Greatest.. Ideas.. Ever..

Three things.

Self Checkout

Whoever invented this concept is a fucking genius. No more waiting in a line of people with 152 coupons and the asinine desire to dig out the pennies from the bottom of their purse so that they can get back a nickel instead of three pennies. You walk up, scan your shit, dump the 20$ into the machine and off you go.
In fact, if I had my way, it would be against the law not to have self checkout. I'm looking at you, Wal*Mart on North Dirksen Parkway in Springfield. Assholes.
And don't worry about it putting people out of jobs. You will always have people too stupid to understand how to use it, too scared of it, or just really lonely fucks whose only human interaction is with the minimum wage register jockey.
Self checkout. Wonderful. I also include other self service wonders like the postal station at the post office and the really cool machine they have at the Nevada DMVs.

Redbox

A fucking vending machine of DVD's. You swipe your credit card (or if that scares you, get one of those prepaid credit cards which is a pretty awesome concept in its self) and pick your DVDs. The machine bills you a dollar a day, for up to 25 days. After that, you get to keep it.
One of the coolest concepts is that you can rent the movies from one machine and return it in another machine. You can also preselect your movies, show up at the machine and it just spits them out! Hell, if it had a better selection (like it could burn you movies on demand), it would kick Netflix's ass.
I need to find out if they franchise out these machines.

Bluetooth

I used to think that people with these headsets were self important douchebags. But then I got one, and to be honest, I still thought that. In fact I remember commenting to my friend Troy back in Springfield how much I felt like a douchebag having it dangling off my ear. However the more I used it, the more I realized how fucking cool and useful it is!
I then learned that not just cell phone headsets use Bluetooth. You can get Bluetooth printers and various other gadgets (even medical stuff can use Bluetooth) to wirelessly connect to your technology.
And that, is cool as hell.

Now, this list is very small when you compare it to the things that I hate, but at least I have shown that I am not a complete negative nelly.

I do hate a lot of things though.

9/11/2007

Six years.

It’s hard to phantom that it’s been six years since that horrific Tuesday. I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was living in Hastings, MN at the time, working for American Security. I just woke up; it was about 9 or so in the morning. I wandered into the living room to see my roommate, Mark in front of the TV. I looked at it and saw smoke pouring out of the two towers and asked Mark, ‘What happened?’

I will never, ever forget the look on Mark’s face when he turned to me and said, ‘We’re at war.’

When I saw the replays for the first time, I stopped breathing. No way could this be real. No way. But it was. And it really started to hit me when I went on my route that day. The streets were damned near empty. My route, which ran out past Minneapolis/St. Paul International, was so quiet. The lack of airplanes in the sky was – quite frankly – fucking scary.

It got really freaky that Saturday. Micky (my partner) and I worked in downtown Minneapolis, picking up the money from the parking ramps; most of which were run by Somali Muslims. These guys were very quiet and very quick in getting us the money and getting us out of there. The streets were dead. We saw a couple of police cars and maybe one or two people walking about, but nothing like it should have been on a Saturday morning. We did the whole route in no time, and neither of us really said anything. We couldn’t. There wasn’t anything to say.

Anyway… It was that day that I knew the United States had changed forever. As my only political statement on this solemn day, I ask that no matter what our leaders do and what bad roads they take us down, we should never forget the 2,752 people who were murdered that day, remember who attacked us and do not rest till the people who did it are deep in the cold, cold ground.

Victims of September 11th, full list.

I ♥ TPD

You know I was discussing the difference between the Las Vegas police and the Tulsa police to John Farrell the other day and I told him a story of how I arrived to a homicide about 7 minutes after it happened and missed the soundbite.

?!?

It's funny how two police departments can be so different. Having been in Vegas, I thought soundbites took 7 hours to get.

And take a look at how far TPD keeps up back from a scene...



This was a homicide. See, you can be nice to the media (or in the case of most TPD officers, just ignore us which makes us very happy) and still get your police work done! I have a game I play at every crime scene. I look around and try and determine where METRO would have put us.

Hell, Friday I was on a fatal where a dude was running from the police when he crashed into someone and killed them (they died yesterday, I guess, but still...). METRO would have had us so far back that we would have barely been able to see anything, at least until Tracy and the Fatal team showed up. TPD had the area of the crashed roped off and allowed us to park and go right up to the edge of the tape.

Amazing...

Ach...

I'll post about my trip to Illinois soon. I swear to God I cannot go back to the Godforsaken state without there being drama. Usually involving the same person. What's worse though is I only had one horseshoe.

*cries*