Wow, just when I thought I’d seen the worst from the United Parcel Service… there’s this.

Looks at this crap!

http://www.tax.ny.gov/e-services/stlr/stlrinfo.htm

“This application is provided by the Department of Taxation and Finance as a convenience and to facilitate compliance with collection of the appropriate amount of sales tax for various goods or services subject to the tax. However, it is your responsibility to ensure that you use the correct tax rate and jurisdiction reporting code when reporting sales tax.”

Wow, they were even smug enough to bold that on their website.

So basically, they say:

• “We are going to make you collect a sales tax based on where your customer lives. “
• “By the way, sales taxes are different county to county”
• “No, we don’t provide a spreadsheet of zip codes for you to somehow try and enter into your online store”
• Here’s a stupid tool for you to look up one sale at a time. http://www8.tax.ny.gov/STLR/stlrHome

It’s almost as if the crotchety old men who run the sales tax in the state of NY are being sourpuss about the lost revenue due to online commerce and are attempting to sabotage NY residents and now the rest of the country (yes, they are forcing people in other states to collect tax like this now also) for being successful at online sales.

• Rumor has it they are at war with Amazon, and the now Federal, NYS sales tax has been dubbed “The Amazon Tax”.

But who does it hurt the most? NEW YORK residents that plan on doing most of their online sales to other people in New York. Unfortunately, that’s me.

I’ve hired an accountant and there’s no easy way out of this. You can’t just collect 8%, you’ll be penalized by the state, the same state that is basically trying to fuck your shit up. Madness.

I’ve really only been able to find a list done by another poor soul. Thank you cwpollock! I can’t believe that the best information on this is from someone else who’s been struggling since 2009. I’m worried, because the data may be outdated.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/20179/

Even Paypal doesn’t have a canned solution for this. Their official answer is… “Maybe paypal isn’t for you then”

New York needs to stop being an old man yelling at a cloud. You can’t stop online sales. If the state would work with people instead of against them, maybe they’d have an easier time collecting. How about a flat NYS online sales tax? 8% sales tax for New York residents. Heck, make it more – just be consistent!

The world is shaking it’s head at you Thomas H. Mattox – do something about it.

Mercedes

Drives the speed limit, a little under or over. Never gets out the way for anyone. Rides the passing lane and thinks the road belongs to them. Not the worst drivers, but rarely good.

BMW

Either a fantastic driver, or can’t drive for shit. If they can’t drive for shit, then they are usually converts from Mercedes, and don’t get out of the passing lane for anyone because they own the road and everyone else is a peasant.

Saturn

Drives slow or carefully because they know their car is going to break.

Ford

Under educated. Either extremely white, or extremely black. Knows their car is going to break, but bought it anyway or it’s all they could afFORD.

Ford Mustang

Under educated Italian. Pompous, rich, and the car will break, but they will have purchased a new muscle car to transport their muscle milk by then.

Honda (Ticked out)

Puerto Rican, suburban white kid, or almost 30 verging on midlife crisis.

Toyota Prius

Under the impression that they own the road because they think they are saving the planet.

Smart Car

Drives defensively. Scared to death that they are behind the wheel of a pregnant roller-skate.

Acura

Either drives like / is an old person or:
Is an aggressive driver, often bossy on the road. Not a stranger to speeding and lane changes.

Chevy Impala,
and other cars driven by police. 

Either drives like / is an old person or:
Is a cop, a wanna be cop, or a complete hoodlum who wants to be perceived as a cop.

Truck

Raised Truck = Redneck
Lowered Truck = Mexican

Minivan

If it has rims or pretend rim hubcap covers = Mexican.

That or they drive horribly. A) because they are a soccer mom and they are on the phone. B) because they are driven by a guy who used to own a nice car and got sucked into having kids, is mad about it, and drives the minivan like a dick, trying to imagine it’s still that tricked out Honda he was forced to sell.

It’s a skin condition of the scalp that’s extremely annoying to manage. I’ve had it since my early teens, some times it would be fine, but certain times of they year it would get bad. In short, the condition is caused by an over production of skin oil. The oil is food for natural skin yeast. The yeast grows rapidly, irritating the skin, and sometimes creates dandruff, and if it’s itched at can create sores that tend to take some time to heal.

A dermatologist will prescribe Selenium Sulfide, which you can not get over the counter, it’s a topical shampoo, and does not clear the problem up indefinitely. It’s a real pain to put to use too. And who wants to keep going to the doctor for something that “can’t” be cured?

Over the years I did my own research and learned that part of the problem is that sulfates agitate the condition. Not surprisingly, most of the shampoos we are bombarded are Selenium Sulfide, a toxic, cancer causing agent and it just seems to make the condition worse.

I’ve fumbled through a few different shampoos and found that it takes a rotation of 3 shampoos to keep it under control.

The reason you need 3 is that the problem consists of 3 different problems.

•    Oil Buildup
•    Over abundance of skin yeast due to oil
•    Damaged skin, inflammation

For the oil buildup I found that a great product is “Folicure”. It’s meant to treat hairloss. Did I mention that Seborrhea can cause some hairloss?

http://www.folica.com/hair-loss/hair-growth-systems/folicure-shampoo-12-ounce

For the skin yeast, Malassezia furfur (tinea versicolor) formerly known as Pityrosporum. Nizoral shampoo. Do NOT use head and shoulders. It is not the same.

http://www.amazon.com/Nizoral-A-D-Anti-Dandruff-Shampoo-7oz-Quantity/dp/B00620S5AE

For the damage skin and itching. A great low sulfide shampoo with tea tree oil and mint. “Organix Hydrating Tea Tree Mint Shampoo” – it’s available at CVS and Walgreens. This should be the shampoo to use if you don’t need to remove oil or kill the fungus.

http://www.cvs.com/CVSApp/catalog/shop_product_detail.jsp?skuId=445078&productId=445078&WT.mc_id=Shopping_Feed_Products_Google_Free_Listing

I hope this helps other folks out there that have this issue.

5/4/2012

I recently saw Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead that’s available on Netflix. This is a fantastic documentary that really calls out the deranged addictive relationship Americans and apparently also Australians have with food. The documentary struck a nerve with me. I too work in an office, and reward myself with food and my priorities are all wrong. In this film you see two men succeed when there’s room for every excuse in the book. Car, office, inactive, on the road, you name it.

Not only have I been associating happy times with food calorie intake, but drinking calorie packed alcoholic beverages as well. The film covers food addiction, and touches on caffeine withdrawal too. I’m also a Monster Energy Drink addict. With my juice fast, I’ll be dealing with not having booze, caffeine, or food.

I’m waiting for my friend JP who will also be doing this with me. He’s buying a juicer and plans to start soon. Last night I made my first vegetable Juice, wasn’t bad. Cucumbers, tomatoes, celery, beats, romaine lettuce. I used a glass pasta jar to put it in for my lunch today. That’s because they say it’s best to drink it right away but if you can’t, like me (I lost the pulp catcher to my juicer and I’m using bowls) it’s recommended to use a sealed glass container to prevent oxidization.

I had a fruit juice two apples, an orange, and a banana this morning. This really wasn’t much of a task to have for breakfast, it was more of a treat. I’m really fighting the urge that my roomie kept bringing up to mix it with booze. Some help he is.

I ate horribly and drank booze last night accompanied with some veggie juice, fruit juice for breakfast. It’s about 11:30am now and I’m getting hungry. I’m going to eat some food today. But feeling good about the test run so far. I have an idea how it’s going to be. The hardest part is going to be dealing with the food associations at the office… associating getting food with having a break from work etc.

I’ll keep you all updated on this process when I start.

I’ve been on a journey to heal my self my whole life, as many of us are. Each foot step towards a better you involves better understanding of yourself. I have come to a great many realizations and am humbled by how much more I have to learn.

When I was 16 I met an older brother / father figure, code named Lucky. He was and still kind of is, to but it bluntly… Berserk. He grew up in a hard way, fending for himself at a young age on the urban streets of Brooklyn. 

He fearlessly train surfed on the tops of subway cars out of boredom, not giving a fuck, and for the sheer sake of being a Crazy Ghetto Bastard. He also enjoyed other New York City hip hop cultures such as Graffiti and Break Dancing.

He shared his insights with me and taught me to believe in myself, most importantly he taught me how to not only be immune from peoples judgment, but to almost feed on it and laugh at it, because when you don’t care about it or you can get a reaction out of someone from doing something obtuse or out of place..  the jokes on them really.

One of the first things he had me do I think was stand on my head in the middle of a busy mall. I really didn’t have that hard of a time with this. I was hurt that people had always made me into an outcast, but since it always was like that, I didn’t really have a mortal fear that if I did something that didn’t fit in with the usual grind that I’d some how loose their approval.. because I never had it in the first place. I was pretty much a monster when it came to basking in my odd, unusual, and often on purpose in your face, don’t care, attitude. Trying to get a rise out of people, I found that it mostly led to entertainment of others, more so than it rubbed people the wrong way. Most people have a fun loving inner child waiting to get out if provoked.

My mother was a spiritual healer, and I was raised around a lot of talk of inner journey and understanding. I spent most of my 20’s pondering life and making mental upgrades.. dealing with my issues and growing.

There’s always a place that you get to where your own most difficult flaws to overcome get the best of you. You might be stubborn, holding a grudge, holding on to a single perspective on a topic, or just being ignorant about some quality in yourself that needs to change. This is your road block.

I owe a lot to my teacher Lucky for helping me understand. He made me feel like I have superpowers. He said he’d taken me under his wing, and he did. I felt a great sense of warmth, that we were getting as much out of showing me the ways of the wild mind as much as I enjoyed learning them. And in later years I found myself identifying a lot of internal struggles that others were having. Many that I had experienced or been through. Having some success with giving advice to others. I got pretty hooked on the feeling of making things work for people. It made ME feel good.

I had really taken a break from feeling good about me because I had identified a few of my hobbies as well.. pompous ego driving activities. I could observe that many DJs, break dancers, and the like were pea-cocking for lack of a better word to somehow fix a low self worth issue buried somewhere deep inside. It didn’t really take me long to put two and two together and make the realization about myself. I stopped introducing myself as a DJ to people. Letting other people have the spotlight. And there I remained for a while… focusing on work mostly. I imagined I had dissolved my ego… or so I thought.

The Ego, as I understand it (I use the Buddhist eastern philosophy mostly) goes hand in hand with desire, and comfortability. Suffering is the lack of fulfillment of that of which you desire. The ego is the human identity, the little blind spot you’re born with the lays between your eyes. It’s the illusion that you’re separate from everything else. The Ego is the illusion of self importance, that your identity is what is truly important and not your being, or higher self.

It is from here one can understand how all religions and beliefs relate to one another. One could theorize that the Ego it’s self is a complex system based on the animal needs of the body.. “The Beast” if you will. Could it be that the omnipresent westernized “Devil” is giving into to your desires? I mean if we just let ourselves go, we’d be sinners just eating and having sex with everything that moves. Sounds like modern day society if you ask me.

The Buddha was a yogi who was born of riches, he only knew a life of riches, beautiful women, and luxury. He went outside of his kingdom one day and he saw a sick, dying man, for the first time. He then saw a corpse. All of these horrible things had been hidden from his sight. It became obvious to him that he never knew suffering, and that one day it was inevitable that his life as he knew it would come to a screeching halt. He became a traveling yogi despite his riches, which he left behind. He fasted, in attempt to desire not even food, to desire nothing at all… it was when he came to the realization that to desire nothing at all is also a desire.

Desire is not the problem, desire out of balance is the problem. Ego out of balance, is a problem. The Buddha had his breakthrough near the fig tree. To desire immense personal gain is not a better desire than a desire for world peace. To desire to create a beautiful tapestry as a gift from someone you love far outweighs the desire to break another person’s bones.

So with all of that in mind. You’d think that I was doing pretty good – making a point not to peacock and investing my time in helping people with their issues right?

Wrong.

People can learn their own lessons, they are their own to learn. It’s one thing if someone asks you for help or advice, and don’t get me wrong, forcibly turning on cheat codes on a video game for a person will always be applauded at first. But imagine you were hooked on helping everyone cheat, because you enjoyed their praise. That’s where I messed up. Wanting to feel perfect even though I’m not. It still comes back down to identity. “Hey, look there goes the smart guy who helped me figure <random thing> thing out, gee he’s swell”.

It took me getting really wasted one night at a bar and I just melted down, I couldn’t stop deprogramming everyone’s brain that I came in contact with, as I stated before I’m pretty disconnected from caring what people think of me, but a normal person would have been embarrassed the morning after that night. It made me question my concrete values I had adopted and had so much “success” with. My friend Jay really helped me realize that it’s not right to force everyone to put on their thinking cap just because you’re around. Some people are happy with where they’re at. And stealing their thunder might just take away some of the feeling of grandeur for another person making a breakthrough on their own.

I saw Lucky again last weekend. I failed to mention that we hadn’t been talking. Being my teacher he, I feel was suffering from the same kind of neurosis I’m speaking about here. Having the idea that you know best, and how to go about things, superior or not, gives you some type of superiority complex. Whether he likes it or not, this affected us both. I lie when I preach that you don’t have any power over anyone’s will but your own. It’s just not morally right to do it, even if you justify it by your own assessment that it is for their good. It’s not your will. Save it for someone who’s will desires your advice. It explains how the old wise man on top of the mountain got there.

Lastly, Lucky agreed with me when I said that another reason one gets addicted to “fixing people” is because it’s much easier than deal with the next obstacle within yourself that you have to deal with. Don’t say there’s not any room for improvement unless you’re a Tibetan Monk.

If you find that you yourself a “Mother Teresa” or the “Kick in the ass that the person really needed” type of person ask your self why? It’s probably because you’re still pretty messed up yourself, and you don’t want to admit to yourself that they person who needs help more than anybody.. is you.

The ego just wants to feel important. It doesn’t matter if you are causing yourself pain as long as the identity feels nourished. Look at “emo” kids cutting themselves. Think of the attention they get from the scars. Helping people through their journey is strangely debatable when it comes to the bigger picture. It’s certainly necessary to have a teacher, but is the teacher really to be praised? You know how they say… those who can’t do… teach.

The need to have power over someone else’s will no matter if it be positive (a teacher) or negative (a cop) or worse (a rapist, a murderer, or a soldier) is a social sickness, and I feel we are pretty prone to it here in the west. If you want real understanding of anything out here you have to look long and hard, and search it out for yourself. What we refer to as “normal” society, is bombarded with mind altering advertisements carefully designed to work on the ego, sub-consciously suggesting that one is inadequate if they don’t have a fancy car or the latest fashion that gets the ladies. Or that they are a bad parent if they don’t show their kids a fun fun fun time at Mc Donald’s.

In the end you’re left with a sea of people who are strangers to one another, either shallow and plastic, or fat and obese.. all feeling incredibly empty inside, no matter how much material or carnal gain they obtain.

It’s in the presence of “Ego Death” that Moksha is attained. I’ve been there once or twice, but one regresses quickly as we always have more lessons to learn.

I’ve learned that while you’re alive you can’t escape the ego. It’s an extension of “The Beast” that is your vehicle in the physical existence, which by the way, quantum science and enlightened people agree is pretty much a giant holographic video game made up from nothing more than vibration of energy alone. So the next time you have that yearning for a cheeseburger and that sad feeling that you wont be happy if you don’t eat it, Think of a misbehaving dog that begs for treats all the time.

Another example is that most of us as kids just wanted ice cream for breakfast lunch and dinner. But it took a parent to discipline us and make us eat some vegetables, much like you’d raise your voice to the bad dog to make it stop summoning you for a milkbone or a walk when they just had one five minutes ago.

When you grow up, you don’t have parents to tell you what to do anymore, and it can be difficult to keep that ego in check. Punishing it and locking it away under the stairs isn’t the answer, balanced discipline is. The thing is, I’ve never been that great with training animals. But now’s a good as time as any…

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between Grandmothers and
Grandfathers? Well, here it is: There was this loving grandfather who
always made a special effort to spend time with his son’s family on
weekends. Every Saturday morning he would take his 7-year-old
granddaughter out for a drive in the car for some quality time -
pancakes, ice cream, candy — just him and his granddaughter. One
particular Saturday, however, he had a bad cold and really didn’t feel
like being up at all. He knew his granddaughter always looked forward
to their drives and would be disappointed. Luckily, his wife came to
the rescue and said that she would take their granddaughter for the
drive and breakfast. When they returned, the little girl anxiously ran
upstairs to see her grandfather who was still in bed. “Well, did you
enjoy your ride with grandma?” he asked. “Not really, Pa Pa, it was
really boring. We didn’t see a single asshole, queer, lesbian, piece of
crap, horse’s ass, liberal pinko democrat Obama lover, blind bastard,
dipshit, Muslim camel humper or son of a bitch anywhere we went!”

Problem: Forum Spammers suck and you’re running phpBB

You’ve installed so many mods that other spam related mods don’t want to install so that’s not an option.

You try and import the entire ban list from sites like stop forum spam, and you crash your phpbb with “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of bytes exhausted”.

Partial Solution: 

Load my condensed ban hammer list. I wrote a script that crunched all the IPs listed as forum spam from the stop forum spam website.

The script works like this. If two or more spam IPs happen on the same /24 subnet. Ban the whole 1.1.1.* thing. Sure, you might be blocking some innocent china men from seeing your forum. But chances are they arn’t look at it anyway.

Download it here.  22874 rows of ban v.s. 200k+ wont crash phpbb but it depends on your host.

http://blog.drsuds.com/forumspam_subnets.txt

http://soundcloud.com/drsudsmixes/dont-book-dr-suds

Don’t Book DR SUDS by drsudsmixes