Kimopolis

My kind of town.

Posts Tagged ‘Rants’

Too Much Technology VS. Not Enough Technology

Posted by kimlno on April 5, 2009

NOTE: The following is an old post from an old blog when I was, ironically, younger. Doesn’t mean that it’s not still giggle-worthy. And, really, if you’re going to plagiarize, shouldn’t you steal from someone you know? Or better yet, yourself?

P.S. Don’t get your panties in a twist about my use of the word “ironic.” I may, or may not, be using it correctly, but I blame Alanis Morissette. You should write HER a strongly worded letter about the proper usage and definition of all things ironic.

April 6, 2006

So, I had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon in Beverly Hills. Normally not a place where I get the chance to experience great leaps in technology, but today was a little different.

Now, I don’t know how many of you have experienced the Automated Parking Experience (I like to call it APE for short because in place of a human, you now get a machine with all the eloquence of an ape), but it’s quite interesting. Instead of actually paying someone to sit in a booth and take tickets to exit, now you pay in advance, and just slide your parking ticket into the slot to leave. Apparently, paying someone to sit in a booth is more expensive than an automated machine that decides whether or not you get to leave the parking lot.

And therein lies the problem. If you get to the automated ticket taker and you HAVEN’T properly paid for your parking beforehand…the entire system grinds to a screeching halt. The poor, unsuspecting parker is left stranded in front of the unequivocal machine, and now, no one gets to leave the parking lot. Oh, well, at least until a human being comes around to take the parker’s money, validate their ticket properly, and then the unforgiving gate arm will open. This is probably not the level of efficiency the parking lot attendants had envisioned when switching over to this new and improved technology.

The APE is new at my doctor’s office, being that the last time I was there there was a booth and a person where now only a glaring white box exists, and let me say…it isn’t making things any more efficient. It took me 15 minutes to park. 15 MINUTES! And this isn’t some gigantic underground parking emporium, or anything, it’s a little three story lot. Oh, how I missed the little person in the booth.

Alas, I finally parked and made it to my appointment on time (amazingly). Of course, one of the first things they always make you do at the doctor’s office is give a urine sample. This is my least favorite doctor’s visit activity. I’d rather give pints of blood to an amateur blood-taker than ever have to give another urine sample again. The urine sample is where technology has failed us.

Isn’t there some better way to do this? Invariably, I end up with more pee all over the outside of the cup, than actually in it. Couldn’t the cup be…um…bigger? And then there’s the whole transportation of the cup. The Cup-Pass, as I like to call it. Is it really necessary to have to walk down a hall full of patients and other medical professionals with a cup of pee that you then have to literally hand over to the nurse? Couldn’t there be one of those speedy pneumatic tubes that you put it in and it just shoots right up into the lab??? The whole thing is a disaster waiting to happen, really. What if someone accidentally SPILLS the cup? Ugh. Perish the thought.

So, instead of having the APE present in every new parking lot…can’t someone think of a better way to collect urine samples? And can’t anyone think of a better word than “urine”?!? Geez.

UPDATE: The last time I visited the same doctor’s office mentioned above, the APE and the Urine Cup were still in use. Apparently, advances in Urine Cup technology have been at a standstill since 2006. And, thankfully, the APE is everywhere now, so stupid people have had plenty of time to master the subtle nuances of APE garages. Funny story, though, while waiting to be called in a handsome young man entered the waiting room and, since all of the other seats were occupied, he sat down next to me. We did the polite, non-verbal, possibly awkward situation exchange: he looked at me, I smiled at him, he gestured toward the open seat, and I nodded. Then, as I went back to reading my book* I thought, “Holy crap. That’s Dawson Leery.” For those of you who just said to yourself, “Who the hell is Dawson Leery?” I will tell you. Remember that show called “Dawson’s Creek?” THAT’S Dawson Leery, better known as James Van Der Beek, who was sitting right next to me. Although this may come as a surprise to many of you, I never really got into the “Creek.” It was too wholesome for me. I suppose I just missed the boat (pun intended).

ANYbeforeIhadtimetoeventhinkwhyJamesVanDerBeekisinmygynecologistsoffice, moments later I was called in. Oh, how I wish I could say that the story ended there, but…it didn’t. I was escorted to the nurse’s station, handed a cup with my name already on it, and led to a foreign bathroom. My usual bathroom was occupied, and I really had to go, if you know what I mean, so I decided to go with the flow, as it were. A bathroom is a bathroom, right? Well, not exactly. The new and unfamiliar bathroom was in a much busier area of the office, and even after I closed the door, I could still hear everything going on right outside. Yes, it was a dreaded…DUM DUM DUM…fan-less potty. For a brief moment, I almost started to cry, because going to the doctor is stressful enough, and the fan in my usual bathroom was as loud as a Boeing 747, but I managed to regroup and get on with it.

So, there I am, doing my best to (a.) pee, (b.) get the pee into the cup, and (c.) not get pee on my hands or my clothes when I heard familiar voices. One voice was definitely Dr. Jiggly-berg (my doctor), and the other voice, definitely male, I identified by the simple process of elimination. The only other man I had seen in the immediate surrounding area was Mr. Van Der Beek. It had to be him.

I couldn’t hear everything, but certain words were recognizable: fertile, wife, swimmers, and options. Now, I knew WAY too much about Dawson’s family plans, but I had also managed to obtain the sample for which I was sent to this unfamiliar, and obviously less desirable, bathroom. It was time to leave the sub par commode and move onto the really fun part of the examination, but Dawson wouldn’t shut up and move it along. Honestly, I waited as long as I could, and then I did what I had to do.

After thoroughly washing my hands and McGyvering a Urine Cup sleeve out of paper towels (if nothing else, I can be quite resourceful), I opened the door. There they were, not a foot away, just chatting as if they were discussing their favorite beers or golf clubs. And there I was, Urine Cup in hand and a smile on my face, when Dr. Jiggly-berg says, “Oh, hi, Kim! Didn’t know you were in there.” Really? Because I certainly knew you were out here, so you must’ve heard something…like me PEEING. “Why don’t you go on ahead into the examining room and I’ll be in a few minutes?” And so I did.

I wish I could say that was the most, or even the last, embarrassing moment I’ve had in the doctor’s office, but, alas, it was neither.

*A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore. I distinctly remember because this is on the cover:dirtyjobA dead baby with it’s own Grim Reaper sickle being pushed in a stroller. Not exactly the kind of thing you’d want to see someone reading while waiting to see their OB-GYN. Oops. My bad.

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Posted in Everything Old Is New Again | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

An Open Letter to WordPress.com

Posted by kimlno on March 14, 2009

Yesterday, I decided to add a feed button to my blog. In my estimation, I calculated that this would take 5-10 minutes of my busy day. Much to my chagrin, the entire process took just over 2 ½ HOURS. For reference, I have included the instructions as they appear on your FAQs page.

If you want to show your feed link:

  1. Go to Appearance -> Widgets
  2. Add a Text Widget to your sidebar
  3. Open it by clicking the blue lines
  4. Type the following:
    <a href=”http://your-blog-name.wordpress.com/feed”><img src=”image-location” /></a>
  5. Save the changes

Do not copy and paste the link above! Write it out properly.

That will add a link to your feed.

As you can see, the directions are not complicated. I read them through once, and then proceeded to follow them, step by step. Step #1 was straightforward and easy to complete. Step #2 was also very simple. However, Step #3 is where things went decidedly south. The directions read: Open it by clicking the blue lines. “It” I assumed, was the “Text Widget” referred to in Step #2. Once added, the “Text Widget” looks like a blue oblong button with the words “Text” on the left and “edit” on the right. “Edit” is underlined. Because I had added other widgets to my page, I was familiar with the blue button and how it worked. So, I managed to “open it” without following your specific directions. Had this been the first widget button I had ever used, I would not have been able to complete Step #3 because these “blue lines” of which you mention are nowhere to be found. I suppose you could be referring to the “blue button” as a “blue line” but, in that case, the word “line” should be singular. Additionally, if someone cannot tell the difference between a line and a button, they shouldn’t be allowed to have a blog in the first place. Finally, why not make everyone’s life a little easier by not even referring to the blue lines and simply direct the user to click “edit?” Then, there would be no squabbling about lines or buttons, and we all could just move on to Step #4.

Step #4 is the most poorly written, misleading, inadequate, and utterly baffling line of instruction that has ever been conceived.  I have read Ikea instructions that were more helpful than that nonsense.  The problem with Step #4 is that it lacks vital information that is required to complete it. Therefore, it cannot be completed. It is impossible. Needless to say, Step #4 is where the bulk of my day was spent.

After reading Step #4 it seems simple enough. Essentially, it instructs the user to do one thing: Type this. However, “type this” is only the very tip of the iceberg. Issue #1: The instructions warn to NOT copy and paste that giant line of gobbledygook that looks as if it were typed using the Cyrillic alphabet or Wing Dings. Because maturity-wise I am essentially a three-year-old with a large vocabulary and a driver’s license, my immediate response to this direct warning was, “Why?” Why can’t I just copy and paste it? Since I was not provided with an answer, I decided to ignore the big, bold warning and I highlighted the line of code, right-clicked copy, tabbed over to my blue button, and pasted it. “Screw you, WordPress,” I thought. Maybe the other less intelligent users would have followed your exact command, but I am smarter than them. Feeling rather superior, I moved on to Step #5 and “saved the changes.” Well, that was easy enough, right? Let’s see how it looks on my page. As you can probably surmise, I was less than thrilled with the result. No feed button, just the words I had added, “Click here to subscribe to my blog.” Okay, so maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, but I was positive that I could remedy the situation relatively quickly.

At this point, I went back to my widget page and clicked on the blue button to see what was the matter. Sure enough, the code I had copied and pasted was different from the code that appeared there now. How’d that happen? Nothing like that has ever happened before when I’ve copied and pasted. Ever. And I’ve done my fair share of copying and pasting. So, not admitting defeat, I tried in vain to copy and paste the code once again, hoping for a more positive outcome. Do you know what they say about people who do the same thing over and over again, yet expect a different outcome? Of course you do.

So, I referred back to the instructions, and this time, I followed them implicitly. I TYPED the following into the blue box:

<a href=”http://your-blog-name.wordpress.com/feed”><img src=”image-location” /></a>

Hunting and pecking at my keyboard, I carefully entered each character, and when I arrived at the part that reads, “your-blog-name.wordpress.com” a light bulb illuminated above my head. I quickly changed “your-blog-name” to “kimlno” and all was right with the world. Or so I thought. I saved the changes and visited my site to see how they looked now (now that I’d actually followed the directions). And you know what? STILL no button. WTF? It was ONE LINE of code. People (and when I say people, I mean geeks who build their own computers from scratch) program thousands of lines of code every day. How difficult could this be? I have a MASTERS DEGREE, damn it. I can program the clock on my VCR, for crying out loud (I just really dated myself, didn’t I?)! I was not going to be bested by one stinking line of stupid HTML code. “I can do this,” I told myself. And, like Vizzini had instructed, I went back to the beginning, and started over once again.

By now, as you may have predicted, I was getting a little cranky. I was tired, nothing seemed to be working, and I was weighing the advantages to even having a stupid feed button on my blog that has less than 2000 hits and has been up for almost 6 months. But, I’m no quitter and, by golly, I was going to figure this thing out. Maybe I was missing something. Maybe, just as the directions had failed to mention that “your-blog-name” should be replaced with your blog name (stop laughing, it’s rude to mock an idiot), perhaps there was another piece of the code I needed to swap out in order for this feed button to work. But what?

I looked at the code more closely. I decided that the first part of the code looked right, and the problem must therein lie somewhere in the second half. Because I have formatted a note or two on Facebook, I was aware that all code had to exist in between < and >. Plus, not only did you need to indicate where you wanted the code to begin in your text, it was imperative to indicate where you wanted the code to END. Otherwise, even though you may only want to italicize one word of text, if you forgot to add </i> after the word, the rest of your document would be in italics. The code for the feed button started and ended with the proper punctuation marks, but INSIDE those < and > were two OTHER sets of < and >. AHA! Now, I was getting somewhere.

It was at this juncture that I decided it might behoove me to look at the directions once again, just in case I had missed something (of course, I WAS missing something, but I had no idea what it was or even what I was looking for). Below the instructions were lots of pretty feed buttons in different sizes and all the colors of the rainbow. Directly next to each button was a URL. Upon clicking various links, I determined (in all my brilliance) that the links corresponded to the size and color of the feed button. No light bulb switched on over my head this time, and I was caught up in deciding which color would look best on my page, should I ever unravel the secret to mystery, that is.

Before all the pieces of the puzzle did, indeed, finally come together, I had one more failure ahead of me. The code was now memorized and emblazoned on my brain for all eternity when it occurred to me that “img src” was most likely an abbreviation for “image source.” Hmm…image source. Well, the image I wanted to appear on my page was a button, and each one the buttons on the bottom of the page of directions had its very own link. So, if I substitute “img src” for one of those links, I should be in business! Right? Not quite. I plugged the URL into the code, but, alas, still no feed button appeared on my blog.

It was at this point that I began to cry. Not all out blubbering, snot-running-down-your-nose (Hey, Aqualung!), red-splotchy-and-swollen crying, but a definite pout took form and tears welled up in my eyes. A deep, cleansing breath later, I convinced myself that the solution was close at hand, and to give up now would be fool hardy. Perhaps it was the tears that cleared my vision, or maybe with all the trial and error, I only had one option left. Whatever it was, I had the notion to replace the words “image-location” with a URL. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, this appeared on my page:

feed-button1

I had solved the riddle. I was victorious. No thanks to you, WordPress. Vexed at every turn, your instructions mocked my intelligence, tested my patience, and all but extinguished my belief in a higher power. It is, for these reasons, I write this now.

WordPress, I implore you to revise your FAQs post haste. So strongly do I feel about the necessity of this action that I have rewritten them myself in hopes that no one should endure the level of frustration I experienced. You’re welcome.

If you want to show your feed link:

  1. Go to Appearance -> Widgets
  2. Add a Text Widget to your sidebar
  3. Open it by clicking “edit”
  4. Type, DO NOT COPY AND PASTE, the following:
    <a href=”http://your-blog-name.wordpress.com/feed”><img src=”image-location” /></a>
  5. Replace “your-blog-name” with the name of your blog (i.e. if your blog address is http://myblog.wordpress.com, change “your-blog-name” to “myblog”)
  6. Replace “image-location” with one of the URLs below (i.e., if you want your feed link to appear on your page exactly like the first link on the list, change “image-location” to http://faq.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/a14.png)
  7. Save the changes

That will add a link to your feed.

Here are some different link styles available for you to choose from:

feed-button2http://faq.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/a14.png

feed-medium

http://faq.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/a28.png


feed-large http://faq.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/a64.png

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Posted in Unsolicited Mail | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Excusez-MOI!

Posted by kimlno on March 12, 2009

kermit-fashion

I have seen some sick shit in my life. But, this? This is BY FAR the most disgusting, repulsive, stomach-turning, bile-producing fashion garment I have ever laid eyes upon. How dare they turn a beloved muppet into haute couture?!? Kermit is NOT a fabric! He’s a frog!

Oh, Kermit. My dear, sweet little Kermie. How? HOW?!? How could they do this to you? You didn’t leave the swamp to end up as an accessory on the runway! Now, *sniff* you’ll never know why there are so many songs about rainbows.

A pox upon you Jean-Charles de Castelbajac! Vengence, in the name of the frog, shall be mine.

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