No Zytrons In Range

Slashdot has always been a buggy piece of shit, but recently it’s exploded into a buggy metric fuckload of shit. No matter what I do, every Slashdot article looks like this:

(Click image for a closer view)

Seriously. Slashdot is supposed to be full of smart and technical people, and they can’t even get a goddamned website right? How is that image even being shown to me, the end-user? Have they ever heard of the concept of “staging servers?” It’s fucking disgraceful.

It’s not like I’m using the hated Internet Explorer browser, or some experimental web browser from beyond the stars, or that I’ve hacked the shit out of my system, it’s fucking stock Firefox with one fucking add-on.

Oh, and to make it all worse, I have Slashdot set to use the “classic” (read that as: “working”) comments system, not this new piece of shit they’ve been shitting out over the last year. Not that anybody at Slashdot gives a fuck for my preference, since I still get the new version on my user page, and half the templates.

Maintaining this site is somebody’s full-time job. In fact, there are several people who work for Slashdot and only for Slashdot… what the hell do they even do? Think up more creative ways to cram so much fail in such a small space?

Slashdot is the only website I’ve ever seen where the owners/administrators of the site simply don’t fucking care.

They just do not care.

I got to stop posting about Slashdot, it’s kind of pathetic. Not a third as pathetic as Slashdot itself, though.

Thing the first:

I’ve been playing Left4Dead recently. One of the zombie types is the “smoker”, which shoots out a long tongue that ensnares one of the survivors and drags them away from the group.

Take a look at this approximation of what happens, in cute Valentine’s Day form:

So when I was playing the other day, I was surprised to learn that you can actually save a survivor being dragged by using your melee attack. Somehow, in the magical zombie-infested world of Left4Dead, slapping someone upside the head with the butt of your automatic shotgun will unravel a mutated tongue wrapped around their neck. I’ve been playing the game for several weeks, and I’d never heard this before, but lo and behold it works.

And it makes no sense.

Thing the second:

The other day I signed up for an account at Mint.com. I put in my bank info, and it went and retrieved my balance sheet from Bank of America using magical Internet technology somehow. It worked pretty good, except for one thing: for some reason it categorized ATM withdrawals as mortgage payments.

So I dive in and try to fix the problem. For each transaction, Mint.com has a list of dozens of categories you can select from. But for some reason, I couldn’t find ATM Withdrawals anywhere on the list. I knew it existed, because a friend I was talking to told me as much, but where was it? Turns out, the category “ATM Withdrawals” is a sub-category of “Uncategorized.”

And that makes no sense, either.

Lesson learned:

Maybe I’m some kind of freak, but if I think that something’s not going to work, I don’t even try it.

For example, in Left4Dead, since whacking a fellow survivor with your melee attack is something to be generally avoided, and since there’s no possible way that could (in real life at least) uncoil a choking snakelike tongue, it never occurred to me to try it.

Similarly, when looking for a category named “ATM Withdrawal” it would never have occurred to me, in a million years, to check underneath the menu item called “Uncategorized.”

In short: things are easier to use when they make sense. Make sense.

Mint.com is great, but there’s a lot of very obvious features it could use:

• An offline data uploader applet, so that I don’t have to store my username/passwords to the web. I don’t know about most people, but I have trust issues with stuff like that.
• Depreciate cars. Right now you just plop in the value of your car, and that’s it– since Mint.com doesn’t know the make/model/year of your car, it has no way of judging the value of it other than what you specifically type in.
• Recognize Bank of America ATM withdrawals by default. Not only is Bank of America one of the largest banks in the US, but ATM transactions specifically show up with the descriptive all-caps text: “BANK OF AMERICA ATM WITHDRAWAL” on them. Despite that, they showed up in my Mint account as “Mortgage Payments.”
• Similarly, a purchase from Steam Powered.com (i.e. Valve’s Steam game service) showed up as a coffee purchase. I’m pretty sure that Valve’s Steam is bigger than whatever podunk coffeeshop is also named “Steam Powered.”
• If I tell Mint I don’t have a credit card, it should remove the “Credit Cards” section from my homepage. The “add account” wizard seems to be smart enough to stop asking when I say I don’t have one, but the homepage isn’t similarly smart.
• Also, there’s a bug with their lightbox where sometimes it’ll get taller than the browser window and become impossible to close. Wasn’t just me on this one, a friend saw it also.

I gripe because I gripe a lot, but Mint.com really is a good service, and I think it’ll be very handy to me. Since I’m godawful with money, generally.