The Nerd Rage Thread

I have a theory about this aging vs tech thing. According to a book I'm reading on the adult brain (specifically the middle-aged brain), most people get smarter with age but have a harder time absorbing completely new things. (They can do it, it just takes a little while longer than for younger brains.) The thing is, geeks under about 45 in the Western world have been raised with constantly shifting tech. Think about how fast tech changed between 1950-1970, then look at now. Our brains are trained for quicker changes than our parents'. Combine that with the fact that we get smarter with age when it comes to putting concepts together and gaining expertise, and we're pretty much the smartest generation yet. The generations that come after us will be even smarter, if current trends progress. This is also reflected in the fact that IQ tests have to be recalibrated every couple of years because the average score keeps going up above 100. We as a species are getting smarter, mostly thanks to the fact that we have much better nutrition and better medicine. Our brains have more fuel, and because we don't all die before age 30 we have longer to sharpen our intellects.

A lot of people think the past was better, but fuck that shit. I LIKE living in the future.

That reeks of generational bias. Previous generations pioneered engines, flight, electricity, the automobile, radio, television, computers, rocketry, space travel, satellites, the harnessing of the atom, unassisted advanced mathematics (as in, without computers or calculators), nearly all of the protocols that govern computer networking, global telecommunications, the Archimedes' heart, antibiotics, genetics, cloning, and so on.

"Our" generation might be "smarter", and even that is an arguable term, but that in no way makes us more intelligent, faster to react, faster to create, faster to deploy, more creative, more inventive or, simply, better. To claim otherwise, or for anyone to claim vice versa, is generational bias. We don't like it when they do it, I'm sure they don't like it when we do, and I doubt we'll like it anymore when the next generation does it to us despite our pioneering of stem cells, gene therapy (possibly), colonizing of other planets (possibly), curing AIDs and cancer (possibly), and so on.

But I expect the next generation to be smarter than me. I hope they look back on me as being stupider, otherwise I would feel that we as a species have lost our way.

There's a great line in Mad Men, when the firm's long-time secretary Miss Blankenship dies at her desk, a trooper to the very end. Bert Cooper eulogizes her thusly: "She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She was an astronaut."

Family members delivering broken computers via other family members to my doorstep because they cannot be bothered to understand the difference between a firewall, and antivirus.

I would set this thing on fire if I had a match.

After much whining, I gave my younger niece (who is 21) one of my old laptops on the condition that she never ask me for tech support. Two days later, she asked me for tech support.

Last Christmas she gave me a "No, I don't know how to fix your computer" t-shirt. This is a knock off of the actual, "No, I won't fix your computer" t-shirt. It's insulting. Of course I know how to fix your computer, I just refuse to do it.

She couldn't even get a condescending t-shirt right.

Amazon fucking customer service. When I log into my account with my correct email and password, it's showing some other person's name. No wishlist. If you do a search for my email address in the "find a wishlist" my correct name and wishlist come up. I've talked to four fucking different people at Amazon about it and I finally, FINALLY got someone to believe me. They just kept saying "Well the name on the account is x" and I was like "I know. That is WRONG. That is what I am telling you." "Well that's the name that's associated with the account!" "No. No it's not. Do a search for a wishlist with that email and my CORRECT name and wishlist come up."

So now I'm on hold since finally, FINALLY the guy was like "...oh. Well that is not right."

I KNOW! THAT IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO EXPLAIN TO YOU MOTHERFUCKERS FOR A WHOLE GOD DAMN DAY NOW!

Is it still OK to rage against Apple maps? I was using it to estimate how much time I had left in a drive and did not need directions per se, but it showed me that you cannot rely on it.

Example 1. Wegmans is not at the pin that is highlighted. It is actually at the other pin on that map. Of course why two pins for the same store?


Example 2. If you know enough to select the second pin, these were the directions it provided.


Fuck you, Apple, and fuck your hubris.

I was lost on The North Side last week and spent 40 mins. faffing around trying to get Google Maps working on an EDGE connection. It was only when I got home that it occurred to me that I could also have tried Apple Maps.

But would you have actually gotten home if you did?

Yeah, I finally tested this quite by accident. We were looking for a place in Germany where we're going this spring and I was at my inlaws with really terrible connection, and without thinking I just hit the Maps app on the iPad out of old habit - loaded instantly and showed me the place and had instant zoom available. Then I remembered, that I don't use the map app anymore and went and found Google Maps instead - took forever to load even the smallest sliver of the map, and zooming just started the process over.
And for what it's worth, they showed the same place.

I still don't trust Apple Maps, but now I get what they thought they could bring to the table by doing their own.

Oh, forgotten nerd rage. We stayed at a hotel that had the Dish network or some provider with a similar name. While I applaud it for having it's HD channels right next to the SD channels, so that they were actually easily found, it's 'HD' channels were 'zoomed' in. WTF? This is like selling Blu-ray Pan-and-Scan DVDs. Utterly asinine.

Not sure if it's worse than SD stretched out to 16:9, which I still see approximately everywhere. I mean, do the people setting these things up simply not care that it looks like shit? IDGI.

Dear guy in the lane next to me with the autism haircut rapid-firing his AR-15 with a muzzle brake at a target 15 yards away: FUCK YOU. YOU ARE WHAT IS WRONG WITH AMERICA.

Or your range/rangemaster sucks for allowing it.

Your bowling alley sounds awesome.

Haha, Gun Nerd Rage is a thing! This is something I will never experience.

Mission accomplished. He mostly did himself in ultimately, which is fine by me.

It's just a form of rage at inconsiderate dipshits.

"I've been calling you people ALL DAY and no one's answering!" Caller ID tells a different story, ma'am.

Oh hell no, you gotta watch a gun nut watch a movie with guns:

• "You can't silence a revolver!"
• "SWAT body armor is not going to stop a rifle at 15 feet! That's bullshit!"
• "He just fired 9 rounds out of that .45, which can only hold 7 rounds. Well, plus one in the chamber."
• "WHY WOULD YOU COCK YOUR PISTOL JUST NOW? FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT? ARARJADSFKJALKJFA!"

Of course, they have regular nerd rage when just hanging out. "You called that a magazine? No, that's a clip. Ugh."

FYI, that's from Douglas Adams' posthumous book The Salmon of Doubt.

He wrote a book after he was dead? I knew he was a gifted writer, but wow.

(Couldn't type that with a straight face. Heeheehee.)

My colleagues who insists on sending me deadlines as calendar appointment instead of tasks in Outlook.

I even explained to them how tsks work, and we then had an expensive efficiency consultant visit and amongst other things tell everybody how to use tasks.
Yet, today - "here's this meeting that isn't really a meeting, but just you mailing me the article".

Fuck people who can't use Outlook. Fuck them for asking me if I'm available (check my fucking diary). Fuck them for not understanding tasks. Fuck IT for not putting enough information in AD to make the address book even half as useful as it should be.

Oh, and an especially big FUCK YOU to IT for not implementing resource mailboxes so we can have a sane meeting room system... oh sorry, they did, but only one per floor so reception need to arrange the rooms.

Seriously IT. What. The. Fuck?

He was only spending the year dead for tax reasons.

I'm not much of a gun nut, and the cocking thing just drives me nuts. Also, the effect where someone gets hit by a bullet and goes flying across the room like they got hit by a SUV.

Pre-raging. Going to see the season two The Next Generation two episode Fathom event tonight. Don't fuck it up, Fathom. Please, not again. Not being able to transmit a simple satellite feed properly, or not having properly trained projectionists on hand to receive the feed, is especially bad during a Star Trek event. I'd like it in high definition and with surround sound too this time.

Of course, well played if this is all intentional. Very well played.

Edit: It's worth clarifying why this is especially bad. I mean, there's the obvious uber-nerd issue of playing Star Trek and not being able to master late-90s technology, but, OK, I don't care about that, I'll just get my refund and leave; it isn't the poor guy manning the booth's fault that this all went pear-shaped. No, the problem is all of the people who start "cleverly" quoting lines from Star Trek (or Star Wars, to be _ultra_ funny) at the screen. Oh, the screen is dim? Adjust the phase polarity of the... EPM matrix... ... You know, I don't even know, I like the show for the fucking philosophy and the pew pew battles and to see the few good actors act, not the fucking technology. Argh.

The movie stuff never bothered me because duh movies. I've stopped being bothered by the magazine/clip thing and have happily accepted that the meanings of words change, even if mostly through widespread misuse. Hell, my father, who taught me to shoot and gave me most of the guns I own, calls them clips.

Then again, I like to think of myself as less gun nut and more gun enthusiast. In my mind, "gun nut" implies things like confederate flags and "obummer takin r guns". Oh, and FrankA. That guy is weird.

But I'm probably just playing semantics to make myself feel better.

I do get a little annoyed by all the physics ..defamation, for lack of a better word. It's not just guns, but martial arts as well, to the point where people have really weird and distorted ideas of how guns and fist fights actually work. I don't think most of the public understand why weight classes exist in combative sports. Like one of my Bro-in-Laws, "I could totally take that UFC fighter by fighting dirty". Yeah, I'm sure an attempted eye gouge by someone who's never done an eye gouge, heck, never even fought anyone at all, and is outweighed by fifty pounds of muscle will totally be successful.

Or for guns, it's "I'd just shoot the gas tank, and the thing would explode."

Tsks are pretty basic scolding mechanisms, it is a little crazy that they had to bring in a consultant.

But hey, it's Daneland. Whatcha gonna do?

Took me a while, but well played sir.

Here's a classic:

I fucking hate iTunes.

iTunes 11 is an improvement in speed and responsiveness on the pc... shame I can't find a damn thing anymore.

People who don't know anything about gats frequently do that.

Fuck you, you don't know me. I've read every single Gat Fact and I operate operationally on operations with my AK-Glock every single day, and I operate harder than you can even imagine. You've never even seen high speed, low drag like the shit I'm into every day. You can't tell me shit about gats.


BRB gotta go buy more of those cop killer gatteries.

You're not elite enough to join the ranks of known underground operating operators, so go clean your semi-automatic assault gat and cry into your GATerade.