I always love a good piece of sarcasm.  Like if someone tells you they are one in a million, you can always say there are six thousand people like them.

Tact is for people who aren’t witty enough to use sarcasm hence you could say this letter is quite tactless with a tactful reply.

I was going to post some photos of our bike ride along the Port Fairy to Warrnambool Rail Trail but it can wait as I stumbled across Rebecca Barry last night and I’ve been splitting my sides ever since.

You have to hear this 8 year old from Dublin making prank phone calls.  Apparently she’s a sensation around the world but I’ve never heard of her before.  She’s setup by a radio station in Dublin but the kid is smart, cute and quick too. 

Start with the call to the demolition company, and if you can get past that one, there are 3 more and several on Update 1 and 2.  Hilarious.

I’ve taken the liberty to linking to another blog, Merchant Prince, and check out the 1339 comments!  Get it HERE.

A sequel to the old favourite, GirlFriend 1.0……………………..

Can you please advise me.  I’m having some problems.  I’m currently running the latest version of Girlfriend and I’ve been having some problems lately.  I’ve been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 all along as my primary application, and all the girlfriend releases have always conflicted with it.  I hear that DrinkingBuddies won’t crash if you run girlfriend in background mode with the sound turned off.  But I’m embarrassed to say I can’t find the switch to turn the sound off.  I just run them separately and it works okay. 

Girlfriend also seems to have a problem coexisting with my Golf program, often trying to abort Golf with some sort of timing incompatibility.  I probably should have stayed with girlfriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance with GirlFriend 2.0. After months of conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with GirlFriend 2.0. He said that I probably didn’t have enough cache to run girlfriend 2.0, and that eventually it would require a Token ring to run properly.  He was right — as soon as I purged my cache, it uninstalled itself.  Shortly after that, I installed girlfriend 3.0 beta.  All the bugs were supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it gave me a virus.  I had to clean out my whole system and shut down for a while.

I very cautiously upgraded to girlfriend 4.0. This time I used a SCSI probe first and also installed a virus protection program.  It worked okay for a while until I discovered that GirlFriend 1.0 was still in my system!  Then I tried to run GirlFriend 1.0 again with GirlFriend 4.0 still installed, but GirlFriend 4.0 has a feature that I didn’t know about that automatically senses the presence of any other version of girlfriend and communicates with it in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both versions!  The version I have right now works pretty well, but there are still some problems.  Like all versions of girlfriend, it is written in some obscure language that I can’t understand, much less reprogram. 

Frankly, I think there is too much attention paid to the look and feel rather than the desired functionality.  Also, to get the best connections with your hardware, you usually have to use gold-plated contacts.  And I’ve never liked how GirlFriend is totally "object-oriented".  A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of GirlFriend to GirlFriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of GirlFriend.  He discovered that GirlFriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don’t upgrade to Fiancée 1.0. So he did.  But soon after that, he had to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he describes as a "huge resource hog".  It has taken up all of his space, so he can’t load anything else.  One of the primary reasons that he upgraded to Wife 1.0 is that it came bundled with FreeSexPlus 1.0. Well, it turns out that the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreesexPlus, particularly the new Plug-Ins he wanted to try.  On top of that, Wife 1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything. 

Although he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw 1.0 which has an automatic pop-up feature that he can’t turn off.  I told him to try installing Mistress 1.0, but he said that he heard if you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself, Then Mistress 1.0 won’t install anyway due to insufficient resources. 

Can you help??

My mother taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE – "If you’re going kill each other, do it outside – I just finished cleaning!"

My mother taught me RELIGION – "You better pray that will come out of the carpet."

My mother taught me about TIME TRAVEL -  "If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to knock you into the middle of next week!"

My mother taught me LOGIC: "Because I said so, that’s why."

My mother taught me FORESIGHT – "Make sure you wear clean underwear, in case you’re in an accident."

My mother taught me IRONY – "Keep laughing and I’ll *give* you something to cry about."

My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS – "Shut your mouth and eat your supper!"

My mother taught me about CONTORTIONISM – "Will you *look* at the dirt on the back of your neck!"

My mother taught me about STAMINA – "You’ll sit there unil that spinach is finished."

My mother taught me about WEATHER – "It looks as if a tornado swept through your room."

My mother taught me how to solve PHYSICS PROBLEMS – "If I yelled because I saw a meteor coming toward you; would you listen then?"

My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY – "If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times – Don’t Exaggerate!!!"

My mother taught me THE CIRCLE OF LIFE – "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out."

My mother taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION – "Stop acting like your father!"

My mother taught me about ENVY – "There are millions of less fortunate children in this world who don’t have wonderful parents like you do!"

I’m not sure I’d want to read meters in Churchill, Canada.  A guy got mauled by a polar bear  recently while people looked on and no one made any attempt to help.  It makes you wonder about the values in society today when people fear helping others in need in case they get hurt themselves, or even worse, sued.

The good news is the guy survived and is making a good recovery from his horrific injuries. 

Hence this picture isn’t for the faint-hearted.  Click HERE if you must.

That sticky post I did on how many days left until school starts was actually my 800th blog post.  I’ve spent untold hours writing copious amounts of babble for your enjoyment and here I am posting one that actually has nothing in it and I get a record 12 comments!

You have to be kidding me.  So the most interesting post that I submitted in 800 was one that was blank.  Now that speaks volumes about the quality of my writing so maybe I just do blank posts in future and stir up vigorous debate.

Maybe it speaks volumes about the sanity of my readers.

In Captain Doug’s blog, which I’m a regular reader, he mentions that in order to stay current, airline pilots must undergo rigorous testing every six months in a flight simulator. For the pilot, one of the toughest hurdles to nail down during a check ride (flight test) is the “loss of an engine” on take off. 

However, a lot of you probably don’t know that Santa Claus is regularly tested by a Transport Canada flight inspector and went through his 6 monthly check early December.  In preparation, Santa had the elves wash the sled and bathe all the reindeer. Santa got his log book out and made sure all his paperwork was in order. He knew the inspector would examine all his equipment and truly put Santa’s flying skills to the test.

The examiner walked slowly around the sled. He checked the reindeer harnesses, the landing gear, and even Rudolph’s nose. He painstakingly reviewed Santa’s weight and balance calculations for the sled’s enormous payload.

Finally, they were ready for the check ride. Santa got in and fastened his seat belt and shoulder harness and checked the compass. Then the examiner hopped in carrying, to Santa’s surprise, a shotgun.

"What’s that for?!?" asked Santa in disbelief. The examiner winked and said, "I’m not supposed to tell you this ahead of time," as he leaned over to whisper in Santa’s ear, "but you’re gonna lose an engine on takeoff."