Tag: moral obligation

Jun012013June 1, 2013June 1, 20132Commentsby Tony Hunt

Good people…

Posted in Randomosity...

Sometimes I really love where I live…I mean geographically of course.

Okay I love it a LOT of the time.

I almost didn’t write about it because it wasn’t earth-shattering ranting news I usually gravitate to when writing.

I have been moving, and it’s been slow because I’ve been moving in multiple directions and maintaining the business at the same time has been a little chaotic.

Anyhow, while I was running errands yesterday, the car in front of me had turned their hazard lights on and the guy driving had jumped out to push his car because it was in a bad spot and would have caused a bit of a jam.

Now, I like top help people as a practice. Some people don’t, but I consider it almost a moral obligation to help where situations present themselves. I don’t really slant others for not feeling the same way, but my sense of priorities doesn’t tell me I cant help someone out because I might miss a hockey game or miss a meal. My hopes are that I can only lead by example and that someday everyone feels that same sense of obligation I do in cases like this.

I’m not mental about it, but I can hope, ya know?

So I pull into the parking lot nearby and run over to help the guy (who is now having a very hard time trying to push his truck up an incline to get it out of traffic. I ask if he minds if I help him out, and of course he’s appreciative. I am not really paying attention to anything except moving a truck up this incline because it’s not a small truck and it’s not a small incline…but the truck IS moving and we don’t have too far to go.

Within like 30 seconds, two more people park their cars next to mine, run over next to me and start helping push…at which point the truck is no longer very hard to push and we get it safely out into the parking lot. I don’t know why, but immediately afterward I asked if everyone there was from The Colony…sure enough, everyone was local. I kind of grin and state to no one in particular how much I love this area, check with the driver of the down truck to see if he needs a ride or more help and he declines but thanks me for offering (he had already called for a can of gas…he was out).

Now, I’ve done this sort of thing a lot, I mean so many times I couldn’t count. The reason this event stood out for me so much was that two other people pulled over to help! Honestly, that doesnt happen. People are honestly just too preoccupied with whatever they’re doing normally. But here, I wasn’t the only guy getting out to help push.

I just think thats one of the coolest things. I like it here. 😉


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Oct192011October 19, 2011October 19, 20114Commentsby Tony Hunt

Indifference kills…

Posted in Randomosity...

A day or two ago, I started seeing links to a very provocative video that was released detailing a situation whereby a child was not only hit twice by traffic, but that for some time a large number of people ignored the poor child that was struck and moved on about their day. I have two links for this on CBS News and The Sydney Morning Herald (there are more but these two paint a good enough picture). I haven’t been so outraged in a long time. And hopefully this will shed some light for all those friends of mine on why they couldn’t understand why I have to help…

indifference hit and runYears ago, when I was 19, we were leaving Ellum going northbound on 75 and were exiting to hit Cafe Brazil I think…our exit was slowed to a stop, but the highway was full speed.

I was looking out at the cars passing by so fast. Then it happened…I watched a biker get rear-ended and hit again twice by cars that did not stop afterwards, the bike with no driver spun into the middle of the highway, further causing another biker and a couple other cars to crash.

My friends in the car were jamming out pretty loud so when they heard me scream “NO!” they didn’t realize what it was I had seen right away. It wasn’t just that all those people were in trouble. I wasn’t just fear that gripped me. I was soooo angry. Because even after all that…the cars weren’t stopping.

I couldn’t stand it, and jumped out of the car I was in and ran onto the highway to get people…anyone to stop and help. The people in the cars that had crashed were fine, and even their cars were relatively okay…but the bikers, no one would come near them.

The second biker was closest and was in full riding gear, he was able to tell me his name, where he was and which day it was. A doctor stopped his car to block the lane properly and help with him as I then ran to the second biker.

The second biker was barely breathing and he couldn’t talk. His eyes were alert and frantically trying to communicate…it was pure fear…and though and I could tell he was trying to move – he didn’t have the strength to even move a finger. I was afraid to even hold his hand his body was in such bad shape and…slightly twisted.

It took the police 5 minutes to get there because of the traffic jam, and it took the ambulances almost 10. It was Friday night around 12am on northbound 75. I don’t remember much after that, I was horrified. At some point I guess I’d given my contact information to the police and that doctor that helped out there, because the next day he called me and thanked me for the effort. Unfortunately, he also informed me that one of the motorcyclists had passed away at the site of the accident, and the other had passed away overnight in the hospital.

That wasn’t my first tangle with Death. But that was when it became clear to me that I’ll never be able to even feign indifference in these situations. I would never be that guy that just kept driving on.

A year or two later on vacation in New Mexico, while I was blissfully asleep in the passenger seat. The driver of the car I was in fell asleep from exhaustion and drove us off the side of a mountain at 60mph. Your best imagination could not describe what happened to us in that fall. The only thing that didn’t happen was the car didn’t explode…

…It took the busload of people behind us over 30 minutes to get to us from the road. It took over an hour for an ambulance to get there, and almost two hours to get us back to the hospital. The truck had bounced and rolled over 100 yards down. Days later, we were shown pictures of what had happened and what happened to the truck, and pictures of where it had happened. If that bus hadn’t stopped and those people on it not come, the sun and environment would have finished the job for both of us.

It wasn’t just seeing a wreck now that influenced me. As far as I was concerned, I felt, and still feel to this day, that I have a moral obligation to help in any way I can. I don’t expect the same from everyone, but from experience, I sure as hell hope that when something like that happens to me, someone will be around that feels the same way I do.

And for anyone that feels they can’t be bothered to stop and help, I hope there was a lesson in this somewhere.

My .02 for the evening. Hope everyone has a great night.

-Tony


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Aug292010August 29, 2010August 14, 201111Commentsby Tony Hunt

How to be a Douchebag.

Posted in Randomosity...

Normally, I reserve names such as these when referring to…

…people who beat children and/or spouses.
…people that think civil, or even human rights are “quaint”
…people that go out of their way to shit on others without reasonable justification.

But tonight, it becomes more than a moral obligation to point this waste of internet space out…

…it becomes an absolute pleasure.

Now you have to know a little tech first. You see, I’ve been administering over 10 domains (not including subs) for a long long time. When I first started blogging and transcribing my journals into my blog, I also set up an aggregation site on a sub-domain of TonyTown so that I could read all my news without going to anyone else, or having to surf like mad to so many sites. In doing this, I didn’t realize the RSS feeds were being indexed by the big search engines, which is in fact a pretty huge screw-up on my part. But I screwed up more. This same sub-domain/site is also where I tested out plugins for WordPress. One of these was the first original TonyTown twitter account, which I have also not used or looked at in ages, but was taking it’s queue from posts on the news feed.

Bottom line…All my RSS feeds for The Onion, BitRebels, CNN, Natalie Tran, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and Scientific American they were being posted as linked articles on the aggregation site on my sub-domain. This reeks of techno-babble, but the bottom line is that the articles were getting regurgitated through my sub-domain. This is very bad etiquette on the net. Well, let me rephrase, it is very bad etiquette to re-post content without some level of permission from the publisher.

This was totally me. I never realized the site was searchable, and didn’t know the stupid twitter feed was attached to it.

The part that makes me want to write about this though, is how I was approached about it. This insane low-life self-anointed waste of internet space starts spamming the absolute hell out of my personal twitter account (non-direct, for all the public to see) with completely unnecessary hashes (tags like #douchebag etc) and foul language. There are children who watch that feed. Not to mention a few news sites, WORK, etc…and this guy didn’t even bother emailing me.

I have to point out something here…this guy, out of the 13000 links aggregated, owned…wait for it… 7 articles. They weren’t even really articles. After reading them, I found them to be more or less absolutely useless amounts of regurgitated music babble about who’s hot and who’s not. Even funnier…he hadn’t posted to BitRebels in months, which was the actual publisher of the content.

You see the pleasure of not being in this for the money is this is 100% opinion. This winner could have easily just messaged me but started off the conversation by calling me a Twat…and THEN telling me to remove his content from my site.

Foul-mouthed Tweet #1 “Hey you TWAT! Remove immediately MY POSTS from your so called blog #XXXXingDouchebag”

Thoughts/Reaction #1 – “Wow, this guy is nuts…I don’t rip others content.”

Foul Mouthed Tweet #2 “@XXXXXXXXXXX Just look at the whole thing, [he] is stealing content from @gizmodo, @theonion, @bitrebels and Scientific American.”

Thoughts/Reaction #2 – “Wow, this nut is angry about something. Wait…those are on my aggregator”
At this time…I am trying to figure out how this guy even knows that feed is there. Remember, I haven’t even looked at it in ages, I didn’t even have the password for it.

Foul-mouthed Tweet #3 Sent to his buddy: “People like this [ME] that steals content from others really piss me off. Sorry for the language…”

Thoughts/Reaction #3 – “Why is he spamming Twitter instead of emailing me? Oh…this guy apologizes to his friend for saying PISSES…but wont bother to contact me properly.”
–Friend in California texts me to let me know the activity is on the radar *AWESOME* (not)–

Foul-mouthed Tweet #4 “That is MY CONTENT you XXXHOLE!”

Thoughts/Reaction #4 – By this time I’d found the problem (i.e. me being a dumbass) and apologized to him for the problem.

Foul-mouthed Tweet #4,5,6,7 – “I don’t say they are mine, they are mine you XXXXing douchebag! Just search for [Insert Foulmouthed Asshat’s Name Here] on your site and DELETE IT!”

–Two more people letting me know there is some guy flaming the hells out of me on twitter–
By this time…honestly…nothing I tried to say I was doing was getting through. I had already moved the aggregation access to another undocumented and unsearchable domain AND fixed the twittering silliness, but this guy was now spamming others and continuing on his little rant.
By then a tiny little minuscule spec of the Twitter community…that is ONE of his followers/friends RETELLS his complaint long after I’d already rectified the situation.

I’ve been using that feed for years without a PEEP from the other sites. Yes, the activity it was performing by allowing itself to be searchable was very bad net-etiquette. Yes, my completely forgetting there was a Twitter feed attached to it…yep, all me – my fault.

But you sir. You’re a Twitter Guru right? So in your vast repertoire of blog-knowledge did it occur to you that I might have just screwed up? Because if I were leeching content deliberately…do you honestly think I would pull content from…BitRebels?! Seriously?! I read your articles, (they’re shit) and it makes me glad I didn’t bother trying to get on with BitRebels when they started…because if you’re half the egotistical asshat in person that you come off as on Twitter, I’d probably create a website dedicated to your vastly unreasonable and offensive attitude with people on the net….which by the way…isn’t copyrighted.

The real funny, is after he’s apparently satisfied his insanely valueless content is no longer available via my news portal…he goes on to start another fight with another guy on Twitter about…of all things…how lame his blog posts and intellect is. The guy…none other than Robert Scoble of http://scobleizer.com. This is about the equivalent of Joe the Plumber telling Steve Jobs how to market the iPhone. Yeah. Winner. You. Are. Not.

Finally going to get some rest on this though. Hope everyone had a great night.

-Tony


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