Entries Tagged 'Rant' ↓

Ya know - I’m all about “the little guy” and, hey, fair trade sounds awesome… but not if it fucks me.

I guess I’m selfish but here’s the deal…

So, it’s not that I hate fair trade; I’m just annoyed at the the coffee shop down the street from Fuzz. They have a great staff, awesome coffee but they also have a pesky $5 minimum for credit card purchases. WTF is that about? Also, as far as I know merchants cannot institute a minimum… it’s not allowed in their contracts.

I, like a ton of my friends, never have cash (why the fuck would I bother going to an ATM?) and rely on my debit card. Hey, “Visa it’s everywhere you want to be”… right? This $5 minimum screws me about 3 or 4 times a week. A cup of coffee costs < $2 but I gotta buy some other bullshit to get to the magic $5 figure: I have a stockpile of Naked Juice at the office.

I get it; CC transactions cost the merchant $. I’ve done a ton of e-commerce stuff as an engineer and know more about CC transactions than I ever wanted to. But still, it’s fucking annoying.

As much as I hate to say it, God bless Starbucks. The coffee’s nowhere near as good and hearing the cashier scream “grande, non-fat, 2 pump mocha” to the barista is annoying as fuck but, on the flip side, they’re more than happy to swipe my AMEX for $1.85. Convenience is king… for me at least. Plus, their margins can handle the CC fee. I mean, how much does a cup of coffee actually cost them (minus fixed costs & wages)?

I wanna support the little guy but if there was a Starbucks within walk distance I’d definitely go there instead. I’ll trade coffee quality for convenience any day… millions do this every morning.

Dear “the little guy”,

Help me help you

Love
Arin

PS: this whole rant has little to do with fair trade itself. It just seems like the private shops support fair trade the most and they’re the one’s (IME) most likely to have these retarded minimums for CC purchases.

Why do people use an Office app (word, excel, powerpoint etc) to jot down shit that a standard text editor could easily handle?

Please… if you’re just writing down something quick and sending it to an engineer to check out don’t waste our time and RAM by using MS Word when an email or a plain text file would suffice.

I’m killing some time before I head out to see Nothington at the Bottom of the Hill so I decided I’d blow a few minutes on YouTube. As I started clicking through some videos I notices their new, bigass ads.

What the fuck is this shit? I dunno why, but I feel all violated. I always felt that one of the highest value parts of the page (obviously, after the video itself) is the box where you can read the description, see who posted it and get your hands on the HTML you need to embed this thing somewhere else.

This placement is stupid for a few reasons:

• Like I said, they demote the contributor. Especially if this is original, user generated content… aka UGC (i hate that acronym BTW). If I was posting some original content I’d be a bit upset.
• It pushes down the EMBED code. This is their viral stronghold; why would you fuck with that? Ya, some people “know” the site now and will assume that real estate has moved but there’s a ton of newbies (my dad for example) and not-so-smart people out there that will trip over it.
• The “More from” and “Related Videos” sections got pushed down too… again, more valuable stuff got “demoted” and possibly pushed below the fold.
• plus its this big fucking eyesore

I guess you gotta start making $ off your $1.5 billion investment but c’mon. This is stupid.

Here’s my suggestions… move that fucking thing. I dunno where but somewhere, anywhere. Maybe text-link ads under the video instead of some video ad that I don’t wanna see slapped right next to the video I’m trying to watch.

While you’re at it…. You know those “Related Videos”… sometimes they’re not so related. That’s fine… but what would rock is if they’d put an AJAX driven search field right above those suggestions. See you’d get this:

While I’m watching my video I could do some searches and essentially create a 4 or 5 item playlist, on the fly, before the initial video’s even done playing. Now, that’s value. I’d love that. That could increase time on site quite a bit… then maybe, with more time on site per user, you’ll have a different story to monetize and can ditch those eyesores.

Thanks!!!
xoxo
Arin

I have my iPhone all setup etc (more on that some other time maybe) and just about everything is A-OK except one thing is fucking pissing me off. I’ve had this same issue with the Ipod/iTunes as well. This issue is string trimming…

Currently some contacts in my Contacts List on my iPhone are indented by 1 space. Now, i checked thru these entries on my Mac’s Address Book and none of these entries have a leading space character. None of them. But still, on the iPhone some contacts have this little indent going on. Kinda looks like this:

 Ryan Abcdefg
  Ryan Bcdefg
 Ryan Cdefg
  Sam Blabla

Why the fuck is this happening? I trolled around the web and found someone in the Apple Forums with the same problem. They insist that their Address Book doesn’t have any leading space characters for any of the offending entries. BTW, The forum thread has no proposed solutions.

Now, I stash my contacts in a few places and sync them all up to Plaxo. I’m using Address Book on both my work and home MacBooks, some contacts that are created on my phone and a bunch of others I sync to Plaxo from my Yahoo! account. And somehow, while setting up my iPhone, iTunes asked me if I’d like to import contacts from Yahoo! as well. So, that leaves a few points of fuck up failure here. I’m guessing one of these sync points left/inserted an “invisible” character in either the prefix, first name or last names fields that’s manifesting itself as an “indent”.

I’ve had a similar issue with iTunes and the iPod. I’ve seen multiple entries for the same artist… its always just been the same artist name with trailing whitespace. So “Bad Religion” vs. “Bad Religion ”. Here the solution is easy because your can edit the ID3 tags of multiple songs at once using iTunes. Now, this new iPhone issue of mine is not as easy to fix…

Last night I went thru almost all of my contacts and made sure that their first and last names did not have any leading spaces. After that i synced the iPhone to my machine and nada; the contacts on the iPhone still had the indenting BS going on. Funny enough, the list of contacts on the Mac itself did not have any of the whacky indenting going on - just on the phone.

This leaves me pretty confused. I’ve edited names on the iPhone itself to no avail. The edit screen for a contact shows no leading whitespace… regardless I cleared out a couple contacts’ names and reentered them and even this didn’t fix the issue.

I guess I’ll write a script to plow thru my Address Book database tonight and see if I can find any whacky data.

But, seriously… why doesn’t Apple just trim the fucking strings? Maybe the iPhone bullshit is a bit more complicated (assuming crazy characters are at fault) but the iTune thing is just lame; just trim the fucking string upon saving data.

Bleh, hopefully I’ll have this shit squared away tonight.