Did this place always suck this bad, or have my expectations risen over the years. I’ve had like three steaks there over the last couple of years, and all of them were on par with Waffle House’s offerings when you order steak and eggs. It’s insane that people consider Red Lobster to be a nice restaraunt. It’s like one level above Longjohn Silvers.

I know now why Georgia has such horribly uneducated grade school students. My friend teaches at a school in south Georgia and happened to walk by a classroom where a teacher was teaching some young, impressionable first graders about the universe.

Outside the classroom was a poster where a bunch of the children had written a collection of facts that they’d learned, and there were a few main points that the teacher put there herself.

Of those were two important facts that many aren’t aware of:

1. The sun is the center of the universe.
2. The sun is the hottest star in the universe.

The teacher wrote these things down. She thinks our sun is the center of the universe, and she’s teaching human children about science in the United States of America in the year 2007.

WTF.

[ More to follow: My friend is going to write an essay on other things he's seen, and he's going to name the school so we can voice our concern. I'm going to link to it here. ]

I grow tired of dealing with 50 Cent-wannabe employees in business establishments that are attempting to portray an upscale image. When I go into a Starbucks, for example, there is a culture there that I enjoy. The ambiance is based around intellectualism, civility, and an overall concept of bettering oneself through education, business, and conversation.

As such, I don’t want to talk to someone behind the counter who has their hat to the side, pants too low, refuses to smile, and speaks in mumbled single-syllables because that’s how “ganstas” talk. These people convey one message with every action:

I don’t like this place, I don’t like this job, and I don’t like you. I tolerate you because I need money in order to pretend to be something I’m not. I’m not playing your stupid “act nice” game. I don’t jump through hoops for nobody. I’m a (gangster|player) and I’m proud of it.

Well, from now on my answer to that is going to be to ask for the manager and see if I can get the person disciplined. If I get an adverse reaction from the manager, I’ll call corporate and let them know that they’ve got a branch that’s not supporting their image.

Culture, Not Race

And before someone goes off on some race tangent, let me assure you — this is about behavior, not skin color. A good example of “Starbucks culture”, in my view, would be a recent experience I had. I came up and ordered a ” ‘medium’ …er….grande mocha.” The guy behind the counter (Mexican, according to a conversation I heard him having earlier) jumped on the opportunity in a typical geek fashion.

Him: Ah, yeah…we don’t have “mediums” here… (beaming a large playful smile) Me: Oh, damn…I’m probably going to get put on some kind of list now… Him: Actually, you’re already on the list; I’m just going to move your name closer to the top now…

This is the type of banter you expect from a place that caters to students and business people. And I don’t expect that from everyone, of course, but that same branch has multiple people there (of many races) that consistently smile and laugh and generally have a good time. Race is a non-issue.

This is what I expect — no, demand from a business trying to impart a positive experience onto me. I don’t want to see Eminem or R’Kelly trying to be players or gangsters while in a customer service role. It’s incongruent. It’s the same reason I wouldn’t buy rap albums from Erkel.

Bottom line: If you don’t subscribe to the culture of the place you’re working, and it’s a place that requires a public-facing role –don’t work there. And I ask you to join me in calling these people out when you see them instead of just getting pissed about it.:

I just recently posted two messages to a message list I lurk in. I don’t do this often, and now I remember why. Within a few minutes I’ve received probably 25 messages from various happless individuals who have fcuking auto-responders placed on the email address they use for mailing lists.

Then there’s the whole list of people who’s addresses are invalid for whatever reason. God I hate this medium. It’s time for it to phase out. I love the interaction, but for the love of God let’s modernize the implementation.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to implement something better all day, but I already have a project going on (and another in the queue), so I don’t see any interesting thought progress made in that direction any time soon.

Oh well…

daniel@kairin .ssh $ ssh pix@192.168.1.x Warning: use of DES is strongly discouraged due to cryptographic weaknesses pix@192.168.1.x’s password:

The only thing I’ve ever touched that uses an SSH version from the 1940’s, and it’s a Cisco PIX. Fitting.

OpenSSH doesn’t even support it by default; I had to create an ~/.ssh/config file and explicitly tell it to use DES. My local SSH install did everything but spit on me to keep me from doing so.

If you’re into driving or gadgets you may have heard about the Escort X50 radar detector. Well I got one like a year ago and it worked great…up until it didn’t anymore.

It’s saved me from numerous tickets during my time with it, but a few weeks ago it started acting kooky — telling me it was “calibrating”, and then demanding to be serviced. Of course, you don’t service radar detectors — you replace them.

So, like a dumbass, I ignored it. And last weekend I drove through some cop’s speed trap. He was right in the middle of the road no doubt spraying radar down the road for miles. My trusty detection device remained silent, however, and I got what’s commonly referred to as a “citation”.

Bastards.

So I’ve rectified that situation with the new BEL STI Driver. Turns out the Escorts are renowned for being excellent detectors with serious stability problems. I wish I had known this. When it comes to both radar detection and IDS, nothing’s worse than a false negative. Oh well, lesson learned — stick with BEL, they’re solid.

If you’re into cars, driving fast, or just technology in general you’ve likely heard of the Valentine 1 radar detector. It’s widely accepted to be the premier radar detector on the market, and few people question this status.

I got to thinking about what makes it so great, though, and my conclusion was startling. Evidently, the entire reason the Valentine is supposed to be so good is because it can show you whether a cop is in front of you or behind you. The entire idea is to have the ability to respond differently based on where the radar is coming from. What?

Who in their right mind is going to respond differently based on the direction radar is coming from?

Seriously, what are the options here? You’re going down a road listening to some music and all of a sudden you get hit with radar from the front. What do you do? Yeah, slow down.

Ok, so now you’re on the same road and you get hit with radar from the rear. Now what? Is this the Dukes of Hazzard? Cannonball Run? You’re still going to slow down unless you participate in an alternate reality.

I fail to see how showing you the direction of the radar helps anything for someone not wanting to get tickets in the real world. The prospect of accelerating if you know a cop is behind you is just asinine in the extreme.

So sell me on better detection. Sell me on less false positives. But don’t put a big ugly arrow on the front and tell me that knowing where the radar is coming from matters. It doesn’t. If I’m speeding and I get hit by radar — I’m slowing down.

WTF.

Not only does this seem horrible for the user experience (goodbye proper CSS, etc), but they actually named security as one of the reasons for this choice. Security? So let me get this straight — you go around the country touting the security of IE7, but you’re not going to use it render web content in your mail client because you don’t trust it?

I’m emotional right now.

…or at least it seems that way. You can’t really walk anywhere in this city (this is outdoors, you understand) without walking through a cloud of ciggarette smoke. It’s really quite disgusting. It’s like the thing to do up here. It seems nearly every other person is lighting up, already smoking, or just getting done at any given moment.

The moment I step outside the apartment the smell hits me because someone just walked by smoking, or is smoking a few feet away. And this pretty much continues unless I’m inside somewhere (away from the door). Oh, and in front of our place of business you pretty much have to hold your breath as you approach. There are always like 10 people directly in front of the doors polluting the air at any given time.

It’s very annoying to be constantly accosted like this, and I honestly can’t wait until laws get passed that say you can’t do this in public anymore. I mean, here I am on public property being forced to breath known carcinogenic material. Constantly. Day in, day out. It stinks, it’s known to kill on a regular basis — it’s just not positive in any way. I really don’t understand why it’s permissible to expose others to this poison, and I look forward to when it no longer is.

For some reason I’m giving Internet Explorer another chance and making an effort to use IE7. They’re claiming “we heard you” as a tagline for the product, but I don’t think they did.

I just tried going to a couple of wallpaper sites as a test of the next generation of Microsoft’s browser. Guess what I was greeted with? A Windows dialogue box telling me that it’s “preparing to install”. Excellent. Any chance we can discuss what exactly you’re installing?

Then, of course, I’m taken to like 4 sites via popups that are doing god knows what to this VMWare session. I finally got tired of dealing with it and opened the URL in Firefox. Guess what? No popups, no software installations — just wallpaper. Interesting concept.

It appears that, just as with Vista, the IE project has had a lifetime to get where it needs to be but has utterly failed to do so. Why is this? I refuse to believe the programmers are inept; I’ve heard too much to the contrary. So the question remains: what’s making Microsoft so impotent? Why does IE continue to suck so horribly? Let’s see:

1. The interface is crap. It’s not consistent, it’s not intuitive, and it even looks lame.
2. Rumor is that they’ll continue to not support web standards.
3. I’m using a relatively late beta and still can’t safely navigate a goddam wallpaper site due to on-the-fly software installs. They could get away with this being “a feature” in 2000, but today it’s just inexcusable.

Seriously, why can’t these people get their act together? Is it management? No leadership? Resting on laurels? I’m really curious. It’s just a sad joke at this point.