The Angry Drunk

I’m declaring a zero tolerance policy towards the willfully ignorant, the terminally self absorbed, and the criminally selfish. To take a page from the author David Brin, I am part of a civilization, and so are you. What does that mean? It means that responding to the issues of the day with facile responses such as “the government’s always been corrupt,” or “why bother the election is fixed,” or similar tripe is no longer acceptable. Slightly more acceptable is commentary that adequately exposes the commenter as being an dick, who’s only out for their own interests. Such people are evil; but mocking them amuses me. In short, if you aren’t ready to join the rest of the human race, Fuck Off And Get Off My Planet.

August 30th, 2008 | Tags: FOAGOMP, Politics | Category: Posts |  Print This Post | Comments (24)

Before getting started here I want to make a few things clear. I do not like the Clintons; neither Hillary or Bubba. I’m firmly of the opinion that they, and the Democratic Leadership Council that they represent are, in many ways, nothing more than “Republican Lite.” Having said that, if the situation was different and Hillary had cinched the nomination, not only would I be voting for her in November; I would be enthusiastically campaigning for her the whole way. Not because I like her or dislike McCain, not because of any “loyalty” to the Democratic party, but out of loyalty to the United States of America. Because I don’t think that the lower and middle classes of this country can survive even another four years of the criminally inept “leadership” that the real Republicans bring to the table.

Now, given that, I have to say “thank you” to Hillary for the speach she gave last night at the Democratic National Convention (text here). It couldn’t have been easy for Senator Clinton to swallow her pride and deliver the rousing endorsement of Barack Obama that she did. And have no doubt, it was an endorsement; regardless of how the Old Media Douchebags and Neocon pundits will attempt to spin it. Here is one small quote that sums up, for me, the point:

I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?

This is the bottom line. Vote for Obama. Not because he’s black and that’s a nifty narrative, not because you’re a Democrat and are toeing the party line, not because he has the powers of a magical hobo and can heal the sick and farts rainbows. Vote for Obama because the alternatives are all too clear, and all too terrifying.

August 27th, 2008 | Tags: old media douchebags, Politics | Category: Posts |  Print This Post | Comments (23)

I’m going to take a quick break from Apple and New Media Douchebag related topics to point out some Old Media Douchebaggery. I don’t follow sports much (read, “at all”) but I can spot some dipshit logic as well and anyone, so this piece by Alan Abrahamson at nbcolympics.com caught my eye. The bottom line is that some Jamaican cat named Usain Bolt broke some world records. Apparently this dude is really fast. The part that I want to highlight is this.  After questioning whether Mr. Bolt is under the influence of anything more powerful than some tasty jerk chicken, Abrahamson writes:

And while no evidence of any sort has surfaced to suggest he’s not, it’s naïve not to wonder how Bolt is able to run so fast. Because no one in the history of human beings, from the first primitive soul desperately trying to outrun a saber-toothed tiger to the sophisticated races of our times, has ever run as fast as Usain Bolt has run at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

Fuck me running! Isn’t that the point of breaking a record? Apparently, in Alan’s mind, doing anything more competently than a neanderthal is suspicious. Anyway, we all know that there only one real performance enhancing drug. Everything else is ashes and dust.

August 20th, 2008 | Tags: old media douchebags, sports | Category: Posts |  Print This Post | Comments (11)

A couple of posts back I went on one of my semi-annual rants about “social networking” and the fact that the New Media Douchebag contingent that most promotes “social” technology is the group that least gets it. The group of friends that I mentioned in that previous post is a great example of people using “social networking” (in their case MySpace) to enhance, rather than replace actual relationships. For us, MySpace is basically nothing more than a community message board, where we can post pointless little messages or coordinate a happy hour. The real relationships are based in the real world.

There is another group of friends that I have that are utilizing “social networking” (again in the form of MySpace). This group is orthogonal to the first group I mentioned, but they illustrate the other way that services like MySpace and Facebook can actually act to bring people closer rather than act as a way for marketers to gather vast audiences. This group is comprised of people whom I have know, who I still consider friends, but who have drifted out of my life for one reason or another. MySpace is giving us a fairly simple way to reconnect to those people who we may not have been able to otherwise. The irony is, neither group would be able to tell you if a “Scoble” was a blogger, or a skin rash.

Shameless Plug Time

One of the friends who has recently reconnected with me via the intartubes is trying to get a catering service off of the ground. So, I’m going to provide a little link love. If you’re in the Reno area please take a look at Catering Chrissy’s. The website is a little raw at the moment, but it should be getting fleshed out shortly.

August 19th, 2008 | Tags: friends, Personal, social networking | Category: Posts |  Print This Post | Comments (3)

MacRumors is reporting that some bunch named the American Customer Satisfaction Index have ranked Apple at the top of some customer satisfaction survey. But wait, I thought that Apple was doomed by it’s horrible hubris to a fate worse than corporate death. Oh, that’s just what the doucheblogs want us to think. In reality, the average consumer probably hasn’t even heard of the majority of the issues that we’ve all been nattering about for the last few months.

Let me tell you a story…

Once upon a time, when I was at EarthLink, I was part of the team that was in charge of data gathering and reporting for customer satisfaction survey data. This means that, among the various unpleasant things I was responsible for, I had not only access to the compiled survey return data but access to the raw stream of survey returns. Of particular note was the survey comments. Based on the comments that we were getting back, it was obvious that EarthLink was possibly the worst company on the face of the planet, and we should all kill ourselves out of embarrassment (a thesis that I’m not exactly disputing).

Now, here’s where it gets amusing. The last year I was with the company, EarthLink won a prestigious customer satisfaction award. In fact, we won that award every year I was there, but this year I was on the panel that got to review the results. It was amazing, these customers seemed to think that we excelled in the very areas that our own internally gathered customer satisfaction data said we sucked ass in. Of particular note was email availability. I’d estimate that while I was in Tech Support, we never went a day without at least 1% of our customers not having email problems (sound familiar), but the external survey group rated us higher than all of our competitors in that regard. What could have caused the discrepancy?

The answer is obvious once I tell you how we gathered our internal survey data. We gathered survey data by sending a survey to every customer who had contacted Technical Support or Customer Service. Simply put, we were surveying a population that was skewed towards people who were pissed off at us.

So, what is my point here? Simple: the douchebag bloggers with their 50 ways to diss the iPhone hit pieces, and the poor saps complaining about their valid, but fairly rare issues on Apple discussion boards, and the borderline criminal “analysts” with their FUD laden speculation reports are about as representative of the actual body of Apple customers as I am of the mass of Hannah Montana fans. It’s time for the blogokleinbottle to understand that.

August 19th, 2008 | Tags: Apple, blogorama, iPhone | Category: Posts |  Print This Post | Comments (3)

Hey kids, got this one via the whiny fuckers over at The Consumerist under the delightfully wrong title of AT&T Won’t Honor iPhone Price Announced In Its Own Press Release. The long and short of it is that our Douchebag of the Week contender “Rom” wants an iPhone 3G, and he doesn’t want to pay the unsubsidised price, even though he recently bought a BlackBerry from AT&T too. Hey, chucklefuck, wake up! This is how the subsidized phone trade works. The sooner you dips realize this, the sooner I can stop mainlining Pepto Bismol. I guess I can’t be too hard on Rom though, he is a Ferengi, and we all know what cheap fuckers they are.

(Via Consumerist.)

August 18th, 2008 | Tags: Apple, douchebaggery, iPhone | Category: Posts |  Print This Post | Comments (1)