Tag Archives: suck

AppleScript Sucks

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Here’s the thing: the idea behind AppleScript is actually very cool. That I can write a (theoretically) simple program that harnesses the power of several applications on my computer is the Next Frontier in Computing (Apple is not the only company doing this stuff). Now Apple even has a program called Automator to handle some of these tasks without you ever having to write any code. That’s a good thing, because AppleScript the language really, really blows. So much for the next frontier. It’s like the covered wagon is being pulled by an armadillo.

The temptation of AppleScript is that I need to take information from iBlog and convert it to a format that WordPress can use. AppleScript makes it really simple to ask iBlog for its data, already set up and accessible. Cool. Then we get to the part where we have to make AppleScript do useful things to the data. Uh oh. Welcome to the worst programming language ever created.

Sometimes with familiarity one learns that although a different language might do things a different way, it has its own strengths. Perl, for instance, is a text monster, but makes sacrifices to be one (so I’m told). AppleScript occupies a unique position in the programming world as I know it by doing everything badly. I challenged myself tonight to come up with one good thing to say about it. For perspective, when I try I can even think of good things to say about Microsoft and the Yankees. Not AppleScript. It’s like Apple is intentionally hiding powerful capabilities I know are there, built into the operating system. Not only that, it hides simple abilities that I can use in any other comparable scripting environment. AppleScript doesn’t want me to get my work done.

On top of that my task this time is made harder by iBlog’s grinding horrible slowness. Is nothing at all happening because I made a mistake, or is iBlog just off smelling the roses right now? What I want to do is exactly what AppleScript and iBlog’s script support were designed for, and I’ve already written some text functions that every other comparable environment has built-in, yet in the end I’ve been wasting my time. Now it’s time to bring in the big guns. Doing this the hard way turns out to be simpler than doing it the easy way. Go figure.

I will be doing a series of propellerhead articles documenting the migration from iBlog to WordPress. The articles might be interesting to someone if I wasn’t the only one on the planet still using iBlog.

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You’re Doing it Wrong!

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This is not beer pong.

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The World’s Worst Writing

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I’m not a big fan of television serials, as a general rule. There was a period of several years in which I never watched a single minute of sitcom. Not counting animated shows, anyway. Over the last few years the cartoons have been able to go where no live show dares. Which isn’t saying much.

As I write this I’m sitting in Pizzeria Roma, an old haunt of mine (the black hole by the oven is still working). They have a plasma TV now, showing network programming without sound. A crime drama just concluded, and it confirmed what I have come to suspect for a long time: There’s a lot of crap coming out of Los Angeles and New York, but the worst television in the world is made in Germany.

Maybe I should qualify the title a bit. This is about the world’s worst writing that people actually get paid for (regularly!). There’s plenty of truly awful writing published on the Web and in vanity press.

The Czechs have Ulice (rhymes with “street”), and old-school low-budget urban soap opera, and they have “Kriminalka: Anděl” (rhymes with “CSI: Prague neighborhood” – Anděl means angel which adds a nice nuance to the title). I am told that this show is actually pretty good if you’re into the whole CSI thing. It might just be national pride, but the locals tell me that the show makes up for a smaller budget with writing and acting. I know the one time I watched it without sound, I found it far less silly than the American franchise that inspired it.

Then there are the German shows. After a while they’re easy to spot. And when it comes to bad, they have taken sucking to a whole new level that American television can only dream of. I know that’s hard to believe, given the state of American TV, but the writing in the German shows is so bad it is a shining beacon of suck even with the sound turned off. (Worth noting here is that I’ve never seen a Chinese television serial. They might be worse.)

The other night I was laughing out loud at the action in a German detective drama featuring a dog. (There is another that features a helicopter, and so forth. In every case the show is constructed so we can say “yay dog!” or “yay helicopter!”) One of the many Toma

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Missed it by That Much

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I’ve been working on a really cool (in my opinion) story, and for once I knew exactly where I was going to submit it. City Slab is a very pretty quarterly that shows up in major bookstores, and they specialize in urban horror, where the city is almost a character in the story. My story, “Haunted City,” fits that bill nicely. While the pace may be a little slow for some editors, I’m quite pleased with the result.

Last week I was at City Slab’s Web site, and I got all the required information and even wrote my cover letter. There were still a couple of things I wanted to check for the story, however, so I did not submit. Good thing.

Today I went back to the Web site to double-check the address, and this is what I found: http://www.cityslab.com

Bummer. If they’d only held on long enough to publish my story, I’m sure their financial woes would be over. Instead, there is one fewer magazine paying real dollars for quality fiction, and therefore another twent-four good stories will go unbought each year. The best stories (or the ones by recognizeable names) will find a home somewhere else, but life on the bubble just got a little more precarious.

The venerable Weird Tales now has my manuscript. I hope they like it. They published Lovecraft, so a slow pace shouldn’t bother them.

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Just Because I Don’t Know What They’re Saying Doesn’t Make it Not Crap

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I’m at the Budvar Bar Near Home right now. There aren’t many people here, and the plasma TV is showing an American thriller movie. Tom Clancy was mentioned in the opening credits, and it seems that Ben Affleck is the star.

It could be that Mr. Clancy bludgeons himself whenever he’s reminded of this flick. I hope so. I’ve read several books by him that I’ve enjoyed greatly. But what is happening before my eyes on the television is patently ridiculous.

A pilot is patrolling the desert wastes. He is distracted when the photo of his wife and child comes untaped from his jet fighter dashboard. While trying to recover the photo he lets his guard down and runs into a hostile missile. Words fail me. The photo on the dashboard immediately classified the guy as Dead Meat. But then I am asked to believe that a guy carrying an atomic fuckin’ bomb would be distracted that way. Or even that he would be flying without an escort.

Then I’m asked to believe that those who lost the bomb shrugged and said, “oh, well, we can make another.” Twenty-nine years later, the bomb is recovered by Bad Guys. “It’s warm!” one of the scavengers declares. I am being asked to believe (I think) that the Israelis lost an atomic bomb and didn’t try to get it back. Yeeeeaaaah, riiiight. Tom! Mr. Clancy! That wasn’t your idea, was it? I can still respect you, can’t I?

OK, and as I watch we have the silliest of all action movie conceits. The standoff where each guy is pointing a gun at the other. Only in Hollywood would someone hesitate to pull the trigger. *ahem quentin* Seriously. A standoff occurs when the person who moves first loses. Guns pointed at each other is not a standoff situation – the first to move wins. If I have a gun pointed at someone’s head, and they have a gun pointed at mine, and we’re not old chums from back in the day, I’m pulling the trigger.

It could be that there was dialog to go along with this patently ridiculous standoff to make it make sense. If I was the guard with bad teeth, things would not have got to that point. Here’s the test I give myself as a writer, for every character in every story. Would I have done that? Given that character X has limited information and even less time to make a decision, would any non-stupid human being act the way the author asked this guy to behave? You can’t base a plot on the actions of stupid people.

Nor can you depend on bad driving, but as the movie progresses they have done that too. You can’t make a really stupid driving error a plot point. OK, you can, but you shouldn’t. The car that won’t start should be reserved for crappy horror movies. Please, Mr. Clancy, tell me you’re better than this. I hunger for the reassurance that you were not responsible for what I have been watching.

Although, honestly, I know you’ve already sold out. You flog your name shamelessly, unconcerned with quality. There’s the whole series of crappy airport novels with your name on them that you can’t feel good about. But there they are. You’ve earned your laurels. Just… don’t insult me like this.

Hopefully, when I sell out, I will do it more gracefully.

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Another Brief Message to the Gatorade Marketing Team

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A while back, while on a road trip, I wrote a message to the boys at Gatorade. In a nutshell, I told them that all the flavors were silly, and many of the names of the flavors were downright stupid. To that I have this to add:

Lemon-lime and strawberry mixed together are awful. Making the result the same color as regular lemon-lime is criminal.

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A Legal Recommendation

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When a guy is trying to call his girlfriend after his Internet connection goes haywire, and he discovers that he has no signal, he should not be held responsible for damages when a “more bars everywhere” commercial comes on.

I’m just saying, is all…

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Give ’em the Razors, Sell ’em the Blades…

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I’m hanging with That Girl, and the other day we were out on the town together, shopping for a variety of techno-things for our office. One of those items was a printer. We spent time at OfficeMax looking at a variety of options, and finally settled on a competent-looking Epson for seventy bucks. I was struck by couple of observations as we lifted the black beauty from it’s packaging and set to work hooking it up:

  1. The cable to connect the printer to the computer is not included. This is mentioned in small print. Oddly, It is not possible to tell from the outside of the box what cable is required. You must get home, unwrap the printer to find no cable, then make a separate trip. Thanks, Epson. (Thanks also to the almost overly-helpful people at OfficeMax, who probably should have known about this.)
  2. The cost of a printer, including a full complement of ink cartridges: $70. The cost of a full complement of ink cartridges: $80. It is cheaper to buy a second printer and throw it away than to buy a backup set of cartridges. Wow. Just… wow.

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My Curse, Apparently, is Broken

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For several years the performance of San Diego sports teams was almost frighteningly linked to my proximity to the club. Just watching the game, even remotely, has been well-documented on these pages to be a kiss of death. (In the interest of science, I have on some occasions in advance correctly announced that I was jinxing a game.) There was a period with the Chargers when it was just downright ridiculous.

This year, I have paid almost no attention whatsoever to baseball. I knew that pundits were predicting good things for my team this year, but things have been hectic, you know? Finally I had a bit of time and I thought I’d go see how my boys were doing. There is weekly column at espn.com called the power rankings, and I started scanning the list for my team. I scanned down… and down… and down…

By just about any measure (most notably the ability to win games), the Padres are the worst team in the league, with no help from me whatsoever. If the blessing of my absence is ended, so too must be the curse of my presence. I declare the curse ended.

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Já, robot

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I, Robot the film with Will Smith in it is on TV right now. I’ve never seen the movie in English, but I had heard that it wasn’t very much like the short story collection by Isaac Asimov. All I can say is that unless there’s some dialog that really doesn’t match the action on the screen, the title is the only thing the two have in common. The bit I watched was much closer to Terminator 2 than it was to anything that ever came from Asimov’s pen. Gone is the graceful economy of the writer’s storytelling style. The original stories presented a series of intellectual challenges; problems that were solved with cleverness and occasionally personal risk, but none of these ridiculous flurries of hyper-accelerated violence.

And maybe it’s the small screen, but the cinematography in the action scenes I watched was crappy too. Absurdly, forehead-slappingly over the top, which could possibly be forgivable if it weren’t so badly done. So, if there’s anyone else out there who has not seen the movie, well, don’t bother. Read the stories instead.

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Ratings System Thingie

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I have turned on a new Haloscan feature that allows you to rate the blog episodes here. Honestly I don’t know if such a feature makes sense in this context, but I thought we could give it a try together. I have a feeling that most episodes (like this one) won’t really inspire readers to give it a score, and I’m pretty sure that I won’t want ratings on the fiction episodes and the like.

But what the heck. It’s free.

Edited to Add: I voted, then when I reloaded the page, it showed no ratings again. If anyone loads the page and sees a rating, could you mention that in the comments? Thanks!

Also note that the ratings thingies are the very last thing on the page to load. That might take a while on a slow connection.

Edited again to add: I have tried to put the ratings thingie in manually, rather than depending on the automatic implementation by Haloscan. We will see if it can remember votes now, and this way I can also control where the ratings show up a little better.

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A Bumpy Day of Travel

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I’m sitting now in a Denny’s in Selma, California. I did not plan to stop after covering such a short distance, but sometimes even plans as nebulous as mine go astray.

It all started when I bid my gracious Piker hosts goodbye and hopped in the car for a fairly routine trip down the central valley. If things went well, I’d add a couple of hours to the trip to go around Los Angeles. I turned the key and… nothing. The battery was dead, after racking up significant highway miles yesterday. One trip to the auto parts store and a jump start later, and I was on my way. Clearly, though, the months of storage and little use had taken its toll on the battery. Wherever I stopped for the night, it was a safe bet that I’d need a jump start in the morning. The auto parts store didn’t have a battery for a Miata — it’s some kind of mini-sized high-tech thing. I would need to go to a Mazda dealership.

Then the road. Highway 99 south, an easy drive despite fairly heavy traffic. Zipping along, I saw a sign by the highway. Selma Auto Mall. Mazda. Well, heck, I’m going to be buying a battery, so why wait? I pulled off at the next exit and began to work my way back to the dealership. It was not obvious how to get there and I was in a residential area when I pulled out from a stop sign and turned to see a car coming right at me. The girl driving locked up her brakes and slid on the rain-slick pavement, slowly slowing, and right up to the end I was able to hope that disaster would be averted. As she came to a stop the noses of our cars kissed. Ouch. Although a more skilled driver might have been able to avoid me, the collision was, without a doubt, my fault.

We pulled to the side of the road. I’ll say this for the flexible plastic parts at the front corners of our two cars, They really handle this sort of impact admirably. There were some scratches and paint swapping, but everything was fundamentally intact. “I’m going to call my dad,” the other driver said. While waiting for him I gave her my insurance info and whatnot.

Dad arrived, looked over the damage, and said, “I don’t think we need the police.” I readily agreed. Not knowing what else to say, I told Dad that I had already given his daughter my insurance info. “Do you want to use insurance?” he asked. “I know a guy.”

The prospect of just taking care of the repair without taking a hit to my insurance premiums was attractive, to say the least. So, we all formed a convoy, dad in the lead, and drove across town to a backyard body shop just past the city limits. They all exchanged pleasantries in Spanish, obviously old pals, and one of the guys looked over the scratched-up bumper. he named a price, less than what I expected, far less than the hit to insurance premiums would be. Now all that was left was getting to a bank machine for the cash. Dad gave me a lift in his pickup truck, and on the way we had a nice conversation. he used to live in Mexico City, but much preferred the small-town life. He had 40 acres of farmland, and had just been offered $50,000 per acre for it, but he hadn’t sold. Where would he go? He liked it where he was.

Overall, that little automotive bump could have gone a lot worse than it did. It cost me precious cash out of pocket, and time, but thanks to the fact I was dealing with reasonable, friendly people it all turned out OK. Then it was back to the original destination. I was due for an oil change, so I went ahead and had them do that while I was in the neighborhood. Once that is done I’ll hook up the new battery and I’ll be off and running once more. Let’s hope the rest of the trip is without unexpected bumps.

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Evening has arrived. The service guys were kind enough to set my clock for Pacific time; it took me a while to realize that I wasn’t experiencing a premature twilight caused by the low clouds. I could have pressed on, worked my way through LA, and arrived in San Diego late in the evening. I chose not to. LA is a big obstacle, but with planning and a little extra time, it can be avoided. Rather than plow through the hellish traffic of Los Angeles, I chose to go around. Tonight I am sitting in a place called Molly’s Pub, poised for some fine back-road driving in the morning.

Tune in tomorrow for: The Road Less Taken!

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Double Whammy

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The bartender asks, “You want another?”

“Nah. I’ve gotta go home.”

He nods knowingly. “You seem sad tonight.”

Shit. Am I that obvious? And where the hell does a pimple-faced beer slinger get off even tiptoeing over the surface of sadness? Where in your world of primal teenage lust have you ever had the chance to understand deep, permanent, sorrow? If the cure to a broken heart is a new thang, what happens when there are no more thangs? Take your whole ‘there’s always tomorrow’ platitude and choke on it.

Still, the little bastard was right. I was sad tonight. Am. Women shined me on not one but twice, chopped-liverificating me to the harshest degree. The second shine was from my favorite bartender in this country. She was intoxicated and in a hurry to get back to the party downstairs, so I will cut myself some slack. Still, there was a big hole where “it’s great to see you again” might have fit.

I probably would have passed that over with a chuckle were I not already feeling raw from a previous shine. I suspect I have only myself to blame in the end, but I wrote in these pages a while back about a woman (name rhymes with feevah!) who out of the blue started talking to me. Perhaps it was my public expression of joy over this event, or perhaps I cashed in on another opportunity to make a complete ass of myself, but she doesn’t talk to me any longer. She doesn’t even look at me. She would be more comfortable if I didn’t exist at all. Which, overall, pretty much sucks.

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NASA chief says it’s not for us to decide what the Earth’s climate should be…

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Yep, we have global warming. Yep, it’s largely due to human activity. That’s what the boss of NASA says. For a long time the current administration refuted that the earth was warming up. Then they had to admit it was, but maintained there was no evidence that it was due to human activity. Now they’ve had to accept that. The next step in the Washington stonewalling of any attempt to even contemplate doing something about it: Hey, climates change. It would be arrogant of us to decide what the climate should be.

OK, maybe. But doesn’t that make anything man does to alter his environment for greater comfort or productivity arrogant? By that definition, arrogance is one of the primary characteristics of mankind, one of the things that makes us who we are. Why shouldn’t we decide what the best climate would be? Hell, if warmer is better for for most of humanity, I’m all for global warming. Let’s heat this place up! The problem is that making the climate hotter is more likely to be negative, and has the potential to cause suffering on a scale never before witnessed in history. Not since the black death, anyway. That’s a pretty big potential downside.

No, it’s not arrogant to consider potential disasters in the coming decades, it’s just that the people getting rich off current policies risk having the cash gusher they’re sitting on slow down a bit. Energy policy is, as far as I can tell (I’m no expert), a critical element in mitigating global warming. We will not have a well-considered energy policy while oil men are in charge. We would also not have a well-considered energy policy if windmill people were in charge, but that’s not what we’re facing right now.

If Cape Canaveral is abandoned to the waves, I hope NASA puts up a plaque with this guy’s picture on it.

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Czech word for the day…

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The spelling may not be quite right, I’ve not seen it written down. The word means ‘wallet’, as in: Zapoměl jsem mou penižinku, or in English, “I forgot my wallet.”

Some lessons stick better than others. More context, you might say.

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