For a few minutes every day, I find myself distracted by the incredibly bad parallel parking I see in Seattle. The image is an example of someone with no spacial awareness, the available space roughly the same size as the car. That didn’t prevent him (or her) from attempting to park and then proceeding to hit both the vehicle in front and behind. He then pulled out a bit to correct the angle and did it again. The owner of the car behind came out and banged on the rear quarter panel of the parking vehicle to let the driver know he was about to hit the car again.

The driver drove off shortly after that, but another car came within thirty seconds to try at the same spot. Fortunately, this car was 3/4 the size of the previous vehicle. Unfortunately, the driver still managed to hit both the vehicle in front and the vehicle behind. If only such hits were a rare occurrence and not a daily one.

At least I have gained new respect for the durability of car paint.

I’ve been meaning to post this picture for a while, but I just finally got around to it today. A letter for Stuart in Florida somehow ended up in my mailbox (I’m Ian, and I live in Washington State). Our names and addresses are completely different, so I have no idea how it happened. I think Obama was right when he said, “It’s the post office that’s always having problems.”

It seems that every single time I use a webpage with forms in it, something goes wrong. Okay, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration but not a huge one. This screenshot is from the Verizon site where I was setting up new service. I selected an option for Internet and TV, which was supposed to be $50 a month after the “bundle discount.”

When I clicked Next, I got to the screen that expected me to add in a phone service. I selected no and was promptly warned that not having the phone service disqualifies me for the bundle discount. Oh, the ol’ bait and switch, I get it. Fine, next. What’s this? I have to select an international calling plan option despite that I have selected not to add a phone service and there are no other options on the screen (not even an “I changed my mind, give me phone service” option)? Clicking Next just keeps me on the page with the warning.

Congratulations, Verizon, you’ve made it into my Ridiculing Stupidity category!

I think this is one of those idealistic arguments that ignores reality. The logic of the argument must be along the lines of the second amendment grants the right to bear arms with a dash of “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.”^* Ignoring that courts have already ruled that the rights of individuals can be taken away for the protection of the greater public (e.g., you can’t yell “fire” or “bomb” in a crowded theater to exercise your freedom of speech), I still have to wonder about the additional logic. I’ve come up with a few possibilities:

• While incredibly drunk, armed people will exhibit the excellent judgment to not take out their firearms during a fight
• When a dangerous situation does break out, the average “buzzing” hero will be able to shoot someone else in the face to save everyone (this works especially well with the idea of “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law”)
• People will be too drunk to be able to even use their guns
• The dumb people will begin to eliminate themselves

I don’t know; I must be missing something. We recognize that intoxication + car = bad, so why not recognize that intoxication + gun = bad? I hear the argument that people have to get permits to carry guns, blah blah; you have to get a license to drive and yet sober people still cause deadly car accidents every single day.

Besides, as far as I am concerned, the second amendment grants me the right to own a nuclear weapon. Now I can take my suitcase nuke to the bar with me when I visit Tennessee!

^*Please note that it is okay to not grant this right to people we have not given a trial to but whom we suspect have done bad things.

This was a dialog that came up fairly early on. It asks, “Do you want to join the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program?” and, as shown in the screenshot, I selected the no option (more positively spun as “I don’t want to join the program at this time”). Selecting this option disables the OK button. I would think the expected flow would be to have a simple yes/no dialog come up. You pick your option and select okay. If you don’t want to pick an option, you select Cancel. It appears that you either select Yes and pick OK or select No and click Cancel. That doesn’t make sense to me because it’s requiring two clicks that say the same thing, but I guess that’s fairly standard Microsoft practice (e.g., the delete confirmation dialog that’s really just a confirmation of sending it to the recycle bin, which has its own confirmation).

I’ve also experienced regular “unknown” errors with the Windows Update feature.

The first few I encountered were solved by retrying, but now I seem to have attracted error diarrhea, and my logs are filling with errors.

Here’s what I think happened: I saw that there were 14 new updates to install. I picked to look at which ones they were and it looked like all MS Office stuff (I have Office 2003 on the notebook), so I clicked to start the update process. Little did I know, IE8 was snuck in there below the scroll point. After a few of the Office updates, a dialog box to install IE8 comes up. I pick to cancel, and now all 14 of the updates show as failed. Now any time I do updates, those same 14 updates are automatically selected, and I have to manually uncheck them one-by-one. That’s right, there’s no “Select None” option.

At least Vista leaves a bit more than two gigs of my four gigs of RAM unused at startup…. *sigh*

Curiously enough, the technique I use to remember my birthday each year is also the one I use to remember which forums I don’t frequently post at.

The error message reads:

“Microsoft Office 2008 Update” doesn’t understand the «event sysodisA» message.

Well, that makes two of us.

One of the job search sites I registered for allows businesses to send emails, and I’ve been receiving a few here and there. Nearly all of them are for commission-based jobs that generally involve selling insurance, though not all.

Our website is designed for the processes of selling,buying, exchanging E-bullion, Pecunix,E-gold and other internet money. All orders completed in 1(one) business day. Our Organization have local branches in Germany,France,Belgium,Finland,Sweden,Austria.

…

If you don’t have bank account, We will find nearest bank, and help to open a new bank account there.

And then there’s the form letters that aren’t filled in:

JOB INTERVIEW INVITATION

< $Date$>

< $CandidateName$>

Through a targeted search, we discovered your resume online. We are interested in talking to you about a career representing the HealthMarkets Companies.

Clearly, this is a highly targeted search. Amazingly enough, they also offer a six-figure income and flexible work hours. How awesome is that?

And then there are ones like this:

We saw your resumé online and would like to speak to you about a career with…[removed two sentences] Please CLICK HERE and send us a current copy of your resumé

I guess the one they saw online was old.

How can there be any economic challenges in this country or others when the business of unsolicited marketing is so booming? Someone has to half-ass these form letters.

Unfortunately, it's a Navy job that you can't apply for directly through the USA Jobs site, so I went to the Navy site to create an account there and apply. I submit my details to create an account and...

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e31'

Timeout expired

/includes/clsAccount.asp, line 871

Awesome. I waited a while and got the same thing. I waited even longer and eventually successfully made an account. Next step: actually applying. I put in the job number and click the result. Then I come to a screen with two chunks of checkboxes. The first is titled "IA0132" and has choices for "02" and "03." The second makes more sense and is a ten-mile-long listing of potential job locations. So I find some that don't start with "IRAQ" and click them. I go back up to the cryptic "IA0132" and determine that the two boxes are referring to pay grade, so I select both. I click submit.

Please select a pay grade.

It's a JavaScript notification. I disable JavaScript and click submit. Nothing. Great, it's a submit button that uses JavaScript (for those who don't know what that means, just groan and say, "Man, who the hell did that?"). I check the source and see a simple chunk of code for the submit button. Basically, I believe the JS is written for either Internet Explorer or an imaginary browser. It looks like this:

I believe it should be this (though it's been a while and is rather late, so I might make mistakes too!):

No worries though, right? I mean, they threw it in a try... catch statement, so that any errors would be caught and properly handled. Check out how the errors are dealt with:

Yeah, the errors are ignored. And this particular error means the form can't be submitted (at least, not in Firefox). No problem, I'll just manually trigger the script that should be run on success and... it's undefined, yay.

At this point, I am frustrated, so I get a bowl of ice cream to reinforce my determination. I added a standard submit button. Success! Except that I was logged out at this point due to inactivity. Well, that's what I assume happened. There was no warning, no notice; I just found myself on the login screen instead of the next page of the application. I log back in, fill that page out again, add a proper submit button, and submit. Oh, I don't have a resume on file, so I can't start a job application. Why didn't they tell me that before I filled out that page? If I can't fill out a job application without a resume completed, why let me start an application? It makes no sense!

Not quite at the point of committing seppuku, I start working on a resume. Don't worry, I won't go into detail about all the problems I encountered there. I have to end this blog post while my keyboard still works. I will mention one interesting thing... one of the three required fields for the employment section is the end date. What do you do if you are still working there? Leave it blank according to the directions, but it's a required field. You can't write "present" or anything like that, because it has to be a date in a specific format (I think their server sends some robot assassins at you if you use hyphens instead of slashes).

After all this, I decide I need to get to bed before I start showing signs of my irritation in the way I am filling things out. I decide to just leave the employment section blank, so I click Save and Exit.

No Information provided. If you want to continue working on your resume without completing this section at this time, then click the Skip Step 4 link to skip this section.

But I don't want to continue working on my resume. I clicked the exit button for a reason!.

And what was at the end of the journey when I clicked "skip step" a few times? A bad URL with 294 commas in it. Sadly, I am not kidding.

But wait, the next line is the one that gets me: "The nine troopers have been on paid leave since Oct. 13". Moral of the story: scam the government by buying a bogus degree and get both a pay increase and a 2+ month paid vacation!