The Right Technology for Right Job

Dear Twitterers,

I've been picking up several followers on Twitter lately, which is kind of surprising as I haven't done much to promote it or anything, but I've seen some fundamental flaws in the way the my new followers use their accounts. Using Twitter to post the title and the tinyurl to your latest post is pretty much the easiest way to ensure that I will never ever follow you. If I wanted to know about new posts on your blog I would use interesting technology called "RSS" which not only predates Twitter it also, get this is even compatible with tools that were created for this specific purpose. So yep you kind of screw the pooch on by using Twitter to do so.
Secondly if I want to follow your Twitter posts the way I do not want to do it is by subscribing to your RSS feed for your blog and then get instead of updates about posts to your blog I get summaries of your Tweets.

So yo summarize it I want to read your Twitter posts I'll subscribe to your Twitter stream, if I want to read your blog I'll subscribe to your blog and never the twain shall meet.

Sigh,
DC Dan

PS to subscribe to my blog please send an email to me and I'll add you as a Twitter a friend so you can follow my blog posts and email a link and a copy of the message each time I post.

Yore Two

Dear Internet Users,

There are many things one can do to not look like a complete idiot while online. Here are three grammatical errors I often see.

Yore, Your and You're
Yore means back in the days and is rarely used.
You're is a contraction for "you are" if you can't replace the word you're with "you are" in the sentence then you have it wrong.
Your signifies possession.
Here is a sentence that uses them all remember this to guide you.
You're looking at your yearbook thinking about the days of yore.

To, Too and Two
To is a preposition, it also is used to put verbs into the infinitive tense though if you understood that then you probably don't make that mistake.
Too is used in a couple of ways to mean more in the sense of more than enough or it means additionally.
Two is the number 2.
If it doesn't mean more than enough, additionally or the specific number 2 then use to.
Here is a sentence that uses them all remember this to guide you.
Is it too much to ask that you take the two cats to your sister's too?

Thanks,
DC Dan

Fuck You del.icio.us

I like the del.icio.us service it provides as a nice way to keep bookmarks, but the fucking site does a couple of really annoying things.
1) It doesn't allow your browser to remember your password (yes I know about this though I don't think it plays well with Safari )
2) They have requirements that require a "strong" password, which means the simple I use it on a lot of sites that I don't consider important password won't work.

What the fuck, this is goddamn bookmark site not my bank account.

Rant done.

Grinds My Gears

This is a grinds my gears post to get some things off of my chest to let me vent a bit about annoyances.

1) The bike lane on East Capitol is a lane for bikes, not the Capitol Police hangout lane, not the FedEx/UPS stopping area, not the I'm going to try to slip around traffic on the right lane, not the I'm only stopping at the store for a minute a lane and certainly not the I'm jogging the wrong way down the street with or without my goddamn baby stroller lane. It is a lane for people on bikes.

2) Going one floor on the elevator is never acceptable unless you are carrying something heavy this goes double when the stairs are right next door to the elevator.

3) When you are on the Metro and you decide to stand in the doorway the least you can do is know which side of the train the majority of the stops are on. An axiom to this is if you are the dumb ass who doesn't get out of the way when people are trying to squeeze through the limited space left because of your lack of consideration, you don't have the right to complain about how people are being rude and that they didn't say excuse me. To he fucker on the train who pulled this shit at the McPherson stop on Friday, you are lucky you I wasn't slightly more annoyed that day otherwise one of us would probably have ended up in jail and from the looks of it I could probably afford a much better legal defense.

That is all.

Official Declaration

Non-nerd readers may skip this post:

I here by officially declare if your browser doesn't render a page the same way it is rendered in Firefox then your browser is broken until it works like Firefox. The reason for this is two fold.

1. Mozilla is available on pretty much every platform
2. Mozilla has the best developer tools

This is a dogma, so no arguments will be accepted.

Ignorance Follows Not Only Party Line but Religious Ones

Religion—our maelstrom of ignorance

This leads me to often heard "you can't prove there is no god" argument I hear from the faithful; and you know what you are right I can't and I don't claim to, but you can't even come fucking close to proving there is a god, the burden is on you to prove that "He" exists.

Look at it this way, if I told you that eating ice cream made people healthy and would build classical greek olympian bodies you'd ask me to prove it right?
Or if told you that your significant other was cheating on you, you would ask me to prove they were, no? And not take the "you can't prove they aren't" route would you?

So starting with no belief, prove to me that Jesus, Allah or Buddha is right.
If you can you've got a follower but I'm not going on faith, I need evidence.
I want something that proves it is right and I'm going to tell you right now, the Bible, the Torah, the Koran and the Siddhartha Gautama is so full of holes that they can't count as evidence.
and if you tell me that "I need faith and it comforts me", my response is "Fine by me, but you're living in denial and suppressing rage, motherfucker! "

later,
dc dan

PS hat tip to Sam Harris and Kevin Smith

Who Did VECO Piss Off

Oil execs plead guilty in political kickback scandal

While corruption and collusion between oil executives doesn't come as a surprise to me seeing people held accountable for it does.

It also seems apparent that from the brewing scandal around Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that the Department of Justice likely doesn't investigate people the administration likes.

We also know that with Bush and Cheney, that this administration is incredibly linked to the oil industry.

This begs the question who did VECO piss off in order to actually have some accountability?

Douche Baggery

Forrester to government research plans: You're wasting your money

To anyone who has spent any time in the startup tech market, Forrester is "the shit." A good review from them means that your name will be in the all of the industry rags and the you'll be considered "a real company" something that is very important to fledgling startup when looking for credibility and funding

I have worked with Forrester, Gartner and several other industry analysts and my analysis is that they are all pretty much full of shit. Dealing with them I've dealt with, at best, people with sub-par technical skills who haven't really even been through an in house test product implementation (let alone a real world setup of the products they promote) Secondly it seems that the companies that subscribe to their over priced information and pay them a lot to them get better reviews. Thirdly their "analysis" is usually less informative than typing the product name into the Google search box and hitting the "I'm feeling lucky" button. Fourthly they like to throw in random (and I'm betting [.7 to .8]) that theses stats are made up.
Also I've been on conference calls with their vertical experts for products my clients have been evaluating and the time spent with them would have been more productive reading glossy brochures from the company in question (and I'm sure is pretty much the source for their "informative insights") Lastly they list a bunch of corporations that the governments should run like, I'd be willing to bet that this research was somehow funded by these companies.

Listening to these analysts for useful information, let alone public policy direction, is tantamount to taking financial investment advice from the guy walking out of bankruptcy court or looking to a homeless guy for interior design tips.