Category Archives: Observations

Hey! Wait a Minute…

Posted on by
1

This morning I got an entreaty from c|net (though apparently now they’re just cnet) to remain an active participant in their community. I haven’t been on the site in a long time, and perhaps they’re paring down their spam lists. As an incentive for me to opt back into their site, they offer the chance to win an Amazon Kindle.

Since I’m interested in owning one of those electronic book thingies, I checked the fine print to see how many they were giving away. The answer: one. I don’t like my chances there.

But wait! While looking for the list of prizes I noticed the following (sloppy formatting theirs, emphasis mine):

3. Promotion Period. The Promotion begins on January 24, 2011 at 12:00:00 PM ET and ends at 11:59:59 PM ET on January 31, 2011(the “Promotion Period”).

4. Entering:

To enter this Sweepstakes, go to your email inbox. Find the email from CNET Membership and open it. Look for the red button that says “Keep me connected.” By clicking this during the Promotion Period, you will receive an entry into this Sweepstakes.

(The sloppy formatting was also why I had a hard time finding the prize list – a list of one.) The flashy email copy above the fine print is dated February 3, 2011, and it was actually sent on the 6th. A week after the contest was over.

Chances are this mix-up is due to incompetence rather than malice, but CBS Interactive Inc. won’t be hearing from me.

Thanks!

The What Now?

Posted on by
4

Range Rover has introduced a new version of their suburban assault vehicle, a massive beast that will get the kids to soccer practice on time at the cost of $100 per quickly-depleted tankful: the Range Rover Sport. I’m pretty sure they didn’t intend irony when they gave it that moniker, but I have to believe the marketing team that blessed one of the least-sporty vehicles on the road today with that appellation must have had a good laugh when all was said and done.

And… it will work.

Thanks!

to: Douchebag

Posted on by
4

If blue smoke and the smell of burning rubber aren’t enough to get you to stop tailgating for even a minute or two, maybe you shouldn’t be driving.

1

Thanks!

Microsoft Needs to Run its Grammar Checker on Word

Posted on by
3

I just saw this in the user interface for Microsoft Word:

“Word found 36 items matching this criteria.”

This criteria. In a product that is supposedly created by professional writers for professional communication. Interestingly, when running the above sentence through Word’s own grammar checker, the sentence is flagged. Use these criteria or this criterion, the software advises.

This isn’t the latest version of Word, so there’s a chance it has been addressed. But still, this doesn’t reflect well on the Quality Assurance team at Microsoft.

Incidentally, my sweetie and I discovered this while comparing to see who had the most f-bombs in their story. It’s been one of those years. (It would be premature to declare a winner, as she will be adding a lot more words over the next three days.)

Thanks!

Night of the Busy Brain

Posted on by
1

I couldn’t sleep last night. My brain just wouldn’t quiet down. Kept thinking of stuff. Sometimes those times are productive, however. Last night I thought of:

  • Why my algebraic attempts to calculate the point on a sloped line where the two halves of the shape had the same area were turning out so complex
  • How to make money off PeoplePost (ten years too late).
  • What to call my next version of PeoplePost
  • One of the reasons Tomcat won’t run as a daemon on my machine
  • There was a WordPress thing, too. What was it?
  • Sometimes a weasel with a hammer… um… maybe that wasn’t so productive.

Anyway, eventually I fell asleep. That was about two hours ago. I’m more convinced than ever that alarm clocks are the bane of our civilization.

1

Thanks!

Carts and Horses

Posted on by
2

We discovered the other night that the battery backup for our digital phone service is not working. I’d fiddled with it, without success, so I resorted to reading the instructions. Crazy, huh?

The last instruction was to unplug the unit while doing all the previous steps. That was followed by: “If you do not have a dial tone, please call us at…”

Nice.

3

Thanks!

Congratulations, Spain

Posted on by
1

The boys from Madrid and Barcelona managed to work together, and scoring only nine goals in the entire tournament, have become world champions.

I was pulling for Spain, as in general I prefer finesse over brute strength. I would have been much happier, however, if the winning goal, which came at the most dramatic moment possible, when overtime was almost expired, had not been scored by the most flagrant flop artist on the pitch. He will go down in history for scoring The Goal, rather than for being The Big Whiny Whistle-Baiter. Except in these pages.

An indication of the state of the sport: At one point a Dutch player was breaking away. There was contact. Rather than fall down and draw a whistle, he tried to score. The announcers questioned his judgement. FIFA, we have a problem.

1

Thanks!

Ground Control to Lincoln Marketing Team

Posted on by
4

I’ve noticed a couple of new ads for Lincoln automobiles lately. They’re pretty standard fare; cameras sweep over the body of the car, revealing design details that are somehow supposed to make this car better than Lexus or a Cadillac. Then there is the music. I’ve seen two different ads, with covers of two different songs. The first is Cat Power’s rendition of David Bowie’s classic “Major Tom”, the second is Shiny Toy Guns covering Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom (Coming Home)”.

While both songs have their uplifting moments, you have to wonder about associating your car with songs about a man being killed when his vehicle fails.

2

Thanks!

Google Calculator

Posted on by
6

Here’s a little trick I discovered by accident a while back: Go to Google, and put 250-(tan(4pi/6))^2 into the search field. Hey presto! It does the math. This came in handy yesterday as I was evaluating things like

E.x = Origin.x + sqrt(1/((rv2/rh4)(tan2θ) + 1/rv2)

To find the point on an ellipse where the tangent is at a given angle. My little calculator widget was not remotely up to the task.

1

Thanks!

Something New to be Afraid Of

Posted on by
8

I’m sure other people have already thought to be afraid of this, but it’s new for me. I was thinking about genetically modified foods the other day, comparing them to newer, faster computers. It’s not the end consumers who benefit most from either technology; in the case of computers it’s the software and OS developers who win. For genetically modified foods, it’s the farmers and the big agricultural companies who benefit the most.

Sure the end users may benefit indirectly from having more awesome small-shop applications to try (modern power-hungry operating systems are packed with features that make creating robust applications simpler) or less pesticides on the food (plants can be modified to fight back agains pests), but for the most part people are not getting much of a perceptible lift.

Sometimes the practices of the big agribusiness companies like Monsanto don’t even help the farmers. They have now created versions of their big-selling products that don’t reproduce. That is to say, a farmer can’t keep some of his crop from one year to use as seed the next. He must go back to the big seed factory each year if he wants to grow crops that have the other benefits that make his farm profitable. (My information on this is actually a few years old; I don’t know what has happened since, so I might be totally wrong. That happens fairly often.)

I promised at the start that I would give you a new source of fear, and I’m a man of my word. Here’s the scenario: Farmers grow crops that can’t be used as seed. Then Something Happens, and the agri-giants are unable to create seed crops, either. It could be something as simple as bankruptcy or a corporate move to manipulate seed prices. It could be some sort of genetically engineered snafu if you want to Fear the Machine while you’re at it. Whatever mechanism you want to invoke, suddenly all these high-tech seeds that the farmers were counting on are not there. In their place – nothing. As winter comes farmers are reaping a record harvest they can’t replant, and they already know that there are not enough seeds for spring. Not nearly enough. Then what?

To make the story scarier, it would be best to wait until the agricultural giants are more entrenched in developing countries as well, but even if it happened now it would be something to worry about. Worrying is one of the things I do best.

1

Thanks!

An Odd Preposition

Posted on by
10

I noticed this on a bottle of Listerine recently:

“Do not use in children under 12 years of age.”

Do you use Listerine in your children? What about in the other adults in your household? I imagine the writer pondered the correct preposition to employ, and finally settled on ‘in’. Personally, I don’t use Listerine in anything other than my own mouth.

3

Thanks!

One Last Microsoft-Related Thought

Posted on by
1

While watching television a couple of nights ago, I saw an ad for the new Windows 7, code-named “all the stuff we wanted to put in Vista but ran out of time.” After the ad was over I turned to my sweetie and said, “I know there’s a joke about the significance of them using the theme for The A-Team in the ad, but I can’t think of it.”

After perhaps a second of reflection she said, “How about, ‘We get the job done but there might be a lot of explosions first.'”

I laughed, thought for a few seconds, and ventured, ‘There will be a lot of shooting, but no one will be hit.’

Obviously my sweetie is funnier than I am.

2

Thanks!

Whew! That Could Have Been Trouble!

Posted on by
Reply

I was watching television this evening and there was a commercial for a car of some sort. In the ad a giant claw descends with a crash and lifts an old junker up into the air. From underneath the crappy car a shiny new car drops.

At the bottom of the screen, in fine print: Do Not Attempt.

Thanks!

Remember Bing?

Posted on by
12

Yeah, Bing. The Google-killer. The Decision Engine. $100 million marketing budget.

Bing.

Thanks!

An Odd Little Grammar Thing

Posted on by
8

I was reading a blog for Web designers this morning and I came across this little gem:

… there will be no performance affection due to…

which was intended to mean “… performance will not be affected by…” My handy dictionary labels the above use of affection as archaic (I was surprised it even got that much respect), and I wouldn’t use it in any sort of serious writing.

The thing is, I like it. It’s one of those things that, on a special occasion, I might want to pull out and use. (You have to admit, it’s pretty funny.) In my book it’s perfectly all right to break the rules of grammar if you do it on purpose. So remember when you read my occasional bad-grammar rant, or the rant of any other hard-ass, that rules are made to be broken—but when you break them, know why. Even the hard-asses will smile if you do it well.

2

Thanks!