Charlie has Been Sold Out. Anybody Understand Corpspeak?

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Kirk M

Charlie Tuna sold out Poor Charlie, he was sold out to the Koreans along with the StarKist brand when Del Monte decided to unload their seafood division to the Korean Dongwon Group companies for $363 million dollars.

Okay, fine then. Another American standard is sold out, such is life. By what I get out of the article is that Del Monte has a lot of debt to get rid of and this sale is going to help do just that but what really irks me is that the CEO of Del Monte can’t just come out and say it. Listen to this load of corpspeak will ya’.

Charlie Gets The Hook: StarKist Goes Korean – Forbes.com

“This divestiture will immediately help improve our margin structure, eliminate a source of earnings volatility and reduce our debt leverage,” said Rick Wolford, Del Monte’s chairman and chief executive officer.

“Given the unique dynamics of our seafood business, including its heavy dependence on a single input cost and participation in a comparatively lower growth category, StarKist was no longer an ideal fit for Del Monte, given our sharpened strategic focus going forward,” he continued.

Holy shades of Dilbert, Batman, that’s as bad as being politically correct. If you have to sell off the top selling brand of tuna in the USA to satisfy your debts otherwise you’ll end up in deep doo-doo then just say so, don’t insult my intelligence while you’re beating around several acres of bushes with your over wordy, non-informative explanation.

(yes, they allow you to embed strips

)

And that’s my rant for the day. Thank you very much.

Organic, fur bearing, can fed, anti-blogging device

Posted on June 28, 2008 by Kirk M

anti-blogging device

Need I say more?

Bush Buying Time for Big Oil?

Posted on June 28, 2008 by Kirk M

This has got to be the most transparent move that the current Administration has pulled yet.

The Bush administration has put a two-year stop to solar energy projects on federal lands in Arizona and other Western states while it studies their environmental impact.

Source: Bush administration halts solar energy projects on federal lands: Phoenix Business Journal

Yeah right. This is the same Administration that’s pushing domestic oil drilling in some of the last true wilderness areas left in this country regardless of the environmental impact but their worried about the impact of these solar energy projects?

If this isn’t a ploy to obtain more time for pushing domestic oil drilling then we’re all living in the Matrix and I’m Morpheus. At this point I wouldn’t doubt in the least that this current “oil crisis” was purposely manufactured by our own government in order to further convince Congress and the American people that domestic oil drilling is the only solution.

I must be in a bad mood or something but this sounds like a whole lot of BS to me.

An Icon of an Age Passes On

Posted on June 25, 2008 by Kirk M

George Carlin, the originator of the original Seven Dirty Words (upped to eleven as time went on if I remember correctly), the one comedian that’s followed me throughout the my entire life–is gone.

This is the end of an age indeed.

He broke all the rules and made us laugh while he did it. He showed us that it was alright to be ourselves, showed us that we shouldn’t take life so seriously, not to sweat the cheapshit so to speak.

He was “Al Sleet” the Hippy Dippy Weatherman, playing his sax (badly), predicting never ending rain for the Netherlands, increasing dark towards evening and showing nothing but lows all over the country while stating “…what this country needs is a good high“.

So goodbye to an old and dear friend. You’ve had me laughing all the way.

Note: one of the most impressive routines I’ve ever seen or listened to him do was his “I’m a Modern Man” routine at the beginning of his “Life is Worth Losing” HBO special which I was lucky enough to find online. “Modern Man” is the opening bit of the show so you won’t have long to wait once you start watching it. You’ll probably have to listen to it more than once to catch all the cliches.

Losing my Mind Again-Upgrading to 2.6 beta 1

Posted on June 25, 2008 by Kirk M

Yup, it’s that time again. My absolute addiction to using beta software has left me no choice but to once again update my WordPress install to an official beta 1 release of the upcoming version which in this case is WordPress 2.6.

Things are libel to get very wonky here during the upgrade but as long as the usual morons on my shared server don’t decide to try to upload several hundred photos to their gallery or send out 1000′s of mass mailings (as they’re not supposed to do), the upgrade will be done in less than a half hour.

Green Mountain Geek, my new outlet for my T/G (Tech/Geek) psychological problem has been running 2.6 trunk builds for the last week or so without any problems and has been already updated. So far I’m loving the new features.

Okay then. Like I said, things might go wonky but it’s just me doing satisfying my horrible craving for MORE!

Update (shortly after this post was published): Yessir! The morons are up to it again and have slowed the server to a bloody crawl once again. My host keeps kicking them off and they just never seem to get it. Thing’s will run fine for months on end and then there will be a few weeks of non-performance when the latest batch of numskulls sign on and think they own the whole server.

Please stand by…

From the Mail-One for the Irish

Posted on June 23, 2008 by Kirk M

I got a set of 4 good Irish jokes in the mail today and I thought the first one was the best and although I’m sure it’s most likely an old one as far as my Irish friends and fellow bloggers are concerned, I thought it was pretty good myself. So with all my respect to ya’, here ya’ go:

Six retired Irishmen were playing poker in O’Leary’s apartment when Paddy Murphy loses $500 on a single hand, clutches his chest, and drops dead at the table. Showing respect for their fallen brother, the other five continue playing standing up.

Michael O’Conner looks around and asks, “Oh, me boys, someone got’s to tell Paddy’s wife. Who will it be?” They draw straws. Paul Gallagher picks the short one. They tell him to be discreet, be gentle, don’t make a bad situation any worse.

“Discreet?” exclaims Gallagher, “I’m the most discreet Irishmen you’ll ever meet. Discretion is me middle name. Leave it to me.”

Gallagher goes over to Murphy’s house and knocks on the door. Mrs. Murphy answers, and asks what he wants. Gallagher declares, “Your husband just lost $500, and is afraid to come home.”

“Tell him to drop dead!”, says Murphy’s wife.

“I’ll go tell him.” says Gallagher.Six retired Irishmen were playing poker in O’Leary’s apartment when Paddy Murphy loses $500 on a single hand, clutches his chest, and drops dead at the table. Showing respect for their fallen brother, the other five continue playing standing up.

Michael O’Conner looks around and asks, “Oh, me boys, someone got’s to tell Paddy’s wife. Who will it be?” They draw straws. Paul Gallagher picks the short one. They tell him to be discreet, be gentle, don’t make a bad situation any worse.

“Discreet?” exclaims Gallagher, “I’m the most discreet Irishmen you’ll ever meet. Discretion is me middle name. Leave it to me.”

Gallagher goes over to Murphy’s house and knocks on the door. Mrs. Murphy answers, and asks what he wants. Gallagher declares, “Your husband just lost $500, and is afraid to come home.”

“Tell him to drop dead!”, says Murphy’s wife.

“I’ll go tell him.” says Gallagher.

I swear I can even hear the accents and see the expressions on the characters faces.

Back to Web 1.0 for Cash?

Posted on June 23, 2008 by Kirk M

Liz Liz Strauss recently asked another thought provoking bloggy type question called; “$10MIL, Luxury Home, Would You Go Back to Web 1.0?” and of course I just had to answer that one. And no, I’m not going to tell you what my answer was, if you wish to find out then head over to the post and you’ll find it there and while you’re at it, why don’t you leave your own answer as well?

Web 1.0 refers to the state of the World Wide Web, and website design style before the Web 2.0 craze, and included most websites in the period between 1994 and 2004. It is important to note that “Web 1.0″ is a retronym. That is to say that it has been retroactively named only after the introduction of the term “Web 2.0″, and has very loosely defined boundaries. For the most part websites were a strictly one-way published media, similar to the Gopher protocol that came before it.

So would you do it? Would you take the money and accept that the fact that the Internet was just a one-way street for you, a read-only situation? Let her know what you think and I’ll be over there myself, looking forward to seeing your answer.

Best Day at Just Thinkin’-June 17th, 2008

Posted on June 19, 2008 by Kirk M

So what does it take to achieve the best day ever as far as unique visitors go? How about a single post about a certain popular Firefox extension and another on how to disable extension compatibility in Firefox? Yup that’s it; 1852 visitors with only a 50% bounce rate on Firefox Download-frickin’-Day–1783 visitors on the extension post and nearly all the rest on the “How to disable extension compatibility” post and the my usual, non-tech content bringing up the rear.

Okay, I’m not really as disturbed as I sound but still…

*sigh*

I shouldn’t complain any. All those folks looking in and obviously finding the info they needed albeit it was for the beta builds of Firefox 3.0 and not the final (it still applied though). So here’s a big thanks to everyone who made up those 1852 visits and a bigger thanks to the 50% that actually stayed and looked around some. My daily visitors should shrink back to the usual 30 to 50 a day here real shortly.