THE CAT’S PAWS

There are a couple of scenarios of life that I delve into knowing that there’ll be potential agonizing consequences. One involves a myriad of unspeakably horrible retributions I gift myself by interacting with my children’s mother. My oddball demeanor and personality come to you courtesy of her. The other is more tangible, more present, more concrete, but nonetheless full of potential pain and shame. I speak of the dozens–no hundreds–of attempts I’ve ever made to actually prepare a DVD player to interact properly with a television set in such a way that viewers can actually watch a movie. The latter experiences, combined with the former, have tremendously shortened my life expectancy. A long series of crushing defeats will do that to any man. Women generally don’t delve into these realms of life, so as far as I’m concerned, they can go ahead and live a great period of time longer than us men. (sigh) Oh well. Nursing homes aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. (more…)

The team at Google should know better than to roll out a blog/photo sharing blog platform with unnumerable untested script errors. Posting requires the force of Mike Tyson’s in-his-prime hammer punch. There is a chat site attached to it for attempted-and-failed user attempts to howl in, but the sheer immensity and scope of all the improperly tested architectural components, simply to post pic-laden blogs for the web, are too vast to encapsulate in just one dialog box. Error reports continually burst new registrants’ bubbles, and I heartily recommend that users stay well clear of this monstrosity of mistakes. (more…)

I’ve never liked the idea of it. We had a large plant with quite a few guys that weren’t particularily literate, let alone adept at sitting at a computer.

Yet here they were, being force-fed (by me, their boss) the ‘easy’ new on-line enrollment for health insurance. (more…)

A couple of months ago, Elvis Costello from stage assured us that British television is still sadder n’ ours, but I don’t buy it. That is simply impossible to imagine.

‘Fear Factor’. ‘Amazing Grace’ (pass the head bandana, please), ‘American Idol’…

…and loads of other crapola on American quasi-network TV. (more…)

This company’s famous for the problem that few, if any, users understand. In short, buying and using Hewitt-Packard printing products is a (emotional) health hazard.

The crux of the problem? Innocent enough. Running out of paper during a print job. The results are nearly fatal to the human user, who risks a stroke and/or heart attack from strain and agonizing frustration. (more…)

I’ve noticed it during the last year-and-a-half or so, and so have you. You may or may not regard it as you (literally) stumble through this problem, but you’ve noticed it just the same and go through the same hassle I’ll describe here.

Say you’ve went to a site for information. The next page you need to go to is a bum steer; it doesn’t provide you with answers to the questions you have. (more…)