Category Archives: Stupidity

So, it’s a slow day

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So, it’s a slow day here at work. I’m so bored I can’t even whip up enough mental activity to post something funny. It’s not that I don’t have anything to do, it’s more of a general sense of it really won’t matter if I did it or not that keeps me from getting around to doing anything at all.

I have successfully avoided watching more than one whole minute of the Olympics so far. I like hearing that we have done well, but for my money the Winter Olympics is a lot more spectator friendly. You have hockey which usually gets fun to watch at the Olympics, luge which is beyond comprehension, biathlon or whatever that ski and shoot thing is called, and the ski jumping. It’s all about the truly spectacular crashes, isn’t it?

Those luge guys are nuts. I really can’t figure out the logic behind their equipment. Let’s follow the reasoning, shall we?

1. Hm, ok so I want to go really fast downhill. Check. Let’s get icy tube fastened to a mountain, how about like those bobsled dudes have? They are wimps anyway, riding in an enclosed car.
2. I don’t want to get hurt, that would be bad. I’d better put a helmet on. Check.
3. I hate it when snow gets up your pantleg, it’s all cold and wet, eww. Let’s just use some Dupont Exterior Latex and paint pants right on my legs, that’ll fix that problem. Check.
4. Since I’m riding down the mountain naked, but with a helmet on, I had better ride feet-first. That way the only piece of protection I’m wearing is pointing away from the direction I’m travelling. Good idea.

Yep. At least those skeleton guys get it right. If you’re going to rocket down a mountain at 85 mph, at least do it headfirst for God’s sake.

Ok enough about my recent

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Ok enough about my recent Fedex obsession, here’s a neat article about the printer ink industry. Anybody that owns a printer these days knows that the ink is very expensive for these suckers. It seems that the ink costs more than the whole printer, or almost. Well, you’re right.
The article goes into some of the economics of the ink business. Here’s some of the better lines:

“With a scant 17 milliliters of ink in some cartridges, you end up paying about $2 for a few dribbles. Do the math the other way, and you’re paying about $8,000 per gallon.”
“If you were to fill up the tank of your car with Hewlett-Packard or Lexmark ink, it would cost $100,000,”
“If you filled an Olympic-size swimming pool with ink from HP or Lexmark inkjet cartridges, it would cost $5.9 billion with a B.”

See how it stacks up, in price per ounce:
Printer ink: $60.88
Chanel No. 5: $44.11
Dom Perignon: $4.53
Milk: 3 cents

Now, that’s a revenue model to be proud of, people.

Since I’m more or less

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Since I’m more or less in the IT industry the word “outsourcing” is a point of interest to me.

Here’s an interesting little angle on outsourcing in the restaurant business. In a nutshell, when you are in the McDonald’s drive-through at Girardeau, Missouri and place your order, you are actually talking to someone 900 miles away in a call centre in Colorado. It’s meant to take the errors out of ordering. That’s a little extreme.

Bear with me for a minute here people.

What happens when they ask you to pull ahead and they run your food out to you since it might take too long to prepare? Do they air drop it in using a military chopper? Why would you even need to have a drive through speaker phone anywhere near a restaurant? Just stick them at stop lights anywhere in the city, place an order while you’re waiting for the light to go green, and they’ll deliver it to you at the next stop light. Via dogzooka, or whatever those hot-dog firing air guns they have at hockey games are called. Please remember to open your window before arriving at the light, sir. You don’t want to get any of that vanilla shake on your car’s paint, it will strip it right off. But don’t worry if your limbs are too fat and weak to safely catch projectile Big Macs, flash your lights so that we can have one of our McHomeless People ™ run it over to you through traffic.

Ok, that was a little over the top.

Ok, this is so weird

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Ok, this is so weird I just had to link to it.

Basically it boils down to an inkjet printer that lets you print anything you want on your fingernails. This is really going to revolutionize the tacky fingernail industry, isn’t it? As for me, I’m thinking that a much more practical use will really help this thing take off, like I’m heading to a meeting and I can’t be bothered to actually carry the minutes, why not just print them onto my fingernails? Then my hands are free to carry, um, coffee.

It’s at least saving paper, right? Never mind that I would need to use like font size .2 to fit anything on there. Or I could grow my fingernails out, you know, for legal sized documents. I could even use my toenails. (Wait for it)

For the footnotes.

Hello there. You all know

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Hello there.

You all know me well by now. I like music, or some kinds of music. I have talked before about the music industry. Sometimes I get a little carried away, sometimes I don’t. Today’s chapter is an update on the efforts of the industry to prevent CD copying. The particular focus is on CDs that you buy from a music store, you take home and stick in your comuter and make a copy. Well, you do now maybe, but you won’t be doing that in the future, mister. Nosirree. The music companies are hard at work thinking up ways to prevent you from doing just that. This is to prevent you from stealing music, or rather from getting music from other people that stole it. And this is all because the music companies say that CD sales are way way down due to theft. But here’s Harvard University smart people saying that ain’t true. Huh.

So anyway, back to the story. They are all spending lots of money from their slumping profits to figure out ways to make the CDs we do actually buy a lot suckier. I’m thinking (in my own limited selfish way) that this is punishing the people that buy CDs in order to make the people that don’t buy CDs feel ashamed and sad. That’s it, isn’t it? So who do you think is paying for the fancy new technology on CDs? You don’t think that they might just pass that cost along to…. oh, the people that buy CDs? These guys do.

So, that just leaves us with wondering how long it will actually take from the time a music company releases a CD with copy protection to the availability of a “utility” that will circumvent that copy protection. I’m betting on less than a day, in most cases.

I like to think that I’m not one to flog a dead horse, but come on guys, what’s the point here?

Ah, spam. I take the

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Ah, spam.

I take the time to personally delete every piece of spam that I get here at Vallentyne.com. It’s one of the things I do to honour the senders of spam, in my own little way. The time invested (none at all) in each one of these little messages too often goes unrewarded. Mostly I end up with only an impression of the content based on the subject line. Usually it’s the standard stuff: porn of all kinds, relationship hookups (more porn), weight loss, body modifications of one kind or another, gas prices, mortgages and other financial scams, I’m sure you’re familiar with most of them.

Recently I noticed a small subset of spam coming in with a pretty funny twist; offers to become ordained ministers within 48 hours. Now there are a few questions that come to mind: What do they actually do that takes 48 hours for you to become an ordained minister? What kind of person would want to become a minister on a whim based on an email message? What happens after you pay (lose your money) and 48 hours passes? Do you get another email message that says, Whammo! you have been hit with the divine light, and guess what, you’re ready to go and spread the word. The text of the message is especially good:

As a minister, you will be authorized to perform the rites and ceremonies of the church!
Perform Weddings, Funerals, and Perform Baptisms Forgiveness of Sins and Visit Correctional Facilities

First off, what church exactly are we performing rituals and ceremonies for? And then the best, “Visit Correctional Facilities”. I’m sure I don’t want to know what kind of access any old minister can get to a correctional facility, and neither do you.

Still, that’s good stuff right there.