NAV

Welcome to my rants page

Things I should say before you read this.
There is some noise in here, some ideas that have no real substance, some theories without proof, some pessimistic opinions and some humour that may not be for everybody.
Some of the quotes in here are without their original reference, I try to give credit for ideas which origins I can remember.
< insert disclaimer here >

Rants are filed using the "M Filing System", because most things here are filed under M, M for miscellaneous.

My pet hates

• MS Outlook, Outlook is a bigger disease carrier than that monkey from Outbreak. If you must run wintendo at least have the sense to not use Outlook.. most humans have the ability to learn from mistakes, people who use Outlook are mules. If you are a mule, please do NOT add my email address to your mule email client address book. Have a look at The Bat or Mozilla Thunderbird. Friends don't let friends use Outlook. Also, if you must use Outbreak at least have sense enough to send MIME attachments and not winmail.dat.
• Word Attachments. Please DO NOT attach Word or Excel documents to email, contrary to popular belief these are not standards for exchanging information. If your document requires formatting, please use the PDF, Postscript or HTML open standards. Using Wintendo you can "Print to PDF" with a PDF print driver.
• Email-quoting abuse. "> " quoting of text is used to indicate that text is from a previous email and it gives context to your reply. Do not get creative and quote the text you are adding to the thread. Do not make assumptions about how your email is going to display in somebody else's mail user agent.. sending a mail and marking your reply text in "blue" is just stupid, not everybody reads html email.
• I hate cats (yes, the musical too), they smell, their hair has this mysterious power to travel everywhere. I have a sinus problem related to cats and their fur.
• I have some serious issues with people who claim to watch/protect your car and demand money for this "service" in Cape Town. if you come back you are supposed to find no problems. when I come back and these people have the nerve to tell me "everything is ok", I always get this urge to say "it's supposed to be that way, what do you want ? a cookie ?"
  I'm proud to say I dont give any money to this un-natural industry and i urge everybody not to support this extortion.
• SMS's. Especially people who set their phones to beep with that annoying tone at full volume when they receive an sms. The whole idea of bulk sms spam really gets to me.
  My theory is that SMS's dont have a place, its somewhere inbetween Synchronous (Voice) and Asynchronous (eMail) communication. People assume SMS's are both, and expect you to respond to them as if they were a cheap form of sync comms. The human interface to SMS's suck. I cant figure out why people would want to enter text on a numeric keypad.
  My solution is to disable SMS's for my mobile account. If you are a Vodacom client you can disable SMS's with these codes:
  • *35*1111*16# - Disable Incoming
  • *33*1111*16# - Disable Outgoing
  • #35*1111*16# - Enable Incoming
  • #33*1111*16# - Enable Outgoing
• "No-number" phone calls. Dont turn off caller ID number sending, ever.
• HTML email. eMail should be plain ascii text, no bells and whistles. The simpler the better.
• BIND, a.k.a The Buggy Internet Name Daemon, not much to say, it sucks.
• Gif's and frames in HTML suck. People who do not specify the background colour of an HTML page and assume it will be white annoy me. Please check that your pages validate as HTML and view them in Netscape.
• Spaces in Filenames and Directory names. Not everybody uses clumsy GUI's.. so if you ever intend to send or share a file, never put spaces in the name and keep the names lowercase.
• Calling client side browser scripting "JavaScript". It should be called ECMAScript.
• People who sell roses in restaurants. I really dont get this, some woman walking around with a basket full of roses selling some sorry story about the blind or whatever seems to be the tragedy of the day. And they seem to have this stubborn determination and little fallback line, if you say 'no thank you', they have to say 'what about a donation then'. I think it should be the responsibility of the restaurant to keen them out.
• Tatoos.. just cant figure it out?
• Men with earrings. Mass insanity.. sign of the most probable end of the world.
• SPAM, die all spammers, die. This is really the biggest waste of people's time and bandwidth and never, ever have I even seen a spam message even closely resembling something interesting. Spammers must be really dumb or have no profiling software.
  My solution: Spamassassin Works well with Qmail and Mutt and does a good general job of sending spam to my /spam Maildir. The SMS spam solution is simple, just dont get SMSs.
• Phones that ring in a movie, opera, etc... some times more than once before the idiot owner switches it off. The death penalty is fair for people who answer their phones in these places or they should be sentenced to spend the rest of their lives as call center operators for dial-up ISPs. "I got the Internet for Christmas, what now ?" * 10^1000000
• People who BCC mailing lists should be shot.
• Guns. Violence when there are other routes available.
• People who send me eMail without indenting the text from previous mails with "> "
• People who CC a whole lot of people in the hope that making somebody else look bad will somehow make them look better.. usually used as a tactic to shift the blame in a work environment.
• Evil companies: MS, Verisign, SCO
• The Lottery is a tax on people who dont understand math.
• Traffic, the kind where there is too many cars on the road.
• People who make their underwear stick out on purpose, why would you want to wear your jean hanging around your knees. I've heard stories where kids get their moms to sew their underwear to their jeans for them.. really, why dont they just only wear underwear.
• Finger marks on computer screens
• White backgrounds on computer screens. Put text on gray or black
• 5FM the radio station. it sucks.
• Restaurants that dont serve breakfast all day long

Technology

• Imagine how much more productive the world would be if lifts had undo buttons.
• Computers are like fire, lanterns and candles.. we like to stare at them for hours on end.
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke
• "You can take anything to the n'th degree, that means with enough effort you can probably break off your thumb in your butt." This is one of those memorable quotes from a math lecture.
• "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
• "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
• it use to be people lived in their homes, now they sleep in their houses.
• it use to be people played tennis, now work on their backhand.
• Never have so many understood so little about so much. -- James Burke
• If Java had true garbage collection, it would clean itself -- seen on slahsdot

Vegetable Empire

• Our battle is that of the vegetable empire, vast and slow
• Why is it that most people feel they should all use the same buggy virus prone mail client ?
• The Fax is dead, it should never have become popular
• I find windows really complex, unintuitive and unpredictable. unix is really user friendly, consistent, intuitive, logical and simple.
• you know how there are things about the 80's which just cannot be explained, stone washed jeans, delorian automobiles, the music, the business culture, the (pure evil!) fax machine...
  
  I think in ten years time people are going to ask us what the hell were we thinking.. a vast vegetable empire of brainless drones following a large dinosaur called microsoft. hoards of people too busy to stop for a second an think about the freedoms they are deprived of. Coke drinking, BigMac eating, Wrestle Mania wathching ingorance and mass delusion.
  
  all we will be able to say is.. "it was a natural monopoly", our nature had to change.
  
  

Unix

• Unix enhancements arn't
• Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Unix hack
• Unix is the worst operating system; except for all others. -- Berry Kercheval

Quality

• "We build good ships here, at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships", from an industrial engineering lecture.
• Three Men playing poker and the news arrives that the world is coming to an end..
  one guy says he is going to church to pray
  one guy says he will go to the whore house
  one man says.. "well I'm gona finish the game"
  -- Young Guns
  

Dr.HST (R.I.P.)

• "It's up to us Bubba, we have to keep sin alive"
• He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man
• When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.

• "Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas.  Five years later?
  Six?  It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak
  that never comes again.  San Fransisco in the middle sixties was a very
  special time and place to be a part of.  Maybe it meant something.  Maybe
  not, in the long run...  There was madness in any direction, at any hour.
  If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or
  La Honda...  You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic
  universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
  And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory
  over the forces of Old and Evil.  Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't
  need that. Our energy would simply prevail.  There was no point in fighting
  -- on our side or theirs.  We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest
  of a high and beautiful wave.  So now, less than five years later, you can go
  up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes
  you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally
  broke and rolled back."
                -- Hunter S. Thompson
  			  
  My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty
  nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and,
  instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at
  a hundred miles an hour ... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at
  the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which
  turnoff to take when I got to the other end ... but being absolutely certain
  that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were
  just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that.
                  -- Hunter S. Thompson
  

Random

• A pot of honey is nice, but there is a moment just before you start eating, that's even nicer... Pooh Bear
• Truth is Free, Information costs
• We hate the most in others, what we see in ourselves
• All men think all men are mortal but themselves
• If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. -- Maslow
• Soccer is a gentle man's game played by hooligans
  Rugby is a hooligans game played by gentleman
  Waterpolo is a hooligans game played by hooligans
  
• The best 4x4 is the hired car
• Mistakes are only expensive if you learn nothing from them
• You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education.
  -- Wilson Mizner
• There are two kinds of people in the world. The hustlers and the workers. The Workers never hustle and the Hustlers never work.
  -- Cocktail
• "It requires a very unusual mind to understand the analysis of the obvious" -Alfred North Whitehead
• 'Real Artists Ship' - Steve Jobs
• "I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign."
  - Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
• All things being equal a friend will buy from a friend. All things being not so equal a friend will still buy from a friend.
• Products are not sold anymore, they are bought.
• "thats what you paid for it, it's not what it cost, we still need to find out what it cost us" - Shalow Grave
• "Play by the rules, but be ferocious" -- Bill Bowerman
• "Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess." -- Oscar Wilde
• "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." -- Usual Suspects
• "Congratulations, you just made my list of things to do today" -- Rushmore
• "After all, it is only the mediocre who are always at their best." -- Jean Giraudoux
• "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw
• "The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficeincy. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty." -- Eugene McCarthy
• What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. -- Bertrand Russell, "Skeptical Essays", 1928
• All hail the lucky ones, I refer to those in love -- Mr. Vedder
• People ask me, Ford.. why do you go to those two masseuses?.. and I always say: because one of these days, one of them is gonna give me a massage. -- Andrew Dice Clay
• I'm through with all the hot cars, the hot clubs, the hot chicks -- Ford Fairlane
• The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy. -- Bladerunner
• The most successful innovators are the creative imitators, the Number Two. -- Wired Magazine (1996)
• It's the price you pay for the life you choose -- Used to be on the wall of Caprice, in Camps Bay
• "it is the strongest swimmers who drown." -- from Dangerous Liaisons
• "I never saved anything for the swim back." -- Gattaca
• "The New New Man is perhaps a better father than a husband. He loves his children with a passion that frightens him." - January 2009 GQ
• "Stay hungry, stay foolish." -- The Whole Earth Catalog and Steve Jobs
• "Dammit, Smithers! This isn't rocket science; it's brain surgery!" -- Mr. Burns
• Anarchy means "without leaders"; not "without order". -- V for Vendetta
• "Speak softly and carry a big idea" ~Me
• "What is a mind worth if it can't be changed?"
• "Decision making is the ultimate power."
• "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." -- Ripley
• "Inside every working anarchy, there's an old-boy network." -- Mitch Kapor
• "That's why God created wives, Bob. So that they could show men when they're being assholes." -- The Big Kahuna
• "Heretical thoughts, delivered in a way that capture the attention of the minority--that's the path that works." -- Seth Godin
• "It's hard not to like a man of many qualities, even if most of them are bad." -- Anonymous
• "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature." -- Tom Robbins

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