I'm not going to speculate on where it originates from, I can't be bothered today. But one thing is for sure, crying is not socially acceptable behavior. It makes people uncomfortable, maybe that's why everyone shys away from it. Whatever the reason, crying is definitely perceived as a sign of weakness, the ultimate expression of weakness in fact. It's a taboo, people who cry don't want others to see them cry, they feel weak and vulnerable.

Well I'm taking a stand right now. I've been crying everyday for the past week. Now go knock yourself out.

You've seen those headlines in the papers more times than you can keep track of. And it's always the same nonsense. "Real crisis in Madrid", how many times have you seen the word "real" used ambiguously in a sentence about Real Madrid? Doesn't it make you sick? Sick to see such abominable journalism? Such inexplicable lack of creativity? Such appaling use of language recycling? I'll tell you the first time I saw it I thought that's not too bad, very obvious but fair enough. But I later discovered that I would be fortunate enough to see it every goddam week!

I mean who would even want to read that bs in the first place? Why can't they compose normal meaningful headlines, it must be some itch to require that to appear every chance they get. I wonder what those offices look like, do they have a pool going for who finds the next one? Do they throw an office party when they print the next bad pun? I'm starting to think there's a whole subculture pushing this terrible language to feature in the press. It is unfortunate that players and clubs have these names that can be taken advantage of but perhaps they should hire lawyers to end this abuse once and for all..

Seen bad puns lately? Post them here..
"Arsenal stranded in Norway" referring to Rosenborg's Roar Strand scoring the equalizer in their CL match

"Low countries flying high" referring to the Netherlands and Belgium being successful

"A dutch of brilliance"

On a sidenote, do you know the saying "you can never have too many friends"? Well I always found it confusing because there is no reason given, it's a claim with no argument to support it. Well if you've also been annoyed by this fact, you don't have to ponder the issue anymore, because I've found the argument. The full version is: "you can never have too many friends because you never know when you'll lose the ones you have". Even your closest friends, those you always thought would be around forever (or at least indefinitely to use a less absolute term) can split on you at any moment, you just don't know.

It must have been about 15 years ago when the madness struck in Norway. 10kr became 9.95, 100 became 99, 1000 became 999. I would like to know which moron came up with this ingenious sales gimmick. It clearly has stuck, because after so many years it's still around. But is there a documented case of even one customer who fell for it? I find it hard to believe that any sane person, with or without the basic grasp of arithmetic (but with a working knowledge of how currency works however, in as much as the two can be separated), would fall for this trick.

It's obviously not a discount, because that would involve lowering the price by a distinguishable amount. Instead, we pay 9.95 instead of 10, which is a bipolar aggravation. Firstly, if you don't have the change, the cashier will still customarily ask you for it. Secondly, not having the change means you are getting it with every purchase. And it doesn't take a financial analyst to realize that the change we are walking around with is worthless. It's not enough to pay for anything and if you want to actually spend it, you have to keep saving up for some period of time before you have enough. Unless you keep it around for the sake of that cashier, if you give them change, they will reward you with a bill. But then you do need change in the first place to complete that transaction and walk away in satisfaction. So there is no getting away from it.

But the question remains, what is the purpose of this annoyance? And if there actually is a purpose for it, perhaps it's now, 15 years later, safe to say that it's outlived its function? Wouldn't we all be happier going back to paying 10? I would like to see a store open with that motto, we don't give you change. Everything costs a full amount, 10, 20, 50. No more change. I think it would be a tremendous success.

Having used a computer the past 11 years of my life, I've come across a plethora of install programs for various software. The absolute majority of them are a pain in the ass, let's face it. The simplest kinds of software, like Winamp, don't exactly require a lot of configuration options, but even those are a pain to use a lot of the time. Very rarely do I see an install program that caters to the user. The occurence is borderline miracle, in fact.

But worst of all, the operating system category. Any OS I have tried my hands on had a fairly long install procedure and just about everyone of them was painful. To make this more intuitive, I'll try to categorize a little.

1. buggy software
This is an immediate show stopper in many cases. If you can't even get the install program to run, there's little hope for you. I've had many experiences of this kind. Off the top of my head, the Windows XP installer will not run if you have a somewhat custom partition scheme with Linux partitions. It won't give you an error (that would be too convenient after all), so the best thing you can do before starting the install is to wipe your drive and try again. I had a reiserfs partition on mine drive, perhaps that's what did it. Another fond memory was the RedHat installer (think it was 8.x), which wouldn't start anaconda because the hardware detection failed at the pcmcia step. Passing the nodetect flag to the kernel didn't work and trying to omit this step was theoretically possible but required a fair bit of skill and determination to hit that F8 none too early and not too late. Finally I did succeed but it took a good hour to get there.

2. horrible design
This is the most prominent deficiency install programs possess. Around 10 out of 10 times, the dialogs are laid out in such a manner that makes it a pain in the ass to use them. The most glaring error is the notion that thou shalt not be blessed with the privilige of navigating both forward and backward in the install steps. Some installers give you an overview of the steps to be carried out first, guide you through them and then offer you a possibility to review your choice. But these are a minority among installers. In many cases, such as the Sun Solaris install I'm conducting at the time of writing, give no such privilige. If I press the wrong key by mistake and bypass the hardware autodetection, there is no way at any point in the installer to go back and fix it.

3. missing functions
In some installers, certain basic functions are just missing. Most recently, when conducting and install of Fedora Core 2, I selected to install no boot loader at all, awaiting the prompt at some point in the install process that would allow me to generate a boot floppy. But it never showed up, it was gone. And given that making a boot floppy in FC2 is as simple as typing one single command, it probably wouldn't have been too much of a problem to throw it in there or at least not take it out. Meanwhile, getting a FC2 bootdisk was far more involved than one might imagine, so in the end I was forced to run the install again, just because that step was missing.

4. bad interface
For those of us who have installed a few programs in our time, the interface of the installer is a key issue in determining how much time and aggravation goes into installing a certain piece of software. For Windows programs, the blatant lack of keyboard shortcuts is a real pain, although this applies to a wide range of "mouse-driven" installers. Omission of reasonable defaults is another annoyance, forcing you to type in or select a certain setting you use over and over again, which might as well have been made easier to define.

5. inflexibility
A close cousin of #2, this one is just about omnipresent. And for once, you can justify that being so, because installers give you a limited set of options to choose from, no matter how you look at it. You would have to do everything manually to allow any possible configuration. So I will go lightly on this step, because it's a tricky one. However, some installers are truly egregious when it comes to giving the user basic flexibility. Things like offering only ext2/3 for filesystem when the distribution has built-in functionality for reiserfs is annoying but no show stopper. But not allowing a custom location for installation destination certainly is.

Apart from the practical side of facilitating a large volume of installs with a well designed interface, the installer is also the first piece of your software that clients see. Evenso, it often seems to be the most neglected of them all. You would think any software vendor would want their software to be easy to install, if not pleasurable. But if the vendors had conducted any kind of feedback program on the installers, they would very well know (perhaps they do) how bad those installers really are.

What is it with bikes that causes endless aggravation? I bought mine new a year ago and no matter if I use it a lot or very little, there's always something wrong with it. For one thing, the gears have never functioned properly in its entire existence. The breaks are great when new but then they get loose after a while and you have to mess with the string to tighten them. But when you go there, you notice that it's quite a challenge to fix it so that the brake pads will stay symmetric, more often than not, one of them is inching closer to the wheel than the other and you get the wonderful automatically breaking effect. Aside from that, you know that sooner or later you will puncture your tire. Do I ever hate fixing that, it's a pain in the ass to take it out, you have to dismount the wheel and break open the tire with a screwdriver. Then you patch the puncture, wait for it to dry (or you can replace it, either way it's still time and effort), then put it back in, again a pain in the ass to seal the tire with the screwdriver. Then put the wheel back on.

And unless you're some kind of bike enthusiast, the maintenance is just a pain in the ass.