My thoughts on how not to run Yahoo!

So, the game is to get eyeballs on advertising. That is your #1 objective if you are Yahoo! And how do you do that?

By giving your users a great experience which encourages tham to come back to your site. Sounds simple right?

So what do you do to make that user experience seemingly as shitty as possible?

1. You fuck up your "redesigned" email. Possibly the biggest draw of users to your site. You make it slow, java-heavy and some days, unuseable.

2. You screw up your news feed, making it hugely irritating to try to find the stuff you want and you embed political content like Faux News that cannot be filtered out. And you make every fourth item some sort of "Sponsored" advertising. This raises all users' hackles.

3. You mess up your mobile email app so badly that people uninstall it and swear to never download it ever again.

4. You completely fuck up the user comments sections on news stories making it now impossible to follow reactions and replies to a user's comments, even though you tell them "You have 2 replies and 3 thumbs up" to those comments.

5. You take away a user's ability to create a simple profile for themselves with a pic and a short bio. This one you messed up years and years ago and with your utter contempt for your users, you have never ever addressed fixing it.

Microsoft blocks emails from QuickBooks

A friend's company has set up an email server and is using it to send monthly email invoices to his customers via QuickBooks.

This has been working for about a year and now Microsoft have taken it upon themselves to block some emails due to "spam-like activity".

The server is clean and not on any spam lists. It is used 100% to send invoices to customers.

Microsoft have taken, on their own "initiative", to decide that emails generated from one of the most common accounting packages used in business today are spam.

This is simply not acceptable.

And when you try to delist yourself a second time from the MS blacklist ( after you thought you had successfully done so the first time they fucked up) you get this response:

We see that the IP address in question has been submitted for delisting within the last 90 days. 

In order to process this new request please provide us with the following information:

1.       What caused the spam-like activity from the IP address?

2.       What steps have been taken to prevent the spam-like activity from occurring again?

Please respond to this email with your answers and any questions or concerns you may have.

---||---

Of course, they do not tell you what "spam-like activity" is in their myopic eyes.

I'm sure QuickBooks are not happy that is assholery is happening.

The Differences are what will make the Difference

Today on the Diane Rehm show on NPR, the political "experts" in the studio said that the three principle Democrats vying for their party's nomination essentially all agreed on the major issues of US politics.

Well, that's debatable of course, but if it is true, then the differences that the candidates do exhibit are what we must use to choose between them.

So Hillary voted for the Iraq War. Bernie Sanders did not. And of course neither did Governor O'Malley.

Hillary was Secretary of State, and a poor one. That cannot be laid at Senator Sanders' or Governor O'Malley's doors.

Hillary and Bernie can definitely be tagged with the the label "Washington insiders". I don't think that can be put on Governor O'Malley.

Bernie Sanders is proud to call himself a Socialist. As an ex-Brit who lived under the Socialism of the British Labour Party, this will forever disqualify him from getting my vote. I did not become a US citizen to have Socialism follow me to the United States.

I am a liberal. But I believe is American Exceptionalism, I believe this is a country where the success of its citizens is lauded and still possible.

I do not wish to live in the Nanny States of America.

This is why I so fervently hope Governor O'Malley stays in the race. He is the only Democrat I will vote for.

If Hillary goes get the nomination, I will write in my choice for President.

#NoBushes #NoClintons #NoSenators #NoBuffoons

2016 shaping up to be bad for movies...

Pointless sequels, remakes and comic book crap. Yes, 2016 is setting itself up to be even worse than 2015.

Ride Along 2

Kung Fu Panda 3

Zoolander 2

Divergent: Allegiant

Batman vs Superman

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2

God's Not Dead 2

Amityville: The Reawakening

Barbershop 3

The Huntsman: Winter's War

Captain America: Civil War

Angry Birds

Neighbors 2

X-Men: Apocalypse

TMNT 2

The Conjuring 2: The Enfield Poltergeist

Now You See Me 2

Finding Dory

Independence Day: Resurgence

The Purge 3

Ghostbusters

Ice Age: Collision Course

Ben Hur

The Shack

Mechanic: Resurrection

Bridget Jones's Baby

Magnificent Seven

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

Ouija 2

Underworld 5

Assassin's Creed

Jumanji

Are these the choices?

1. You bring in a radicalized bride on an arranged marriage from Saudi Arabia and she poisons your mind into hearing every casual insult to your religion as a monstrous insult against the Prophet. And she tells you you're not a true man if you don't stand up to the people who secretly hate you. So one day you do. And she does too.

2. You bring in a demure and totally submissive wife on an arranged marriage from Saudi Arabia and you browbeat her every day until she will agree to kill people with you because of your perception that there is a torrent of workplace insults against your chickenshit religion happening every single day.

Seems to me that one of those statements will turn out to hold more than a grain of truth.

And that is scary. Because what we will have are religiously fueled workplace rampage killings.

2015 has been a Terrible Year at the Movies

These are the movies I have seen:

71
It Follows
The Woman in Gold
Ex Machina
Avengers Age of Ultron
Spy
Inside Out
The Gallows
Trainwreck
Mr. Holmes
The End Of The Tour
American Ultra
Pawn Sacrifice
Sicario
Roger Waters' The Wall
The Martian
He Named Me Malala
Steve Jobs
Crimson Peak
Bridge of Spies
Spotlight
Spectre
Hunger Games: Mocking Jay Part II
Krampus
Trumbo

These are the movies I still have to see this year:

Macbeth
The Big Short
Concussion
MI-5
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

And these are my predicted critics' Oscar favorites for 2015:

99 Homes
Freeheld
End Of The Tour
Steve Jobs
Brooklyn
The Danish Girl
Room
Trumbo
Carol
Joy

For me this is a very short list, which defines why 2015 was so bad for movies. And the worst movies I saw were without doubt, The Avengers and Spy.

Dazzled by the Flashing Lights of Mediocrity

So Twitter took away the Favorites star and replaced it with a Likes heart. This tells us many things. And most of them are bad.

The Arrogance of the Wrong Management

A company may initially provide a Social Media service to users, but it is the users themselves who shape that Social Media platform's ethos and culture. They take it, and organically use the features provided to create interesting communities and unexpected usages of the software. And people like the platform. And the number of users grows. And the service is a success.

Thus it was with Twitter.

Then there is an IPO and the initial geekiness that drove the platform's creation is lost in a haze of quarterly reports and stock price expectations. And you bring in management who supposedly know how to run publicly traded companies and they fuck up what differentiated the service and made it special.

How? Via late night brainstorming sessions and workshops to come up with exciting ways to keep the platform "relevant" and "buzzing" And what ideas and innovations do such corporate-driven events tell you to do?

They tell you: Copy Facebook. Remove the favorites star and replace it with a "likes" heart. FB has likes, we should have "likes" too.

And a feature is wiped out and morphed into something no user ever requested and no user ever wanted.

Innovation is not driven by copying. It is driven by addition.

But, after an IPO and putting the Wrong Management in charge, the safe bet, the copying of features, becomes the order of the day. And a pseudo-stability of the share price is maintained by timidity. But bonuses all round! That's what counts right?

---||---

The Mediocrity of Unnecessary Changes

So the changes come in on the platform, and your millions of pretty contented users collectively shout "Why?" and "What are you doing?" and "That was working fine you stupid idiots!".

There is a direct relationship between tinkering with changes no-one asked for and pissing off your users to the point of their leaving you.

This tinkering with software is now what laughingly passes as development. Companies are not developing anything. That is all done before the IPO. What they are doing is very little, changing interfaces and pissing off users.

And this mediocrity of unnecessary changes plagues once innovative outfits that are now treading water and saying "innovation" but no longer doing anything innovative.

---||---

Agile Software Development

And my biggest bugaboo that allows unnecessary tinkering on the edges of your product? Tinkering that produces maximum anger in your users? Agile Development! Fixed in the next build. New app! New app! New app! This methodology of software development is a recipe for bad software. Heck, updates come out so regularly from some companies they are actually screaming "We make unreliable stuff!" to anyone who cares to listen.

And now, users have to take some blame. Because they don't complain about poor software quality because they have now an almost Pavlovian acceptance of bad products and services when they hear "Fixed in the next build".

You know what? IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN RIGHT IN THE FIRST BUILD.

---||---

Please Twitter do not go down this road. Yahoo! went there and you know how successful that was.

Bank of America - A Definition of Bad Customer Service.

Dear Bank of America,

AFTER I phone you to say I will be using a credit card for large purchases, I DO NOT want any transactions denied at the POS. And doubly, AFTER I get the transactions allowed at the POS, I DO NOT want a hold put on that credit card and to have to log on to your website the next day ( WHERE I CANNOT SEND AN EMAIL to complain ) to clear that hold.

This is pisspoor Customer Service. Really, really BAD.

What I know

Two things I know for certain:

1. When you tweet Truth to Power and they block you, you win the right to the moral high ground.

2. Everywhere in the developed world, 10-year olds grow out of playing with guns. But in the USA, that doesn't happen.

Can someone, ANYONE, explain 2 Kings 18:27?

And this is an actual quote :-   

But Rabshakeh said unto them, "Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? Hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?" 

That's pretty fucking scatalogical considering the supposed proximity of Godliness to Cleanliness.

Getting back on my hobby horse

To date the media coverage of the candidates vying for their party nominations for the Presidency has been nothing short of APPALLING.

When this election is over it will go down as having the worst ever coverage from the media. Remember at the last election when, because the process took so long to resolve the GOP candidate that the media apologized for simply "covering the horse race" and for being way too quick to declare front runners and hence the presumptive nominee? Cain, Santorum, Bachmann? Anyone remember the disservice to the electorate of that?

And now in 2016, it is only worse. The media in lock step, just follows the polls and calls that political reporting.

How's this for an idea? COVER THE CANDIDATES. ALL THE CANDIDATES. Tell us their views. Tell us their policies. Send reporters out and find us some facts. INTERVIEW PEOPLE. Educate the public.

Just reporting about the polls has led to the absurd situation of Donald Trump leading the GOP field, a man who has ZERO chance of being President. And who's second in these polls? Dr Ben Carson, a man beloved by the right for making a very silly speech at a prayer breakfast and who has been living high on the political hog ever since. Again, a man who has not a snowball's chance in you-know-where of being President. A man who has said things just as asinine as Bobby Jindal or Mike Huckabee but who, because he's up there in the polls is getting just the glowing coverage without the scrutiny. Why? Because the poll number is all that matters, not views, not opinions, not lack of opinions. "It's all about the number ma'am".

And if poll numbers are high, the media gives these candidates more publicity making their poll numbers high and reinforcing the wall of separation of legitimate candidates from the public.

God help us, but this utter utter nonsense of what is passing for political reporting has to stop.

And please please please CNN in particular, have your reporters and editors talk about the political stories of the day, I have no use for this "GOP strategist" or that "Democratic consultant" spinning a speech at me THAT I JUST WATCHED.

Stop that.

#NoBushesNoClintons

My 2015 Trip to Montreal album on Photobucket

Sometimes a link is all you need.

And then you will have a 2015 Trip to Montreal album on Photobucket.

Oh boy! Did I eat well or what?

Pinterest Strikes again

Hi,
We're getting in touch to let you know we received a copyright complaint and have removed one (or more) of your Pins. The complaint wasn't directed against you or your Pin; it was directed against another user's Pin of the same content from:
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While many copyright owners are happy to have their content on Pinterest, we recognize that some do not want their content to appear on Pinterest, or did not receive attribution for the content. When a copyright owner sends us a complete notice per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it’s our policy to remove the Pin(s).
Again, this complaint was not directed at you, or anything you did: we just thought you'd like to know why we removed your Pin.
---||---

And then there were 17....

So Jim Gilmore has entered the race for the GOP nomination for President. Holy crap! I never thought you could find someone with less chance of becoming the nominee than Bobby Jindal or Carly Fiorina, but apparently I was mistaken.

This man has even less name recognition than George Pataki. How is that even possible?

Mr Gilmore was the  68th Governor of Virginia from 1998 to 2002, so he will be pushing that "Executive Experience" button for all it's worth in his brief yet already doomed campaign.

Here is a pic of Governor Gilmore, in case he comes up to you in the street and asks you for your vote. He won't, but I think it is important to at least put up his picture before he is engulfed by political oblivion.

Take a quick look. He won't be running for long.

 

Covering the horse race

Soon we will be entering a very traditional part of the Presidential campaign season - the time when the media start to issue their mea culpas apologizing for only covering the horse race and the meaningless polls; and promising to do better "covering the candidates and the issues".

But not quite yet. They aren't quite ready yet to DO THEIR JOB.

Right now they are in full on "Trump is leading" mode, hanging on every word the jackass says, sucking in all the coverage like like a vast NJ Superfund site combined with a black hole and an utter ideas-free political void.

That's why CNN covered Trump saying stupid shit this week rather than Governor Kasich's announcement he was running. Ditto last week, where Trump sucked all the air out of Scott Walker's announcement.

So here is my friendly advice to the media..

1. Polls are utterly without value right now. Stop covering them. I don't want to hear the word "Quinipiac" again until December.

2. In a huge field, it is very easy for the biggest blowhard to seem important. But he really isn't, having as he does, no chance of being anyone's nominee. So stop coming off like he's all there is to see.

3. If you want to cover the candidates, COVER THE CANDIDATES. All of them. Equally. So the voters can see if there is actually any gold in the dross.

4. Every night do a bit, ON EVERY CANDIDATE. What is Bobby Jindal doing today? Governor Perry? Stick a cub reporter on Pataki. Show us Carly Fiorina parking her broomstick before she makes a speech.

5. Cover the candidates' policy announcements. In depth. So we can see if they have any ideas or if they don't. So we can see who is just bombast in a $3000 suit or a mouthpiece for Heritage Foundation.

6. At least make an effort to be informative. Pictures of Trump standing at the border tell us what? They tell us NOTHING.

7. And stop having political spinners like Ana Navarro and Van Jones on every day telling us how we are supposed to feel about shit we have just seen for ourselves. You have reporters and Political Editors for analysis, USE THEM.

And then there were 16

So the Big GOP clown car careened into Ohio today and as full to the brim as it is with wannabes, never-will-bes and nobodies, I think Chris Christie leaned against a door just a tad and it eased open by the thinnest crack allowing the boyish-faced John Kasich to run up and say "Room for one more"?

John Kasich is a good candidate because he's a Governor. This potentially gives him some leverage to bash Congress. You know the thing: "I'm a Washington outsider. I can get things done. I have Executive Experience".

But a man with NINE TERMS in Congress should be no-one's idea of an outsider.

And if he insists on playing the outsider card, his opponents need to call him out on it every single time he says it.

And the other negative? No-one knows who he is nationally.

He's like George Pataki but with better hair.

Finally the True Contest Can Start

With Scott Walker now formally announcing his candidacy for the GOP nomination we have the two candidates in the race that the Republican party really wanted to see all along.

Namely Scott and Jeb!

All the other people running are just providing the background noise for the campaign. And of course with only 10 being able to get on the stage for the first Fox led debate, at least seven will be out before they get out of their starting blocks.

So it comes down to a Tale of Two Governors. As it was always going to be.

Scott, with his proven purist conservative credentials - a man who has gotten shit done and survived a leftie-inspired recall election. He will surely prove to be a formidable opponent to Jeb! with tremendous appeal to the party base. But will his brand of scorched earth conservatism prove palatable to a wider electorate? It is hard for me to think so.

So Walker's tactic has to be to burn Jeb! on not being ideologically pure enough. And then once he has the nomination, to run away from all the positions he has espoused to that point, to "appeal to the middle". Because if he does not tone down the rhetoric, his chances of being President are just about zero.

And Jeb! has to the hoe the row of the completely opposite strategy.

Jeb! has to lurch to the right during the nomination process. He has to prove he is the "True Conservative" and hammer away at his record as Florida Governor. All while forgetting he ever heard the words "Common Core", "Immigration" or "Mexico". If he can push his most conservative achievements as Governor and not suffer any mishaps ( aka Rick Perry Moments ), then the nomination will be his. He has been The One from the beginning as far as the GOP is concerned.

So if Jeb! does manage to convince the party faithful his is conservative enough and he gets the nomination, then he just has to forget everything he said to that point and revert to being Florida Moderate Man: John Ellis Bush. Then the Presidency should at least hove into view for him.

The GOP race now is finally starting. Hillary is probably more fearful of Jeb! than Walker, simply because Walker's record is so unambiguously to the right of Jeb's and harder to muddy up in the roiling electoral waters to come.

My mantra of #NoBushesNoClintons remains. But only a fool would think it impossible that both Hillary and Jeb! cannot get their party nominations.

Scariness Abounds - The Clown Car Becomes a Double Decker

So two more candidates have thrown their hats into the ring for the GOP nomination for President. Neither has any chance of being the Republican Party nominee of course, but this week they added themselves to the every burgeoning field of egomaniacs who seemingly want the job.

Piyush "Bobby" Jindal aka "The Louisiana Boy Wonder"

This man has royally fucked over Louisiana as that state's Governor, and the first time he was given a national stage on which to speak, he completely failed to convince anyone as to his competence or his political stature.

That national opportunity came on February 24th 2009 when he was given the opportunity to deliver the official Republican response to President Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress. He was simply inept, unconvincing and plain bad.

All his opponents need to do is play excerpts from that speech over and over again with the tag line "Wrong for Louisiana; Wrong for the Presidency".

And currently running at a heady 0.8% in the polls, this is a man whose chances are as likely as a snowstorm on Bourbon Street in August.

Chris Christie

Two words damn him from the outset - and they are "President Obama".

Forget all the scandals - that's just New Jersey politics at their finest.

To get the GOP nomination, you have to appeal to the Republican base. Those people will forgive all kinds of skeletons in your political closet, but what they won't forgive is paling around with Obama.

And after Superstorm Sandy, that is what Governor Christie seemed to be doing.

And the ads against him will say "Too close to Obama; Too removed from our values."

---||---

As I said before, neither of these men has an earthly chance of being President. But what their candidacies do is make it quite likely that the GOP nominee will need initially to have two things going for him - a 15% ranking in the polls and Name Recognition.

This means with such a large number of people running, Donald Trump genuinely has a shot.

Please also note I did not say "two things going for him or her" because Carly Fiorina has more chance of leading the AFL-CIO than getting even a sniff at the GOP nomination.

But mark my words, with a field of candidates as large as this, a Large Buffoon has a chance. But as of my writing this blog Mr Trump seems to be saying enough outrageous things that he his self-destructing his Presidential bid before it even gets going. He's like the Space-X rocket of this nominating process.

I think there is something in the water down here

Recently, Tullian Tchividjian the grandson of Billy Graham announced he was resigning from his position as the Senior Pastor of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale because of a personal "moral failing" - apparently he was driven into the arms of another by wifely infidelity.

Though his wife's riposte to his initial explanation for his resignation of "Well, that's his story!" is kind of telling.

Pastot Tullian in happier times

Tullian's downfall comes only 15 months after Pastor Bob Coy of Calvary Chapel of Fort Lauderdale also resigned over what itself was initially described as a "moral failing". Though as you can see from the picture below taken just before his demise, Pastor Bob was already auditioning for his part of a Lost Soul Wandering in the Desert of Moral Bankruptcy. Either that or he was moonlighting as a lumberjack while still pulling in his $500,000 a year salary from what we can now laughingly call a "Church". HALF A MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR? You've got to be shitting me.

But alas Calvary Chapel, you are not.

Since his ouster, we have learned that Pastor Bob was having multiple affairs while also enjoying the fleshly delights found in Internet Pornography. So pretty much he succumbed to the curse of any asshat moralizer - participation in the stuff he condemned to his flock just about every Sunday. And how often do we see this behavior? ALL THE DAMNED TIME.

Pastor Bob indicating his preference in waist sizes

So what is going on here? And can we see any patterns of behavior to look out for in the future?

Well one thing these guys had in common was wastrel youth. Both were admitted druggies before "finding the Lord". I'm sure they would both make some bullshit "Prodigal Son" argument as to why they should legitimately have been given jobs as Pastors when they got their breaks into Big Time Ministry. But perhaps those early lives should have raised some red flags to the Churches leaders who hired them?

Perhaps we can make a rule: Druggie at 25, no $500,000 tax free ministry job at 45. You can work for the Church with that past, but leading the flock for the Big Bucks? I don't think so. Christ preached forgiveness for sure. But I don't think he taught His Church should be gullible and easily hoodwinked.

And secondarily.....

Both of these falls from grace happned in South Florida - a State of tropical heat, little clothing, body shots and very tiny bikinis. Could men of dubious moral character such as these two resist the temptations Florida offers every day? After all, they could not resist the call of drugs when they were younger. And the hot girls of South Florida know what to do to get a man with a half  million dollar salary to party like he's 18 all over again.

So I see these two cases as very much related. And both falls from their respective ministries should have been at least anticipated by the people who made these men the leaders of multimillion dollar congregations.

Want to to see what South Florida tempatation can look like? Well here is the Miami-native actress formerly know as Ms Selena Rose...

South Florida Temptation

So only one question remains. And it is "Who's next?"

It's only a matter of time. We all know it.

The clown car now needs to be a clown coach

"You're gonna need a bigger boat" is one of the great lines from the movie "Jaws". I think the necessity for a bigger mode of transportation could now be applied to the GOP clown car with the addition of John Ellis Bush ( aka Jeb! ), Donald Trump and Donald Trump's ego entering the race for the GOP nomination for President.

Though I'm sure Trump would quickly snipe back at that by saying "My boat/car/mansion/estate/empire" are already as big as they can be. And it they're aren't it's all the fault of the rapist and leprous ISIS-supporting immigrants who are restricting my God-given freedoms of assholery and buffoonery."

So as the reverse of any kind of winnowing process is entering full gear, we now have two more candidates for the GOP nomination. And one will actually be the GOP nominee.

John Ellis Bush ( aka Jeb! )

Straight off the bat, I refuse to say "Jeb Bush" because that's saying "John Ellis Bush Bush" which when you think about it, is really Fucking Stupid. And while we are on this subject. puh-lease mainstream media, why did you all to a man say "The name Bush is not even in his logo for President"? The "b" in Jeb stands for "bush" you lazy lazy lazy morons. Even the BBC god bless 'em, were guilty of running with this less than honest narrative.

Stop it. Don't do it again.

So the Big Dog is in. And what we can now say is that we saw the Big Dog coming on the horizon a long time ago and strangely as he has come closer, we didn't see his stature increasing. This means that when he finally arrived at Miami-Dade College for his Big Event yesterday, instead of a towering candidate ready to take on the mantle of front runner, the Big Dog of our expectations shrank before out eyes into a wee Mexican Chihuahua speaking in Spanish.

And I think when it was translated it came out as "No-one deserves to be President, except me and any members of my family who want to hold the office in future."

Now Jeb has his work cut out for him for sure. His stances on Common Core and immigration reform are problematical to the GOP base, but he's the Party Choice, so he will get the nomination. All he has to keep saying is that he won't compromise his positions and his PACs just need to spin ads out their asses about him being a "Man of Principle and Integrity". Then barring any major scandals coming up, the nomination will be his.

And then we come to The Buffoon....

Donald John Trump Sr.

Why?

I have two theories. Both are outlandish. Both could be true.

(1) The hairpiece wants to run free on the White House lawn.

Or (2) Mr.Trump really feels the need to run because that explanation in "Cabin In The Woods" why blondes are stupid, WASN'T JUST A STORY.