Entries in Category: Flunkies

Well, as I feared, the insurance company decided to declare the car totaled. Actually, the body shop to where the car was towed declared it totaled even before then. And so began the long, arduous process of the value of the car being judged, and renumerations paid. What a painful process that is. If you can avoid having your car hit by someone, I highly recommend that you do so. First of all, it's a game to the insurance company. ...

Here's an update: Office Depot has actually pulled their ad spots with the disembodied hand. Seems like enough bloggers (including yours truly) called them out on its creepiness to have an effect. More "me too" advertising, but this one has a couple of twists: it's a two-pronged "me too" approach. It was bound to happen, of course. Slowly but surely, more and more people know about the Firefox browser. Interestingly enough, though, I've found that the name Mozilla ...

I'm filing this in the "me too" advertising section (when I get around to having such a section). So, there's some US wireless carrier called Alltel which launched this new cool feature that lets you call up to 5 of your friends/family on other networks for free. They call this feature "My Circle," which is nice and catchy. And of course, within weeks, you can't walk through a mall without hearing about T-Mobile's response, which they've ...

Ignoring, for a moment, the conjunction of those two words with respect to cults and organisations (and some fraternities), I'd like to share some thoughts about branding and loyalty in airlines. As you, my dear readers, might recall, Aimee and I had gone to Los Angeles and Oklahoma for Thanksgiving (late November), and then to Jamaica for Christmas. Well, as it turned out, we had two starkly contrasting airline experiences. For the first trip, we booked all ...

For those of you not familiar with this, there are two major office supply chains in the US: Staples and Office Depot. They both stock pretty much the same stuff; they're both in strip malls all across this great land. And they're both Red. You know, the font, the entryway, the building's facade. Same shade of red. Oh yeah, there's also Office Max, but that's red too. Or it was, the last time I saw one, anyway. ...

So, apparently, the banking industry has made new rules to dick customers out of their money. It's not enough that the bank holds all your money already. Now they want to keep some of it for good. So if you post-date a check by 2 days, your bank can still cash it and then charge you oodles and ooodles of money for "overdraft protection." The date is simply unimportant to the honouring the check part. No matter that you have ...

Yeah, ok, so if there is a top ten, I nominate this one to be in the top 5. It's at least in the top 3 of the ones I've mentioned on these pages, doncha think?

Hmm, I seem to have lost the content of this post. OK, so anyway, there was some stuff about this thing where this guy did some stuff and some things that was, like, cool. But I can't find the link any more, so blah. Here it is: So, hot on the heels of -O9, mike showed me this bug where pretending and wishing for a 6-way cpu system is apparently enough, if you wish hard ...

Not much time lately, but the people love their optimisation, don't they? I can't believe I missed that report and sent it on to foser uncommented. Anyway, it's at least a candidate for the top 10 of this year.

So, now there's bug 90663 which shows a user clearly using compilation flags gleaned from some 1337 ch4nn31 on some freaky irc network somewhere. People, if you're going to be filing bugs, please at least tone down your cflags before you do. Bug reports like this are a waste of: * Gentoo developers' time * Your own time It's a small enough list that you can probably memorise it. Please pay close attention to the first item there.