After a few months I got a phone call from E.ON. where they basically offered me a better than the default deal, which I accepted, and then today the contract arrived. Now… not a lot of people read these, right? I tend to give them a skim at least, to see if something insane appears and sometimes I hit the jackpot.

“The personal details of you that we have obtained are necessary to accomplish our part of this agreement and to accomodate your needs as a customer. Your name and address may also be used for marketing by E.ON. as well as by companies with which E.ON. is cooperating. Your personal information may also be used in educational purposes.” (bold emphasis mine)

So uh… not thinking there was much hope, I still decided to just email them,

“Hi,

According to the contract you sent to my home, “(the above quote)”

I do NOT want you to use my personal information for marketing, and I most definitely don’t want you to give it out to other companies.

Sincerely,

-Kalle Alm (my personal id number).”

Within an hour I got a response which to my surprise went:

“Hi,

Thanks for your email.

We have registered that you do not want us to use your personal information for marketing purposes.

Please contact us again [blabla].”

I didn’t think it’d be that easy, but there you have it. Summary: read through your contracts! You might end up with a company like E.ON. who thinks people are too lazy to read through this “boring” stuff!

Last year when I went to the U.S., I had the unexpected fortune of encountering a customs officer who actually treated me like a living object. I even told her so.

“This is my first time being treated like a person, you know. Going through these customs control thingies.”, says I.
“Oh… I’m sorry?”, says she, with a guilty grin.

Most of my trips to the states, I’ve over-thought this situation quite a bit. I’ve reasoned erroneously that these guys probably have a lot of tired and annoyed people going through, so I should at least make an effort and smile. That smile has put me inside rooms with mexicans and other dirty peoples (note the sarcasm, by the way) for 3-4 hours at a time. That smile, to me a way to say, “I know you’re just doing your job, but I don’t hate on you for it,” was to them a sign of suspicion.

So a few years ago I had enough. I knew I was going to be treated like excrement glaced with vomit, so I gave them exact, precise honesty. Frowning, grunting out replies, staring at them fully expecting the treatment I was surely going to be having, and I had it every time but that one time last year. And amusingly, I’ve not been questioned extensively or brought to any rooms with mexicans since.

Then came ESTA. Going to a country which is a part of the Schenger agreement (I think that’s the one) lets you, without a visa, enter the country for up to 90 days. Except someone in the states decided this was awfully unsafe, so they put up ESTA, a web site with seemingly no meaning whatsoever* , where you are asked questions you will be asked again, later.

(* except to deny you entry BEFORE you fly all the way over there, which I guess is a good thing — I’ve heard of people being sent all the way back home)

Regardless, what are these questions then, you might ask? Anyone who’s gone to the states has no doubt (whilst giggling quietly to themselves) answered these absolutely ridiculous questions.

I mean… good thing I said No to all of those, right! Phew. Just look at (B), for example. If I was — and to any U.S. officials swinging by to see why the ESTA content are being published on my blog, I might assert that I am not — planning on “engaging in criminal or immoral activities”, I’m sure I’d be tempted for at least a second to answer Yes, honest as I am.

The big dump of excrement in my eye though is that this ridiculous form underwent a change as of March this year.

It now charges you $14 per application.

So not only am I forced to waste my time on the above bullshit, but I’m charged to do so.

You are using a “Team Provisioning Profile” and it expired. You went to renew and download it, and noted “Managed by Xcode” and the “Renew” button was grayed out.

The solution: delete the profile from Organizer in Xcode, then at the top click “Refresh” (right by “Automatic Device Provisioning”). Organizer will fetch a new provisioning profile with a new expiration date.

Intuitive indeed.

Bored as I was, I typed in “sex” in the search and got a bunch of random looking results. I downloaded one, looked at it, noted (with no surprise) that it was retarded and then the machine beeped and I thought nothing more of it.

Fastforward a bit. Here you see me plugging my iPhone into my computer. It syncs.

Fastforward some more. Here you see me finding that app later. I delete it from the phone, thinking “phew, good thing I didn’t leave that around in case someone found it. How embarrasing.”

Fastforward again. Here I’m plugging the iPad into the computer. It syncs.

Fastforward a final time. Here’s my 12 year old niece playing, as she always does whenever she’s visiting, with my iPad.

And then later that day, I look at the first app page and what do I see? Yeah. iTunes synced that app in from my iPhone and out to my iPad. It’s a setting that I have control over, but geez, where are the privacy features on these bloody things? Where can I “hide” stuff I don’t want my 12 year old niece to stumble on?

Sigh. And now you guys know I downloaded a smut app. But the fact my 12 year old niece might have seen it is by far worse. Much, much worse. Ugh.

The ads in Gmail sort of figure out what you “want” and show you ads related to that. If you have an email discussion talking about wanting to get a new BMW, Gmail will show you BMW retailer ads.

So when I the other day got ads about “Chinese women wanting a man”, it got me thinking. For one, I have no interests in Chinese women, whether they want a man or not, and I haven’t been talking about Chinese women anywhere either. Except for the fact I write and receive emails in Japanese.

Then earlier today I got an ad which reassured me that, “there are plenty of reasons why you can’t get an erection”. I’m fine with the emails, really, but when this kind of shit appears as a “legitimate” ad, it’s annoying on a new level.

I wonder if Google ever realized that the better their “targeted ads” become, the more hated they will be, because as they start to “hit home”, that’ll trigger some very sensitive buttons with people.

I mean, if I was having erection issues, do you think I’d be thrilled and excited and grateful that Google blares it in my face? I’m sure I could google it on my own, thanks.

800 MBs of RAM. And you know what? I haven’t even used Flash since I started Chrome.

So in the midst of Flash versus Apple (well, we’ve sort of blown past it, but anyway), let me just point something out here…

You blow.

Oh, right, I renamed that “MultilineTableViewController” to “multilineTableViewController” (lowercase M) because everything else has lower-case-initial-letter.

Kalle-Alms-MacBook-Pro:trunk me$ svn rm Classes/MultilineTableViewController.h
D         Classes/MultilineTableViewController.h
Kalle-Alms-MacBook-Pro:trunk me$ svn rm Classes/MultilineTableViewController.m
D         Classes/MultilineTableViewController.m

Great! Let’s add the new lower-case one to SVN now while at it…

Kalle-Alms-MacBook-Pro:trunk me$ svn add Classes/mult*tab**tab**tab**beep**beep*

Hm?

Kalle-Alms-MacBook-Pro:trunk me$ svn add Classes/*tab**tab*
.DS_Store                     gridreaderViewController.h    mgImageSourceRequest.m        mgScrollView.m                muddyGrid.m
.svn/                         gridreaderViewController.m    mgImageView.h                 mgWindow.h                    tile.h
UIImage+Scaling.h             gridreaderViewController.xib  mgImageView.m                 mgWindow.m                    tile.m
UIImage+Scaling.m             mg2DTileSet.h                 mgMinimap.h                   mgXMLParser.h                 worldViewController.h
fileIO.h                      mg2DTileSet.m                 mgMinimap.m                   mgXMLParser.m                 worldViewController.m
fileIO.m                      mgImageSource.h               mgMinimapButton.h             mgXMLWorld.h
gridreaderAppDelegate.h       mgImageSource.m               mgMinimapButton.m             mgXMLWorld.m
gridreaderAppDelegate.m       mgImageSourceRequest.h        mgScrollView.h                muddyGrid.h

Wait.

Where’s my class…?

Turns out SVN fucktardedly presumed “oh im shure he ment delt da fl thats lcase here insted lolstfucoksknmfur”. Luckily I had the files in memory.

The wonderful adventure continues.

svn: Failed to add file 'foo/Doc-credits.png': an unversioned file of the same name already exists
Kalle-Alms-MacBook-Pro:iphone me$ rm foo/Doc-Credits.png
Kalle-Alms-MacBook-Pro:iphone me$ svn up
Restored 'foo/Doc-Credits.png'
svn: Failed to add file 'foo/Doc-credits.png': an unversioned file of the same name already exists
Kalle-Alms-MacBook-Pro:iphone me$ masturbate furiously
-bash: masturbate: command not found

This time, the file Doc-Credits.png exists and the file Doc-credits.png needs to be added.

For the record, Mac OS X is at fault here — Apple decided to “be compatible” with Windows and not allow filenames of the same size with different capitalization, which *NIX does allow.

That doesn’t make SVN any less retarded though. After all, it’s running on the OS, so it should know the OS.

But… when I try to change it so that Swedish is the default input methods …. I can’t. Uh. Right.

… huh? Why can’t I drag and arrange my input methods in order of preference?

The deal is, whenever I open a new … window. Or tab, in Safari… I get it in Japanese.

Imagine this scenario: I open up a new tab in my browser! I decide to boldly go where none other has boldly gone before, and I type in “www.google.com” BUT!

BUT!!!! I do not GET “www.google.com” in the browser.

No sir. I don’t. I get “っっw。ごおgぇ。cおm”

in the browser.

And this is not what I wanted! Nope. No sir. Not anywhere or any way.

Can you feel my frustration shining? For now, I’ve turned Japanese off, so any time I talk to my girlfriend or whoever I will do so in “Konnichiwa watashi no chinchin wo sutte kudasai” romaji. Anyone got any nice clues on this one? It’s completely unbelievable that they’d not realize that people, sometimes, would prefer not to have their languages thrown at them in alphabetic order. (Yes, “Japanese” comes before “Swedish”.) Or is it that every tester was an American, thus “English” comes before “Japanese” and it’s not a “problem”?

EDIT: I finally figured this out. The reason it was acting up was because of 3 separate factors which, combined, do not work:

1. Japanese input.
2. Swedish as alternative input
3. English as operating system language.

The fix is to change the OS language to Swedish. I personally hate having the OS in Swedish, but I’m apparently given no choice. Better that than no Japanese though, I suppose.

Which at the top of it had in big colored text the words: HURRY, RENEW YOUR SUBSCRIPTION BY APRIL 15 2010.

Yes. Capital letters. And then, at the bottom of this OMG DO IT NOW OR PERISH LIKE THE NEANDERTHALS!!1111111111oneoneoneoneoneoneoneoneoneoneoneone email… there is the following: To continue to receive the NVIDIA UK Corporate Newsletter, you don’t need to take any action! On April 15 2010, your subscription will automatically be transferred to our UK database.

Which means “right, we just screamed at the top of our lungs to tell you that you actually don’t have to do anything“.

Asshats.

(Oh and yes, I comprehend that they have now divided their newsletter up by country, and that this is what they’re trying to say. They’re just saying it like asshats.)

Note in particular the line that in parentheses starts with “also misspelled as”.

kthxbyem8s