Macrocost nutworking
Microsoft to the rescue, making our lives harder than we ever dreamed possible
I’m proud to be #2 in Google for the search term: MacroCost
Quite proud, actually. Macrocost ™ is a little something I invented to make fun of Microsoft. Get it? Hoooooweeeee I crack myself up.
So, anyway, the reason this popped into my head right now…
MICROSOFT IS THE EVER LIVING ZOMBIE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE!!!
Or something to that effect.
At the moment we are engaged in a “project” here at work. That, of course, is code for: We are up to our hips in shit. You know, the typical “we completely failed to plan” time crunch. And by “we” I mean the boss. And there is lots of yelling around here, like, “Move like you’ve got a purpose, maggots!”
Naturally when the chips are down and time is critical we turn to Microsoft to make sure we are completely and irrevocably fucked. I think that actual language can be found in their EULA which takes effect the nanosecond your retina looks in the direction of the five-dimensional authenticity hologram found on their boxes of software. I remember quite distinctly turning to my companion at the time I felt my eyeballs ping and saying, “I think I just got holo-raped.”
Random Factoid: Microsoft spends about 500,000 man hours per release of Windows on the authenticity hologram. Seven hours are spent on new features and other various improvements. 12,000 hours are spent on bug fixes. 24,000 hours are spent on the project code name.
If our enterprise was in the 24th century, the conversation might go down a little something like this:
Cmdr. Riker: Main engines just took a direct hit!
Capt. Picard: Options?
Riker: Eject the core. The resulting explosion should knock us clear.
Picard: Make it so, Number One!
Riker: Riker to Engineering. Geordi, we’ve got to eject the core in sixty seconds or we’re all dead!
Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge: Umm, yeah, we’ve got a bit of a delay here. Microsoft Starship Console says, “Not Responding.” I’m going to have to get back to you on that.
[boom]
Luckily, for us, the situation isn’t quite that dire. We are merely in the business of selling actual pieces of shit to obliviots who are informally known around here as “customers.” To get our priority project done right away we need to share files between two office computers. Hey, that should be a perfect job for Windows Networking, right?
Dammit, I still can’t see your Public folder!
Is the little hand icon visible?
I don’t know! Where is that supposed to be? Right click and Properties?
Oh crap. I just clicked the wrong menu option. Now we’ll have to wait five more minutes for it to fail and tell us that the “network resource” is “not available.”
Oh my God. You’re kidding, right?
Nope.
Hang on! Something happened! Now it says, “Microsoft Word (not responding).”
At least it did something. That’s a good sign, right?
We are fucked.
Yep, our old friend Windows Networking. It doesn’t work and every time you click something you have to wait about five minutes for it to fail before you can try something else. Nope, the ESCAPE key and/or the little clickable red X are not your friends here. They are powerless. Nothing short of waiting interminably will do. Indubitably!
Try something else and wait five more minutes. Rinse. Repeat.
I’m so grateful we put our eggs in the Microsoft basket. Seriously. Where else can you get paid to have fun like this?
Oh noes, gubment is out to get us
Today’s misleading headline comes to us from the good folks at CBS News who tell us:
TSA to Block “Controversial Opinion” on the Web
Yikes! This raises so many questions like: Is free speech brewing terrorism on the net? Why else would the TSA of all things be involved in something like this? What I mean is that the Transportation Safety Administration is tasked with security for all modes of transportation. This must be something extremely serious for them to be involved, right?
Actually read the story, though, and one just might come away with a slightly different interpretation.
You see, the story is actually about TSA computers, not the “web.” Computers that are supposed to be used by TSA employees in the performance of their job duties, you know, doing things to make transportation safe and stuff.
And the “controversial opinion” that TSA employees will be blocked from? (Check out those quotation marks in action, used for dramatic effect, to make things sound so chilling.) One example is that employees will be blocked from playing online games.
Wow. That is chilling. Oops, please excuse me. I just accidentally snorted some Jack Daniels up my nose.
TSA employees will also be blocked from other things like criminal activity, extreme violence, chat/messaging, and yes, even the aforementioned “controversial opinion.”
In other words, they’ll probably have to spend more time doing their jobs. We can only hope that surfing porn (like they do at the SEC) will fall under one of those broad (no pun intended) categories.
So here’s a tip of the hat to CBS News and their attempt to sensationalize their headline to induce clicks. It certainly worked on me.
TMZ reports $100 million in Woods divorce
It is being reported by TMZ that Elin Nordegren’s divorce settlement with Tiger Woods is worth approx. $100 million.
It’s not exactly the $750 million that had been previously rumored, but what the hey. The equivelant of winning Survivor 100 times isn’t too shabby. Nordegren will also reportedly receive additional funds in child support.
I know being married to him had to be icky and all, but seriously. $100 million? That’s a lot of money. Hell, I’d let him have his way with me for less than half that.
So, who will be the next lucky woman to take a ride on the Woods gravy train? Time will tell.
Beg, steal and borrow: A gerbil’s tale
What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine
Gerbils sure are industrious little critters.
My little point and shoot camera isn’t much but it’s all I have. My wife and I used to have two of the exact same cameras, but one was lost, along with a vacation’s worth of pictures, in a Greek restaurant in the big city. I don’t recall what I was drinking that night but it must have made me forgetful. As far as we can tell, I must have left the camera in the booth and it was never seen again. Someone out there got some crazy pictures of me at the Chinese gardens, that’s for sure!
I guess it would probably be a good idea to make a sign that says, “Hello. My name is Tom B. Taker and this is my camera. My email address is shoutabyss@live.com and my phone number is 555-555-5555.” I could have my picture taken holding that sign and keep it as Photo #1 on the camera for all time. Yeah, something like that would probably be a good idea. I guess that’s probably why I’ve never gotten off my ass and done it yet! Maybe we should also use a Sharpie to write my name in my underwear. Meh.
It turns out that our son, the gerbil, has a camera like ours, too. Same make but a newer model and, amazingly, it uses the exact same USB cable to download pictures into the computer.
I have these hooks in my home office where I hang my car keys. I’ve always kept the camera cable hanging on one of those hooks because I do not want to lose that puppy. We don’t have fancy things like card readers.
Even though we were careful somehow the cable still went missing. We were never sure what happened and just shrugged it off as one of those things.
We take a lot more pictures than the gerbil, so we ended up “borrowing” his camera cable. That was a few months ago.
I don’t want to go into all of the specific gerbil news of late, but suffice it to say he has been quasi-moved out of our house for about two months now. In a nutshell that means that all of his stuff is still in our home, his dead car is still in our driveway, and we see him about twice a week but only when he needs favors.
Somehow this weekend my wife ended up going through some of the gerbil’s possessions that still remained in our home. They are likely to be there until the day we die.
Suddenly I heard my wife cry out in alarm. “You are not going to believe this,” she yelled across the house.
Fearing the worst, I stayed relaxed and kept my ass glued to my chair in front of my computer as she came to me rather than the other way around. “Guess what I just found?” she asked.
She held up a camera USB cable. “This is the gerbil’s camera cable!”
I dumbly looked at her holding up the cable and then over at our camera case. Laying there, next to our camera, was the twin to that camera USB cable. A light bulb went off over my head. “That means we’ve been borrowing our own damn cable from the kid this whole damn time!!!”
She just nodded. “Yup!”
Shouts from the Abyss 
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