/dev/null/kevin

Ridiculous and misleading election commercials are the norm right now (in the US where we have a midterm election tomorrow next week).  However, there is one that must target only the dumbest people in California.  Using the usual negative ad music and voice over, the announcer warns that...

Dear God!  Not words!!  No!!!  And legally binding at that!

Remember, this November, only vote for laws that contain pictures, but not legally binding pictures, only suggestions.  Yes, support suggestive pictures.  And the more suggestive, the better! 

Tags: election, voting, humor, stupid

 Update [12 Mar 2007]: The problem has been fixed iTunes 7.1.  Thanks to Tony Bove for the comment!

 Someone is guilty of some bullsh!t.

Forgive the strong language (lest I become the next Tim Bray), but it's called for.  For many years I have been using Musicmatch Jukebox for playing music on my computer.  I prefer it as a player/ripper over WinAMP and iTunes.  You may disagree with that choice, but hopefully you agree that we should all have a choice.  I do have an iPod and was using iTunes 6 to update it.  iTunes and Musicmatch lived happily together without conflict.  If you don't know, Yahoo! bought Musicmatch and it is now part of  Yahoo! Music.

So, the problem: I recently upgraded to iTunes 7 and suddenly Musicmatch stopped working.  It just bailed with a very generic message to reboot or contact customer support.

Customer support's response was this:

Uninstalling iTuens did "fix" the problem, but it's not really a solution, especially when Musicmatch can no longer update an iPod.  For a while (2002-2003), Musicmatch was the only way to update an iPod on Windows (and in fact, was bundled with the iPod). 

And guess what?  This isn't the first time that this has happened.  Shortly after iTunes for Windows came out (2003) there was a conflict between the two programs.  Installing iTunes disabled Musicmatch's ability to update, or even see, the iPod.

So, who it to blame?  Apple?  Are they intentionally disabling a competitor's product, or just guilty of bad programming?  Maybe it's Yahoo!/Musicmatch.  Is there code to abort if it detects iTunes?  That seems less likely since the same version of Musicmatch was accepting of iTunes 6.

This is the kind of crap that we would have expected of Microsoft during the 1990s, using its market share to bully out the competition.  Has Apple sunk so low?  I want to like Apple.  I want to buy and use their products, but they keep pissing me off.  I don't want to fully convict Apple yet, but things don't look good.

Tags: apple, itunes, ipod, yahoo, musicmatch, monopoly

Speaking of Stupidity, Mike Harding has a great post about his troubles with Comcast.  It's a great example of how to lose a top-paying customer.

Tags: comcast, cable, customer service


Tags: cable comcast customer service
October 27, 2006 02:42 PM PDT Permalink | |

OK, if this is going to be a tradition, I should do it at least two weeks in a row.

And now, the week in stupid:

• Big Sunglasses on Stupid Celebrities - I'm convinced the the intelligence of an actress is inversely proportional to the size of her sunglasses.  The bigger the glasses, the dumber the brain.  Need proof?  I got your proof right here.


• George Bush and "The Google."  - Yes, old news, but it just highlights how an inappropriate "the" can make you look stupid.  Up here in enlightened Northern California, we make fun of our less fortunate brethren down in Southern California.  One easy way to tell the difference between a NoCal person and a SoCal person is how they talk about road names.  Up here we will say "Take 101 to 280 to get to San Francisco."  They will say "Take the 101 to the 405 to get to Los Angeles."  They are so used to adding useless words to their speak, like, they don't even know they are doing it, ya know?


• Deep Fried Coke - The stupidest thing about this story is how they want to try deep fried Diet Coke "for those watching their weight."  Good luck with that, fatass.


• Madonna's Adoption - Could she have handled this worse?  No.  Most biological kids of celebrities are messed up, so why are we letting them adopt?

BTW, something not stupid (I hope) is this new blogging Firefox plugin from Performancing.  I wrote this post with it as a test.  It's kind of cool.

Tags: topic:[bush], topic:[coke], topic:[sunglasses], topic:[celebrities], topic:[stupid], topic:[performancing]

One thing I hated about the new Firefox 2.0 was the small, but significant, change to the close-tab button.  They changed it from a single, never moving button on the far-right side to multiple buttons, one for each tab.  These buttons, of course, become moving targets as the number of tabs changes.

I normally open a bunch of tabs (comics, news articles) and then read them with my mouse hoving over the close-tab button.  It was easy to close the tab and move to the next page without even looking.  The new approach of one button per tab made that impossible and caused me some angst.

Fortunately, phocks blog had the answer.  Yeah phocks!

There are now four modes to choose from:

The author of Understanding Basic Piano proves that you don't need a fancy word processor, or even a computer, to become an author. All she needed was a pen and a good copy machine.

And at $9.00 you can't afford not to buy this!

Tags: piano, publishing, low tech

Here's new feature I'm calling "Stupid Friday" where I point out stupid things.

• Restless Leg Syndrome.  Apparently this is real, and you can get medicine for it, but how about a better, and less goofy, name for it.  Maybe "ants in your pants disease" or "cooties."
  


• Mark Foley's priest, who Foley says molested him, claims that he's sorry if the nude massages and skinny dipping were perceived as inappropriate for a priest.  Maybe they had Restless Leg Syndrome and needed to massage it out.
  


• George Michael says that smoking pot keeps him sane.  Can you really be sane with no brain? Or career?


• Bling H20.  Really, really expensive water for really, really, really stupid people.
  

Looks comfy.
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October 17, 2006 08:54 AM PDT Permalink | Comments [2] |

If you live the in San Francisco bay area then you know that BART is the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, a.k.a. an electric rail system.  Today BART began an experiment with Smart Cards to replace the old paper ticket system.  To listen to the news and to BART's own press releases you would think that this is something new and innovative.

*Sigh*

This is pretty much old news to many other places in the world.  I'll just give one example, which is Hong Kong.  Hong Kong has its Octopus system which has been aroud since the 1990s.  Almost all rail and bus systems use it these days and it's popularity as a form of cashless payment has increased to the point where you can use it almost anywhere.

The Octopus cards uses a proximity sensor so you don't even have to take it out of your wallet.  If you go to the train station, you will see most people just dragging their entire wallet or purse across the sensor.  I believe the new BART cards will still require you to swipe them like a old credit card (new credit cards also have "touchless" interaction now.

Hell, my Sun ID badge is also a Java Smart Card and works the proximity door locks.  The door sensors are a little to high for me to just swipe my butt against it to open the door, sadly.

Tags: BART, transportation, smart card

What's the most amazing thing about this Falling Sand game?  That's right, it's written in Java!  Good ol' Java applets.  Makes me kind of misty-eyed.

From their web page:

The next best thing to being slashdotted is being Jello'd.  That would explain why I'm #11 on the hit list today.  I guess they liked the Jetsons slides.
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October 12, 2006 09:29 AM PDT Permalink | |

Elevator too slow?  Escalator too crowded?  Take the slide from the 5th floor to the bottom at speeds up to 30 MPH.

Well-named Turbine Hall in London contains several of these stainless steel slides for public use so now you can know what it feels like to travel in one of those vacuum tube systems.  This is just a few steps away from the cheesy 1950's view of the future where people travel in tubes.

More pictures here.

And, yes, I know the subway in London is called the "tube."  Coincidence?  Yes! 

Tags: topic[slides], transportation

This story comes out about once a year, just to make those of us who don't send our kids to every possible activity feel better about themselves.  The report, as always, says that it's a good idea to let your kids just play and not to over-schedule their little, tiny calendars.  "Spontaneous free play" and "playing with toys" are good for kids and reduces stress in both the kids and parents.  Wow, thank you, science for that helpful and never-before-discovered fact. 

In all seriousness, there is a lot of pressure for "educated" parents to do as much as they can for their kids.  However, I have found (and science now backs me up) that smart people can out-smart themselves and that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.  It's a good thing that I'm lazy and never bothered to sign my daughter up for more than one activity at a time.

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October 09, 2006 01:57 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [2] |

If you think Line Rider is cool, take a look at this sketching program from MIT.

I've been at Sun for 17 years and have been to every instance of CEC (in it's many forms), except one, since they started way, way back.  I won't compare this CEC to past ones (when they were called "STS" - Software Technical Symposium), or make specific observations because so many other people are.  I will, however, give you the old-timer's perspective.

What I've learned to take away from these conferences is the message between the lines.  When the bigwigs are talking, what are they not saying?  What kind of technical offerings are being shown this year, and by whom?  It's kind of like reading tea leaves.

This year the tea leaves are good.

First, the speakers.  These conferences are generally meant to be moral boosters and pump everyone up.  Thus, there is a lot of "rah rah" speak and positive spin on everything.  However, right before the dot-bomb bust the executives who spoke put in a few clues that things weren't going to be so rosy for a while.  These speeches became more motivational as things got worse ("we've got to tighten our belts").  Some years we didn't even have an STS (they are expensive), for good reason.

But that was the past.  This year, as Sun finally pulls out of the slump, we are getting lots of positive messages with very little spin.  No one has to choose their words carefully and my "BS" detector never went off.

Second, the products.  The main purpose of CEC/STS is training and to expose the customer engineering staff to all of the technology that Sun is offering, or will be offering.  When things are going well at Sun, the products all fit together and it's clear how our customers can use them.  However, during the "dark periods" the vision isn't so clear.  After a presentation, you might say, "What I am going to do with that?"  Or you might even see two technologies that do the same thing, which confuses customers and employees alike.  Or you might see something that it so far out that you can't sell it, or it dies before becoming useful.

Those were the bad times.  I'm happy to say that this year everything fits into a well defined place and has a purpose.  From the hardware to the software to the tools, it was easy to see why a customer would want it and how it could integrate and place nice with other systems.

One of the few benefits of our recent layoffs (called RIFs at Sun) is that many overlapping or unfocused projects got axed.  These products were either redundant, didn't have a clear purpose, or just didn't provide enough customer value.  As a result, I didn't attend any "what was that?!?" sessions.

So, I'm happy to report that for the first time in a few years I'm leaving the conference with a positive feeling about Sun that I haven't had in a while.  If you know me and my cynical and sarcastic ways, then you know that I don't say things like this often.  Maybe I'll actually stay another 17 years at Sun.

Tag: cec2006

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October 04, 2006 03:27 PM PDT Permalink | |