Swans on Tea

I’ve been putting up with the new Dilbert website abomination for however long, a couple of months at least, and the fact that Scott Adams is a fellow Hartwick alum doesn’t mean I’m going to cut him any slack — the website breaks the first commandment of web design.
1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
Adobe’s (ADBE) [...]

mustventmustventmustventmustventmustventmustvent
There seem to be a lot of bureaucratic jobs out there. People shuffling papers around and about, sending them to and fro, ostensibly with a goal in mind of accomplishing some task. Sometimes that task is helping someone else get something done. Somehow, though, there are cases in which the metric by [...]

I went out geocaching in the wonderful weather today. First stop was to check on caches I have placed, in response to a couple of emails from people who couldn’t find them. Sure enough, they had been muggled. One cache almost completely gone — only the lid and the logbook could be [...]

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Consistency in how your program interprets rules, decidedly not.

The World’s Worst Toaster
Fortunately it doesn’t belong to me. But the web experience described does — I buy stuff for the lab. I run across the “bad toaster” interfaces all the time. For the life of me, I don’t get why certain segments of the science/tech world won’t tell you how much [...]

“Smart” quotes, “dumb” quotes. Nobody has explained to me why I should care, or why one is correct and the other incorrect. I think some people are caring about this a little too much.
(At the moment, I can apparently post only if I don’t use any html markups. Blogging in the [...]

I fucking opt out already.
I buy stuff for my lab. I get email. I don’t care if your widgets are on sale — if we don’t need one, I won’t be buying any. I don’t make any “OMG, those 100 microfarad capacitors are to die for” impulse purchases for the lab. [...]

Because I’m gonna be rich.
This is a new one for me. I’ve won the lottery, been asked to assist in moving money out of Nigeria, been asked to pose as a dead person to collect an inheritance. But now there’s this:
“On behalf of the Trustees and Executor of the estate of Late Engr.Lurther [...]

Primary season is upon me, and as with the elections last fall, I am being inundated with phone calls. I will take the same strategy on Tuesday as I did in November: if I get a call from or on behalf of a candidate, I won’t vote for them. It’s an open [...]

It’s not a big deal.
By that, I meant that “quantum” does not mean “big.” (This is a peeve of mine. Not so sure it’s a pet peeve. Perhaps a feral peeve?) I ran across a blog entry about the use of quantum that wasn’t wrong as it usually is. (But [...]

Censors wagging the dog
OK, for the Nth time in recent memory, there was a movie on cable, with which they just shouldn’t have bothered. If you’re going to show Blazing Saddles but are going to blip out every instance of words like “nigger” and “faggot,” just don’t bother. It’s a satire about bigotry. [...]