Politics.NET

This past black Friday, I decided to do the smart and yet fiscally-responsible thing: shop online for electronics. Our current TV has been making weird noises that I interpret to be death rattles. So what better way to snag a big screen TV than by shopping super early on black Friday. Like a smart consumer, I did my research before hand and found Walmart.com had 2 TVs at really good prices: 47 inch LG for $699 and a 55 inch LG for $898. As soon as it was 12:05am, I logged on to Walmart.com and bummer, the 55 inch was "sold out". I settled on the 47 inch and made the purchase with an AMEX card. Why AMEX? Because they offer free extended warranty on electronics. Done with my shopping, I went to sleep. Woke up around 7am and decided to try the 55 inch again. Luckily it was in stock and I bought it too figuring I'll just return the 47 inch when it arrives. Free shipping on both TVs meant I wouldn't have wasted money on shipping the unwanted 47 inch. I was feeling very pr...

I wrote this a long time ago but didn't published it. Not really sure the title fits but what the heck...read it. Ever since I became a parent, this blog post has been rolling around in my head. The fact is it's very easy for us to take good luck for granted. I am not saying one should "give testimony" for every little thing like waking up in the morning, taking the next breathe etc. But when I think about my kids and how normal they are and how non-trivial my wife's pregnancy was, I realize that I am very lucky. When you have 6 nieces and nephews, you start to think pregnancy isn't a big deal. After all, your sister and sister-in-law have done it 6 times with apparent ease. What could go wrong? Then your wife gets pregnant, with twins and she starts watching all these weird shows on Discovery Chanel. And the answer to the question "what could go wrong?" becomes "a lot!". Then you go to bed one night while your wife is only 4 months ...

On July 4th 2011, I spent over $1500 at Value City Furniture on living and dining room set. I shouldn't have. I should have done somewhere else. Because Value City Furniture sucks. Here's what I wrote to them: Hello, I am writing to tell you about my horrible experience shopping in New Carrollton your store. I bought a living room set (3-piece sectional) on July 4th.  About a month after delivery, I noticed that both the sofa and loveseat had ripped. I called in to have it repaired. At this point, I was already disappointed with the quality of the furniture. The fillings inside the cushion were already coming out and the 1-month old sectional already had the appearance of a much older couch. To make matters worse, the rip that was repaired came back exactly 2 days after repair (and I was out of town for those 2 days!). Needless to say, at this point I was very disappointed with the quality of VCF's merchandise and repair expertise. After several calls to the store, I ev...

Ever opened your aspx or ascx in Visual Studio 2010 only to see this: When this happens: Editing in design view is virtually impossible Can't add new controls Existing controls can't be edited in design view The solution that's worked for me is to: Close VS 2010 Delete all temporary files created by VS 2010. In addition to the usual suspects, make sure you delete the folder that corresponds to your website in this location: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache Restart VS 2010

There is a site called " The Daily WTF : Curious Perversions in Information Technology". Contrary to the name, the site is perfectly safe for work. In fact, it's probably should be mandatory reading for some workplaces. Why? Because the content of the site can be put in 2 categories: amusing screenshots of software behaving badly and  examples of phenomenally bad code . By the former, I mean amusing error messages; error messages that the developers thinks will never show to the user; banks sending letters to demand payment of $0; things of that nature. The second category is what I call the curse of being in the software business. Smart people coming up with really clever and awful ways to get things done. Part of the reason is that end users never get to see the source code of most applications. They only see the pretty UI. So what happens? Developers have the freedom to use whatever to get the job done. And boy, do they abuse that freedom.Spend a few minutes perusin...

Every once in a while I come across this dialog in Visual Studio and the language used in the dialog text always bugs me: Dangerous? If you can't see the image, the text is: An editor or project is attempting to save a file that is modified in memory. Saving files during a build is dangerous and may result in incorrect build outputs in the future. Continue with save? I am not sure what a better word is but "dangerous" just bugs the heck out of me. I mean I understand software is important and all but dangerous? Really? What's the worst that can happen? You mess up the build and are forced to do a "clean" and "rebuild". Big deal. Generally, I don't think anything that can happen in Visual Studio (short of blowing up your computer) should be termed as "dangerous".

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the weird behavior of Chrome's omnibox. Today, am posting about how Chrome's bungled a very simple feature of all web browsers. Since the very early days of the web, web browsers have always had an option for viewing the source code of the currently rendered page. Typically the menu is called "View Source" or something similar. You click it and you get the HTML source for the page you're looking at. Very simple, right? Well Chrome does it differently. In the spirit of complicating simple things, clicking on "View Source" in Chrome doesn't just give you the HTML of the current page. Oh no! It makes another request to the web server and shows you the HTML for that version. Yep. I am not sure how that's better than just showing the HTML of the already rendered page but that's what Chrome does. So in addition to using the omnibox to complicate web development , the "View Source" option makes a triv...