Reddnet Scribbles

It has been a while since I’ve gone off on one of my famous rants... so go refill your coffee and enjoy ?

The national healthcare debate here in America has continued well past the typical levels of American political absurdity. It's a mess, and a real solution hasn't appeared anywhere near the table yet.

But the biggest victim of this political fist-fucking so far has been the U.S. Postal Service.

Anytime someone wants to scare you away from a government solution to the terrifying state of healthcare in this country, they dig up the specter of the post office!

"What? Do you really want healthcare to be run like the post office?”

Most people think then of long lines, mail gone missing, and incompetent postal workers... and they answer, "hell no"!

But I say "hell yeah"! Give me a post office for healthcare PLEASE!

So... I've moving to a new place, but I need to keep electricity turned on at the old place for a while. 

The Sci Fi Channel has always been one of the most confusing failures in American Television. Now, they have decided that the reason for the suckitude must just be the name of the channel.

So they are changing the name to "Syfy". Somehow they think that this move will make their crappy shows appeal to a broader range of people.

Reading an article at TV Week about I have to say, the reason this network sucks has never been clearer...

Hey, Orange Juice vendors! Listen up!

Please stop putting shit that isn't made from oranges in my fucking juice already!

See these two cartons?

One of these contains a beverage that tastes yummy.

The other contains a beverage that tastes like someone took a shit in it.

Can you tell the difference? 

And why the fuck do you insist on putting this crap in OJ anyway?

If you are going to put crap that isn't orange in your orange juice, then at least have the decency to make sure the package is CLEARLY marked!

It doesn't matter what you put in there. Calcium, Vitamins, Omega-3, whatever.... if you put something in there that isn't made from a god-damned orange then... well....  it fucking is NOT "100% Orange pure & natural not from concentrate" then is it?

But if you are going to put crap in some of your OJ lines, then please at least have the decency to make it VERY obvious what is in the carton. A tiny little sub-text is NOT clearly marked. So what will happen is that I'm going to accidentally pick up the wrong one, shell out $4 for it, get it home, then puke OJ all over the counter.

That does the fuck NOT build brand loyalty there guys!

Last night, a young man claiming to be a U.S. soldier threatened to "hurt" me because he disliked an opinion I had expressed in a conversation with someone else.

In most "conflicts", especially ones that don't quite go to physical blows, there is always a lot of "stuff" that you "wished" you'd said.

While I can't go back and change the confrontation now, the internet does let me say what I should have said after the fact.

So listen up Captain Hypocrite!

Card opposes gay marriage... should I avoid reading his brilliant fiction books? WTF!?!?

The South Carolina DVM expects to use my car's license plate to advertise for the state... we'll see about that!

Recently, I ran across one of the many little spats that develop between bloggers. This time it was between Alastair Rankine of girtby.net and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror. It's the typical spat. One blogger decides that another blogger is no longer writing what they want to read. Rather than just unsubscribe, they write a big public post about why they have decided to unsubscribe and why the other blogger sucks. And, as is typical of these kinds of spats, the blog post starts by talking about how they don't normally slam on people they unsubscribe from... then they slam on them anyway. Sigh.....

For Autism Awareness Day this year I decided to celebrate by remaining very pissed off at the stupidity and gullibility of the average concerned American citizen. Over the last couple of decades, a new pop-cultural trend has arisen. Autism Awareness is just the latest in this line of fads. This one will play out the same as the breast cancer crusade before it. It’s a fraud that will steal large amounts of time, money, and attention from other problems and in the end it'll leave us with no real progress towards the treatment, cure, or even understanding of Autism than we had before. These...

As a programmer, my number one tool for getting out of a tough bind is a quick google search. Developers are chatty, and we have about a million different forums, blogs, wikis, example sites, source projects, etc. When I'm having a problem with my code, chances are that there have been many other programmers that have already found a solution, and some of them probably posted answers online somewhere. But, in any given search, you are bound to get at least a few links to this place called "Experts Exchange". Note: I'm not linking to Experts Exchange... this is deliberate... Nothing about...