All posts by Eric "smurph" Murphy

Eric is a software engineer and father of two, who's hobbies include video games, open source software, and just being a geek.

Construction

[rant]
Well its no longer winter in Wisconsin, so that means road construction season is in full force. Our road is currently reduced to gravel with a maze of sewer parts and huge mounds of dirt and more gravel. Normally I wouldn’t really care but a few things about this project really piss me off. I can deal with the inconvenience of parking on a different road and walking a little ways, that’s no biggie. What pisses me off is if you drive around our neighborhood, well all of Oshkosh really, there are dozens of roads that are nothing but potholes. There’s no more than a square foot of concrete in-tact for blocks on these roads. They’ve obviously been ignored for decades. They don’t get plowed or swept, they’re an eyesore. Honestly, I wish I was exaggerating. Despite all these other roads in dire condition, they chose to re-do our road and sewer, which was in decent condition until they ripped it up last week. There were one or two potholes per block and I really had no complaints.

The worst part about this, is that home owners are stuck with the bill. Excuse me, but what the hell are property taxes for if they’re not paying for road construction? I haven’t even looked too closely at the bill yet, because frankly, I can’t pay it with all the medical bills I’m trying to cover. It’s in the ballpark of $2000 though. Oh, and if we don’t pay up front, they charge 8% interest. So we’re paying quite a bit for work we didn’t ask for or need, and being charged a ridiculous interest rate to boot. THANKS.

Amidst a global economic crisis, the unemployment rate is at an all time high since the great depression. So explain to me why there are construction workers picketing on my sidewalk. That baffles me. They’re complaining about having to work weekends (which pisses me off too), working long ~12 hour days, and being under-staffed for the work. Why our city is choosing to over-work construction workers instead of hiring more is beyond me. All I know is that all of this nonsense means our road is probably going to be ripped up for longer than it should be. Not cool.
[/rant]

Ok, I’ll try not to make a habit of ranting but I just had to get that out. Hope you all have a fun construction season!

1st post!

I guess the normal thing to do is to introduce myself and give my brief history. Well I’m not normal. And that’s the basis of this site. It’s just a hobby, an outlet for me to purge my thoughts, and probably not very informative. I don’t expect anyone to read this.

To give you some satisfaction from my first post, I will explain what you’ll find here. I’ll be posting a lot about gaming, technology, linux, open source software, and probably a bit about my life and being a daddy. I don’t pretend to be an expert at any of those topics but I like to think I have something of interest to say.

I can’t make my first post without giving a nod to Co-Optimus. Some of the guys on the forums there inspired me to start blogging again and fixing up this goofy site. If you’re a gamer who enjoys co-op gaming and have never heard of that site, hop on over there, you won’t regret it. They cover only co-op games for all platforms and do a damn fine job.

Have a great Memorial day!