fwaggle.org

I’m not sure, but I think the average YouTuber might be borderline retarded. Personally, I try and avoid the comments section on videos, because every time I indulge in reading them I feel dumber for having done so.

It’d be nice if there was a way of filtering slideshows out the way Flickr lets you tag screenshots so they can be excluded. Hey dumbasses: this is a video, this is fucking not. In fact, dear reader, if you want an exercise in anger management… try to find an actual video clip of the famous Simpsons song “See My Vest” that isn’t some dumbass slideshow.

Which brings me to my next rant – the re-posts. It’s not enough that one douchebag puts exactly 11 images to 60 seconds of audio and calls it a “video”, it’s that two hundred and fifty other dumbasses will come along and think they can do the same thing better, assuming they don’t just out and out steal it and re-post it verbatim.

I guess that’s my major gripe about YouTube, is that people think they’re contributing stuff when they’re really not. Now I’m not perfect, most of my contributions are formulaic gaming music videos which are now missing the audio. Exactly one of them is informational, and another video I uploaded is black and white footage of my dog. I’m not exactly an internet superstar, and I don’t pretend to be.

But people who re-post shit like a certain auto-tuned “song” so they can get views to their channel instead of the person who should be rightfully collecting them; to the 13 year old who thinks they’re going to be famous for doing nothing but cursing on camera, and to their parents who think it’s okay and/or that anyone other than internet pedophiles are interested in what your kid has to say; and of course to the people who post slideshows in the guise of video…

… go die in a fire.

My phone is off-contract on August 10th, which is pretty exciting for me. I thought I would wait all the way through until my contract was up, because then I’d qualify for “new every two” – a much touted feature when we’d originally bought our handsets. Apparently they took that feature away from sub-lines “quite some time ago”, so I wouldn’t qualify for it anyway.

So I decided to call up on Thursday, after Sabriena watched one too many videos on the “Droid Does” website. The glowing red allure of giant oversized novelty pulse oximeters had their tractor beam trained on her, and she was really excited about the idea of it. She couldn’t understand why I wanted one, and then she watched the videos of all the neat stuff they can do.

So I’m on the phone with a Verizon rep, knowing full well even if I ordered them that day, it wouldn’t ship until the 4th… then I was told no way, no how, I would have to wait until the 10th to re-up my contract. I can’t order the phone right then and jump the inevitable queue, I would have to actually call back on the tenth.

I was a little bummed, but today I decided to call back and bug them again – maybe being a little closer to my freedom date they’d be more inclined to put the lasso back on me for another two years. Today, they offer me some “special upgrade offer” where I can order one today and blah blah blah. Awesome, so I place the order – and now they’re back-ordered until the 18th.

So I’m a little butt-hurt I’ve got to wait an extra two weeks because they took three days to offer me a deal that any salesman worth his salt would have offered someone who was two weeks away from being able to switch carriers anyway.

I had a brief exchange with someone today over the use of the internet meme “<object|adjective>fag”, in which it was basically asserted that it was homophobic of me to use it.

To the offended party, first let me say if you’re actually a homosexual and felt offended, I’m deeply sorry. It wasn’t my intention. If you’re not (and I think this is the case), in my mind it’s just another example of people taking offense to something that doesn’t affect them personally.

Assuming for the moment that I meant offense by the term, or even that I simply implied homosexuality with the term (it should be noted that in the typical use of the meme, describing someone as homosexual would involve calling them a “fagfag” or a “gayfag”, and that this is not redundant),  and you’re not… are you offended that I implied you were, or are you offended that I made the assertion without knowing either way?

It doesn’t matter, because I’m not the least bit homophobic, or racist for that matter. My feelings on both subjects are exactly the same: we need to spend far less time than we do thinking about things which are irrelevant, namely, that which makes us different. Race, skin-pigment, and of course sexual preference are no more related to intelligence, morals or any other social measurement than the color of your hair or how long your middle finger is in relation to your index finger.

Hate is a stupid feeling, particularly when rooted in something a person can do nothing about such as skin pigment or sexual preference. It’s the refuge of neanderthal types, ignorant people who have no place in society. In a sense, memes like “ps3fag” serve to help defuse the negative connotations associated with the word – when most internet-savvy people hear the word “ps3fag”, they automatically start thinking of someone who plays a PS3, or perhaps a PS3 fanboy. Unless the person hearing the term is a complete idiot, they very rarely associate it with a homosexual who plays a PS3, and certainly not someone who became a homosexual from having played a PS3.

In a similar sense with “gamers” copping a bad rap recently in the media because a huge percentage of them have used the phrase “that’s so gay” to describe something unfavorable. It’s a meme… an idea that grew organically by exploding in popularity through imitation.

When a World of Warcraft gamer hears that Blizzard are planning on showing other players their real name and exclaims “that’s so gay”, they’re merely expressing displeasure. They’re not insinuating that having your real name exposed on the internet without your express consent is akin to a tender embrace between two consenting male adults. The usages of the words are about as related as the phrase “dark forces stand ready” is related to people of sub-saharan african descent – which is to say, not at all, unless you happen to be at a Klan meeting.

There is of course the small chance that some folks will feel empowered by the use of such terms (referencing a metafilter post RE: the Blizzard fiasco), because they actually do feel the same way and think you do too. But honestly, there’s really no changing these people. They think the way they do because they’re too stupid to think otherwise, so for that reason a racist will always be a racist and a homophobe will always be a homophobe even if they’re in a sea of opposing opinion, and nothing will ever change that. Using the term “newfag” is no more encouraging to the homophobe than breathing next to someone is encouraging them to breathe.

Is it crass? Sure, but no more so than saying any given off-color word of your choice (ask the late George Carlin for a list of them), nor is it any more crass than making a blond joke (in fact probably less-so, because blond jokes are typically targeted at people who are in-fact blond).

Of course I’m not trying to say that such words should enter the lexicon of polite conversation in these definitions, but it should be noted that gaming circles, social networking, and other places aren’t typically places for “polite conversation” anyway. I certainly wouldn’t go up to my grandmother at a family reunion and refer to her as an “oldfag”, but that’s not to say that I wouldn’t address a friend older than I who’s huffing and puffing while we’re out playing Paintball as such.

In the context of gaming (and social networking, given that I’m married and not cruising for members of any sex) – it’s simply none of my business who you like to physically express desire for, so none of my comments should be taken as assumptions of such.

If you’re a homosexual, try not to take offense when a gamer exclaims “that’s so gay”. By using the term in a negative sense they’re not necessarily implying that being gay is a negative thing any more than being happy would be a negative thing. There are exceptions, of course, but they don’t deserve your attention, much less your outrage.

There’s some really goofy behavior in software these days – it’s enough to make you scream. Go ahead, do it – I’ll wait… there, doesn’t that feel better?

Thunderbird 3 is quite annoying at times, but on the whole it’s rather nice to use. My main annoyances are it won’t save my settings to keep the message pane closed (I hate automatically reading every mail I click on, sometimes I want to leave things unread but move them around, for example)… every time I restart it I have to hit F8 to get rid of the message pane again.

Another thing that bugs me is the behavior of GMail’s “All Mail” folder – to be fair, there’s bugs about it, the Mozilla team are trying hard to figure it out, and it’s probably GMail’s fault for not really following the IMAP specs… but basically I get notified twice of every new email, once for the root folder and once for “[GMail]\All Mail” – despite the fact [GMail] is unchecked for “check this folder for new messages”.

But the real doozie probably has to go to Visual Basic… yes, I started doing a little more lately, mainly because Sabriena wanted an app built and VB’s the quickest and easiest way for me to bang one out. Anyway, I’m probably doing something wrong, but suppose the following:

Dim strSomething as string
strSomething = "a"
If IsNumber(strSomething) And Int(strSomething) > 0 Then
Debug.Print("Something: " & Int(strSomething))
End If

First of all, I’m not entirely sure why typecasting a string to an Integer has to throw an exception if it contains non-numeric data – to my knowledge atoi() et al work okay if you send them “123a”, it’ll return an integer equal to 123, won’t it?

Anyway, the issue I was having is in most language I’ve ever tried, if you have a conditional and the first condition is false, the rest of the conditional isn’t evaluated. You can do things in C like “if ((someptr = malloc(8)) && strcpy(&someptr, “omfg hi”))” and if the malloc() fails then the strcpy() will never be executed.

VB fails spectacularly in this respect – in the above example the IsNumber() is completely useless because it will try and typecast the string to an integer anyway – throwing an exception. The only solution I found is to do a nested If, with the typecast inside the If block for IsNumber(). This works and throws no exceptions.

I’m sure the reason this hasn’t been fixed is that there’s probably some retarded programming out there that relies on this behavior, and the shitstorm will be bigger than it would if they just left it.

Being a moderate in such a polarized political climate as the USA sucks. I think mainly it has to do with how ignorant most people are to how much the two-party system sucks… everything is “us vs them” on every issue.

If I say how much I can’t stand the neo-conservative stance of the current republican party, I’m painted as a socialist lefty with no work ethic or family values. If I say I think Obama was a fraud and there’s absolutely no change going to accompany his presidency, that he’ll just do every damn thing the democrat party’s done – well then I might as well be a churchie redneck with a mullet.

If I say that safe-sex education (in addition to the continued use of abstinence encouragement from parents, I don’t think anyone’s suggesting we don’t tell our kids not to do it) is important in keeping the numbers of unwanted pregnancies down, well apparently that makes one a pedophile (I wish I were joking about this one).

If I’m upset because the people who haven’t worked a job in years eat, sleep, watch TV, and just generally live far better than my family – who have struggled and actually for a period been effectively homeless… well then I’m either a callous, heartless person or worse: I’m somehow a racist. Because, you know, all lazy welfare trash are black*, and if you hate lazy welfare trash that means you hate all black people as well.

What sucks about US politics is not entirely unlike ordering cable… if you want one little feature, you are forced into every damn thing that goes along packaged with it. If you want your gun owners’ rights protected, well kiss goodbye your ability to get an abortion should the need arise, your right for two consenting homosexual adults to be recognized to be as happy as the rest of us, etc.

You can’t protect a woman’s right to her own body without ordering the full Nanny-state package along with it. I’m not against abortions completely, but a woman under democrat-only rule has the right to terminate as many babies as she likes… but dog forbid the state execute a convicted mass-murderer, or that I play Grand Theft Auto!

It’s kind of pathetic that with the majority of political discourse, it’s made up almost entirely of two groups of people who believe everything their group tells them is right, and do nothing but sling mud at each other and using straw-man arguments. Kind of pathetic that everyone is either a churchfag or a socialist and that not a single one of us is recognized as being in between.

What’s even more pathetic is that this consumer-culture that abounds in the United States, you’re far more likely to wind up keeping your IQ reading about the latest dumb-ass celebrity gossip, idiots putting tapeworms in themselves on purpose, the whole “hcg diet protocol” thing (because getting off your arse once in a while is un-american, we all want a pill or a shot to make us shit chicken-grease so we can keep eating that KFC – consume consume consume!)…

No, the fact is that anyone remotely intellectual should be interested in politics, but US-politics is so fueled by intellectual retardation on every front that you’re actually stupider from having participated in a discussion… that’s what’s truly pathetic.

Seriously, there’s massive design flaws on our Sony DSC-H3 camera, and it’s starting to piss me off. We mainly bought the thing because it performed really well with macro photography, and despite it being a point-and-shoot you could attach extra lenses to it to better that affect (as well as other things, like a polarization filter for photographing aquariums)… considering that at the time, DSLRs were much more expensive (though within about 6 short months they’d fallen down into our price range, boo!) it was a pretty good deal.

Except that with some shots, the flash is obscured by the lens housing itself. It’s not uncommon at all for many of our shots to have elliptical dark patches covering the bottom border of the image.

The flash is so high, it’s really hard to take tight-spot shots like the inside of electronic devices too. Just today I decided to do a little work on Hungry Hacker and update my article on DVD player repair – I think it’s still relevant and it’s still a popular article despite the fact that they just about give DVD players away in promotional bags at trade shows these days… heck, it costs more for an HDTV converter box than it does for a DVD player, and they have no moving parts!

So anyway, I decide that the old image taken with a crappy USB webcam just wasn’t going to do, so I opened up our old faithful DVD player – the one that just happened to be used for the original article and is now pushing a decade old – and took some real nice macro shots. Except that in almost all of them, some parts of the image are completely dark because the flash is so damn high on top of the camera.

I like to think the final result isn’t a terrible picture, it just makes me grumpy to think how much better it probably could have been.

I hear this crap every day, and it’s pissing me off. Automatic transmissions are bad, ABS is bad, TCS is bad. Just quit it already.

First of all, I would consider myself an automotive enthusiast, albeit a light one… I grew up around things with engines on them, and my inner-geek is intrigued by the workings of all systems, not just those with LEDs and screens. I learned to drive in a manual transmission, and I got my license in a manual transmission.

I think everyone should know how to drive a manual, but that’s where it ends for me. Driving an automatic doesn’t make you less of a man – I’m secure enough in my manhood to get from point A to point B without feeling the need to grab some phallic control lever ever few seconds. Most of the people I see saying this crap are wannabe-racers who feel like they’re driving faster if they rev-out, slam the shifter through the gates and then grip the steering wheel as if they’re about to be rounded on the home turn.

I have to wonder about the genitalia-inadequacies of these types of people “I only drive stick-shifts”… the types of dumbshits who jack off into bags of random ferrari parts and disable the ABS on an otherwise okay vehicle. Don’t even get me started on that.

ABS is there for a reason, and even though every pencil-dicked retard will claim they can out-brake ABS for the most part they’re full of shit. You can’t modulate brakes at the same rate those little servos can, and while there’s some truth in the whole “more parts to break” theory, a well maintained ABS system works good in the majority of panic-brake situations.

Where are these people, unfortunately, right? I don’t particularly have a problem with an adult who owns a vehicle in full disabling (partially or fully) torque management systems. There are times when you might want that extra oomph (or to light up a pair of perfectly good tires) and if you’re a responsible adult who wants to inhale a couple hundred bucks in rubber who am I to disagree. Teenagers who don’t know any better, or adults who haven’t finished paying off their vehicles probably don’t want to be subjecting their drive-train to that kind of hurt.

Cars that parallel park themselves are a definite bad idea. I’m not speaking in automotive-luddite terms here either, but the inability to parallel park illustrates a blatant lack of understanding of the mechanics of driving.

While I’m quick to disown the “driving purists” who seem to want us all to go back to wearing aviation goggles while we drive, we must walk a fine line about understanding how to operate a vehicle… regardless of how “appliance-like” they get, because there’s no amount of technology that can make up for the fact that you’re still piloting several hundred pounds of metal projectile down the road.

But no, we’re not all still driving cars with drum brakes, manual-chokes, wood-spoke wheels and open-diffs. Nope, these “automotive-luddites” are perfectly content to use technology when they don’t feel “doing it old school” can help their manliness. Driving a stick-shift is what real men do, one wheel peels aren’t.

… put nude pics on the internet, other people can see them? Oh my god!

That’s what people are basically saying about Facebook these days. I’m not a big Facebook user, but I do have one – and full disclosure, I know someone who’s workin’ for them temporarily, though that hasn’t changed my outlook on the site.

Nope, apparently, there’s a bunch of really smart (HURRRRR) folks out there who have figured out that you should probably avoid using Facebook if you care about your privacy.

Wow – what an earth-shattering revelation. I guess it’s news to these folks, like you should avoid sunbathing if you don’t want suburn, or avoid working in an asbestos mine in 2009 if you don’t want Mesothelioma.

I shudder to think at the magnificent amount of idiocy it takes to think you can go post everything about yourself on the internet (on a “semi-private” site or not) and then be horrified when it shows up elsewhere on the internet.

Or better yet,the skanky girls (and guys) who put naked pictures of themselves on the internet in a locked photobucket, or something like that. They must rationalize it, “oh it’s only in my photobucket” or something. Stop thinking like this right now.

You’re not posting something “on your facebook” you’re posting it on the internet, using facebook. That’s what’s broken here folks, not Facebook’s care (or lack thereof) for your privacy… the expectation of privacy you have when you post your pixelated genitalia on the internet and the shock you have when it shows up “on the internet” is completely and utterly retarded.

Don’t post anything on the internet if you’re not prepared for everyone on the internet to possibly see it.