Reddnet Scribbles

Last night, a young man claiming to be a U.S. soldier threatened to "hurt" me because he disliked an opinion I had expressed in a conversation with someone else.

In most "conflicts", especially ones that don't quite go to physical blows, there is always a lot of "stuff" that you "wished" you'd said.

While I can't go back and change the confrontation now, the internet does let me say what I should have said after the fact.

So listen up Captain Hypocrite!

Card opposes gay marriage... should I avoid reading his brilliant fiction books? WTF!?!?

The South Carolina DVM expects to use my car's license plate to advertise for the state... we'll see about that!

Recently, I ran across one of the many little spats that develop between bloggers. This time it was between Alastair Rankine of girtby.net and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror. It's the typical spat. One blogger decides that another blogger is no longer writing what they want to read. Rather than just unsubscribe, they write a big public post about why they have decided to unsubscribe and why the other blogger sucks. And, as is typical of these kinds of spats, the blog post starts by talking about how they don't normally slam on people they unsubscribe from... then they slam on them anyway. Sigh.....

For Autism Awareness Day this year I decided to celebrate by remaining very pissed off at the stupidity and gullibility of the average concerned American citizen. Over the last couple of decades, a new pop-cultural trend has arisen. Autism Awareness is just the latest in this line of fads. This one will play out the same as the breast cancer crusade before it. It’s a fraud that will steal large amounts of time, money, and attention from other problems and in the end it'll leave us with no real progress towards the treatment, cure, or even understanding of Autism than we had before. These...

As a programmer, my number one tool for getting out of a tough bind is a quick google search. Developers are chatty, and we have about a million different forums, blogs, wikis, example sites, source projects, etc. When I'm having a problem with my code, chances are that there have been many other programmers that have already found a solution, and some of them probably posted answers online somewhere. But, in any given search, you are bound to get at least a few links to this place called "Experts Exchange". Note: I'm not linking to Experts Exchange... this is deliberate... Nothing about...

Caress (who posted about this too) and I came across this report on CNN yesterday. Since then I've seen it reported at least a dozen other places on TV and around the net. The FDA has issued an advisory designed to needlessly scare the shit out of epileptics and healthcare professionals treating epileptics. According to the FDA advisory , epileptic treatment drugs cause people to commit suicide! Check this shit out: Data from 199 placebo-controlled clinical studies covering eleven different antiepileptic drugs were reviewed and analyzed for reports of suicidal behavior (completed suicides, suicide...

When you think about the U.S. phone system, you have to be amazed! Copper and fiber wires running all over the country connecting nearly every home and business, plus all the equipment in between that makes the magic happen. Its massive and staggering in both scale and complexity. All that infrastructure cost a fortune to create, but it must also be enormously expensive to maintain and keep up with too. So when you think that a phone line only cost between $20 and $30 a month, it really is a pretty sweet price tag. In contrast, cellular networks must be dirt-ass cheap to both create and operate...

Caress made the ultimate statement while playing The Darkness for XBOX 360 the other day. "They really should put a checkpoint at the end of the tunnel!" -- Caress Redd I agree... they really should...

Richard's Braindump: Problems with the new MSDN Download Manager I agree with Richard, the new MSDN download manager is worse than horrid. I've ran into every one of the problems reported but these in particular really chap my ass: Close IE and the download manager closes. It asks you if you really want to close it, but it doesn't matter what you say... it will close anyway. When you re-open it, your download will be corrupt and you'll have to start over again from the beginning. It'll just randomly tell you it can't download because of persistent network problems... and you can't resume because...