Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Tag: Rant

  • Super Wal-Mart

    So there’s supposed to be a new Wal-Mart Supercenter coming to Bend. The Bend.com story is here. It’ll be located at the northwest corner of the intersection of Highway 97 and Cooley Road, and is supposed to be a gargantuan 200,000 square feet in size.

    I can’t say I’m thrilled. Why?

    • Bend and Central Oregon already has more than enough box stores, including two Wal-Marts.
    • Likewise, Bend already has plenty of grocery stores (for those who didn’t know, Wal-Mart Supercenters include groceries). Buying groceries from Wal-Mart seems way too sketchy to me.
    • It will make a bad traffic situation at the north end of town 1000 times worse.
    • It will always be crowded, making it too inconvenient for quick stops. Combined with traffic, this will make it far more trouble than it’s worth.
    • It will be ugly. Remember the hooplah that surrounded the building of the driving range at the north end of town?
    • That north end of 97 is already a stripmall, boxstore eyesore. I don’t even like going there (well, except for Food 4 Less, but even that’s not totally convenient).
    • It will drive smaller local companies out of business. This will happen.
    • While it will supposedly create 400 new jobs (according to what I heard on Z21 news), these will be barely minimum wage jobs (according to the Bend.com article). That can’t be good for people who need living wage jobs (especially in this area) or the local economy.

    Now, I used to go to the Wal-Mart at the south end of town. It did the job, but I don’t get down there anymore. It served its purpose. But I really see no reason for a Supercenter to be built. None at all.

  • Crappy tech service

    Don’t bother buying a Brother printer. I helped to set up a new one today and, get this, it didn’t come with any type of interface cable. No USB, no parallel cable, nothing. It even says so on the quickstart instructions. WTF? Is that stupid or what?

    Speaking of stupid, or perhaps just stubborn, AOL apparently doesn’t get the hint that we don’t need their service, and has called us several times. Of course, I brought this on myself—when we went to San Diego, I installed AOL (the free trial) on the laptop just in case we needed to get online and didn’t have any other means of doing so. (Never needed it; we got a strong WiFi signal at my brother’s place.) AOL is sure trying to master the hard sell. When I cancelled, the guy tried to resell me on AOL something like three times, even after I had explained that I didn’t need it and already have broadband access. Must be following the “three NOs before you go” rule. They sure aren’t gaining any favor at our house.

  • PHP code rant

    This is a mini-rant on PHP that can be safely avoided by non geek types.

    This post over on PHP Everywhere caught my attention, vis-a-vis programming semantics and practice. Basically, inside a switch statement, someone placed the default block before the case blocks and was surprised when that default condition executed, and the “expected” case did not.

    Some are calling this a bug; I do not. This is the exact behavior I expect switch and default to display, and I always place any default blocks last in the statement, because that makes the most sense semantically and logically. I expect this because that’s how I learned it when learning C years ago; it’s the way the switch construct works and why it’s so fast.

    Relevant snippage from the PHP manual:

    The switch statement executes line by line (actually, statement by statement). In the beginning, no code is executed. Only when a case statement is found with a value that matches the value of the switch expression does PHP begin to execute the statements. PHP continues to execute the statements until the end of the switch block, or the first time it sees a break statement. If you don’t write a break statement at the end of a case’s statement list, PHP will go on executing the statements of the following case….

    A special case is the default case. This case matches anything that wasn’t matched by the other cases, and should be the last case statement.

    Seems pretty clear to me. I would expect PHP to immediately execute the default block as soon as it encounters it, even if this “cuts off” remaining case blocks below it. So quit complaining and write cleaner code.

    Okay, done ranting.

  • Sheriff Money

    Isn’t it interesting that after the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office pushed so hard to get a levy passed for more money, with all the hand-wringing and guilt trips about people losing jobs and criminals being let out of jail, now all of a sudden they have extra cash?

    Aware of the likely criticism, Stiles insisted the rosier situation wasn’t clear before May’s vote to approve a 3-year levy, and that the funds come from non-levy sources.

    Stiles and Jim Ross, the department’s business manager, explained that the agency’s 2003-04 ending fund balance, which they had conservatively estimated at $200,000, has turned out to be $874,000 instead.

    And not small change, either. No, to the tune of two-thirds of a million dollars. And it might even be more:

    And some said Stiles still may be under-shooting the amount of revenues he’ll have for the new budget year. “It’s going to get to $1.2 million,” said Commissioner Tom DeWolf; Maier said at least $1 million beginning balance is likely.

    The best part? They insist it’s not levy money, and there will still be jail releases. Hello? Shouldn’t keeping criminals in jail be a priority here? Or is it just me?

  • Poor choice in words

    On the radio today I heard a commercial for the Obsidian Opera, with possibly the dumbest choice of words for promoting opera that I’ve ever heard. They said, “opera is like going to a topless bar for your eyes and ears.” Aside from the crude juxtapositioning of opera and topless bars, wouldn’t something that’s like a topless bar for your eyes and ears be… a topless bar?

  • Weak 24

    Maybe it’s just me, but I think this season of “24” is really weak, especially after last season. I thought this at the beginning of the season, and after Sunday night’s episode (and tonight’s follow-up), this weakness was just reiterated for me in spades.

    It just really smacks of bad writing, bad plotting. Jack Bauer had to kill his boss? WTF? Sloppy, poorly thought out, poorly executed (no pun intended). If it’s simply for shock value, as my wife suggested, then I think it’s really bad writing.

    But then again, it’s hard to follow up last season: they offered up Ass-Kicking Jack, Sacrifice-Himself-to-Save-the-World Jack, and Return-from-the-Dead Jack. This season? Junkie Jack, Desperately-Undercover Jack, and Cold-Blooded-Murder Jack.

    It’s almost as lame as me writing about how lame it is.

  • On Politics

    I make it a point to not really write about politics here, for several reasons. First, it’s a hot topic for too many people. Second, I frankly don’t feel qualified one way or another to sound off; I have opinions, sure, but before I voice those opinions, I better be able to back them up intelligently—and there’s a fair amount of political knowledge that I’m ignorant or just plain wrong about, I bet. Third, it’s been my observation that once you start voicing a political opinion in a public venue like a website, the vast majority of people who respond either are of the same opinion as you (which ultimately degenerates into a mutual admiration society that closes off from the rest of the world) or are fervently opposed to your point of view (which ultimately degenerates into a vicious group of trolls who have nothing better to do than denigrate you because you think differently from them); there’s very little real diversity or intelligent conversation. Finally, politics just doesn’t interest me enough to write about.

    Having said that, I’ll write a bit about politics, inspired by having President Bush on television tonight (annoyingly pre-empting regular TV).

    I’ll just be blunt. I am so sick and tired of the spin and political bullshit that surrounds politics these days. All of it. Whether it’s Bush and all the shit going on over 9/11 and Iraq and everything, or Clinton and his “That depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is” hijinks, I don’t care. I do not care.

    What I want is a President who can step up to a news conference like Bush did tonight, and instead of spinning out lies and evasiveness and bullshit, just look into the cameras and say, “Yeah, we fucked up. I fucked up. I was wrong, and it cost us, and now it’s time to fix things.” Is that really too much to ask? Whatever happened to responsibility, accountability, and humility, anyway?

    Hell with it. Rant over.

  • Some nights I just hate computers…

    God damn the computers are pissing me off tonight. All evening our broadband cable connection has just been running slower than molasses, so it takes forever to accomplish anything online. And then I’m trying to get my wife’s computer fixed up, it’s been running really slow lately and locking up a lot. So I rolled back the Windows ME that was installed on it (have I mentioned before how I hate Windows ME??) to Windows 98, which by and large worked well enough, but now can’t get the blasted TCP/IP to work properly.

    It tells me it’s assigned to some 169.* address, and the DHCP server is “255.255.255.255” (yeah, sure), instead of being sensible and using the perfectly acceptable DHCP server and IP address assignment that has worked with every other computer we’ve had in this house. And the worst part is, I’m sure I’ve encountered this same problem at work, and solved it, but I can’t remember what the solution was. I’ve already tried uninstalling and re-installing TCP/IP, so I don’t know. Maybe it’s just time for the straight low-level format route. Son of a bitch.

  • WTF is up with Amazon?

    Just WTF is up with Amazon.com this evening? I’m trying to place an order and I keep getting a “We’re Sorry!” message every other page load:

    An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we’re working to resolve the problem as soon as possible. If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed. We apologize for the inconvenience.

    It’s totally unusable and just completely pissing me off.

    Heh. You can tell I have a lot of patience for this sort of thing, eh?

  • Spam Pounder

    So the spam problem finally got to be a little overwhelming on our BendCable email account, and we opted in to use BendCable’s anti-spam software/service, Spam Pounder. But here’s the catch: you don’t actually get this anti-spam service on your regular bendcable.com email, no—instead they change your email to a bendbroadband.com address because that’s where they have the actual anti-spam software running. (In order to preserve your bendcable.com address—which you may have had for years, as we have, and don’t want it gone—they set up a forward that shunts everything from your bendcable.com address to the bendbroadband.com one.)

    I mean, what the hell is that? Sure changing your email address is a solution for spam, but that’s not the point. I don’t have a lot of confidence in an ISP that can’t even set up spam filtering software on their main mail server, fer chrissakes.

    And what the hell is with that name (“Spam Pounder”) and logo?? The images I’m associating with it are not good ones…

    Now, having said all that, I will concede that so far it’s doing the job: almost all of the spam is now being caught, I’d give it a 98-99% effectiveness rating so far. The technology seems to work.

    But why can’t BendCable integrate this into their main email server like everyone else?