Tag Archives: rant

I have a problem.

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It’s a serious problem. No, it’s not a medical condition. No, it’s not the fact that I hold political, social, and sexual views that put me at odds with 90% of the population. No, it’s not fleas.

My problem is this: Credulity pisses me off. I mean really pisses me off. When I see people spouting nonsense about how the Egyptian pyramids were built by space aliens or how meditation can teach you to levitate, unlock your psychic powers, and cast out demons or how vaccination is a Jewish plot to murder Christian children or whatnot, I get mad. Breatharians, Bigfoot fanatics, the looney tunes who hang out in Groom Lake, Nevada believing they’ll uncover evidence that the government is hiding the wreckage of a crashed flying saucer, and the yahoos who go on about the lost continent of Atlantis and its super-advanced spacefaring civilization produce in me the exact same emotional reaction as I have when I hear someone say something like “This world would be a better place if we killed all the niggers.” I get that pissed.

The world is filled with people who dress up turds to look like brownies, and then sell them on the street corner. And the world is filled with people perfectly willing to take a bite. And it’s infuriating.

You see, this kind of credulity is never harmless. It softens the brain. It corrodes reason, the one thing that sets us apart from the other animals. It makes a person easy to manipulate. Atrocities happen because the gullible are willing to believe that thus-and-such a person isn’t really human, doesn’t have a soul, murdered Jesus, whatever. Gullibility is a knife at the throat of civilization.

Even in its less extreme incarnations, the credulity that lets people happily munch on turds and believe they’re brownies is expensive. I’ve ranted before about the gullible nitwits that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money–MY money–on “psychic drug detectors” (empty plastic boxes from Radio Shack whose “inventor” claimed could harness “psychic energy” to detect drugs and even locate missing persons, which he sold for $8,000 a pop to schools and police departments all across the country). And, of course, there’s the yahoos who buy everything from “laundry balls” (which supposedly “energize water” to get clothes clean without detergent) to “AIDS crystals” that use the energy of those Egyptian pyramids to cure AIDS.

It all well and truly pisses me off.

It’s amazing, really. I feel like I’m living in a society of people who cannot muster the cognitive skills to tell the difference between shit and brownies. You show a person two Web sites–one published by the CDC, for instance, and the other by that aforementioned Christian Fundamentalist group that believes that vaccination is a Jewish plot to kill Christian babies, and it’s a crap shoot which one he’ll believe. Basic analytical and reasoning skills are so lacking in the population at large that you might as well flip a coin.

“But,” the person will say, “it’s important to hear both sides of the story.”

Both sides??!! Both sides of the story? One side contains carefully collected, peer-reviewed, objectively verifiable data; the other contains the ravings of religious zealots about how the Jews fabricated evidence of past smallpox epidemics, invented margarine to poison Christian women, and oh, by the way, the holocaust never happened.

Christ, people. Seriously, if that’s your idea of “listening to both sides of the argument,” you’d best re-open the debate about whether or not the world is flat.

There is absolutely nothing that is so well-documented, so obviously true, that a turd-dresser can’t come along and try to make believe that, no, wait, there’s another side to the story. Unfortunately, it seems that very few people have functional bullshit detectors; hell, there are actually people willing to believe that water will change its crystal structure in response to human emotion–which, when you examine the methodology (namely, writing words with an emotional content onto a piece of paper and taping it to the side of a glass in a freezer) leads one to the inescapable conclusion that not only is water responsive to human thought, but it’s also possessed of the remarkable ability to read written Japanese.

If water is fluent in reading Japanese, and my body is 70% water, shouldn’t I be able to read written Japanese with at least 70% fluency? And what happens if a person writes a Japanese word on a piece of paper but doesn’t know what the word means–does the water still react? But I digress.

Of course, for the faithful who believe this nonsense, the turd-peddler has many devices for sale. They’ll energize the water with, y’know, positive emotions, to, y’know, cure cancer. God help me, I am not making this up.

Why? Why why why? Why are people so goddamn incapable of distinguishing between shit and brownies? Why is it that no matter how many turds these people bite into, they’re so eager for the next? Do they so desperately NEED to believe something–conspiracies, sea monsters, anything because their lives are so crushingly dull? Are they completely blind to the breathtaking, awe-inspiring wonder that really exists in the real world? Are they just so intellectually sloppy that they don’t know any better–they can’t read total gibberish dressed up with scientific-sounding words and tell the difference between that and real science? What makes a person gullible? Why are otherwise intelligent, articulate people so hopelessly credulous that they’ll send their bank account information to deposed government officials in Nigeria who want to wire them “THE SUM OF $150,000,000 (ONE HUNDRED FIFTY MILLION US DOLLARS),” believe in Bigfoot and Nessie and space aliens in the deserts of Africa, but will refuse to immunize their kids because “oh, there’s no real proof that it works”? Where do these people COME from?

Grr. Maybe I’m the space alien.

All I can say is, God bless James Randi–a far, far more patient man than I.

It’s the user interface, stupid!

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or, why the iPod is raking in the dough and Linux is still a non-issue on the desktop

I hate my cell phone. It’s a modern, Kyocera flip-phone with a color LCD and a camera and an Internet connection, and I hate it. But it’s a step up; I hate it less than I’ve hated any other cell phone I’ve ever owned.

The first cell phone I owned had a user interface so abysmal that in order to access the built-in contacts list, I had to press nine buttons. Considering that here in the US, a phone number is only seven digits long without the area code and ten digits long with the area code, that’s almost unbelievably lame.

For some reason, every cell phone in the world has a crap user interface. It’s a testament that I hate my new cell phone least of all, and consider it a great leap forward, because its interface is merely awful and not abysmal.

The Apple iPod is, by any measure of the word “success,” a wild success beyond what even its creators could possibly have predicted. It’s selling like mad; it’s become a cultural icon; car manufacturers are putting iPod docks in their dashboards, purse manufacturers are making purses with iPod slots. Yet for all that, it’s a simple gadget. It plays music, that’s it. It’s expensive; it llacks the fancy features (such as radio tuners) of cheaper MP3 players; what’s the big deal?

The big deal, as Apple understands and everyone else seems to have forgotten, is that user interface matters. The iPod is a runaway success because it does one thing and does it well. The user interface of the iPod is a marvel of simplicity and elegance; all the other MP3 players on the market seem awkward, clunky, and clumsy by comparison.

Nobody gets it, except for Apple. Nobody understands that the way a person interacts with a device is as important as what the device does.

Take my car stereo (please!). It’s a Pioneer model, and it’s a microcosm of bad design. I can see my car stereo being used to teach a class in “How to Fuck Up a User interface 101.”

It does two things: it plays CDs and it plays radio stations. The power button is also the button that switches between radio and CD; you want to turn it off when you’re listening to a CD, you hit POWER POWER. Intuitive, right? Uh, no. But the controls won’t tell you this; the power-cum-radio-cum-CD button is labelled “Mode.”

Not that you’ll ever be able to read it. It’s labelled “Mode” in five-point light-gray type on a dark-gray background. It’s difficult to read if you’re sitting nose to nose with the faceplate; from the driver’s seat, two and a half feet away, it might as well not be labelled at all.

It has a number of different controls and modes. Many of these are reached by pressing a “Shift” button, also labelled in five-point type; the button is tiny, about as big around as the guts of a cheap disposable pen, and you hold it down wat the same time as you press one or more other buttons to access various functions.

These people were not thinking. Not even a little bit. They clearly did not think about the fact that the operator would be sitting too far away to read microscopic print, nor about the fact that the operator would be working the device while driving a moving vehicle in traffic. And, like my cell phone, my car stereo has a user interface which is actually better than most. Shelly’s car stereo has an auxiliary input mode which you get to by pressing the power button; to turn the stereo on and off, you press the power button and hold it down for two seconds. To insert or eject a CD, you remove the stereo’s face plate. (No, it’s not a CD changer; strictly one disc at a time!)

User interface matters. User interface on an MP3 player makes a difference to the user’s experience with the gadget; user interface on a car stereo can make the difference between life and death. Yet every day, we are surrounded by devices, from stereos to cell phones to fax machines to microwave ovens, that have a crap user interface. Manufacturers think that what attracts us to their products is a long list of features–“Look! This car stereo pulls in stations from Kenya, and then translates them into English while piping them directly into the brain of the driver!” They add functions to their gadgets without ever thinking about the way people use their gadgets.

I don’t want a video game console that plays CDs. I guaranfuckingTEE you that if I’m buying a video game console, I already have a CD player. If for some reason I don’t have a CD player, I am not going to have a set of external speakers either, which means I’ll be listening to my CDs through…what, the shitty speakers in my TV set? I don’t think so. I buy a video game console to play video games. If the console plays the games I like, I buy it. If it does not play the games I like, I don’t buy it, and making it play music CDs will not make me buy it, okay?

Ditto for MP3 players. If I buy an MP3 player, it’s because I want to fill it up with songs I like. If I want to listen to the radio, which plays commercials and lots of songs I don’t like, I can do it for a whole lot less money than an MP3 player–and if I’m giving the choice between listening to songs I like and songs on the radio, I’ll take the songs I like, mkay? Every supposed new “iPod killer” that comes out, and falls flat on its face, fails for the same reason: they take an MP3 player, add something else on to it, and glue it all together with a crap user interface–all without the slightest thought to how people use the goddamn thing.

I just put the new Fedora Core on my Linux machine. Linux, once the choice only of hard-core technogeeks, really has come a long way. But it still has very serious interface problems.

Every Linux enthusiast I’ve ever spoken to raves about Linux’s functionality, its price (free), its power, its features. Why, they all lament, do people continue to use Microsoft crapware, when a better and more secure operating system is available for free?

It’s the interface, stupid. I’ve been using computers since 1976, I’ve been using Unixes of various flavors for almost as long as Unix has existed, and it’s still a pain in the royal fucking ass for me to install and configure a Linux system.

It’s worlds better than it was. Good Linux distros come with bootable CD-ROMs that take you through the installation in a graphical environment; indeed, the installer for Fedora Core is now prettier and more elegant than the installer for Windows XP.

Prettier and more elegant, but fragile, so very, very fragile.

When I ran that pretty, elegant installer, it got about a third of the way through the install, then suddenly disappeared to be replaced with several screenfuls of decidedly un-pretty and unfriendly text. Error messages, stack backtraces, exceptions…yuck.

Restarted the installer, same thing again. And again.

I finally puzzled out from the cryptic exceptions and backtraces that the installer was having a heart attack over a piece of hardware in my system; pulled the network card, and the install worked. (Strangely, when I put the card back, it was recognized and worked without a hitch.)

It’s the user interface, stupid. I don’t care how many features you have or how powerful you are; I don’t care if you’re cheaper than an iPod or cheaper than Windows. It’s the user interface, stupid! Even today, the Linux interface still feels unnecessarily clumsy and awkward compared to the Mac’s or (God forbid) even the Fisher-Price interface Windows XP offers us. For a long-term Linux user, the various awkwardnesses and clumsy design choices of the interface are not an issue, because the long-term user has learned ways to deal with, or occasionally work around, the shortcomings in Gnome and KDE, and of course he can always drop down to a terminal window (it’s the user interface, stupid!) to get things done.

Back to my cell phone. It does not do the things I think it should. It offers me call-waiting, for example. I’m on a call and another call comes in; it seems to me that pressing the “answer” button will let me talk to the new caller. But it doesn’t. It brings up a menu asking me what I want to do. Put the old caller on hold and answer the new call? Ignore the new call? (If I wanted to do that, I would not press any button, goddamnit!) Hang up the old call and take the new?

Now, when I end the new call, and want to go back to the old, I can’t press the “answer call” or “hangup” button. Instead, I press the “options” button. Do I want to hang up? Do I want to swap calls? Do I want to disconnect both calls?

Now, you might think that swapping calls would put caller #2 on hold, and give me #1, but no. It puts both calls on hold, then gives me another menu. Do I want to release #2 and pick up #1? Release #1 and pick up #2? Hang up both? No, goddamn it, I want to swap calls! You know, swap one for the other! Trying to figure all this out quickly is a pain in the ass, especially in a darkened room.

It’s the user interface, stupid. You want my money, think about how I am going to use your gadget. Don’t make me read your mind. Don’t get clever by making the Power button do a whole bunch of other stuff as well. Don’t present irreleavnt choices when it should be clear from context what I’m trying to do. Use your head. Think about the environment where your device will be used.

You want to know why Apple came in and overnight 0wnz0r3d the entire MP3 market? It’s the user interface, stupid!

Link o’ the Week…

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….and dear sweet reanimated undead Jesus, it’s a stinker.

America: a music video to commemorate 9/11.

It’s not a parody. Really. This guy, voice wavering with heartfelt emotion as he caterwauls wildly off-key to the accompaniment of waving flags and shining angels, is actually serious. What’s more, someone, somewhere, considers this video to be the high point of his entire life. I don’t know about you, but that’s enough to keep me sleepless at night.

Work-safe, but likely not safe for your stomach.

Over a thousand servicemen dead in Iraq…

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…and I’m still paying nearly $2.50 a gallon for gas? WTF is up with that??

So now the Bush regime has finally formally admitted that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (warinng–big-ass PDF download). None. Nada. Zip. I still remember watching CNN as Colin Powell heroically kept a straight face as he put on the WMD dog-and-phony show for the United Nations, waving around vials of confectioner’s sugar and pointing gravely to flip-charts of Iraqui “mobile germ warfare laboratories” that, as it turns out, existed only in the fevered imagination of some of the CIA’s tinfoil-hat brigade. I knew we were being duped; the rest of the world knew we were being duped; but the American public just ate this shit up and asked for more.

So. Here we are, sending people to die in the Middle East, for…um, no reason whatsoever. Weapons of mass destruction? Never existed. September 11? That was this guy named Osama somebody, not Saddam Whatshisface. Bringing stability to the Middle East? Iraq is more unstable now than at any point in the past hundred years. Securing ourselves from terrorism? Saddam Hussein was Al Quaeda’s biggest enemy in the Middle East; with him gone, Iraq is now ripe recruiting grounds. One hundred and sixty billion dollars spent to date, and we have nohing to show for it except a bunch of cars driving around with lopsided “Support Our Troops” stickers on them.

And I’m still paying nearly $2.50 a gallon for gas.

Man, that’s fucked up.

When good companies go bad: how Google learned to stop worrying and love spam

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Okay. So, Google’s founders have an unofficial slogan, which is a part of Google’s genetic DNA: Don’t be evil. Nice idea, that; do well and do good.

But in my experience, “don’t be evil” has become more of…well, a suggestion than a statement of corporate policy. No, I’m not talking about the way Google records information about searches or how the Goolge toolbar inserts paid links into other people’s Web sites–frankly, I don’t care about any of that.

I’m talking about something different: spam. And the fact that Google likes it.

Oh, now I’m not suggesting Google engages in spam itself; when you’re Google, you don’t need to spam. Everyone uses you anyway. I’m talking about the fact that Google supports spammers. And it’s not even a question of supporting spammers for profit, like Savvis does, or allowing people to host spam software, like MCI Worldcom does, or allowing people to host virus and malware droppers, like Peer 1 does. What those companies do is reprehensible, of course, but it’s also understandable: they profit directly from it. The spammers give them cash, they look the other way (or in Savvis’ case, actually help shield the spammers).

No, Google supports spammers, but doesn’t even do it for profit. Google supports spammers because it simply can’t be bothered to hire anyone to do anything about it.

The entire net abuse community shuddered when Google took over Deja News and started Google Groups. Google, of course, insisted that Google Groups would serve a valuable function, and would not be used by spammers; they set up an abuse address, they promised that spammers would not be tolerated, and so on, and so on.

Now, a few years later, it seems that Google’s motto has changed from “Don’t be evil’ to “Don’t bother.”

Google Groups has become, as many people predicted, a wretched hive of scum and spammers. I’ve personally seen more spam coming from Google Groups in the past few months than from any other single newsgroup source in the world–Google has dethroned the previous reigning champions of UseNet spam (Skynet.be, newsfeeds.com, and usenetnews.com) in the sheer volume of spew and in their stubborn refusal to stem the tide. In just the past few hours, I’ve collected some nuggets of Google’s outstanding offerings to the Internet community here

And in today’s news…

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…an 18-year-old Kentucky student is sitting in prison on “terrorist’ charges for writing a short story for English class in which zombies overrun a school. The police detective in the case, one Steven Caudill, apparently doesn’t realize that the legions of the Undead aren’t in fact actually real, and said “Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it’s a felony in the state of Kentucky.”

Were I of a more cynical mindset, I might suggest that nobody can actually be as sunningly stupid as Detective Caudill is claiming to be, and that it’s more likely that Mr. Caudill is in fact cynically manipulating a fundamentally b0rked legal system to puff up his own personal fame. But I’m not really that cynical, of course; it’s possible that Detective Caudill really is that stupid. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a police department deliberately sets out to weed intelligent people out of the force…

Prejudice is expensive

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Last week, I was on-site with a client of mine I haven’t seen in quite some time. My client was complaining to me that she and her husband are planning to move, and the two of them can’t afford a house that’s even as good as the one they’re living in now. They’ve lived in their current house for quite a number of years, but a combination of changing property values and the recent Florida hurricanes, which have made insurance for houses near the coast impossible to obtain at any price, have created a situation where they can’t really get much from their house and moving into a new house of similar size, age, and condition will cost them three times more than their current house is costing them.

The reason they’re moving? They’ve discovered that one of their neighbors down the street runs a porn Web site. It’s “disgusting,” she says, to have to live in the same neighborhood with one of those kinds of people, and “who wants to live in that kind of environment?”

Now, what’s interesting about that, aside from its inherent silliness (“that kind of environment”? What, is he shooting porn flicks in the middle of the street?) is the way I responded emotionally to it–my opinion o fthis particular client as a person immediately dropped through the floor, melted its way through the Earth’s crust, and now sits at the center of the planet’s molten core, where it can’t get any lower unless the earth is swallowed up by the sun. I responded exactly as if she said they’re moving because there are Negroes living in the neighborhood, and “who wants to live in that kind of environment?”

What she probably doesn’t realize, though, is that there’s no neighborhood she can possibly move into where her neighbors aren’t doing things behind closed doors that she disapproves of. The other thing she doesn’t seem to grasp is that the proclivities of her neighbors really don’t have anything to do with her at all, and are None Of Her Business.

Randomness at a grocery store, and the suckitude of life

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At the grocery store this evening, between the frozen aisle and the canned goods, two women bumped into each other and started talking about a mutual acquaintance. “Has So-and so gotten married yet?” “No, she’s still not married.” “Really? That’s too bad.” “Yeah, i don’t know what it is. She has to find a husband some time.” “Maybe she’s just too picky.”

Dear God, I didn’t know there was anyone left like that in the world–not for real. Seriously. I thought that was something you’d only find on bad TV sitcoms. This is 2004, not 1904, right? Women do have value that doesn’t derive from their husbands, right?

Later, at the checkout line, the cashier looks at me and says “You know what’s interesting? All these countries that don’t like the USA, and say bad things about America, when something happens to them, who do they turn to? We give everyone in the world handouts and they still don’t like us. Like Russia. And why doesn’t Canada have its own army?”

The Universe of Suck Department: This weekend, Shelly and I were supposed to go to Atlanta with nihilus and phyrra so we could look at apartments, then from there up to Nashville to pick up their car. And as it turns out, next weekend I’ll be in Miami Beach with a client instead. Suck, suck, suck.

Aaaaaaarrrrrggghhhh!

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Shelly wants to get rid of her problematic, virus-ridden, malfunctioning Sony Vaio system and start using my Mac G4 desktop in its place. The one thing standing in the way of doing this is World of Warcraft; the graphics card in the G4 isn’t good enough to play.

The difference between a Mac AGP graphics card and a PC AGP graphics card, besides the price, is just the software in the flash ROM on the card–the PC version contains Intel driver software, the Mac version contains Mac driver software. Since the video cards are firmware flashable, it’s possible to buy a PC AGP video card, get a copy of the Mac firmware as a ROM file, flash it onto the card, and end up with a Mac card.

Power Mac G5 systems come standard with an nVidia GeForce 5200 card, and you can buy the PC version of this card for about $80, so we bought a PNY GeForce card from CompUSA and set about installing the Mac firmware on it.

Doing this is A Big Pain In the Ass.

Problem 1; The nVidia flash ROM utility only runs from a floppy disk and only in DOS mode. Why PC users put up with crap like that, in this day and age, is beyond me. (The Mac version of the nVidia flash ROM utility works in the GUI just like any other program, but can’t be used because if you put a PC card in the Mac, you have no video until you run the flasher, and if you have no video, you can’t…err, run the flasher.)

Problem 2: Getting the Mac ROM image is A Big Pain In the Ass. It’s hard to find the ROM image because…well, I don’t know why. Apple goes after people who distribute the ROM image files, which is kind of weird because Apple does not sell video cards. If Apple did sell video cards, it’d make more sense, because Apple would have a vested interest in keeping people from buying PC cards and flashing them, but as Apple does not sell video cards except as included with Mac systems, this makes little financial sense.

And finally, after five hours of formatting floppies, installing the nVidia flasher utility, installing a PCI graphics card in the PC so I can flash the AGP card, and searching online for a kind soul with the Mac graphics firmware image, we come to Problem 3…

…which is that the GeForce card I bought is a PNY branded card.

Okay, just for the record: Never, ever, ever buy a PNY-branded video card.

A PNY-branded GeForce card is cheaper than, say, a Creative-branded GeForce card, and as it turns out, there’s a reason why. PNY, you see, uses different (cheaper) RAM and a different (cheaper) RAM controller on their video cards.

So, the firmware that turns a PC GeForce card into a Mac GeForce card works in any GeForce card except PNY-branded cards. PNY-branded video cards, when flashed with Mac firmware, won’t work, because the cheaper, slower RAM in the PNY-branded card is not accounted for in the Mac firmware.

Suck, suck, suck.

The good news: i kept a copy of the original PNY firmware, so I flashed it back and the card is good as new. We’re taking it back tomorrow. The bad news: Shelly still has to play World of Warcraft on her crap Sony PC, which is no end of aggrevating, and I’ll never have those five hours of my life back again.

No, not the Necronomicon photos yet…

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…I’ll post those later today.

Instead, i want to complain about silicone.

The distribution of stress inside silicone rubber is fractal in nature. What that means is that silicone rubber tends to fail in unpredictable ways when it’s stressed. It never cleaves cleanly in the way that most solids do. It will rip or tear, always roughly and sometimes not at the point of greatest stress.

What that means is that carving, boring, and drilling a silicone dildo is exceptionally difficult and frustrating. It’s virtually impossible to get a clean hole through a silicone dildo, and the silicone can rip even when being sliced by a razor knife. It also deforms under stress, of course, so the cuts and holes assume an irregular shape when the stress is relieved.

Frustratin’.