Please stop asking me to update Java on a near daily basis. Also, please quit trying to trick me into installing the AWFUL Yahoo toolbar every single time I do an update.
All posts tagged Furious
Harry Potter / How to Waste an Afternoon
Last night I finished rereading Harry Potter. Its the first time I have picked up the book since the series began to develop momentum many years ago. Not surprisingly, I have come to the same conclusion; Harry Potter is a wretched book.
There are so many problems with the book, I don’t even know where to begin. And, I am not talking about the whole sacrilegious angle. I suppose my biggest gripe would be the style of the writing. It is inconsistent, and agitating. Reading it is like talking to someone that keeps slipping in and out of an irritating accident. This however is just the tip of the iceberg.
One of the things I found most disturbing about the book is the promotion of a strong sense of classism. There is a sharp delineation between the “elite” magic users, and everyone else, whom are referred to as “moggles” with some level of contempt. And, to make the normal people seem even more awful, the author reinforces her stereotype by having the foster family of Harry Potter behave brutally towards him.
In fact, the whole situation with his family is another annoying facet of the story. The book basically begins with him, as a very young child being dropped off at his Aunt’s house. This was necessary as his parent were slaughtered by a wizard who is apparently not a nice guy. The problem is that his aunts family essentially hate him. In this section of the book, Harry is apparently a well behaved child, but is constantly punished. On, the flip side, once he is taken to the magic fairytale land to learn to be a wizard everything is different.
Harry Potter seems to be a character of opposites. In the regular world, he is good but falls downwards. In the fantasy land, he constantly does foolish things, and is quite reckless. However, the worse he screws up, the more upward he fails. It makes little to no sense. While I agree that no good dead goes unpunished, it is pretty rare that failure is directly rewarded either. And, really is this a lesson we want to teach our children?
I could rant about this forever, but I am going to tie it up here. Upon reading the book twice, and giving it due consideration. I am whole heartily issuing it my lowest possible rating, -5. Please people, avoid this book at all costs.
The Vikings are Pathetic
The Vikings demonstrated that they were nothing more than pretenders today. They turned in a PATHETIC performance in their most important game of the year. Hell, they looked like Detroit. I am throughly disgusted.
Powerless ’09
Today, I experienced a traumatizing event fit for an xkcd comic strip.
A few minutes after returning from Family Video with a video game, the power goes out. This is extremely uncommon, as we are on Grand Haven’s independent grid that nearly never goes down. So, I sat in the dark for a few minutes assuming the power would come back on at any moment (99% of the time is back in in five minutes).
After few minutes of waiting I finally decide to start scrounging around for a flashlight. Jesse found one, and we used it to find another. To be clear, we had enough time to wait a little while, find a flashlight, find another flashlight with dead batteries, find batteries, figure out how to open the flashlight, and put the batteries in the flashlight. And, the power still wasn’t back. This was unheard of.
So, of course the first thing I want to do is write a post about the experience. But, ultimately I decided not to, because I obviously could not post it since I had not internet access. But, more importantly, my laptop gets quite warm so I only use it when I can have a fan blowing on me to prevent my brain from boiling. No electrify = no fan.
At this point, I am figuring that I can survive without internet access for a little, because certainly the power should be coming on at any moment. I figured that it would be a good time to get a little catch up reading done. So, I grab my kindle only to say “battery is empty.” Ugh. I swear, whenever I want to use that thing the battery is dead. I really need to remember to turn off wireless when I’m not using it.
Next, I figured I would grab my iPod Touch, and see if everyone’s power was down by scanning for wireless networks. After that I was going to listen to some tunes. That thing was so dead that it wouldn’t even show the “charge immediately” screen. I swear, when the internet goes down, or in this case the power, all my electronics instantly die.
My last resort was to pull out an analog book, and attempt to read with one of those little book lights. I haven’t tried to read with one of those in ages. The light I use works pretty good with the kindle, but doesn’t work to well with a regular book, unfortunately. I managed to get through a chapter but it caused to much eye strain I was feeling sick to my stomach. At this point an hour had pasted.
So at this point I’m searching the house for a length of rope, and trying to figure out which branch would hold my weight the best.
After 90 minutes of unbearable horror, Jesse and I went to Wal-Mart. We wondered around for a half hour or so, and picked up some flashlights and portable fans. We got back to the house at a little after 12:30. Thankfully, during the time we were out the power came back on.
According to the blinking light on the stove, the power had come back on 11 minutes before we walked through the door. In order words, over two hours from the time it went out. Unfortunately for us, those two hours felt like an eternity.
Microsoft Hates Web Developers
I officially squandered and hour of my life updating my xp install under vmware fusion, and fiddling with ie to get 6, 7 and 8 all working along site each other so that I might have the displeasure of testing websites in all fucking three of the browsers.
After getting all the versions of ie installed, I took the new ie8 final out for a test drive. And, low and behold it still sucks, not surprise there though. I love how they don’t care about standards, and just keep introducing more fucking bugs for web developers to deal with. I can’t wait until the next site that I have to add yet another ie version specific stylesheet to. I mean seriously, I have one file for every other browser on the planet, but I expect to have to have three stylessheets just for ie.
I am seriously considering instituting a $1,000 surcharge to make sites ie6 compliant, but it seems absurd to me to devote such a huge portion of project development to debugging issues for a single, very obsolete, browser. Am I wrong? In the not too distant future I plan on modifying this site so that ie6 users are sent to a static page with download links to modern browsers, they will not longer be able to get to the actual blog and send me annoying messages about rendering quirks.
If you are viewing this post in internet explorer: what the fuck? Get with the program, and drop that piece of shit.
I could site here and rant about how awful internet explorer is, and how it takes years off my life, but it is getting late and I really should be sleeping, not venting. But, I won’t let that stop you from venting.
Anyone reading this is more than welcome to post a comment expressing their hatred for internet explorer. Any version is fair game, as they all suck.
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