Monthly Archives: May 2009

Touch

Reply

Ever worked in a shop or a bar? You know those people that don’t actually give you the money but put it on the counter? Doesn’t matter if it’s a note or someone determined to empty their penny jar it really annoys me. It’s like you are not worthy, that you are an untouchable, that you are there to serve and do their bidding. That’s why they count the money out so they don’t have to touch anything that you have had your filthy dirty disease-riddled necrotic fingers near.

Well it’s the same when someone sends an email which is full of junk but has no actual substance because it says “Read the attached”. IT USUALLY HAS A LOT OF CAPS IN IT. Oh, and it’s sometimes a .doc screenshot. What in hell is going on there then?

Really fucking irritating.

Quit with the slow

Reply

Apple are meant to be good at this “We know what you want and we’ll tell you how you are going to get it”. It’s just that patronising attitude that pisses me off about them. So I want them to speed something up.

If you remember cassette tapes you’ll know that “back in the day” when you pressed Eject the little door clicked straight open. Fast, slightly noisy but it worked. Then some idiot decided fast was bad, terribly nasty and he introduced damped eject. Press Eject and that door open really bloody slowly. I think that was one of the first things that annoyed me to an extreme. It was that annoying I would not buy certain equipment if it was damped. My tape, my machine and if I want it out then that should happen as fast as it can be done. At least tapes have died out – if you are still using them I assume you look on damped eject with fondness…. but DVD’s are here for a while.

Put a DVD in a mac and play. Apart from the fact you cannot eject until the DVD Player has decided you can when you decide to eject the disc it takes forever. First it checks the software allows it, then it engages something noisy, then something else noisy, then it whirrs and then it ejects the DVD. Too damn long. If the DVD is not being used it should be assumed that I will eject it – especially if it knows I just played it. That DVD should be poised to fly out of the drive. No ‘Press, wait, yawn, press again to check it got the message, walk to next room to find box and hey, there it comes”. My machine, my disc and if I want it out it should be done as fast as technology can possibly do it. So Apple, get – yet another – clue and speed the damn thing up. After all, isn’t technology about getting more done in less time?

Linking permission

Reply

Three years ago I highlighted the way a company called Evrsoft decided how people could link to them. It was very precise – to the pixel – and to be honest was a pile of nonsense. A link is a link and I’ll be damned if I am going to ask anyone to link. My site, my choice. They improved it hugely – http://www.evrsoft.com/linktous.shtml – though mentioning Netscape dates them somewhat.

Terms of Use
Permission to Link
You may link to the US-CERT web site by using “US-CERT” as a text hyperlink. If you wish to use an image of the US-CERT word mark, send email to webmaster@us-cert.gov and include the URL of the web site where you plan to place the link.
http://www.us-cert.gov/privacy.html

So the United States Government want to vet the image and the site and presumably get into an argument over the niceties. Don’t they realise that people on the internet and not in the USA may want to link? That they may not have read the Terms of Use (after all, who reads those eh?) and they may, just may, wish to ridicule in some way. So why start a fight you cannot possibly win? It’s the frigging internet and you shouldn’t need permission to link anywhere with any image and with any text and for any purpose.

Unless you want to link to vnunet. You should read all this little print first. http://www.vnunet.com/about/linkingtermsandconditions

http://advertising.gawker.com/legal/
RSS feed use
Gawker Media reserves the right to object to your presentation of the RSS feeds and the right to require you to cease using the RSS feeds at any time.

This one is odd. I can see why but I can’t see how. How do you stop a Fair Use? I’m sure you will have considered this yourself though seeing as “Please read this statement carefully before proceeding to access any of the GM Sites.”

I’m sure there are wackier things out there and yes I can see why from a legal pov why they are there because the fact they could act on something unwritten means there is no need to try and details so much surely?

Break don't kill

1

In films – and probably real life – someone does something very bad (usually killing a someone) and a member of the bereaved family then kills the perpetrator. And that seems wrong to me.

It’s not the killing I have a problem with (I can understand that) and it’s not the desire for revenge (I can understand that too) it’s the thinking that this will teach them a lesson. It doesn’t does it? You can’t kill someone during “teaching them a lesson” – you can’t measure the success or failure of your chosen method. And all it really does is hurt the family which is okay because they hurt yours but they are not the prime target.. Any further vengeance will happen regardless of the death surely? So if you want to make them (the killer) pay, you want to teach him a lesson (and let him live to learn it), punish the family and generally make the other side genuinely regret everything that happened then the killer has to live.
So paralysing them would appear to be the way to go here. Full paraplegia could be tricky given the location of the necessary injuries – we don’t want to kill them after all – but breaking the spine halfway down has no real possibility of that (assuming no real collateral damage to other internal organes). You get the satisfaction of visiting pain and revenge on the person, you are teaching others that you should not be messed with and the original offender gets to live with the consequence of their action for the rest of their days.
Bonus points would seem to be in order simply because no-one actually died – but you did take a life.