Ivan's weblog

Note: This rant is actually Fabiola’s idea, but I’m writing it down for the world.

When we watch Telemundo or Univisión, the Spanish-language cable channels, we notice that there are plenty of “public service” advertisements. Common themes include:

• Be nice to your neighbor
• Talk to your baby to help him develop his brain
• Be careful with pesticides
• Buckle up and use child car seats
• Leave dangerous substances out of reach of children
• Don’t smoke when you are pregnant

We can all agree that these are very useful messages. What is disturbing is that they are only shown in the Hispanic channels. This could be interpreted as implying that Hispanic people have less common sense or less education.

An anonymous victim told me this story of strife and suffering.

For mysterious reasons, most programs in her laptop (including, but not limited to Microsoft Office) worked fine while plugged in at the office, but they hung when trying to run them at home. After several perplexing months, the conclusion was that those programs didn’t work because they couldn’t find the network printer. The solution: to set a dummy printer such as PDFwriter as the default printer.

Thanks to the generous weasels at AT&T. I spent $52.05 on long distance, but they claim that, thanks to their wonderful offers and discounts, I saved $1,263.93. What’s next: buy a can of Coke for $0.75 and save $323,751,823.15?

This is the first message in the “rants” section. I hope there won’t be too many, but I have always wanted to complain about this on the web: who’s the genius who designed DVD boxes so that you can’t get at the edges of the DVD to actually grab it without having to shake the box upside down? Look at the picture carefully to see what I mean (click on the picture for a larger version).

Look at the four indentations that seem like they are meant to allow the user’s fingers lateral access to the disc’s edges. And then note the four thin vertical barriers that utterly negate any possible use for the aforementioned indentations!