The Lowest Form of Wit

Ah computers, how I loathe thee.  

I’ve had a particularly trying day with my computer today, so excuse me while I launch into an extended power-rant about everything that pisses me off about PCs in general.

Electronics, like people, seem to have an uncannily-annoying sixth-sense which enables them to detect when you’re tired and irritable, so that they can direct a vicious stream of trivial, frustrating quirks in your general direction.

It’s all on purpose, I tell you.

Well alright, to be fair it’s generally the developers.

I just love applications that won’t minimise, and when forced to do so (via Show Desktop or the like), will sproing back up to fill your screen upon every subsequent unrelated action you take.

Or trying to drag-select text that extends below the bottom of the currently-on-screen area - that’s always fun, provided you wanted to select the following 20 pages too, at approximately the speed of light.   I call it the "yoyo select" (because that’s what you inevitably end up doing - up!/down!/up!/down!/argh-give up!).   Perhaps The Flash was it’s beta-tester.

And Windows behaviour.  I could dedicate an entire blog to Windows annoyances, heck an entire internet (but I think that’s been covered already).  For example, Mr Vista, when I tell you I want the List View "Applied to All Folders", that’s what I mean.  Funnily enough, I don’t mean Details View here and Icons View there, however you see fit.  See?

Fixing what isn’t broken, there’s another good one.  There’s nothing worse than being in a frantic rush to get a few things done on the computer, and finding that simple tasks have suddenly been renamed or moved elsewhere in the latest version to which you recently updated ("where the HELL has Add/Remove Programs gone??!").  And yes, Logitech, I much enjoy the re-arranged edit block on my keyboard, because accidentally selecting and deleting random blocks of text from my documents on a regular basis is a complete barrel o’ laughs.  It must be fun to pull off an ongoing prank on thousands of computer users simultaneously.

And how about good old Bloat.  Maybe I’m showing my age here, but performing tasks on computers used to be simple and relatively-efficient.  DOS, while archaic and limited, put out the impression of being complex and difficult with it’s command-line interface.  But strip that away, and things were quite simple, really.  WYSWWYG.  All options out there in the open, and well-documented for any to find and learn.  And they weren’t all so fundamentally twisted-up with one-another that getting something to work was a miracle of prayer and synergy, as it is today.  Windows - with it’s pretty GUI and so-called user-friendliness - is just a paper-thin front for something FAR more complex and prone to quirks and failures of all kinds.  

My quad-core machine is infinitely more powerful than my computer of 15 years ago.  But really, little practical functionality or speed has been gained as a result - once you overlook all the shallow cosmetic crap, and facilities to cater for people who can’t type, spell, read, or think.  A word-processor 10 years ago ran just as quickly as a word-processor today (if not quicker).  Sure there are additions of various kinds - but enough to justify tying up a computer with 4 CPU’s running at 3.0Ghz, 4GB of RAM, hard drives magnitudes faster than those of old, etc etc?? Not even close.

I’m so sick of closing unwanted toolbars, information screens (complete with checkboxes - "don’t show this again" - how about "don’t show it in the first place unless I ask for it", douches?), sidebars, balloon prompts, reminders, update dialogs, splash screens, watching unskippable introductions, closing firewall prompts, filling in registration screens (thanks for the spam), spending half an hour trawling through labyrinthine Options dialogs replete with 30 tabs to disable nagging bullshit "features" which detract from the user experience far more than they ever helped, and so on and so forth.

Sick of installation processes that take 10 minutes to perform (what should be) a 30-second file-copying process and a few seconds to throw in some reg keys (let’s not even get started on the whole Registry system!).

And "freeware" - is anything really free?  Not a lot it seems these days.  Have some spyware free with your download!  Install this toolbar!  Give us your details!  Sign up to the download site to be able to even download our file!  Then click "Download" on 3 subsequent pages, until you (if you’re lucky) eventually reach the actual download link!  View these ads!  Get nagged to buy the commercial version!  

Google itself is becoming less and less effective over the years.  Search for information on something that can potentially be purchased, and you’d better be wanting to purchase it, because all of your search results will handily lead you to commercial sales sites.  Hope you didn’t actually want to find any useful information about it!  Far handier than Google’s "SafeSearch" feature, would be a "NonMoney-GrabbingSearch" feature.  "Don’t be evil", indeed.

The gist of my disorganised ranting is that I like to be able to quickly and simply achieve the tasks that I wish to perform on my computer, with a couple of minimal and intuitive (to humans!) clicks - no extra bullshit please! - and it’s getting harder and harder to do that.  Where a quick Google and/or a few well-placed clicks used to suffice, it’s now more often than not a frustrating epic journey of crap, bloat, errors, unwanted extras and obfuscation at every turn.

Of course these annoyances always seem to peak when you’re in a hurry.  A recent hurried attempt to scan my Vista64 system for virii was a comedy of errors.  Java wouldn’t install, the Java site was full of "help" pertaining to XP folder names, temp files that didn’t exist, and blissful ignorance of half the errors I faced.  So, no TrendMicro Housecall for me.  When I did finally get it going (thanks Windows Search!  you’re almost exactly as quick and effective as the search would have been in XP!  but with added system bloat!), Housecall appeared to work - and if it wasn’t for the "Failed to install" dialogue box that determinedly popped up at the last minute before Housecall started scanning, I might have had some modicum of faith in it’s results.  So, off to try Avast!.  First Google result, is it the official Avast site itself, as one would expect?  No, it’s some bloody download.com link which requires a 3-step registration.  Great.  Fuck that off.  So let’s find the official site - there it is - oh great, a fill-in-your-personal-details screen to access the download, and another one for the post-installation registration process.  Log into Gmail to get the registration email, copy and paste the code, and oh yay, a ‘quick-start’ splash screen (there’s an oxymoron!).  If software requires me to read a manual to perform (what should be) simple intuitive tasks like selecting what I’d like to scan, then it’s shit, frankly.  So, close that, and after the obligatory "tick the box to not show this annoying screen again", lo-and-behold, the program’s interface looks like the panel of a futuristic spacecraft, forcing me to puzzle out how to perform tasks that should be immediately and unmistakably obvious.  God forbid there should be a button with "Scan" written on it, which spawns a dialog box where you choose what you’d like to scan. That’d be far too obvious!

Time is precious, developers.  We don’t want to fritter away our lives dealing with all of this crap.

It’s funny how computers and operating systems are supposedly becoming geared more towards the Average PC-Illiterate Home User, yet something which 15 years ago would have required the simple copying of a few files (that you perhaps paid $10 for) from floppy to hard disk, and the typing of "Scan C:" is now a time-consuming 50-step nightmare of a process involving various errors and run-arounds and compulsory giving-out of personal details and confusing GUIs with 5000 options and click-throughs.

Vista is all about patching the fuck-ups that the Win9x/NT paradigm spawned.  Note that I say "patching", not "fixing".  Fixing involves taking away the problem.  Patching involves the problem still very much existing, but having had a big ol’ cover (labelled "Hope This Works!") riveted over it.  A few things might leak around the edges every now and again, but at least it’s something that marketing can spin with, in order to pretend that the half-assed covering-up of their own company’s past shortcomings is somehow a kind of bonus deserving of double the money you paid them for previous version.

Meanwhile the Bloat Epidemic rolls on, bringing us new, pretty, and exciting ways to fuck things up and have our time wasted, and stretch our fancy new computer’s resources to achieve things that could ostensibly have been performed just as easily - sans bloat and bullshit - by one clever programmer on the hardware of yesteryear.   Yester-decade.

Maybe I should buy a Mac.  As a long-time PC user (enthusiast, even), that’s not easy to say.

See here for a somewhat-tangential yet equally-cynical (and better-written!) rant about gadgetry - and it’s mindless followers - in general.

I’m going to diverge slightly from my usual ravings for a moment, to talk about the state of cricket in NZ.

It seems that NZ Cricket has stepped up it’s involvement in recent times, with outspoken head Justin Vaughan fast becoming a near-ubiquitous feature of media reports and broadcasts.

And it is good to see strong leadership in the sport, provided it knows it’s place - but that leads me to the issue of Stephen Fleming.  I’m still a bit stunned personally that one of NZ’s most successful and universally-respected captains of all time - even the Aussies at their peak never had anything but praise and admiration for the man - was relieved of his captaincy.  Statistics never told the tale when it came to Steven Fleming, and I can’t help but feel that the NZ side have lost a couple of what could have been valuable years under the leadership of one of the best we’ve had, and that it’s more than a little criminal to have Fleming walk out into the park in the NZ test uniform in a role other than captain.

I’ve grown to dislike World Cup Fever (an attitude I probably share with a lot of Kiwis, after our sporting debacles of 2007) - the ’special preparations’ that the teams put in during the lead-up year, the frantic pressure on the players, the drastic changes and measures put in place in an effort to miraculously step things up (often to no avail, in my opinion), and the one-track mind focus on the whole furore, at the expense of all else.

I think Fleming was the obvious (after-the-fact) victim of WCF this time around, but I also think that the selection and development departments have at times squandered the opportunity to foster and build a stronger and more consistent team when they’ve had the chance.  For one thing, selectors are too quick to act on short-lived form of late.  There’s more of a tendency to drop players overnight if their past few performances aren’t at the high end of their achievement scale.  This can be seen with Stephen Fleming, and perhaps even moreso with the recent announcement that Scott Styris won’t be part of the current test squad.  

Perhaps I’m a little simple-minded when it comes to the backroom tactics and reasonings of cricket, but I can’t help wishing that team selection was primarily driven by old-school criteria such as "being one of the country’s best-performing and most respected international batsmen".  I respect the fact that they wish to have batsmen who they feel can occupy the crease a long time in the impending test series, but to focus on that to the extent that you’d overlook a player of Styris’ ilk?  Not good selection in my books.  If Cumming, Sinclair and co. work out, then great, but I still don’t think it’s fair to leave Styris out on the basis of only a couple of tough series abroad, after all of his positive and consistent achievements in both forms of the game over a long period of time, and excellent form.

It’s a fair tactic to plan and groom players for the future, but I don’t believe that NZ has the depth of talent to forego recognised world-class players on a regular basis, in pursuit of a gamble hoping to stumble upon some winning formula of fresh talent.  Particularly not when some of your top players (including the best pace bowler NZ has seen for literally decades*) are being enticed away to rebel leagues, and when early retirement by experienced and accomplished players seems to be becoming more and more commonplace (is it because they’re "past it"? or because the administrative environment became untenable?).

While it’s understood that NZ Cricket has a duty to the game itself, let’s not forget the game’s most valuable asset - the experienced players.  And let’s also not forget that we are a small country with few sporting resources compared to many of our rivals, and that we are often, by default, the underdog.  Hastily throwing out players that, despite a bad patch, have thoroughly proven themselves on the world stage, and hoping that new blood will suddenly elevate us to the top is just not going to work.

*RIP Shane Bond in NZC - probably.  Seeing one of our quicks bowl out the Aussies (instead of the other way around, for once) was one of the greatest highlights of my 25-year-and-counting cricket-watching career.

Yarrr 2008 [editor: this was written not long after the New Year].  With those prolonged festivities out of the way, let’s get on to today’s topic - an endearing little human-interest news item I read earlier.

Snipped article below:

So, let’s recap.  God was clearly "looking after the place" - after all, what better way is there to look after something than to have it catch fire??  Though one would infer from the article that the church catching fire in the first place was in fact not God’s fault, but that the actions of the woman who put the fire out were obviously his manifest will.

Backing up this startling miracle, we have a further heart-warming surprise in store - get this: hay-festooned items in a nativity scene were apparently burned in the short-lived fire, while a nearby ceramic angel - whose construction incidentally involved being fired for hours in a kiln-oven at 1000+ degrees - incredibly enough, failed to burn!!  Oh my gawwd!

The icing on the cake though, is the final sentence.  "She was sitting in the middle looking like nothing was happening".  Well stop the presses here folks, and bring out your boldest headline fonts:

Somebody call the Pope, he’s gonna want to hear about this one.  I think we may just have the basis for a New New Testament here.

Administering the office computers is part of my job, and one of the regular menial tasks I perform involves trawling through our Spamtrap, to weed out and forward-on the obvious false-positives.  After awhile it becomes an endless blur of:

The same tired old stock ads
Wow, I can exchange some of my money - booo money! - for some must-have shares in Antique Mongolian Tractor Valves - yay shares!!

Various penis enlargement propaganda
If I used my dick to press the Delete key every time I had to get rid of one of these spams, it would be utterly huge by now.

A range of high-quality and doubtless-reliable pharmaceutical goods
Aldous Huxley wishes he’d thought of such a pervasive and efficient sex-drug distribution system.

I can only conclude that your average spammer’s idea of Utopia is a world where men roam the planet with disproportionately-massive 36-hour hard-ons in an endless quest for the world’s worst and most doomed-to-failure stocks.  The Matrix eat your heart out.

Occasionally an individual spam subject-line will jump out at me as I scroll through the pages, a brief transcendental moment of spam brilliance.  To preserve these gems of twisted human enterprise, I propose a Spam of the Week feature (possibly even a Spam of the Arbitrary-Time-Frame feature, if you’re extra-lucky).

Here’s a recent one:

So it’s a normal day in Spamland, with beautiful exotic ladies on offer for all and sundry (as in real life).  But hey, just for the fun of it, let’s randomly add the word "anus" to the end of the subject line. Hell, why not?? Maybe it was a typo - maybe he meant to put a full-stop there, but accidentally typed ‘anus’ instead - we’ve all done it.

And another:

A "wide-ranging body-part for[r]est".  Yum, how enticing!  Wait while I restrain my credit card, which is attempting to tear out of my wallet so it can propel itself magic-carpet style, directly to the source of such tempting wares.  I take it they’re going after the ever-lucrative "serial killer" segment of the online market.

I indulged in a healthy dinner of Macca’s last night, and tried that new Name-It burger among other things.  I think I’ve devised a suitably catchy moniker for it - The Not-Particularly-Good BurgerKing-Ripoff Burger.  I’m sure my prize is coming any day now.  Provided it’s not a lifetime supply of those burgers, I’ll be happy.

It’s quite funny how they blithely sell these burgers that have "50% daily saturated fat intake" written on the box, yet still do their damnedest to market their healthy wholesome image.  I’m sure there’s some alternate-reality where having 150-odd% of your recommended daily saturated fat in one meal is considered healthy, but I think Macca’s may have picked the wrong one.  Unless they wanted to make a trillion dollars of course, in which case they’ve definitely come to the right place!

Still, at least they put that 2 mouthfuls of lettuce in your Big Mac - that makes up for all the bad stuff, right?

Maybe in the future we’ll have teleportation at our disposal.  That’ll be the ultimate - we’ll be able to laze back on our floating couches and have an edible sack of blended Maccas-and-Coke teleported directly into our stomachs.  Mmmmm.  None of this pesky chewing business.

On the other hand, while fast food’s great, we’re not all in a frantic hurry.  I think "slow food" is a niche market yet to be fully explored.  Maccas could have McDonalds, McCafe.. and McHangi.  You go in and pay for your meal - then they start digging the hole and heating up the rocks…

Ahh dating sites - strange, strange places.  A segregated, exaggerated digital reflection of the twistedness of real-life human interaction.

They often feature profile-search boxes, and while some sites have the foresight to set the default search age-range as 18-30, or 20-30, as you’d perhaps expect, others have the default search age-range set as 18-99 - obviously anybody who uses these sites is presumed (perhaps unfairly!) to have potentially low standards, but I think I’ll refine my search just a little further than that, thank you!  Though I applaud the technical prowess (not to mention other areas of prowess that we won’t go too far into, for your imagination’s sake) of any 99-yr-old women out there who are using dating sites.  I note (for no particular reason, I swear!) that the highest selectable/searchable age is 99 - a shame for any horny cyber-centenarians out there!  

[editor: great topic, by the way!  Who wouldn’t want their readership comprised of people who’ve Googled the terms “dating horny 99 year olds”??]

Speaking of which, I had my first look around a NZ dating site last night (just for fun, I assure you - you won’t find me on there!).  It was a little surprising to see over 100 women from my region on there – none that I specifically knew, but there were a few that I thought I recognised from having seen around at random places.

A few of the profiles had me in stitches.  Like this one, who could have alternatively called herself Miss_Subtle:

Maybe I should follow suit and call myself vag_obliterator or something equally ‘cryptic’.  (side note: you wouldn’t expect any Google search results for the term "vag_obliterator", would you? Well, consider yourself educated - not surprisingly, it’s been used before by none other than an online role-playing nerd, whose only theoretical involvement with vag involves the steady obliteration of his chances of ever actually getting any).    

This profile is an absolute gem, it has me cracking up every time I think about it:

"Sometimes in alleys" is undeniably classy, but when I read "im not desperate but im keen to meet new people who are free of STD’s" I was almost rolling on the floor.  I mean, that’s setting the bar real high right there!  I could model my profile after hers, with something along the lines of "I’m quite picky, I only go for girls who have exclusively-female genitalia".  Not an entirely untrue statement by the way!  I don’t loves_the_cock…

(‘chop courtesy of OCAU’s Assasinator_2)