Cursing
Although I thoroughly enjoy cursing, some people don’t. Here’s a list of five alternative phrases to use instead of dropping the F-bomb everywhere
expletive inserted Does cursing make you feel better?
Modern Efficiency Means I Don’t Care
When in a meeting about a subject they can’t be bothered with thinking about, one of our team member’s famous catch phrases is:
“..I’m just going to gloss over this so we can be efficient…”
It’s kind of hilarious because everyone can tell she means, “Hey asshole, I don’t care.” Very professional. It’s kind of not hilarious though because most of what they don’t care about are things like requirements to give software developers about projects they desperately want to get done.
Double Entendre Acronyms
Dear Mr. Crockford,
DVDA doesn’t only mean what your post is about. I nearly peed myself after seeing that shirt though. A way of life indeed.
The Wamu Screw
I generally like Washington Mutual as a company. It seems like they genuinely give a shit about your piddly checking and savings account and since I moved to New York City five years ago, I’ve been using them for both my personal and business banking. Visiting their branches has always been pleasant, the employees always act politely and even seem genuinely happy to be there doing their jobs. Six months ago, I saw what looked a pretty good rate on a online CD via the Wamu homepage, and after investigating the rate on my savings account I was shocked to find out that the APY and Interest Rate are both 0.25%! That is seriously fucked up. OK sure, I didn’t start paying attention to my finances with an adult mindset until a few months ago, but man, I really expected something over/around 3%. I invest in the online CD at something closer to 5%, mark my calendar with its maturity date, and then get all but the minimum $350.00 out of that awful savings account and into a money market fund. Hey, at least the minimum in savings affords a small degree of overdraft protection on the checking account.
Anyhow, the date of maturity for the CD came up this week. I am an extensive user of online banking and as such, I rarely have the occasion to use their automated phone system. The CD that my kash-munee was parked in was in fact an online CD, only available for enrollment online, so silly me, I thought I’d somehow be able to discontinue it online too. Nope. Fuckers. I get on the phone, and while there are many options to do all sorts of mundane things like, check your account balance! Get help en Espanol!, there isn’t an option anywhere to get help from a human. You stupid bitches, I just gave you a pretty big loan for the last six months, give me my money back! Button mashing didn’t help. #, 0, 0#, #0, *0, 0*. Nothing from the usual suspects. Invalid entry. Invalid entry. Inv-FUCK YOU! The machine hung up on me.
Then I remembered gethuman.com. What a good idea in theory. The only problem is it’s pretty trivial for these huge-ass companies to reconfigure their IVRs (Interactive Voice System) and foil the hive mind of helpful internetistas. OK gethuman, let’s see what you can do.
At first prompt press 1. Then press # at each additional prompt, ignoring messages.
OK. Calling. Welco-<1Booop>
<#Beep> Invalid Entry <#Beep> Invalid Entry <#Beep> Invalid Entry <#Beep> Invalid Entry <#Beep> Invalid Entry <#Beep> Invalid Entry <#Beep> Invalid Entry <#Beep> Invalid Entry <#Beep> Invalid Entry <#Beep> Invalid Entry
Hangup. Tenth # and I get hung up on again. Shit, maybe we really are in the future, the telephone system no longer understands touchtones. I’m almost at the end of my rope. I’m reminded briefly of the Michael Douglas movie Falling Down, wherein he goes fucking ape-shit after no longer being able to order breakfast at a fast food place because it’s past 11:30AM. But I take a deep breath and try one more time. Calmly I press 1 to get information about my personal accounts and at this point, I figure if the fucking system won’t recognize touchtones, I’ll just talk to it. I beg, I plead. Please give me a human. Agent. Help. English please. Fuck me baby, yeah, that’s it. (hoping to appeal to the IVR’s previous position as a sex chat bot maybe?)
After about 30 seconds of begging, finally, the phone rings, and shockingly quickly a human is on the other end. They cheerfully help me out and send me on my way. They are also blissfully ignorant of how to get through the IVR prompts to do what I wanted in the first place. Lesson learned? Forget about gethuman.com. Good idea, but impossible to maintain. We surely are on the verge of the robopocalypse. They have already taken over, they are just lying in wait, and when the great humano-robo war breaks out in 2010, the only method available to us for negotiations will be through one of these asshole IVRs that claims to understand English and Spanish.
“Please say ‘Peace’ to negotiate treaty”
“Peace”
“Invalid Entry.”
All Your Metabase Are Belong to Us
We recently received an archived web cast on a DVD from the company that produced and hosted it live for us. The content included various clips of media (Windows Media & Real Video) that played on the left as several slides (PNG files) were flipped on the right. Our intent was to take this production, shove it up on a web server, and give our customers access after they’ve forked over a small amount of cash. Everything is working fine on the DVD they delivered, so in my typical fashion I put the contents up, and hoped to hell it would work without issues. Bzzzt. Wrong. Ass.
The slides aren’t rendering. The video is playing fine though, so it’s not a complete shit-show. Anyhow, to troubleshoot I attempt to access the URL of where one of the slides should be. 404. Fuckin’ seriously? I know the file is there. I turn on directory browsing (only temporarily) for the folder where the web cast resources reside and hit the directory in trusty rusty Firefox. As expected, a list of files appears. Great. Click. 404. What the Fraking hell? Try a few more times and get the same result. Hm…I think. These graphics files have no extensions on them. Now that’s certainly a bit odd.
Poking around a bit i find this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/264968
It’s not quite what I’m looking for but I think it’s along the same lines. First of all, I already had the IIS Resource Kit installed. But I couldn’t find this so called MetaEdit anywhere. Luckily I have competent hosting providers (thank you RackSpace) who have offered Metabase Explorer on all of our servers. I’m eventually able to find the right MimeMap key, but of course there is no entry there for .*,application/octet-stream. There’s the issue. IIS can’t event fucking figure out what to do with a file unless it’s in this list you need scary tools to edit and who only knows why that entry isn’t in there as a default as you might think would be the case from the help document.
So I bite the bullet and add a new entry. Restart the www service, and finally, success! All is well in the land of files without extensions. Huzzah!
Code on the Road: Navigating The Minefield that is Visual Source Safe
Code on the Road: Navigating The Minefield that is Visual Source Safe: “comment”
Dudes, it was time to move to Subversion two years ago. Get going!
Top EMI DRM-free choices for iTunes
Today EMI announced that in conjunction with Apple they would be releasing their catalog of music on the iTunes store sans-DRM. “This is awesome” you might be thinking, but does EMI actually have any non-sucky music in its catalog? Personally I feel the need to spend some kash-munee and support EMI, so I went browsing. Here’s a few albums I’m likely to pick up:
- The Police : EMI Link / iTunes Link
- The B-52s : EMI Link / iTunes Link
- Blur : EMI Link / iTunes Link
- Kate Bush: EMI Link / iTunes Link
- The Donnas: EMI Link / iTunes Link
- The Flaming Lips: EMI Link / iTunes Link
- Gorillaz: EMI Link / iTunes Link
- Incubus: EMI Link / iTunes Link
- Judas Priest: EMI Link / iTunes Link
Hello Guitar N00bs!
Hello Guitar N00bs!
Finally something to get me over the end of ze frank’s the show.
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