Category Archives: Rants

Actually, No.

No, I will not give you my credit card number.

Adrienne received a voicemail today, from Citibank, stating that we should call the fraud department, and they left a 1-800 number. She relayed the message to me by IM, and I called them. This is a rough transcript of the phone call:

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Stealing Shopping Carts

It seems to be a California thing. I’ve never seen it happen so frequently anywhere else. I remember after first moving here, I wondered how it was that shopping carts get distributed all over town, so far from the stores. I figured it must have been homeless people… you often see homeless people with carts full of cans, bottles, etc.

Lately, however, I’ve noticed that what appear to be normal, sane people apparently walking to the store, buying more than they can carry, and taking the cart home with them. What .. the .. hell?

No, of course, they do not return them. I suspect that’s where the homeless people get them, not from the store, but from in front of people’s houses and apartments, where they left them. Maybe these people think there’s a cart pickup service? After all, when they leave the carts outside their front door, they disappear.

People are stupid.

C++ Gone Wild

This summer, C++ gone wild. These are brilliant:

int Log_event::read_log_event(IO_CACHE* file, String* packet,
                              pthread_mutex_t* log_lock)

and

#ifndef MYSQL_CLIENT
Log_event* Log_event::read_log_event(IO_CACHE* file,
                                     pthread_mutex_t* log_lock,
                                     bool old_format)
#else
Log_event* Log_event::read_log_event(IO_CACHE* file, bool old_format)
#endif

and

Log_event* Log_event::read_log_event(const char* buf, int event_len,
                                     const char **error, bool old_format)

Save me.

24-Hour Time Misformatting

I really hate it when companies mess up the formatting for 24-hour time. Adrienne’s phone does this too, but in a worse way.

There are two basic rules of formatting time:

  1. In 24-hour time, hours less than 10 should be zero-prefixed, so 00, 01, 02, etc.
  2. In 12-hour time, hours should never be zero-prefixed. One does not write 06 PM. It doesn’t make sense!

Mac OS X Tiger messed it up. It was right in Panther. Why, Apple?!

Update: No, the settings in [International -> Formats -> Times -> Customize… ] appear to have nothing to do with the time in the menu bar. Actually I have no idea what those are used for, but definitely not the menu bar time. Try again!