Things that totally suck – Page 18

Annoying Junk

July 21, 2020 Kim du Toit Marketing / Advertising

I’ve recently been going through my Inbox, deleting and unsubscribing from various news feeds. Why?

Because while I like having news delivered to me, I hate it when I get an email from a news organization that contains not news but something that, if followed to its intended conclusion, will involve money leaving my bank account for someone else’s.

The org that triggered this one was either Washington Times or Patriots4Truth (can’t be bothered to look up which, as I nuked both), which initially promised good things but soon degenerated into spam delivery services. The WT actually has sent me some interesting reports, but the spam : content ratio is hopelessly overcome by the former. So: tchuss.

And FFS: if I do subscribe to your feed, and you send me a link to a serious article, could you at least do away with the need to log into your poxy site when I get there? You called me at my email address. (Which is why I seldom read much at the otherwise-decent Epoch Times.)

And by the way, all those people who want to pay me money to publish articles on this website? Fuck off.

In the first place, I don’t do guest posts, ever. In the second, in only a very few instances are the organizations ones that I would even be remotely interested in supporting (by linking to their articles or websites).

A good example was one which said something like, “We LOVE your website, and especially [link to a post about travel] ! We’d love to publish an article which feeds off that post, as we suspect that your readers are pretty much the same as ours! And we’ll pay you $50!”

Right: considering that I equate going on a cruise liner to some Mexican port with being strapped into a dentist’s chair for ten days… I don’t think so, Scooter. And the online casino sites…? Give me strength.

Now, I don’t even bother opening their bullshit letters. I see them in the Inbox, and delete them unread. Then I’ll get a “follow-up” letter which is also ignored. (If a third letter then comes in, I respond with vitriol, foul language and ALLCAPS.)

My email activity is nowhere close to what it used to be in Ye Olde Blogginge Days (around 400-500 emails from Readers daily back then), but it’s still pretty high (thankee for all the kind words, btw, and keep ’em coming because I love to hear from y’all). But I have to delete around a hundred bullshit emails a day, which bugs me only because it takes time to answer the genuine correspondence — which is why it sometimes takes me ages to respond, and why sometimes a letter will fall through the cracks, so to speak, mistakenly deleted and collateral damage in my irritated frenzy of spam deletion. So write away, guys.

All the rest can FOAD.

Irrelevancy

July 13, 2020 Kim du Toit Sports

Let me see if I’ve got this straight: a team representing a city I hate, playing a sport that I never watch, is changing their name to appease a bunch of woke assholes I hate even more than the city.

Did I miss anything?

Update: I knew I should have waited to post this thread. Now a crap sports magazine I never read has announced the names of the women I’ve never heard of, who are going to pose semi-nude in an issue I’ve never bothered to look at, let alone read.

Proper British

July 1, 2020 Kim du Toit Behind Enemy Lines

This story got a lot of attention a little while ago:

A supermarket security guard has won the internet’s hearts as he stood in the pouring rain to shelter a patient dog. Morrisons security worker Ethan Dearman was photographed braving the elements outside the supermarket in Giffnock, Glasgow on Sunday. The picture, taken by Mel Gracie, 25, shows Mr Dearman holding a green umbrella over golden retriever Freddie, who is relaxing underneath.

And the pic:

Several people have commented that this is a typically-British story. I disagree (and my Brit Readers will back me up on this, I think).

What would have made this a typically-British story would have been if the security guard was fired for not doing his proper job — because if there’s one thing Brits excel at, it’s bossing people around just because they can.

It’s precisely the same mindset behind a parking warden booting an ambulance for parking in a No Parking zone while picking up an injured patient, or a pharmacist’s assistant denying a customer a purchase of a pregnancy test kit during a lockdown, because it’s not an “essential” item.

I love Britain and its people, and I have as many Brit friends as American or South African friends, but this is one character flaw I find particularly tiresome.

Straight-Out Bullying

June 30, 2020 Kim du Toit Business, Terrorism, Two-Minute Hate

Oh, this looks like fun:

Recently Breitbart News reported that six eBay employees were named in federal charges for intimidating critics of the company with a cyberstalking terror campaign, now a recent article from the New York Times outlines how many Silicon Valley companies have been using similar intimidation tactics for years.
…
The Times states that Silicon Valley companies regularly employ “trust and safety” teams staffed with former police officers and national intelligence analysts. Their work includes protecting executives and intellectual property, preventing blackmail attempts, and watching out for fraud and theft. But, in some cases, Silicon Valley’s intense focus on reputation and brand can lead these teams to take excessive action.

Read the whole article for details. Beware the Red Curtain Of Blood (RCOB) that may come over your eyes, as it did mine.

Looks like some corporate executives need a good ball-kicking.

And by the way? The inability of law enforcement to deal with this shit properly is what enables the Tony Sopranos of this world to flourish. And even without that, bullying only works on fearful people.

Don’t be fearful. Just be prepared to be enraged.

Morons

June 27, 2020 Kim du Toit Technology

Several years ago, I had lying around the house some of those “bullet-hole” decals:

…which, for no reason at all, I affixed to the lid of my then-laptop (as I recall, a Gateway), to set it apart from the half-dozen other laptops in the house. All was well, and I forgot all about them until one day I called on a longtime client, and when I opened up the laptop, he chuckled and said, “Another satisfied Microsoft customer.” Statement, not a question.

I told you all that so I could tell you this.

I set up my shiny new HP laptop, transferred all the files and data over, and it all went off without too much fuss other than the Thunderbird email setup, but even that was just a small annoyance.

Next was to set up all the hardware. As I never use a touchpad, only a wireless Logitech rollerball, I went to disable the touchpad — because as we all know, when you type on a laptop, your hand will often brush over the active pad, which moves the cursor all over the place or, more annoyingly, you may hit the “Enter” or “right-click” button by accident, with the expected dolorous outcomes. This is a simple job: you find the hardware under Options, and click the “Disable” button. I say this in the present tense, but if fact, it should be in the past tense because — and here’s the executive summary — with the latest version of Windows 10, you cannot disable the touchpad. There is NO “Disable” button. Oh, you can (sorta) disable it, but every time you reboot, it comes back to life. And guess what? If you uninstall it, it gets reinstalled when rebooting, too.

So off I went to Microsoft’s “troubleshooting” web page to see if I was just being a moron or otherwise dense. I wasn’t.

There were TWELVE PAGES of questions on the topic, for both Synaptics and Elan touchpads, and the executive summary is that, in characteristic fashion, Microsoft’s “upgrades” have somehow just fucked this most simple of tasks in the ass. (Ever tried changing your Windows background to black with Win10? You can’t do that either.)

And the irritation from the users was, in a word, volcanic as fix after fix was tried, and found wanting. Even if you go in and physically delete the touchpad drivers, they’ll be reinstalled automatically either in the upgrade process, or (once again) upon rebooting. The fucking application cannot be killed.

One guy actually ended up going to a geek store and had them uncouple the internal connections so that the touchpad could never work again but, as he admitted, if his mouse ever crashed, he’d be stuck with essentially a brick. (Nobody knows how to use a keyboard to get around Windows anymore, and I think that some of the workarounds have actually disappeared over the years.)

What a goat rodeo.

So… what did I do? I did what a couple of users suggested. Here’s a pic of my new laptop:

And here’s the modified laptop:

Yes, Gentle Readers: I stuck a piece of cardboard over the touchpad. High-tech solution, n’est- ce pas?

One of these days, the bullet-holes in my laptop may not be decals.

Sinking Ships, Rats Leaving

June 24, 2020 Kim du Toit Anarchist thugs, BaconLettuceMayo, Crime, Disaster, Law and Order

Oh, dear: it appears that the double-whammy of the Chinkvirus and the BaconLettuceMayo / Pantifa Lootfest Extravaganza Of 2020 is having an [unexpected!] consequence:

New Yorkers Flee New York

Apartment purchases for co-ops and condos in Manhattan fell by 80 percent in May. The high-end market took an even bigger hit – with sales of those valued between $5 million and $10 million down 90 percent.

That article is just in response to the Chinkvirus. It’s going to get worse as the Pantifa Summer gets going.

Let’s hear it for the Big Apple: