Problem Bears are for the State to take care of, not you!!

This really chaps my hide. Yet another dumbshit thought he should destroy a brown bear for the sake of his family.

This story takes place in Wasilla, Alaska. Wasilla is a nice large area with tons of houses on huge multi-acre lots scattered throughout the roadways leading to other, more interesting places. Many of these lots are homesteads or parts of original homesteads where squatter rights applied for thousands of Americans in the area. Most homesteaders have what I like to call PHSS or Post-Homesteader Stress Syndrome. PHSS symptoms include, for the most part, forgetting that your property does not need to be violently defended and you are no longer living in a cabin built from your own crap, piss and assorted little sticks. Most people with PHSS deny that governments exist or can effect them, or that laws apply, and - darn tootin - their property is theirs to do with what they want. If it so happens the neighbors are doing something to encroach on your property, block your view, or cause some sort of damage to their own property which in turn negatively effects your quality of life then you have more than enough rights to handle it house to house with insults, weapons, fire, or large ugly posters instead of bringing it up to the city, state, or somebody else who is quite possibly smarter than yourself.

Today the news posted yet another story of a Wasillian who felt it was in his family's best interest to shoot a bear that liked their neck of the woods - no matter what the cost. Hunting seasons are defined for a reason by "Scientists" who study the mating and travel habits of bears and other live game in order to determine appropriate time and quantity of kills to thin out herds and packs and to control over-hunting. This person failed to really involve the government agencies responsible for this bears well being when it first started hanging around his property - instead he shooed it away himself and assumed that would be good enough. Well the bear came back, that's grounds for shooting it.. right? Below is the original story as fed down the wire to us Alaskan folk. ADN is about the only publication that's worth a dime in this state - even if they have a crappy website. I also included a related article printed last month about the same dang problem.

The Story: http://tinyurl.com/2taokh

Other Related Story: http://tinyurl.com/27wr4u

When is it O.K. to shoot a bear? I would like to think when it starts being violent or has kept you trapped in a cabin with no comms for a few days. Only then would I destroy a bear.

Deconstruction Day

Todays agenda was set aside for one simple task, paint one room downstairs. This is a smaller room with nothing in it, even the carpet which was removed a few weeks ago, that only had some trim wallpaper to remove and a tiny bit of spackeling. I ended up removing two sheetrocked walls, left the studs, when I attempted to remove some nails and my hammer went through the sheetrock. Uh oh, its moist here.. hmmm..

Further investigation showed that an animal, or bored child, had been urinating in the corner of the closet, making the sheetrock mushy and smelly. ew...

Now its time to soak the wood in simple green and a few other flashy chemicals to make sure no animal is ever going to be tempted to pee in the corner here. Sigh...

At some point today, we will actually get to a point where we can paint this room, a very quick process with my new sprayer... sigh..

MOOD.. broken..

Today is the greatest day I've ever known.

Can't live for tomorrow, tomorrow's much to long. I'll burn my eyes out before I get out. (Smashing Pumpkins).

Actually, today is not the greatest day and more like the most sucky/mediocre day. I have a long list of bitching to do:

1. Office is too hot
2. Keeping the window open does nothing until noon
3. After noon, keeping the window open chills me to the bone
4. Office is still too hot
5. People think I read minds
6. Borrowed GPS is incredibly inaccurate
7. Headache from heat in office
8. Hot dog man was listening to a terrible song
9. Tech supervisor assumes I have no idea what I am doing
10. Website updates to a website I can't fix make me angry
11. People keep interrupting me to tell me life sucks
12. My blog is all bitchy, and that makes me sad
13. My cats are being mean to the house
14. We have no money
15. I can't keep track of everything I want to do
16. My work office is a mess and requires a lot of personal time to fix
17. My home office is a mess and requires a lot of personal time to fix
18. I keep forgetting to do things at home and at work
19. I needed booze at noon with my hot dog
20. I can't make a good Haiku to save my life today
21. I'm going to get flamed for posting something like this to a blog which is aggregated through other sites
22. Nobody is going to flame me, because only my girlfriend comments on my blog
23. My cats know I watch them remotely and refuse to be bad on camera
24. Putz cat needs to go to the vet which worries us
25. Theres a road to nowhere near my office and I always forget to drive down it
26. My standards are too high even in a world of high standards
27. My standards stop me from doing things, which could be good however sucks still
28. I can't use commas right
29. I can't use semicolons right
30. I have lots of ideas that never get implemented
31. The kids park near our house sucks
32. Train fumes near my office give me even greater headaches, but with the window closed the heat gives me one as well
33. My chair sucks

I'm done.. Can I go home?

Non-informative Information

I was recently asked to help with a Microsoft Excel document and help fix a few graphs. I was presented two graphs, one somebody else in the company did recently that wasn't up to snuff and one the client is used to seeing and was the preferred styling.

First off, I want to make a few things clear before I go on

1. If the end result is supposed to look broken, I'm not going to be that helpful
2. Document education for employees that primarily produces documents should be mandatory. Taking their word on it isn't enough if you value the quality of the documents. Keep up with the latest styles and offer challenges to your employees so they stay sharp on the job.

The preferred chart was imported via black magic and was immutable. It was also useless to anybody that wants any real information. For instance the values for each point on the line graph were overlapping each other in the same face and color, completely obfuscating the information. There were dark text colors over dark and dense grid lines and the font size was too small, obviously a meager attempt to correct the overlapping text. I proposed a different styling and again ran into an old time favorite bottleneck - people fear change. The task was to make an identical looking graph with updated data so I spent some time attempting to explain how this chart offers no real usable information. Things desolved quickly once I found out the person overseeing this graphs creation didn't even know what title to give each set of values. A little meeting was held to discuss what exactly the purpose of the graph is and I finally got the information I needed and titled the value sets accordingly. However the overall style preference was still set to overlap the text no matter what I say. I did my best to clear it up, however it looks like crap and was very hard to understand. Eventually the graph was formed with a little compromise and now the crappy graph is polished a bit more and kind of shiney.

I feel bad for thinking this was just a me thing, and I was being overbearing and getting upset unjustly. Dangit people! You should be careful with information and how you present and distribute it. For instance, how many business suits are going to print this graph out and be totally confused, then chuck it in a non-recycling trash bin to be discarded and never reclaimed. How many recalls of this document will be done because of other such mistakes? What client wants to constantly distribute the latest *known good* copy of a document after reporting error after error to the writer?

Grr.. IMHO if its illegable then its crap..

Peace, Love, and for f*cks sake a little Understanding

The secret to my non-success.

Don't work with feds or fed contractors. You should probably stay away from state contractors while you are at it. As a reminder, avoid any work environment where people don't actually understand the words you say then nod their noggins reguardless and hold you responsible for the outcome. I should start quizzing people after I brief them.

Yours truly,
Angry Whardier