Archive for the 'Rants' Category

What happens after someone heads out of the courthouse after an arraignment hearing for an extremely visible, supposedly newsworthy, set of charges?

There is a press conference. Attorney is present. Lots and lots of inane questions followed by nothing but “no comment” responses.

Not any more. The two dudes charged with a bunch of mass hysteria security theater trumped up bullshit charges just had the best post arraignment press conference ever.

Instead of no comment, the entire interview is a discussion of hair styles throughout the 20th century. Every question is turned away or turned back to hair.

Instead of “No Comment”, you get “That isn’t a hair question and we are really here to talk about hair.”

Brilliant.

Drudge is carrying this video under the headline “suspects mock media”.

Well, DUH! Given the choice of saying “no comment” or making fun of the media for persisting to ask questions that they know can’t be answered, I am damned happy to see someone stand up and indirectly point out the utter and completely inane stupidity of the reporters on the scene.

Update: Pings turned off because the asshole content ripping spamming bastards seem to really like this post.

If someone starts selling reasonably priced ATHF LED advertisement kits, I’d buy in a heartbeat. Can’t be hard to build; just a bunch of LEDs with a bit of a driver circuit to shut the crap off in the daylight.

The reality impaired scaretardos that have now arrested and charged one of the makers with something like “conspiracy to build a hoax device or placing a hoax device with purpose of creating mass hysteria” disgust me.

Sadly, though it would seem that even a half assed lawyer should be able to show that there was no intent to either induce mass hysteria or create a hoax terror device, I fully expect that the completely corrupt asshats leading the domestic terrorism jihad will be able to make whatever charges they can come up with stick. Jail time for LED boy.

Of course, this does raise a question: Can “we the people” bring a case against the overreacting dumbasses for “inciting mass hysteria” by turning every fracking out of place light, candle, or farting high school student into an act of potential terrorism?

Hell, even by writing this pointless little bit of disgusted venting, I fully expect I’ll end up on some federal watch list somewhere. Oh, wait, there is that fear & hysteria thing again — if more than 3 of you feel the same way, we might just have a case on our hands.

But I digress. Anyone selling kits yet?

Taking a break from the Mexico write-up for a moment…

So, by now most have seen this story of:

- hunter shoots duck

- hunter puts duck in fridge without first cleaning it

- 2 days later duck moves when wife opens the fridge

How does this story end? Obviously, the hunter finishes the job and enjoys a fine duck dinner.

Nope. Instead, the duck has now been subjected to some further traumatizing and likely very expensive “specialized treatment”. Only a 75% chance of survival and will likely never be returned to the wild. Who pays for the medical expenses, exactly? More importantly, why?

I think I’ll have to grill some duck this week.

Update: *bing* *bing* *bing* We have a winner! The winner of the “too blinded by rage filled anonymous hatred to recognize sarcasm” award goes to Lake Effect!! Congratulations! And Thank you! The Internet never ceases to amuse.

Christ, people. Do you honestly think there is one ounce of my overweight self that actually takes these pinatas seriously? It is just some anonymous jeep shaped thing with crappy brown paper bits taped on and some random clueless looking generic, non-representative, soldier type cartoons on the side. If that stirs outrage — OUTRAGE — because you equate it to the whole “Iraq Adventure (Where you can declare that you have won over and over again!)”, then you seriously need to unclench the old diamond factory and relax a bit. Being wound so tight has gotta be seriously bad for your health! Especially since there are actual Really Bad Things to get wound up about.

It is just a damned pinata, people. Y’all been punk’d if you took it seriously.

Sheesh.

BoingBoing is reporting the outrage — the OUTRAGE — caused by a pinata in the shape of a hummer with some soldier types in it.

And THANK GOD the company has since taken it off the market.

Why no horror at the reindeer pinata, the (not nearly as realistic) fighter jet pinata, the Dora pinata, or the space shuttle pinata?

But, really, is that all the outrage they can muster? How about focusing some of that toy based outrage — OUTRAGE!! AUGUHGHGHHH!! — at something remotely meaningful like this My Little Hooker Makeup Kit?

Except, of course, if you already have that toy in the house. If so, consider rounding out the collection with this invaluable educational toy.

Update #3: And, not surprisingly, Network Solutions canceled the transfer again. Damnit. I really need to write down the bloody voice menu hell selections.

OK– so, finally, I got through to a Network Solutions Customer Service person that might have a clue about what is really going on. She says that the problem is the “authorization email”. Apparently, there is some authorization email that should be sent that I’m never receiving. It contains an URL that I must click within X hours of the mail being sent for the transaction to succeed.

It would be pretty funny if this ends up being overzealous spam filtering on the part of .mac. Bugs will be filed, if that is the case.

The Nice Customer Support person is updating the email address on my account to point to a different email address.

Hopefully, update #4 will be the last.

Update #2: Got enough coffee in me to call NetSol customer service back (after the 4th denied transfer now). The Nice Guy in customer service transferred me to the Nice Girl in the Customer Care & Retention Center (whatever it is called).

The first thing she did was reassure me that she & Network Solutions could help me with whatever problems I was having but, first, wouldn’t it be easier to stick with NetSol for the low, low price of $8.95/year? It was a price only available through the Customer Care Center.

“No, thanks” is what I said. What I thought was: “No, thanks, this is exactly the kind of marketing that is contributing to my decision to no longer do business with Network Solutions.”.

She also mentioned that said pricing is available to customers who wish to consolidate their inventory of domains with Network Solutions. In other words, if you do business with NetSol you can likely obtain a whiner’s discount.

Unsurprisingly, nothing has actually been resolved and it is abundantly clear that the data provided to the customer center folk is rather lacking in detail. Nice bunch of people, though — as much as I’m frustrated by the company, the customer support folks have been pleasant and patient.

Anyway, the overall customer support experience is maddeningly stupid.

Their claim is now that a domain lock takes up to 24 hours to propagate and, thus, any transfers initiated in that period would likely fail.

Fine, but I have record of four transfer attempts in four days all failing for the same reason.

Network Solutions is further claiming that, not only do they not have the au-thor-i-TIE to block the transfer, but that Joker.com has never initiated a transfer request. That the failed transfers are a figment of my imagination, apparently.

That I have four separate, identical, emails spread across four days that all tell me that Network Solutions has cancelled the transfer and that I should contact customer service is completely baffling to the customer service people I’m instructed to contact!

Their conclusion? Try the transfer again. There is no reason why it shouldn’t work!

OK. I’ll do that. One more time. If it succeeds, happy day and No More Network Solutions In My Life! If it fails, I’m going to have to try and convince Network Solution’s customer support that, in fact, they really are denying the transfer. That should be fun.

Update #1: And, of course, the transfer was again cancelled by Network Solutions, even though they supposedly “do not have the authority” (best cartman voice) to do so.

I suspect this’ll be the first in many updates. I don’t have the energy to argue with their “customer support” about how “weird” the email is right now.

You’d think that transferring a domain would be straightforward. I just want to transfer the last damned domain from NetSol to Joker. Should be easy.

But, no, it isn’t easy. And it makes me feel like I need to wash my hands after every time I interact with Network Solutions.

First sign of trouble was the first login. NetSol requires me to update my contact info. No way to cancel without logging out. I don’t need to update my contact information and I really don’t appreciate getting faced with my entire set of personal information when I logged in. And I am seriously irritated that NetSol won’t let me cancel out of the process.

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I was whipping through my NetNewsWire feeds and saw that Dell is selling some kind of all-in-one, entertainment oriented, luggable. Curiosity piqued, I clicked through.

OK — wow — that’s ugly. And I’m trying to figure out where they would stuff 8 speakers into that box, much more how they would do so and get anything resembling decent sound.

So. I wonder how it compares to a similarly configured 20″ iMac Core 2 Duo?

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My wife and I are huge Disney movie fans. Grew up on ‘em and our son — Roger — gets a healthy dose of Disney movies because we enjoy them so much.

Now, anyone who has consumed a Disney DVD in the last 5 years has likely been annoyed that the rat bastards producing the DVDs stuck a good 10 to 20 minutes worth of previews at the beginning of the flick and disabled the menu button to bypass the previews (track forward works, generally, but that is awfully annoying).

We received Chicken Little from Netflix today and I noticed that it features “Disney’s Fast Play Technology”.

When inserted, you get the choice between “Fast Play” and “Main Menu”.

If you make the mistake of hitting “Fast Play”, you get upwards of 10 minutes of promo crap before the movie starts — just like before.

If you hit “main menu” you get, well, the main menu from which you can actually play the movie directly.

That’s right. Fast Play is the slow way to the feature.

So, not only has Disney added a feature that should have been present from the beginning — enabling the menu button all the time — but they have managed to make it so totally bass ackwards as to leave one wondering exactly how bad the crack was that the producers and marketeers were clearly smoking. The damned bit got inverted between implementation and marketing.

While completely a marketing gimmick, that is no excuse for going out of their ways to make the UI as confusing as possible. From a design perspective, this is just plain stupid and actually worse than the original linear force-the-marketing-pap-on-the-consumer implementation.

Idiots.

For WWDC, I’m staying at the Chancellor Hotel near Union Square. Nice enough place and hotels.com scored me a great nightly rate.

Among other amenities, they offer free WiFi. It is configured to use WEP encryption. Fine enough. Unfortunately, that is where the goodness ends.

The hotel is 15 stories tall + a basement. To attempt to provide decent signal coverage, the hotel has placed a base station — linksys wrt something — on each floor. The guest is instructed to connect to their floor’s base station.

Unfortunately, all of the base stations use the same channel. That would be OK if it were configured for WDS based roaming. But they aren’t.

So, 90% packet loss appears to be the norm between my local system and the base station itself. Forget about VPN or ssh.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t the configuration be something like channel 1, then 4, then 7, then 11, then 2, …etc… in order of the floors?

From my 5th floor room, I see 14 networks — 7 being the floors of the hotel and the other 7 being random networks in the neighborhood. Surprisingly, all but 2 are encrypted.

Update: I’m now seeing about 100kbps down and 5kbps up. Way better. Not sure what might have changed, though I did turn on “use interference robustness”.

In particular, DSL reports has this to say:

Your download speed : 101 kbps or 12.7 KB/sec.
That is 95.5% worse than an average user on pacbell.net

Your upload speed : 5 kbps or 0.6 KB/sec.
That is 98.8% worse than an average user on pacbell.net

Thanks for rubbing it in.

Marketing phone calls suck. I can barely tolerate dealing with a phone when the person on the other end is someone I know. Wasting my time telling some call center droid to never call again is only slightly more pleasant than cleaning up the yard after the dogs “played with” a rotting carcass.

I have been a very happy Vonage customer; cheap long distance and international calls, it just works, online voice mail, etc…

With one phone call, my opinion of Vonage has dropped immensely.

Vonage called earlier in the week to offer me a second line for free for 2 months. “As a valued and loyal customer, we are pleased to offer you a special deal” that is exactly the same as the deal offered on their website.

I was polite; No thanks, don’t need a second line, don’t call back….

They just called again to offer the same deal. I was not as polite and indicated in no uncertain terms that one of the reasons why I have been a long term customer of Vonage is to avoid marketing calls, take me off the list, do not call again, etc…

An angry letter has been written.

If they call again, I’m seriously going to consider switching services. Any suggestions?

There are about a dozen comic strips that I read online daily. And, as I have documented in the past, I have had some problems with certain syndication agencies.

For Better or For Worse has now started animating selected strips:

You’re not seeing things! We began animating the strips on the 19th of June, 2006, and will continue to animate selected strips when the artwork accommodates it. We’re pleased this feature has added some extra interest to the strip - thanks for all your feedback!

Here is some additional feedback.

Random one frame animations of eyes blinking or a cat tail changing from one position to another does not add extra interest to your strip. It adds “extra interest” like a mosquito in my ear or a moth attacking the TV during a late night movie fest.

Please stop.