Category Rant

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???

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

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.

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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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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Shortly after Christmas I upgraded my gaming machine’s video card from a now-outdated ATI X850XT to a top of the line Asus 8800GT TOP edition card.  The card seemed to run great for less demanding games, and even on more demanding ones for shorter periods of time.

The first time I got to really punish it at a LAN party the card failed.  I started getting a lot of artifacting along with system lockups.  After looking in to it I found out the card was overheating.

Now, I had to ask my self why the performance video card I just shelled out $300 for was OVER HEATING.  Long story short, Asus majorly fucked up when designing this card.

1) The card has ZERO ability to control the speed of the fan.  Not only that, but the fan isn’t even a dynamic speed fan, it has 2 wires going to it.  It turns on, and that is it.  This means the card has NO ability to ramp up fan speed as the card heats up from intense 3D game play.  WTF?

2)  The memory chips on the card have ZERO cooling.  NEITHER ACTIVE NOR PASSIVE.   You read that right.  There are not even small heatsinks on the ram chips.

Asus really screwed the pooch on this one.  They put out a performance video card, then fail to give it adequate cooling, causing the card to over-heat and eventually lock up non-stop.  Why would Asus do this?  Well my theory is the company’s apparent ever-declining lack of quality.  They have had massive problems with other products they make (specifically the Striker Extreme motherboard… another performance piece of hardware that has XBox-360 levels of failure rates).  I should’ve known better then to buy Asus after their Striker incident, but the card had the highest numbers of any 8800GT and I couldn’t pass it up.  Now I am paying for it.  My machine is sitting silent with out a video card right now as I send the piece of crap Asus back to the lovely folks at Newegg (best company I have ever dealt with BTW).  As soon as I get my refund I will be buying the EVGA 8800GT SuperClocked edition card.

From what I’ve read online EVGA actually did things right.  You can control fan speeds and the heatsink covers the whole card.

Never again Asus.  Never again.

Hiding a Pickle ornament is NOT a German tradition, nor did it even originate in Germany.  Shocking, I know.  Well… not really shocking at all when you use a little bit of German knowledge and look a bit more closely at this “tradition” whether then accepting it at face value.

The fallacy-laden story goes that it is a German tradition to hide a pickle-type ornament deep in the branches of the Christmas tree Christmas Eve.  The next morning whatever kid found the pickle hidden by ole St.  Nick would receive an extra present.  As I mentioned, with a little knowledge of how the Christmas Holiday works in Germany it is easy to spot that in Germany, St. Nick comes on the 5th or 6th of December, not Christmas Eve.   In addition, children in Germany do not open their presents Christmas morning as is the tradition in America.  They open them on Christmas Eve.

These details aside, the biggest problem with the Christmas pickle story is that NO ONE IN GERMANY HAS HEARD OF THIS TRADITION! 

That’s right.  The story is yet another FRAUD perpetrated on the gullible American public by marketing companies across the country just foaming at the mouths to sell you 12 cents worth of painted plastic in the form of a pickle for $9.99 so that you can hide it in your tree, while needing to buy an extra present to give away with the magical pickle.

Fell like a sucker, don’t yah?

You know… I always thought wine tasting “experts” were pompous snobs that just pulled stuff out of their butts, but now there is scientific proof.

“In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded,” while the vin du table was “weak, short, light, flat and faulty”. Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.”

So remember that next time you’re out looking for which Wine is best. Just buy what you think tastes good. The experts don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.