Switch. Now, damn you!

Some folks are really really serious about getting people to switch to Firefox. Good on ‘em.Mind you, anyone who still uses Internet Explorer is an either ignorant newbie (we’ll forgive you), or wilfully crap-blind…

Software We Love to Hate

Microsoft Access suggests that I search for “disk space, freeing” or “memory, troubleshooting” to find out more information on this dialogue box. What happens when I do?

Go and Fetch Me a Long Weight.

As the serial commenter and proprietor of the Who Goes There? blog, Iddet wryly noted in the comments of my elegy to my iPod photo, I am actually “doing alright out if it”. What he was referring to was that in a miracle of biblical proportions, an insurance company paid up for an item it had insured. Unheard of, I know, but hooray for Zurich.
So I received a lovely cheque with which to buy myself an new iPod. And thus I did the other day – getting my brother to bring me in a new black 60GB iPod in duty-free from Australia. And now it’s in my hands. Tonight I’ll be plugging into the iMac, formatting the iPod back to HFS+ (the Mac disk format), instead of the now default stinky Windows FAT32 format (which, although Macs can read it, creates all sorts of issues when copying files to it in disk use), and gleefully uploading my 40 gigabytes worth of music and my weeks of missed Ricky Gervais and various random podcasts.. Oh yeah.
However, since Firewire has been sadly banished from iPods and replaced with USB2, which my flat screen (and not really that obsolete) iMac does not have, the iPod will finish uploading approximately SIXTY HOURS after I plug it in.
Curses.

Genital-Brained Drivers. Number 1 in a Probably Unending Series.

Yes, I know: as a New Zealander I’m meant to accept the wisdom handed down to us by American-accented goobers or any traffic cop who’s seen one too many fatal crashes, and believe that we’re all terrible drivers.
To that I say bollocks.
If you believe that, you’ve never been to London, or, well, just about any Asian country. We are no worse or no better than any other country. You also can’t blame the roads (it’s fashionable to say the NZ roads are terrible, too), or the cars we drive (the “get old cars off the road by pretending they’re full of rust” routine has seen to that), or the speed limit, or the drink-drivers, or anything else. As usual, it’s a mixture of all those things, plus the culture of new immigrants, plus our own NZ culture, that all go into the nice big stew that is our driving style. And it’s generally fine.
Teenagers will Darwin-ify themselves, truck-drivers and old-people will fall asleep at the wheel, and if someone being chased by the police happens to turn himself and his car into a twisted mound of broken metal and flesh, well, so much the better – one less crim on the roads.

That said, there are definitely still plenty of morons on the road. Imbeciles who cause entirely justified road rage in otherwise placid drivers. And let me be clear here: road rage is not the problem of the person experiencing it. Despite what pop psychologists and researchers say, it’s not a lack of self-restraint, of self-discipline, of the inability to turn the other cheek in a gesture of Christian goodwill. It’s entirely the fault of pricks who lack the courtesy to indicate, to wait, to merge properly.
One of the guaranteed road rage causers is spot-stealing, or cutting you off. Think about it – you’re in rush hour traffic, crawling along at 5 killo-meeters (Yes, it’s misspelled, but it stopped you saying the lazy “killom-itters”, didn’t it? ) per hour when some nob from the adjacent lane decides that your lane is moving much faster than his, and pulls directly across in front of you, doing the “indicate as you move” trick (thus negating the entire point of indicators), stealing your between-cars safety gap, and making you brake so that you don’t plough into his rear end. Utterly pointless, but he’ll do exactly the same move out again when he thinks his original lane is moving faster. Actions like this cause your traditional fist-shaking, middle-finger and V-sign gestures, blood pressure increases, and that nasty squirt of acid in the pit of your stomach that can best be relieved by plunging your hands into the fool’s head and mushing your fingers through his brain tissue.

Even worse, however, is this rectum:

I was driving into work last week, it was past rush hour, since I had done a ridiculously late night at work the previous evening, and needed a tad of a sleep-in. So, it was 9:30am, traffic was light and flowing fast. We’re cruising at 90 killo-meeters per hour, and this cock-brained driver sees that my (mostly empty) lane is moving slightly faster than his (mostly empty) lane. He pulls in behind me, stealing the bloke who was there’s safety zone. Then he decides that he doesn’t want to be behind a little red car like the one I’m driving, so he pulls out, stealing another bloke’s safety zone, passes me, and pulls in front of me, stealing my safety zone, while his load of wooden beams sways around dangerously. Anus-faced dick.
Anyone fancy using his number plate to find out his name, address and other details for $2.25 from a local Post office, and giving him a visit to teach him a lesson in courtesy and/or driving?

Of course, driving a truck like that, he’s obviously a tradesman, so cutting corners is what he does best.

Men Without Arms

He looks like every other vaguely abstract little man on public toilet doors everywhere. But the one at our work is different: he has no arms. That big square thing perched upon his legs is only his (obviously over-gymed) body.
Sure, the vaguely abstract little ladies on toilet doors everywhere don’t tend to have arms, but all they need is a triangle dress to show punters whether they’re welcome or not within. Men need their arms, dammit! Or is this the start of some feminist conspiracy?

Sub-optimal iPod Care

A sequence of steps not to take for optimal iPod usage:

1. Go to China
2. Put iPod in protective case
3. Place iPod in thigh pocket of ¾ length cargo pants
4. Take a train to Guangzhou, listen to iPod on journey
5. Visit the apartment of an elderly relative of one of your party
6. Sit and nod and smile politely while much Chinese is spoken
7. Form a line to say goodbye to elderly relative.
8. Join line at back
9. Realise the prolonged goodbyes are making elderly relative upset, but also realise that you can’t skip out of the line now
10. Say good bye to weeping elderly relative
11. Get shoved aside by concerned son of weeping elderly relative keen to console weeping elderly relative
12. Stumble towards a glass dinner table with conveniently placed corner at thigh level
13. Feel a crunch and tinkle of something breaking
14. Fish iPod out of pocket.
15. Damn.

A Productive Productivity Destroyer

Feeling overly productive at work? Or annoyed by TVNZ “news” items that try to equate spending a few minutes each day browsing the Net at work with bringing down the economy? Yes, that’s right, if you happen to be one of:

“several staff members [who] go onto a website at the same time, the information coming from it can overload the company’s computer system”.

I didn’t think that even virus-riddled, arse-backward Windows-based networks would fall over because a few people visit TradeMe at the same time, but there you go, TVNZ has the technical knowledge of these sorts of things, obviously. Morons.

Anyway, to lose the aforementioned productivity, or to bring your entire company’s network teetering to the edge of catastrophic meltdown, go and have a look at this sand game (mentioned at kottke.org). It looks like it’s been around for a while (like 2001?), but like all these internet memes, it gets fresh popularity everytime somebody such as kottke reveals it to a new audience.Oh, and it’s only a game in the same way the Sims is a game: there’s no goal, no point, and no winning. Just mix your sand, oil, or water, grow plants, create intricate waterways, or set fire to everything and watch it burn, baby, burn. Curiously addictive. If I was some fluffy-headed HR office-worker I’d say that this game would be interesting as a measure of people’s personalities. Oh, wait…  

 

 

iPod Saturation

I don’t quite know what to make of this – while browsing around the other day I saw that the Warehouse , home of the cheap and breakable imported trinket, has started stocking iPod accessories. They’re Cobalt brand, which is the Warehouse’s own brand for any electrical gadgety type thing that it can from find some no-name producer. The art work features something vaguely similar to the iPod silhouettes we all know from the ads , although it looks more like a hit and run victim that has been chalked around by an inebriated policeman than someone dancing blissfully in their own private music universe.

These accessories also feature a misspelled product name: what the hell is an “i-Pod”? Still, full credit to Cobalt, I suppose at least they went to the effort of putting “TM” after it, and they did get the capitalization right, but I think that if they had really got permission from the trademark holders to produce this thing, they probably would have also learned how to spell the item for which they are selling accessories.
Upsides? Well, this particular kit is $24, which is way cheaper than the $70-$100 for most iPod accessories from the real shops, and you get a goodly amount of stuff too: a “cigarette adaptor and i-Pod in-car charger”, an “I-Pod data and power cable” (yes, differing capitalization), and a “cassette audio adaptor”. Not bad for twenty-four squids.
Downsides? Well, the charger you put your iPod into is a plastic cage, which you tighten by squeezing two sliding other bits of plastic up against the sides of your iPod. I can see that’s going to keep it firmly in place for about 10 seconds. Everything is made of white plastic. Not the shiny, rich looking white plastic of an iPod, but the bland, brittle white of a shopping bag melted down into an amorphous blob. And it’s the Warehouse. Do you really think any of the items in this pack are going to work properly?

So what is more disturbing? That the Warehouse believes that there are people who have purchased an expensive quality item which works perfectly in a seamless blend of hardware and software, but who will pick up a barely working lump of shitty plastic to accessorise it? Or the fact that the Warehouse is right?

Annoying, isn’t it?

Undeniably, the leading way to search for something on the web is to Google it. The fact that in that sentence, I just used google as a verb shows how embedded Google has become, not only on the internet, but in real life speech. Other companies, of course, want a slice of this action. Microsoft is one of those companies, and being Microsoft, it wants more than a slice: it wants the whole pie.
So, Microsoft has therefore created its own web search system, currently in beta, which it will no doubt eventually place as a default web search on any machine that is unfortunate enough to be running Windows. Usually, this simple act would be enough to crush any opposition. Microsoft relies on its stranglehold on the computing market, and even more on the inertia of its users, to implement whatever malformed devil-spawn of an application it wants on computers around the world, and calling it a “standard”. Despite flaws as deep as the Mariana trench, as long as the product is “good enough”, the opposition is toast. Take a look at the successes of such tripe as Internet Explorer, Word, and Windows itself.
But Google is different. It’s in the popular lexicon, it has the “mind-share”, and is known by the average punter as the way to search. Even faced with a default of Microsoft’s (no doubt soon to be ad-riddled) search system on their Windows boxes, users will still type www.google.com into their browser to start searching, no matter how hard Microsoft tries to force their face in something else. The herd instinct amongst users, which has worked so well to Microsoft’s advantage in the past, in this case at least, works against it.
And that, dear friends, is why it makes my jaded heart glad to know that for first time in Microsoft’s entire history, the company is actually going to have to make something really good, as opposed to just barely good enough, to win this battle. Microsoft has to make its search return better results, have more options, and yet be faster, look better, and still work properly in order to beat Google. Even if it’s better by a huge margin (and going by past efforts, what are the chances of that?), it still may not convince users to switch, despite any and all clear-cut evidence there may be. Something being better by far, and still not come out on top? To that I hear all the Mac users of the world say: “Annoying, isn’t it?”

Post script: Today I happened to be talking with a colleague and wondering exactly how old I was in seconds. So I typed “how old am i in seconds” into Google, where the first result was http://www.time-for-time.com/howold.htm . There I entered my date of birth, and calculated that I am approximately 1.1 billion seconds old.
I typed the same thing in the Microsoft search site, and the first result was Brevard Old Red Eye Rugby Football Club. There’s obviously a bit of work to do yet.

Update 3 February 2006: I thought I would try this out again: typing “how old am i in seconds” into both Google and the Microsoft search sites. Google’s first result was the same as before, and the next couple were similar sites. MSN Search or whatever it’s called now seems to be out of beta, and the first result from the search actually had something to do with it. Progress. The rest of the page’s results were for AM radio hosts named Seconds. Useful.