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Category Archives: rant
You’re Dead. Stop Kicking Me.
Interactive Television has always failed, and will always fail. A lesson from the early days of telephony is significant. Early on it was thought that telephony would provide a subscriber with a way to listen to opera in the convenience … Continue reading
Daylight Saving Tricks
Now that we’ve returned to Standard Time, let us pause for my annual rant on Daylight Saving Time (DST). Calling the boiling point of water 100 instead of 212 does not mean the water boils when it is colder. We’re … Continue reading
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How Stupid is the Mass Media?
Check out the headline on this article: CNN Poll: Still no front-runner in the battle for the GOP nomination. Of course not, you stupid shit. They just started campaigning. It’s a [expletive and a half] horse race. Did you see … Continue reading
Dear Amtrak: Learn How to Price Your Service
Apparently you neglected to read my last letter, but with the fast approach of National Train Day and the increase in oil prices making your services slightly more competitive, I thought it might be helpful to bring up the topic … Continue reading
Dear Amtrak
You disappoint me. You don’t understand pricing. Or perhaps you simply have no experience of buying things with your own money. In any case, what are you thinking? I know that you stop in both cities, so I was hoping … Continue reading
DirecTiVo, your return can not be too soon
Our DirecTiVo was dying. Every now and again, frequently at times, it stopped, hung. Maybe it waiting on a bad block on disk. Maybe it was just the heat. But the only option offered by DirecTV was a replacement with … Continue reading
Posted in communication, rant
Tagged directv, rant, television, user-unfriendly design
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Comments Disabled Until the Internet Gets a Life
O you spammers, may the fleas of a thousand camels nest in your pubic hair.
Die, Spammer, Die!
Dear Spammers: I sincerely hope you all die a horrible death. Have a good day. Yours,
Like, but not totally unlike, Useful
IBM has a way of making software that looks like it would be really helpful and of great utility — if it didn’t totally suck. Stick to hardware, guys.
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To Those of You Paging Out for On-Call Support
You’d better have a damn good reason for waking me up. Ask yourself this: “Is somebody dying?” No? Then it can wait until morning.
Posted in rant, Work
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Against the Time Change
Really it’s not the shift in noon that I’m against — though there is a certain rightness to being able to look up at the sun and say, “ah, yes, it’s mid-day” — but that there’s a change at all. … Continue reading
The Impact of the Daylight Saving Time Change on Traffic Accidents
It seems to me that accidents would increase during the transitional period surrounding the switch between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time. And apparently others have asked this question, and looked at the data to see if what effect the … Continue reading
Newlines
What do the text utilities on AIX have against following the manual and manipulating newlines properly? Is it just that AIX is from IBM, and IBM software is half-assed? $ uname -a AIX myhost 3 5 00C2D2804C00 $ echo ” … Continue reading
Posted in rant, Work
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Commenters
I tend to be very happy with reading websites through their syndicated feeds rather than directly. Recently, with all the political and economic ferment, I’ve become even happier. It’s a cesspool out there. If the original author of the piece … Continue reading
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Maybe I should read things as fast as put them in the pile
Either I accidentally clicked the close box instead of the minimize box, or Google Chrome crashed a whole set of tabs. I suspect the former. Kudos to the idiot who put those two functions next to each other: You’re a … Continue reading
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Adobe, You Owe Me Money
I was wondering why my laptop was not idle when I wasn’t using it, because when I picked it up I burned my hand. Using the handy-dandy Task Manager, I saw that Mozilla Firefox was using 25% of this 1.8GHz … Continue reading
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Tired
One of Rick Klau’s shared items in Google Reader suggested that journalists today will need to know Photoshop, HTML, and a bunch of other crap to get a job. That may be so, but remember that computers are just a … Continue reading
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You Made Your Bed, Now Lie in It
I read Joel Spolsky’s “Martian Headsets” post a while back, in which he discusses Microsoft’s about-face with regards to Internet Explorer 8 in terms of balancing backward-compatibility with standards compliance, as if they are necessarily incompatible. Mark Pilgrim followed up … Continue reading
Posted in economics, liberty, rant
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Apple Makes Useless Design Decisions Too
Which jackass at Apple thought that it was more important for iCal to leave 50% of a day as white space and display ellipses than to display the entries that I’ve so painstakingly added to the calendar?
Lowering My Health Care Costs
If Mrs. Clinton, or Messrs. McCain or Obama would like to lower health care costs, then perhaps they could encourage Congress to start by requiring that all insurance companies, doctors (and anybody else who conducts inter-state commerce) have a real … Continue reading
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