Category: Rants

Professors Like to Rob Students Blind

February 1, 2010

Rants, School Related

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Business lesson with Dr. Portfolioso, CEO of Portfolioso Industries. We will be discussing how to cut costs regarding book purchasing for a management class I am taking

So a week ago, I get an email from one of my professors before class starts. “I will be buying your books. Bring me $100” Well gee, thanks a lot, that’s a lot of money. I’ll take care of buying my own books, not you, and here’s why:

So I get to class tonight and he brings us 6 different books. Me being an OCD control freak, come back and do some magical Excel calculations. First, I add up the retail price on the books. The professor claimed to have purchased these books at a 50% discount from a local mom and pop bookstore. So first I add up the retail prices on all 6 books: ($15.00 + $18.00 + $15.00 + $14.95 + $14.95 + $14.95 = $92.75). Add in about 7% sales tax and you’re around $100. Okay so this guy was completely bullshitting us about his discount, but at least the figures add up and he’s not stealing my money.

But here’s what pisses me off. I usually buy books on Amazon.com. So I do two more calculations. First, I calculate the cost of buying them new from Amazon, with free shipping if they were all combined: $21.15 + $9.75 + $9.85 + $10.17 + $10.17 + $10.17 = 71.26. Add some tax and you’re around $76.

But F that. I don’t need new pristine books. As long as I can read them, I will get them used – who cares. Normal professors list their books before the course starts, along with the authors and editions so I can grab them off Amazon, which is how I normally buy my books. So I added up buying them used on Amazon from various sellers. Including shipping, we’ve got: $8.94 + $6.98 + $7.98 + $8.18 + $8.54 + $8.17 = $48.79

Someone tell this mother fucker he owes me $51.21. This greedy bitch makes over $100,000 per year. I am poor. Cut me some slack, Jack. By the way, thank Christ this is the last semester I need to buy books. It’s all one huge sham.

Moral of the story: This “management professor” is a terrible manager because he can’t cut costs. Everyone knows you need to save money. Under my system, I would have saved $51.21. This is why this jokeface is only a professor of management and doesn’t actually manage anything in real life. Okay, this is only like $50, but in corporations, we’re talking millions. It’s the same concept though. People like him break this economy and drive companies to the ground.

The iPad is a tremendous piece of iShit

January 28, 2010

Computer/ Tech Related, Rants

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Sucks to you Apple fanboys! When stuff like this happens, I grin from ear to ear. The only reason Apple is so successful with new products these days is because they hype them so much. They are running out of new ideas quickly and all they can do is improve upon what already exists. For about a month now, the internet has been plagued with “Apple Tablet” rumors. It actually started to sound cool. Then they announce the iPad (which is an awful name by the way). Numerous stupid people will confuse iPad and iPod, mark my words.

So I really didn’t know much about this iPad, since I was busy all day sleeping, looking for jobs, Watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, wasting time etc. I pretty much ignored all the hype. So after researching it and learning more, here comes the shitstorm:

iPads automatically suck. First off, it’s absolutely huge. An iPhone can do the same exact thing. Let’s go over some specs:

  • It cannot multitask. Seriously Apple? With Android 2.1 around the corner, haven’t you learned yet? Why don’t you spend your R&D making a 4th gen iPhone with a screen that doesn’t get shit on by the Droid/Nexus One and actually multitasks.
  • Screen resolution: 1024×768. That was decent in 2002. And it’s not widescreen, so movies will look awful on it.
  • No camera. How am I supposed to use Skype on this thing? And so much for the rumors of the front and back facing cameras.
  • iPad? What an awful name
  • No Flash support.
  • All the ports are nonstandard and you need to carry around various adapters. So much for portability. Guess what? My netbook is portable and I don’t need to carry around extra hunks of proprietary shit so I can plug in a flash drive.
  • Only runs app store apps. WHAT IS THE POINT?! A phone can do that. Why not put Snow Leopard on it?
  • Storage maxes out at 64GB. Netbooks can hold much more with real harddrives or SSDs.
  • Ranges from $499-$829. Way too expensive for so few features. As I said a few times, netbooks are cheaper.
  • There’s probably a lot more wrong with it, but I don’t give two hoots and have seen enough, and writing this is making me rage

In conclusion, a netbook can multitask, is smaller, has a better display/ resolution, has a camera, has a real keyboard, runs Adobe Flash and is much cheaper. Enough said. Only gullible, idiotic Apple Fanboys would buy this shitpile.

CRTs Suck

January 12, 2010

Computer/ Tech Related, Rants

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There needs to be a law where all CRTs are instantly banned. It’s 2010 and they have become completly useless. There’s absolutely no reason why any kind of display needs to have a huge ass bulky tube that shoots electrons onto a piece of phosphorous coating… It’s madness, and it’s been around since the 1940s.

I went to my living room to watch some TV, turn it on and hear the loudest, most annoying high frequency tone in my life. It drives me mad and it’s so loud I can’t even watch it. You don’t get that with LCD and OLED displays. It enraged me, because everyone else in this house is old and can’t hear it. Plus the pixels are huge. Awful.. Just awful.

Come on, WordPress…

December 31, 2009

Rants, Website Related

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You know what really pisses me off sometimes? WordPress. Never use the schedule post feature – it’s a useless piece of shit. WordPress allows you to write a draft blog entry and then schedule it to publish at a later date. Every time I do this, it always misses the schedule and then I struggle severely to get it published because it keeps scheduling it. Well maybe I don’t want it scheduled you stupid bitch, I just want it live. I set my end of the decade ramble to publish at 8AM and was supposed to wake up with it here. Instead it’s being a shithead and now I can’t get it published. This also happens on another WordPress blog I maintain. Could be a server setting, but it’s poorly documented. Fix your shit.

Edit. Okay so I Googled this a little bit. Seems like what happens is that WordPress runs a cron (automation) job. There’s a setting in wp-includes/cron.php where it checks every .01 seconds, so if the server is a slow piece of crap and can’t keep up, it misses it. I set it to check less frequently and that might work.

Change:
$cron_url = get_option( 'siteurl' ) . '/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron';
wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array('timeout' => 0.01, 'blocking' => false, 'sslverify' => apply_filters('https_local_ssl_verify', true)) );
TO
$cron_url = get_option( 'siteurl' ) . '/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron';
wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array('timeout' => 20, 'blocking' => false, 'sslverify' => apply_filters('https_local_ssl_verify', true)) );

A post (the decade recap) is scheduled for 11:45AM EST. It better work.

eFollett, This Means War

December 29, 2009

Rants, School Related

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eFollett is one of the most awful companies around. They exist for the sole purpose to rob poor college students by charging inflated prices for textbooks. At the end of the semester, they either don’t buy them back for real market value or say they have no value. Protip: buy and sell on amazon.com. eFollett will not get another penny from me and I haven’t been to that crook bookstore in two years.

So I’m buying my books for next semester and I can tell you right now, I want to bash my history professor’s skull in and I haven’t even met the man yet. Rather than assigning normal textbooks, I look on the booklist and see the following:

First of all, give me an ISBN, a real title (not the course title) and a real author. It’s doubtful these two books have the same title. The info above tells me nothing. Now I have no choice but to buy these two books from the bookstore because it doesn’t give me enough info to shop elsewhere. I absolutely hate when professors write their own books for the class. I hate it even more when it’s sent to Kinko’s and consists of spiral bound printer paper that they make the bookstore sell for $50. Morons.