"Differential Diagnosis"

Why is it that growing up involves pushing aside the very things that made you who you are? Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was my absolute favorite show growing up! I remember waking up extra early every Saturday morning just to watch the newest episode. Everyday after school I’d immediately turn to Fox Kids to watch my brightly colored heroes save the world yet again.

Getting together with the other neighborhood kids and playing Power Rangers was always a real treat, we’d fight invisible enemies using our individual pseudo-martial arts, and when things got really rough, we knew what we had to do. “Its morphin time! Dragonzord! Mastodon! Pterodactyl! Triceratops! Sabertooth tiger! Tyrannosaurus!” Invisible evil space aliens everywhere feared our legendary morphing abilities! My front yard being the main stage, I of course, was always the Green Ranger. Thus my favorite color was selected and remains to be changed, even a decade later.

At some point, I “grew up” and stopped watching the series. Over the years, the show matured, cast members were changed, and even spandex outfit designs changed, but no matter who or what the rangers looked like, I always had a deep level of respect for them.

Power Rangers was the reason I became interested in martial arts to begin with, not for self defense purposes, but in preparation of me becoming a ranger one day and saving the world from “evil space aliens.” To this day, I’m still heavily involved in martial arts, and for what? Self defense? Sure, I may need to defend myself one day, but deep down inside I still feel that one day I may just have the opportunity to make a difference in someone’s life using martial arts. Weather it be by teaching a kid discipline, restraint and integrity, or by standing up for whats right with the self confidence instilled by years of training. In the end, thats what Power Rangers was really about. A team of self-sacrificing heroes fighting for whats right against unbelievable odds.

So again I ask, why push aside the very thing that made me who I am today? In a society where stealing, killing, and taking advantage of other people is admirable, Power Ranger morals and values are needed more than ever! While I may not have the brightly colored outfit, I am a ranger at heart, and I hope to inspire the kids in my class to walk a virtuous path. If that makes me “childish”, then so be it!

I’ve come to realize that in this day and age, your qualifications don’t mean much, especially if you know people in all the right places. In fact, after working for several years in a “professional” environment, I’ve come to realize that job requirements are usually in place to keep people out of a job.

I’ve witnessed first hand how a government position is created and filled. I find it extremely inappropriate that the supervisor usually recommends certain job “requirements” be placed on that new position. Requirements that are specifically tailored to the person he/she already has the intent of hiring. This way, HR is practically baited into hiring that person. When its all said and done, I’m sure the supervisor’s new employee is just the right person for the job, why wouldn’t he be? I mean, he matched the criteria perfectly!

Sometimes, neither the employer or HR is to blame for hiring completely incompetent people. Some job prospectors find it easier to pad their resume full of “white lies” and throw in all the right buzz words in all the right places. A padded resume combined with an HR employee knowing nothing about the specifics of the work the new employee is being hired to do makes for some fine hirings!

There are other times where a prospector meets the job requirements perfectly without someone tailoring them before hand. A prospector fresh out of college holding his shiny new bachelor’s degree, rejoice! Surely, having a four year degree must mean something? Not always…

While I’m not one to discourage higher education, I for one do criticize our education system. The mere fact that someone holds a degree from any institution doesn’t necessarily prove that this person is actually worth their weight in salt in the work environment.

This brings me to my main point behind this rant…incompetence of a college graduate.
The company I work for is required by the DoD to maintain two people at my location to maintain the systems. My coworker holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Management Information Systems, and has been at his job for over seven years. Seven years! More than a quarter of my time on this earth!

Two years ago, a young teenage guy fresh out of high school scores a great job as a DoD Contractor simply by running into the right people at the right time, and proving his vast knowledge of computer systems. Hired! This teenager was met with animosity and crude comments of his skills, experience, and competence by the seven year veteran of the company.

During these past two years, several upgrades, updates, and new systems have come online falling under our responsibility. Our college graduate isn’t keeping up with the changes and is merely a glorified seat warmer. Speaking with several former staff members of his time revealed that all he has ever been is a waste of space. People from other organizations, other companies, and other military bases have all heard of his grand incompetence and lack of understanding of the system hes worked with for seven years!

My biggest question is, how does such a waste of space get away with merely “existing” for seven years? Is a college degree merely an excuse to become lazy and ignorant, or is it a combination of a college degree + knowing the right people?

At the very least he has begun to recognize my superior knowledge of the system and I’ve put him to good use as my unofficial secretary. He also handles some of the jobs I don’t really feel like dealing with. ? Life is much easier with him out of the way dealing with the meanial tasks. >:)

Former GameSpot editor Brad Shoemaker’s latest blog post gave me the pleasure of watching food from various nations re-enact several wars throughout history. I love food, and I love learning about past wars! This page is the video creator’s website detailing the nationalities of all the “foodstuffs”, just in case you need help figuring it all out.

I found this image while browsing PSP Fanboy, all credit for this awesome piece of artwork goes to canecodesign over at DeviantArt. Great work!!

One of my previous entires in this mediocre blog of mine was expressing my discontent having been pulled over going only four mph over the speed limit. Because of that incident, I sat through a six hour defensive driving course.

Having successfully completed the course about a month ago, I patiently waited for my certificate of completion to arrive. A few weeks later, and it still hadn’t shown up in my mailbox! The certificate was sent off from a town several hours away, there was no reason for it to take this long! I called up the company to express my concern with the tardiness of my certificate, and the quickly approaching deadline which I needed to file it.

After a short conversation, we figured out what happened. Apparently I misspelled the name of my home town, and the certificate was probably lost in the mail because of it. I found it somewhat odd that I had “misspelled” my home town address, especially since my bank’s card isn’t billed if something like my address is even slightly wrong. Oh well, whatever.

As the man on the other end of the phone arranged to have another certificate printed and shipped to me, he asked me to verify my name. After spelling it out to him he tells me “I” must have misspelled my name on the online form as well. Wow, not just one typo, but now two typos?

After finding this many mistakes in my record, we went over all the little bits of information…guess what? Another typo!!
Seems as if “I” misspelled the judge’s name, and even the county he presides in. I’m usually the first person to admit when I’m wrong, but this many typos and incorrect information just couldn’t have been my fault.

After all the information was verified, another certificate was made and shipped out over night, or so I thought. Apparently certificates can only be printed before 3pm, and our verification of the data had carried on well after 3pm. So now, my certificate would show up 1 day after the damn thing was due…lovely.

Having shipped all the paper work via express mail to the next town over one day late, I received a letter for the judge. The letter read somewhat like this,”Dear reader, the honorable judge demands his money!” So all this, was a was of my time and money. How I hate the court system in our country…had I a couple extra million dollars, I’m sure I could of found a way around this and never had to have worried about a stupid ticket in a small rural town.

This adds two things on my “Hate List”, the Texas Dept. of Transportation and the honorable judge of the next town over.

I’m sure we’ve all seen those Internet ads with characters that follow your mouse pointer with their head, or eyes. Kinda creepy no? Well, this one , which I’ve dubbed ‘Zombie Girl’, just takes the cake as the creepiest one of them all. I’m not sure if its the bloodshot eyes, or the robotic facial expressions, but I’m strangely disturbed by this.

Apparently the technology is called "Motion Portrait", and its being used throughout Japan in various forms including television shows, commercials, schools, and even the recently released Bandai Namco PSP Game "Lian Palace promise HARUHI".

Perhaps they can one day be used to keep old people company while they sit in their nursing homes…maybe even custom made Motion Portraits of family members, or their favorite movie stars? I think I’ll keep Zombie Girl running on my 2nd monitor to creep some people out.

The pirating of games has been an on-going issue since before I care to remember. My early PC gaming days involved copying, and sharing games between my friends and I. Eventually, downloading became my primary means of acquiring new PC games in my early years. Why did I do it you ask? For many reasons, but primarily the lack of income!

Kids these days dont quite have the money to buy fifty or sixty dollar games as often as he/she would like to. Hell, I know full grown adults that can’t afford to buy new games but maybe once every couple of months. That was fine and dandy a few years ago where one game could last a person months at a time. I remember being perfectly content playing Perfect Dark on N64 for almost half a year before I even thought about buying another game. Alas, those times are gone now, and many games have become short five or six hour experiences relying on multiplayer to fill the void. If you think about it, you’re paying almost ten dollars an hour to play that short game…minimum wage is barely $5.75. A person earning minimum wage would have to work 10 1/2 hours, just to earn enough money to buy your five hour game!

At this point, it shouldn’t be a big secret that the US economy is currently suffering from high gas prices, lower valued dollar, and raising cost of goods and services. The government is bending over backwards to forgive debt and losses of big corporations by offering tax cuts, and lowered interest rates. This in turn leads to a lower valued dollar, since countries with lower interest rates attract less investors. This lower valued dollar leads to a price increase of goods and services which leads to increased interest rates on consumer credit cards, since credit companies still need to maintain growing profits, and as a result…decreased consumer spending. The consumer is left dealing with the weight of a struggling economy on their shoulders.

As our economy worsens, piracy goes up. Consumers just don’t have the same purchasing power they had only a few years ago, but they are already accustomed to getting a “new game fix” ever so often. People won’t change their rate of consumption due to limited funding, they’ll simply turn to other sources. Digital forms of entertainment such as music, movies, and video games are easily distributed over the “series of tubes” called the internet. This is why, now more than ever, a growing number of companies and developers are speaking out about the rampant piracy going on these days. The numbers are vastly rising due to our slowing economy!

Its a widely known fact that Asia is one of the highest pirating areas of the world. Think back for a moment about everything you just read above. Asian countries, such as Japan, are incredibly expensive to live in and maintain a standard of living similar to ours in the US. Tokyo,Japan has been named as the most expensive city to live in the world! The power of the Yen is horribly low, and goods in Japan cost three to five times what they do in the US. This, I fear, could be the eventual fate of the US if something isn’t done about our economy now!

So where am I getting at with all this? I just wanted to state that piracy is directly linked to the state of a countries economy. No more, no less.