Background Info

The following is a satire I wrote 3 years ago about the stupid comments you hear from the media and other people about video games causing highschool murders. It is hard to believe it has already been 10 years since the Columbine shooting incident. People will continue to blame whatever the hell they feel like I suppose for these incidents; books, movies, games, magazines, music, to name a few. If people are determined to carry out a massacre, they’ll do it regardless of what kind of media as at their disposal. The same kind of media that is available to the rest of us who don’t go on killing sprees. Anyway, here it is.

This is a Dateline Exlusive

“Earlier last week, there was a bombing at columbine high school in Colorado. The two suspects are dead and officials have been trying to figure out the motive behind the massacre. The two suspects’ rooms have been inspected by the local police force here, and they have taken a couple of pictures for us to see what kind of rooms the two boys had.”

“Here you can see a vast array of video games. Among these games were found the titles Mortal Kombat, Doom 64, and other violent video games.”

“This poster of Hitler was also found in one of their rooms. From what their diaries say, they had been planning this attack for a long time and have idolized Hitler for years. They planned to attack on Hitler’s birthday, celebrating their massacre.”

“The two boys’ parents had never been very involved in their sons’ lives, and didn’t even know they were worshipping Hitler all these years and harboring so much hatred.”

“So Jane, what was the reason these two boys lashed out like this and killed so many of their classmates?”

“It’s all of the video games they played. They are all bad and make kids violent and kill. They should all be banned.”

“What about their obsession with Hitler and Satanism through many years of their lives? Did that play a role in making them commit their homicidal massacre?”

“No, not at all. The fact that they both had terrible parents which were rarely home and that they both adored Hitler for years had nothing to do with their violent behavior. It’s all the video games fault. They are so bad for children. Don’t buy them for your kids, or they’ll be killers too.”

“So there you have it, it appears that worshipping Hitler and being involved in Satanism for years isn’t at all harmful to your kids. Neither is poor parenting or holding grudges against classmates who bully you. It’s the video games that are the only culprit. They make killers out of kids. In a nutshell, video games are the root of all evil. That is the one and only possibility and reason. Thanks Jane. We’ll be right back after a short commercial break.”

That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the subject. Nuff said. The original spoof can be found here.

Recap

This rant is about two types of despicable/disturbing people. But before I get into that, I’d like to recap the last rant and differentiate between stupid and despicable people. The last rant was about a stupid woman and her son who blame two months with an unexperienced teacher for the son’s entire outlook on life. I mean, give me a f^%!ing break! How stupid and overdramatic can you be? Apparenty quite a bit. Anyway, on to the first of two types of disgusting people.

Type 1

We’re all familiar with this type in one form or another.  This is the conceited, vain, stuck-up type of person who looks down on others and places themselves on a pedestal high above most everyone else.  Their attitude can be so disgusting it makes you want to smack them across the face.  They are usually dishonest with others and show complete disregard for them.  Their attitude is very disgusting.  One person who has these charactersitcs is known as Andree Close.  Its always great to see (on rare occasion) when these types of people are knocked down from their pedestals and put in their place.  I  have to applaud those who cause such people to fall from their ‘throne’.  There was one such occasion where this happened to the above mentioned person.  There was someone who came across her path that she treated like complete s!%# that retaliated, probably much to her surprise and anger.  It was probably the first time that had happened to her.  I don’t know why people are usually afraid to stand up to these types of people, but thank god someone did in her case.  It was about time someone had done something.  Apparently she was told off quite a bit through emails sent to her exposing her true character and calling her names, knocking her down a few pedestals.  Of course, being the whiny, b!tchy person that she is, she went to seek help from an even more disgusting person (yes, I didn’t know there could be another worse than her either).  This leads us to disgusting person #2.

Type 2

I don’t know whether to classify this next type as disgusting or insane.  This type of person stands up for Type 1, mentioned above.  They may even go to extreme lengths in this person’s name, ‘honor’ or any other false sense of ‘chivalry’ to attack any such ‘offenders’.  This type of person has the mentality that women have never done, can’t do, and never will do any wrong.  They have a misandrist mentality.  They think of women as above everything, even anyone’s belief or concept of anything divine, or godlike.  They classify most, if not all men as conceited, low-life  b!#tards who aren’t worth much, or anything at all.  Kevin Salmon is one such person who fits this description, and who Andree went running to when her feelings were hurt.  (oh god, what a tragedy!)  I mean, there’s nothing more important than the fragile feelings of a b#tch like her, right?  That supercedes everything else doesn’t it? To hell with everyone else.  After hearing what had happened, and being the weirdo he was and probably still is, he called the police on the person that had stood up to her.  Now that’s pretty extreme in my opinion. He is little more than a fool who protects women from getting their feelings hurt. He takes great, moronic pride in this. It doesn’t matter what they do or what they’re like, they’re all so special to him. Creepy. (*gag*)

Thoughts

I don’t know what else happened after that, but it’s a shame we have these two types of people in our societies. The two types of people above feed off each other and perpetuate the cycle of hate.  I know there are two sides to every story, but I mean really, know matter how you look at it, those two types are crazy.  Those two types of people are scary quite honestly.  It’s too bad that those who choose to stand up to crap like that are belittled and hated and have the tables turned on them.  I believe she got what she deserved and shame on Kevin for supporting people like her.

The Preface

Today’s rant is about an overdramatic mother who works for the granite school district named Donna Lloyd. She sent a letter to a school where her son attended complaining about a new teacher. This new teacher had never taught before, didn’t know all the material, and was busy working on taking care of other classes he had to teach. At the time this letter was sent, the teacher had only been teaching for about 4 months, and on top of that, started right in the middle of the semester when the original teacher left, and after 2 weeks of the classes being taught by a sub. I don’t have the letter with me, but I did read it and will paraphrase the ridiculous complaints of this mother. This is just one of the many examples how parents like to play the blame game when their kids whine and act like babies when they aren’t being entertained in the school system. Pretty scary stuff.

The complaints from the parent

“My son had an F posted on the internet and couldn’t play sports until he got his grade up. I don’t know if the teacher knows that people actually look at those grades posted, but his coach wouldn’t let him play baseball until he got the grade up.”
This isn’t a teacher’s problem, this is the student’s problem. Teachers are supposed to post current grades online and its the job of the students to get the grades up with the teacher’s help if they need it. I don’t see how this was something the teacher wasn’t supposed to do. It’s his fault if he’s failing, he needs to turn in whatever assignments were missing. All of that info is clearly posted online, so yes, the teacher knows that other people see the posted grades. Isn’t that the point? Interesting that she blames her son’s shortcomings with grades on the teacher.

“The teacher couldn’t help him with every assignment he had. Thank goodness another kid in the class knew what to do to help him.”
Honestly, lady, it does take a little while getting down all the material for 4-5 different classes on your plate. The fact is, teachers don’t know everything and there are things that take them time to learn. I’ve had a few teachers in the past, (one in college that I’m currently thinking of) who didn’t know the material that well, and couldn’t teach it well either. That sometimes happens when people are new to the game and learning some of the material themselves. But I certainly didn’t whine about it and send a letter to the heads of the school. Yeah, it’s not the ideal situation having a teacher who is still learning themselves, but it DOES happen. Deal with it! That’s how life is!

I don’t really remember what else she may have whined about (and don’t care), but for the most part, they were unfounded. What was mentioned above was the gist of it. It would’ve been different if it would’ve been with an experienced teacher, etc., but there are new hires who didn’t go to college to become a teacher, who are learning the ropes. I hope someone throws her into the middle of something she’s never done before and makes ridiculous demands on her abilities and then whines to her superiors about it. My advice, Donna and her son Jacob need to stop being whiners and finding scapegoats for their problems and grow up and deal with things more maturely.

What is it?

Heritage Web Solutions is a company which makes websites and provides web hosting for owners of small businesses. It is a company run by four clueless morons known as David Aitken, Mark Strong, Brad Stone and Leah Young. It is located in Provo, Utah.

A brief history

The company started in 1999, but before that, it was a mortgage company; under a different name of course. I think they were all owners of the mortgage company except for David Aitken, who was a salesman.

Skimming the surface

On the surface, the company does have some impressive logos and websites they have completed for clients, and they are pretty cheap compared to a lot of other website companies. Their prices start at $199, which if I remember corretctly, gets you a simple, five page site which consists of a logo, html, css and javascript. Any other features such as databases, shopping carts, etc is extra (Usually a lot more money).  They also promise to get your website done in 2 weeks after you send in all the necessary materials and information they need.

Problems

Every company has their problems and have their share of unhappy customers, but this company is abysmally bad in many ways. Only by having worked there or knowing someone who has worked there can you fully know about all of the retarded things that go on there.

It is becoming a well-known fact among more and more people that the company is a sweat shop; although that wasn’t always the case in years past. It gradually became such mainly due to their salesmen selling more websites than they can keep up with. One might think that they would hire enough people to work on the websites to keep up with the demand since that would make sense, but instead they chose the cheapskate route and decided to pile an inordinate amount of work on their already existing resources.

A lot of problems in companies begins with its management. People who belong to this group in any company are usually so far removed from their employees and their daily schedules that they begin to have unrealistic expectations of how long things should take and how much work should be done in a given amount of time. That was a huge problem with Heritage Web Solutions. Not one of the aforementioned owners of the company had any experience or much knowledge about building websites, which was part of the problem.

As mentioned earlier, the workload and expectations were reasonable in the beginning, but after a short time that all changed. I’ll give you an idea of what it was like in the begginning and later on as to compare the drastic changes.

Expectations at first

1. Have a list of 20-30 websites to work on at any given time.
2. Communicate with clients after the 1st draft was done and make any necessary changes.

Getting each website done in 2 weeks was do-able as long as the clients were willing to communicate and give employees the materials needed, and if the clients weren’t so wishy washy and didn’t make multiple changes all the time.

Expectations later on

1. Have a list of 60-80 websites to work on at any given time.
2. Nearly constantly on the telephone with either one of your many clients or a random person calling into the phone queue in the company.

That’s right, many people would call into the company phone line daily and almost all employees were required to log into the phone queue. So for a good 2-3 hours a day, instead of working on websites which was part of their job description, they had to perform secretary duties as well. So many times when your phone randomly rang, you had to answer it and 98% of the time it wasn’t your client or anyone you could help. Why didn’t they just hire more secretaries to handle this and direct calls to the proper departments? To save money and give few people the work of many.

Some of these things are indicitative of many businesses, but it doesn’t make it any less absurd. So needless to say, there were random calls coming in everywhere, and nobody knew exactly who they should be transferred to; so many clients were tossed around the phone system and being understandably frustrated. Then the management had the audacity to question their employees why they weren’t completing as many websites as quickly as before. Do people in management have no common sense? As well as that, other departments would dump off their work load on another department that wasn’t supposed to, or could do the work. For example, the tech support deparment frequently sent calls from clients asking to set up an email account, or fix a technical issue to the web design department, who were only supposed to build the websites. Can you already get an idea of what a mess this turned out to be?

To top it off, they decided to make it a goal for everyone to complete two websites in a day while all this was going on. They threatened to fire anyone who couldn’t do all these things in their ridiculous time line. This company gets an F for management and its a wonder they’re even still around. It’s no wonder it turned out to be one of those companies that became a revolving door for high turn-around rate. Most people just quit after a short time after realizing the ridiculous workload and the small amount of time to do it all, and the added secretarial responsibilities they were given. Others were “let go” after they couldn’t meet their ridiculous expectations and small time frames. Those managers/owners should be fired themselves when they try and perform at their own set expectations and fail.

There are a few main reasons why this company is still afloat (amazingly).

1. They have good salesman.
2. They make monthly profits off all the websites they host.
3. They don’t give their full time employees any benefits until 1 year.

It’s incredibly cheapskate of them to do that. I’ve never heard of another company requiring their employees to wait that long for benefits. In short, it’s not a company I would ever recommend working for, unless you enjoy the above mentioned work conditions.

`I just spent about 3 hours trying to fix this error with the LoginStatus control. The control updates fine when I log in, but when I click the “Logout” link on the LoginStatus control I wasn’t getting a postback. After a little more looking I noticed I was getting a javascript error whenever I clicked Logout. The error I was getting was “TheForm is undefined”. I googled and googled and googled and ultimately I didn’t find the fix for my problem on google but I did find a lot of different solutions to the problem. I am consolidating them with the solution for me all in one place so that hopefully noone else has to go through this.
Scenario 1

Make sure when including external Javascript files like so:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="javascriptFile.js">

That you DO NOT self close (i.e. …src=”javascript.js” />) but that you include a close tag. The above example would look like:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="javascriptFile.js"></script>

Scenario

The script created by Asp.Net references your form by id. Make sure your form id matches what is shown in the javascript generated. For instance mine had to be named Aspnetform so I made sure it looked like:

<form id="Aspnetform"  runat="server">

I also read that the id is case sensitive so make sure that is correct as well.
Scenario 3

Make sure your form has a runat=”server” attribute as follows

<form id="Aspnetform" runat="server">

Scenario 4

This is the one that got me. I had my form defined outside of my <body> tag. My HTML looked like this:

<form id="Aspnetform" runat="server">
&lt;body&gt;
&lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/form&gt;

This will not work. Swapt the order of your tags to be thusly:

<body>
<form id="Aspnetform" runat="server">
&lt;/form&gt;
&lt;/body&gt;

Hope this helps someone else.