Finding good mushy peas is actually not easy – I’ve tried many different brands, and amazingly the brand I found I liked the most are Coles $mart Buy Mushy Green Peas – basically a cheap no-name brand. Here’s the simple can that houses the taste sensation that is the minted mushy pea:

So, I’ve been eating these for a while now, and I thought I’d show some images of what they are like. First, in the can – not a pleasant sight at all. And then out of the can in a bowl – much better!

Yum!

Now, apparently the green food colouring used is considered bad for you – it’s always something with these health nuts! So Coles have started selling this without the food colouring. They taste the same, but check out the colour! It just isn’t the same experience:

Close your eyes and think of England!

Coatsie, having seen my previous article, asked me if I would be the child’s scienceparent. I am honoured and accepted immediately. Chemistry sets, electronic kits, models of the solar system – all lining up as potential gifts…well, when they are a little older… :-)

Congratulations once again guys!

I was surprised to see this:

Lots!  Hilarious.

I did a quick experiment, and it seems that once you get past 60 attachments in an email, the display shows “lots”.  It seems to occur in Snow Leopard and Leopard, so maybe this has been around for a long time – it is rare to get so many attachments in one email, so I’m not surprised I hadn’t seen this before.

Apple has even internationalised this – so in Japanese, for example, you get:

That’s Apple sweating the details – unlike certain other companies we know.

Not sure why they chose 60 as the cut-off point (or why they had to have a cut-off point). I would have thought they’d have gone for 64, and that was what I was expecting as I added more and more items to a draft email to test. But still, it was funny and brought a smile to my face this morning.

Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!

“Faster simpler”? What does that mean? Did they possibly mean “Faster, simpler”? And given the other sentences ended with correct punctuation, shouldn’t that one end with a full stop?

Not to mention the large 7 is a different font than the 7 in the actual logo at the bottom?

It’s just lazy, like everything Microsoft does. Their ads have as much attention to detail as their operating system. No need to click the “Experience now” button – I think that ad tells you exactly what to expect.

Obama is currently in Japan to discuss regional security concerns. He is also requesting additional support to halt the production of the “Kung Fu kid” after previous attempts to stop Will Smith have failed.

So what’s next for Rove? Some say a permanent radio gig. Others say he’s working on the 4th phase of the road map for peace in the middle east. We’ll just have to wait and see.

“Don’t stay with XP, you’re bound to get confused, Windows 7 really rules.”

Those are the wise words of Will Smith. No not the Will Smith that spends most of his time butchering your childhood. This is a much smaller, pastier version who enjoys singing. Will appears to be a love child of the actual PC guy from the Apple commercials, brought into this world to defend his father’s honour.

Click the below link to see Will in action.

Will’s Windows 7 Rising

For those who aren’t aware, Tiger is filthy rich, so rich in fact he hires small children to polish his golf balls all day. I have no issues with this, he’s the mighty Tiger and he can do what he likes. But I have to remind the people that the Australian tax payers forked out 3 million for this guy to turn up and then prance around in plaid pants. According to Wikipedia “he was the highest-paid professional athlete in 2008, having earned an estimated $110 million from winnings and endorsements”.

Tiger Woods might be a golf player, but first and foremost he is nothing but a corporate whore and a sell out. He makes more money than the GDP of a small pacific island and then demands for more. He’s the face of Gillette, he has his own brand of Gatorade, a clothing range, video games and a range of flat pack furniture that would make the Swedish jealous. So before you next tune in to watch Tiger swing his club around like an angry homeless person defending his turf, I want you to ask yourself, is it right he’s stealing people’s wages to feed his Tiger empire? Tiger, you’re a disgrace.

ELDRICK TONT WOODS BE GONE!

Reconnect on Facebook

Logging in to the new look Facebook the other day I was greeted with the following suggestion:

Could it be that I actually talk to my wife in real life? Damn, Facebook is getting to be as crap as Twitter.

Windows 7 copied OS X

A Microsoft exec said they copied OS X. Another exec then said the first has no idea and they didn’t copy OS X – apparently the Windows 7 team lived in a bubble without internet access for the last 8 years and made it all themselves.

I’m going to surprise everyone and say that I think they didn’t copy OS X. If they did, they are shit copiers. Or the photocopier broke down part way through.

Evolution for children

My grand nephew is being brain washed by his grandparents in to Christianity. He’s 7 years old, and being told that God created Adam and Eve. They’ve got him reading a children’s version of the bible at night. Time for me to step up as Great Uncle and self-appointed Scienceparent – I’ve ordered him a book “Our family tree: An evolution story” – something he could also read at night. That’s a first step anyway to give him some balance.

Macs and viruses

I’ve had it with idiots who keep telling me the Mac has viruses too (defending the fact that Windows has a bizzilion viruses and you only have to connect to the internet for like 1 second with Windows 7 and you are infected). The Mac, currently, has no viruses. It has no viruses because no one has worked out how to make a virus for it – not because there are too few users. It is a holy grail for virus writers – the best they have done so far is write trojans for it (which every operating system can have).

Just because you wish the Mac was as virus ridden as the piece of shit operating system you choose to use does not make it a reality. Accept that your choice of computer is crap and live with it.

It is wireless, has no visible buttons (but is in fact a touch sensitive 2 button mouse), has multi-directional scrolling via a touch surface (with acceleration), and support for multi-touch gestures.

WarMouse today announced the availability of a new mouse – the OpenOfficeMouse. Let’s take a look at this beauty.

It is wired, has 18 buttons, a scroll wheel, and a joystick.

I was going to rant about the open source community and how they are even worse than Microsoft at innovation and usability (who would have thought it was possible?), but I think the OpenOfficeMouse does that without me saying anything more. But this monstrosity does remind me of a great cartoon – I recycle this a lot at the office when feature requests start to make the usability of our applications questionable.

Oh, and I apologise for the appalling title of this article. It is late.

This one ad, taking pride of place on Microsoft’s front page, is a showcase for just some of what is wrong with Microsoft.

First, the obvious thing is Microsoft desperately wants to be cool. So desperately. You can smell the desperation.

I can tell you now, using “pretty dope” on your website does not make you cool. In fact, this ad reminds me of some teenager’s father trying to act cool with his teenage son’s friends as they leave to go out partying on a Saturday night:

“Homies…that car is the shizzle! You dudes are dope!!! Where da bitches at tonight? Yo?” (flicks fingers in an attempt to make some cool gang sign he saw on Law and Order).

Mentioning “Twitter” does not make you cool either. You can’t just throw around the latest trends – It makes you look like a try hard.

But there is more. There is always more.

“More reviews”? Was that a review? Well, I guess it was. Just not a particularly good one. A random tweet from a random anonymous user with a one line comment. That’s the quality I’m looking for in a review about an OS that I’m about to drop AU$200 or more on.

But the quality of the copy is nothing compared to the details. Take a look to the right of the ad. We have a number of buttons:

So what’s wrong? Well, first we have different size buttons. This is sloppy when the buttons are all left aligned and not vastly different in text length or position, and even if you argue it is because the text is shorter in some, then you’ll notice inconsistent spacing (between the last letter and the arrow), so that argument doesn’t explain the size variations. And finally, inconsistent capitalisation (“Learn More” versus “Find out more”) – I mean, that is beyond sloppy.

It’s all part of the Microsoft experience – sloppy and inconsistent. Don’t forget this is on the front page of a multi-billion dollar company with an advertising budget of 1.4 billion dollars in 2009 – almost 3 times the budget of Apple in that same year! Compare their ads. Compare their websites!

It’s about sweating the details. It is why Apple’s software is a superior experience to Microsoft’s. It is why the iPhone blows away Windows Mobile. Microsoft still doesn’t get it.

If you are reading this and you still don’t get why those buttons are bad, you see nothing wrong with the ad text, and you can’t smell that desperation, you probably deserve to be using Windows. I can offer you no more.

Friend: You should be his Godparents.
Me: That’s nice of you, but you realise we’re atheists?
Friend: Oh, right. Yeah, that won’t work.

A Godparent, traditionally, is informally responsible for ensuring the child’s religious education is carried out. Now, if you are going to give a child a religious education, that child needs some balance. In particular, they need to learn that “creation” is not “science”. A little education about evolution is needed to ensure they have that balance and can decide what religion (if any) they really want to follow once they are old enough to think for themselves. We really don’t want ignorant children in the world.

Now not everyone was good at science in school, or went on to work in an area of science, or keeps up with modern scientific discoveries. There is nothing wrong with that – I sucked at sport, I sucked at wood work, I wouldn’t know how to fix a drain, build a house, or even bake a cake (well, from scratch at least). But if you have a child, why not ask someone who does know about science to be the child’s Scienceparent!

Now admittedly, you could also have Accountingparents, Lawparents, Medicineparents etc. I single out Scienceparent though, not because I happen to have studied (and continue to study) science, but because science is the balance that is required for any religious education – in particular an education that promotes “creation” as a plausible explanation for the development of humankind.

Would it then follow that if you are an atheist family, you should give your child a Godparent – surely the child needs balance from all that science? If you can find a person willing to teach a child all about different religions and views (not just Christianity), I would have no objection – learning about different cultures and religions can provide a balanced outlook on life and a greater understanding of others in a multi-cultural world. Though I would also suggest studying science will give a child a thirst for knowledge, that will lead them naturally to question everything around them, including origins. This will lead them to study religion themselves, and make their own decisions.

So, I give you, the Scienceparent¹. Make it a reality.

Cosplay

Cosplay is for losers. “Norms” aren’t freaked out by you – they are laughing at you.

There are only two situations where cosplay is acceptable:

1. At fancy dress parties
2. In the bedroom (if you are into that sort of thing)

Get full time jobs and stop hanging out at every convention in Jeff’s Shed.

Windows 7 is the best Windows ever

This article is my best article ever. If you’ve read my other articles, you know that means very little.

Lolita fashion

Lolita fashion is sick.

I’m not talking about a grown woman looking cute in some shirt, or even with pigtails. I’m talking full on shirley temple style outfits and wigs. If you like this stuff you are a pedophile.

They say there is someone for everyone

I want to introduce Gym Boy (the guy in my gym who uses the equipment until sweaty, then jumps straight into the pool without washing) to Gym Girl (the girl in my gym who uses the equipment until sweaty, for twice as long as the rules state you can use a single piece of equipment, and then leaves without towelling off herself or the sweat she has just dripped over the equipment).

Blackface on Hey Hey

The only thing offensive in that skit was that it wasn’t funny. It was not racist. Harden the fuck up Australia.

Gorgeous

Men should not use the word “gorgeous” except when talking to their partner, and then only sparingly. It should never be written down in anything you write. Ever.

Windows 7 is good

8 years of Windows users looking at Mac OS X and wishing they had that. Well, you’re a little closer. You still aren’t there, but maybe “near enough is good enough” for you. Of course, some of us aren’t willing to accept “good enough”.

Terminal illness

I like to think that if I had a terminal illness, yet was still mobile, I would go on the run and kill every rapist and murderer who got off with some stupidly low sentence for their crime. Our laws suck and the gene pool needs chlorine. Fortunately I don’t have a terminal disease (I hope). And anyway, the only weapon I own is a blunt samurai sword.

Women raising their arms above their heads in public

This is never a good look, no matter what you look like. Australian Idol contestants should pay attention.

Free range eggs

If you aren’t buying free range eggs, you are an arse and I don’t want to talk to you.

Glee

This show would actually be good, if it dropped all the singing and dancing.

Electricity bills are going up

People want to fix the damage they’ve done to the earth. They want greener power. Yet they don’t want to pay for it. Why do you think we’ve been using the dirty stuff for so long – it was cheap. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Mac users are arrogant and smug

They have good reason to be. Suck it up.

Do you think Apple create their legendary interfaces based solely on user input? Even Microsoft are smart enough to not do that.

However, I’ve noticed the following Windows 7 ads on the internet:

I give you, the OS built for Homer. :-)

New Facebook updates hit this weekend. Every time my friends make a new friend, I get notified. Why am I being punished with such shit stories?

Facebook is now a continual stream of noise. It seems that every time my friends post anything on anything anywhere I get notified. Facebook is the new Twitter.

So apparently the Facebook geniuses made these changes largely as a result of user feedback.

Let me let you in on a secret of good software design. You can ask users for feedback. And then you are better off ignoring everything they say and doing it properly.

I exaggerate. A little. A good designer must take that input, find the nuggets that are actually useful, and then implement something that is actually going to work. Generally the user has not thought through all the use cases of the change they’ve requested. Do you think Apple create their legendary interfaces based solely on user input? Even Microsoft are smart enough to not do that.

Not following? Think about the car built for Homer.

This is Facebook as of today.

However, my machine at the office is also set up for Wireless Wake on Demand. Those who are interested can read some technical details here and setup details here. This is new in Snow Leopard, and you might recognise that we are talking about waking a machine that is wirelessly connected to a network, not a simple Wake-On-Lan sending a magic packet over ethernet.

So I VPNed to work from home, went to my Finder, selected the menu Go->Connect to Server... and put in “jamie.internal” (my machine’s name on the office network). My machine at work was woken in the background, and I connected to the machine as per normal in the Finder, got the file I wanted, disconnected, and closed down the VPN. My machine at the office went back to sleep and I had the file I wanted.

I could also have shared the screen to manipulate my Mac via its user interface, and apparently even shared iTunes if I had it running.

There is a bit more going on here than just sending a magic packet wirelessly to wake the machine – the Mac is asleep, but our office wireless router is broadcasting over bonjour the services my Mac can actually handle as if it was awake on the network, so that if I try to use these services, it wakes the machine up first. This also means then that my machine in the office, even when sleeping, will still appear on other machines on the internal network as if it was awake, advertising all it’s services. Similarly, if I had it sharing music in iTunes, it would appear as a shared source of music on another machine in iTunes, even when asleep.

This is obviously a very handy feature – possibly more so for my colleagues than for me given I could walk over to the office in 10 minutes from my home to manually get the file (though it is after midnight, and Melbourne streets at night are a little dangerous these days, so I possibly avoided a random stabbing or glassing).

I’m sure you can also see advantages in a system like this for the environment too – machines don’t have to necessarily be running 24 hours a day just so you can access an occasional resource.

This will also work for Macs connected via ethernet. It may also work from a Windows machine to access a Mac at your office (with a SMB share). Not tested, as Windows is not welcome in my home, but I assume it will work.

Although the original idea sounded good, maybe even useful, I found the implementation limiting and frustrating. After lots of whinging, and messing about on Twitter trying to find something useful in it, I was pretty much ready to just ignore it. That was until Twitter started to invade Facebook. That invasion was the catalyst for this article.

In the beginning

When Twitter first appeared, the idea was to provide a micro-blogging service. Short messages, for giving status updates. That doesn’t sound so bad.

So what’s wrong with Twitter?

Let’s start with the obvious.

140-character limit

Tweets (Twitter messages) are limited to 140-characters per message. SMS messages are limited to 160-characters. Take the worst feature of SMS from the 1980s, and implement it in the 2000s…

No, even that isn’t fair. Almost every phone now supports SMS messages well in excess of the original 160-character limit (by sending multiple SMS messages disguised as a single SMS). Who in their right mind would implement a service with that limitation from day one?

The defence of this limitation is startling – the claims people make are sometimes humorous and often ridiculous. It is claimed, for example, that by limiting the number of characters, people will somehow write messages that are succinct and more interesting as a result. Take a look at your average tweet and you be the judge on that.

Some have defended the limitation by claiming that it is like the limitations of haiku, that result in wonderful poetry by limiting the number of sylables in the poem to follow a certain pattern. In the same way, this limitation of 140-characters will create status updates that will amaze with literary genius. Wonder at the typical poetic masterpiece you find on almost every twitter account:

I am eating roast chicken for dinner! Yum!

The limitation is artificial and short sighted. And results in a number of other problems that will be outlined below.

No reply threading

Twitter is a stream of posts. That would be fine if all it was was a stream of your posts, but that isn’t the way it works. People can also post something to you (and others), so in effect can reply to something you posted.

But that reply is not threaded in any way. Tweets appear chronologically, i.e. based on when you sent it. You reply 2 days later, and there are 2 days of other posts before your reply. All context has gone. Often these replies are as a result confusing.

Any sensible system that allow replies would allow threading. My mail client does it. My newsreader does it. In fact, Facebook does it.

Replies and Recipients

So when you do reply, or post a message to someone, or a number of people, you do so by putting in to your posted text an @ symbol, with the recipients Twitter name following. Suddenly your message is littered with @ symbols, and odd user account names for people you may or may not know.

@sam69 Hilarious post dude. @sexyGurl and @mr_b1g should join us for drinks with @ha1ry_back12

This is metadata! But the metadata is being put in to the actual text that is then displayed to the user. It’s like 1970s computing technology. It’s like being forced to store your files with filenames like:

Business report for my manager Mike Georgeff written by Jamie Curmi of Precedence Health Care on the 12th July 2009 owned by account “jamie” with read and write permissions for group “staff”.doc

Not only that, but this metadata is part of your 140-character limit. And there is more of this metadata abuse to come.

Tagging

Where once Twitter was about short status messages, it is now about full on chat conversations, and posting to multiple parties. Next came the request to tag the message so that people could search for tweets of interest.

This by itself is a useful idea. Of course people would want something like this. So how was it implemented?

You use a # sign followed by the tag. So now you have tag metadata in your post. The end result:

@sam69 Hilarious post dude. @sexyGurl and @mr_b1g should join us for #drinks with @ha1ry_back12 #boozeup

This is metadata! It should not be in the message!

So with all these @s and #s, the text is pretty ugly. In fact, the human eye finds it difficult to read because the @s and #s, along with strange non-your-spoken-language usernames draw the eye away from the text that makes sense. And it takes up characters in your precious 140-character limit.

Short links

There isn’t much room to say much is there? So you have to either not say much (which is quite common), or link to something that says more. But URLs are usually quite long (look at the one for this page for example). That will suck up your 140-character limit – so the Twitter solution is to use services that shorten your URL by encoding it in to something that makes no sense.

So this is why you’ll see links like:

http://bit.ly/qPjtp

Wondering where that will take you? Good luck – it could be to something related to the tweet. Or it could be to goatse.cx. You never know.

Now there is even less room in your tweet. What to do?

Two Letter Acronyms

With such limited space, users have invented acronyms to use so that they can actually fit some useful text in with all their #s, @s, and links. Acronyms such as RT (Retweet), FF (Follow Friday, which bizarrely means to suggest a friend to someone, so now even the acronym definitions don’t make sense to a casual reader), OH (Overheard), etc.

Once again, some of this (like RT) is actually metadata – like when you forward an email to someone. Now take a look at your typical tweet and you are seeing @s, #s, acronyms, links with random numbers and letters, and somewhere in all that mess may be a message of interest.

Actually though, rarely is there a message of interest in a tweet.

Facebook

So, the guys at Facebook saw there was something to Twitter, so this year they implemented a new Facebook interface that is reminiscent of Twitter, with its status updates. The difference was, the Facebook team actually improved on the idea. No ridiculously short message limit, full threading of comments, ability to add real links (and even show the link, for example display an image from that link), no need for @s, #s, obscure acronyms, links to real people’s names and not their jumbled usernames.

And this is why Facebook is the better service.

So, I could have just left it at that. Until I started seeing Facebook updates that said things like:

Enjoying food and talking crap with @sam69 @sexyGurl @mr_b1g and @ha1ry_back12 at #taxi in #docklands

What the hell was that?

Oh yes, what you are looking at there is a Facebook application that can take your tweets from your Twitter account, and post them as status updates on Facebook. So now my Facebook page is as ugly and messed up as Twitter.

And this is not on. So from today I am launching the Facebook group “Get Twitter Updates Off Facebook“.

Here’s the way this works. If you find a friend posting twitter style updates (that is, they use any inappropriate @s, #s or Twitter Acronyms), you send them a message on Facebook telling them that:

Hi <Insert Your Friend’s Name Here>,
Although I count you as a friend, your abuse of Facebook with Twitter updates that include inappropriate Twitter detritus such as @s, #s and Twitter-only acronyms, means that I can no longer accept you as a friend on Facebook.
We may still be friends in real life, and you are welcome to be my friend again on Facebook when you stop posting status updates based on Twitter limitations. Until then, I wish you all the best.
Your friend,
<Insert Your Real Name Here>

Sure, your friend might stop talking to you. But think about how much nicer your Facebook Home page will be. Eventually either Twitter developers will actually get it and move in to the 21st century, or Twitter will die. Either one is a good result.

Jamie knew he was guilty of arrogance and misanthropy, but he compensated by being kind to strangers and tipping really well at restaurants.

Ok, I didn’t write that. Sherman Alexie did. But sometimes I do think that way about myself.

Regular readers might recall my trying to help a stranger 2 months ago. I never saw that $20 again.

Today I was walking down Collins Street after work when this girl came over to me and asked if I could spare any change. The voice sounded familiar. I turned to look at the girl – it was the girl I “lent” $20 to two months ago.

“You have got to be kidding!”, I said to her.

“What?” she said. I found I was still walking, and she was chasing after me!

“You still owe me $20 that you ‘borrowed’ months ago!”, I said.

She continued to follow, staring at me, and said, “I….I don’t know what you’re … what you’re talking about”.

She stopped following. I long ago realised I’d never get that money back, and I actually felt sad for her. She was with another girl – the other girl looked like a druggy. The other girl then chased me and asked me, “Could you help us out?”. I said no – a little pissed off.

I continued walking, and was confronted by a third person asking for money. What is going on in Collins Street? I ignored this person. I was still feeling quite annoyed.

I then saw the girl meet up with the druggy girl, and some other new guy who was carrying something in a manner that suggested he stole it off someone (sort of a ‘look what I scored, quick, put it back in my pocket’). That’s four beggars on one journey down Collins Street. Those 3 ran off ahead of me together – probably to work another street.

A few minutes later a guy I regularly see asked me if I could spare a dollar. I said no.

Then I felt really bad. He wasn’t part of that group, had a kind face, and he’s never been pushy. He didn’t lie to me, he just asked for a dollar. I shouldn’t have let those other 3 upset me. So, I’m sorry to that homeless guy – next time I see him I’ll give him some extra money.

See – people like that girl ruin it for everyone. I don’t think I am really misanthropic, though perhaps I wish I could be.

Sadly, Michael Jackson passed away last week. I was a fan, so a sad day.

A large memorial was planned and televised around the world. Although I was a fan, I wasn’t a big enough fan to tune in to the telecast in the early hours of the morning here in Australia. But I did happen to see a repeat telecast in the afternoon.

So, a little about the memorial. First, the memorial was Classy with a capital C. I mean, you had a gold coffin:

And all the men in the family wore a single silver glove:

But this post isn’t about the Jackson family and their cashed-up-bogan style. It’s actually all about Channel 7 – the Australian Free-to-air commercial television network that has its own style as classy as the Jackson’s.

Take a look back at those stills. We have a 7 network logo in the top left hand corner. Nice. Subtle.

Then look at the bottom left hand corner. Oh, classy. A hat, glasses and silver glove – just like Michael Jackson. Taking up almost a quarter of the screen. And on screen continuously throughout the broadcast.

Yep, that’s right – two “watermarks” on screen throughout the broadcast. Nice one Seven. That big orange and black one was nice and subtle.

But that’s not all. This is Seven’s SD channel. What’s on the HD Channel? Let’s take a look:

Oh they didn’t? Oh yes they did. An obscure 1940’s black and white movie, 4:3, scratchy as hell. Nice one Seven. Great use of that HD channel of yours.

Free-to-air television in Australia is Crap. With a capital C.

I was walking down towards Southern Cross Station when this woman stopped me in the street. She was reasonably well dressed, holding only car keys, and she told me this long story about how her car had run out of petrol, she was parked in a clearway zone, and she had stupidly left her wallet in the office. As it was late, no one was in the office, and she had no money to pay for a can of petrol to get her car going again. Could I help her?

To put my state of mind into perspective here, in the past week a good Samaritan in Melbourne had come to the aid of someone being beaten up by a gang of men. The gang turned on him, chased him down and stabbed him to death. This story had really disturbed me – there are so many stabbings these days in Melbourne, and people trying to help others keep being punished for it. People used to look out for one another, and now people are too scared to do anything.

The woman’s story sounded like it could be a con. But I wanted to believe it wasn’t. I wanted to prove that people… strangers… can help one another. If she was telling the truth, I wanted to help her.

She promised that if I could help her out, and gave her my business card, she would return the money to me in the morning as she worked in the city. So I gave her $20 and my card. As I did so I figured, whatever the outcome, it would make a good blog article.

I never saw her again.

Now that could have been the end of this article. A warning not to help people. But it damn well isn’t.

I didn’t just laugh it off. I’ve felt mightily pissed off all week. Not because she conned me out of $20. I’m really upset because I wanted to be proven right that there are good people out there, people who tell the truth, people helping other people. And people like this woman make it harder and harder for people like me to continue believing in people.

This woman was worse than the angry homeless guy I often see who asks you for money, you give him $2, and he then asks you to make it $20 every time. At least he isn’t pretending to be anything more than an angry homeless guy without any money.

I know we have a global financial crisis, and people are hurting a little, but how do people like this live with themselves? How can someone feel good about taking money from someone who was trying to help them? What happened to the grifter’s code of “Never con an honest man”?

Some will call me a sucker, but I’m determined to keep trying to help people. I don’t want to live in a society where you can’t trust anyone. And I still want to believe.