Frank Caliendo is NOT funny

Attention: This content is 15 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

The title says it all. He is not funny.
It’s bad enough I have to be subjected to his TERRIBLE impersonations and “jokes” every Sunday while waiting for my Bears game to come on, but this hack actually has commercials as well.
Seriously… who has ever found this guy funny?
His impersonations are so horrible 90% of the time I can’t even tell who he is impersonating.
His jokes make me cringe. I can’t even crack a smirk when he rattles off one of his stupid cracks.
I suspect people who find him funny also enjoy reality TV, think Chris Angel is the best magician ever, and probably use Macs.

Vista Bashing – I’m SICK of it!

Attention: This content is 15 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

It seems that every single day I stumble on another article, newscast, or person, who is brainlessly bashing Vista.  I’m fucking sick of hearing it.

Every single one of these articles I have seen appears to be written by some talentless hack who has either not used Vista, or someone who has no fucking business touching a computer in the first place.

I have been running Vista for nearly 2 years now and am currently running it on both my desktop and my laptop and I have NEVER had a problem with it.  ALL of my hardware worked painlessly and I have not seen a SINGLE software compatibility issue.

It just boggles my mind when I read articles that say “It took me 16 months to get it working”.  I mean… my mind just can’t comprehend what is so god damned hard about it.  Seriously?  What is it?

Yes, it has it’s little quarks and annoyances, but there is no reason to avoid it.  It is a great, fantastic, VERY stable OS.  Anyone who claims otherwise probably doesn’t understand computers and is scared of change.

Rant over.

Updated iGoogle – WTF?

Attention: This content is 16 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

Going to make this short and sweet.

What the fuck is up with the new iGoogle home page?  They moved the “tabs” from the top where it was nice and sleek to bulging out the side fucking up the whole screen layout.

This looks like absolutely ass and I hate it.  FAIL google.

I am not alone in the utter disgust of this change.

If anyone knows how to switch it back, please leave a comment.

EDIT:  You can change it back (for now) by going to your Settings page, and setting your Language to (English UK)

This will only last until Google forces this new load of manure on the UK as well.

EDIT 2: This fix does not seem to stick between page reloads.  FAIL.

Sometimes Microsoft makes me want to stab them in the face with a hot poker

Attention: This content is 16 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

Over all I like Microsoft, but some things they do just really really annoy the hell out of me.

The most recent happened today when I was out at a client site. Long long story short, I needed to create a scheduled task for this particular computer. Well I kept getting an error message when setting the user account password for the account it needed to run under. Come to find out Microsoft knows about this issue and there is a Hotfix for it, but no patch has been released.

Ugh.

Getting a Hotfix from Microsoft in the past has been like prying a nickel out of a jew’s hands. (Damn near impossible).

Why on Earth can they not simple make the damn Hotfixes available for download! Seriously! There is NO reason why they can’t do this, other then the fact the love to make things difficult.

I filled out their form to email me the Hotfix. It said it would be there some time in the next 5 minutes.

20 minutes later I was sick of waiting around on it as I had things that needed to be done. I started searching around on the web for this Hotfix and finally found a site that had it for download… once you registered. FUCK I hate sites that FORCE you to register just so you can download 1 file and never every visit their site again. Stupid.

So I jump through the hoops, register, confirm my email address so they can spam the shit out of me and FINALLY download the file. Downloaded it, ran it, rebooted, and I was finally able to create a scheduled task.

Well the story doesn’t quite end there. I get back to the office and about an hour after my original request I sent in, I got an email from MS with a link to download the Hotfix. I thought well finally, I might as well download and archive this damn thing in case I need it again in the future. I clicky their link and it downloads a Zip executable, not a standard winzip packager, but some shitty looking MS in-house zip packager.

I run the exe to extract the actual Hotfix exe and guess what…

That’s right, I can’t even use the fucking file they sent me a link for.

I refused to do any research on THIS error code now as I am fed up with it. The problem has been fixed and I am done with the issue.

WHY DO YOU FAIL SO HARD MICROSOFT???

What is so fucking hard about having a list of Hotfixes where you just staight-up download the Hotfix. Why so many shitty hoops, then you end up with an unuseable file???

WHY???

Criss Angel = Talentless Hack

Attention: This content is 16 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

First off, let me say I don’t have anything wrong with magicians.  I actually enjoy them and have been to one of David Copperfield’s shows.  I even practiced the hobby when I was younger.  Everyone loves a good trick.

My problem is with people like Criss Angel who are not magicians in my opinion, but perform this “street magic” and with people who actually believe this guy has powers.

He does not.  He is nothing more then an illusionist who uses planted people in the audience and camera tricks.  That is not magic in my opinion.  That is called being a talentless hack.

Recently Criss Angel was supposed to escape from a building about to be blown up for demolition.  Except that no one was allowed to be with in visual distance for “safety”.

Well they weren’t counting on a news helicopter exposing his trick with a zoom camera.  I think the video evidence is pretty clear here and exposes Criss Angel for what he really is.  Nothing more then a fraud who couldn’t put on a decent magic show if he wanted to.

See for your self

Classmates.com can kiss my ass

Attention: This content is 16 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

Years ago for some silly reason I signed up on Classmates.com

Since that time they have spammed the living hell out of my inbox.

I finally got tired of it today and deleted my classmates.com account.  I’m fucking sick of their bullshit spam.  I also don’t like the site because it’s what I think of as a “bait and switch” scam site.  They show you all these great things you could do, so you sign up for an account… only to realize you can’t do a damn thing with out forking over money to them.

So, if you’re a classmate registered on that spam site, guess I’m lost to you forever.  Oh well.  Chances are I didn’t like you any way.

Hacker Safe = Most untrustworthy worthless badge ever (iPower Server Hacked)

Attention: This content is 16 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

I’m sure you’ve seen them… we’ve all seen them… the little green shield icon with the words “Hacker Safe” next to them.  Showing those links on a site is supposed to make the end user feel safe that their servers are, as the claim, “hacker safe”.

Now I for one have never put any amount of credibility in to that badge.  The claim alone is ridiculous.  Just because it passes some mysterious (what kind, who knows) checks from the hacker safe server, then that site is invulnerable to ALL hacks every where.

I got news for you… it’s bull shit, and I have (more) proof.

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Windows Mobile – Broken Beyond Repair

Attention: This content is 16 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

I have been using WM for nearly 2 years now. I started on WM5 and have been using WM6 for over a year now. I have had 2 different devices, both are PDA/Phone combination devices. The first was an HTC Wizard, and the second (and current) is an HTC Hermes.

I have loved these lil phones. They do literally anything and everything. Besides a phone and contact manager, you can surf the web, play games, emulate NES games, keep up to date on Weather, sports scores, RSS feeds, navigate using GPS, calculate anything you can imagine, take notes, photos, Exchange sync email, calendar, surf via Wifi, stream music and tv shows, or watch tv shows saved to your storage card…. etc… any way, you get the point.

These devices can do it all. If you want to do it, chances are some one out there has written a program that will allow you to do it.

But that’s where the glamor ends. Sure it may do all of these things, some of them well, some of them not so well, but it does not do them gracefully, or with ANY amount of style or intuition. The interface is a clunky disaster and navigating option menus and configurations is all but impossible at times.

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