Archive for the ‘cranky’ Category
Friday, February 3rd, 2012
My boss at work is moving to another state, and will be working remotely from monday on. So, we are setting up facetime betwixt my ipad and her mac, in preparation for the big day. And ever since, my ipad is now making little notification sounds, even though it’s completely muted, and everything I can find about facetime in settings is set to off.
Most annoying is that I can’t see any reason for it to be making the sounds; I’m not getting call requests every five seconds, but it’s making the noise that often.
At least killing the app seems to have stopped them.
UPDATE: Killing the app didn’t make any difference. I finally tracked down that somehow, making a facetime call, turned on email notifications for gmail. WTF?
Tags: annoying, apple, notifications, unmuteable
Posted in apple, cranky, work | No Comments »
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
CEO of the Susan G Komen foundation, she has chosen to destroy the charity she created, by crashing it headlong onto the rocks of the abortion debate. Choosing cowardice and self-hate, she caved to Republican pressure to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood, and showed that she is willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of women.
But she isn’t just a terrible human being, she’s also a failure. Her pathetic decision has resulted in more donations for Planned Parenthood in the last two days, than they got from Susan G Komen in an entire year.
So, screw you Nancy Brinker, or rather, thank you for reminding me to donate to any cause that you oppose. And doubly screw you for what you have done to all the women with breast cancer, who will now have to find new resources, or face the moral dilemma of accepting help from the devil.
UPDATE: The Komen foundation has released a rather weasel worded change of heart, that makes it clear that they are only sorry they got caught, not that they regret trying to take away healthcare options from women. The more you learn about the Susan G Komen foundation (less than 21% of their money is spent on actual research), the more it seems like a bit of close attention to what they are actually all about, is in the best interest of everyone. I can only imagine how many people’s live would be improved if they spent even $300,000 less on Nancy Brinker’s unearned salary of $495,000. She would still be wealthy beyond the dreams of most American women, and might have some sort of ethical leg to stand on. As is, she just seems like a heartless woman who exploited the death of her sister for her own gain.
Tags: nancybrnkercoward, plannedparenthoodheros, susangkomenfraud
Posted in charity, cranky, oh-well, wonderments | No Comments »
Thursday, January 19th, 2012
They defend the inclusion of advertising in the paid-tier of service by touting its cheapness.
I could buy dog food for a lot cheaper than steak, doesn’t mean I’m going to eat it. At this point, it isn’t even worth free.
Tags: hulu, huluplus, wasteofmoney
Posted in cranky, mis-cognition, oh-well, tech stuff, tv | No Comments »
Thursday, January 19th, 2012
It would seem the geekworld’s favorite helper-to-hate, Clippy, has gotten a job at Google’s GMail division. You can see his influence in the new look, with it’s unhelpful way of showing and hiding buttons, assuming you can’t keep track of who your friends are by name, nor really want to see your big screen monitor actually full of useful information.
Hopefully someone will notice, and fire his ass, before it’s too late =p
Tags: baddesign, clippy, gmail, google, microsoft, ui
Posted in cranky, microsoft, mis-cognition, oh-well, silliism, tech stuff | No Comments »
Thursday, January 12th, 2012
I’d like to think threads on how to justify racism or sexism wouldn’t have been posted, and if they had, would have been free of ‘helpful’ advice, with people rightfully concerned about having their names associated with comments that could be taken out of context to hurt someone. But not only was it OK to post, far too many people thought it was OK to participate in, for me to feel like I was in a place I should be, so goodbye to that.
Life is better lived off-line anyways.
Tags: disappointment, goodbye, homophobia
Posted in cranky, happy, metafilter, mis-cognition, sketch | No Comments »
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
Whatever the qualifications for “Field Supervisor” is at Cleanscapes, it doesn’t seem to include an ability to follow basic laws of the road, not to mention simple human decency. Just watched one of these gems of industry nearly hit a woman in the crosswalk at work. Lucky for the inattentive driving jerk, she was paying attention and quick on her feet, and literally jumped out of the way in the nick of time. We shall see just how seriously they take safety at the company; I called in and reported the guy. He had no excuse. The sun is out, there were no obstructions blocking his view.
UPDATE: I did get a call back from the safety manager at Cleanscapes, who gathered some more details and promised that he would track down who it was, and discipline them appropriately.
Tags: crosswalk, grar, safety
Posted in cranky, oh-well, seattle | No Comments »
Thursday, December 29th, 2011
Tivo used to be a great device for giving you control of your TV.
Now it’s just another advertising platform that tries to get in your face as much as possible.
Every time you pause live, you are forced to see a pop-up ad for some crappy ‘thing’ called Morning Joe.
Maybe there are people who paid good money so that they could see more ads, instead of fewer. I’m not one of them. Whatever Morning Joe is, it must be a terrible product,show, person, or pile of festering crap left rotting in the sun. If you are in charge of advertising for Morning Joe, you really suck at your job. You’ve made sure I hate your product before I’ve even seen it, and created a lifelong (minor) arch-enemy. I’m not going out of my way to bring your justified doom upon you, but every chance I get, where it’s legal and effortless on my part, I’m going to shit on you. Good use of those advertising dollars.
Tags: badidea, crap, morningjoesucks, tivosucks, wastedadvertising
Posted in cranky, oh-well, tech stuff, tv | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011
I am not a fan of the ‘new’ look for Gmail.
And it would seem I’m not alone in that distaste.
But Google did user testing, and they all said they liked the changes. Thing is, if you read their explanation of the testing, you’ll notice that “Stay the same” wasn’t ever on the table for fellow googlers, so it seems kind of dishonest to claim feedback was positive there. And any outside usability group you put together was inevitably going to be filled only with people who like to try new things. People who don’t like change aren’t going to sign up, so no matter how diverse by age, gender, etc your group was, it wasn’t a representative sample of the actual user base, and gives you no data about how the change would be received at large.
It would seem that some of the feedback is getting through, slowly.
But some of the worst offenses aren’t ever going to go away, no matter how many people complain, because they would interfere with the big Facebook-ification that is their ultimate goal. I get it, you want people to use Google+. Thing is, I’m not going to post everything twice, and everyone is already on Facebook, so that’s where that stuff goes. I have gigs of pictures and metadata on flickr, and that’s where that stuff goes.
Trying to mimic Facebook is a bad idea. Fads come and go. Instead of trying to reproduce the look of someone else’s website, Google should have been trying to build a tool that integrates all the social platforms seamlessly. I would kill for something that let me post my pictures to Flickr, and my words to my own blog, and lets me control how that gets shared with fine grained control, then automatically takes care of the minutia of which service which person is on. That would be good. Not evil.
Tags: annoyance, facebook, feedback, force, gmail, google, hate, lame, suck, testing
Posted in cranky, idea, mis-cognition, oh-well, review, tech stuff | No Comments »
Friday, December 9th, 2011
So last week, I get an automated phone call from Comcast letting me know that although they upgraded my billing for the new higher tier or cable speed they call “Blast”, a good six months ago, it would seem my modem was never capable of delivering the promised speeds, and I need to replace it with a more modern one.
Fine, whatever. I’ve been meaning to buy my own modem eventually, and stop paying the rental fee like a sucker, thinking I might switch back to DSL. Amazon delivered me a nice new DOCIS 3.0 modem that’s on comcast’s list of approved modems for Blast service. Now I fire up chat with the comcast support rep to give him the MAC address for the new modem, only to have this idiot waste 10 minutes playing some weird passive-aggressive game before he finally tells me I have to bring the modem into one of their service centers, physically, before they will update their system. I can understand offering that choice to the few people who can’t figure out the instructions “turn device over, read label that says MAC address”, but not having a self-service option seems downright stupid.
Maybe I will switch to DSL after all.
UPDATE: I got a message from Comcast to let me know the chat representative was incorrect, and that they can do the change over the phone. Lesson learned, the chat staff are useless.
Tags: cableinternet, comcast, hardware, modem, stupid
Posted in cranky, mis-cognition, tech stuff | No Comments »