rants

I get a lot of spam. A lot. No, really. I get a lot of spam.

I am directly or indirectly connected to the whois / registration of dozens and dozens of sites. I get a.lot.of.spam.

So. Tonight I happen to notice a piece of spam directed towards a URL that I own that nobody should know I own. It’s interesting because it actually includes my full name (along with the URL) in the body of the message. How the spammers got this is beyond me. (I intend to learn, though.)

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We went to see Mr. & Mrs. Smith tonight at the AVCO on Wilshire in Westwood. It was great! I wasn’t expecting much, but (a) the trailers were funny, (b) both stars are dead sexy, and (c) LA has been deluged with posters, and we — as simple drones — just can’t resist such a zealous marketing campaign. (Pay attention for the many homages made throughout the film; for example, a supporting character is wearing a “Fight Club” t-shirt at one point.)

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CapitalOne’s website is just terrible. About every third time I click the “LogIn” button on the front page it simply redirects me to the front page. Even on my work connection the entire site loads like it’s running on a 1992 486 box. There are ridiculous pop-ups thrown at me every time I attempt to download a statement. The layout is cluttered with AdSense-esque ads and 63 small-print disclaimers on every page. This is a company that must have money falling out of their pockets — why can’t they have a fast, slick web site? Even Washington Mutual — my local bank — has an infinitely better system.

There was massive construction along most of the mathematically-convenient 100 miles between Daytona Beach, FL and Gainesville, FL for the entire 4.75 years I was in college. The State repaved almost all of SR40 and made major improvements to I-75 in that time. Work was mostly done between 10pm and 4am so it was not tragically intrusive to the commute I made dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

Compare that to the laughably inefficient way that Los Angeles is handling the Santa Monica Boulevard Transit Parkway Project. I daily have to deal with roads ripped into pieces comparable to the Big Dig in Boston. The main difference is that the work in LA is only over about a 3 mile stretch. Oh, and they only work between the absolutely most-inconvenient hours of 7am and 4pm. And I don’t believe they have a snowball’s chance of hell in being done in the projected 3+ years. What a joke.

What the hell is this? I just got an email from Lids telling me that Nike’s got a new BoSox cap. Are they on crack or something? An “S” with the red socks? It looks ridiculous, and most people won’t even know it’s a Red Sox cap!

Check it out:

• S == Seattle
• S <> Boston

What are they thinking?

from an episode of Dennis Miller on CNBC:

Dennis Miller:  When Clinton was President, I found him to be a really reprehensible human being. I didn’t like him. … But on a day-to-day basis, him being President never really bothered me. I thought, “Well, listen, Bill, it’s a tough job. I’m behind ya.” I didn’t like him. I thought he was a bad guy, but I remember thinking, “I’m not gonna whine about it too much because it’s a tough gig.” If Bush is re-elected, will it upset your day-to-day life?

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The “plural apostrophe” (e.g. no dog’s allowed, sofa’s for sale, UGH) is running rampant these days, and it’s not just my imagination. It’s so wrong that I can’t even begin to fathom how anyone could make such a mistake. I hate it when people dismiss it with, “Oh, not everyone’s a grammar freak.”

Grammar? You think it’s an issue of grammar? I hate to break it to you, but if you can’t spell “dogs,” you’re illiterate.

via strange brew

I own an NEC SuperScript 870 laser printer. When I bought it - sometime towards the end of 2000 - I was incredibly thrilled. (I had actually bought one sometime in ‘99, I think. Then I moved to California and couldn’t bring the world’s most-economical, feature-rich, best-performing printer with me. So I bought another one because I was so happy with it.) This printer does everything. And it does everything extremely well. Watermarks, half-tones, headers and footers, multi-column pages, foldable brochures … it had the most incredible software interface! If you were working in Word and clicked Print and then looked at the Preferences (or Options) it was boggling how many awesome things you could do with this printer.

But that was before Windows 2000.

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amspay otsbay ogay erehay

NOTICE:
Threatening a state employee is unlawful and may result in a fine and / or imprisonment.
CA Penal Code Section 71

from a sign posted at the California Department of Motor Vehicles

Do you have sticky notes on your monitor? Post-It© notes? Of course you do. Here’s a good one for you. Write it on a Post-It and place it on the edge of your screen so you can see it all day. If you work for the federal government, get it tattooed on your forehead.

Insufficient Resources <> Inefficient Use of Resources

I heard for the umpteenth time this morning a representative of my government using the phrase “insufficient resources” to explain why his department was incompetent. In this instance it was the head of INS and he was telling dear NPR listeners that his IT department wasn’t capable of handling the new stresses of post-September 11 security because of “insufficient resources”.

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The California DMV has an extraordinary, superb, terrific license plate Online Registration Renewal system. I was able to register my tag in about 2 minutes and pay by credit card. What a beautiful thing! I love technology. I love that the ‘net makes tedious crud like renewing my license plate so simple sometimes.

Here’s my problem: I had to pay four dollars ($4) extra! There was a $4 “convenience fee” for registering on-line instead of at the DMV office! WTF?!? I should get charged $4 less for saving them paperwork! Boneheads.

<rant>
I could write a book about all the things done horribly, terribly poorly at CNNSI.com. Try to manage your magazine subscription there. Try to edit any of the thirty-eight separate mailing lists to which you can unwittingly find yourself subscribed. Try to find an article! The pages on the site load slightly slower than tectonic plates collide. There are dozens of useless and usability-impinging graphics on every single page. (I can’t even imagine what it would be like to read on a sub-4 browser.) The search functions are next-to-useless. And - can I stress this enough? - the archives are craptacular. You can’t link to an article more than an issue or two in the past, and all that’s archived beyond that are the “teasers” (which is only a bit more annoying than it is pointless).
</rant>

Someone commented on my mini-rant that the words “itch” and “impact” are not verbs. The reader seemed to suggest that the appearance of these words in “a dictionary” as verbs is a viable argument for them being accepted that way. My reply:

There are many words in “the dictionary” that are not words. You cannot use the fact that hundreds of thousands of people use a word incorrectly as evidence that they are using it correctly. This is a tautology. It is tantamount to saying, “There are hundreds of thousands of murders each year, so we should just accept murder as law.”

Yes, impact likely appears in dictionaries as a verb today. (It didn’t always.) And using it as a verb only displays to those of us with a respect for language and law that a person has a limited vocabulary. One last thing: An itch is a thing. To scratch an itch is to do something. To itch an itch makes no sense. Again, it just shows that the person saying it has a very poor vocabulary (or, alternatively, is extremely lazy … splitting hairs, I know …). It is true that there are a slew of words which are appropriately nouns and verbs. Hammer is a good example. You hammer a nail with a hammer. A knock is another good one. When you knock on a door you are producing a knock. Itch and scratch are not the same, though. You cannot itch an itch. A person saying that sounds about as intelligent as a person saying, “I’m hungry. Let’s go food,” or, “Can you car me to the airport?” So. While I have to admit that you are correct - itch and impact appear in the dictionary as verbs - the point of the entry on which you commented is that no self-respecting writer (or speaker) of English would use them as such.