My First Word Processor

Talking about dot-matrix printers, a childhood memory of war (against the computer) comes back to me…

The year was when I was going to 7th grade (I’m 27 now, so calculate it yourself). A teacher wanted an assignment to be handed in computer-typed. No problem, I thought, I have WordStar and a printer.

At home, I booted up my DOS PC, put in the WordStar disk (5.25 inch!), and typed “ws.exe”. Bzzt, bzzt, I was back in DOS. Damnit, the program was infected with a virus!

With the assignment due the next day, I was desperate.

“I know, I’ll use Quick Basic’s features to control the printer, and make it print what I want”. All my program did: wait for input, and print it out. But the variable to hold the input can have a maximum of 255 characters!

“No problem, I’ll just stop after typing 3 full lines with 80 characters each, and press Enter. Put the whole thing in a while loop.”.

So that’s what I did, the printer screeching every time I hit Enter. One time I hit Enter too soon, leaving, aieieie, a big nasty gap in the middle of the page, catastrophe! (Was it in the middle of a word too? Can’t recall).

I was quite proud handing in that piece of paper with unformatted lines filling it. I tried to explain to my physics teacher why there was a gap in the middle, but looking back at it, I don’t think he cared…

F***ing Faceboof!

On my second rant against the most idiotic thing ever invented, Faceboof apps, I shall now rant against the Super Wall…

What is it? Just the “web 2.0″ (or is it just Facebook) equivalent of email chain-letters. It was born to this feature with the fact that you can write, and forward a message, to, per default, ALL of your contacts. What’s in it? The same bullshit, over and over again, forwarded to you by your “friends” because it says “Forward now!”. Somebody should really invent a one-button “Send me money” functionality on the web, imagine how rich he’ll be after posting “Click here now!”.

So anyway, there’s this joke posted on some person’s super wall I wanted to read. It turned out to be a rehash of the old joke of reasons why a computer is male (you got it to solve problems, instead it IS the problem), and reasons why it should be female (only its creator understand its internal logic). Anyway, before I found this out, I had to click “Click here to read the rest of this message” (Haha, I’m just as stupid… Ka-ching!). So I did. “Install Super Wall?”, the stupid thing asked. “Well all right, I’ll delete it afterwards.”. Uncheck all the stupid things it wants to do like write to my status feed, spam my mailbox, put itself on my profile (oh hell no!), and click “Install!”…

“Do you want to invite your friends?” No, f- you, skip that.
“Do you want to send e-cards?” No…
“Do you want [I forget what, I was just looking for the skip message]“.

Ah the stupidity of Facebook apps. If you want to interact with a friend’s installed app, you have to install it too! Because user-base is everything! “We have a million users! Now give us 50 million f’ing dollars you stupid venture capitalists!”

OK, can I now downgrade to Web 1.0 please? Here’s your quote of the day: “Web 2.0 is Windows Vista”.

Faceboof

Wow, Facebook has a pretty cool new feature, “People you may now”, probably those people who have a high number of mutual friends with me, a.k.a. “2nd-degree friends” or nodes on the network with distance = 2 via multiple paths.

Out of the three people it recommended for me, it got 2 wrong, and 1 right, I do know her, but eh, I don’t really want to be “friends” with her, because I think she’s a b***h…

My Take on The Absolut World

Funny to see that most of the photoshops have been from the “America is great, get a brain you morans!” side of the blogosphere. I suppose the don’t-have-a-brain-big-enough-for-a-sense-of-humour conservatives are the ones being offended by Absolut’s humourous ad.

And apparently the war’s even reached Wikipedia’s talk page on Absolut Vodka, with these dolts being outraged that Wikipedia is, I would convey it as “taking Absolut’s side” on this “controversy.”. Talk about sounding like 5 year old kids. One commenter even wrote that they are outraged that a company redrew the border of a sovereign nation. Oh boo-hoo mate, it’s a joke! So what if some ad-executive (or whoever) wants to draw the borders in any way he or she pleases? It’s called free speech and even if the conservative dolts can’t accept it (like a lot of things in the world that they can’t accept), it’s still the law!