Man you know a guy is an asshole when one of his co-workers comes to the desk and apologizes for the shit that happened that morning. As it turns out my assessment of the asshole wasn’t far off. Everyone who works with him thinks he is a loud rude obnoxious asshole. It gets even worse because he is a manager of some kind. So he thinks that his salary affords him the right to be an asshole to everyone.

This nice guy who came and apologized was there that morning. He was part of the reason I got yelled at. He was the guy checking in. The guy who’s reservation should have been under the company name like the old sales lady told the asshole. So this guy had to stand next to the prick while he yelled at me. Which may explain why he felt he had to apologize to me.

But unlike some people I don’t make a broad generalization about others based on my experience with one person. I figured that the guy wasn’t liked by his co-workers. I figured he was an asshole to everyone. And the the guy who apologized certainly didn’t need to do that. I told him as much. But this kind of thing happens often from what the nice guy said.

So I had my one bright spot for the day. It happens every now and then.

See now it’s shit like this that I personally find very amusing. Someone has made a spoof of Get Firefox called Get Internet Explorer. It’s of course probably not meant as anything other than a joke. But I like it. In fact I’m so sick of all of these Get Firefox links I see when I use IE I’ve added a special link down on the bottom of my site. You’ll only see it in anything other than IE.

Pandora is something thats seems worth a further look at. Below is their description of what it is all about.

Can you help me discover more music that I’ll like?

Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.

We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.

I’ve been playing around with it and so far it seem pretty neat. They give a 10 hour free trial to anyone who wants to play with it. So far it is very interesting how this thing decides what to play for you. You have the ability to tell it if you like what it plays for you and it fine tunes what it gives you based on your input. Head over here to listen to my little test station. Keep in mind after the first 10 hours you have to pay them 36 bucks a year.

I’m a non smoker now. I have been one since April 1st. That’s four whole months I’ve been clean. I’ve written about quitting smoking more times than I care to recall. I’ve always failed at quiting smoking more times than I care to recall. The notion that the one had something to do with the other did pop into my head. Perhaps writing about it jinxed the act I’ve thought to myself in the past when I’ve made these attempts.

It’s also worth mentioning that up until four months ago I never really wanted to quit. Wanting to quit is the key. Really wanting to quit. Finding that reason that makes you want to quit. Whatever it may be, you need to find something that makes you want to quit smoking. At least that’s how I see it. I was able to find out that thing that made me want to quit. I can’t tell you how to quit. I won’t even offer advice on how to do it. Just find that thing that makes you quit.

For me finding that thing wasn’t easy. It was my niece that found it for me. I was over at my friends house playing with the kids and my niece asked why my fingers were the wrong color. The thing that shocked me the most was that I had never noticed it. Sure I knew this kind of thing could happen. But to actually see my fingertips turn this gross nicotine color was more than enough to freak me out. I had never seen the effects smoking had on me. Sure theres that cancer thing, but I can’t see inside myself so it’s not something that I loose sleep over.

Which is funny when I think about it. The thought of dying from cancer was not enough to make me quit smoking. Nor did the coughing and hacking that comes with smoking seem to motivate me to quit. I guess vanity goes a long way. The thought of jinxing myself by writing about quiting smoking on my website has really grabbed hold of me. After each month that passed I either thought about writing something or posted something and then later deleted it. I feel rather confident in posting this. There is a finality of this time that all the others have lacked.

There are some good things of course about quiting. As there are some bad things about quiting. The good of course is that I feel so much better. I just can’t stress that enough. Not sure really how to explain it more than that. The negatives far outweigh the good I’m afraid to say. Since quiting smoking I have effectively become a hermit. I don’t go out anymore. I go to work and then back home. Whatever meager social life I had has died a painful death. The thought of going out now scares me. The fear of starting smoking again has made me fear going out. Of course not going out to the bars is something I’m willing to sacrifice when it comes down to it. So of course now it just remains to be seen if this post jinxed me or not. So far so good.

Yeah well strike all that I said last post. Coranto is not working. It times out building the news. So right now if I want a site with “content” it’s back to WordPress. Some links in older posts to pages in my website will not work because of some of the minor difficulties I’m having. It will get straightened out eventually.

Things now are more or less back to normal once again. Just a few minor hiccups are left to fix. You may notice that WordPress is not powering this site any longer. It was once of the causalities of the recent problems my host experienced. It is a nice system there’s no doubt of that. It just doesn’t fit my personal attitude of what it does. It’s frequent use of the term blog for one is something that annoyed me. So it’s back to Coranto for me.

Other than that it does a lot of things that Coranto either can’t do at all or needs an addon to function. RSS feeds, trackbacks, pingbacks, just to name a few. But when it really comes down to it these are things I don’t really need. I can live without them. Plus the whole WordPress community is a bunch of snobs. Honestly they just are not my kind of people. I’m used to the people over at the Coranto Forums. When you have a problem some one will at least reply to the forum post. I tried that with WordPress and I didn’t get any help at all.

Hotelblues.com had it’s host’s hard drive have some really bad problems. That’s the short explanation of what’s wrong. Slowly things are being put back together thanks once again to my wonderful host at Pas-Com Web-Hosting.

A number of things are still not working. As one look at the Camelot AoD site will tell. Email is down, ftp, cgi, and a few other issues. But it’s all coming back up. For now if anyone needs to get me via e-mail just use turk@email.com for the time being. I’ll keep everyone posted on what’s going on.