Green cleaning products Jun 11, 2009
Sometimes I make a claim about something, and then later I'll have to eat my words and go back on what I said.  Although I've never publicly broadcast it on the internet, I once claimed that green cleaning products like Clorox Green Works and Seventh Generation were stupid and ineffective.  How lemon juice and eucalyptus oil can clean anything, I'll never know.  But after trying a few of these products (Green Works Toilet Bowl Cleaner and Bathroom Cleaner), I can attest to the fact that they do indeed work, and they're fairly cheap.  The problem with cleaning products made with harsher chemicals is (1) the typical hippie yaya groundwater thing, (2) they make our cats act weird, and (3) they hurt my throat and eyes.  When I'm leaning over the bathtub scrubbing away that weird orange film that magically develops every few weeks (side note:  invent orange shower paint), products with bleach seem to find a way directly into my lungs and make my eyes tear up.  And then the cats start rubbing their faces all over the bathroom (some sort of primitive territory-marking behavior) and biting me.  These are things I can live without.  So I gave the green products a go and found they clean just as well, and they don't cause bodily harm or cat weirdness.  And they're blah blah good for the environment and won't cause yada yada birth defects.  The one thing that would make my life perfect right now is if these green companies made some of those automatic toilet cleaning tabs that you stick in the back of the bowl to increase the time between toilet cleanings.  Until that happens, I'm reluctantly sticking to bleach. #products
Coding should Jun 11, 2009
I do a lot of programming for work and fun, and two annoying things I come across on a regular basis are the following: 
  1. "You should be able to do (X) even though I've never tried it."  Yes, you should, but you can't.  If you don't know what you're talking about and don't understand the language you're trying to use, don't just spout off answers from the top of your head like some sort of code gunslinger.
  2. "This code should work even though I didn't test it."  You're right, it should work, but it doesn't.  If you took two minutes to actually try it yourself instead of just typing it into the comment box on a website and assuming it would work perfectly, maybe you could've actually contributed something.  Instead, I'm left trying to solve my preexisting problem while also trying to solve the problems your code created.
Programmers are so full of themselves.  Buncha nerds. #technology