zhasper.com

Dear Mr Palmer,

A) Either your blog's comment feature is broken, or navigation links to it have been misplaced. Please fix, so that I don't have to continue commenting here.

B) You are a spammer. You admit that you merrily sent spam on its way into around five user's inboxes - spam that you know appears to come from you, spam that you know is definitely unsolicited and unwanted. This makes you a spammer. The fact that you seem to think that sending this spam to users was somehow getting back at either the authors of the spam, or the writers of the spam blocking tools, only makes this worse.

C) You complain that "but the people whose job it is to write, maintain, and run spam software don't [know that source addresses are forged and there's no point replying to them]". If you'd take two seconds to think instead of sending spam and then blogging while enraged, you'd realise that this is patently false. The authors of these tools are trying to ensure that, in the case they've blocked legitimate email, it can be allowed through. This *requires* that they assume the From: address is not forged.

Please stop and think next time before you angry-blog.

Dear SMH,

Please, please stop employing monkeys and start employing people who understand basic rules of English grammar.

No. "Three year olds" is simply plural, there's no possesion being described here - therefore no apostrophe.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised - this is the same publication that talks about "cop cars" on the front page.

Dear Myer,

It's great that you've got a website where I can track my points balance.

It's great that you're using open source.

It's great that you're pretending to care about me, by personalising the site based on my recent activity.

But do you really think that inspiring slogans like "This is the ALTERNATE message" are going to make me feel special? You really think that "OpenCMS resource /myerone/content/myprofile/my_summary" is going to persuade me to spend more money with you?

Please, try again.

Ber.

The above is what greets me each and every time I reboot and log in to my work desktop.

I can't get rid of the blurry thing. I can't "Install now", because to get to Teh Intarweb requires going through a proxy, and getting through that proxy requires authentication. The updater fails to do both of these (it might do the former, it definitely doesn't do the latter), so it fails to update, and instead reminds me next time I reboot.

I hate programs that do this. Proxies exist, some require authentication. If your app can't deal with that, your app will break for a large fraction of people.

Firefox, I'm looking at you. All too often, Firefox will present me with a notification about updated addons as I'm starting it - a notification that I didn't ask for, I only wanted Firefox to start. It offers me a button that says "update now" - but if I click it, it doesn't read its own proxy settings, but instead it times out and fails to get any updates.

Sony-Ericsson, I'm looking at you. I'm now on my second sony-Ericsson phone. In order to update the firmware, one has to download a small executable, which then downloads the real update. This program thus requires (a) a Windows machine, (b) admin access to the windows machine, and (c) unfettered access to Teh Intarweb. The only Windows machine I have available is at work, so that rules out (b) and (c).

Gah.

(PS. Background is a beautiful picture of a carpenter bee in flight. It's a pity the bee is covered by the noxious popup in the screenshot :( )

When it doesn't allow comments.

Grr.

Oi, Erik, I'd comment to let you know that I've responded to you, but you won't let me. I couldn't be bothered emailing, because I'm tired and want to go to bed. Hopefully your google-fu is working and you somehow detect my post.