WTF List

a new way to funnel traffic

Whether you commute to San Francisco for work or are driving to the city for pleasure (b/c it’s oh so pleasurable to walk down the urine scented streets and get accosted by the homeless the city celebrate) there’ s a good chance you will cross a bridge. If that bridge is the Bay Bridge, you are in for a real treat if you enjoy wasting an hour in your car sitting in stop-and-go traffic. It is not just that it is slow, the amount of time it takes is, for lack of a better way of putting it, consistently inconsistent. Time to get through the toll plaza ranges from 5 minutes to well north of an hour.

So let’s look at the problems. First who was the rocket scientist who dreamed up the MacArthur Maze? Who woke up and thought, “Hey, let’s dump three major freeways into some toll booths followed a set of metering lights. What could go wrong?” Add to that two more feeder freeways (24 and 980) that feed the freeways pouring into the Maze. Second, you’ve got different types of lanes for different types of drivers (carpool, cash/FasTrak, FasTrak only, buses/trucks). So you’ve got the traffic from all of these freeways madly scrambling to change lanes in a relatively short distance. What makes all of this more frustrating is that FasTrak is actually just as slow as the cash lanes, even with the cash lanes merging into each other after the toll booths but before the metering lights. This gives us the perfect lead into metering lights. I won’t even comment on metering lights – anyone who has experienced them knows that they cause nothing but extra wear and tear on your vehicle.

building a new parking lot

Finally we are left with the drivers who drive the Bay Bridge. This is the worst part. They take the smoldering ember that is the Maze/toll plaza/metering lights and stoke the flames until we’ve got an out of control wildfire on our hands. What compels these people to act like such complete idiots? The obsessive lane changing has got to stop. wtf? do you think changing lanes every five feet is going to get you there faster? And then there are the jackasses that enable them because they insist on staying 20 car lengths behind the car in front of them in stop-and-go traffic. CalTrans needs to install some type of dividers between lanes to get people to pick a lane and stay in it. What makes these lane changers even worse is that they couldn’t care less about signaling or even be bothered with checking to see if there is a car occupying the space the so desperately need move into. So with that, I would like to introduce a new weekly segment called “wtf bay bridge driver?” Each week we will one of the idiots doing their best to clog our roads and endanger their fellow drivers. Our first wtf bay bridge driver goes to the Volkswagon Golf driver with CA license plate #5GMJ151. We raise this one finger salute in your honor!

jr. rant, travel bay bridge, san francisco, traffic

You f-in greedy bastards. The MP830 printer is a total piece of crap that guzzles ink. Even when printing in black and white it defaults to using color inks. Those flawed chips you put on your ink cartridges that regularly malfunction make the printer massive paper weight on my desk because I can’t print a thing. Are you that desparate to squeeze every last dime out of consumers with your overpriced ink cartridges? Look everyone knows ink is where you make the money – do you have to screw consumers over with products that break trying to enforce your ink cartel. Printer manufactures might as well start an ink cartel like OPEC.

Thanks for totally f-ing me over when I needed to print something Canon. Last time I ever buy one of your products.

jr. companies, products canon, ink, mp830, printers

RIP Billy Mays

We couldn’t care less about about Michael or Farrah or Ed, but Billy Mays? This sucks. Billy Mays was pronounced dead at his home on Sunday morning. We all know Billy from the OxiClean commercials and the Discovery Channel’s “Pitchmen“. He was only 50.

What is truly amazing is that the Shamwow guy, Offer “Vince” Shlomi, is still alive.

jr. people Billy Mays, infomercials, oxiclean, Vince Shlomi

Restricted Call of Duty

Treyarch, how do you mess up one of the best gaming franchises? Call of Duty : World at War has so many bugs and glitches it is ridiculous. I can deal with a lot of them (glitches on xbox live), but the fact that there is a bug with saving games makes me curse the day your company was founded. After spending hours, yes hours, to make it to some of the checkpoints on veteran I need to take a break. My game is saved so I take a break and turn off the machine. A few days later I fire up the old 360 and go to continue where I left off – only wait – what’s this I see?

Save game data is incompatible with the current version of the game. You may continue from the beginning of your most recent mission or exit to the menus.

WTF?! How many months has the game been out and the problem is still not fixed. After some digging through three “official” sites (treyarch, CoD and activision), I found this solution for the save game problem. This unfortunately doesn’t always work. I think today I will skip the video games and go outside and play frisbee with my CoD : World at War disc.

jr. companies, products activision, call of duty, treyarch

tasty business

This one is, dare I say, kind of cool. It definitely made me say wtf? It’s business cards made from beef jerky. The guys at Meat Cards take 100% tasty beef jerky and use a 150 watt CO2 to burn in all of your vital details. They hope to work out the logistics soon so that they can sell this new must have for business professionals. It’s meat for when you meet.

jr. etc., food, products, rave business cards, jerky, lasers

more fun than you can shake a stick at

they already made a game about us. wtf the game on psp is only $12 with free shipping. wonder when they plan on sending a check our way for use of the name? wtf = work time fun… who knew?

jr. products, rave psp, video games, work time fun

e-milyon reasons not to listen

thanks for attempting to ruin another year of broadcasts from WMC. i know WMC was a few weeks ago, but hearing her babble the intro to DJ Times Shortlist reminded me how annoying she is. even if she didn’t say her name every other sentence, she would still be easy to identify by her inane chatter. and i’m not the only one who feels this way - a quick search of her name pulls up petitions to get Emily Tan pulled from WMC coverage. unfortunately, i guess it didn’t work this year. she still managed to interrupt mixes every five minutes with some of the worst interviews i’ve ever heard. i found myself begging my stereo to make her please shut up. to no avail. she just kept talking, mentioning her name , dropping other people’s names and acting like she was a dance music trendsetter. sirius, she seriously needs to go.

jr. music, people, rant emily tan, sirius area, wmc

not the type of home office one dreams of

Oh, don’t you just love the Orwellian schemes dreamed up by politicians to monitor, track and control the masses? Most of which are easily thwarted by true criminals. Case in point, the UK’s £1.2 billion  e-Borders scheme (that’s $1.78 billion for our American readers).

Under this new immigration scheme, every person leaving the United Kingdom will be forced to provide detailed personal information like their home and email addresses, phone numbers, passport information, credit card information and detailed travel itineraries. In order travel abroad (by any means – including swimming the English Channel),  Britons will have to submit the information a day before departure. Fail to comply? Well then you will be facing a £5,000 fine or possible criminal prosecution for not obeying Big Brother.

Oh wait, it gets better! They plan to hold your information for 10 years. Judging by how well governments (in the US, UK or wherever) keep sensitive networks/information secure, we’ve got nothing to fear about this database being compromised.

As Chris Cuddy points out in an article at Travolution, “…this additional Stalinist hurdle to freedom to travel from the UK is not what ordinary travellers seek when planning a holiday abroad…”

What is worse, with all the money thrown at the misguided scheme, it still has serious holes. Like most things having to do with transportation safety, the effort is more for show than actual safety (the TSA’s 60% failure rate is a good example of all show and no substance). e-Borders is not even online and already problems are surfacing. Have dual passports (something fairly common in the UK)? Darn, they forgot to think about how to handle that. According to the Daily Telegraph, “An airline, under the ‘e-borders’ system, would be denied permission to carry the passenger home. Even if a British passport were presented.”

“But wait!” you say, “that is a minor inconvenience if we are all safer.”

“Not so fast,” I say, “that’s where you are wrong.”

Experts like Frank Gregory, professor of European Security at the University of Southampton, are already warning of holes in the e-Borders system. In his report, he states:

There are two key problems with the e-Borders programme. First, it will not reveal if the person matching the identity documents has created a false identity and, second, ‘watchlist’ scrutiny only works if a suspect person continues to use a ‘flagged’ name.

Unfortunately, the e-Borders ship left port long ago with Big Brother at the helm and Stalin as its navigator. The e-Borders scheme starts this year and will become more and more draconian through March 2014, when it is expected to be fully operational.

jr. etc., people, politics, travel 1984, border safety, orwell, travel

and now for something on the light side…

The Center for Disease Control has issued a medical alert about a highly contagious, potentially dangerous virus that is transmitted orally, by hand, and even electronically.  This virus is called Weekly Overload Recreational Killer (WORK).  If you receive WORK from your boss, any of your colleagues or anyone else via any means whatsoever – DO NOT TOUCH IT!!!  This virus will wipe out your private life entirely.  If you should come into contact with WORK you should immediately leave the premises.
 
Take two good friends to the nearest liquor store and purchase one or both of the antidotes – Work Isolating Neutralizer Extract (WINE) and Bothersome Employer Elimination Rebooter (BEER).  Take the antidote repeatedly until WORK has been completely eliminated from your system.
 
You should immediately share this medical alert with your friends.  If you do not have any friends, you have already been infected and WORK is controlling your life.

jr. etc. beer, wine, work

The title says it all. Why is Facebook listing fan pages for totally random crap on the discover people you may know page? I don’t know, nor am I a fan of Chris Pan (Marketer), the Pittsburgh Pirates, The Ellen DeGeneres Show or the U.S. Embassy. WTF is with these suggestions? Based on these recommendations I can come up with a pretty humorous version of myself as seen by Facebook. Using the recommendations as your guide, tell me who I am in Facebook’s eyes – add your thoughts to the comments.

jr. companies, etc. facebook, fan pages