… has to be the biggest waste of space on the interwebs. Clearly Yahoo doesn’t give a shit about them since they are not policed in the slightest and riddled with spam, trolls, and crazies. There are absolutely no insightful conversations going on for any stock. I wonder why they even bother keeping them around.

My checking account is part of Commerce Bank which about a year ago was bought out by TD Bank. Up until this summer their site still worked for all my online banking. The theme had changed on the site but all the same login functionality was there. Then September 20th rolled around and I goto log into my account to check on some things only to find that now is a search engine spam page?

I must finally reveal to the world my secret for the solution to help curb NYC sound pollution and hope someone out there somehow finds a way to get this done. The solution… ::drumroll:: is to track taxi cab horn usage and impose fines based on excessive horn use. I know , I know I’m a genius , stop it, please. In my ignorant mind about cars, it seems simple enough to create a device that would activate anytime the horn is pushed, record the datetime, and record the duration of the honk.

I’ll first start off by saying I think smokeping is a great program and Tobi Oetiker is a great programmer whose contributions to the community have been great and in no way could I ever create MRTG or RRDTool. But…. After downloading the source to smokeping today and trying to configure it to run, I was completely shocked at how poorly it was put together. It’s clear that Tobi did not bother with making his code easy to run on any other system but his own with constant absolute paths to his own home directories on his personal machine!

Since moving into the city I’ve had to assemble a lot of furniture from ikea and other various places. Today while putting together snack tables from bed bath & beyond I believe I discovered my source of why I hate putting this crap together, the instructions. You see in order to save money on printing costs places like Ikea use picture only instruction manuals so they don’t need to translate every booklet into every language where they ship to.

What’s the deal with the leaner’s on the subways? You know who I mean, the dude who can’t be bothered to hold on the support poll, instead he has to lean against it. In order to hold on and keep yourself from falling all over the place, you have to wedge your fingers in between the poll and his sweaty back. I understand sometimes we all don’t want to stand on the subway.

You are kidnapped and dropped off in one of these stores with all name brands removed. Can you tell which one you are in? I believe all of these stores are too similar and would never invest in any of them for that reason and also there are just wayyyyy to many of them. If I see a CVS next to a duane reede, my only incentive to goto one over the other is which one is physically closer to me at the given moment.

THE PROBLEM The LIRR has a section of seats in each car that are 3 seats facing one another (see diagram to right). I always aim to sit in these set of seats due to the fact that I’m 6’5 and sitting in the regular seats hardly offers me enough leg room to sit comfortably for an hour long train ride. Of course this only works in my favor if no one sits across from me.

Situation: You have 5 minutes to make your train. You are about to enter Penn Station and you are presented with the stairs on one side and 2 escalators going down on the other. Which is faster? Optimal solution: The left hand side of the escalator , when sane people are riding it, is reserved for those who choose to maximize the escalator by walking down it. You fly down that sucker , lickity split, no shit.

….I can hear your music. It’s really loud. Me and the 4 other people around you aren’t staring at you cause we think your fake diamond earrings are kinda cool. Yea that new Timbaland song is kinda catchy but it’s 7:45 in the morning and well I’m trying to read the WSJ and the woman to my right was sleeping until you came on the train. Man you are totally feeling the beat right now, huge adrenaline rush I bet.

Web 2.0 has brought upon perhaps the silliest design trend to date, that even big media companies are doing. That is the addition of social networking links attached to articles. To the right is an example from nytimes.com. How many people honestly take the time out to bother clicking those links to ‘Digg’ the article or share it with their friends on facebook? Nytimes.com is atleast smart about it and saves on valuable screen space by making the list expandable, while some sit there giving you about 8 useless different ways for you to whore their article on your favorite social networking site.