maniacal rage

For a long time, HDR was all the rage on Flickr. Every day, when I browsed the interestingness pages, they'd be crammed full of god awful HDR images. If you don't know what HDR is: It's the process of taking several versions of the same photo (each at different exposures) and tone mapping them together. It can be used to create really nice imagery, but its even easier to ruin photographs with it. Most of the photos uploaded to Flickr with the tag "HDR" are terrible. But for some reason, it was a very popular kind of crap, so for weeks on end interestingness was all crap HDR photos. Luckily (at least for me), that has started to die down.

At the same time, another annoyance has gained more popularity. I'm talking about the whole, "I'm an admin for a group called X and we'd love to have your photo added to the pool." This is so very annoying. If I wanted to add my photo to your group pool, I would have. If I cared enough about the subject your group is related to, I would have found a group. If I didn't, I probably don't care. When I get a new activity notification, I am absolutely incensed to find out that it's one of these comments. For a while I would oblige, but that stopped a while back. Now I just delete the comment immediately.

What's particularly annoying about these requests is that they often come up for the most ridiculous or random of groups. Rarely will I get a, "I'm an admin for the group called Mountains of Europe" comment. But I will get something along the lines of, "I'm an admin for the group called Men Who Wear Belts." What is the point of that?

A perfect example is a recent comment Katia received on one of her Nova Scotia pictures, in which you can see her feet on the rocks above an algae-filled pool of water: "I'm an admin for a group called Keen Shoes..." Now, granted, she noted in the description that "Keens rule!" but seriously? A group for photographs of Keen shoes?

A week or two back, when that whole Four Things meme was going around, Matt Linderman at 37signals posted an entry on their weblog, Signal vs. Noise, in which he "passed" on answering any of the questions (but wrote them all out) and then said he hoped the meme would end. Immediately afterward, Matt posted another entry entitled "A meme worth spreading: If you could give the commencement address at a graduation ceremony, what would you say?"

There's something really offensive to me about this. I can't quite place it, but most of it has to do with the pomposity of 37signals over the last few months. I understand not wanting to participate in the meme, but posting an entry about not participating is just stupid. And then, to think that your meme is "worth spreading" and to actually write that in the title, well, I just can't let that go. Apparently, I'm not the only one.

Here's my problem: I like 37signals. Or, at least, I like a few of their products and I like their simplistic design style, and I love Ruby on Rails. So I'm attached to them in that way. When they talk (especially about RoR), I feel somewhat connected, a tiny, tiny bit responsible for what they say. There have been a few times in the past when David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of RoR, hereby referred to as DHH) has said some extremely boastful things that made me cringe (see an example at the RoR weblog, ironically titled "Don't be so arrogant") and 37signals as a whole has been getting more and more arrogant as time goes on.

I understand that success makes you feel powerful. And 37signals has been very successful in the past few years. But it's starting to affect the way they behave. Nearly every post on the SVN weblog is about "getting real" or "smaller is better" or some sort of "listen, we are awesome, listen to us, Ta-Da!, because we're smaller, smarter and better looking than you and, Writeboard, we've built some crazy stuff that will make you shit your pants and you'll ask us how and we're going to tell you now, but not, you know, Campfire, just straight out, but with some attitude like you should be happy we're telling you and you should feel stupid for not knowing this already, Basecamp, even though we're just making it up now, but it doesn't matter, think about how great it is so eat it." That's a hyperbole, but not a large one. They're laying it on too thick.

Kevin Leitch created a mock-up for a new product that I think is spot-on: Selfimportance, by 37signals. They've linked to it over at SVN, but I hope they're listening. Because it's a problem. A serious one. And I don't think 37signals gets it, because Matt, the guy who posted the first two offensive entries, replied in the comments of one and wrote:

But I also understand there's a bigger thing going on here too. The overall tone of 37s and our content seems to rub people the wrong way. Some people think we're pompous, arrogant, know-it-alls. We know that. We made a decision a while back to go ahead and be provocative even if it angers or upsets some. We think it's better to present ideas in bold strokes then to be wishy-washy about it. If that comes off as cocky or arrogant, so be it. We'd rather be provocative than water everything down with "it depends..." or some other qualifier. We think our readers are smart enough to figure out what's going on.

Being a jerk isn't being provocative, it's just being a jerk, and this reply proves the point more than anything else. Hopefully, Matt is speaking more for himself than he claims.

TWU has given everyone in NYC a nice Christmas gift: a big, fat strike. Here we are, the whole city paralyzed by these jerks, and then I start seeing TWU commercials saying things like, "we're TWU, we're New York," and "now they want to cut my pension and benefits." Maybe the TWU should spend less time making commercials with false statements in them and more time figuring out a deal. Roger Toussaint, who I can't stand anyway, called for a stike the week before Christmas and I don't care what the situation is, this is clearly an attempt to extort the people and city of New York into giving them whatever they want.

I understand their frustration with the MTA. The MTA is probably one of the most corrupt government organizations in the world—they've stolen money, lied, broken the law, screwed over employees and riders, the list goes on—but that doesn't give the TWU an excuse to use the people of the city against the MTA. Transit workers work for us, and they're hurting us with this strike. It's unacceptable.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just strike? What if you just decided this year you wanted a 10% raise and you weren't going to accept anything less (regardless of how much money your company had)? You might as well strike—your boss can't fire you anyway, what do you have to lose? Unions piss me off.

It would be one thing if the transit workers here in NYC did a good job when they had a contract, but they don't. The transit system here is slow, dirty, and inefficient. The workers are rude, lazy, dumb (or a combination) and clearly don't care about their jobs or our safety. Why would they expect me to be on their side when they don't do a good job normally, and now they're striking because they aren't getting exactly what they want?

When Bush said "internets" in the second presidential debate back in October of 2004, it was instantly clear that people would be making jokes about it the next day. But I didn't think I'd still be hearing people saying it. I am. And I want it to stop.

It's been over a year, it wasn't all that funny to begin with, and you all jumped the shark about eleven and a half months ago.

Update: Since I've received plenty of angry emails about it, I guess my subtle joke of using another annoying expression to complain about an annoying expression didn't come through. It's not you, it's me.

Recently I had the delightful pleasure of learning that all FedEx ground deliveries (non-express) are handled by independent contractors. This means FedEx can't directly contact the delivery person when they, say, miss-deliver my package to some random person in Manhattan. It also means it takes about four or five days before they finally find the driver and then, most likely, your package is long gone.

Moral of the story: don't ship with FedEx ground. Only their express services are handled by responsible, actual employees of the company.

People need to stop saying "realign" now. We get it—you read the ALA article, you think Cameron Moll is so fucking cool, you want to be hip, yeah, yeah. Seriously, shut up about realigning.

There's nothing worse than when an inbreeding, self-boasting group of people get their hands on a new buzzword. And, quite frequently, it's someone like Cameron Moll who throws it out there. I don't entirely disagree with his article, because it's not really saying much, but I hate this stupid giving-everything-a-bullshit-name thing that this specific circle of webloggers does. You know the people I'm talking about—the people who consider themselves trend setters but haven't really done all that much. The people who act like they created CSS and HTML, like it didn't even fucking exist before they came around.

Look, it's not just Cameron Moll, okay? In fact, I like Moll when he's not laying it on so thick. It's just that, well, frankly, Cameron Moll hasn't really done anything of note. I look at his portfolio and I think, "Wait, here's a guy who hasn't done anything and he's telling me how to do it?" That doesn't make sense. Was it that whole "wicked worn" thing? If so, I've got news for you—another bullshit name given to something not new. Moll didn't invent this style, he just gave it a name and claimed it as his own. Any time someone created something that looked worn from that point on, he claimed it was his influence. He's the Picasso of worn-looking design elements, apparently.

I'm coming off like a jerk now, so I'll embrace it because there's no turning back and I'll just say that I can't stand stuff like this. I hate it when people slap a tag on something and make it seem like they came up with it. I hate it when people write articles about absolutely unnecessary subjects and people talk about it like they just saw God appear from the heavens with a pipe and shoes made of corn. I hate it when people use a buzzword even when that buzzword is stupid (I don't know how many times I've seen people link to new design recently with the words, "[X] realigns"). I hate it—absolutely fucking FUCK hate it—when people use the word creative as a noun. IT IS A FUCKING ADJECTIVE. NO EXCEPTIONS, NO ARGUMENTS, NOTHING. ADJECTIVE. Seriously, stop that shit.