Tag: Snark

The Agenda

You can smell it in the air. You can hear it rumbling in the distance. You can see the dust cloud on the horizon…

So the commentary in this post seems to have struck a chord, or maybe a nerve, with the St. Johnny’s crew—especially the righteous Anthony Whorebath. A man who would not normally deign to address little old me, but who has decided to make an exception. A man who is so busy traveling as to not have net access enough to drop comment spam on this wayward [and heretofore little noticed] blog but yet clears enough time and magically finds an internet connection during his travels long enough to engage in a limp effort at a punch up.

It would appear that Righteous Tony is playing the Swift Boat card. By his reckoning there is no way I received a comment on this blog linking to his site from the same IP subnet that serves his site because he was “out of town” and “away from internet access during the time in question.” Never mind that I made no mention of when the comment was actually sent… But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, shall we?

His rant doesn’t stop there, though, because the Good Lord provides in mysterious ways. Never mind how spurious our crossed paths might be, little ol’ sinner me has presented Mr. Whorebath with an opening to attack his perceived enemies. In his world I am in league with Richard Carrier who was subject to a “blistering take down” at the hands of Big Tony over some internecine Battle Royale or other. In fact, Mr. Carrier is so demoralized by the extreme Logical Suplex thrown by Mr. Whorebath that he has now resorted to Gogglebombing.

Memo to Anthony Horvath:

Sometimes getting called out for comment spam is just getting out for comment spam. Spammers all make mistakes at some point. We accept your apology. Now lets just move on.

I would like to say, OTOH, that your quick thinking and opportunistic use of some random inbound linkage to further promote your swindle shows promise. You may just be able to keep a step ahead of your flock as you lead them to slaughter. Good luck, sir.

Seriously?

In the O RLY department we have this job posting on Craigslist.

Among the responsibilities are developing systems that will meet the company’s needs and participate in business meetings to identify and understand the company’s goals and objectives in order to develop a system that will meet the company’s current and future business needs.

So, you’re saying, I can’t sit around all day and code on my mega-ultra-awesome Tetris implementation but I have to develop to satisfy the company’s needs? Whoa…my head is asploded.

Watusi Redux

So I offered to help my pops throw together a poster that he is presenting at a conference in October. It’s his master’s thesis work and he’s noticeably nervous about the whole ordeal. I’ve put together an assfull of posters both for myself and for others at the previous jobby job so it’s not a huge deal. Bold yet neutral colors. Delineate segments without walling section off. No font smaller than 18pt (preferrably 24pt). Yadda yadda yadda.

And while I’m not a graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination, I have always had a curiosity about typography and read about it in my spare time. So no skin off my back. After a few iterations, I’ve got something I’m okay with and the pops is pleased it would seem. Hopefully it’ll give the guy some added confidence.

But my bone to pick is as follows—and there is always a bone to pick, no? No bones makes for a saggy blog. Anyway, so he works for an unmentioned federal agency that deals with cereal grains and the like. This is fine and good. But WTF is up with their technical requirements? Seriously. I had no idea—and again, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while, albeit in a one-off manner—that PowerPoint is the preferred poster file format. Seriously. Not Illustrator / Photoshop / whatever-the-heck Gimp uses / SVG / LaTeXT or even PDF. No. They require their posters be done in ppt.

They’re friggin’ scientists! They ought to know better. The file format isn’t designed for this kind of use. It generates big (not massive at least) files and is prone to corruption, freezes, crashing, raping your daughter. My work rendered as PPT == 14.7 MB. The same rendered in PDF == just over 900Kb.

Unbelievable. Which, when you get down to it, totally is believable. I hear about graduate students writing their thesis in Word. I’ve seen relational databases erected in Excel. I’ve seen web pages served as JPG or PDF. There is one project that I was forced into linking to the web site at work that was a set of HTML pages done as PPT. They were so excited because they could click text in one slide and it would flip to some other arbitrary slide in their presentation. Seriously.

I know, technology prima donna and all that. Yes. I am guilty. But, and I really hate to type this out…

what.the.fuck?

I don’t pull the boat with my Prius. I don’t use a spark plug as a standard blade screwdriver. I don’t mow the yard with a weed whacker. And I don’t mess around with Jim. There are tasks and there are tools that might get the task done as well as tools that are designed to complete that task. Use the designed tools and you will be a happier person.

That, and I won’t have to type this rant again.

Rerelevant?

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, makes a stab a relevance. Then takes a poke at some yet unmeasured portion of his readership. I thought Dilbert got old pretty quick and even voted against hiring someone in part because this person kept reciting Dilbert comic strips as evidence of his good humor during a job interview. Yet, suddenly, I am not so great a Scott Adams hater as I once was.

The Dilbert strip can still blow a pony though. Just isn’t funny any more. Not even sure it ever was.