I’ve always been told that people in California are either fruits or nuts. I want to say thank you to this Californian for confirming this trueism. A Californian woman is nuts about your nuts, or whats in them to be exact. I had no idea that your popluation yogurt could be so valuable. Something that’s so easy for us to come by, can now grant you two tickets to the world series. I’m not so sure I’d give up my guys for a sporting event, sure I’d give em out freely to some random at a bar, but she’s not intent on starting a family who roots for the Giants.

I was really, really, really not wanting to write anything about the DC Sniper. This guy is craving the attention. Not that SpittingLlamas.com is high-brow media read by millions, but the principle I was holding onto was just not to mention it at all.

But then I realized something about the DC Sniper. He’s a little, insignificant man. He finds his power by terrorizing people and holding or withholding them to certain behaviors out of fear. That’s where his power is held.

Then I realized something else. I’ve worked for snipers before. Some managers are snipers in the sense they hold their power over you with fear tactics. Instead of guiding you as an employee, mentoring your progress as you learn, and watching out for you as your boss, they use the fear that they are your boss. They don’t garner your respect - they force you to respect their position. They have to do it that way because they know they can’t win your respect with their intelligence or personality. About five years ago I worked for a guy that was a total ass. He had actually been hired in after me, replacing my old boss who moved on. The first day he started he walked up to me and said, “[The president of the company] said I could fire you if I wanted and hire a staffer I wanted, but I decided I’m not going to do that because I don’t want to go through the trouble of the hiring process right now.” Thanks. That’s what I want hanging over my head. I was this close ->

Maybe some of you amateur psychologists out there can help me on this one. I had a strange dream last night and while the content isn’t necessarily something that is recurring, the general nature of the dream happens quite often.

What will happen is that something funny will happen in my dream, and I will laugh very heartily. Often, I end up laughing in my sleep, quite loud, sometimes waking up my wife. I have read that laughing like that in your dream means that you are suppressing some sort of worry or concern.

But the weird part about this one was that I was dreaming about myself dreaming and laughing in my sleep. So, in my dream, I was camping out with some buddies and they got mad because I kept waking them up with my laughing. Several times in this dream would I fall asleep and dream within dream about something funny.

Turns out that I was laughing in real life as well. So, I ended up laughing in my sleep at something that I was dreaming about laughing at in my sleep. It’s like being in two dimensions at one time. A little disconcerting, and it sort of has my head in a tailspin this morning.

Sure, I use Windows every day, but after updating a server with a Microsoft “critical” security update yesterday, I’ve had it. This “critical” update ending up blowing away many of the user passwords on the server and it took me 4 hours of trudging through the Microsoft “Knowledge” Base to fix the problems it caused.

I want a Mac. I want a Mac with OS X Jaguar. I want that beautiful GUI. I want the BSD underneath. I want the ease of installing new programs. But I can’t get rid of the PC because there are so many little useful apps written for it. Little things that do one job really well. And I use a lot of these little utilities. I also can’t afford a Mac. I simply can’t afford to pay double the price simply to get that OS. It is tempting however.

This movie might explain some of my problems:

Get Quicktime, you dumb ass!

So, there it is. To Mac or not to Mac?