Smiley faces for everybody!

Want to hear something cheerful?

Most of the stuff that I do is a test of a guy's cheerfulness... as a teacher I struggle with lumps who don't seem to take pleasure in learning the mysteries of boolean algebra or how to factor polynomials. The bail bond business (the money grubbing part of my existence) is mostly filled with folks who have screwed up in some dramatic and destructive way. And the work that I do as a juvenile probation officer with DJJ is often rewarding, but is equally disturbing because too often I have to deal with some unfixable problem. How can you fix a kid's future if he is a Folk Nation gang member who has been classified as SHO/CAP (serious habitual offender/capital offender) after he "accidentally" put a gun in an opposing gang member's mouth and pulled the trigger just because the guy has on a different colored do-rag on his crappy head? Duh!

All of which supports my general premise that we should not attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

But then something comes sneaking along and cheers me up... even if the redhead thinks that I'm being nutsoid and my daughter thinks that I'm being certifiably goofey.

I just upgraded my isp service to the "accelerated" service at Hawk Communications. There's a great big $30 difference betwen their high speed 56K service and their "regular" 56K service. Big whoop you say. Well.... yeah. What the system does is maintain a huge cache and does these global includes as the pages are picked up by the browser. Like I said... big whoop. But... but.... the new way is an increase in speed by a factor of 3.5 right off the bat and creeps up to a factor of 9 after you've uploaded pages out of the cache on repetition. So I'm smiling and cheerful. I can be glum about all the negative crap that I have in my day to day world, but when I get on the magic carpet around my website and this blog, the thing has really delivered the goods, without me getting raped by Bell South. I have steadfastly refused to pay for the outrageous ripoff of DSL service from those rapists at the phone company. They have the attitude that they have the only game in town (they think!) so they can screw the consumer. They're not even remotely ashamed of themselves. Crooks.

But lookie here... the American Free Enterprise system strikes again! Ah ha... definitely a better mouse trap. The phone company can fold their DSL over and stick it where the monkey hides the nuts. This is great.

There now. Don't you feel better too?

Bob