ralpress.org

How low would your levels of self-respect and self-esteem have to sink before you could put yourself in a position in which you had to take orders from a person like this?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc

http://youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HTkA9L2J2gY

And a great mash up of the first two:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE

Of course, Microsoft’s CEO hasn’t always been a ranting nutter, as this old classic from the mid 1980s makes clear:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk

And why does he shout all the time? Does his software not shout for itself?

One can only hazard a guess as to what percentage of his septum has survived…

No, not MySQL’s recent announcement, but this story: “Pair guilty of harrassing dolphin” .

Can someone explain to me why “distressing” a dolphin by “disturbing its normal pattern of behaviour” is something that can get you arrested, but deliberately fishing a shark out of the ocean and clubbing it to death on the deck of a boat is acceptable?

Today’s Guardian on Geri Halliwell’s role at the UN:

” … we live in a celebocracy, with one academic recently noting that celebrities tend to “practise the politics of emotion”. Geri’s recent “fact-finding mission to Zambia” is a case in point. Asked what the most memorable part of the “mission” was, Geri cites “seeing light in the children’s eyes when they see they are not forgotten and that people care”.

Yes … this column has a powerful suspicion that the relentless seepage of celebrity into these areas is not a Good Thing, that it dangerously skews debate, that it forces people to engage with political issues in emotional, largely cretinous ways, and that if we don’t start calling them out for it, we’re going to be distilling drinking water from our own urine by 2032.”

A pretty good summary of the problem if you ask me.

(Factoid: “geri” means “diarrhoea” in Japanese.)

So I’ve done them a favour and lightened their load by one.

I ordered a couple of hard disks from dabs two days ago. Yesterday morning I discovered an email from them telling me that “You have received this email because we were unable to confirm the details of your address with third party agencies.” I received exactly the same message when I made my last purchase from them, back in September of last year. (I’ve made dozens of purchases from dabs.com over the years, so I’m not exactly an unknown quantity to them.)

I returned my address and other details they wanted well before start of business yesterday. I received an automated reply asking me to be patient, to wait for a reply and to please not send any further messages until I’d heard from them.

By 23:00 last night I’d received no response. Given that I’m not allowed to seek clarification about the situation, I cancelled my order and took my business straight to one of their main competitors (who had no problem processing my card details). I just have zero patience with these web-wrapper-around-warehouse businesses these days.

Oh, and I’ve received no contact from them about the cancellation either. They just don’t seem to care — or if they do, they’re overwhelmed and can’t cope. Either way, they don’t need my business.

(PS. If you’re wondering, I have never defaulted on credit card payments or experienced any kind of “personal credit” problems).