Tralfaz

Category: annoyances

  • Public Bathroom Etiquette

    Public Bathroom Etiquette

    A sort of gross topic today, I am going to discuss some of the oddities I have witnessed in the rest rooms at work. This is not solely my current gig, but instead it is a montage. If you are squeamish, navigate away now.

    The Stall Snob

    Most public restrooms have both normal stalls, as well as larger, handicap accessible stalls. Larger, they give you a little more privacy, and often a dedicated wash basin (sink).

    There are people who will leave a restroom if the handicapped stall is occupied. (hint: they aren't handicapped) They will turn around and either go to a different restroom, or come back later.

    You can tell they are stall snobs when they pull on the handicapped stall door to make sure it is occupied.

    Is a little privacy really that important? I guess it is.

    The Walk Through

    At one place I worked, there were two halves of the building, and in the center were the mens' and womens' room. Opening on both sides, they became a freeway between the two halves of the building.

    This in and of itself isn't a problem. In one door, and out the other. No big deal.

    But add to that the fact that the cafeteria was on one side, and that if you wanted coffee, you had to go to the cafeteria.

    This leads to the grossness. The steady stream of people walking through with empty mugs, and returning with full cups of coffee. Or with their microwaved lunch. Or with snacks from the vending machine. Through the bathroom, with people dropping deuces, and draining their bladders.

    Eww.

    Oh, and you are carrying you coffee, and you need to whiz? Set the cup on the urinal and drop your fly. As evidenced by the perpetual coffee rings on the top of the urinal.

    The Hygiene Freak

    Every company has some people who are super attentive to their hygiene. They brush after every meal, so they drag their toothbrush and floss into the bathroom. Grab a cup and brush your teeth. In a public bathroom sink.

    Nasty.

    The Talker

    The advent of cell phones, and good wireless headsets mean that you can continue your conversation from the bathroom. There is nothing like taking a customer support call, and continuing the discussion in the loo.

    Or to answer your freaking cell when you are dropping the kids at the pool.

    This is rude to both the other users of the restroom, as well as to the person on the other end of the line. For fuck's sake, hang up the phone, and do your business.

    Summary

    Well, I could go on. There are endless odd happenings at public facilities. This is enough grossness for this evening.

  • Commuting Insanity – the exit shark

    Living in south San Jose isn’t so bad, but it does mean I have a somewhat lousy commute. If it is a lucky day, I can get in in a little over 20 minutes. If I am not so lucky, it can take 45 minutes. This is the drive to Santa Clara, the drive home almost always sucks big tool.

    This will be a series of posts, and if I get around to it, I will get a go-pro and films some of the idiocy that I see on the road. There is plenty of it.

    Today, I will chronicle the ever hated exit lane shark. The setup: an onramp, that turns into an exit lane. Maybe a half mile long, it is designed to give merging drivers room to get into traffic, and people who want to exit a chance to get ready for the exit.

    Alas, when there is even moderately heavy traffic, the temptation for drivers to dive into the lane, and speed by, and then to merge into traffic at the last second. No really, we don’t mind when you squeeze in with your fucking pig SUV, or BMW. You are clearly way too important to wait in traffic.

    The worst exit I see is Union Avenue, off ramp off 85 northbound. I am sure that maybe 2 cars a morning do actually exit there, but it is a non-stop stream of dick heads trying to shave off 3 or 4 car lengths.

    Oh, how I wish I had a shoulder fired missile…

  • Competitive Panhandling

    Competitive Panhandling

    Unless you just arrived from Mars, odds are high that you have see the panhandlers working the off-ramps. It is a pretty simple scam. Look scruffy, carry a sign with a sob story, and make eye contact with the drivers waiting at the light. While there might be some seriously needy people, the vast majority of them are completely a scam.

    Oh, yeah, some will have heartbreaking stories, but take note of how many of the pan handlers look pretty well nourished. Hmmmm.

    Of course, "good" corners are popular, and that can lead to panhandler fights. Yesterday, on my way home, there were two groups of beggars arguing rather loudly, and threatening each other with knives.

    I guess there is competition in all human endeavors.

    (for the record, your donations are far better given to one of the organizations who help the homeless.)

  • Car Wash Madness

    I own a nice car, a 2005 Honda S2000, and about 99% of the time I wash it in my driveway. With the move and the selling of our house, I have neglected it, so prior to it being loaded on a transport truck to get it to my new home, I took it to the local car wash.

    Ugh.

    It reminded my why I prefer to wash it myself.

    1. They do a terrible job.  The amount of crap they don’t get off is astounding. From the insect droppings, to just whiffing on my hood, I am completely unimpressed.  I would have asked them to run it again if I wasn’t headed out of town, and it wasn’t going to get on a truck.
    2. Even after doing a terrible job, they expect a tip. I know it is a crappy job that pays minimum wage, and I normally don’t mind tipping, but the effort that they put in, in no way justifies a 20% tip. But they expect $3 on a $15 wash.
    3. Even when you tell them no scent, they friggin’ spray it with “new car” scent. Really?  Is it that hard to just not spray anything in there?
    4. Upselling.  I just want a basic interior and exterior wash. I don’t want the extra undercarriage spray. I don’t want the faux spray on polymer sealant. I just hand waxed it a month ago, so I don’t want a mini detail. When I say no, I mean NO. 
    5. 3rd party harassment. I live in Arizona, the king of cracked and dinged windshields. I drive a 9 year old car, with the original windshield, so it has been dinged and repaired many times. Having someone who puts the high pressure sales pitch to replace your windshield, and who argues that the repaired dings need to be repaired again. I think I had to say no four or five times to that asshole.

    I will go back to my 3 bucket hand wash, and 2x a year bringing out the polishing tools.

     

  • Apple Mail Madness

    A bit of a rant here, sorry. I use Google for my personal domain(s) email service. Google Apps is a good deal, even for the two accounts my wife and I use. Solid performance, wicked good junk filtering, and they do a great job of detecting phishing and spearphishing attacks.

    I use the Apple mail client, setup to use imap to connect to the gmail servers and provide a local cache of my email. Worked pretty good to. (note: “worked” is the operative word.)

    Starting in OS-X 10.7 the mail client began to get lame. I think Apple was really trying to be a better ingester of gmail accounts, but something got wonky.

    I should point out that I have probably 20K email messages in my main account, a similar amount in my true “Gmail” account, and significantly less in my auxiliary accounts. Apparently, Apple mail starts choking above 10K messages, and I am over that by at least 30K messages.

    Constantly needing to reindex my inbox is a major detractor (there are a few messages in my inbox that are “perpetually” new, no matter how often I refresh the indices.)

    Add to that the pretty piss-poor junk mail filtering that Apple mail has, and I am getting pretty frustrated. The last straw was when my daily NY Times update was flagged as “junk” and I couldn’t figure out which of my computers set this rule. Apparently, even if you turn off junk filtering explicitly, it can sometimes turn itself back on. Sigh.

    So I am evaluating options. I don’t mind the Gmail web interface, it is just a pain in the ass to have to relogin all the time.

    There are some stand alone apps to help, but I suspect that the real problem is having huge imap mailboxes and the task of keeping them locally sync’d.

    I am trying an application that essentially is a shell for the gmail web interface. So you get instant access, cool main UI notifications (a big plus) and all the google tools that make gmail a good experience. It is called “Mailplane” and it seems pretty solid. I will use it exclusively for a while and see how I like it.

    One benefit would be to free the 12gigs or so of email cache on my drives. Not a lot of space, but it kind of defeats the purpose of imap to have physical copies of everything locally.

    And then the Apple mail application will be used only for my icloud, yahoo, and godaddy account. Woot.

  • LinkedIn Still Sucks

    Who would have thought that my last rant against LinkedIn would be the third most viewed post on my site. Astounding, and by the comments, it seems to have rung a bell with others. (note: this is a repost from my professional blog)

    LinkedIn is still crappy, for all the same reasons I wrote about here, but some new suckage has floated to the top. LinkedIn is ostensibly the “Facebook” of the professional world. Many people keep totally different personas on the two sites, for obvious reasons. But where LinkedIn fails is that it really wants to have people visit every day, and spend hours glued to the site so they can monetize your eyeballs.

    To try to get people incentivized to visit often (daily or multiple times a day), they have tried to go beyond a business network, and to add things that are really a clumsy fit. These are:

    Groups: A nice concept. Have self organizing user communities where like minded people gather to chat, and exchange information. Very analogous to the old computer BBS’s, the Forums that created vibrand communities (like the one I participate in for the S2000 owners club). But on LinkedIn, they seem contrived. I am a member of 4 different AFM communities. Some are open, some are closed, one is for a specific maker. The same situation for Product Marketing. There is a Product Marketing group, a Product Marketing Professionals group, and a 280 Product Marketing group. Again, lots of balkanization. In the outside world, there may be more than one community, but in truth, there is one that “wins” and the rest wither or atrophy.

    Forums (part of the groups): There is a reason that some of the best forums on the internet are moderated. The world is full of trolls and folks who just like to take the counter argument just to be “dickish”. Moderation helps keep this to a tolerable level. But none of the LinkedIn groups I frequent appear to be moderated (correction: the APS Physics group does moderate with a heavy hand). I have seen competitors in public pissing matches, escalate a discussion into a full blown PR disaster. You would think that reasonable, rational professionals would be more reserved, but then you would be wrong.

    A news feed: When I go to my page, I get bombarded by the trivialities and banalities of my network. I really don’t pay attention to this. Yes, sometimes I will learn that John Smith moved to a new job, but often it is dumb things like a member “liked” something. I get the idea of trying to build your “graph” and to try to gain more eyeball-minutes on your content, but come on.

    Trying to grow your network by giving LinkedIn access to your Gmail contacts: This one pisses me off to no end. (and you can repeat this argument for all the other online email services) Everytime I interact with them, they want me to give them the login details for my Gmail account so that they can look for potential people to link to. Uh, not only is this a no, but it is a giant F*CK NO. None of the social media operators have a shred of concern about maintaining privacy, and will gladly sell their mother for more traffic.

    Constant offers to go to premium (paid) access: This one really infuriates me to no end. I must get 2 – 3 offers for a free month of Premium (just give them a credit card to charge when the free period is done.) I looked up the plans, and the cheapest one, “Business” is a whopping $19.95 a month, IF you buy a year worth at a time. The business Plus is $39.95 a month, and the executive level is $74.95 a month. FFS, what on earth can be worth $900 a year to me?  Oh, so I can connect with and message people who aren’t in my network without having to go through a common connection. Sorry, that is just worth about $0.0003 a month to me. I can understand those who are seeking employment might benefit, but I doubt they will buy a year at a time. And recruiters? No brainer. In fact they should charge $500.00 a month for recruiters. That would weed out the crappy ones pretty quick. I don’t mind paying for things that provide value, but I can’t imagine LinkedIn being worth more than about tree fiddy

    Summary

    LinkedIn is a pretty good way to remain in contact with all the people you come across. But their business model (and valuation) is dependent upon increasing the time that users spend on the site. So they are turning to the Facebook playbook to create reasons for people to visit unprompted, and to spend more time browsing. Their stumbling at the offering of endorsed product advertising (Getting sued for unautorized use of images and user details for adverising is a huge breach of trust) is just one of their ill advised efforts to monetize the service.

    But, the value that they offer me, the professional who drops in when I get a connection invite, or when a notification catches my eye, is not on the social network functionality. I am never going to spend hours a week glued to LinkedIn.

    Lastly, they need to do something to increase the coherence of the recruiters who use their site. LinkedIn is a valuable asset to that business, but it does give way to laziness, and that leads to us, the talent, being bombarded with bullshit job offers. Fix that, or become as irrelevant as Monster.com has become. Perhaps they should make it cost $500 a month or more for recruiters.

  • Coffee time

    Our coffee maker at work (single serving “Flavia” type) broke, and while we wait for it to be fixed we have a loaner. It just makes coffee wrong. Wrong volume, wrong strength. No wonder why it is the “loaner” …

    So this morning I dropped by the Starbucks on my way in. Early-ish, 7:20 I was there, and I ordered my mocha (hey, if I am stopping for some gourmet shit, I am getting chocolate with it).

    Holy hell that place was slammed. 10 minutes in line, 15 minutes to get my coffee after ordering it. I caught up with Facebook and my email while waiting.

    I also ordered a chocolate croissant, and I specified “cold” as in “not heated“. Seemed simple. 5 minutes later, 10 minutes before my drink is ready, they hand me a bag with my croissant in it. Heated. Fook.

    So I go to the very busy counter person and tell him that I specifically wanted it cold. “Are you sure?” – Yes, I am sure. “Have you ever tried it heated?” – yes, and I don’t like them heated.

    So they gave me another one.

    This wouldn’t be worth bitching about, except that every Starbucks I order a pastry at, I order it cold. And invariably, they heat the damn thing. I swear it gives them fuzzy feelings to put the pastries into that damn convection oven.

    (for the record, I particularly hate heated croissants, as it causes them to be messy, butter dripping globs of dough. Adding chocolate to that mix just makes it worse. Hence, serve them at room temperature like a good French bakery)

  • My problems with LinkedIn

    linkedin-logoI am getting social media swamped.  But there is one trend that I am sure that I am not alone in is the in your face nature that LinkedIn has become since going public.  I have been a member of Linkedin for a long time, and it has been a good place to collect my professional connections.  But, it is not a place that I go to daily, weekly, or even once a month.  The truth is that for me it is not a major motivator in my professional career. But lately, the noise from LinkedIn has become intolerable.  I blame the pressures of becoming a public company and the incessant drive to derive money from its users. But, come on…

    First, as a user, and in my past searches for new positions, I have never once thought to look to LinkedIn.  I know that there are job postings there, and that some people are successful in using it to hunt for jobs, but, truth be told I rely on my reputation, and the relationships I have with a few select recruiters who I have worked with in the past (on both sides, as a candidate and to seek a candidate). LinkedIn has disrupted this, but, to me, not for the better.  I get a lot of queries for positions that it should be clear to a 3rd grade level reader that I am not really suitable for, or that my qualifications don’t fit. It is almost like it has made recruiters stupid, and turned them into spamming telemarketers.  I have stopped responding to the most ludicrous ones.

    Second, what started as a nice idea, the “recommendations” feature has become rife with abuse.  How often do you get a query from a past colleague seeking recommendations?  You can decline, but most people just cave in and write one. Usually glowing with flowery praise for someone who is about as intelligent and worthy as a potted plant. When I do go hunting around, I often read the recommendations for former colleagues that I didn’t write, and I have seen a lot of lipstick applied to the proverbial pig. Yikes.  I would never rely on the recommendations of a candidate that are on linked in.  For the record. I have NEVER asked for a recommendation.  The ones on my profile are genuine from people who wouldn’t pull punches.

    Lastly, they have started this thing called “endorsements”.  You see 4 of your connections with what seems like a match for their skills, and are asked to endorse them.  I have received literally hundreds of them. The problem is that most of the people doing the endorsement wouldn’t know how good I am at “Product Management” or “Marketing”.  My interactions with them were either for different reasons, or completely unrelated to what they have endorsed me for. Criminy, I got endorsed for “Microsoft Office”. Seriously, WTF is up with that?

    Naturally, this is all to help them generate more page views, and more advertising, thus leading HR and Recruiters to continue to pony up for the access to this huge pool of talent. But to me, LinkedIn remains a fairly static view of me and my career. Regardless of how often they offer me a free month of “Premium” I will never take it, because to me there can’t be enough value for me to pay for it. Monetizing your “product” is important, but just like if Facebook started charging the users for the service, it would whither and die, so will LinkedIn.  Continue to make it the professional network, but realize that some/many of your enhancements are making the service far less valuable for my time. There is nothing LinkedIn can do to get my visit frequency to daily.

    (I originally wrote this for my professional blog, but thought I should share it here as well)

  • My Nomination for the Stupidest Drivers is:

    I would like to formally nominate the drivers in Phoenix AZ as the stupidest in the world.

    This AM, on the way into the office, there was an accident (not surprising) just before Chandler Boulevard crosses the 101. You could easily see that 2 lanes of traffic were closed about a mile and a half before this (pro tip: 8 or so police cars with lights flashing should tell you something.)

    Of course, seeing that, I got into the far right lane, the only through lane.

    Of course, idiots kept going into the middle and left lane because they were free. Only to beg and try to squeeze in.

    Sigh, I guess that as well as not teaching people in Arizona how to ride bicycles and signal their intent, they also don’t teach them when to merge right due to shutdown lanes.

    Idiots.

  • Ewww – The gross things I stumble across

    Walking or cycling I come across a lot of things on the side of the road that gross me out. Of course, there are different levels of gross-ness, but some are worse than others.

    The grand prize of gross is the used condom on the sidewalk. This morning, walking my dog, I found one of these. Yuck.

    I guess I should be happy that young people who park in our neighborhood for a quick snog are using protection. But for f*cks’ sake, don’t just toss the used rubber out the window.

    Ewww