That is, “people who are currently taking their first class in basic tech support”.

Me: “Hey, Apple, in Ping’s user profile display, song titles that contain apostrophes are cut off at the apostrophe, so that Don’t stand so close to me comes out as Don.”

Them: “I see you have written in with a concern about Ping and word recognition.”

Me: “Um, no; let me break it down into a nice numbered list for you.”

Them: “To resolve this issue, I suggest you uninstall and re-install iTunes. I have consulted with another Agent, and we have found that this is the best solution for this issue.”

Me: “…or I could wait 24 hours for Apple to fix the problem on their end, which they just did.”

“Uninstall and reinstall”, the fuck-off-and-die of customer service.

As the strongest vocalist in the sadly-defunct Melon Kinenbi, I think you could have done without the crap autotune effects on your debut solo single, 「killing my caddy」. And maybe made it sound a bit less like something cut from the soundtrack of Project Gotham Racing.

And maybe released it through something other than a Japan-only, cellphone-only streaming site. Look into selling on iTunes; any distribution mechanism that requires more effort than “Google for a torrent or a Hotfiles link” will never put money in your pocket. You have ten years worth of loyal fans who will click a simple “buy now” button, and you didn’t give them one.

It’s catchy, at least, even if it doesn’t sound much like you.

Stumbling across this screencap from the current Strike Witches 2 episode, I found it curiously Kino-esque.

One wonders if her legs talk.

My friend Dan is a member of the 501st. No, not that one (fortunately); the other one. It occurred to me, though, that there’s a cosplay opportunity here. Crossing the streams, as it were.

I’m not the first to think of it, although the execution leaves a bit to be desired…

Next time, please start with a femtrooper, preferably one built along the lines of Lynette Bishop or Shirley Yeager…

Wow, these new pencils are versatile! But I think maybe I don’t want to hang out with the sort of people who buy them…

Actually, I’m not terribly excited by the new Sharpie Liquid Mechanical Pencils. Unless you apply a lot more pressure than you would with a standard pencil or gel-ink pen, they don’t work well when held at more than a very slight angle.

I am not a coffee drinker. Growing up, I liked the smell, but the taste was always awful. I take my caffeine cold and sweet, and while there are ways to adulterate coffee to the point where I like it, they generally involve adding enough sugar and fat to turn it into a meal (I briefly acquired a taste for the Caramel Frappuccino, in the days when 60 grams of sugar didn’t earn a scolding from my doctor).

Still, I think I’d rather drink day-old truckstop paint-stripper coffee than dandelion, brown rice, or black soybean coffees, all available in Japan.

[dandelion root has apparently been used as a coffee substitute for a long time, but I guess I never knew anyone desperate enough to try it]

Now this is cosplay that separates the gamers from the noobs.

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Just got a complaint from a user about a Perl script that wasn’t handling regular expressions correctly. Specifically, when he typed:

ourspecial-cat | grep 'foo\|bar'

he got a match on “foo” or “bar”, but when he typed:

ourspecial-grep 'foo\|bar'

he got nothing at all.

My surprise came from the fact that the normal grep worked, when everyone knows that you need to use egrep for that kind of search, and in any case, since the entire regular expression was in single-quotes, you don’t need the backslash. Removing the backslash made our tool do what he wanted, but broke grep.

Sure enough, if you leave out the backslash, you need to use egrep or grep -E, but if you put it in, you can use grep. What makes it really fun is that they’re the same program, GNU Grep 2.5.1, and running egrep should be precisely the same as running grep -E.

Makes me wonder what other little surprises are hidden away in the tools I use every day…