people dream about going to London and I guess it would have been the same.

There's a part in the movie where some bad guy is trying to get some good guy to do something for him, and he explains the whole cycle that would happen, and it turns out that everyone is happy in the end. If everyone ends up happy, is that really wrong? Is doing bad stuff not bad anymore if it brings happiness to so many people? I guess it doesn't matter if you can deal with the fact that you did something bad (or you have no conscience), or if you don't believe that you'll be judged at some pearly gated cloud when you die.

Here's a quarter...

Whenever something lame happens to me, I have to complain to someone right away. Too many of my statements or ims recently have started with, "I hate it when..." So why do I get all in a huff when people start doing it to me?

The other day I get an im and whenever some random person who is not my friend or someone I should know ims me, I know it's trouble. People don't ever contact you to tell you how great the stuff you work on is, people only contact you when they have something to bitch about. And this random person was actually a two or three time offender, so imagine my delight when he cuts past the im chitchat and asks to CALL ME.

I never know what to say when people ask me if they can call me, I think it's rude to say, "No, you can't", so I never do...Although I tried that one time and had a valid excuse because I was working from home and d was using my phone at the time so it was impossible for me to use it, and the lady said, "Well, can't you find a way to get him off the phone?" To which I pissedoffedly said, "OK, let me just grab my cell phone and run out into my driveway so I can find a signal to call you." To which I expected her to say, "It's ok, it can wait" but instead I got, "Great! Thanks!" People call my bluff way too often. Or just have NO clue I'm bluffing.

So anyways, this guy calls me and asks where he should move his settings for some program from one machine to another. I tell him it should go under his windows user directory, and he said he tried that and it didn't work. So I ask him to try to move it under the Administrator user and I guess that worked because then he goes off on this tirade about how people running computers should never run as Administrator or root because that's what causes 99% of the virus infections and identity thefts in the computer world (not sure what the other 1% is caused by). He said that people need to learn to use these systems as they were designed and that Microsoft ruined it by allowing people total control over their computers. Can you imagine that? Every time you or your mom wants to install a new program, she'll have to take her laptop to CompUSA or something and ask them to install something because she shouldn't do it herself because she shouldn't be Administrator. Because if she was an administrator and she knew the Administrator password then why wouldn't she bother with having to logoff/logon/logoff/logon in order to install some stupid program?

I've been running as an administrator user on every computer I've ever had and I only had ONE instance of a worm-like email thing because I had the stupid preview pane open in Lotus Notes, and even that sort of thing runs out of your user directory anyway and just uses your email client to infect other people, so why would being a non-administrator help in that case? Whatever. I think even if he was right and if people started using computers the way he helped to design them back in the 1960s (because when you designed something a long time ago, it really shouldn't change EVER), people would find a way to spread viruses and worms, because the kind of people who do that aren't going to let ancient punch-card rules get in the way of their egos.

Don't let those robots defeat me

There's nothing worse than misreading people. You know, when you think someone is really great and then all of a sudden he does the jerkiest thing ever that makes you beat yourself because you thought he was so great. Or even when you think someone is really horrible and you hate his guts and then he turns around and rescues a baby bird that fell out of a tree or something.

I guess you really can't expect people to be perfect one way or another. People are always going to do different things at different times and the nicest person ever can't always be that way all the time. Unless he's a robot. But then again, you've seen what robots can do to people.

"Men turned me into a bitch!"

On Dr. Phil this morning, he's talking to women who say that men are responsible for turning them into bitches. I say that if you're a bitch, you're a bitch and no one is making you be one.

So what if he's nice?

I keep hearing this a lot in work-type situations: "Oh, he's actually a very nice guy". Usually it's in regards to something like a person being difficult to work with or slow to respond to email. I don't think being a nice person has anything to do with your capabilities at work, or in life for that matter. I mean, I'm pretty sure Jeffrey Dahmer was a nice guy.

I just can't stand that lots of people get excuses made for them. Like if someone can't do something or takes too long to figure something out, no one wants to admit that maybe the person is incapable, they just attribute it to some external force like his wife leaving him or the network being slow. Maybe I just don't like giving people the benefit of the doubt when there really is no doubt, and other people just don't like making people feel bad. I guess I don't mind making others feel bad because I'm just grumpy all the time myself anyway.

Quick! Hide the KY!

I'm not sure what happened in this house in the past, but I can only guess it was a situation like this:

[Sound of garage door opening]
"Oh my god! Your parents are home early!"
"Oh no! Hurry! Put your clothes back on!"
"Oh crap! What are we going to do with this KY?"
"Quick! Hide it in the ceiling tiles!"

TV: Helping criminals learn to cover their tracks better

The other night on Dateline, they were doing an "investigative" (read: trashy) report on "cyber molesters", people who join chat rooms for the sake of meeting under ages kids to find where they live and to go and have sex with them. They caught like a hundred molesters in some stakeout house that they rented, and had some lady pose as a 13 year old boy to lure people inside. I'm not sure how the molesters fell for it, seeing as the "boy" had boobs and bra straps, although they really didn't get to see the "boy", because as soon as the molesters showed up inside the house, the Dateline reporter dude popped out of nowhere and started interviewing them. It was kind of comical actually. I felt like those molesters were pretty stupid, as they didn't seem like they had a clue that they were on TV, since that this guy standing in front of them asking them interview-like questions, was wearing a microphone in plain sight. It made me sad that people could be so sick, but it made me sicker that I sat there watching the whole thing play out on TV. Was it really necessary for them to show all of that on TV? What did I learn from sitting there watching these dumb people get busted and try to lie their way out of it?

I think it really made me realize that if I were a molester and I didn't want to get caught by Dateline NBC or some other investigative news show, I should do better to cover my tracks, or check out houses before I go to them, or actually have kids meet me for a frappuccino some day before I decide whether it's safe to proceed to the next molestation level. The stupid thing about the whole report was that they blamed the whole increase in child molesters on the fact that people have access to the internet 24/7. I think that's definitely an enabler for faster molestation-turnaround, but I don't think having internet access 24/7 turns people in cyber stalkers. I think people are just trying to blame technology for something that they can't really explain, except to say that maybe people are just messed up and there's no cure for certain psychoses and maybe the best thing is for parents to be aware and keep their children safe. I'll bet you one of these days some right-wing senator is going to draw up some bill to stop 24/7 internet access to prevent people from becoming child molesters. Maybe if we turn off the internet from like 3pm to 10pm (the times when kids are most likely to be on the internet), we'll stop those child predators for good!

I'm starting to think that a lot of TV shows, especially news programs, exist for the sake of educating criminals further so they won't repeat the same idiotic mistakes as other criminals. Next week on 48 Hours Mystery they are going to show some murderer who got caught because they found on his computer that he searched Google for "how to murder someone and not get caught". I think it's funny how people can be so dumb to do that, but the lesson learned really is to find a place that has internet access but no special login ids that can be traced back to you, go and sit down, have a cup of coffee, put on your gloves, do your Google search, copy your results down (on a piece of paper that you take with you), clear the browser cache, and leave, without fear that the library or coffee shop you're at actually has security cameras and can map what person was sitting at what computer and searching on what at what time. I was really curious to see what kinds of results you get when you do that search, but I was afraid that what if someone I knew ended up getting murdered and I was one of the suspects, and they found that search in my cache? You can try it though, and let me know.