Another Microsoft Joke

Microsoft continues to be such a fucking joke. Tonight I try to find a song I might want to purchase. Under Windows 8.1 I get passed to some random app. I type the name of the song I'm looking for ("My Endless Love") and the results send me pretty much to everything I don't want: first it says I should update my "Xbox" app. What? I don't own an Xbox, I never have owned an Xbox, and I will never own an Xbox. What the hell?

Nearly all the "wonderful" apps that came with Windows 8.1 require me to have a Microsoft login. Hint: I've never had a Microsoft login, I don't currently have a Microsoft login, and I never will have a Microsoft login. Thank you very much, idiots.

And if you think that Apple is any better, THINK AGAIN.

Thank {Gg}od for Amazon.  I can search for what I want and actually get taken to the correct place, where I can buy a song for a buck. Good luck doing that with Microsoft or Apple.

Amazon, your next project, aside from a brick and mortar joint, should be an actual complete OS, based on Android/Linux/UNIX. Or get Google to help. You're the only vendor that has made any actual sense to me in the past 20 years.

--SDP

I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.  I get a new smart phone.  Salesperson says: "Oh sure; turn on 'EZ' mode at any time you want; you can always turn it off again".  So I turn on 'EZ' mode through "Settings".  Now, not only can I NOT turn off EZ mode, but none of the apps work--when you tap them, they only give  you the option of removing their icon from the screen.

I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.  And I did it anyway, and now Verizon and Samsung have screwed me royally. I'm not dumb--been doing IT for 30 years and the fucking phone screwed me anyway. Good luck anyone who calls: I probably can't even answer the phone in "EZ" mode.

What a fucking $700 joke. Next phone: pay me $700 to me to use it.

Oh yeah: I forgot to mention. At least half of my "notifications" have been for me to buy additional services.  It's nice to know that I spend $700 on a phone and a ridiculous amount of money per month just to use it and I'm slathered with hourly "Here's a cool service; only $10 per month; please use me!" messages. Perhaps we all need to email-bomb our carriers with service messages too.

--SDP

Spawning

I come from the ocean.
And once I'm done spawning,
I die.
           --SexDrgsSalmon

Oy; yet another Late Night change

Oy. Fallon on Leno last night. While Leno seems to put on a good face, he's also giving a huge "FUCK YOU" to NBC et. al. as the censors allow.

And you know what?  I don't give a SHIT about Leno. After what he did to Conan, good riddance to Leno.

Fallon is at the top of the world right now and I wish him the best in his new job as Tonight Show host! I hope he'll have Conan on sometime in the near future to discuss real life.

--SDP

"Do Not Hump": A 3-Picture Story from KARE11

I'm posting this story just as an interesting, goofy, fun thing I noticed while watching TV, not in any way as a complaint or criticism of KARE11 or NBC.

Over the course of about 20 minutes on 1/15/2014, TV station KARE11 in the Twin Cities in Minnesota (NBC affiliate) broadcast the following image three times. The first image appeared at about 5:57 PM as a teaser during NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. The second image appeared at about 6:00 PM as a beginning-of-newscast teaser, and the third image appeared at about 6:12 PM during the actual story.

All this is just fine and good. It's a procedure done hundreds of times a day by legions of TV stations. The story, in this case, was about why commuter trains were sitting idle despite the fact that construction on the new track was apparently complete.

But as I watched the KARE11 news broadcast, I noticed that the images were different. Aside from the KARE11 footers, it's somewhat difficult to see with a casual glance what might be different about these three images.  But if we zoom into the location highlighted below in each image, the difference becomes apparent.

Zoomed images below. I remember seeing the "DO NOT HUMP" notice painted on the train's cover during the first teaser at 5:57 PM. I thought the phrase "DO NOT HUMP" was funny and could perhaps be interpreted as a little controversial :-). Was KARE11 subliminally trying to make a political statement that folks should practice sexual abstinence? Nah, I figured that it might just have something to do with trains, maybe train lingo warning not to stack the train cars or something...

Then, as I was watching the news at the top of the hour, the image appeared on the screen again. I noticed something was different, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. So I reversed my DVR and saw that sure enough the "DO NOT HUMP" sign had disappeared, along with a small "window" in the train cover! If you have some experience with editing digital images and you look closely at the following image, you can see that sometime between 5:57 PM and 6:00 PM, the image had been edited probably by copying a plain blue rectangle from another part of the train cover and pasting it over the sign...

Too funny! But by the time the complete story actually aired around 6:12 PM, the image inexplicably changed again!  This time, the little window in the train cover re-appeared, the "DO NOT" portion of the sign re-appeared, and the word "HUMP" had been blurred out (sometimes called "air-brushing")...

Now, again, I'm not meaning to complain or criticize, just detailing a fun goof I saw!

And, I also wonder what the conversation taking place between KARE11 broadcast executives and the graphics team must have been like: "Did that teaser just contain a picture of a sign saying 'DO NOT HUMP'?" "Yep." "We better change that quick..." "Sure. No problem." Then later: "OK that was a nice quick edit, but maybe someone will notice the difference in the picture. Can  you change it again so the window and the 'DO NOT' come back, then blur out just the word 'HUMP'?" "Sure. No problem."

By the way, this interested me enough to actually research what "DO NOT HUMP" means in the context of trains.  Cecil Adams wrote an excellent explanatory article about this in 1986, which you can read here!

(I took these images off my TV screen with a digital camera so I apologize for the poor quality)