Friday, April 20, 2012

When did the slash become too hard?

Hyphens and slashes are not interchangeable.  In fact, they're nearly opposite.  This fact seems to escape more and more people all the time.

Why else would we see mistakes like, "It's a win-win situation!"

What is a "win-win"?  Is it anything like a win-celebrating sports fan?  Or a game-changing decision?  Or an overhead-cam engine?  Or a sun-dried tomato?  A hyphen takes multiple words and turns them into one descriptive term.

When you have two sides or two options to a situation, you use a slash to separate them:

win/lose situation
client/server system
on/off switch
key/value store
work/life balance

Come on, guys.  It's not that hard.

Monday, April 2, 2012

Girls Around Me: The only victims are the developers

So the new national boogeyman is an application that presents public information.  It aggregates FourSquare check-ins by gender and matches them up to public Facebook profiles.


But suddenly the people broadcasting their presence at public venues on a public medium are appalled that it might be received by someone.  Actually, that's not even true: A bunch of blowhards are appalled on behalf of all these supposed victims, zero of which have come forward to tell about how they suffered any harm from this nightmarish piece of software.


Also, if you don't understand what stalking is, stop using the term.  Stalking is the pursuit and haranguing of one person at length. Seeing which venues are currently heavily populated with men or women is NOT STALKING. You can't use this application to home in on one person and follow him or her around.  But hey, what do the facts matter, when you can put "STALKING APP" in your headline as click bait?


So what are you nefarious users of this app doing?  You're finding out where people are to determine WHERE TO GO. Instead of roaming the city and wasting your night on dead venues or the wrong type of crowd, you simply go to the place that has appealing people in it.

Yes, that's what people are wailing about. Pretty stupid when you think about it.  But really, thinking about it is too much work for most of America today.



The United States of today prefers to wallow in pathetic, fake outrage instead of tackling the hard problems.  Anybody who even feels "uncomfortable" is a "victim" now. Guess what? The world is full of homeless people, gay people, people who don't believe in your god, deformed people, diseases... and it's not everyone else's job to shield you from them. Deal with it.  You have no right to infringe on other people's lives because of your hang-ups.


And when you behave like a jagoff and get called out on it, it's not the other person who has the problem. Someone flipped you off for not signaling? Guess what: That's YOUR fault. It's not "road rage". It's someone who has a backbone and isn't going to take your crap.

The only victims here are the developers whose time was wasted.  And why were these guys targeted, when other apps and sites were doing the same thing a year or more ago?  
Here's just one example: Where the Ladies At.

This is the culture of the nanny state. It's one that mollycoddles the irresponsible and the selfish.