… I hope nails mysteriously find their way into the treads of your car tyres. This is the second time in as many months that I've run over a beer bottle some genius has left in the middle of the road (Manly before, the CBD this time), and most likely the second time I will have to get a tyre replaced. GRRR.
Archive for the 'Rants' Category
So I've been fudging around with the internal drive in my PowerBook for the past few days, with little luck in fixing it, despite the fact that it occasionally mounts and doesn't have any disk errors. *sigh*
However… not everything's peachy. I came home tonight, turned on the Firewire drive (a MacPower Icecube II)… and nothing. The light turned on, but the hard disk didn't spin up. Ironically, when booting up the PowerBook, it boots off the problematic internal hard disk with no problems! WTF?! So now I have a working PowerBook, but a dud external drive (on which all of my latest Uni work and mail is) and no way to access it.
Sometimes I hate technology…
Maybe I'm just being totally anal-retentive, but I get really annoyed when people don't follow simple road rules.
I was driving across the Cahill Expressway yesterday (on my way to an exam), with rain pelting down and an overcast sky. As you would suspect, these weren't the most ideal driving conditions. What surprised me, however, was the amount of people driving without their lights on! I mean, isn't it common sense that when it's overcast and raining, cars don't stand out as much (especially if they're silver, like mine)? So… what's the most obvious action to take in that situation? Turn on your lights! (Never mind the fact that it's actually a road rule - though I doubt anyone who didn't get their Ps or full license in the past few years actually remembers what the road rules are.)
Of course, if you're looking to have an accident, then it's in your best interests you just leave your headlights off. But for the rest of us who don't want to get into stupid accidents, maybe it's an idea to turn them on.
News.com.au has a story on the multi-million dollar pay rises given to some of the execs at Macquarie Bank recently:
The bank's chief executive, Allan Moss, now pockets $18.5million - a $6million hike on the previous year - and executive Nicholas Moore takes home $18.2million, up from $11.4million, while property chief Bill Moss is paid $15.5million - a handsome $10million pay rise.
$18.5 million dollars… Damn, that's a lot of money. I'm sure these people worked hard to get where they are, and continue to work hard, but is anyone really worth $18.5 million dollars a year? (Or even US$32 million, the amount the CEO of Merrill Lynch gets paid.) I don't have any information on what these people do with their money, but I'd suspect it would be to expand their property investments, buy a new Mercedes E-class, oh, and maybe a BMW 7-series too - basically, spend it on themselves.
I'm all for making money, living comfortably, etc, but in my view, that amount of money is just excessive (yes, I know there are plenty of people that earn much, much more). If you're spending $9 million a year (when you take out taxes) to live, then there's something seriously wrong with your lifestyle. Even if you're not spending it, what's the point of keeping it in properties/shares/trusts, when it could do so much more for plenty of other people that don't have homes and can't feed themselves? Calling in the poverty line may be cliche, but it's true. You have a handful of people earning absolutely obscene amounts of money (which most of us will never, ever earn in our entire lifetimes), and a whole, absolutely frickin' huge mass of people living below the "poverty line" - some without running water and electricity!
Why don't these people (or the companies paying out these amounts of money) sacrifice even a small percentage of their pay to help others out? With a profit of $823 million, spending $1 million isn't exactly going to hurt the company. I bet the feeling of helping someone (let alone a community) out, by feeding them, educating them, or even building infrastructure far outweighs the cheap (and short) thrill they might get from buying that brand new Mercedes or house in Rose Bay.
It's sad, really.
When editing a document or text field in a MacOS X app, have you ever noticed that hitting the "up" arrow on the keyboard eventually takes you to the beginning of the document? e.g. if you're on the third line, it will go directly upwards twice, then the cursor will move to the very left of the first line.
Similarly, pressing the "down" key will move the cursor downwards, and eventually sit right after the last character.
I've found this to be the default behaviour for many MacOS X applications (and it's the default behaviour in Apple's text views), but for some ODD reason, Word 2004 does not behave in the same manner. It simply beeps. Argh… It's the little things that count.
(FYI, hitting command+up or command+down places the cursor in the expected position.)
One thing that really irks me is laziness and a lack of consideration for others.
I was at the BridgePoint shopping centre today, and someone was kind enough to place a shopping trolley against the pillar next to my car, meaning I couldn't get out. Obviously, it was easy for me to move it (and my trolley) to the trolley bay located about 20 metres away. What got to me was that the shopper had failed to do that in the first place! If you've just spent the past hour doing the shopping, surely moving the trolley back to the bay (all of 30 seconds) isn't such a big ask?!
Bloody [North Shore] suburbanites…
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