Feedburner is a whore!

Feedburner has been fucking me over for days. Almost every time I click a news item in NetNewsWire, it gives me an error.

Some cops are idiots, some are assholes, and some are both.

On Monday afternoon, I was wandering around town before a meeting and decided to go to get a snack. I had to turn right on to a five lane street. I was behind an un-marked police car (which isn’t that un-marked since you can see the blue lights in the rear window and the “Police Interceptor” badge that Ford put on it). We both turned into the outside lane like the traffic test book said we should.

I immediately signaled and changed into the inside lane because I had to make a left turn in a few lights so I wanted to be closer to the turn lane. As I was in the middle of the two lanes, the cop decided to change lanes, too. He basically cut me off and didn’t use his signal to boot. I got rather close to him because I wasn’t expecting that a cop would be so stupid as to do something like that without there being an actual emergency.

The cop immediately got back into the right lane and slowed down. I passed him. He again changed lanes without signaling and turned on his lights. He “pulled me over” in the middle of the lane to lecture me that I was following too closely to him.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?”
“No.”
“You were so close to me that I couldn’t see your hood.”
“Was this when I was trying to change lanes?”
evading the question “Did you know that there is a minimum distance that you’re supposed to keep?”

Imagine the audacity! The only reason I was too close to him was because he fucking cut me off!

Nerd rant: Star Trek: Fluidic Space

I’m watching the Voyager episode “Unimatrix Zero, Part II” and in it, the Borg drone Axum tells Seven of Nine that he’s on “a scout ship patrolling the border of fluidic space. On the other side of the galaxy.”

Ever since I saw this episode this line has bothered me. Fluidic space doesn’t have a border. It’s a “realm” accessed via quantum singularity. How on earth does that have a border?

Damn you high gas prices!

I had to stop and get gas last night. I put $35 in the tank and it still didn’t fill it up. Gas was $2.94/gal. I guess the good news is that I was able to go 380 miles before refueling.

“BOO!” on Apple

The big news going around the Mac web right now is the teaser that Apple‘s thrown up on its website telling viewers that “The first 30 years were just the beginning.” Strange as it seems, any little hint from Apple sends every Mac nerd into a tizzy, myself included.

What I found truly interesting, though, was the highlighted bit at the bottom about redeeming gift cards. It reads, “Redeem iTunes Gift Cards (iTunes 7 required)”. I’m a big fan of iTunes–as long as it’s on the Mac. The Windows version is a utter P.O.S. I don’t like the idea of forcing Windows users to upgrade to the bug-ridden, resource-hogging iTunes 7.x if they want to redeem their iTunes Gift Cards.

When iTunes 7 came out, I immediately upgraded my Windows box so I could have all the niftiness, ugly UI aside. Shortly after, though, I found myself despising it. I couldn’t even browse the Web while iTunes was playing without causing stutters in the playback and freezes in Firefox. I downgraded back to iTunes 6.0.5, thanks to a nice tutorial.

When the 7.0.2 upgrade came out a few months ago, I again jumped on it hoping that it would solve the issues affecting my machine. It didn’t. I thought that the problem had gone away, but it hadn’t. It returned shortly and was just as infuriating as ever.

“Boo!” on you, Apple, for forcing people to use the crappy version of iTunes if they want to redeem their gift cards.

Worst Storyline Ever!

The most hated storyline that I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to sit through is anything and everything to do with Abby Lockhart‘s family on ER. It’s SO tedious. First her mother storms into the ER in the middle of a manic episode, then her brother gets into the mix culminating in his fall into Carter‘s grandmother’s grave.

Every time I hear of them or see them I just have to let out a dejected sigh. The only time that Abby’s mother was bearable in the least was in the season opener this year when Abby gave birth to her premature child. And even then it was touch-and-go.

Second-worst? Luka_Kovač. I wish they’d killed him off when he went to the Congo.

While I’m on the topic of ER, I also hate when networks move the commercial breaks around in television shows. It’s really prominent, and annoying, when they string together two segments that were previously separated by commercials causing a momentary fade to black followed by a restoration. It’s even worse when the network decides to cut to commercial and the scene just ends. It’s too abrupt. It’s too annoying. And here’s another dejected sigh.

I like newspapers.

Okay, odd way to title an entry, but I do. I like them. I know I can get the same information faster through the Internet, but there’s something about having the actual paper in my hand and sorting through it that appeals to me.

Take USATODAY for instance. I can get almost every story in the paper as soon as its published through its RSS feed and I can select which parts of the “paper” that I want to read thus eliminating sections that I won’t bother with like the Sports section*. I’m hardly ever interested in that part. But I can do the same thing with the actual paper, too. I can just pull that section out and toss it aside.

The same is true for magazines. I can get probably 90% of magazine content online at no cost. But for a lot of magazines, Macworld in particular, I just like having it in my hand.

RSS feeds are convenient, I can get what I want, faster than they can print it, but an actual newspaper or magazine is a different kind of convenient: I can reade it any time, anywhere.

*That’s the beauty of USATODAY’s RSS feeds. They have a separate feed for not only each section of the paper, but it’s broken down into a myriad of subcategories. The thing that really makes me love their feeds is that they don’t mix the sports headlines in with the real news. I don’t care much for it and it makes me happy that they leave it out. Other sites, like BBCNews have separate feeds, but they still mix in sports with all of the rest of them. It’s just annoying. If I want sports “news”, I’ll got to either a dedicated feed or to a site that specializes in sports “news”.

Better question: "Who cares?"

CNN.com – Has Ashlee Simpson had a nose job? – May 11, 2006

Another better question: “Why is this newsworthy?” I found it in CNN’s news feed. Sure it’s in their Entertainment “news” feed, but also in the main, supposedly real, news feed.

Irrelevant headlines

One thing that really annoys me is a misleading headline. Take this for example:

XM Radio set to battle Apple’s iPod

The article itself never mentions the iPod. I can’t fathom why it’s even included.

The article, instead of being about XM Radio versus the iPod (how the compete is beyond me, but whatever) is about XM’s coverage of all things Grammy.

Why choose a headline that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual article? It’s just stupid…

Sign me up!

CNN.com – GIs from celebrated unit in gay porn?

Oh yeah, shame on the military for even investigating. DADT is crap policy and always will be.