The Ford Excursion : 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 is what Caligula would drive if he were alive today. It's a truck which had no other purpose but 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 gasoline.

Powerpoint : The final victory of style over substance, of the medium over the message. The world managed to ignore this bloated piece of shit until it was "integrated" into Microsoft Office at which point every presentation had to have 27 colors, 14 typefaces, and 7 different animations to distract you from the fact that it had absolutely nothing to say.

True story: I once called a secretary at a big computer company (no longer in business) to ask for directions to one of their facilities. "No problem" she said "I'll email them to you." 5 minutes later a 400KB document showed up in my inbox in a format that my version of Powerpoint couldn't open at all. (don't even get me started on how big a dipshit you have to be to invent a file format that's not at least partially backward-compatible). After a few nips and tucks with Unix tools I was horrified to find out that the actual text of the directions was fewer than 400 characters! Thanks to our friends at the software monopoly we all have to suffer a 1000-to-1 inefficency.

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.

Got anything smaller?

Another variation on this is "got 4 cents?", but either way it really bugs me. I'd like to reply:

Yes, but I'd like to use a $20 for this purchase if it's not too much trouble. Gee, I'm really sorry that I can't buy something from you in a way that's convenient for you.

...but usually I just mumble "sorry".

-- TobyCabot - 02 Jan 2001