Archive for the 'Rants' Category

Post-Debate Trainwreck

After last night’s presidential debate, MSNBC spoke with undecided Virgina voters in an effort to prove to the rest of the world that, indeed, Americans are complete idiots. The MSNBC panel delivered — big time.

Host Ann Curry begins by reporting on Obama’s “10 percent” lead, then corrects herself to say “10 points,” despite the fact that these are identical. Unless — and this is a real possibility — she is actually referring to the score of the recent McCain/Obama 1-on-1, no-blood-no-foul, street rules b-ball game (currently in rain-delay.)

Next, she gets the ball rolling by asking the panel for “a show of hams.” Yum.

Panelist Jimmy takes a second or two before deciding, apparently on the spot, that McCain had appeared stronger on economic issues. He then becomes visibly uncomfortable upon realizing that he will be asked to defend this position. Gulp. Ultimately he explains that, in his view, McCain is “lookin’ downna road.” Eloquently put.

After Brian deftly defends the Obama “longer plan-picture”, Renise ruins everything by making perhaps the only reasonable comment of the night: that nobody even knows what the hell is going on with the economy, let alone how to fix it.

Lisa is introduced and described as being undecided because both candidates are just so great! Nobody listens to a thing she says, because we’re all too busy being amazed that anyone has this problem.

Next we have a couple shows of hands which, scientifically-extrapolated, prove that while 50% of Virginians know a racist, a full 100% know someone who thinks Palin is a moron. I’m going to be honest with you, Virgina: this makes me very sad/happy and I am disgusted/overjoyed to hear it.

Panelist Joan now joins the fray and, in a heroic effort to use as many words as possible, speaks of “The general public at large…” Wait, I’m confused. We’re talking about a subset of people here, right? Yes, that was sarcasm. The word you’re looking for is “everyone”. I just saved you 6 syllables.

Eventually we come back to Renise who, after disappointing early, now regales us with tales of Obama’s “temperament”, “discipline” and crowd-favorite “even kiln.” (I can second that one. You should see that dude’s pottery — it is freakin’ amazing.) Nice save, Renise. You are tonight’s big winner. I’m sorry I ever doubted you.

Last place goes to Michael, who by virtue of the fact that he is never called upon and, in fact, doesn’t utter a single word, is unfortunately able to maintain an illusion of competence. Better luck next time.

Google Reader Chokes on Google Groups RSS

I’m a member of a Google Group. I’d like to get group updates as RSS, not in my email, because email sucks. Google Groups helpfully provides XML feeds in both RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 formats.

Google Reader refuses to eat either of these.

An error has occurred because the feed being requested cannot be found.

Am I the only one with this problem? Impossible.

  1. Can we please introduce someone on the Groups team to someone on the Reader team?
  2. When Reader chokes on a feed URL, can I get a big red button that says “REPORT THIS”?


PS: Perhaps this problem has to do with Reader’s lack of support for authenticated RSS feeds. In that case a better error message is needed.

Next Time, Use a Chess Clock for the Debates

I thought it was pretty obvious, last night, when the VP candidates were stretching their sentences in order to fill all the allotted time. Many answers started strong, but ended in an incoherent train wreck of talking points.

This is silly. Human brains immediately detect this crap and deactivate.

We should have a debate system that encourages the participants to make direct and succinct points when appropriate. Seems to me that a Chess clock would do the trick nicely.

Windows Wireless Zero Configuration Sucks

God I hate WZC on WinXP. Why does it make me type my WPA key twice? Why doesn’t it provide a way to turn on the damn echo, so I can see what I am typing. Yes I know it’s a password but after I type it for the 10th god damned time I don’t care anymore.

Oh, and for the love of god, why do you show 8 “circles” in the pre-filled password dialog regardless of how long my pass-phrase actually is? This does not inspire confidence.

Objects in dialog may be larger than they appear.

Apple’s Wifi config is seriously better. (Not that it needs to be… Their supplicant actually works.)

Outlook 2007 Instant Search

Outlook 2007’s instant search is just awful. It rarely shows me the results I want — I have to hunt them down manually. It’s like web search circa 1995.

Apparently others share my opinion.

Asking Unanswerable Questions

Just got the follwing gem from Google Calendar Sync:

As a result of the sync operation 29 events will be deleted from your Google Calendar. Proceed with the operation?

The obvious problem here is that I am not provided information sufficient to make a choice. The only way to find out which events will be deleted is to click “Yes” and see what happens. †

I realize this was probably someone’s 20% project, and it’s beta software, blah blah blah. It still sucks.

† Actually, I still have no idea what the hell was deleted. If I’m late to your party, consider this a preemptive apology.

Shell PR Disaster

Some silly Seattle customers expected that the pumps at local Shell stations would dispense actual gas. Imagine their surprise when, instead, they got tankfuls of watery sludge and their cars broke down. Oh, what a hoot!

Thankfully, a senior executive from Royal Dutch Shell immediately arranged for each customer’s vehicle to be towed to a service center where rental cars were waiting. All repairs were paid for entirely by Shell and each customer was given a $100 gas card for their trouble.

Right, and then Santa Claus flew out of my ass.

Of course, what really happened was that each customer was forced to handle all this crap entirely on their own. They are actually being made to get multiple estimates and submit them to Shell for reimbursement. Yes, that’s right, they have to foot the up-front cost themselves, which in at least one case was $2000. Some of them have been without any means of transport since the incident.

Apparently something like 10 customers were affected before the stations realized the error, and it seems like they’ve all been on TV. Our local news stations are all over this thing. I’m vicariously incensed for those poor schmucks.

You might think that a company which made a profit of $23.7 billion dollars last year could spent a few thousand to avoid a PR disaster in one of america’s largest cities. Guess not.

I’ll be avoiding Shell stations from now on, both out of solidarity and fear.

Dear Engadget

Today I read your post about some new Z-Wave dongle. The first occurrence of the word Z-Wave was a link, which I immediately clicked, because I had no idea what Z-Wave was.

Was I immediately whisked away to this Wikipedia page, which describes the technology? Nope. Perhaps I was directed to the official site of the Z-Wave alliance? Again, no.

Indeed, this link transports me to that bastion of all net-knowledge, the “Engadget Search Results for z-wave” page. Uhh… what?

This is apparently standard operating procedure at Engadget. I’m too lazy to bitch-blog about something until it happens 5 or 10 times.

Anyway, I’m willing to accept the possibility that there is a good reason for this behavior, but from the outside it looks lame and it makes me hate you.

Please cut it out.

Repair Outlook OST File

Outlook 2007 just crashed on me and, once again, was unable to restart successfully. Instead the following error message was presented:

Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window. The set of folders cannot be opened.

In my case at least, the solution was to run:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\scanost.exe

(I don’t understand why Outlook wouldn’t automatically attempt to repair these files following a failure to start. But I digress…)

If you Google this error message, as I did, you’ll notice that the results exhibit a very low signal-to-noise ratio. It seems that this particular Outlook error is highly overloaded — it occurs for a variety of reasons and thus has a variety of fixes.

Incidentally, this is why I decided to blog about it. I hope this saves someone some time.

While I’m in rant mode: Can we get some software vendors out there to require googleable error messages? I mean seriously. I should be able to Google any error message that could possibly come out of your product and immediately find an official page describing it. Bonus points if this page is a Wiki.

While you’re at it, please ditch the stupid “OK” button (no, screw you, it’s not OK) and replace it with “Google this error…”

IT Erased My Brain

I came in to work this morning to discover that my machine had been rebooted overnight, undoubtedly to install some security update.

The IT department should just invade my home at night and erase my brain. I have no idea what the hell I was working on yesterday.

On plus side, Firefox helpfully restored my previous session of screwing off. So, yea, that’s going well.




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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States