Dear Mr. Microsoft,

I have a few gripes:

• Outlook sucks. If I click “Reply”, but then decide not to reply and close the window, it still marks the message as being replied to. That’s stupid.
• Also in Outlook, when I am composing a new message you like to save my drafts in the Inbox, even though there is a beautifully labeled (and empty) “Drafts” folder right next to it. That’s just bad form, good buddy. Thanks Matt!
• Why, for the sake of sweaty donkey balls, does Windows limit the total path length of every file on my computer to 256 characters. What the hell is wrong with you Windows?
• Explorer doesn’t allow me to create/rename files that begin with a period. I can think of numerous programs that use this naming convention (”.project”, “.cvsignore”, “.classpath”, etc). However, when I ask Explorer to create or rename a file to begin with a period it tells me: “You must type a file name.” Well I did, dumbass. The file name is “.project”. Just because it starts with a period doesn’t make it an invalid file name. Even your sorry excuse for a command prompt allows me to create/rename files that begin with a period. Stop being such a douche, Explorer.
• Hey Explorer, I’m not done with you yet! How about when I am renaming a file and accidentally make a mistake (such as including an invalid character or typing the same name as an existing file). Do you keep what I have entered so far and allow me to fix my error? Oh no, my friend. You declare that if a single character was mistyped then ALL of my changes must be erased and forgotten. Yeah, good decision there chief.
• And finally I come to cornbread. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

love,
Mike

I work on a computer for a living: in my current position I code Java, JavaScript, and SQL. The codebase in this project is very large, so many different groups across several different companies are constantly modifying something.

Usually the incoming code we see from these other coders is ok. But occasionally we see some astounding bad code that deserves to be put on a wall of shame.

I give you Exhibit A, a nice little snippet of JavaScript stupidity:
if ((document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
(document.Form1.theField.value == " ") ||
.... (continues for 30 more lines!)


Yikes! I sometimes make small mistakes or typos, but this… this is insane.

It’s more than incompetent: the programmer should have their keyboard access permanently revoked. I wouldn’t trust this person to write an e-mail without accidentally formating their hard drive.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, the picture in this post is Bill Gates posing for a teenie magazine spread (back in the day).

I don’t mean to rant, but this must be addressed:

“The improper communications between Congressman Mark Foley and former House Congressional pages is unacceptable and abhorrent. It is an obscene breach of trust,” Hastert, R-Ill., Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said Saturday in a written statement.

No. What Foley did was despicable, immoral, pedophilic, and wrong. The obscene breach of trust was done by the Republican leaders in congress who allowed this man to continue to violate the very laws on pedophilia he was creating for several years.

Where is the public outcry? Why am I only seeing Democratic blogs and editors digging deeper into this terrible situation? Where the hell is the religious right?

Now Foley’s lawyer is claiming that Foley is gay and was molested as a teenager by a clergyman. And… so what? Is that supposed to excuse him in some way?

Our common sense is slowly losing the battle with the “war on terror” (which is a completely moronic term - how can we wage a war on a tactic?). Check out this personal account of what happens when some guy accidently drops an iPod down the toilet on a plane and everyone freaks out. A tasty quote:

Now the questions became really pointed. What do you think about 9/11? What are your views on the Iran issue? Do you think government is too big, too powerful? Would you ever “make a point?”

He asked me if I knew how to make a bomb. “I have a degree in physics, and I’m not an idiot.” Of course I knew how to make a bomb — what kind of question is that?? The better question is, WOULD I make a bomb? The answer is no.

All this guy did was lose his iPod down an airplane toilet (after which he informed the flight attendants exactly what happened). What the hell is wrong with these people? It could even be argued that the reaction to this minor incident was itself a minor act of “terror” for all the people involved.

Obvious Alert: life is dangerous. Very little of what is being by the government can help. Get over it.

And another thing: the feverish search by the media for how “terrorists” could possibly hurt us is out of control. There are a million ways to hurt people - listing them out or having experts explain exactly how each can be executed actually HELPS terrorists (I’m talking to you, Fox “News”).

Despite a large majority of the public supporting stem cell research, President Bush stubbornly stuck to his anti-science guns today by using his first presidential veto. The bill, named HR 810, would allow federal funding agencies to support the development of new embryonic stem cell lines derived from unused frozen embryos created by in-vitro fertilization treatments.

These “embryos” (more accurately “clusters of cells”) are already being created and destroyed by the tens or hundreds for each couple undergoing such fertility treatment. It seems incredibly wasteful to NOT use these cells for some utility after a chlid has been successfully conceived. But Bush continues to bow to crazies in his party that demand control over science based on their interpretation of a 2,000 year old book.

Shannon and I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest while on vacation. It sucked. It really really sucked. I can’t get back those two and a half hours of my life, but if I could I would spend it outside the theater warning others to avoid this heaping pile of crap. The only redeeming part of the entire movie was the cinematography; it was a beautiful movie set in interesting places. But everything else was extraordinarily bad.

As always, Ask A Ninja’s resident ninja has some funny things to say about the movie and how much it sucks.

Senator Stevens is a prime example of why term-limits make sense. While I take issue with all of his pork projects benefiting Alaska (i.e. $453 million to build two bridges instead of post-Katrina support), the disgust in this post is directed toward his utter lack of technical knowledge and obvious role as mouthpiece for telecom companies everywhere.

The man doesn’t know what he is talking about, yet this is the man is spear-heading the anti-net-neutrality movement. The man just sounds senile trying to explain how the internet works. Funny (and sad) quotes from his 10-minute speech against net-neutrality (taken from a recent Dvorak column):

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Wow. If a seven-year-old said something like this it would probably be cute (though I would wager any self-respecting elementary school student already knows more about the internet than Stevens).

Senator Stevens is claiming that we, as consumers, are getting a free ride on the internet (hey jackass, what am I paying $20/month for?). He also supports allowing telecommunication companies to ask content providers to pay more money just to ensure that their packets aren’t delayed. Someone get this man out of office!

The Hi-Lite 30 is an old drive-in theater about 1 kilometer from our home. It stands in disrepair, mostly because the owners of the land have only leased it one year at a time for the past ten years to the current theater operators; they have had no incentive to renovate property that they did not own. Despite it’s current condition tens of thousands of residents still flock to see movies each summer as they have for the past 50 years. But not this year.

The story is exceptionally convoluted, but it now appears that the theater will be torn down in the name of “money for schools.” School District 131 stands to benefit if (and that’s a big IF) they can sell the 8 acres donated by Bigelow Homes. Not coincidentally, Bigelow Homes is also the developer who proposed to expand it’s existing communist commune HomeTown Aurora by 240 homes where the theater stands today. Big surprise.

You can follow all the drama at the excellent Aurora-based blog OpenlineBlog, specifically this entry which talks about the public hearing Shannon and I attended last night (you might have been able to see us in the picture if it were not blurred).

The whole situation makes me ill. I feel bad for all of the “concerned parents” who were fooled into believing that the hypothetical 1.3 million dollars the donated land was claimed to be worth could help their schools. The problem is that this estimation comes from the developer (who gets a tax write-off for the “value” of the land) and there are no current buyers for the land (in fact there are multiple parcels of land in the area that are currently on the market and not being sold, much less for the per-acre cost used to estimate the land’s value). Money is not going to solve their problems: the East Aurora High School (the only in District 131) already spends $2,000 more PER STUDENT than the surrounding districts. City Hall is not who they should be protesting - they should be protesting outside of their own school board’s meetings. Besides, with the addition of 240 homes and the accompaning children that come along with that influx of people, do they really think that’s going to help their already over-crowded schools? Morons.

I am against violence, but these people need to get their faces smacked with a heavy gauntlet of truth and common sense. About 85% of the people who spoke at the meeting supported the Drive-In, many passionately and with excellent supporting arguments backed by facts. The other 15% lived in HomeTown and appeared to be ignorant of the actual issues surrounding the drive-in. They spoke, for the first time in this months long debate, “because we care about our kids education.” Great! But this wasn’t the place to do it, you naive wastes of carbon, and you sure as hell don’t have a clue about what damage you did last night to you, your children’s, and Aurora’s future.

To the moronic few: Thanks for destroying a wonderful landmark (something unique in the western suburbs), removing cheap family entertainment (now we have to drive elsewhere to spend our money), and driving our property values down with shoddy housing and cheap strip malls (which will go unsold if they have the same luck as the half-empty strip mall 2 kilometers down the road).

This is why I hate stupid people.

current twc: 14,467

I had the displeasure of flying the friendly skies with United last weekend. They were 1 ½ hours late on my outbound flight and they canceled my return flight, forcing me to wait 12 hours before the next available departure. The really sad thing is that I can’t say I am surprised. Shannon generally flies United when she works and she has had a couple of flights canceled and many delayed.

I wrote them a letter to let them know how much they suck. Maybe I’ll get something for my troubles, but I highly doubt it. One thing is certain: if given the choice I will avoid this airline in the future.

Has anyone had a similar experience, either with United or another airline? Am I being too harsh over something that all airlines suffer from?