Sep 25th, 2008Check this out, a burger from McDonalds that’s 12 years old, and looks like it hasn’t aged a day:
Why anyone would want to eat this shit is beyond me. Eat chemicals much? Here’s the story behind it…
Archive for the 'rant' Category
The thought that ISPs may start charging users based on the bandwidth they consume each month really pisses me off. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T are rolling out trials of systems that would allow web users a certain amount of data that they could consume each month. If users exceed it, they pay more. The caps vary. It’s certainly going to cause people (including me) to think twice about what I download, and will crimp efforts to distribute video and music online. Apple TV, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube — they and others like them are all in serious jeopardy of having their traffic cut substantially. And what about rich media ads that will count against your bandwidth cap? Those will be really welcomed when metering begins. Just when the web was getting competitive with TV and terrestrial radio. Grrrrr….
Freaky coincidence. Last week I was talking with Linda about the increasing cost of gas and the eventual toll hike on the Golden Gate Bridge, and how it might prompt me to think about trying to work one day per week from home to offset the cost. Then, today, this article comes out about employees who are requesting exactly that. What’s more, some progressive companies are proactively offering this option to employees. It’s sounding more and more attractive.
On a related note, I bet within two years a scandal will emerge involving the price of oil futures, and we’ll find out that the people on the inside of the oil market manipulated prices, just like Enron manipulated the electricity market years back.
One of my least favorite buildings in San Francisco is the Transbay Terminal. It’s dark, dirty, old, and a virtual bum magnet that is a bit scary to walk past, especially after sunset. What’s more, the scope of this horrible landmark is huge - a couple of square blocks, at least. But at last, it’s all going bye-bye - it’s going to be torn down and a stunning new highrise and multilevel public space will be constructed. The winning design was just announced. Building the new structure will take years, but once they tear down the old one, even the construction zone will be an improvement to the neighborhood.
Our company recently moved from Lotus Notes over to Outlook 2007. While Outlook is better than Notes 5 (my God, Notes 5 came out in 1999, what took the company so long?), there are a number of things that stink about Outlook 2007. First and foremost is that it hangs when checking mail on the Exchange Server. I use a dual-core Lenovo T60 — a fast machine. But when Outlook polls the server, it hangs my computer for anywhere from seconds to minutes. I’m looking into what could be causing this lag, but according to Computerworld, I’m not the only one frustrated by Outlook’s performance. I uninstalled Xobni (which, despite my initial enthusiasm, turned out to be not much more than Outlook eye candy), but the problems persist. I don’t have Instant Search enabled in Outlook, so the hanging isn’t being caused by Outlook indexing my email. It’s just slow to check and syncronize with the server. Interestingly the lightweight Outlook web client I use (under Firefox) is snappy. But I shouldn’t be forced to use a web client from my desk at work. I long for Thunderbird, or even Microsoft without Exchange - that worked fine.
On a sidenote, I recently discovered how to fix something that has been bugging me for about a month in Outlook 2007: the prompt at the top of my inbox that asks me to install Instant Search. It got so irritating that I finally gave in and installed it, only to uninstall it about a day later. (Google Desktop search is so much better.) But then Outlook continued to prompt me to install Instant Search again.
Here’s how to remove that annoying prompt.
In Outlook 2007, go to Tools>Options, and click on the “Other” tab. Under “General”, click on the “Advanced Options” button. On the subsequent pop-up window, about halfway down, there’s a checkbox that says “Show prompts to enable instant search”. Uncheck it.
Whew, doesn’t that feel better?
I salute the CA Supreme Court for overturning the ban on gay marriage. Frankly, I really don’t see why some people are so opposed to the idea.
The argument that I keep hearing against allowing gay marriage is that permitting gays to marry a) tramples on the sanctity of marriage, and b) goes against the tradition of marriage. On the first point, I think marriage is only as sacred as the married couple makes it. Remember years ago when Britney Spears got loaded in Vegas and married an old friend of hers, only to annul it a day later? Where was the uproar against the sanctity of marriage back then? Where’s the sanctity in a drive-thru chapels? Etc, etc.
On the second point, let’s not kid ourselves and pretend the institution has not evolved over thousands of years. If marriage had never evolved with the times, here’s what we would still be stuck with:
- Wives would be the legal property of husbands.
- Dowries would be required by the bride’s family.
- If a woman’s father died without male heirs, that woman could be forced to marry her nearest male relative—even if she that meant divorcing her current husband. (That chestnut was around in Ancient Greece.)
- Polygamy would be no big deal.
So let’s be thankful that our concept of, and traditions around, marriage have evolved with our society. I’m sure people in ancient Greece similarly freaked out when women couldn’t be forced to marry a male relative. So let’s all take a deep breath and try to get some perspective.
I commute from Marin to San Francisco every weekday. It’s a nice commute. Pretty bridge. Nice view.
BUT IT’S GETTING TOO F-ING EXPENSIVE.
Between jacked up gas bills, tolls, the car insurance premium I paid two days ago, the costs of driving a car are making me seriously reconsider my anti-telecommuting stance. Maybe it’s time to try it one day a week.
It’s so good to see people talking truth to power about the gas tax holiday. Jesus, did McCain or Clinton ever take a introduction to economics class? This idea is just ludicrous, and hundreds of economists agree. But of course Hilary doesn’t listen to economists, she says.
The murder of a Cal student a few days ago made me sad and angry at how bad things are getting in the East Bay. Crime is getting horrible in Oakland, and it quickly spills over to the areas around the Cal campus. Beyond the senseless violence and its impact on the victims, it makes me sad at how it affects the students at Cal. These people are there to get an education at one of the best universities in the world (yes, I’m biased), but I know firsthand that going to school at Cal is sometimes like living in a war zone. Guys from Oakland often come into Berkeley to steal, fight, and occasionally kill. Here’s my victim’s resume of my time at Cal:
- Bike stolen from my living room. (1988)
- Jumped by a gang while walking home from a bar in Oakland. Beaten up and robbed. (1989)
- Attacked by gang on New Years Eve in my own house. (1989)
- Room broken into, over $1000 worth of stuff stolen (1990).
And then there was the Henry’s shooting in 1990, where about a half a dozen of my friends were held hostage by an insane gunman for seven hours. (I was supposed to meet them at the bar that night, but I fell asleep in my room and didn’t make it.)
It pisses me off that such a great school is located in such a crime-ridden area. What’s the solution? Who knows.
I was working over at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, and one of the guys I work with at Techweb, Fritz Nelson, came into the show office with an awesome balloon logo for the event. He said that the guy who does balloon animals for kids over at the Chevy’s restaurant on 3rd & Howard was bugging him to make an animal (not sure why, he was with a group of adults), and after initially blowing him off, Fritz thought better of it and commissioned the guy to make this:
Pretty cool. Fritz said he’s going to use it somehow in his video coverage of Web 2.0 Expo on Techweb.com.
