random bits of this and that

Bush Begins Preparations For Nation’s Final Year – let’s start things off with a bit of humour – or is it?

Conservative pastor urges buying Microsoft stock to fight its gay rights efforts – a black man uses race and his position as a pastor to encourage white people to discriminate against gays?

Iraqi Soldier Who Killed U.S. Troops is a Hero in Iraq – what do you expect? the US troops were acting like assholes, and they got what they deserve for a change!

Adobe, Omniture in hot water for snooping on CS3 users – yet another reason not to use adobe products… it’s too bad that adobe went from making one of the best page layout programs in existence to the microsoft-clone that they are currently…

Continue reading random bits of this and that

hybrid elephant update

i paid (heh) my state taxes today… which is to say, i filed my tax return, but i didn’t owe anything. i’m not really sure how that works, because i actually did around $1,200 worth of “taxable” business (i.e. that which isn’t mailing stuff to people who are out of state), but i’m not complaining – if i could complain, it would be because the lady from the department of revenue i talked to on the phone about how to correct the errors in my tax return was wrong, but i don’t know that yet, and i’m hoping that everything is as cool as she assured me it was. i also did about $1,100 worth of mailing stuff to people who are out of state. this year’s inventory came to $1,066.89, and this year’s filled orders came to $2,454.85 which is about twice as much as it was last year, although about $1,200 of that was stuff that didn’t cost me anything to produce, and i didn’t have to buy anything in order to be able to fill their orders. i’ll never figure out why this business of print brokering actually makes money, but as long as it does, i’ll keep doing it.

shortly after i had the irritating, irrational phone conversation with the lady at paypal yesterday, i received the following email from “teresa”, who is one of the uncountable number of paypal agents i have talked to in the past:

I went in and tried to request a debit card to your po box and I
received an error I believe this error was due to the length of your
name. I have escalated this to the debit card processor for review and
you should receive a notification within 24-48 hours. I do apologize for
the inconvenience this may have caused you.

i don’t know if teresa was the person i was talking to yesterday, or before that, and i don’t know whether or not the lady i was talking to yesterday has anything to do with this whole fiasco, but it appears that i am, once again, waiting for 24 to 48 hours for a mysterious email from some unknown body that either will, or will not tell me that i am, or am not eligible for a paypal debit card. just to make sure, i actually purchased $20 worth of swastika jewelry from ManWoman yesterday, so it’s possible that all this uproar is for nothing anyway.