Devin on Earth

I really hate that there are things I want — nay, need — to write about right this minute and I can’t because it would be revealing too much about sensitive stuff that isn’t my place to talk about.

What good is a personal blog if you can’t use it to rant and kvetch and cry and work out dealing with the bumps the Universe throws your way?

Email clients need to be more intelligent. For example, I can appreciate the Request Read Receipt feature that Outlook/Exchange and other email systems offer; it makes sense in a corporate environment, or when sending correspondence with business partners. However, all bets are off once you starting emailing the Internet in general. Why, oh why, do Outlook and Exchange continue to be so clueless about these wonderful things we call mailing lists?

It wouldn’t be very hard at all for Outlook to notice when a message I’ve received comes from a real mailing list; they have all sorts of wonderful headers (at least, they do if they’re compliant with RFCs) that easily distinguish them. It should then automatically change its behavior in several key ways:

1. Stop sending read receipt requests to that address. It’s really bloody annoying to be reading along a mailing list and suddenly get the read receipt request dialog in my face, and all it does is make me think that the sender is an idiot.
2. Stop sending OOF (out of office/out of facility) messages to that address. That looks even dumber.
3. Offer to automatically create a new folder and rule to manage future messages from this list.

Oh, and email users who set “request read receipt” as their default? Should. Be. Shot. 

Dear Big-Ass Bank,

Many years ago, we switched our accounts to you from one of your competitors because they had crappy customer service and you did not. In fact, your customer service rocked our socks off. Sadly, it has become clear that you’re more interested in trying to grab customers from other banks than you are in retaining your existing customers. In fact, you are consistently engaging in extremely short-sighted “cost-cutting” practices while other banks are rejecting those same practices because they lose customers.

As an example, your phone menus. I should not have to be the Amazing Kreskin to figure out how to get to live human with my question that does not fit into any of your carefully thought-out categories. I can accept having to type in my account number before I get to that live human, but what the fuck is this “Telephone Access Code” you’re now requesting? How come I didn’t get a nifty brochure in the mail telling me all about it and how it would help keep my personal information safe from big bad identity thieves? Please don’t expect me to believe that you care about the environment, because you don’t hesitate to send me all sorts of paper and brochures about other items.

And since I’ve brought up identity theft, I have to say that while I appreciate the thoughtful tips you printed on the back of the paper that my new debit card came with, I feel compelled to point out that it does no fucking good when you insist on using Social Security numbers as default settings for access codes, PINs, and pretty much any other type of verification question you think up. Come on, seriously people — the SSN is one of the main targets for identity theft precisely because you idiots (and your fellow idiots in the financial verticals) insist on misuing the SSN as identification. Have you ever even looked at a SSN card? It says right on there in big fat type that the SSN is not to be used for identification purposes.

No, I don’t care if everybody else does it. No, I especially don’t care if it’s convenient. I’m the customer here, not you; your convenience is second to my security. By misusing the SSN this way, you and other banks (and the credit agencies, and insurance companies, and pretty much everyone else who feels obliged to collect my personal data) have guaranteed that bad people want to steal that number — it’s the key that makes comprehensive identity theft even possible. Congratulations, you scallawags — you’ve made it more convenient for the bad guys to get to my financial data than you have for me.

Thanks for nothing, bank. Please be assured that we will be looking over our options. It’s clearly time for us to part ways; this relationship is no longer working for us. And yes, it’s totally you — not us.

Sincerely,

Devin L. Ganger
 

Dear IT Marketing people;

You are required to immediately cease and desist from using the phrase “perfect storm” (example: “the current regulatory environment creates a perfect storm for compliance vendors”) in any subsequent communications or materials. You may be under the delusion that it shows that you are hip and trendy, but all it really does is let us know that you have nothing substantive to say and merely rely on stealing the latest buzzwords to try to tell us about your boring, unoriginal product.

Here’s a suggestion: stop your frantic efforts to stay on top of the latest chic IT lingo. Instead, devote a mere 10% of that time (yes, that’s one-tenth, for the four of you who understand fractions) to actually coming up with something original to say about your product or service.

You will get extra bonus points (and probably higher sales) if you can do so in simple language: “If you buy our product and use it correctly, your CEO has a smaller chance of going to jail” is much more clear and persuasive than just about anything else you can say, except for possibly, “If you buy our product and fifteen years’ worth of consulting services to go with it, you will be 500% more attractive to members of the appropriate gender and orientation.”

You can really increase sales by being honest about your product, but that’s an advanced topic for another time.

Thanks in advance for your kind attention. Please close your mouth and wipe the drool from your chin; it’s unbecoming.

Sincerely not living in 2000,

Devin

Apple sells gift cards that can be redeemed online or in their physical stores. So far, so good.

Apple sells gift certificates for iTunes — both phsycial and email versions. So far, so good.

A friend got me a $50 Apple Gift Card for Christmas. So far, awesome.

Apple won’t allow my to use my Gift Card to buy songs off iTunes. Annoying. 

Apple won’t allow me to use my Gift Card to buy the email iTunes Gift Certificate (which I would receive immediately, and be able to use to buy the $50 worth of songs I’ve got saved in my iTunes cart, that I was planning on being able to listen to on the plane tomorrow).

Bastards.

Thinking about it, the reason behind it is probably either a) fraud prevention or b) the result of some legal settlement/contract along the way…but either way, it’s incredibly crappy that I have credit with Apple, want to make a purchase, and can’t through no fault of my own.

Apple, you suck. Fix this, because it makes iTunes and the Apple Music Store far less convenient. I don’t really care what the underlying problem is; you’re a smart company. Fix it and get out of the way of me spending money at your store.

This isn’t aimed at anyone in particular whose blog I read, or who I know reads this blog, but more of a general comment prompted by the reaction of a friend who just received a huge Battlestar Galactica season 3 (the current season) spoiler on Digg:

If you’re talking about the current season of a TV show, or a recent book or movie, do NOT reveal plot points without providing adequate warning. Doing so can result in innocent readers having their enjoyment of said plot point diminished thanks to your moment of thoughtlessness.

I myself can be very easygoing about receiving spoilers — for most shows, movies, and books I just don’t care. (Harry Potter, for example, although I definitely in the minority on that one.) BSG, however, I care about. If I were my friend, I’d be livid right now.

If God is just, there is a special eternity of torment reserved for habitual spoilers.


 

Words mean things.

If I have one word such as “request” that functions both as a noun and a verb, and I have another word such as “ask” that is a synonym for it as a verb, that does not mean that “ask” is a synonym for “request” when used as a noun. “Ask” is not a noun, dammit. How lazy does one have to be to think that trying to drop two syllables off “customer requests” is a good idea?

Attention, marketing departments: verbal abominations such as “customer asks” (meaning things that your customers have requested in your product) are sufficient grounds for summary execution. Use of these phrases is your voluntary indication that you are a waste of biomass and must be immediately recycled.

“My computer can beat up your computer.” What a load of horse hockey.

I’ve long been tired of the whole PC vs. Mac vs. Intel vs. AMD vs. RISC vs. Windows vs. UNIX vs. Linux rat race, and was finally motivated to sum my precise feelings yesterday when commenting on a friend’s computer plans:

Computers are tools, not religious icons or penis extensions. Pragmatism should be the first, best factor in picking the right hardware and software for your needs.

The reality of the matter is a dirty secret that, deep down inside, all computer geeks know and few want to admit: all hardware sucks and all software sucks.

How can they not? They are produced by human effort and design processes, which involve the fine art of — say it with me now — compromise. No design team has an unlimited budget, infinite time, mastery of all physical processes, or the ability to make up their own requirements. The history of computing is replete with the corpses of elegantly engineered designs that proved to be too costly to mass-produce or that failed to meet the real-world needs of the customers expected to buy them.

We live in a physical universe ruled by the Satrap of Entropy and his lieutenant Murphy. Instead of wasting a lot of time heating the atmosphere and murdering electrons with endless flamewars, people need to chill out and find the flavor of suckage they can live with.

So take a stand against computer zealots everywhere. The next time you see a wrinkled lip or furrowed brow being unshipped for the opening salvos of a rant, take pre-emptive action. The only answer to “My computer can beat up your computer” is, in the end, “My sledge hammer doesn’t give a shit.”

WHAM!

I think Robert Heinlein said it best in “The Happy Days Ahead”, an essy from his 1980 collection Expanded Universe:

Baseline: fifty-odd years ago astrology was commonly regarded as a ridiculous former
supersition, one all but a tiny minority had outgrown. It is now the orthodoxy of many, possibly
a majority. This pathological change parallels the decay of public education.
….Today natal horological astrology is so widely accepted that those who believe in it take it
for granted that anyone they meet believes in it, too — if you don’t, you’re some sort of nut….
I don’t know the percentage of True Believers but it is high enough that newspaper editors will
omit any feature or secondary news rather than leave out the daily horoscope.

Heinlein may have been a opinionated old fart, but he usually put a lot of thought into his opinions, and he draws a completely valid distinction between what he called natal horological astrology and the type of astrology that was the historical precursor for modern astronomy. The former is the belief that “the exact time, date, latitude, and longitude of your birth and the pattern of the Sun, Moon, and planets with respect to the Zodiac at that exact time all constitute a factor affecting your life comparable in importance to your genetic inheritance and your rearing and education”, while the latter was a branch of descriptive astronomy that could make repeatable and accurate predictions about the positions of planets, stars, the sun and moon, and related phenomenon such as eclipses. Granted, many ancient astrologers probably traded on their scientific knowledge to enhance their own status as counselors, but the art of astrology was initially founded on some extremely impressive math skills.

So what draws my ire today? This story in which a Russian astrologer is suing NASA for $300 million because they crashed a probe into the Tempel 1 comet:

“It is obvious that elements of the comet’s orbit, and correspondingly the ephemeris,
will change after the explosion, which interferes with my astrology work and distorts
my horoscope,” Izvestia daily quoted astrologist Marina Bai as saying in legal
documents submitted before Monday’s collision.

Well, guess what, lady? Your precious ephemeris is a load of bunk to begin with. While astrology may be based on some live genius-level mathematics, the whole system depends on mankind’s collective knowledge of the Solar System to begin with. The modern system of 12 signs of the zodiac, based on constellations in the ecliptic of the Solar System, only stablized around the 1930s (and oddly enough, there are actually 14 constellations in the ecliptic, not 12, and they are not even close to being distributed perfectly in 30 degree arcs). We know about a lot more asteroids, comets, and even planets nowadays than we did; astrologers have had to take all of these changes into account. The fact that we discovered existing celestial bodies means that all previous astrological charts were bunk. Since we still don’t have an accurate catalog of all bodies in the Solar System, future discoveries are guaranteed to continue to invalidate current astrological charts. So your stupid-ass lawsuit is a waste of time and money. I hope the courts laugh her out of the building. Sadly, however, I fear that NASA will have to waste time and money fighting this idiocy.

This will be a category I visit every now and then. Think of it as a running list of things of such excruciating stupidity that the people who do them need to get their asses kicked. It won’t name specific names, unless I think that would be more funny than otherwise.

To start off…

People who put ATA/EIDE peripherals in a system and mix manual jumpering with Cable Select on the same bus.

Most PCs (practically all workstation-class) these days use EIDE/ATA drives. The IDE specification permits exactly two devices per IDE bus, a master and a slave. These designation helps the IDE controller and the devices figure out priority when both devices are trying to move data across the bus. In order to declare a hard drive, CD/DVD-ROM, or other ATA-compatible peripheral as either master or slave you have to move a small plastic jumper to bridge a set of pins. Which pair of pins you bridge tells the drive which position it is.

Some bright soul figured out that with a slight modification of the IDE cable, and with the appropriate smarts on the drives, you can use a method called Cable Select. Cable Select (a separate pin setting on compatible devices, which is pretty much anything IDE/ATA these days) tells the device that it is master if plugged into one position on the cable and slave if plugged into the other position. It’s fairly nice, since you set all your devices for CS and you never have to worry about conflicts.

You never want to mix the two methods. If you’re using CS, it needs to be used for both devices on the chain; otherwise, bad things happen. For example, two hard drives on the same chain, one as master and the other as CS, might cause severe speed slowdowns on the master drive and prevent the OS from ever seeing the CS-enabled drive.

If you are a person who has configured a computer like this, this is stupid. If you’ve done this to someone else’s system, then I will have to kick your ass, because it will one day be me (or someone like me) who has to fix it and explain to them just how stupid you were.

Don’t be that person.

I don’t get this. I post pictures of myself and get feedback — one half-assed crack, at that. I post about the bloggers opposing Alberto Gonzales and nothing.

WTF, mate?* Is this thing on? Hello?

* “WTF, mate?” is a quote from the hysterically funny and definitely raunchy Flash animation “The End of the World”. Not kid-safe, probably not work-safe. You’ve been warned.