Sometimes it’s just as valuable to tell a client they’re wasting their money on you.

Jason Santa Maria, Feb 24th 2010

Matt posted a short summary about the downtime, and there were over two hundred cuddly comments made. That response says a lot about the amount of goodwill WordPress has.

I had to get the graphics card replaced as there was a known issue with it, and this diminished battery performance has only been noticeable since it came back from the shop. I’m surprised at the rapid decline, so I’m not sure if the shop have made a mistake or not.

As a backup I’ve splashed out on a FastMac TruePower battery, that is cheaper than the official Apple ones, and performs better too. I’ll let you know how it performs when I get my hands on it.

That’s not so bad in itself, but there is a secondary symptom. The infected have a compulsion to defend this opinion. Their opinion cannot change. Their opinion becomes fact (in their mind anyway).

That’s when it goes viral, and the social networks of the world are suddenly swamped with this is shit, that is shit, who the fuck wrote this, what a piece of shit, and other such amazing insights.

A second attack swiftly follows, lead by the “my Commodore 64 was able to do that” brigade, who fear that their favourite product/service could be threatened. Then the “I cannot waste this opportunity to attack Apple/Google/Facebook/etc.” pincer movement strikes, and before you know all the sensible commentary is sinking in a swamp of curmudgeonliness.

It disappoints me to see so much energy being wasted by this non-deadly disease, when it could be channeled into providing valuable feedback.

I also have two new linkblogs; one for design and technology (lin.keyes.ie) and one for everything else (fun.keyes.ie).

All the new blogs are hosted on Tumblr and are currently using some of the supplied themes. I may eventually get around to designing custom ones, but not today Sharon.

I’m weary of this notion (even when presented as satire) that anyone who can’t master a computer must clearly be mentally retarded. The personal computer of 2010 is hard to understand for novices and people who struggle with abstract concepts. Macs, PCs, all of them. Folks, it’s us, the freaks who understand drive partitioning, regular expressions, virtual disk images, task switching, and shell scripting — we’re the exception.

Steven Frank, Feb 1st 2010