GregHowley.com

I'm just in the mood to rant today. Here are some things that annoy me.

• My web site breaking - Last night, Lia turned 6 months old. I took a few pictures of her and uploaded them to my photo gallery. Later in the night, when I went back to check, the entire photo gallery was broken. I'm still not sure if it was something I did or if my host is having issues. I hate having to do constant maintenance on the one part of my site I didn't write, and therefore for which I don't know the code. Then today, I went to post a new article and couldn't access the custom control panel I'd written for myself. I wrote it years ago, so I've mostly forgotten how it works. It took quite a bit of tinkering to get it to work well enough for me to post this. I'm thinking my host company changed the way certain server variables are parsed. Anyway, if my site suddenly stops working or I suddenly stop posting for weeks, you'll know what happened.
• The term pop - it's soda! I know, it's regional. Somehow, it annoys me.
• Trying to give my cat antibiotics - Have you ever tried to feed a cat a pill? I've got this elaborate technique whereby I sit the cat in the sink so he can't back up, then place my middle and ring fingers on either side of his neck with my palm facing his head and grip his nose with my thumb, prying back his head until he's looking straight up. I then have my right hand free to pry open his jaw, drop the pill in, and with a quick poke force it to the back of his throat where ideally he'll swallow it. I've given him pills once before when he was a kitten and didn't fight me. Now, he fights. After three failed attempts this morning where he kept spitting it out, I gave up and put it in his food, which he didn't finish. Aargh. Make Greg angry. Greg smash!
• Non-analog volume knobs - Perhaps this one requires a bit of explanation. I'm speaking of volume knobs that aren't explicitly mapped to the volume. For example, in my car radio, if I twist the knob one half turn counterclockwise slowly, the volume lowers almost unnoticably. If I twist the knob one half turn counterclockwise very quickly, the volume drops almost to zero. When I first got the car, this was actually pretty intuitive and convenient. Now, my car's six years old and has nearly 140,000 miles on it. The stereo volume is difficult to change at all. The volume knob on my six-year-old Creative Nomad Jukebox mp3 player is the same way.
• People who put the accent on the first syllable of insurance
• the Writers' Guild Strike - I've heard the arguments, and I suppose that it is indeed unfair that the writers not be compensated for online publications of their work, but damn it! Why the heck does Heroes have to be cut short? Why does 24 have to be cancelled? I'm just bitter. Hopefully things turn around before it's time for the new season of The 4400 to start.
• Your's guys - everyone always says this and it kills me. "Your" is the proper plural possessive.
• All the good games I want to play but can't until I buy a better PC or an XBox 360 - Assassin's Creed. Mass Effect. World in Conflict. Crysis. The Witcher. Gears of War.
• People who insist on saying the WWW in web addresses - not only is there no need to say the WWW in a url, 99% of the time there's no need to use it. Even worse are the people who can't say a web address without verbally including the http colon slash slash.
• Loading a Pez dispenser - you'll always try to hold the entire stack of Pez between two fingers and slide them in, but one will always flip sideways. Or else the whole stack will explode outward and land behind the desk.
• People on EBay who leave retaliatory feedback - I haven't encountered this often, but these people do exist. They won't leave feedback for you until you leave feedback for them. And then if you leave neutral feedback about them because the book you ordered took 5 weeks to arrive and smelled like fish, they'll leave negative feedback about you.