rants

To the political analyst who discussed Obama’s campaign this morning on NPR: I’m sorry to say that you lost whatever shred of credibility you had the moment you said that something was furmaliar. Nothing is furmaliar. Lots and lots of things are familiar. There is no r in the middle of that word. It’s not an accent. It’s not “the way we say it here”. It’s not anything other than wrong. You disagree. I know you do. So, Mr. Political Analyst, imagine this: If you and I were engaged in a conversation about Obama and I pronounced his name Orbama, would you correct me? I think you would. If I said, “Oh, that’s just the way I say it,” what would you think? Good day, sir.

The new member registration form at the Blue Cross of California website has what I consider to be several major bugs.

• A user’s username must contain a number and a letter. Because this is not exactly a ‘net “standard”, they need to do a better job of bringing this to your attention.
• When you submit the form with an error — for example, not including a number in your username — any values selected in drop-down combo boxes are reset to their defaults. This means that you have to re-select your “Group Member Type” and “Secret Question” before submitting the form again. If you don’t re-select these fields, the submission fails.
• When you submit the form with an error — for example, if you didn’t include a number in your username and then re-submitted the form without re-selecting your “Group Member Type” and “Secret Question” — the two password fields (which you entered twice to avoid typos) are cleared as a security precaution. You must enter these values again.
• When you submit the form with an error — for example, if you didn’t include a number in your username and the re-submitted the form without re-selecting your “Group Member Type” and “Secret Question” and then re-submitted the form without re-entering your password twice — you really have a strong desire to punch your monitor.

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When I got my new laptop a few weeks ago I thought it was pretty cool that it came with Office 2007. The nifty new toolbars and embedded wavey swooshes are slick. I don’t really mind that by default Word and Excel assume you want to save files with a .docx or .xlsx extension. (That’s fine with me; makes it easier to remember to not save something as an ‘07 file if I need to share it with others that are still using Office XP or 2003.)

What I cannot handle is the fact that Outlook 2007 is using over 130 MB of RAM. 130 MB?! I wouldn’t mind that much, since apparently it’s supposed to play nicely with Windows and just use whatever RAM is available. But even using as much memory as it is it’s still slow slow slow. And this is even after I disabled iTunes 7.3’s ridiculous Outlook add-in. 130 MB?! Are they crazy?

A day or two ago I was pinged by a co-worker from my previous job. He wanted to know why, during its recent redesign, I didn’t include keywords in the URLs of the pages on a site I originally built a long, long time ago. I told him that there was no concrete evidence anywhere to support the theory that search engines give any weight to keywords in URLs. He then pointed me to an article at Search Engine Land that begins by stating that, “Keywords in the URL can help rankings,” and, “Hyphens are better than underscores when separating multiple words.”

First I noted that I don’t include keywords on this site, either, and it’s been doing just fine. Then I argued that I find it very, very hard to believe that Google (or any other search engine) has some sort of negative bias against the underscore character but that hyphens are just fine. So basically I completely disagree with the single piece of actual “advice” in the article.

Am I saying that it is wrong to include keywords in your URLs? No. I don’t think that at all. I just don’t think you should be stuffing keywords into your URLs in an effort to boost your pages’ rankings in search engine result pages. It makes great sense to use words in your URLs if you’re doing it to improve the usability of your site or to make it easier for people to link to your site. Unfortunately most site designers and blog engines — WordPress included — fail to effectively do this.

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Zeldman does a spectacular job explaining why I hate when people use Word as their email editor.

There’s been a lot of blog buzz this morning about a page displaying the difference between what you ordered and what you get at fast food places. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being in the car with me on a trip through a fast-food drive-through, you know that this is a subject near and dear to my heart. I do not care how many cars are in line behind me. I do not care that you are only making minimum wage. I do not care what your franchise policy is. When I order super size french fries, you better give me super size french fries. I want it to look just like it looks on the big menu ten yards behind my car. I’m paying you two dollars for about eight cents worth of potatoes. Do not $*&# with me on this.

Also: It is amazing that a Google image search for “french fries” returns so much porn. Who knew?

Washington — At least two federal government agencies are refusing to upgrade their computers with Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Vista operating system, citing concern over costs and compatibility issues.

In a Jan. 19 memo to staff, Dan Mintz, the Transportation Department’s chief information officer, imposed an “indefinite moratorium” on upgrading desktop and laptop computers with the new operating system, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.

Mintz wrote that there is “no compelling technical or business case” to upgrade to the new products and specific reasons not to upgrade.

Think I’m crazy for saying there’s no reason to go to Vista right now? At least a small village’s worth of friends and family have asked me if I’m upgrading to Vista, when I’m upgrading to Vista, whether they should get Vista on their new computer, and why the hell am I not all excited about Vista. I’ve told each and every one of them that I’ll upgrade to Vista someday, but not in 2007. XP works just fine for me, thank you. I don’t have the time or the patience to spend half my working hours for the next six months installing service patches and emergency updates. I’d never buy the first year of a new model of car and I’ll not upgrade my OS the same year it’s released. My operating system is probably the only thing in my life that I choose not to have on the bleeding edge. Sometimes it’s just not worth it to be an early adopter.

One of the world’s worst, most-annoying spam-prevention systems is the one in my current version of Outlook — Microsoft® Outlook® 2003 (11.8002.6568) SP2. I’d say about one out of every three times I attempt to click on a link in an email, I get a warning telling me that all links in the message have been disabled to help protect me from ones that may be “harmful”. As far as I can tell there is no way to globally deactivate this, so I have to continually enable links before I can click anything. It is obnoxious and insulting and I hate it.

Recently I saw a commercial for Sylvan Learning Centers. This is a company that is selling products to help your children do well in school. The ad showed a teenage girl gabbing on the telephone. The voice-over said, “Sally sure can talk fast. We can help her read fast,” or something like that. Apparently grammar is not one of the subjects that Sylvan covers. How does a company that claims to help educate children manage to let a commercial with such an egregious grammatical error get all the way to the television screen? There must not be any English majors working in the marketing department over at ol’ Sylvan.

Fast is an adjective. You don’t do things “fast”. You do things quickly.

For a few weeks now my instant messenger tagline has been, “I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous.” Lately I have been shocked at just how pathetically stupid my left hand is. If all my body parts were chillin’ in a schoolyard, my left hand would be the dork loser that always got picked last. I mean, seriously. It cannot do a damn thing. You ever bend over a sink and make a cup out of your hand to drink a little water? Yeah. I can’t do that with my left hand. I can’t put keys in a doorknob with it either. It’s really, really stupid. I am amazed that I can type so well. It’s the only thing this blasted hand can do. It used to smoke cigarettes, the rat. I do remember that I was a left-handed smoker. Figures. It had no problem helping me kill myself. I’ve wanted so desperately to play guitar since I was a wee little Gagne, and I blame this left hand of mine.
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Few things in life irk me as much as getting duped. Caveat emptor: Because Ralph’s refuses to provide meaningful unit price labels — and because the box is exactly the same size and shape as the other forty-two varieties of their microwave popcorn — you might be fooled into thinking that the “sale” price of Orville Redenbacher’s Organic Butter flavor is a bargain. Look closely, though. This package only contains two bags of popcorn. What’s worse is that (a) this variety tastes like crap compared to the “regular” butter flavor and (2) it has a very low “popping yield”. Damn you, Orville!

Dear IHOP,
At the end of September I visited your brand new Marina Del Rey location with several of my co-workers. Everyone in my office had been excited for months while we waited for you to open. When you decided last year to demolish the friendly, inexpensive, personal, small-town bagel shop that we all knew and loved, we were very sad. But we were glad when we learned that an IHOP — a friendly, inexpensive, personal, small-town restaurant — was taking its place.

I ordered a big breakfast even though it was my lunch break. We all did. Terrific eggs, two pancakes smothered in strawberries, bacon, ham, hash browns. So good. I thought that $11.94 was a lot to pay for breakfast and coffee and an orange juice, but I understand that you have to charge $3.00 for a glass of orange juice because oranges are so hard to get here in southern California. I left a $3.06 tip because I like nice round numbers and the service was pretty good.

Imagine my surprise when I connected to my bank to synchronize Microsoft Money that night and realized I was charged $25.00 instead! Sure, I suppose it could have been a typo, but I’m guessing that Hector the waiter pocketed that extra ten-spot with glee. My penmanship isn’t brilliant, but I’m fairly certain that anyone can tell the difference between my 1s and my 2s. I was a little bit bothered, but not irate.

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Where do I go to complain about grocery store shenanigans? I’m at the end of my rope with Ralph’s, the local supermarket here in Los Angeles. There are two things they are doing to blatantly defraud customers and it’s driving me crazy.

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I receive an incredible amount of spam. I have a dozen or so email accounts and I manage about two dozen websites. Plus I run the IT department at my office. I get about 500 spam comments and 1500 spam pingbacks and / or trackbacks on blogs each day, and that’s with Akismet and a captcha installed. If I had to guess I’d say I get somewhere around 1500 spam emails each day. I have both Outlook’s internal spam-catcher and SpamBayes running, but some still slip into my Inbox. I’ve gotten quite good at scanning and realizing instantly if something is for me or for the trash.

This morning a piece of spam managed to make it into my Inbox and it momentarily shocked me. I hardly ever look at the subject line of email these days. The part that I noticed said, “This is not meant to be an insult or anything but people are talking at work about your weight.” Whoa! I mean, I’m not carrying around a spare tire or anything, but I’ve been knocking back M&Ms and Almond Joys like a madman since Halloween so when I saw that I freaked. Sure it was only for just that millisecond before my brain realized it was spam, but still. Talk about a way to catch someone’s attention!

I really don’t understand how this particular message is supposed to fool anyone. I don’t have anyone at my office named “Mark” and even if I did there’s no way he’d mail me at the completely obscure alias of a domain nobody at work even knows I own. This guy must be sending millions of these if he expects to get any sort of response.