Jonathan’s Universe

Archive for the ‘Lame’ Category

Not to offset my tremendous satisfaction and extreme gratitude with SEPTA and a few of its employees from my last noteworthy SEPTA experience, the other night I had a pretty bad issue with SEPTA.

For those that don’t know, the north east got slammed by major blizzard-like snow storm on December 19, 2009. I think we had almost two feet of snow and severe wind. It was not a winter wonderland. At all.

I had to go shopping at Target due to a last minute change-in-plans on a gift-exchange party. And due to my limit availability and energy due to my new job, I decided to go on Saturday. It took me about an hour and a half to get to Target when it’s normally a 15 minute ride. This wasn’t just because of the storm.

SEPTA has a track-improvement project going on right now, and because of this, regular service stops at the Woodland Avenue stop. After this point, there is a shuttle bus that takes you further. The shuttle bus took forever to arrive, and we were waiting outside in a bus shelter for at least 45 minutes. Once the shuttle arrived, we had to wait for the next trolley to come to drop of its passengers. At this point, I was debating whether or not to get on that trolley and just go home.

I should have gotten on that trolley and gone home.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah, I was wondering why I never received an email with my tracking status. I went and clicked “I forgot my claim ID” on Asurion’s website. This is what I was greeted with:

There’s like many many errors with that email address. I even spelled my name and email domain!

Jesus God damn…

My employer (which has remained nameless, thus far) has chosen to go ahead and dissolve the physical position (and by extension, my employment) of web developer.

A certain high-powered person has made the decision to sub-contract a company (for now, nameless) to take care of the work for them. Completely. This will obviously render the posistion of staff web developer completely pointless, which is why I will be shown the door.

I think it’s a pretty dangerous thing when you start empowering third-party entities to control your assets, which is exactly what my employer is doing.

The way I found out about this master genius plan is what really gets me. I was sitting at work minding my own business when a teacher I know asked me “Hey, so I heard they are taking the web-site away from you. What happened?” — you see, this guy likes to joke around, so I didn’t take it seriously. Then a teacher came into my office asking for A/V help. I told her I could not help her since “I’m just the web guy.” Her response was, “oh are you that new web guy they just hired?”… my response.. “just hired? new? I’ve been here.. for 2 years.” At this point I knew something fishy was going on.

Apparently, this huge decision was made by one man, who then proceeded to petition for approval from the board of directors…. and because this man is among the most powerful persons with the company, he has inherent leeway with things he wants to do. Assuming the board is comprised of people that aren’t up to par with today’s technology, which does not enable them to make informed decisions about something as severe as this. Does the company not realize they are forfeiting majority control of their biggest public relations asset? Whenever they want something done, they have to submit that and it’ll get done “when it get done.” They won’t have things instantly done when and how they want. Anytime the director of public information had something for me, it was up within minutes. If it was something more involved, it was up within a day. I surely hope this company knows they are in for.

What also ticks me off is now this explains why they kept blocking my projects. I had a project in place that could have theoretically saved the company quite a bit of money per year. I already had the stuff started off, but the implementation of it would’ve required policy change in each building within the organization — which is more work than its worth if they knew for a while they were planning on getting rid of my work. Which is exactly what they are doing. Everything that I have worked on will be meeting the recycling bin and go down the drain.

When I took this job, the website was a barren waste land. I turned it around and developed a brand new innovative content management system specifically for the district. I took the liberty of setting up a testing/development environment server to take care of the development/code changes before they get rolled to the production public server — something that was never down before — something that known of the previous web developers knew/bothered to do. I fixed up errors and the “growing pains” that occured with moving the website to a new server that was due to shotty code written by the first group of web masters. All by myself. What do I get? Nothing. Not even benefits. No paid time off. Just crappy treatment from my co-workers and continous obstacles that are placed to prevent me from doing what I need to do.

I should have honestly figured this out sooner. The company is not taking my employment seriously, because I made myself into an expendable asset by not fighting for what I deserve. I work full-time hours for this company, but they insist on having me officially labeled as a part time employer, which legally means they have less responsibilities — they don’t have to give me benefits or any honors and treatment they give to full time employees. You remember the black mold issue and how long it took them to fix that.. and how much office-political bull crap I had to put up with just for THEM, my employer to deal with a severe health concern in the workplace. Seriously, they knew about the incident before I was an employee here, and I sent my own  requests in (filed them with the building administrator’s secretary) Obviously, I was not important to them, but I should have figured this out back then. But I guess hindsight is always 20/20.

As for my timeline — I have no idea. They still need someone to maintain the website right now. The contract is not finalized, and it will take a bit of time for them to construct the new webpage. But see, any new enhancements I make will all be done in vain… as by the time it’s implemented the system will be erased from existence. I was working on a YouTube-style video system  that would’ve been very innovative for my company’s website.. but now I don’t see the point in exerting myself. But hey, it’s their company. Whatever the hell they want.

See this is what happens when companies choose the easy way out of things and make it someone else’s problem. The little people get screwed.. while the big people get six figure salaries and sport cars can sit back. Niccceeee.

You guys remember that unannounced fly-over New York City? You know, the one the Obama Administration decided to perform so they could update their publicity photos (oh, the irony) based on the Air Force One flying around national landmarks? Yeah, the one that caused public on the ground to fear the worst and run for their lives fearing another 9/11 attack.

Turns out, hey, we won’t even be seeing the photos. Obama’s administration (possibly Obama himself) has ordered that the “photos taken” to not be released to public view.

It’s kind of funny. This president has no problem revealing photos of the “abuse” of known terrorists, closing down Gitmo bay and making previous presidents’ dirty laundry be known… but what about his own? Not a shot.

So not only did they not tell anyone (not even the mayor!), they spent almost $329,000 on this operation. That’s OUR tax money, on OUR plane, flying over OUR city. Does anyone else find something fishy about this? A supposed super secret operation to get new press pictures of the president’s plane over national landmarks, but the pictures aren’t being revealed. Also, the plane was being escorted by a fighter jet… since when are fighter jets mounted with high-resolution, high-quality cameras? Something really fishy. By all means, I am NOT a conspiracy theorist, at all.. but stuff isn’t adding up here.

I’ve sent in a Freedom of Information Act to obtain more information. These photos are not “classified, but being kept from public view.” Well, since they aren’t classified, I’m invoking the FoIA. Here is my request:

“Please disclose any documents relating to the Air Force One “landmark fly-over photo-op” on the day April 27, 2009, including but not limited to, photographs (color) taken, flight manifest, fighter escort aircraft camera specifications, operational directives and all correspondence with the FAA & Flight Traffic Control before and during this operation in regards to all operational notification, planning and commission.”

It’s short and sweet, but to the point. We’ll see how much executive cooperation I receive.

So much for the transparency we were promised.

Thanks to Insignifcant Thoughts and New York Post

Oh yay, alliteration.

Since last night, I have not been able to use Twitter via my mobile device. When I send a tweet, my phone immediately says “Sending Failed, Message in Outbox to be sent later” [paraphrase].. after about 5-10 minutes, I get another message box that says “Message #NUM cannot be sent, see outbox for message status.” Checking the status of the failed message simply says “Sending failed.”

I can still receive tweets, but I cannot send them via SMS. Is this a temporary problem? Or is T-Mobile playing god and blocking Twitter again?

So this Saturday, there was a relatively huge slip-up/oopsies done by Google. They updated their definition file that contains a list of potentially bad sites that host malware and somehow (by human error) a single ‘/’ get entered as an entry. In terms of a file path in this context, the / is interpreted as a wildcard – so every site. Essentially, every single result was marked as a “This site could harm your computer” kind of website in the search results. It even flagged its own sites as dangerous:

Now you see, this is causing web-masters and companies ALL OVER THE WORLD to call foul. Apparently because of this slipup are causing “potential visitors/customers to be steered away from our site because we have been labeled as a malware provider.” Uhm. That’s just stupid. I think anyone with half a brain could see that every single result is being flagged as dangerous… will realize that there must be SOME mistake. I mean it’s kind of obvious. I mean, before this glitch, I’ve only come across a few of these flags… so if all of a sudden every single result from Google starts displaying this flag, especially with a legitimate search string (ie not “cracks for photoshop”, “movie torrents”, etc),  it’s obvious there is a problem.

No doubt some idiot is going to try to initiate either an individual lawsuit or a class-action suit against Google for something along the lines of “defamation of character” or some bogus claim. And I hope it gets shot down.

Accidents happen. Get over it. Get over yourselves.

Though I will say – the guy that made the typo – is probably jobless right now.

Uhm. What?

It seems that, at least this McDonald’s, has started to charge for extra packets of sauce. Goodbye it is to courtesy sauce packets.  In my opinion this a bit of ludicris.  First off, this will simply cause more time at the register as the cashier will have to carefully ration off each packet and enter the exact amount in their POS/cash register. The point of getting something from fast food is that it is as quick and efficient as possible. Adding additional little tasks for the cashier only adds additional oppurtunity for failure.

Also, only  one packet for a six piece? Uhm. Lame. You’ll be lucky if you make a single packet last that long. Especially if you’re like me and dip your fries into the sauce too. That kind of sort of REALLY sucks. It’s going to drive people away, especially when we already have to penny pinch to begin with. This is stupid.

Also, notice something. It costs more if you get the sauce with the strips. You know.. the bigger longer chicken? So, you’re probably going to need more packets to eat this properly. How can you sell the exact same product for two different prices? I don’t think this policy will last too long.

Ugh, now I’m hungry.