Posts tagged as "rant" - Chris Hardie

At some point, you've probably heard some version of the axiom that it's better to fail quickly and often, because then you learn a lot - about what not to do, and about what does work.  One thing I appreciate about working in the world of technology is that there are lots of opportunities to fail, and there's very little room culturally to keep failing in the same way multiple times.  You either learn your lesson and find ways to do it better the next time, or you're left behind. I can't help...

(Some of my blog posts are constructive, this one is pure rant.) There's a new amusement park ride opening up in town!  It'll take you on a thrilling journey through ups and downs of successful projects, communication failures, happy long-term partnerships, and total failures in competence.  It's called THE CONTRACTOR EXPERIENCE and you can hop on it today by opening up the phone book and calling pretty much any contractor you want to try to get some work done on your home or business! Okay,...

Sometimes you see those weather stories on the evening news where they show a few seconds of airline passengers stranded in some airport looking like hell as they try to figure out how to cope with canceled or delayed flights, and usually you just feel a little bad for them and then move on. At the moment I'm feeling some appreciation for the misery that's displayed in those brief clips, having had a bit of a travel adventure myself: It started with Mark and I barreling through the snow on I-70...

Sound the rant alert. I've written here before about how much I don't like getting credit card offers in the mail, but I've learned to deal with it. Or, I thought I had. Then came the onslaught of offers from the Miami University Alumni Association for a card branded by Miami - "support us and save with our low introductory rate!" Groan. One of those mailings I could have dealt with...but I've gotten four identical offers in the last two months alone - and I didn't even attend Miami. So, that...

Mark Burnett's checklist for Season Two of "The Apprentice" (yes, I watch that crap, leave me alone): Elevate Donald Trump to the status of demigod through not-so-subtle use of regal music and flattering camera angles. Check. Exploit women for profit while using Carolyn's "strong character" to take the moral high ground. Check. Breaking the stated rules of the game, fire someone who isn't technically allowed to be fired that week. Check. Breaking the stated rules of the game, prematurely...

Even though it's apparently technically legitimate, one of my biggest pet peeves is the use of the word "itch" as a verb, as in "he itched the bug bite". Blech. I double over and cringe in disgust. You scratch a bug bite, or an itch, or anything similar. You don't itch it. The itch is what you scratch. If you can just follow that one simple request, we'll get along fine.

Fair warning: this post is pure rant. I have a Sprint PCS phone that I use as my primary, and only, home phone line. There are tons of reasons why I like this arrangement, which I won't go into here, but I've been a loyal, pay-on-time Sprint customer for several years now. Which is why it was maddeningly frustrating to go to make a call today and get a note that my account had been shut off because I was over my spending limit. I went to Sprint's website to see if I could find out how I'd used...

Random rant: In 1970, Intel produced a memory chip, the first, capable of storing 1 kilobyte of data - a couple of paragraphs of text or so. Today, one can obtain memory chips that store many gigabytes of data - enough to hold entire movies, encyclopedias, and more - for mere hundreds of dollars. So, why is it that when I finish pumping gas at a gas station and hit the "RECEIPT YES" button, the piece of crap machine can't store that one simple keystroke in its input buffer long enough that it doesn't...