When spam subject lines go from annoying to insulting:

You look stupid in this video anthony!

So there I was, writing my weekly letter to Obama wherein I beg him to carry my children since he’s obviously the second coming of Christ, when I heard this on the news:

Quoting Barack Obama:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them," Obama, an Illinois senator, said.

"And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," he said.

Thanks Obama; we love you too!  But you forgot cannibalism and NASCAR.

Anyway, we’re sorry for turning to such barbaric things as our belief in God, our second-amendment rights, and our desire to have secure borders.  We’ll try to do better by taking after you, and turning to more enlightened things like cocaine.

The irony, it hurts.

How can a dial go MIN->MAX->MED->HI?
I’ll tell you how: FAIL

Ugh.  I’m not even particularly cool, but even I had to gag a little bit when I read that.

Nice job, Comcast.  I can’t think of a better way to say "Hi, I’m a clueless 50-something business executive, and I’m trying really hard to sound hip for the kids in the 18-35 demographic!"

So I’m on weather.com just checking up on the weather forecast.  On the side of the page I see this "Tee-Off With Tiger" ad.  Obviously the image is a combination of three separate images, those being the golf course, the car, and the man.

But then I take another glance because something doesn’t seem right.  Ah yes, the "Buick" name and logo are totally Photoshopped onto that vest.  Haha, lame.

But there’s something else.  What’s wrong with Tiger’s head?  It looks freakishly small in that photo, almost as if it doesn’t match the body.

And then it all becomes clear when you notice that the arms on the body are clearly the arms of a white man, not a black man; and yes, the body that the arms belong to is clearly about twice as big as it should be for the size of Tiger’s head.

Today I had to actually physically go to the bank, something I virtually never need to do, and I encountered a great example of poor interface design.

At the drive-through, there’s the terminal for the canister that’s used to send stuff to the bank teller via a forced-air tubing system.  This terminal has only 2 buttons, Send and Call, but the canister was behind a hard plastic door and therefore inaccessible to me.

I sat there for a few seconds looking at it and trying to figure out what to do.  I thought that perhaps pushing or tapping on the plastic door would open it, but it did not.  The teller must have noticed the stupid look on my face because she got on the speaker and said, "Can I help you?"  "Yes, I’d like to make a deposit," I said.  "OK, just press the Send button and put your check into the canister," came the reply.

Why, of course!  You press the Send button in order to retrieve the canister.

I had actually considered pressing the Send button, but I assumed that it would send the (empty) canister to the teller, before I’d gotten a chance to put my check into it, which would obviously be stupid.

Here’s PA representative Bob Belfanti in a Philadelphia Inquirer article:

Quoting Rep. Bob Belfanti:

"Face it, cigarettes are part of the military," Belfanti said. "Those guys and girls who come home, maybe without an arm or a leg, want to go to the VFW and have a cigarette."

That statement is all kinds of dumb, not least because 70 percent of the military are non-smokers.

Conversely, an intelligent comment by senator Stewart Greenleaf, from the same article:

Quoting Sen. Stewart Greenleaf:

You wouldn’t allow people to blow asbestos in other people’s faces.

Why not?  Because it’s a carcinogen, exactly as tobacco smoke is.  The only difference is that asbestos lacks the rich and powerful lobbying forces that tobacco has, and states aren’t collecting millions of dollars in tax revenue from asbestos sales like they are from tobacco sales.

More from the article:

Quoting The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Cigarette maker Philip Morris spent $275,000 seeking to influence lawmakers in 2007.  The Breathe Free Coalition (American Lung Association, American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society) staked out a spot in the Capitol this year where they set up a large poster reminding passersby that six people die each day in Pennsylvania from the effects of secondhand smoke.

Someone uploaded this picture today:

My hatred of Verizon started sometime in 2004, when I started hearing horror stories from Kim about the despicable, greedy, and just plain evil things that Verizon did in the course of providing her cell phone service.  And I don’t mean 1 or 2 small issues; it was 5 or 6 or 7 totally unbelievable instances in which they either intentionally or through gross incompetence tried to defraud her of vast sums of money.  I wish I would have written them down.

As an aside, it’s funny to read posts by iPhone haters saying that it’s doomed because it’s tied to the evil AT&T, and if only they could get it with service from Verizon instead, then they would get an iPhone.  I’ve had zero problems with AT&T in the 6 months that I’ve had my iPhone, and their coverage is far better than Nextel’s ever was, and I’m pretty sure that their $20/mo for unlimited data is the best data deal going.  But the fact is, all of these giant telecom companies pretty much just suck if you give them enough time.

Anyway, back to Verizon: the only reason I have a landline at all is for my business.  When I signed up for this business line, we ended up moving a couple months later.  And despite the fact that now you’re supposed to be able to transfer your phone number to a different provider, Verizon couldn’t even let me keep my number while still using Verizon service at the new house.

As if that weren’t bad enough, they also told me they couldn’t provide me with voice-mail at the new house, which makes no sense whatsoever because it’s not like the voice-mail is stored at my house -- it’s stored on Verizon’s servers anyway!  So I actually had to use something called an answering machine -- a physical device used by primitive peoples before the invention of fire or dirt -- to get my messages for the past few months.

Verizon’s website is as terrible as such a terrible company’s website should be.  Literally every time I log in to my account, it displays the following 2 messages:

We are temporarily unable to retrieve information for this phone number. Please try again later.

We are temporarily unable to retrieve current billing information for this phone number. Please try again later.

And most unbelievable and frustrating of all, when you try to call Verizon for support, they don’t put you on hold like a decent company would; instead, you get a recording that says "all representatives are busy; please try again later" and then THEY HANG UP ON YOU.

Now to the bill: it was nominally $30 or $40 per month, but virtually all calls are "local long distance" or regular long distance, so it always ended up being $70 or $80, even though I hardly used this phone line (for outgoing calls) at all.

Of course, Verizon is the local monopolist, so as much as I would have liked to tell them to go take a long walk off a short pier while I switch to another provider, the fact is that there is no other provider that I could use.

Well, I finally found a way to escape Verizon’s evil clutches: I switched to Vonage.  Vonage is a VoIP phone service provider, which means your service comes in over the internet instead of through a phone line.  But it sounds and acts just like a regular phone line: you can plug any normal phone into it, you get the normal dial tone, etc.  They provide all the standard stuff like voice mail, and unlike Verizon, they let me keep my existing number no problem.  They also have some cool and innovative features like sending copies of your voice mails to your email account.  But here’s the best part: Vonage costs just $25 per month and that includes unlimited local and long distance.  There was a setup fee of about $40, but the first month is free, so there’s effectively no setup charge.

But here’s the real best part: Vonage calls your existing phone provider and takes care of the cancellation and transfer and everything, so you don’t have to do any of that.  But once that happened, Verizon called me (of course I didn’t answer) and left a message crying about the fact that I was leaving, and "we’d really like to keep your business" and "we have some very competitive plans that we’d like to discuss with you."  Yeah, like you really have anything competitive with $25/mo with free everything, you scumbags.  And then, a couple days later, I got a "DHL EXPRESS EXTREMELY URGENT" package in the mail, containing a letter from Verizon still begging me to stay.  No wonder their service is so expensive when they’re wasting money on overnight shipping instead of working on, oh, I don’t know, VOICE MAIL SERVICE maybe?

Quoting ABC News:

The Iranian Foreign Ministry, however, called the incident "ordinary"

Yes, a speedboat jaunting around in the wake of another country’s warships is entirely ordinary.  These guys were obviously trained by Baghdad Bob himself.

It’s certainly possible that Iran is trying to provoke us into war, but nonetheless the above statement is absurd.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on the history of maritime incidents as they relate to the wars we’ve fought.

It’s tragic for sure.  But no one should be surprised that a tiger could scale a 12-foot wall.  Our housecats are less than a foot tall, and they have always been able to scale the 6-foot fence surrounding the pool at my parents’ house.

What is surprising, and amazing, is this:

Quoting The New York Times:

The tiger was killed by three shots fired by four police officers.

Huh?

Is it really not possible to delete a file from the trash in Mac OS X, aside from the "Empty Trash" action which deletes ALL its files?

Kim and I have been downloading the TV show "Heroes" in iTunes and watching it on our TV.  This is on my Mac Mini system, using Apple’s DVI to video adapter to display the video on the TV, which works quite nicely.

But today, right in the middle of watching one of the episodes in full-screen, iTunes decided to pop-up a dialog box saying "Thanks for using iTunes.  Would you like to back up your collection?"

Frankly, if I wanted this kind of brain-dead and annoying behavior while watching a video, I’d use Windows or Linux to watch it, where the overall experience is nowhere near as seamless and polished. I expect that kind of thing on those operating systems; I expect more from Mac OS X.

On every operating system, there should be a flag that any application can set, which would tell the operating system "I’m in full-screen do-not-disturb mode", the effect of which would be to prevent anything from popping up in front of the application.  I’m surprised that OS X does not have such a mechanism, especially in the tightly-integrated environment of iTunes/QuickTime, where all the running code should know that there’s a video playing.

(Update: the public smoking ban went into effect on September 11th 2008.)

The PA House of Representatives and the PA Senate were both working on legislation in the past few weeks that would ban smoking in most public places, including restaurants.  But the ban ultimately stalled because the two chambers could not agree on a set of exemptions to it.  The ban is now shelved until September.

I hate breathing other people’s smoke.  That’s not only because second-hand smoke kills 50,000 Americans including 3,000 Pennsylvanians every year; it’s also because it’s freaking disgusting.  So naturally I want this ban enacted into law as soon as possible.

The main arguments I’ve seen that are against the ban -- i.e. that are pro-smoking -- are:

1. Waaaaah I want to smoke and you can’t take away my rights and next thing you’ll be making it illegal to eat thumb tacks!!

2. Restaurants (etc) should just have smoking and non-smoking sections as they do now.

3. This is a decision that’s best left to market forces to decide.

The first argument makes me angry because it’s so common and yet so moronic and/or disingenuous.  No one is trying to take away a smoker’s right to kill himself.  The issue is whether smokers should be allowed to kill other people, as they have been doing for years and years without punishment.  When you’re spewing cancerous filth in an enclosed area, others have to breathe it in, and that’s as issue of their rights, not yours.

The second argument is invalid because the "non-smoking" sections are still contaminated with smoke, as anyone who’s eaten in one knows.  Any high-schooler who’s taken a physics or chemistry class can tell you that smoke, like all other fluids, moves freely within its container and does not pay any attention to the "non-smoking section" signs.  This whole concept is exactly like having a peeing section in a public pool, except that urine is a sterile fluid, whereas tobacco smoke is a lethal fluid.  Air ventilation and filtration systems have been shown to be ineffective in solving this problem, and in any case, the workers in the smoking sections are not protected at all.

The third argument says that anyone who doesn’t like smoke can simply avoid establishments that allow smoking.  I’ve seen a bunch of news or opinion articles making this argument, stating that "many" or even "most" restaurants are already smoke-free so non-smokers should just patronize those businesses instead.  I don’t know where these people are coming from, but around here, literally none of the restaurants that we go to on a regular or semi-regular basis are smoke-free: not Chili’s, not the Olive Garden, not Carrabba’s, not TGI Friday’s, not Ruby Tuesday’s, not Red Lobster, not Outback Steakhouse, not Applebee’s.  If there were such a restaurant, we would be all over it.  Instead, when we’re being seated, I always have to say "please seat us as far from the smoking section as possible," and still about half of the time, we need to ask to be moved once we’re seated, because the "non-smoking section" is too darn smoky.

Second-Hand Smoke Statistics

therecordherald.com, 20070619:

According to the American Lung Association, secondhand smoke is responsible for approximately 3,400 lung cancer deaths and 46,000 heart disease deaths in adult nonsmokers annually in the United States.

nosmokeindoors.com, 20070621:

Three-thousand Pennsylvanians die each year as a result of the health conditions caused from breathing in someone else’s tobacco smoke.

For every eight smokers that die from the effects of their own tobacco use, one nonsmoker dies from the effects of secondhand smoke.

84 percent of Pennsylvanians believe that all workers should be protected from exposure to secondhand smoke in the workplace.

Waitresses are almost four times more likely to die of lung cancer compared to workers in other fields, and bartenders face a 50 percent greater risk of dying from lung cancer, other cancers, and heart disease than other workers.

Secondhand smoke is harmful and hazardous to the health of the general public, and particularly dangerous to children.  It is a proven cause of lung cancer, heart disease, serious respiratory illnesses, low birth weight and sudden infant death syndrome.

businesswire.com, 20070626:

In June 2006, the Surgeon General of the United States declared that there was no safe level of second hand smoke, ever. Secondhand smoke - a carcinogen classified in the same league with asbestos, formaldehyde and radon - is known to kill more than 53,000 Americans each year, including 3,000 in Pennsylvania alone.

And that doesn’t include people who actually smoke. These are just the people who stand within breathing distance of smokers and suffer the fatal consequences.

During just a one-hour dinner in a restaurant where smoking is permitted, nonsmoking patrons "smoke" the equivalent of three cigarettes. That’s enough to cause stiffened arteries, prompt irregular heartbeats, exacerbate colds, bronchitis and pneumonia, worsen heart attacks, and trigger asthma, particularly in children.

Nonsmokers who are regularly exposed to tobacco smoke pollution, either at home or at work, have almost double the risk of heart disease. And secondhand smoke causes 30 times as many lung cancer deaths as all other regulated air pollutants combined.

PC Magazine has some serious iPhone hate going on.  On their current front page, there are 6 negative items about the iPhone:

Will the iPhone Be an iNightmare for Business?

The Anti-iPhone Solution

Cranky Geeks: iPhone: A Recipe for Failure?

Any Phone Can be an iPhone

Apple iPhone Exposed: How we secretly an obtained an iPhone, reviewed it all night, and found some serious flaws.

Apple iPhone Launch Reveals Phenomenon (in which John Dvorak makes fun of iPhone line-waiters)

There’s 1 neutral item (but this is just copied from Think Secret):

Inside Apple: Getting Inside the iPhone

Then there’s 1 positive item... about iPhone accessories:

10 Awesome iPhone Accessories

Then there’s this last item, which seems partially positive but is ultimately negative:

Apple iPhone: Fun, Fabulous, Flawed

This one contains all kinds of dumbness:

put simply, it isn’t a very good phone. Call quality was the worst we’ve heard on a high-end device in years

...and their testing apparently consists of just saying "it sounds teh suxorz."  Compare this with wirelessinfo.com’s review in which they actually perform tests on the audio, and then conclude things like "compares extremely well to other phones", "performance...was very good", and "overall, the sound quality is very acceptable".

It’s complicated to dial

...because it has the exact same dialpad that phones have had for decades?  Or because, since the iPhone is a multifunction device, you have to hit the "phone" button to put it into phone mode?  If that’s complicated, what the heck are you doing writing a review for a tech mag?

difficult to send text messages on

...despite the fact that just about every other review has praised its iChat-like text-messaging interface?

the iPhone Internet experience is loads of fun. It’s not quite "the Internet in your pocket," however. It displays HTML pages gorgeously (even over EDGE!)

...because the speed of the connection has ANYTHING to do with the aesthetics of how pages are displayed?

but the Internet is now loaded up with Javascript, Java, Flash, streaming media and other plug-ins. The iPhone can’t hit many of these rich experiences

Javascript isn’t a plug-in; every major browser supports it natively, including the iPhone’s browser.

The internet is hardly "loaded up" with Java; quite the contrary, Java is rarely seen nowadays on web pages, thankfully, since web-embedded Java applets were never anything but clunky and ugly.

Flash is the one item in this list that actually makes sense, but the most popular Flash destination on the internet is YouTube, and Apple convinced YouTube to convert their proprietary Flash content to standard H.264 video, specifically for iPhone and AppleTV.  Many internet users, including myself and apparently Apple, are fed up with the clunky non-native proprietary mess of plugins like Flash and Java that have plagued the web thus far, and the move to standard formats like H.264 can’t happen quickly enough.

Anyway... here are the 2 cell phone items from the front page of PCmag that aren’t about the iPhone:

Video Review: Hot Slim Phones

Sprint’s Most Powerful Smartphone

Quite a difference in tone there.

I never read PCmag; it just happened to come up as I was browsing news.google.com today.  So maybe it’s common knowledge that they are an anti-Apple publication (they are called "PC" Magazine after all).  But you’d think they’d at least pretend to try to hide such a glaring bias as this.

PS - here’s a screenshot of the hate-filled front page:

Apparently the people who lived here before us had DirecTV.  We’ve never had it, and we sure don’t now.  A few days ago I heard what sounded like a metal trash can blowing around in the parking lot, but, no, it’s just a satellite dish hanging from the roof and banging against the siding.  I told the landlord about it a few days ago, but nothing’s come of that yet.

That’s quite possibly the longest and most complex URL that I’ve ever seen in an advertisement.  Did no one at IBM (or their ad agency) realize that a 30-character URL including 3 sublevels is the opposite of simple?

Look what just came in the mail from Nextel:

It’s pretty much your typical here’s a special deal that’s only for special customers like you (er, along with every single other customer we have, whom we also sent this letter to) which will allow you to get huge savings of $70!!OMGFTPBBQ off a new 2-year contract regularly priced at $1680 and PLEASE STAY WITH US AND DON’T JUMP SHIP FOR THE IPHONE COME JUNE 29TH! -type letter.

Fat chance, Nextel.

Apparently it was 2 years ago this month that I signed my 2-year agreement with them, and of course this month the iPhone will be released.  The iPhone ads are quite salivation-inducing, especially in light of the fact that every cell phone I’ve ever owned has been basically garbage, including my current sucky Motorola cell phone: call-making ability is only adequate, interface/usability is without exception awful, and ability to do anything else is nonexistent.

The $500 iPhone price tag seems steep at first, but when you consider the total cost it’s pretty much negligible.  My current phone cost me $200, and with my "$60/month" plan which of course costs me $70+ each month, the total cost for the phone with service is $200 + $70x24 = $1880.  So the iPhone with a similarly-priced plan would be $2180, which is a difference of only 16%, and is actually only $12/month more overall when you consider the cost of the hardware as part of the 2-year contract (which of course it really is: the "free" or cheap phones that we get are of course paid for over 2 years as part of the service plan).

Twelve dollars per month is so worth it that it’s a no-brainer when you consider what you’re getting: the old phone could only make phone calls, but the new phone also has:

-full internet capabilities on a decently-sized screen

-a sweet Google Maps front-end (GMaps being one of my favorite things ever which you know if you read my blog)

-a decent digital camera

-photo-displaying abilities (again, the big screen makes all the difference)

-the ability to use WiFi internet connections

-an iPod

As I’ve said before, its 4-8 GB capacity will be far too small for my ~40 GB music collection, but I’ll upgrade in a couple years when one that large is available, and in the meantime I’ll have all those other awesome features which I didn’t have with my cell phone before.

Also, WWDC is next week and Steve Jobs’ keynote will be at 1 PM eastern time on Monday.  MacRumors and Engadget will be live-blogging the event, during which some interesting secrets about the iPhone and/or other Apple products will likely be revealed.

Electronics manuals are goldmines of great warning labels.

This is from an air conditioner I just bought:

Yes, don’t try to cool your precision with it.  I love how concerned the second air conditioner is.  Noooo!!  Don’t drink it, son, it contains containments!

And this is from a hard drive I just bought:

(show full-size image viewer)

The past couple of Daily Dilbert comics have been near and dear to my heart:

May 7th:

May 8th:

(show full-size image viewer)

Here are just a few reasons why my Motorola i760 cell phone sucks.

1. About 90% of the time when I plug the phone into its charger, the phone turns off by itself in about an hour, for no good reason.

2. It makes an awful buzzing/clicking interference noise in the speakers of any nearby stereo, especially when it’s ringing, about to ring, or in use.  This is actually true of all GSM phones though, apparently:

Quoting wikipedia:

A nearby GSM handset is usually the source of the "dit dit dit, dit dit dit, dit dit dit" signal that can be heard from time to time on home stereo systems, televisions, computers, and personal music devices.  When these audio devices are in the near field of the GSM handset, the radio signal is strong enough that the solid state amplifiers in the audio chain function as a detector.  The clicking noise itself represents the power bursts that carry the TDMA signal.  These signals have been known to interfere with other electronic devices, such as car stereos and portable audio players.

3. Its "Recent Calls" feature doesn’t work properly.  This is true of all Motorola phones I’ve used (3 different ones).  Let’s say you’ve recently received (but missed) the following 5 calls:

3:00 PM - Client Bob
3:20 PM - Mom
3:30 PM - Client Bob
3:45 PM - Wife
4:00 PM - Client Bob

A "Recent Calls" list would display exactly that, though probably with the times on a separate screen (which is dumb).  But here’s what the phone actually displays:

3:20 PM - Mom
3:45 PM - Wife
4:00 PM - Client Bob

So you have no idea that your maniacal Client Bob actually called you 3 times in the past hour.  The fact is, this feature is a "Recent Callers" list, not a "Recent Calls" list.  The feature actually implemented is much less useful, and it’s made even worse by the fact that it’s incorrectly titled.

4. The address book only lets you enter 20 characters in the "Name" field.  20 characters isn’t even enough for many people’s first and last names; forget about including an extra word or two to indicate who the person is (business name?  location?  something to indicate their affiliation with you?) -- that would just be too darn useful.  It says I currently have 127 slots in use and 473 free, so it clearly has enough memory to spare a few extra letters on each entry.

5. The alarm feature (under "Datebook") is totally lame.  It won’t turn the phone on to sound the alarm, which means you can’t turn the phone off if you want to use the alarm (for, say, an ALARM clock in the morning), which means someone can call you in the middle of the night and wake you up.  This could be fixed by setting the phone to "silent" overnight, except for another boneheaded feature: the alarm won’t go off if the phone is set to silent.

6. Miscellaneous inconsistencies, for example: if you go to the messages screen and highlight "voice mail", you can’t hit the "call" button to call it; you have to hit the "OK" button.  But if you highlight the "voice mail" item in the "Recent Calls" list, the opposite is true: "OK" doesn’t call it, but the "call" button does.

Update: more reasons to hate this friggin’ phone:

7. OK, so I can send an IM to my phone from AIM by using the phone number (starting with "+1") as the screenname.  That’s cool.  And I can send an email to my phone by sending it to phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com -- cool, and I can even attach photos -- really cool!  But can I set one of my own photos as the wallpaper (background image) on the phone?  No, of course not!  Only "official" images (read: ones that you purchase from Sprint/Nextel) can be used as wallpaper.  Just another example of the phone networks artificially limiting the phone hardware’s capabilities to extract more money out of us.  Friggin’ crooks.

You know those obnoxious forwarded chain-letter emails that you get sometimes all the friggin’ time?  The ones that always end with some kind of totally realistic and believable warning, like this:

If you dont forward this message to 10 people in the next 10 minutes your face will fall off and your head asplode!!1!

I think a good policy would be to reply to those emails with this message:

Thanks for the warning!  Now, if you don’t delete my address from your address book in the next 10 seconds, the internets will burn down and you’ll never have email again!1!!

This seems like it should be obvious and/or easy to find, but I can’t find it anywhere.  When running the "mysql" command-line program under Windows, how do you clear the history of previously-typed commands?

Well, we just got back from our trip to California.  I have lots of photos to post, but it will take some time to sort and prune them.  I took about 800 photos, but because I often take 3-5 different shots of any given scene to find a good exposure, and because many of the photos end up being not very good anyway, I usually end up posting only about 10-15% of them.  And the process of picking the good 10-15% out of 800-some photos takes a while.

In the meantime, though, I wanted to post this little gem:

It’s sad to think of how many Holiday Inn employees this got past before being placed in every single room at the Holiday Inn in Concord, CA, and probably others.