Those of you who’ve been reading this for a while know that I don’t have a lot of patience for many religious organizations. Maybe I”m just cynical, and maybe I focus too much on the bad examples, but all too often, especially in the popular religious culture, I see people who are just out to make a buck in the name of the Lord.

One is not one of these groups.

Bono, who makes me laugh because he’s an Irish Evangelical with a potty mouth, co-founded the group, and it was through one of his speeches that I learned some of the following:

In 2007, two million, two hundred thousand people were killed by the AIDS virus.
In that same year, one million, seven hundred thousand people died from tuberculosis, and almost nine hundred thousand people were killed by malaria.

Across the world, more than one billion people lack one of the most basic elements of life: clean drinking water. Nearly three times that number lack basic sanitation facilities. These two things together kill more children every year than any other cause.

In 2003, the United Nations reported that twenty-five thousand people died of starvation every day. In 2001, the World Bank estimated that one million, one hundred thousand people lived on less than one American dollar per day, and nearly three billion lived on less than two dollars per day.

One’s goal is simple: to work until these statistics are no longer true. Through awareness, through activism, through individual charity and through government reform, they air to make these statistics lies.

True religion, it has been said, is this: to care for the widow and the orphan. To neglect those who have so little, when we have so much, is a crime. We don’t realize how blessed we are in this nation; our economy may be in turmoil, our confidence may be shaken, but very, very few of the people reading this went to bed hungry last night. Very, very few have to decide between putting food on the table and buying medicine to save their child’s life.

I went into this meeting wondering if Bono was a Christian, and I walked out in tears, wondering if I was.

-Pastor Frank Jewett

That’s religion I can get behind.

One resources: about One, issues, blog, get involved.

Every once in a while, I get to say something that’s just kind of cool. I had one of those happy moments tonight. To wit:

I’m the scariest guy you know. The fact that he concerns me should tell you something.

I’ll leave the context of that little nugget to your imagination.

I dropped by Wal Mart on the way home tonight. The cashier asked the woman ahead of me if she wanted to spend a dollar on one of those hearts/shamrocks/whatevers that go to feed starving soldiers without puppies or whatever. The woman stopped, considered, and then asked:

“Is it tax deductible?”

I just kind of stared at her. No, this one dollar donation is, sadly, not tax deductible. No, the woman working the overnight at Wal Mart will not be writing you a receipt to document, for the benefit of the IRS, your lavish generosity. This dollar, this single, lonely dollar, will be forever lost to you, earning you no reward and no recognition, save maybe the warm feeling in your heart.

The woman said “no thanks.”

I was asked this afternoon if it would be possible to develop a new user interface over the weekend. I hate questions like this, because the answer is usually “yes,” but a “yes” qualified with “if I work seventeen hours a day, every day between now and Monday, stopping only long enough to get more potato chips and soda out of the vending machine, and occasionally using the loo.” I relayed this fact, and the guy doing the asking got a thoughtful look on his face, then said “I’ll ask management,” and wandered away.

I’m getting really tired of these FaceBook “notifications” that are really ads from some stupid application. “Some guy you have never met, but friended anyway, because you’re a wanton internet hussy, just told us whether or not he thinks you ever dropped E. Click here to install an application that will let us suck all of the extensive data FaceBook has on you into the Identity-Theft-O-Tron 2,000, oh, and to see what his worthless opinion might have been.”

Notifications are for five things:

1. To let me know someone wrote on my wall
2. To let me know someone commented on something I posted
3. To let me know someone commented on something I also commented on
4. To let me know someone accepted my friend request
5. To let me know I was tagged in someone’s post

That’s it. Ad space is for ads, notification space is for notifications. And if I haven’t installed an app, don’t let it send me notifications. Also, no, I do not want to send anyone a virtual teddy bear, thanks much.

I spent the morning looking over various themes for Swing, Java’s native User Interface toolkit. I learned two things: One, the themes available for Swing are almost universally horrid, and Two: that might not matter very much longer, because Sun has announced that they aren’t making any core changes to Swing.

The first point makes me angry because I do pretty much all of my UI work in Swing, and it’s just this side of impossible to make a Windows app that doesn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out. The second makes me angry because I’ve spent the last five years honing my Swing skills, to the point that I’m one of the go-to UI guys at my site, and now I have to learn an entirely new, buggy, poorly supported and not at all documented, procedural language, because some guy at Sun decided “Java is hard.”

Once again, I feel the need to remind the world that when I say “go ahead and work in” at the gym, I most emphatically do no mean “go ahead and spend the next half hour monopolizing the only chin up station in the entire freaking gym, while I stand here, panting from exertion but slowly loosing my heart rate, glowering at your pathetic attempts to mimc physical activity.” What I do mean is more along the lines of “hurry up.”

So I guess the Oscars were last night. All I know about the whole shindig is that The Dark Knight was the best movie of last year, and the Academy can roast over a slow pit if they disagree.

I’m starting to drop weight in preparation for summer. And, yes, it does take that long; I get up to around 240-250 in the winter, and walk around at about 210 in the summer. Anyway, this makes me angry for two reasons: one, I’m in between belt sizes at the moment, so I’m pretty much never comfortable, and two, every single ad I have seen on the internet today has been for some form of pizza.

Finally, some of you are wondering why you’re getting a Things that Make Me Angry and not an Epic Travelog. The answer is that I decided to check my work email at about 10pm last night, and discovered that my trip had been pushed back two weeks. I was this close to getting on a plane for no reason. A phone call would have been nice. You know, to a number that I check over the weekend.

Facebook ads are hilarious, and kind of spookily accurate. Last week, when I was posting my California Dreaming series, and ranting about how much airlines suck at life and fail, pretty much every ad I saw was for cheaper, better air travel. And on-line dating. But mostly air travel.

The one I’m looking at right now, though…

There’s a whole series of ads, which have a title like Celebrity X’s IQ is 120, a little blurb, and then a link at the bottom which says think you’re smarter? Take out quiz!

Even these ads are pretty heavily targeted. I’ve seen ads which say Barack Obama’s IQ is 120, or House’s IQ is 138, so they know who I voted for and what TV shows I watch, which also means that most of the hits on my blog are probably coming from their robots.

The ad I’m looking at right now, though, is for Bella Cullen nee Swan, heroine of Twilight. So, okay, Facebook knows I like trashy emo teen vampire romances. But the ad says that Bella’s IQ is 102, and states that she’s “noticeably smarter than most students, whose IQs average 86.”

Okay, so first, the average IQ is 100. And that’s not a happy coincidence, it’s by definition. Second, an IQ of 102 isn’t noticeably superior to the average. Third, how in the nine fires do you give an intelligence test to a fictional character? Fourth, if the average IQ of a kid in High School is 86, we are so, so screwed.

And then I started reading about The Milwaukee Project, conducted by Rick Heber, and got all depressed. The executive summary: idiots are made, not born. Which means: all those people at Wal Mart? It’s not their fault. They didn’t have to be that way.

Software bundling. I’m setting up a laptop at work, so I can give demos when I’m on the road, which is pretty much full time these days. Anyway, I need a few third-part program in order to give these demos, like Quicktime and Google Earth. It should be pretty trivial to install these, right?

Wrong. Because when you try to install these programs, you’re hit up with “offers” to “helpfully” install a “suite” of “useful” “software.” Or, as I like to refer to it, “several gigabytes of useless crap that I will never, ever willingly use.”

You cannot get Quicktime without getting iTunes at the same time. It’s simply impossible. Now, I use iTunes at home, and even use their online store rather than buy physical media. But, if I want iTunes, especially on a company laptop, I’ll install it myself. And in this case, I never will, because iTunes does something funky with the network settings which makes my network connection stop working. Which leads to really awkward moments when you’re trying to give a client an on-line demo. “And as you can see, if you click this button… oh. Drat.”

Google Earth, on the other hand, offers to install Chrome, Google’s fairly new web browser. Actually, make that “Google’s fairly new, crappy, not-even-ready-for-beta, buggy, only runs on Windows, and last time I checked, lacked even a decent bookmark manager, poor excuse for a web browser.” No, thank you, I will not be using Chrome.

Speaking of Google Earth, there is no decent mapping widget or library. Google Earth is great, as long as you don’t mind sending all of your data to Google for rendering. World Wind for Java has a dependency list longer than my arm, and JOGL, the Java implementation of Open GL, is buggy on every platform except Windows. JXMapPanel is nice, when it works, which is only occasionally.

Also, I read this little bit today:

JEditorPane is a powerful component. One of it’s main strengths is the ability to render auto-wrapping text.

Wow! 2009, and we’ve got a component that wraps text when it’s too long to fit on one line! Look, I’ve written text components, and I know that this problem is deceptively difficult, but we’ve pretty much solved it at this point. Maybe now we can get on to things like a styles system that works, or exporting documents with the embedded images actually embedded. Pretty please?The snow in my driveway was over my knees this morning. That isn’t even whether, it’s a sign that God doesn’t want us to live here. He’s trying to drive us out, people. Let’s pay attention. Also, while I was digging out this morning, I noticed that a stack of envelopes had gone flying into the air. My mail was buried, and I didn’t notice it.

I read two articles about Social Security this week. The first states that the Unted State’s outstanding financial obligations (debt), which includes Social Security and Medicare benifits which will be paid out in the future, amount to sixty-five and a half trillion dollars, which is more than the gross domestic product of the entire world.

The second spoke of a plan by Peter Orszag, Obama’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, to save social security through “modest tax hikes and modest benefit cuts.” For those of you who don’t follow these things, Social Security needs to be “saved” because, by 2049, the program will be paying out more money than it takes in.

Both of these articles sparked apoplectic outrage. People were furious (and rightly so) over the Government’s fiscal promiscuity, and enraged that the Third Rail of American politics was going to be tampered with. Numerous plans, all of course “superior” to Orszag’s, where offered by the internet punditry.

My reaction was a bit more laid back, and quite a bit simpler: we’re still trying to save Social Security?

I’m not talking about cutting benefits for people already in retirement, or even for the people who have been building their retirement plans on the assumption that Social Security would make up the shortfall. I’m talking about people like me, who are just starting their careers. who have an entire lifetime to save money, and have grown up with the knowledge that the Government is about as reliable as a junkie looking for a fix. I laugh when I get a letter from Social Security, because I have no illusion of ever collecting a dime from that program.

So, my question is two-fold. One, is there anyone under thirty that really expects Social Security to be there for them when they retire? And if not, why don’t we just let it die? Again, not right now, not while there are people dependent on it, but a slow, planned phase-out of what might be the most expensive program in the history of the world?

As I drove home tonight, I came across this billboard:

Now, I imagine that the message this billboard was trying to impart was something alone the lines of “wow, I never knew that Wilberforce’s awesome exploits were inspired by the Bible! I should read that for myself!”

Here’s the problem. Well, problems.

First, I have absolutely no idea who Wilberforce is, nor how successful his quest for justice was. I mean, maybe he was the Batman of his day, the victim of a tragic childhood, driven to protect the innocent from the cruel fiends who have stolen the night from the good people of the world. But maybe he was just angry that the waitress gave him the wrong change, again.

And your wood-cut image does nothing to inspire me to research him, either. And the color scheme… God, the color scheme. Black and white on a red-brown background? Really?

And then there’s the composition. This thing is almost painful to look at. It’s like this national advertising campaign, with two thousand billboards, was turned over to a guy with a copy of Your First Photoshop and a small collection of clip art.

And thank you for adding the mouse cursor. I was unaware that hyperlinks needed to be clicked on. Except, well, these hyperlinks, which would actually have to be typed in, manually.

Look, if your billboard leaves me cold, I can only imagine what it does to some random guy, who has no interest in matters theological or historical. It probably makes him say something like “wow, those Christians sure do suck at photoshop. Well, I better get back to drinking beer, neglecting my kids, and looking at porn.”

And it’s not like I’m some photoshop or marketing savant, either. And that’s why I don’t do those things. I’m good at three things: writing code, picking up heavy things, and making fun of people, so that’ what I do. I don’t do damage to my own causes by throwing myself at tasks I suck at.

Okay. Enough with the feel-good, here’s a list of people I admire stuff. Enough with the moralizing and the politicizing. Enough with the pictures of Obama wielding a sword.

It’s Friday, and I’m Angry.

This:

Is the Greek letter Sigma. You will notice that it looks sorta like an “E,” leading people to use it thus:

Sigma is not an “E.” It’s the Greek equivalent of an “S.” That box doesn’t say “Greek,” it says “Grssk.” I don’t even know what “Grssk” means. It’s like the sound Tony the Tiger would make, if he was trying to say “they’re great,” but got punched in the throat by a kid that didn’t like the toy surprise. And in this case, they “toy surprise” is a complete lack of understanding of the language you’re trying to use.

I see this all the time. Movies, Greek restaurants, college t-shirts. It’s like all those people wandering around with Asian tattoos. I’m convinced that ninety percent of those say “I’m an ignorant white boy” in Japanese.

Also, that girl on the box, with the heart straw?  Needs to be punched in the face.

Facebook limits comments to some ridiculously tiny number of characters, like five hundred or something. There are two possible reasons for this, both equally annoying.

One, whoever designed their database doesn’t know that there’s a TEXT type, and went ahead and used the same VARCHAR(500) that his professor used in his freshmen DB course. Look, bro, you work for one of the biggest web sites on the internet. Brush up your skills.

The second possibility: they just don’t want people to talk that much. Yeah, yeah, you don’t need a whole lot of space to write “LOL Nice bong! U gonna win a gold medal now?!?” But some of us use the internet to discuss things of more substance that who slept with whom after drinking what. You just can’t discuss the finer points – or even the broad points – of an economic stimulus package, or the morality of torture, in five hundred characters. Five hundred characters is an opening paragraph. You’re teaching people that detailed, thoughtful opinions aren’t worth having. Stop it.

Speaking of comments, please top trying to “correct” my HTML. I’m a software engineer. I know what I’m doing. Your “fix the poor idiot’s shameful attempt at using a markup language” algorithm is not a software engineer, and does not know what it is doing. Or what I was trying to do, for that matter.

Wolverine’s claws. Look, Wolverine is awesome, and if there was a way I could get a set of adamantium knives grafted to my knuckles, I would sign up in a heartbeat. And then I would use them for everything. Need a letter opened? Snikt. Trouble opening that can of spaghetti sauce? Slice. Want some butter on that bread? Sching.

And yeah, I get that there’s some suspension of disbelief involved. He’s a mutant with an accelerated healing factor and an indestructible metal skeleton. But the thing is, his claws, when not deployed, hide inside his forearms. Which means they have to be shorter than his forearms. But look at this:

Those things have got to be four feet long. There is no way that they would fit inside of his forearms. He’d be walking around with little claw-nubbins sticking out of his hands all day. Not to mention the fact that he couldn’t bend his wrists.

And then there’s this guy:

No. Just no.

I tend to either get up very, very early, or stay up very, very late. By that, I mean I usually either wake up at 4:30 in the morning, or go to bed at 4:30 in the morning.

One of the side effects of that is that I’m usually not around during the busy hours of the day. I’ll hit Wal Mart at midnight – because I haven’t learned my lesson yet – go to the gym at five in the morning, and I usually hit restaurants at off hours, too.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I decided to try and get something to eat at 7pm on a Friday.

Dear. God.

Why are there so bleeding many of you people? And how do you deal with the crowds? Seriously, I nearly had a panic attack walking in to Wegman’s. There must have been four hundred people there, skittering around like a swarm of ants. And there was absolutely no sense of courtesy. No one said “excuse me” or “sorry I just rammed my cart into your knees, repeatedly.” No, just this general sense of “hm, I want to go over there now, I’m sure if I push hard enough, everyone will get out of my way. CLANG!”

We went to Uno’s, and there was an hour long wait. We went to some “American Fare” restaurant near that, and didn’t even walking in the door, since the line extended outside.

Then we stopped at the Olive Garden. We don’t have an Olive Garden in Utica, and I’ve been craving it for roughly six months now. I swear, there was an entire high school waiting to get in. I nearly had an aneurism.

Nothing I like stays in stock. Particularly clothing. There’s a certain kind of shirt I really like, an athletic fit tee from some weird brand, that fits me better than pretty much anything I’ve ever worn, which is a big deal, since it’s so hard for a guy my size to find clothes that aren’t clownishly big or uncomfortably small. So, of course, they stopped making them. I found another brand that is a bit too long, but still acceptable, so I started wearing those, and, naturally, they stopped making them, too. And don’t even get me started on buying pants. The last pair of pants I found that had a long enough inseam had a fifty inch waist. I could have had a friend join me inside of those freaking things.

I like Diet Cherry Pepsi, and Wal Mart didn’t have any for two weeks. I drink RTD 51, a protein shake, and now you can’t find them anywhere in Oneida County. Heck, the kind of pens I like aren’t sold any more.

If I start patronizing your business, be afraid, because there’s something like a ninety percent chance that you’re going to go out of business soon.