Tag: complaint

Longtime reader is fired

You may have seen comments from GayleForceWinds here before, or you may actually know her. I’m now announcing that she’s fired. From what, you may ask. From nothing. Just fired.

As you may also know, Gmail has a built in chat program that can be set to display the music you’re currently listening to.

About ten minutes ago, Gayle was listening to “Heaven is a Place on Earth” by Belinda Carlisle, and now that infernal song is stuck in my head.  I didn’t even hear it, and it’s in my head.

I can’t adequately explain how much I hated that song back in the late ’80s. I didn’t hate it as much as Debbie Gibson’s “Shake Your Love”, but I hated it a little more than Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now”.

And I’m not really sure why.  Sure, they were perky pop stars who seemed way too happy all the time (Well, not so much Tiffany, which is probably why I didn’t hate her song as much), but why that would evoke such a reaction is beyond me.

Anyway, thanks a lot, GayleForceWinds.  I won’t forget this.

You were not meant to live that way

As I do once every month or two, I drove out to our corporate office today. This involves 20 miles on 66 West through Fairfax. I go against traffic, which is nice.

For those of you going East, though, I can’t imagine it’s worth it. It was backed up from the Beltway all the way out past Fair Oaks, and I doubt that’s unusual. Keep in mind this was before 8AM, so we haven’t even quite hit peak rush hour.

How do people justify this sort of commute? I did it for about a year, but it was my first job out of college, and I didn’t really know any better.

This will be the downfall of our society. Someday we will all commute from the Moon, and it will take us a week, but we’ll justify it by saying that real estate on Earth is just too expensive. Why, out here on the Moon, you can get a fifteen square foot survival pod for only $36,000,000 (That’s $450,000 in today’s dollars, or about 13 British pounds.)!

It’s just bad for people to spend time in the car like that. It’s stressful. It’s bad for the environment. It takes you away from people and sticks you in your own climate-controlled little box where you can choose to be entertained by repetitive garbage pop songs, inane morning show drivel, or depressing public radio.

As an aside, the radio is just awful.  I turned on 94.7, as recommended by a friend.  I don’t want to give up on the station because of just one song, but Jack Johnson sure blows.  I don’t know what the song was, but it sounded like the Chili Peppers will sound when they’re in their 80’s.  Maybe I’ll try it again on the way home.

Every time I drive to work, I want to go home and set fire to the car.  And then set fire to everyone else’s car.  Oh, wait, that’s not really environmentally responsible.  Okay, I want to recycle all the cars into affordable modular housing so we can all live in car-free cities and walk everywhere and lose weight and clean up the air (Yes, I know that cars aren’t the bulk of the air pollution, but they sure don’t help).  It will be awesome.

Anyway, stop commuting.  Telework, or get a new job closer to home.  You really didn’t need that fourth bedroom that you keep made up nicely for the guests who don’t come visit because you live an hour from civilization.  You probably didn’t even need that third bedroom where you keep all the crap your mom made you take with you when you moved out.

AT&T wants to censor your complaints

AT&T Legal Policy Via Boing Boing, Gizmodo, and others.

So, AT&T has decided that they can terminate your service if your conduct ” tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.” I’m not exactly sure what “tends to damage” means, but it sounds ominous.

That being said, I do not use AT&T as a web host or ISP. If you have any grievances against AT&T, or its parents, affiliates, and subsidiaries, feel free to contact me. I will happily provide a soapbox for you to stand on and voice your complaints.

You can do it here, or, if you have something particularly poignant, well-written, and not slanderous or libelous, I would probably be willing to allow a guest post to the main site. Email Jon at complaint hub dot com.  I will be your voice, because AT&T has no power over me, and I believe in every human being’s right to complain.

Not to pile on Microsoft . . .

Actually, yes, I am piling on Microsoft. Microsoft deserves it.

Work just upgraded Outlook web mail last night, and the new and improved version only works in IE 6 or “greater” (their words, not mine). What this means is that Microsoft decided (Again) not to play along with all the web standards to which everyone is supposed to adhere. Instead, they’ll introduce some proprietary garbage that only works properly with their own ideas of what people should be doing with their computers.

I imagine they get around monopolistic anti-trust violations by continuing to support the old version for other browsers, but exploiting legal loopholes is hardly what I would call being a responsible company.

Anyway, those of you who come to this site in Internet Explorer, you’ve probably noticed the site doesn’t render properly. Some of you may make the argument that it doesn’t really render properly in any browser, and I would tell you that I’ll redesign when I’m good and f’ing ready. But I won’t make sure it works in IE. If you read at work, and don’t have a choice in your browser, I apologize. But if you’re using IE by choice, then I have no sympathy. IE is not only an inferior way to view a web page, it is also actively making the internet worse.

And please don’t tell me to buy a Mac.  They’re just as bad as Microsoft (In some ways worse), they just have prettier cases and better marketing.

Visual Studio is killing me inside

In March, I moved from a web development project in Java to one in ASP.NET. It was a good opportunity to get some more experience and more responsibility, and I had been on the old project two years.

So here I am, programming in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. And let me tell you, it’s a piece of crap. It continues in the long Microsoft tradition of assuming that users are stupid. Go search for solutions to problems in .NET. Almost every single tutorial relies heavily on the Visual Studio GUI.

A good analogy here, for those of you who aren’t coders: Remember back in school when you were learning math? You probably learned how to do long division on paper, and you probably hated it. If you’re like me, you no doubt complained about it. Later, you got to use a calculator, and then things were more or less okay.

Imagine, however, that you had never been taught long division. More than that, you were never even told that long division even existed. Instead, you were handed a calculator and told that division means hitting one number, then the division button, then another number. Not that doing that would tell you the answer, but that doing that was what division was. It wasn’t a shortcut, a convenience. It was division.

Sure, you’d have the answer. You’d be able to divide any number by any other number. But you wouldn’t understand division.

This is what Visual Studio does.  It assumes that, if you end up with a working web page, then the fact that you have no idea how you got there is not important.

Now, I don’t mean to say that Visual Studio doesn’t have a lot of nice features that save you time.  I use the code completion features all the time.  But seriously, Microsoft.  Stop treating me like an idiot.

Why am I not mad?

I just can’t seem to get worked up over the DC voting rights push.  Sure, it bugs me that I don’t have a representative.  But when I see the “Taxation without Representation” license plates (which aren’t the choice I thought they were – they’re standard issue DC tags) and I read about the “injustice” that this is, my immediate reaction is, “Stop whining”.

It may be that I moved from Virginia into the District knowing full well that we had no representatives, so I feel a little silly complaining about it now.

I really do want to have someone speaking for me at the national level.  I think it’s the right thing to do.  And I’m even okay with this little deal with Utah to placate Republicans who see giving DC a vote as a Democratic ploy to gain a seat.

Maybe there’s some argument that would strike a nerve and get me worked up over this that I just haven’t heard yet.  Anyone know what that argument might be?

And with them goes the stench of failure

AOL Moving Executives, Headquarters To New York – washingtonpost.com

The company said that while senior executives would depart for Manhattan, most of the 4,000 employees at the Dulles campus would remain. The shift is the latest step in the company’s transformation from a provider of dial-up Internet access to one focused on online advertising.

While I’m disappointed that the Dulles area may lose a bunch of jobs, I can’t say that I’m sorry to see AOL start to pull out of our area.  I say, “good riddance, you miserable failures”.  This is a company that for a while was synonymous with “the internet”.  Your average American didn’t “go online”, they “went on AOL”.  Never mind that the day AOL merged with Time Warner is generally considered the day the internet boom died.  These guys were so entrenched as number 1 that it’s amazing how clueless they turned out to be.

I would warn Google and the other companies that AOL’s entrance into the online advertising world probably means that the business is going to be changing significantly very soon, but I’m pretty sure they already know.  And don’t think I mean that AOL will drive the change.  I mean that AOL throwing their hat in the ring probably means it’s time to move to the bigger and better ring you’ve been building down the street.

Anyway, I don’t want to lose area jobs.  But I would like to see the Dulles area get a flagship company that doesn’t symbolize everything that’s wrong with the internet.

Go high or go home

We were at Science Club on 19th Street Saturday night.  I’ll try not to pass judgment on the crowd, because I was kind of tired and not really up for a crowded bar.  I went because some good friends were going and we didn’t want to call it a night.  I had a good time, but it was definitely the company, not the bar.

Anyway, if you’re going to go with a themed bar, you have to GO with the theme.  This place threw a few things up on the wall and left it at that.  We were down in the basement, and they have a periodic table on the wall, a picture of Einstein, and a microscope on a shelf.

How hard would it have been to look up geeky science stuff on Wikipedia?  Or give some GW student a free happy hour in exchange for covering the walls with differential equations?  Shame on you, Science Club.   You  get bonus points for having organic beer on tap, though.

Pepco still sucks, but Im not quite so mad

Pepco came out and read the meter after all.  I just got off the phone with the first Pepco CSR who didn’t make me want to break things.  He said the meter was read yesterday, and we’ve used 4344 kilowatt hours since we moved in.  Our latest bill was for 7942 kilowatt hours, or 183% of our actual electricity usage.  Based on what they charged us on our latest bill, I think that’s about $450 that we’ve paid them that we don’t owe them.

Actually, I haven’t technically paid the latest bill.  I scheduled it, but it hasn’t gone through yet.  But apparently they can’t cancel the payment once I have a confirmation number, which is crap, but whatever.  We aren’t going to pay another bill for a few months.

I’m not sure why I had to be home yesterday.  They read the meter after I left for work, despite their claims that someone had to be at the house.