My Review of this Dixie cup

Hi, I just got this Dixie cup, and I wanted to give you all my review of it.

I noticed it was quite cheap, so I decided to try it.

At first, I had a great time drinking out of it, but over time, I noticed I could not pour an entire can of beer into it. And it's kind of poorly made, really- made out of paper. It was cheap, but I am having a hard time giving it five stars. I mean, I can't even fit a can of beer in it.

Also, I later realized that it didn't come with instructions on how to mix a Long Island Iced Tea. I want to drink this drink, and I am sure I should be able to drink it with this Dixie cup. I don't see why they don't tell you how to make that drink somewhere on the box the cup came in. Jeez.

Another downside is this Dixie cup did not fare well when I ran it through the dishwasher. It fell apart, and I had to get a new one out of the box. I was hoping to stretch this box out a while, and I have already used one cup up completely. Not so good in the longevity department.

Pros: lightweight, inexpensive, holds liquid

Cons: doesn't hold much liquid, doesn't come with drink mixing instructions, cheaply made out of paper instead of glass or metal

Other: Just in case you think I am off my rocker, I am not. I have been reading product reviews, and people are fucking idiots. "I bought X, and it would be great if it did Y, but it doesn't, so, the product isn't good because of that."

Uh, if it was *supposed* to to something and then didn't, that's one thing. But if the product clearly isn't supposed to do something, and then it in fact does not do that thing, that is not a negative aspect of the product, that's you being disappointed. ALSO, the manual is not supposed to tell you how to do every possible thing with your product. That's what the internet is for: if you can think of doing it, probably someone else has thought it too, and documented it, and posted it on the internet somewhere. For crying out loud. So many reviews read like a complaint list of all the things the person had to actually learn in order to set up whatever it was that they had bought.

And yes, I am clearly complaining about people not being able to properly describe the actual functionality of a product as opposed unintentionally highlighting the thickness of their skulls. Which is to say, I am complaining about a product we already know is faulty- human beings- and highlighting my own thick-skulled disappointment in them rather than illustrate their actual usefulness. My bad.

However, when someone is trying to ascertain the actual quality of functionality of some product, the "I am an idiot who can't or won't read the manual" is a detail that largely does not have anything to do with the product's performance.

[sigh]

Ok, back to clicking.

Internet Explorer 7: Microsoft doesn't care about usability

Just a general rant:

The top menu bar of IE 6 is completely configurable. You can add or remove buttons and change the appearance and generally make it just how you'd like.

Good luck trying that with IE 7.

In typical Microsoft form, some idiot decided that you didn't need to be able to reduce the size of the menu bar area.

Here's IE 6 with the top menu customized to be very small,

http://www.clickthebunny.com/ie6menu.JPG

and here's what you get in IE 7

http://www.clickthebunny.com/ie7menu.JPG

Webstalking is fun!

Hello!

I am your frienly neighborhood webstalker.

How am I different than a creepy webstalker?

Well, a creepy webstalker is someone who has some unsavory intent, right?

A lot of people online are blissfully ignorant of the concept of at least attempting to obscure their identity.

When I first started on bulletin boards back in the mid 80's, most of the online world then was quiet and safe, and you could get access on a BBS without any contact information or anything- completely anonymously. That sentiment has rolled forward with me for many years, and while I have let my guard down a bit, it's only now in this day and age when there are literally billions of people online. I am not rich, famous, or keeping the secret to eternal life. It's likely nobody reads my blog except for a few friends, and if someone decided to webstalk me, well, I am just one of many: white, 5 foot 9, brown hair- someone stalking me would be spooky only in that it seems so unlikely.

Anyway, back to the blissfully unaware. If you put your actual name in your e-mail address... that's a bad idea, unless it is a common name, like Lisa Smith or Richard Davis or something. If your name is uncommon, you are exceedinly easy to webstalk, and as such, ought to make sure not to use your real name if you wish to ensure some level of privacy. Hint: websites like myspace and facebook do not protect your real name.

I seem to be going off on a tangent here... that's ok.

My point is: if I am webstalking you, it's because you're an old friend of mine that I want to talk to- or, in a rare case, I will webstalk someone to show them that they are being foolish with their personal information. An example of that- I bought something on craigslist a while back, and the seller replied to me from their personal address which was their uncommon last name. When I picked the item up, I mentioned to them then, in person, the 'danger' of doing that kind of thing. I told them "In many cases, a person can google all kinds of things about you just by knowing your name and roughly where you live.", not "I did google all kinds of things about you, just to see if I could."

I feel like I am providing a public service announcement for online safety.

Everyone should have a spare e-mail address for doing business which does not have any google-able content associated with it. Two bonuses to this- when it gets overrun with spam you can just delete it, and also, you do not mix up business correspondence with personal.

It may seem like a deviant thing to do- webstalking people- but I think you should assume that everyone does it, and that any information you put online is susceptible to a nosy websurfer, and post/not post it accordingly.

MyLife : wants to be myspace, but misses the point

If you have been trying to find friends online, you may have stumbled onto this site, "MyLife".

The idea with a social networking site like myspace is that it's free, and at least relatively easy to connect with your friends. Since it is free and 'easy', if you are lucky, your social networking site will succeed, and many people will find their long lost pals on your site. Hooray.

Enter the wanna-be, for-pay site.

"We want you to feel like that person you are googling is here, and after you invest time and effort into setting up your profile, we're hoping you pay for access, because after you dink around here long enough, you're going to figure out that you can't see anybody's profile without paying" is one version, and then there's the possibility that the site is exclusively a ripoff site (not sure whether this not-very-clever ruse actually exists), where the extent of the person's information you get after you pay may very well be what you already have: their name.

But this pattern violates rule one of the myspace model. Free.

Another thing- superbly annoying, high-pressure interface. "Fill in your profile!", "Add everyone from your e-mail address book!", "Pay for access!"... and the creepy icing on the cake- the site sucks your facebook profile image in automatically, and won't let you delete it.

Maybe back in the mid-nineteen ninetys people in general were unwary enough to be taken by this kind of nonsense. Let's see: site I have never heard of claims to have a shred of information about an old friend I can't dig up anywhere else online... hmm. So, I am to believe that this person, who is not surfacing in google, not in myspace, not in facebook, not in a white-pages search... this nearly not-online-at-all person chose your crummy for-pay site as their jumping-off point into the internet?

Not highly likely.

Screw you people and your sucky business model. Hope you feel really good making money off of the few old people who don't know any better- not that their money will be enough to keep you in business. Please make sure to keep your mylife credientials on your linkedin profile so I can make sure I never have to work with you.

PS: a quick google of mylife and ripoff came up with plenty of peeved people. might want to give these guys a miss.

How to access network a usb hard drive with administrative share

This explanation assumes you have windows xp, administrative rights on your computer, an NTFS file system, and a wee bit of technical ability. This ought to work with windows 2003, possibly 2000, and I have no idea about vista or windows 7- YRMV.

First let's cover the concept of "administrative share"- this is a built-in service for administrators using windows. It allows an administrator to remotely access any hard drive of a computer they are an administrator of.

If you have a networked computer named "piggy" with a c:\ drive, you can access the C:\ drive with the administrative share remotely. If you add a usb hard drive, though, you can't access the contents of the usb drive across your local network.

To use the administrative share, go to another computer on your network, open file explorer, and in the address bar, type

\\piggy\c$

...and press enter.

As long as your username and password are the same on both machines and you are an administrator on both machines, what will list in the file explorer window is the contents of the c:\ drive on piggy.

This will not work for the usb hard drive... but there is a handy workaround.

Search for "junction windows" in google. This will return the link for downloading the junction tool from the microsoft website. Get it and put it in ..\windows\system32\ , and after you do that, open a command prompt and type 'junction' then press enter. This will pop up the EULA for junction, which you will only see once.

What does junction do? It creates a connection between one drive and another (conceptually, a bit like creating a shortcut for a file), and the operating system can't tell the difference. There are plenty of uses for this, but it suits us fine in this case.

If your usb drive is the f:\ drive, make a folder on c:\ and name it something you'll remember- say, c:\MyDrive\

Now, in the command window on piggy (where you installed junction), type this and press enter-

junction c:\MyDrive f:\

Once you do this, windows will think that the folder "MyDrive" on c:\ contains the contents of the usb drive. All done!

Now you can go to \\piggy\c$ from a remote computer, look in the MyDrive folder, and you will see the contents of the F:\ drive.

This may not work with a usb drive not NTFS formatted, but you are welcome to try.

Hollywood Video: lame!

The return of the grump.

So, Hollywood video has introduced new-fangled membership plans!

And they suck.

Previously, for a monthly fee, you could check out one, two, or three videos per month with no due date. Pretty simple subscription plans.

Their new plans do not work like this, and they are not, apparently, monthly subscriptions.

If you had one of their old plans? They just dumped you off of them, because as of May 6th 2009, those old plans ceased to exist.

After going and spending 15 minutes picking out some movies yesterday, I was informed that I'd have to pay for two of them. I was not entirely convinced that the clerk knew what he was talking about, as oftentimes they do not. In this case, however, he was correct.

Thanks for several years of a decent service, Hollywood, but this latest scheme of yours isn't very good, and I'll take my money elsewhere.

Humanity as Idea Virus

There are very few cases of humans who somehow made it to adulthood completely without human contact, but the few we have highlight a very important aspect of human beings.

Examples of such are Caspar Hauser, the random 'wolf child' legend, and more recently, a poor child here in the USA whose mother severely neglected her. This poor creature, left with minimal human contact, was found severely malnourished, lying alone in a room egregiously filthy and in disrepair. She had no reaction to human input, nearly non-existent motor skills, and a look in her eye not unlike a simple farm animal. Even if we only have her as the example to draw from, the implications of failing to be raised by humans is devastating- I do not have further data that declares her perfectly normal, so, the following is conjecture, but I wouldn't suggest otherwise even if the child were certainly physiologically "normal".

We are well aware that a human infant is an extremely complex learning machine, and that there are distinct stages in human development where certain types of learning flourish.

I would run further with this line of thinking, perhaps off the map and into the darkness, and suggest that there are interactions between child and parent- involved, critical, and absolutely essential interactions and lessons- which take a human animal and, over time, mold it into a functioning member of society. Maybe you can think of these subtle things as the breath between words in a song- the paper the words of the song are written on, etc.

On an assembly line, a bare vehicle frame rolls out, and this is the beginning. It glides along its path, and at each stop essential parts are added. Without these properly constructed and attached parts, at the end of the process, we do not have a complete vehicle.

If the car example were a human child- there is no complete list of required "parts" in human development, so we can't say for sure what part is missing when a child is "at the end of the process".

My feeling is this- humanity is an idea virus your parents give you, and if they are not around you enough to properly transmit it to you, your copy is incomplete and you end up with some trouble or other, or perhaps you luck out and have no problems at all.

If your parents don't have a complete copy of the virus, you won't get it no matter what they do. So you spend years trying to figure stuff out on your own, while other people waltz through life as if they knew what to do at each step along the way.

This leaves a lot of fun things to think about- and so I will. More later, perhaps.

Gandhi's Seven Things

I just stumbled onto this, hadn't heard of it before...

Gandhi made this list of "Seven Blunders" that lead to passive violence and gave it to his grandson shortly before his assassination. His grandson added the eighth item.

1. Wealth Without Work
2. Pleasure Without Conscience
3. Knowledge Without Character
4. Commerce Without Morality
5. Science Without Humanity
6. Worship Without Sacrifice
7. Politics Without Principles
8. Rights Without Responsibilities

This will fuel some interesting thinking in the next few days and weeks. I am not entirely sure I will make much of #6, but the others look promising.

Whiny End User

Man.

There seems to be a plague out there in the world, a horrible affliction which once contracted is terminal for the host. A pitiful, ignominious fate for those so unlucky to contract it.

I am speaking, of course, of affiliation with Microsoft.

But first, this side note.

Software development is a curious beast. A company gets an idea to make a product: people decide what the user wants from this product, other people write meticulous documents which are revised and re-revised that describe all aspects of the functionality of the product, yet further people create the product, another team tests the product, and all the while, someone who may or may not have their head up their ass is overseeing the whole project.

Often what happens along the way in this process is that the developers and testers- the very first people to ever use the product- come up with additions and elaborations to the product which are very useful. What ends up happening to these good ideas is that the product ships without any of them.

So, because they weren't in the original budget, and it would cost too much to pay for them to be officially added to the software...

spec writers add the new bits to the spec,
coders make sure they're coded to spec,
testers test them to make sure they do what the spec says,
tech writers write up the section for them in the manual and online help,
ad people add the new bit to the advertisements and box label,
et cetera

And all despite the fact that in a lot of cases the developers add them anyway for their own benefit, so they are already IN the product, just unofficially.

The very system 'designed' by the comapny to generate the product can end up being the enemy of a "very useful end result".

And it appears that as a software company grows larger, there is simply more and more of this nonsense, such that at some point the products the company generates have no discernible positive traits.

...and now back to Microsoft.

Fallout 3 and Grand Theft Auto 4 are colossal, complex games which, had they been entirely Microsoft's responsibility, would never have made it to store shelves.

Apparently, though, at some point in their path from idea to end result, these two already spectacularly popular products fell on such hard times that they needed to be paired up with Mircosoft's sucky content delivery system, a tiresome hunk of garbage that allows the game player to buy crap to expand the game. Without getting too deep into the mechanics of it all, it's a bit like putting a garage-door opener in your bathroom to put the toilet seat up for you.

What makes me so angry about this? Well, I'd love to play the add-on for Fallout 3, but it's only available via Microsoft's customer annoyance system. And GTA 4? It's so fantastically buggy I think I am going to uninstall it. The last four times I have played it (out of about seven times, total) I have spent around 30 minutes starting the game, killing it in task manager, restarting the game, restarting the PC, just to try to get the game to start. And 30 minutes is no exaggeration at all.

There have been frustrating aspects of Microsoft products for years now, but in most cases it was manageable suffering we endured. When MS takes an already flourishing game franchise and so thoroughly mangles it like this, well, it's really very sad.