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Since every other vanity website has a page full of self-indulgent rants, here are a few of mine:
The Ford Excursion | ||||||||
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| < < | This is quite simply the most disgusting vehicle available today. It's vanity, insecurity, gluttony, and lust wrapped in a shiny body and pushed around by a V8 engine. This, folks, is the vehicle that Caligula would drive if he were alive today. It's a truck which had no other purpose than to be bigger than the Chevy Suburban. It's basically a great example of what's wrong with America today: "It's incredibly wasteful, but I can afford it, so why not? It's unsafe for me, but much more unsafe for the poor sap in the VW. I don't need anything nearly this big but my neighbor has a Suburban." The irony here is that many people consider Corvettes vulgar but they cost less to build, buy, run, and dispose of; they burn less gas and pollute less per gallon of fuel burned; and they're much less dangerous to the other drivers on the road. | |||||||
| > > | This is quite simply the (second-) most disgusting vehicle available today. It's vanity, insecurity, gluttony, and lust wrapped in a shiny body and pushed around by a V8 engine. This, folks, is the vehicle that Caligula would drive if he were alive today. It's a truck which had no other purpose than to be bigger than the Chevy Suburban. It's basically a great example of what's wrong with America today: "It's incredibly wasteful, but I can afford it, so why not? It's unsafe for me, but much more unsafe for the poor sap in the VW. I don't need anything nearly this big but my neighbor has a Suburban." The irony here is that many people consider Corvettes vulgar but they cost less to build, buy, run, and dispose of; they burn less gas and pollute less per gallon of fuel burned; and they're much less dangerous to the other drivers on the road. | |||||||
| Vehicles like this are a great argument for $3/gallon gas. If only my income taxes weren't subsidizing your cheap fuel... | ||||||||
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| Scott Mcnealy had it right: powerpoint should be banned in all rational companies. The problem is that he can't even make it happen within Sun. The last time I went to the valley to see a bunch of presentations at Sun they were delivered in, you guessed it, powerpoint. Game over. | ||||||||
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| > > | UPDATE Turns out I'm not alone in my Powerpoint loathing. None other than the guru of information presentation, Edward Tufte, has written a hilarious little pamphlet called "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint." http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint Bottom line, Tufte agrees with me, although in much more convincing prose. | |||||||
Got anything smaller?Another variation on this is "got 4 cents?", but either way it really bugs me. I'm caught in the crossfire between lazy banks whose ATM's only dispense $20's and lazy merchants who don't want to make change. Yes, I do feel like a loser buying a cup of coffee with a $20 but what am I supposed to do? I'd like to reply: | ||||||||
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(ACK) | ||||||||
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| < < | You must have seen them - those little white ovals with three block letters written in them. They're based on the "country of origin" stickers used in Europe to indicate where a car is from, but now they're used for damn near anything and everything. The initial premise was arrogant and snotty ("gee buffy, the great unwashed will see our 'ACK' sticker and they won't know that it's the airport code for Nantucket airport, it will be our little joke, aren't we just the bee's knees!"), but at least it was limited to one pretentious little sandbar off the Massachusetts coast so it was relatively easy to ignore. Somehow, then, the fad spiraled out of control. Now every second-rate town and crappy top-40 radio station is printing the damn things, and people are just stupid enough to plaster them everywhere. | |||||||
| > > | You must have seen them - those little white ovals with three block letters written in them. They're based on the "country of origin" stickers used in Europe to indicate where a car is from, but now they're used for damn near anything and everything. The initial premise was arrogant and snotty ("gee buffy, the great unwashed will see our 'ACK' sticker and they won't know that it's the airport code for Nantucket airport, it will be our little joke, aren't we just the bee's knees!"), but at least it was limited to one pretentious little sandbar off the Massachusetts coast so it was relatively easy to ignore. Somehow, then, the fad spiraled out of control. Now every one-stoplight town and crappy top-40 radio station is printing the damn things, and people are just stupid enough to plaster them everywhere. | |||||||
| Here's a clever enhancement to the original (ACK) sticker: take a Sharpie and add a "t" at the front and a "y" at the back and with any luck the pretentious nouveau-riche social-climbing asshole will drive his Range Rover or Excursion around with people laughing at him for 6 months before he figures out what you've done. | ||||||||
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| > > | UPDATE Ha! I may be a crank but I'm not alone. Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, in his "Mr. Fussy" persona, writes:
Also, use of the bumper sticker "ACK," which cool people recognize as the airport code for Nantucket, will be banned. Instead, ACK-olytes must display the following message in a highly visible place on their Lexus, BMW, or Audi: "Would you like to know how rich I am? I'm so rich that I can afford to summer on Nantucket with Jack Welch, Tim Russert, and John Kerry.""ACK-olytes". Priceless! | |||||||
Software PretenseI was ticked off by a letter to the RISKS digest this morning and I thought that ranting about it here would be less counter-productive than flaming the guy who wrote the letter. Here it is: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/22.06.html#subj5. I have to say I haven't read quite such an obnoxious, elitist, arrogant screed in a long time. Why is it that every time an idea comes along that opens something up to a broad audience it's reflexively trashed by the few who had access to it before? This guy seems to indicate that it's a bad thing that Unix (a very elegant and powerful computer operating system) is now available for use by "diletantes". This makes me sick. The GNU/Linux people look down on Windows people. The BSD people look down on the GNU/Linux people. The Plan9 people look down on the BSD people. The eros people look down on the Plan9 people. Folks, just because something's popular doesn't make it bad! Of course in the case of Windows it happens to be both bad and popular, but the first didn't follow from the second. | ||||||||
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| Watching television has become increasingly frustrating recently, but the most annoying thing I've seen in a long time are the ads for medicines that don't say what the medicine does. "Ask your doctor about Tristatin Chlogycerol." I would ask my doctor if I thought that it would do something useful like make me belch less, but they don't give you any clue what the stuff does, and I'll be double-dog damned if I'm going to ask my doctor about some drug only to find out that it's designed to make you think you're cool driving a Hummer. | ||||||||
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| < < | -- TobyCabot - 02 Jan 2001 - 24 Jan 2004 | |||||||
| > > | -- TobyCabot - 02 Jan 2001 - 29 Jun 2004 Thanks for reading, I feel better now. | |||||||