Merry PDF-mas!

HO HO HO! Merry Christmas!

 

And to show off my geeky side I am not only wishing you a wonderful holiday, but sharing a technoid tid-bit from St. Nick himself!

 

====  From the North Pole ====

Are you sick of Adobe bloating the SNOT out of their dumb PDF viewing software??  Wish you could just view PDFs and not have to put up with their updates and forever downloads?

 

Well, my fellow HO-HO-HO-ers, you are not alone – my elves would not stop whining about how their core-duo hamsters were consuming FIVE times the amount of magic dust just to run Adobe’s key-logging back-stabbing post-script nightmare before Christmas.

 

To help you all, I have found a very good boy indeed. Yes I have! No lumps of coal for this young man:

 

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/download.html

 

A free PDF viewer that runs on a thumb drive, and it keeps my little elves from sitting around with their thumbs elsewhere – always a good thing! HO! Gotta love it. And if you try it out and it works for you, too, then save a few hundred megabytes and a few hundred headaches by uninstalling that pesky Adobe viewer. (My elves have a special lump of “coal” just for THEM! HO HO!)

 

Your Pal,

 

Santa Script

==== End North Pole Transcript ====

CASE STUDY: How Bailed-Out M&I Bank Screws The Little Guy

Of course, not long after shelling out cash to the banks, I am sure momma government is wishing they had given some thought ensuring the money actually got USED to make the economy better, right?  I own a small, beat-to-hell business that is suffering, and let me tell you, the problem is  NOT my mortgage rate.  The problem is my unsecured lines of credit!

Is anybody LOOKING at these? Here is a perfect example – I owe money to Swift Financial (who gets their money from M&I Bank).  M&I just went to the feds during these hard times and got 1.7 BILLION dollars.  BILLION.  OK, my business owes them x,000. THOUSAND.  They’ve heard my complete story about 5 times: losing my biggest customer (their parent went bankrupt to the tune of 3.2 Billion), about how I am going to try and cover payments from my personal income, about how I am trying to get my shopping engine back on line (and no, AuthorizeNET and IPayment have not made that possible yet, over a $25 balance that went unpaid… so I cannot collect what little money I am owed because of $25 – that is real SMART guys, thanks alot!), and yet M&I still calls me 1-2 times a day to try and squeeze blood from me.

Recently, even though I told them that my personal credit scores are important to my ONE PAYING GIG, they decided to put a 30-day late on my credit!  So, with one hand M&I Bank is stashing 1.7 BILLION dollars of OUR PAID TAXES in their pocket, and with the other hand they are strangling those same tax-paying people that owe them thousands of dollars!  They are jacking up their customer’s interest rates, charging late fees, and damaging our credit.  Did anyone ever read them the story about KILLING THE GOLDEN GOOSE?

Does M&I think this is what will HELP THE ECONOMY?? Well, it is NOT helping me or my business! And if the government wants to look for opportunities to helps us little guys out (the employees and micro-businesses out there who are actually still lucky enough to be employed, still be paying taxes, and still trying to do our part to move through this nasty economic storm), maybe they look at some rules for lines of credit:

• Mandate that interest rates be capped at, say, 7.9% for a period of 12-24 months.
• Allow borrowers to set their own minimum payments, as little as 1% of the total balance due, during the next 12-24 months.
• Mandate that, although accounts can continue to accrue interest, there shall be no late fees assessed and no 30-day lates issued against a borrower’s personal credit file until further notice . 

How many people would benefit from that? I would!  I have some creditors with interest rates over 20%, which is killing my ability to make the minimum monthly payment, and causing them to punish me further!

In summary:

• Jacking Up Your Ability to Process Credit Cards… $25.
• Line of Credit…$x,000. 
• Loss of Customers… $ -x,000
• The irony of M&I Bank using tax dollars to save its skin while screwing its tax-paying borrowers to the wall is…well… Priceless.

I would like to take a fluffy moment to thank American Express, because as a DEBIT card that is due in full, they have offered a repayment option at 5% interest.

I would also like to thank Compass Bank’s SBA program – no late fees and no changes in my interst rate.  Thank You – in the end it helps both of us!

Coders Should All Be Emo

Technology sucks! There is no reason to code anymore.

 

LOOK MA, NEW TECHNOLOGY!

Hmmm  this is going on my blog, then I am going to bed.  So – openly I confess, since the last 2-3 years were spent writing code for business logic, it has been a while since I wrote a website from scratch.  There are a lot of “NEW” things out there… some make life easier, while others, uh, not so much. In fact, there are a lot of pretty dim ideals driving technology. 

 UH-OH, I STEPPED IN TECHNOLOGY! STINKY! 

Why am I telling you all this? Because I thought maybe you would want to know what keeps me up til 3A, and why I have started “cutting” (it’s what all cool Emo types do, don’t you know).  Her name is Cascade – Cascading Style Sheets, and I thought because she had “sheets” in her name this was going to be fun. Not Not Not!  She’s a pain in the butt like so many others in this business.  She’s not even “all that” – gah, she is shallow…all about style and looks and layouts.  She has no substance!   She is empty like MEEEEEEE (cut cut). Wahhhhhh! Watch me wallow in my self-induced coder pity…

EMO:  LET THE THESIS BEGIN!

Meet the rest of the geek family, and you too can know why all coders should go Emo:

HTML:  Hyper Text mark-Up Language.  He’s a decent enough bloke, which is why he has one foot in the GRAVE.  Takes your web page and tells the web browser how to draw it.  Sounds good right! Well you CAN’T HAVE IT! Most HTML layout conventions are being dumped like cold meat in favor Miss CSS!  That’s right, if you or your web page wants to get laid (out that is), you’ll be talking to the dark, empty princess.  It makes me sick just thinking about it (cut). 

C#:  “C-Sharp” – One of the .NET (“dot-NET”) languages from Microsnot.  Nobody really respects .NET software developers because a true ENGINEER (oooOOOooo) would use a real language like C++.  And then there is JAVA – which is basically what Microsoft stole from to create .NET.  JAVA people get more respect because JAVA is hell compared to .NET.  It’s like this – you know how crack addicts get more attention than people who stay away from drugs? Yeah, like that… JAVA people are like emos – all cutting on themselves and bitching about it, so the C++ guys take pity on them because Microsoft is evil, blah blah, whine whine… and then the .NET club feels rejected and becomes blinded by angry rebellious SADNESS!! Where is my black eyeliner, I want my tears to make cool black streams down my face…who appreciates OUR PAINNNNNNNN!?

SQL:  Structured Query Language.  This is TRULY like crack, because once you are hooked on it, you know it sucks, you know the database doesn’t love you, but somehow you still crave more.  SQL is an instant high – you send something to the database (SELECT password FROM Users WHERE username=’cinderfire’): See?? You can kinda tell what that means right?? You are getting the password for a user named cinderfire.  You are a GOD!! YOU KNOW THEIR PASSWORD [1]!! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  F–k. See?  Then you come down…down into a relational darkness because the database knows it has you like its little strawberry!! (cry…why…why must the SQL Server be so cold to me!!??) – dammit, I need my eyeliner again.

XML:  eXtensible Mark-Up Language.  Who the hell knows why this ever got invented – my life was fine before some academic eff-up dreamed into my peaceful reality this… this abominable fart-child, intended for shuttling information in a human-readable format.  Why? Why would I want to SLOW down a computer by having it store its information in human-readable words?? SOOOO STUPID! and it is all the rage in software now.  Yah, dig this… like the you could have the computer think in… oh, I don’t know, how about NUMBERS (because that’s what binary is good at – shhhhhh!)? But no… no.  Instead of letting the computer pass around a number like 27, we’ll  have it pass something like “<Wine bottleID=”27”>Porky Port</Wine>”  so that WE can know the computer is thinking about the bottle ID for a bottle of wine. 

OK, so the computer has a drinking problem– why do I care as long as it gets its job done and doesn’t play with its floppy drive on the clock? And don’t even get me started on XSD.  X-rated Style Definition is the language that helps describe how the XML should be interpreted (Yeah, nice try…Cascade isn’t letting you use XSD on her! That is incompatible!).  So, thanks to XSD, we know how to deal with “<Wine>” tags, and know that they need an attribute called “bottleID” that needs to be a number.  Yeah, that slows things down – MUCH!  And then on top of all that, someone has to bring in the SOAP and the WSDL and all this other madness they call SOA (which is not the same as SOAP. Again, that would be EASY.  I just don’t CARE anymore! My heart is filled with CSS darkness, an implosion of C# jealousy, a wicked hatred of my SQL addiction, and bitter disdain for all things XML.  I hate it all (cut cut), and I’ve been crying and whining under this 1000-watt blue spot-light for so long I am a sweaty miserable rainbow of eyeliner, purple hair dye, poorly electroplated jewelry,  and…SALT!! 

I AM OVER IT (SLAM BATHROOM DOOR. HUDDLE IN A WHIMPERING CORNER UNDER MY OWN PERSONAL RAIN CLOUD.) 

I am sure I have pissed off someone who thinks this web stuff is all an improvement.  Yeah.  Sooo much better.  I think I would rather count my own belly-button lint.  Shut-Up SQL Server!! Nobody asked you… I hate you all!! I’m just going to turn off the lights, crank up some screaming 15-year-olds who have endured such all-encompassing pain that us adults don’t even KNOW,  dwell in all my anger at web geek society and its patterns for frail stupid happiness, and pitiful weak respect, and…and…CARVE my Last Will and Testament into my forearm using these dull chopsticks from the sushi restaurant next door.  At least, that is where I think they are from – I wouldn’t know, because I found them in a drawer in the employee kitchen next to a small puddle that smelled like leaky ketch-up and soy sauce.  Did you HEAR ME?! I am going to carve myself WITH TAINTED SOY SAUCE! Hey…SOA!! SOy sAuce! Whatever, XML! If you can be eXtensible, I can have my effing SOy sAuce. Dumbass.

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[1] – note that a proper password would be stored encrypted in the database. And no, the database, even though we might call it “relational” – still doesn’t care about you or any relationships…unless it means enforcing primary key violations…yeah SQL Servers get all sick-excited about violations, and they could care less if the data is riddled with poor little defenseless orphans!  I hate SQL Server! It’s all LIES.