After a recent stint wearing the togs of one of the lesser-played classes, I just wanted to throw a couple little tidbits of wisdom out there for the general TF2-playing public. You know, a few little “pro tips” that might add up to that little extra edge, something to sharpen your game.

Medics are some of the hardest-working members of your team. But it’s a two-way street. You gotta give a little to get something back. To wit:

• When you call for help from your friendly team Medic, stand fucking still for just a second, could you please? Especially if you’re jumping around in a roomful of other idiots. The “health hose” doesn’t automagically lock onto your sorry carcass just because you’re mashing the “call for medic” key.
• Don’t run and cower behind your Medic when an enemy Heavy or Pyro rounds the corner, then whine and bitch that you “could have taken him if the Medic had used his übercharge” after the Medic, thanks to your brilliant display of cowardice, turns into a collection of bloody chunks. You’re in front for a reason, dumbass.
• Don’t instantly become a petulant little twat and complain that your Medic “can’t keep up” or “should have stayed around” if the healing suddenly stops. There’s a good possibility your Medic got backstabbed, torched, or gunned down, and you were too dense to notice. Guess who’s next in line to be fragged, shithead? Look over your fucking shoulder every once in a while. Protect your Medic, and he’ll protect you.
• For fuck’s sake, don’t charge into that four-sentry crossfire unless you can see the übercharge is already at 100%. And when you stupidly do it anyway, ignoring the Medic’s pleas to wait, don’t start screeching about how much your Medic sucks. There’s only so much a Medic can do. Down to half your hit points? Gotcha covered. Are you a halfwit? Can’t help with that.

Bitte sehr.

When I was a systems administrator for the now-defunct Dantz Development Corporation, we migrated the company from an ancient Communigate installation and no org-wide calendaring solution to an AD/Exchange environment. Exchange worked exactly as planned. It was super make fun happy go time. Unless you used OS X, that is, in which case you were out of luck.

This was back in the day when a G3 “Pismo” PowerBook was an aging but still somewhat respectable machine, and OS 9 was not yet the quaint laughingstock it now seems. While OS 9 users were pretty well-served by Outlook 2001, Microsoft had no Exchange client for OS X. Finally, Microsoft released Office X, but the execrable Entourage was no replacement for Outlook. After leaving Dantz for Apple, I had no reason to continue using Entourage, so I didn’t think much about the release of Entourage 2004 when it came out. (As an aside, it still amazes me that for all Apple’s fantastic infrastructure and intranet resources, it still has no centralized, enterprise-class message and calendaring system a la Exchange.)

When Apple pulled the rug out from under me, I jumped over to UC Davis, landing in another Exchange environment. Perhaps, I thought, Entourage had finally arrived as a full-featured Exchange client in the interim. I was sadly disappointed; Entourage 2004’s Exchange functionality is really not much more than a glorified IMAP client, and its calendaring functionality, frankly, sucks balls. Disappointed again, I pinned my hopes on the next version of Entourage, 2008.

Surely Microsoft would have finally produced an Exchange client for OS X with all the features available in, say, Outlook 2003. Right?

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Apparently some asswipe named Glenn Beck recently said that Californians hate America. I almost missed hearing about this comment because I was busy burning American flags during my commune’s reading of The State and Revolution we held right after the gay orgy.

His precise statement (that has, not surprisingly, earned him much hatred amongst San Diegans and expatriates like myself) was:

I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.

Never mind, of course, that San Diego is home to Camp Pendleton, MCAS Miramar, and the Coronado Naval Base (they all must be full of the “phony soldiers” his soulmate Limbaugh was talking about). Or that Santa Clarita and Escondido, both areas impacted by the fires, are listed by VotingResearch.org as in the top 30 most conservative cities in America. No, never mind all that! Obviously this is happening because we hate America.

Yeah. Obviously.

Fuck you, Glenn Beck.

A sideshow to the recent hullaballoo over the efficacy and questionable utility of Blackwater security contractors mercenaries, some relatives of violently deceased Blackwater employees have been making the rounds, demanding some kind of… I don’t know, justice, contrition, wergeld, or something along those lines from America’s most-talked-about employer of erstwhile Special Forces personnel.

One of the bereaved recently had part of her story told on CNN:

“Katy Helvenston never wants Blackwater or America to forget her boy. Scott Helvenston was a decorated Navy man who, at age 17, became one of the youngest Navy SEALs in U.S. history. But her son’s life was cut short on March 31, 2004—one of four Blackwater employees savagely attacked that day. It was Scott Helvenston’s first mission inside Iraq with Blackwater, his mother says.

She recalled how she repeatedly called Blackwater the day her son was killed. She says she finally got word Scott was killed around 3 a.m. “I said, ‘Will someone be here with me?’ And they said, ‘No, you’re on your own.’”

As a parent I understand her grief. But, frankly, I have little sympathy for the wives and mothers of these dead men. Let us be frank. These men were paid very well to go to a very dangerous place. They knew what they were getting into. They were mercenaries, in it for either money, adventure, or some combination of the two. They could have left Blackwater any time.

The families of these latter-day condottieri are upset at the deaths of their loved ones? Tough shit. They were paid to sling guns in a war zone. There is no glory in mercenary work; battle glory is one of the few, if arguably dubious, perks reserved for regular military forces in the service of the nation. Many thousands of servicemen toil and fight daily for a fraction of the pay, and with far less control over their immediate fates. My sympathies lie with them. Scott Helvenston left the Navy, then left a career in Hollywood for Blackwater. He—and his colleagues—had options, and chose their fateful stint as soldiers of fortune with both eyes open.

Let their families mourn if they will, but I cannot. These men knew the terms of the game and rolled the dice anyway, not for God or Country, but for their own personal gain. They played with fire and lost.

It seems Uncle Steve has suffered another fit of generosity, doling out free iPhones to all employees, a little over a year after Apple kicked my PowerSchool colleagues and I to the curb.

I was initially going to dismiss the report when I saw a former colleague’s postscript to one of his recent blog posts corroborating the story, and quickly found that other sites like Engadget had also picked up the story..

I would just like to take this opportunity, as a former Apple employee, to state for the record that while this is awesome, and that I had not been particularly interested in owning an iPhone, you current Apple employees are all fuckers.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go finish my bowl of sour grapes.

After spending part of the weekend redecorating the kitchen, I have a couple of tips for anyone who might be considering putting up wallpaper to spruce things up:

1. Fuck off.
2. Die.

Seriously, fuck wallpaper and the roll it came in on. At least the kitchen wasn’t nearly as big a pain in the ass as the atrocious cutesy crap the previous owners put in their kids’ rooms—they used so much adhesive on those walls, I scraped half of the knockdown texture off the drywall getting the damned paper off—but it was still a hassle. Please, for the love of God (and anyone who might purchase your house), use paint, not paste. Just say NO to wallpaper.