alex: ok, ok, so he’s got all of this knowledge, and they give him a hot baby sitter? HAHAHAHAH. when do they do the reveal at the end of the series that this is his fantasy to help him survive the extreme torture
tony: haha
alex: they put him through to extract the information he has. because i swear to god, i would watch it if that were the case

My response was not hateful, so much as impressed. Only someone like The Situation could make a shirt like that successful. At the same time, a fly happened to be buzzing around us, and I grew irritated with it, claiming that a fly’s sole biological function is to be repugnant. Manfriend suggested that this too would make a great blog post in my hate blog. We decided we should record our conversations, and rehashed the ideas. So, without further ado, our lunchtime conversation about Mike “The Situation” and flies:

Do you think a blog devoted to rants and raves written by me would be a good use of our time, or should we pass on this one? More importantly, would you read it?

Also, how many times do I say “situation” in that recording?

Should we just make recordings of our stupid conversations? Manfriend is convinced that I am “very popular on the internet,” but I am not as convinced. I don’t think people find us as funny as we find ourselves.

UPDATE:
The verdict so far is that we should do a lunch podcast instead of a written blog. I like this idea, and suggested that the blog be a) a container for the podcast itself and b) provide supplementary information, such as bulleted lists, visuals, pie charts, cat pictures, animated gifs, and glitter unicorns. I call it “blogcast.”

What doesn’t work:

1. When addressing your cover letter, don’t write “Dear Sirs:” Women also read cover letters, you dingbat.

2. If your resume is over two pages long, I’m skipping you on basic principle and out of self-preservation. If you’re that verbose on paper, you’ll probably kill us all in your interview. I don’t give nearly as much of a fuck about your life history as you think I do.

3. A lot of you are designers, or think you are designers. I’m trying to read a resume, not get a deeper understanding of humanity through your abstract use of Word ClipArt.

4. If your objective is to get a job in the industry you’re applying for, congratulations, I kind of assumed that. What baffles me are the people who’s objectives are for two totally different jobs, like chef and big rig driver. Especially when the chef one is kind of an afterthought, like, “well, I want the big rig job, but if you don’t have any and you’re hungry, I guess we could work something out.” You seriously couldn’t create two separate resumes?

5. Stop applying for every job ever. If there’s a job you want that requires skill sets you have, apply for it. I don’t give a flying fuck if you’re really well qualified for my job, my boss’s job, my coworkers’ jobs or HR jobs. I want you to be qualified for the job I’m hiring for. I get that you’re desperate for a job and you want to throw everything out there in a desperate bid for SOMETHING OH GOD ANYTHING PLEASE, I WILL WASH YOUR SHOES, but you are seriously like the BUZZING OF FLIES, and your desperation reeks. I don’t hire desperate, I hire qualified and good personality fit for this role.

What does work:

1. Get to the point quickly. Break out your resume into three basic sections: Skills, Experience, Education (in that order). Always include your name, contact information, and work-appropriate website (if applicable) in your header.

2. Don’t pad it. A long resume is not a good resume. Talented people don’t feel the need to go on about themselves, they know what’s important, and they talk about that. Insecure people who aren’t very confident in their skill sets tend to talk a lot about what they do and over explain. If I want to read a fucking novel, I will buy a goddamn book.

3. Stay on point. It’s awesome you have a lot of experience doing a lot of things. Your resume is not the place to talk about it. Stick to the stuff that directly relates to the job you’re applying for. Trust me, no one will give a fuck that you spent ten years of your life picking cherries on a farm in New Mexico before you settled on business administration as your career choice.

4. Speak to your audience. Yeah, I admit it, most people (myself included) skim the cover letter, but sometimes it makes or breaks a resume and can be the deciding factor in whether you get a call back or not. Keep it to two paragraphs. Tone is important – you want professional, but not overly technical. The cover letter is where you can speak more about why you’d make a good employee, why you’re the perfect fit for the company, and why you enjoy doing what you do. Why the fuck do you want a job? It’s not the place to summarize or repeat your resume. A lot of people just avoid the cover letter all together. Whatever, if all I have from you is a generic resume, guess who’s not getting a call?

5. Be confident. No one wants to hire someone desperate. Desperate people do desperate things and they create a shitty work environment. Your confidence not only speaks volumes about you, but also about your caliber of work. If you are confident in the work you do, you can then confidently defend it and explain it. This is kind of mission critical for every job. Being able to speak to what you do will help you get along better with coworkers, explain your role to your boss, and help the company overall.

OH, and P FUCKING S? Stop sending me fucking word files. Convert that shit to a PDF.

After screening one of the episodes of the new American drama Skins, (based of off the award winning E4 show of the same name), PTC President Tim Winter had these painfully idiotic things to say:

“The episode included all manner of foul language, illegal drug use, illegal activity as well as thoroughly pervasive sexual content.”

He’s pissed off about this, and he’s not going to take it. Winter has sent a letter to the U.S. Senate and House Judiciary chairmen as well as the Department of Justice, because apparently, the fact that he didn’t like a TV show is serious business. I had no idea that his opinion was a matter of national importance. What a puffed up little twat. But it gets better!

“Many of the actors appearing in the show are below the age of 18. It is clear that Viacom has knowingly produced material that may well be in violation of [several] federal statutes.”

He’s accusing MTV and the producers of the American adaptation of Skins of making child pornography. Having watched the british version (which may be considered risque by American standards but in no way pornographic), I’m calling bullshit.

What troubles me most about this isn’t that he’s making a big stink about the content of the show – that’s nothing new. What troubles me is that he can’t seem to differentiate between acting and reality. Does this man go through life truly believing that what happens on TV is actually happening? Does he actually think the actors are really doing drugs on this show? Or that they’re actually having sex?

Does it freak him out when he sees Kurtwood Smith out walking around? Does he wander up to the man and go, “dude, I thought Robocop stabbed you in the neck, Mr. Boddicker.”

Does he get confused when actors play different characters? Does he just assume the world has an exceptional number of twins that get into film and television? Or is this why he’s against cloning – we should stop wasting the talent of wonderful actors like Leonardo DiCaprio in crap films like Titanic. Don’t they know we have to grow a whole new Leonardo every time the guy has an onscreen death? Titanic cost as much as it did because they had to grow five Leos in order to get the drama and emotion of freezing to death just right.

1. They strive to find new and creative ways to rip off their customers. The HP Printer/Ink scam is exactly what it sounds like – they sell cheap printers and profit by selling ink at exorbitant prices. It’s actually cheaper to just buy new HP printers (with ink included) than to buy new ink.

2. Their tech support is aggressively awful. I’ve luckily had very little experience with HP tech support, but when I first bought my HP printer a few years ago, none of the software would install correctly on my brand new laptop computer, despite claiming that it would work fine. After literally hours of being transferred, I was finally sent to the “Mac Help Desk” which was closed most of the time, and most definitely closed at the time of my call. Before getting there, I was berated for not taking up the reps offers on discount paper and ink. When I asked them what they thought I would do with paper or ink for a printer I couldn’t get to work, they got exasperated and impatient, and hung up on me. My personal experience is merely the tip of the HP Tech Support iceberg.

3. They think their customers are idiots, and treat them as such. Sure, this is probably obvious from items 1 and 2, but it becomes down right insulting with their new video campaign on Amazon. Hosted by lab-douche Thom Brown, in the HP Inkology videos he deigns to explain to us weak minded morons why HP ink is actually a good deal. His smug attitude as he presents us with bullshit math is almost as annoying as his haircut.

And that is just three reasons why HP sucks. If you have more, leave them in comments.

1. “…we are actively helping set the standards for the modern web.”
2. “Through our investments in standards and interoperability, we hope to help bring predictability to web programming.”
3. “Because when you can spend less time rewriting your sites to work across browsers, you can spend more time creating amazing experiences.”
Source: www.beautyoftheweb.com

What irks me about all of this isn’t that IE9 is clearly trying. What bothers me is that Microsoft is making some bold claims and delicately skating over the fact that IE has held back standards for “the modern web” for 10 years. It’s a bit like having five companies develop better green initiatives while one company sits around polluting unapologetically for ten years. Finally, the polluting company comes out and says, “Wait, wait you guys, we should stop polluting. Our company is going to set the standard for green initiatives. Aren’t we super awesome!?”

In 1996, during the height of the browser wars, it was common to see websites built for use with one browser only. In those days, you could download most browsers (including IE), regardless of operating system, and have at least an approximate experience cross-platform. Unfortunately for all versions of IE released after 6, they only work on the Windows operating systems. With IE9, that pool is even smaller, as it cannot be downloaded on any system except Windows 7 (the most recent).

Couple this with the fact that most IT departments stopped upgrading IE at version 7, and there’s a wide and growing gap between IE7 and IE9. Likewise, these same IT departments wisely decided not to upgrade to Vista, instead opting to stay with the older but vastly more stable WindowsXP. Consequently, Windows 7 and IE9 present a UI experience radically different from the UI the vast majority of PC users are accustomed to.

My point here is that IE9 is woefully exclusive. It makes massive demands of its users: you must have a new computer that runs Windows 7 in order to download and use IE9. Unfortunately, the internet is not browser specific. The true beauty of the web lies in its ability to transcend geography, demographic, platform, and yes, even browser. When we begin seeing alerts cautioning us against using any browser except IE9 which the vast majority of internet users cannot download, we’re severely limiting not only a user experience, but the ability for users to access information. The ugly fact is that despite being a self-proclaimed leader of standards development, sites built for IE9 mean sites built only for IE9.

We learned in the 90′s that this is detrimental to businesses. The more people who can access a company website, the better for the company. The last thing I want to see with IE9 is a repeat of those miserable user experiences that plagued us ten years ago.

Facebook
Facebook allows you to search for friends by plugging in their email address. Email addresses that aren’t registered with facebook will get email messages telling them that So and So has invited them to Facebook. If you’re already on Facebook, you can link your accounts.

There’s one hitch – you can’t look at the person’s profile without logging into facebook, and if you search for them, well, odds are you’ll get a good couple hundred of results. So here’s the scenario:

1. I have multiple email addresses.
2. I don’t know immediately who this person is, but I can’t view their profile to confirm one way or another
3. Facebook keeps sending me reminders that this person has friended me on their site.
4. I can’t stop this email from sending without blocking all future emails (from people I may in fact want to be friends with for sure).

Now, I don’t arbitrarily have multiple email addresses. I have multiple email addresses for an excellent reason, namely that I use them on different sites and they help me preserve my anonymity. My facebook profile is public in one sense, but I don’t want to link it to say, an old forum account where I was a site administrator for a few years. While all of these profiles are public, they aren’t all tied to me.

What pisses me off is that Facebook doesn’t allow for the possibility of someone wanting to keep their online identities separate. Facebook is arrogant enough to try and force me to connect all of them. I don’t have any desire to do that. I can’t identify who’s trying to friend me on that email, but it doesn’t really matter – I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be friends with that person. Still, there’s no way for me to contact them outside of Facebook, and Facebook won’t let the subject drop and stop emailing me about it.

If I block the Facebook notification emails, I block all emails of that variety, even from people I might know and care about and want to reach out to on my existing account.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Facebook.

OBSERVE, NON BELIEVERS:

There are several problems with this. Allow me to list.

1. ONE PAIR OF UNDERWEAR IS $12.00
2. You can get FOUR WHOLE PAIRS of men’s underwear for the same price.
3. “A flattering fit, a comfortable fabrication, and cute detail, make for a perfect everyday pair.” The implications are obvious – you can’t afford seven of these fuckers, unless you want to drop almost $100 on a week’s worth of underpants. SO THIS IS GOING TO BE THE PAIR YOU WEAR EVERYDAY, you dirty, dirty lady.
4. Not pictured, a review from a customer (she gave this underwear five stars): “…they are affordable which is great cuz my basset hound likes to eat them. Haha.” HAHA. HA. HA. They taste like expensive.
5. What makes the above comment terrifying is that these are affordable. AS OPPOSED TO WHAT? Oh.

What’s all the more horrible about all of this is that there’s no logic involved. The less fabric, and subsequently, the more comfortable the underwear is for people who’s asses are not prone to falling off (and therefore need some sort of parachute apparatus to save it in the event that it does), have to pay MUCH MORE for their underwear. You would think that ass-saving technology would cost more, and that less fabric would cost, you know, less. But the opposite is true. That ain’t right!

No, I don’t want raw fish. Fish, depending on what it is, needs to be cooked differently, and I expect the chef to know that. The first time I was asked this question I sort of stared at my waiter and said, “I don’t understand. Just however the chef would ordinarily prepare it. That’s what I want to shove into my mouth.”

Sadly, I forgot this response and answered automatically the way I would if I were ordering a burger, which I haven’t done in years. “Medium.”

I didn’t even realize my mistake until I was served a repugnant fillet of tuna, grilled to an unappetizing shade of grayish beige, and stinking to high heaven like someone’s overcooked canned tuna. This is not what I ordered. Except, technically, it was. This was a situation where I couldn’t blame the chef, and I couldn’t fairly blame the waitress. Had I not ordered my grilled tuna done medium? I had. But why?

Because the question, “How do you want your fish cooked?” is a trick question, as anyone who actually likes eating fish knows. A grilled tuna steak can be cooked well, but not done well. You can eat a rare steak of tuna that isn’t sushi, and tastes great. Most people suggest ordering “Medium rare,” and perhaps that’s the magic answer, but when I go out to eat, especially at finer restaurants, I’d like to be able to put some faith into the chef that he or she will know by now how to cook tuna.

But then, our waitress served me a soda with someone else’s lipstick on the glass. Her simple questions tended to be worded in convoluted ways. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that in this case, it was a situation of an inexperienced waitress coupled with someone who forgot the right answer to a trick question.