Things That Are Fundamentally Wrong

WARNING: This page is full of rage. I vent it here so I don't end up killing people or having four-digit blood pressure or something. If at least one of these things gets banned or one of these people or organizations gets their comeuppance, partially as a result of this list, then I've made a positive contribution to this world.

You will see obvious things here. This page isn't just for original thoughts. Indeed, I'm not famous for original thought. That's okay, because this page's target audience also includes people for whom the stuff is not obvious. It also includes the people and organizations named on this page.

These are not opinions; they are objective statements of fact. I am the final arbitrer on these matters. If you are any of the following people, or support any of the following things, seek psychiatric help and find something useful, good, and meaningful to do. There is hope.

2008-08-25

  • Deal or No Deal.

2008-08-13

2008-08-12

  • Church bells that aren't really bells at all, but are speakers or something.
  • Microsoft SharePoint. A giant enterprisey software package that provides poor implementations of wikis, bulletin boards, etc. Those things are better served by individual software packages that are more robust and provide more features. Authors of those individual software packages are more in tune with the needs of people who need those things. Vendors of packages like SharePoint think in terms of "business requirements", "focus groups", "checklists of features", etc. so they are more in tune with the things that enterprise customers say they need, which are typically out of sync with what they actually need. SharePoint is yet another instance of Microsoft providing to us by counterexample that the Unix philosophy ("do one thing and do it well") is the correct approach to building software.

2008-08-09

  • MediaSentry and MediaDefender. Filled with unethical black hats from top to bottom.
  • Idiots who see the words "EXIT ONLY" on an exit door from an establishment, yet continue to try to enter the building using that door. Also, if you are inside such an establishment, and decide to let aforementioned people in, you are a tool.
  • Censorware that categorizes sites like TinyURL as "hacking tool" or "proxy".
  • The War On Drugs. Read Reefer Madness and Drug Crazy if you do not yet realize that the war is a complete failure on all counts. You'll see a longer rant on this topic here eventually. But don't take it from me.

2008-08-04

  • The word webinar.
  • Asset forfeiture.
  • "Police" departments that recover stolen property and put it on auction instead of returning it to its rightful owner.

2008-07-30

  • go daddy dot com, for suspending the domain seclists.org at the request of MySpace instead of simply asking the site's owner to remove a list of usernames and passwords from the site. The list was automatically added to the site because someone posted it to a mailing list that the site auto-archives. Go Daddy: you could have simply asked the site's maintainer to remove the posting from the online archives, but chose to overreact. For that, you deserve to go out of business.
  • Patrick Pogan, the rookie NYPD officer who intentionally body-slammed a random bicyclist at a Critical Mass ride. Mr. Pogan also lied in his report, claiming that the bicyclist was aiming for him. The video is prima facie evidence to the contrary.

2008-07-19

2008-06-25

  • Experts hyphen exchange dot com.
  • The fact that milk starts to stink before it turns sour.
  • Web forms that don't accept email addresses containing a plus sign. The programmers responsible for this usually fall under two categories:
    1. They are actually unsavvy enough to not realize that people use them.
    2. They know that people use them but don't care.
  • Words other than "sandwich" that end with "wich". This includes "fishwich", "unwinch", "slimwich", etc. These are made-up marketroid words that are awkward to pronounce and serve no purpose other than to make the people who say them sound like tools. At least one restaurant chain also uses "wrapini". Can't you people come up with better portmanteaus?

  • People who pronounce the word "harass" as "HAIR-ess" (rhymes with "heiress"), or in any other way that doesn't sound like "her-ASS". The fact that "her ass" and "harass" are pronounced exactly the same is entirely coincendental, and if you have a problem with this, you are uptight and need help.

    Actually, this one is particularly insidious because there are a lot of people who do this. It's gotten so bad that I'm scared I'll do this if I hear enough other people do it. So if you catch me doing this, feel free to interrupt the conversation and say, "Excuse me, Darren, it's her-ASS, you dumbass." Feel free to follow that up with a comment about your lack of realization that I had sand in my vagina, or something. Thanks.

Older

  • Neoconservatives
  • Microsoft's business practices
  • Microsoft's philosophy about everything
  • Microsoft Windows
  • Microsoft OOXML
  • Microsoft Windows Mobile
  • Microsoft Visual anything
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer
  • Microsoft CRM
  • All Microsoft products not mentioned (fonts excluded)
  • See a pattern here?
  • Tailgating (as in following someone too closely)
  • Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease
  • Getting a rack with five Is in Scrabble
  • PHP
  • Changing lanes without signaling
  • The Religious Right
  • Milquetoast Democrats
  • Not waking up because you accidentally set your alarm for 7:30 p.m. instead of a.m.
  • The smell of malt vinegar
  • Digital Rights Restrictions Management
  • Diabetes
  • Bloatware
  • Clear Channel Communications
  • Devices that take SD cards, but only up to 2GB
  • Wearing shorts and tucking your shirt in (golf players excepted, whlie playing golf)
  • Bad analogies
  • Rain (except while I'm sleeping)
  • Snow
  • Tornadoes
  • Temperatures deviating from 72°F
  • Java. The language itself is good for a language that isn't great, but everything else associated with it is bloatware.
  • How most people can't handwrite an ampersand
  • Shared hosting
  • Fluorescent lightbulbs that flicker
  • Color-blindness
  • Insensitivity to color-blindness
  • The television show Club TV USA
  • Day-quil. That stuff makes me vomit, you see.
  • Wendy's "Honey Sauce". Are they too cheap to just use honey?
  • Products labeled "Made With Real Fruit Juice" that only contain 2% fruit juice
  • Lung cancer
  • Ticketmaster
  • The Hummer H2
  • The Hummer H3
  • The Cadillac Escalade
  • The Chrysler PT Cruiser
  • The Pontiac Aztek
  • The Buick Rendezvous
  • Southeast Christian Church
  • Littering
  • Talk radio callers
  • IT recruiters
  • Radio and most TV commercials
  • Mobile home parks within 10 miles of the city
  • Outsourcing computer programming to cheaper labor
  • Constantly referencing Monty Python and the Holy Grail or that skit about Spam.
  • The Recording Industry Association of America
  • How Louisville's #18 bus used to be always late
  • The Creation Museum
  • Sports talk radio (except for Jim Rome)
  • When a half-gallon of milk costs $1.39 and a gallon costs more than $2.78
  • Dane Cook, and the people who think he's funny
  • Caffeine withdrawal headaches
  • Indiana's "In God We Trust" license plates
  • Links on web pages that don't have underlines and/or are too close to the same color as the text
  • IDEs
  • Text editors that are not emacs, vi, ed, or teco
  • Top-posting in emails and online discussions
  • Abstinence-only sex education
  • Web-based control panels
  • Elevators that don't ride smootly
  • When people put those removable letters on signs and mount the S upside-down
  • Slogans. Like. This.
  • Rubber dome keyboards
  • Products whose names contain "OS" but are not operating systems. Examples: WebSiteOS (one of the crappiest web-based control panels ever), HTML/OS (a crappy programming language)
  • Sam Brownback
  • Splinters
  • Hypoglycemia
  • Homophobes
  • Bans on gay marriage.
  • IHTML
  • Kenny G
  • Compacta
  • John Duncan
  • ColdFusion
  • Fox News Channel
  • The fact that Cherokee Unit No. 5 is no longer a municipality in Jefferson County, Kentucky. It was the best sixth-class city name, ever, you see.
  • Gambling that does not involve games of skill
  • People who find it perfectly acceptable to legislate against gambling that does not involve games of skill
  • The lyrics to "On The Roof Again" by Eve 6
  • People who hate Arial
  • Powdered non-dairy creamer, a/k/a beverage whitener
  • Panhandlers
  • The suburbs
  • Most uses of XML, including but not limited to the following:
    • Web Services
  • 8664
  • That "Five Dollar Foot Long" song from the Subway commercials. That song needs to get out my head.
  • People who think that Terry Meiners is funny.
  • 1024x768 web design
  • Ben Stein.
  • Florida.
  • "Fn Lock" on computer keyboards.
  • That overly perky female voice you hear on the grocery store intercom pimping products you don't need.
  • Simon Leis
  • Coinstar machines that don't have the "gift card with free coin counting" option.
  • Telemarketers
  • Smartphones that have non-QWERTY keyboards.
  • A two-fer:
    • Bluetooth Earpieces. It's not the 24th century, and you're not Buck Rogers.
    • People who walk around with their cellphones in speakerphones mode.
  • The use of the word “viral” to describe videos posted on the Internet.
  • Monster Cable Products, Inc.
  • MP3 players that don't mount as standard "USB storage" hard drives.
  • People who still use MapQuest. It's not 1997 anymore.
  • People who always order sweet and sour chicken at Chinese restaurants.
  • Shrinkwrapping on CDs
  • Those stickers along the top of CDs
  • Those paper towel dispensers at the restrooms that require you to press one button then press the other button twice and then only dispense one towel.
  • Subject-line-only emails
  • Web sites that show all their content to Google to get indexed, but require exhorbitant fees for people to view it.
  • Scribd dot com
  • The "Chrysler $2.99 Gas Price Guarantee" scam.