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All coffee places around here suck

All the coffee places and all the people in them suck.

There are two coffee places near the place where I work. I was looking for a quiet corner today, just to write one document and do some translating, things like that. I don’t need much, a few cups of coffee, maybe a sandwich, a table to put my laptop on and some peace.

The first place is nice. It’s well lit, has spacious tables and serves good coffee. But they have the radio on, blastic the top hits from the past decade – you know, hipity-hop, dance, that kind of shit. What the hell? That’s dancing music. It’s meant for nightclubs, where people are by default deaf, stupid, drunk or all of the above. Why the hell are you blasting it at noon, in a nice cafeteria? I asked if they could at least turn it down a little and was told “no, it’s required that we play it at least this volume”.

Okey dokey, I’ll go to the next place. It’s much smaller and packed with iphone-show-offs who just can’t live without ordering double mocha latte cappucino espresso with skim milk and  opossum-vomit syrup served from a chilled but warm cup and a sandwhich but I’d like to change the lettuce to organically grown chilean sun-dried spruce bark which is cut diagonally, but not too diagonally.

Come on people – do you have any idea how long it takes to make that shit? And everyone else stands in the queue behind you as the clerk mixes, foams, chills, cuts, piles and and so on, and in the end it’s just the same shit, coffee with milk. Why can’t you just take a cup of coffee? It’s better than that shit, and takes fifteen minutes less to get.

I submit that the latest economic downturn was caused by the snot-nose wankers who just couldn’t order anything normal. It caused seven hundred million people to waste twelve minutes standing in queues every day, waiting for the asshole to get his precious dose of overpriced crap. That amounts to nineteen billion hours of worktime wasted in a year, which meant that two trillion projects were late, and because of that their payments were late and hey presto – the whole world ran out of cash.

So how about a nice cup of tea? Please?

| Posted 18 June 2010 | Antti | Old crow whining | Comments (0) |

For the one who already has everything

You know when people say they have seen everything? Well obviously they haven’t, but me – I’m one step closer today: http://www.stupid.com/fun/SIGM.html - Sigmund Freud Action Figure! Holee shite Batman, that is… bonkers. Seriously. People, you need to get a life.

| Posted 17 June 2010 | Antti | Random stuff | Comments (0) |

Ultimate time waster

Whoa! Check this out: http://www.remedygames.com/games/deathrally - Death Rally, now on Windows! That is so totally cool that I don’t have words for it. If you played computer games in the early 90′s you will know what this is and go download it already! And it’s free – and legal! Now how often do you get to download something that is cool, for free and completely legal? Thought so.

Go download it already. Go go go. I’m waiting for you at the starting line, and I’m so going to blast you to smithereens…

| Posted 16 June 2010 | Antti | Random stuff | Comments (0) |

Acquires taste

I didn’t really like St. Anger at all for a long time, but now – listening to it when slightly pissed off with headphones just a little bit too loud – I’m starting to like it a bit. Who knows, maybe by the time I’m 70 I will actually enjoy it.

| Posted 14 June 2010 | Antti | Books, Flicks and Music | Comments (0) |

New camera – new tricks

My old camera gave up the ghost so I had to buy a new one. We take quite a lot of pictures so I wanted something good – a small-size pocket camera with good image quality. I bought a Canon Powershot S90, and oh man does it have a load of doo-dahs!

First, it has all the “regular” stuff like image stabilizers and automatic ISO level and all that easy stuff. But here’s some stuff that I found seriously cool:

  • You can print directly from the camera, just plug it in to a printer (which of course needs to be modern enough to support this as well) and you can just select an image and print it. No need to transfer anything to a computer first.
  • You can plug it in to a TV directly, using S-video or HDMI. Whoa, that’ll be handy, I can show a day’s shoot to people right there and then!
  • It has face-recognition! Well not that it would recognize who it is, but it recognizes that there are faces in the picture and automatically focuses on those if you want it to. Nice.
  • The self-timer has a mode where it will count the number of faces in the picture and when one more appears it will take the shot. So as soon as you’ve set the timer up and join others in the pic, it will take the picture. No more running to make it in time, just take it easy and smile.
  • It has eye-blinking detection! I’m not kidding, it can actually detect if someone blinked during the shot and shows an icon for that so you’ll know to take another one. That’s almost spooky…

On top of that it has a pretty nifty image quality, and even the video quality seems pretty decent so far. My main reasons for getting this particular model were a) it’s a Canon, so I can expect good optical quality and easily available service if I ever need it fixed and b) it had about the best low-light performance I could find, which is important in dimly lit conditions.

| Posted 09 June 2010 | Antti | Random stuff | Comments (0) |