8 Grams of Bullshit

My last visit to McDonald I noticed that my meal has “8 grams of whole wheat” printed on package. I was quite surprised to see US company use Système international d’unités to express how much of health they pack in the box.

To put things into perspective 8 grams is almost 4 times less than legal amount of marijuana in California. That whole grain thing is really potent stuff indeed.

While someone might say that McDonald is not doing anything wrong and that this is just reporting fact I would not agree. I think that this is pure game of numbers that targets USA citizens that quite often have no feeling what grams are (as I have no feeling for ounces). This is pure sham intended to represent their food as a healthy choice.

McDonald food is probably the next best thing one can do to his body after a car crash and that probably holds true for fast food in general. Of course I will grab occasional meal or two because I don’t have time for anything better and because (shame) I do like taste of it. Just please stop bullshitting be. Let my cholesterol rise in peace.

P.S. For my SI challenged USA friends 8 grams is 0.28 ounces. :)

Reasoning

Most of reading that I do is on Amazon Kindle and there I have noticed disturbing trend. Quite a large number of books have Kindle version priced higher than paperback.

I just cannot figure why any cost involved would be any higher for an e-book when compared to a physical book that needs both printing and physical distribution.

Call me old fashioned but I will not buy Kindle book that costs more than physical copy out of principle.

One Man's Feature, Another Man's Annoyance

Being programmer I need to do send executable files a lot. However my mail client, Google Mail, does not like this. Since it check for executable files is done even in zipped archives, easiest solution for me was to use my trusty WinRAR. Google had no idea that .exe was hidden inside it.

Not any more. Google now supports RAR archives also. While that does help with preview, it also enables Google to check my RAR files for executables. And to annoy me with “Our system detected an illegal attachment on your message.”

Now only way to send executables is to change archive extension to e.g. rarx… Annoyances…

Fujitsu and Search

I needed some Windows 7 drivers for Fujitsu LifeBook S710. At first glance support page looked promising.

It asked for serial number and I gave it one but this hasn’t worked for some reason. However, I did got link to Fujitsu tool that reads your system and it promised that it will take me to correct page. I executed it and it got me back where I started. Tool just read serial number and it redirected me to the same page that failed me first time.

I would have gone through model selection but that part of page was also broken. It just kept showing single item: “Please select the product line”. I spent quite some time having fun making circles around Fujitsu web pages. I found driver’s bits here and there but some of them haven’t worked at all and some of them were meant for other notebook models. It took some googling to find useful product search page that gave proper list of drivers.

When manufacturer shows that level of laziness and lack of quality control, it really inspires confidence in it’s computers.

Crazy Feed

MSDN subscribers have two choices when it comes to getting new software. Either you will visit MSDN site every few days to see what is new or you will subscribe to their feed. Logic would dictate that MSDN feed should be preferred way of doing this - every time something new arrives you get notification in your RSS reader.

Because of some idiotic programming MSDN feed is worse than useless. For example today I had total of 370 of new items in my feed. Those are probably quite a same items that were available yesterday when I had around 200 items. Or day before that when another 200 ended up in my reader. Who knows, maybe there was some new software inside. I haven’t got a clue since I was too lazy to read everything.

I am not sure why this happens - I am too lazy to investigate thoroughly. And no, it is not a RSS reader’s fault since no other feed exhibits such behavior. My guess would be that missing GUID and pubDate that keeps on changing are one to blame. Without unique GUID for each item it is very difficult for any program to say what remains same and what is really different.

It would be easy for Microsoft to fix RSS feed but they haven’t in last three years so I am not holding my breath. After all, they never said that developer’s satisfaction is their priority.

P.S. As I wrote this, I noticed another 300+ waiting…

Losing Battle

Apple is screwing their customers again. This time literary - there is new screw head called “Pentalobe” that is slowly working it’s way in Apple products.

Current effect is that nobody can open iPhone without risking damage to screw but I wonder what net effect will be. There are already products that enable you to replace that “secure” screw with normal Phillips one. I wonder how long it will take for everybody to get proper pentalobe screwdriver. A week? A month?

Pointless Mails

I just got e-mail from Microsoft with my free 30-day pass for Windows Azure. It came in mail titled “Take Advantage of a Free 30-Day Windows Azure Pass”. Last year I wanted to get into but Croatia wasn’t among supported countries. From good sources I got that this year this will change. I took this offer as good sign.

Of course, when I came to registration site, Croatia was suspiciously missing from list. Another disappointment.

I am not that much disappointed at Microsoft as such since it is their business decision whether they want Croatian money or not. I am disappointed by assholes who sent such mails to everybody everywhere. Microsoft has all my data (and that does include country). How hard was it to filter out people not in “proper” countries?

Aspect Ratio

I installed new TV for my dad. Part of installation was climbing roof and bunch of cabling 10 meters over splash surface, but that was not hard part. Hard part was teaching my dad about how TV should be used (he had 4:3 before).

In Croatia we still use 4:3 aspect ratio. Our national TV just cannot be bothered. Choice was simple for this… You must use 4:3 for everything to look properly but 16:9 can be tolerated if you hate vertical black bars and you like stubby people. Yes, you can zoom picture (three different ways to do it) and cut either people’s heads, or subtitles, or both, but this is not a real choice. That is, until they decide to show 16:9 movie. It is done in such manner that 16:9 picture is crammed into 4:3 frame with black bars on top and bottom. For this you need zoom.

Of course there is sport channel that has proper 16:9 support. If we switch to it, we should use proper aspect ratio. But that sport channel also has some shows that use 4:3. It’s switching time again.

To make things better, aspect ratio settings are common for all channels. That means that my father must switch aspect ratio every time he switches between “incompatible” channels. Tracking two football (proper football) games on two different channels could (and usually will) cause need to adjust aspect ratio.

Before today all choices were clear to me and I never gave it much thought. However, as I stood explaining this to my father it struck me how this can seem complicated and annoying to someone who just wants to watch TV. This whole system is just piece of shit.

Roasting in Amazon's Kitchen (Kindle Edition)

Since my BeBook left this world, I mostly use Kindle for Android in order to read books.

I do love cooking books (yes, I am weird that way) so I decided to buy Roasting in Hell’s Kitchen by Gordon Ramsay. Whole process was painless until I got famous “This title is not available for customers from your location in Europe”. Quick search has shown that I am considered worthy enough to buy paper edition.

I will not even go rambling about Kindle recommendation system that recommended this book to me even I cannot buy it. I will not even ramble about extra $2 on almost any book just because I am not from triple-letter country. I will however say what I will do: I will download this fucking book - I may not read it - but I will download it.

This does hurt a little. Everybody that knowns me is probably aware that I am licence freak. I do have all my software either paid for or freeware. Sometimes I even donate to authors of particularly good freeware service. As far e-books are concerned I probably bought more of them than I have paper-ones.

If somebody does not wan’t my money, I will not force it upon them. I am sure that some other book will be worthy purchase.

Some Things Never Change

I played a little with Windows Phone 7. I will save my opinions about Windows 7 as development platform for some other post. This time I want to rant about one thing that survived even into new and polished Windows Mobile.

I am not sure what situation is in USA, but in Europe we tend to have more than one mobile phone. I have two of them. Quite few people that I know also have two mobiles. My sister has total of four.

Excessive? Maybe. However, this is reality for parts of world that are not “mobile challenged”.

Windows Phone 7 does not recognize that reality. There is only one field for Mobile phone entry. I usually use Pager as substitute field (pagers never took hold here) but that way you lose ability to quickly send SMS and anyhow that trick is good for only one additional mobile. What with others?

Windows Phone 7 is probably singled out without reason since I do not recall any Windows Mobile version that worked “properly”. Problem is actually much deeper and has root in Outlook and Exchange. Until those two start their life in 21st century nothing will change.

Sometimes I miss my good old Nokia.