Archive for the 'Annoyances' Category

So a guy goes into a Best Buy, purchases a Western Digital hard drive, and finds out later that the box is filled with bathroom tiles. He tries to return the hard drive (since it wasn’t what he thought it was), and the manager says that they can’t do that. Instead, he should take up the complaint with the manufacturer. How is this even legal?

I’ll just add this story to the ever-growing list of reasons why I don’t shop at Best Buy. Amazon.com FTW.

One nice thing about the xkcd web comic, is that each comic’s image has an additional joke or tidbit of information hidden away in an HTML title attribute. Hover your mouse over it for a second or two, and you’ll see the joke. Sometimes, the text is fairly lengthy, as in this example. Unfortunately, Firefox only shows one line of text in a title tooltip, so any lengthy amounts of text get cut off with an ellipsis.

Thankfully, bug 218223 was filed way back in 2003 (as a Firebird equivalent of a bug posted in 2000). Now, 7 years later, a fix has been implemented. Firefox 3.0 will include this fix, much to my delight. This just might be enough to make me switch to the alpha builds of 3.0 for my daily browsing habits.

Update: I’ve found an extension that fixes this problem. Woo-hoo!

I am growing increasingly frustrated with Google Maps. In the past month, on two separate occasions, Google Maps failed to find my intended destination. What really gets under my skin is the fact that Google’s competition found each place without any problems.

Example 1
My family checked out the Clarksville Station restaurant in Roxboro, NC for my sister’s graduation. It’s a steak-house built inside of an old train station and a couple of dining cars from an actual train. It’s located at 4080 Durham Road, Roxboro, NC. Let’s see what the mapping services show for this query:

• Google Maps: Only locates Durham Road, not the 4080 address.
• MapQuest: Shows the location as expected.
• Yahoo! Maps: Can’t find the exact location, but interestingly enough, centers the map at the exact location. Weird.
• Microsoft Live Search: Gets it exactly right.

Example 2
My car needed service recently, so I took it to Jay’s Automotive, a repair place not too far away from where I live. They are located at 3510 Highway 70 West, Efland, NC. Let’s see how the various mapping services do with this one:

• Google Maps: Wow. This is so far off, it’s not funny.
• MapQuest: Again, MapQuest gets the location exactly.
• Yahoo! Maps: Again, they cannot locate the address, but the map is centered at the correct location.
• Microsoft Live Search: Again, Microsoft got it exactly right.

What gets me even more steamed is the lack of aerial (or satellite) images for example number 2. Google Maps only has images beginning at zoom level 6 (levels 1 through 5 are all “unavailable”). MapQuest has color images down to zoom level 3 (1 and 2 aren’t available), which is very close. Yahoo! Maps has color imagery at all zoom levels, while Microsoft Live Search has images to zoom level 3 (just like MapQuest, though the image quality is very poor).

Google needs to stop spending money and effort on cheap gimmicks like their recent Street View (is that thing worthless, or what?), and instead beef up their location database and aerial photographs. I can’t even see my house on Google Maps! All the other mapping services have it, so it’s certainly possible to do.

Get with the program, Google. Until then, I think I’ll stick to your competition (at least when satellite photographs are involved).

The English language has been sliding down the quality charts for a number of years now, and today it’s at an all time low. People’s grasp on grammar and spelling is tenuous at best. Take this story, for example. Note the sign in the picture (”Let are kids walk”). Are people really so ignorant that they would confuse the words ‘are’ and ‘our’? Sadly, this isn’t just a problem that surfaces in the general public. Professional editors are letting more and more errors slip by as can be found in this New York Times article on Jonathan Coulton. One sentence in the article reads “They pore over his blog entries…” Do you see the error in this sentence? I certainly hope so. I got this one wrong folks. Thanks to Kip for correcting me! The very next sentence should explain why I made the mistake.

I was taught somewhere between little and no English grammar in school. At certain points, I’ve tried to better my use of the language on my own, through books like The Elements of Style. But self education for this kind of thing just isn’t good enough (at least for me). I really wish I had been given a decent education on this stuff, and judging by the way people are failing to use English every day, I really wish educators took it more seriously.

One “feature” of Windows XP is the built-in support of what Microsoft likes to call “compressed folders.” But nothing new was introduced here; the zip file format is all that’s being used. When I first learned of this feature, I was fairly excited to see that Microsoft was actually trying to make life easier. No longer would I need a zip tool like WinZip to do my extractions. Instead, I would just use the features in Windows Explorer to do my compressing and uncompressing as needed.

That was an idealistic view if there ever was one, and I’m not too surprised to say that it was grossly mistaken. The zip support offered in Windows XP is utterly horrible. My work place is fairly strict about not having shareware applications installed on our personal workstations, so WinZip isn’t an option for me. As a result, I’m relegated to using the native support offered by Windows. What I’d like to know is this: what the heck are they doing when unzipping a file? We package stuff up in zip files all the time around here (since we often have tons of source code files to deal with), and unextracting them through Windows literally takes 5 to 7 minutes. Literally! WinZip could chew through these files in less than 30 seconds (I know, because I’ve tried it at home). Is the Windows stuff just horribly inefficient? Are they doing more complex file system stuff than WinZip? Whatever it is, it makes file extraction very slow.

I use the Cygwin package all the time at work, and so I occasionally use their command line zip utility. It’s way faster than what Windows provides, but it has the occasional problems with file ownership, which is why I use it sparingly. For instance, I’ve encountered the case where I extracted a zip file using the Cygwin tools, then tried to open a subsequent file for viewing. Windows then tells me that “I don’t have the authority to open that file.” I’m the freaking administrator of the machine! I should be able to do whatever I want, right?

If anyone has tips on how to improve things in the “compressed folder” world, I’d be glad to hear them.

There’s nothing that says “my career as a popular icon has hit rock bottom for good” more than shaving your head, getting a tattoo, and wearing a blond wig with gigantic, Cobra-style sunglasses. I’ve never had any respect for Britney Spears, so I’m really not moved by her latest cry for attention. What really makes me laugh, however, is the fact that semi-respectable people are saying that we shouldn’t poke fun at Ms. Spears, since she’s going through a “tough time” right now.

Get serious.

Everyone should be making fun of her non-stop. She has now entered the realm of Michael Jackson and Mike Tyson; everything she ever does from here on out will be a joke. I say that we get the most entertainment out of her while we can. Let the late night jokes commence!

We got hit with a “winter weather storm” here in North Carolina, and it was a colossal disappointment. A forecast 1 to 3 inches of snow (with a 1/4 inch of ice on top of that) turned out to be a light dusting, most of which melted in a few hours time. It seems like every state in the US has gotten tons of snow this winter; it even snowed in the Arizona desert! But does North Carolina get anything? Not around here. It’s like we’re cursed or something.