Category: Annoyances

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An intense deluge woke us up briefly around 5:00 this morning. I think I was awake enough to say “Damn!” and fall back asleep. It reminded me of something that’s been bugging me.

I looked through the first few pages of Otherworld #2 in the comic store yesterday. As at the end of the first issue, one character made a big deal about how it never rains in L.A.

Admittedly, people drive as if it were true. It starts drizzling, and people freak out. Three days of rain is billed as Stormwatch 2005 on the TV news. Some years we don’t get much rain at all.

But every 7 or 8 years, we get drenched.

I’ve heard people cite this year’s near-record rainfall as an example of the extreme weather that climate models predict for global warming. While I do think there are plenty of valid examples, this isn’t one of them. We got just as much rain in 1997—eight years ago—when the UCI campus flooded, stairs turned into waterfalls, streets and underpasses became rivers, and one student infamously bodysurfed naked down the hill next to the Student Center. (A yearbook(?) ad later remarked, “Who says nothing happens in Irvine?”) We got nearly as much rain two years before that. I knew someone from Vermont who brought friends out to visit during the heaviest period of rain. They got their preconceptions handed to them.

Every once in a while the cycle skips. Those skips coincide suspiciously with droughts. I remember tons of rain and the occasional hailstorm in the early 1980s, then it was all dry until 1995.

The thing is, while a very wet winter is uncommon for Southern California, it’s not unusual. In fact, it’s very regular. I recommend looking up El Niño as a starting point.

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From the Gnome 2.10 release notes:

In the past, while typing something into one application when suddenly your instant messenger offered a chat request from your friend, your words would be typed into the chat window. Imagine if you were typing your password at the time. This should no longer happen in GNOME 2.10.

In addition, if an application takes a long time to start, your work will not be interrupted when it finally opens its window.

About time someone fixed this! The window focus-stealing problem has plagued just about every desktop out there. I think Windows is the first one I noticed that attempted a solution (blinking the taskbar button instead of switching to the dialog box). And since I often fire up several programs at once, it can get really annoying when I start typing my password into one, hoping I’ll finish before the other window appears and drops the last three letters into my web browser or something.

Unfortunately I’ll probably have to wait for Fedora Core 4 to really use it, unless I want to go even more bleeding-edge than I already am.

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In the past few weeks, advertising developers have come up with scripts that will work around Firefox’s pop-up blocking. This is rather like a telemarketer calling someone on the do-not-call list. We installed a browser that blocks pop-ups for a reason. We are not your target audience; we are the people for whom pop-up ads are an invitation to boycott the advertiser.

If you’re selling something door-to-door, some people will buy, some will not, and some will be annoyed. But if someone has posted a “No Soliciting” sign, it’s a sure bet that they’re going to slam the door in your face. Why go to the effort when you know it’s going to be counterproductive?

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You’d think with the number of years we’ve been sharing files across networks we’d be able to do it somewhat reliably.

Windows: Try to connect to a computer that’s down or misconfigured, and sit for at least 30 seconds, unable to use an explorer window, click on your desktop, or, if you’re really unlucky, use the taskbar or Start menu, until it realizes it can’t connect. (I don’t know if this has been fixed in Windows XP, but it’s still a problem in Windows 2000.)

Unix: On one hand processes are separated better so you don’t normally get a full system lock-up unless it’s trying to connect while starting up…but if you have a modern GNOME desktop, and you have a file in your recent documents list on an auto-mounted NFS share that isn’t available anymore (say, because you turned the computer off), it can lock up your desktop while it tries to connect to create a thumbnail. (This happened to me last night.) And don’t get me started with trying to disconnect from an NFS share that isn’t available.

Mac: Have you got a folder on a server with lots and lots of files in it? Especially images? Hope you can wait for it to transfer every single image over the network and create a thumbnail, because you aren’t going to be able to see anything in that Finder window until it does. (To be fair, I’m basing this on connecting to a Linux box via Netatalk, which implements Mac file sharing. For all I know, connecting to an actual Mac would pull thumbnails out of the images’ resource forks or something.)

Hmm, now that I think about it, generating thumbnails of files on network shares seems to be a problem in itself.

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Before leaving for Comic-Con, we went to Ruby’s for lunch and discovered that they’d stopped wrapping up their burgers and started serving them on plates. If you’ve seen a Ruby’s burger, you know what a bad idea this is. If you haven’t, these burgers are easily 5″ in diameter, made with 1/3 pound of meat or an oversized veggie patty, and generously topped. I have problems holding one together, and my hands aren’t exactly small. I had ordered a mushroom burger, which promptly and repeatedly fell apart, sometimes on the plate and sometimes on my lap. We not only told the waitress but also filled out the comment card, in pen, and mailed it. Since then, I’ve made a point of asking for my burgers wrapped and sending them back to have them wrapped if the kitchen forgets. Putting my meal back together in between bites is not, in my opinion, a worthwhile way to spend my time.

Well, the madness is spreading. We went to Togo’s the other day and received our sandwiches on plates. Thankfully, they were less messy, but it irked me. What chain is going to be next? Fatburger? Johnny Rockets? Red Robin? God forbid, In-N-Out? Or will they catch a clue that not everyone is willing to trade personal cleanliness for “restaurant atmosphere?”

(And speaking of restaurant atmosphere: to all you managers out there, the Anxious Clown should not be your business model. Just because not all of us customers are Wednesday Addams, that’s no reason to think we all appreciate perky waiters with 29 pieces of flair, or will order food we don’t want just because said waiters suggest it. Please recognize that some of us are (horrors!) turned off by overattentiveness, and would much prefer to eat in peace. We will come back, but please know that this is in spite of your best efforts to impress us, and that our undergenerous tips are not meant to spur the above-mentioned waiters into greater hyperactivity–as any true service employee worth their tips should be able to tell from our reactions. If they can’t tell, maybe they’re not as great as you thought they were.)

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Comments on this site are now moderated. After a week of daily spam runs that have managed to get past other blocking methods, I’m tired of messing with it. At least with moderation, they won’t show up on the site.

This means that when you post a comment, it will not show up immediately. One of us will have to get the moderation notice and approve the message before it will appear.

I apologize to those who want to make actual comments on our posts. Just one more thing for which you can thank the spammers.

Update: It turns out it could have been much worse. The run of about 15 comment spams that showed up this morning turns out to be the few that made it through out of a total of 357. Over the course of 20 minutes this morning, a network of 126 zombies posted nearly 360 junk comments to this site, and 95% of them were rejected immediately. On one hand, it gives me a bit more faith in the countermeasures, but on the other hand, the scale of the attack is just staggering.

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A truism of television is that they aren’t in the entertainment business, they’re in the advertising business. Their job is selling commercials, and the shows you watch are nothing but an enticement to get you to watch long enough that you’ll see the ads. This is true for ad-based websites as well. The content is just there to get you coming back so you’ll see and click on the ads. (I’ve always had a problem with the idea of using click-through as the primary measurement of an ad’s success, but that’s another story.)

The problem here is that a balance needs to be struck between content and ads: Tilt too much toward content, and you need another business model to pay for hosting. Tilt too much toward ads, and people will stop visiting your site—or start blocking your ads. The more intrusive and annoying the ads, the more likely people will block them.

I rarely block ads. (Of course, I don’t click on them very often, either.) I figure if the website owner needs an ad banner to pay for hosting and/or make a profit and continue providing the site, that’s fine…as long as it doesn’t distract from the content. Remember, I’m not there for the ads, they have to convince me to come to their page, and if the ads make an otherwise-appealing site too annoying to read…well, sorry, I’m either blocking the ads or I’m not coming back.

DevArticles is a good example of this. The page was so full of animated banners visually screaming for my attention, I could barely focus on the article long enough to read it. This one page prompted me to install the Adblock extension for Firefox at work and block everything coming from their ad server, just to be able to read it. Had they kept their ads sensible, like the dozens of ad-supported sites I frequent without blocking the ads, I probably would have bookmarked it as well. As it is, the site reminds me of a line from Babylon 5: “Too annoying to live.”

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