Innocuous things that make you irrationally angry (a list thread)

Dactyl is from the Greek daktulos which does have 3 syllables (I think it even is actually a dactyl - at least it would be in English, but Greek/Latin metre is confusing because they measure it by whether vowels are long or short rather than where the stress is, never got the hang of that)

You have blown my mind!

- when people say '5 am in the morning', just to be sure you don't go thinking it's 5 am in the afternoon

that always bothered me about that song "Moonlight Shadow" ("four AM in the morning")

Oh god I hate "am in the morning" too! As if we dont know what AM means? Come on.

No one ever says "11pm in the evening" tho do they?

Great now I'm gonna have Mike Fecking Oldfield stuck in my head all afternoon, thanks a lot Corey ;P

It means Anno Momini, for "in the year of our in the morning."

ahahahahaha

I had ~10 Word docs open (all saved coz i am anal) and Word crashed. When it restarted it gave me a list of docs I had open and wanted me to manually save EVERY SINGLE ONE in a new location! JUST FIX IT, DO NOT HASSLE ME, JUST FIX IT

"x years of age" instead of "x years old". Is this some kind of new anti-ageist POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD thing? *Everyone* on the tv seems to say "years of age" now.

"Itunes terms and conditions have changed. Before downloading the app you must accept the new terms and conditions".

ppl who come to you at the last minute and ask to borrow something of yours or ask for a spare (whatever) and when you give them what they ask, explaining you don't really have much, or you don't think it's really what they want, they turn up their nose and say 'oh. Do you have anything else?" and then start making jokes about how lame whatever it is you have is

I'm struggling to imagine this, can we have a concrete example? Bits I don't understand:

- last minute? before what?
- you don't have much. Is this a foodstuff, or money? What things do people ask for where "having much" is an option?
- making jokes about how lame it is. So they're expecting a better version of whatever it is? It's not a pen then, or a fiver. What could it be??

"Itunes terms and conditions have changed. Before downloading the app you must accept the new terms and conditions".

So tired of this shit with my PS3 - "to play this game you need to update your console" *does system update* "you have updated your system and need to sign the T&Cs*" (*that haven't even changed) -- just let me play the fucking game!

However did we manage with MegaDrives and SNESs that we couldn't update? Oh I remember, we just played the fucking games!

Ridiculous passwords requirements are stupid because people respond by writing their passwords on post-it notes and sticking them to walls.

And by choosing the simplest passwords ever, i.e. myoffice2 which gets changed to myoffice3 or whatever..

My PSP does the PS3 thing too, unsurprisingly I guess.

"To play this game you need the new firmware"
uh well uh-huh I guess
(brief pang of regret that I'd been meaning to go over to the p!r4te firmwarez to run homebrew games/apps, which would be easier if I kept the old firmware, but I want to play my new game which I have spent money on, plus don't really understand if these games that check the firmware would shout at me if I put a non-Sony one on)

"Your current firmware is too old to upgrade to the newest firmware, you must do 3 incremental updates instead"
uhhh-huh (sigh)

"To install this new firmware, please confirm that your soul is the property of Sony Inc and that you will never even think of doing anything naughty with your PSP like playing homebrew games or putting an mp3 you haven't paid for on it"
(repeat 3 times for the incremental updates)
(notice that the time/date has probably reset to midnight of 1 Jan 2003 if you haven't played it for a week and don't leave it on the charger 24/7)

Good grief. Having pretty much gamed so much on the DS and having had to update firmware on my wii all of about once, this sounds hideous. And not very innocuous either ie totally justified! Eff you Sony.

tbh it probably only happens every 6 months, but then I only play my PSP once every 6 months when I've got a new game, play my new game for a week, then forget about the PSP again

definitely feeling new password fatigue, too - they used to bother me less, when song titles and computer games about aliens seemed an inexhaustible supply of fresh, memorable non-words, but now I don't spend my time thinking about either of those much, and my brain is already full of passwords I used once 6 years ago

We have the ridiculous password problem at my job too, capital letters, numbers & punctuation are compulsory on one of the domains. Which means I store my password in a text file on my desktop. Fuck you, idiotic system administrators.

> "Itunes terms and conditions have changed. Before downloading the app you must accept the new terms and conditions".

flash updates always make you read the new adobe terms and conditions. which are delivered as a pdf. which you need adobe acrobat reader for...

We have the ridiculous password problem at my job too, capital letters, numbers & punctuation are compulsory on one of the domains.

Must include: cap letters, small letters, at least one number or symbol but it turns out only about 5 of the total keyboard symbols "count" toward this, must be between 8 and 12 characters and can't have more than 3 characters in common with the last 3 passwords you picked. All this, and it has to be changed every 90 days.

I realize they're trying to stop people from making it "password01" and stuff, but why are we even doing this? I promise you, neither I nor my email are that important, and most of our other systems are only accessible on the premises. Are you worried that the UPS guy is going to try to find out how many widgets we just sold?

Really complicated password req's: Smarter or dumber than keyfobs with a code number that changes every 60 seconds?

As someone who has to occasionally deal with computer security issues I'm just shaking my head and reserving comment here.

Well that's good then

Oh c'mon, what?

My IT friends all get butthurt too when I complain about the needless difficulty of passwords, but c'mon, there has to be a middle ground between "password01" and insanely complicated procedures that cause you to spend half an hour every 90 days trying to come up with a password that fits the weird criteria precisely.

btw I work in IT and EVERYONE in my dept also thinks complicated passwords are counter-productive precisely because of the tendency for people to write them down.

You know how long it takes to brute force break a password right?

ur just cranky cos of ur sore foot

I hate when stupid insignificant web sites make you register for stuff then present you with a visual showing your password going from "weak" to "very strong" - you just keep typing till it goes green then click the "remember password" button on the browser - making it all completely pointless.

Our password criteria at work isn't too annoying. I was getting IA at the fact that it reminds me every day for 18 days that it's about to run out.

Think I may have already mentioned this in here but since it happened again this morning and made me IA all over again, I guess it bears repeating - you are a horrible human being if you insist on bringing a full-size newspaper onto a crowded commuter train and read it all spread wide open instead of folding it.

yeah those people should be shot imo

The third time he elbowed me in the side to turn a page it was all I could do to keep from ripping it out of his hands and throwing it on the ground.

you just keep typing till it goes green then click the "remember password" button on the browser - making it all completely pointless.

Not at all, because you're assuming that passwords are to keep it safe on your end. Longer passwords keep it safe on their end. Or safer, at least. The programmers still have to not be idiots and store it in a dumb way like Gawker media did. Still, anyone with a complex password would still be pretty secure even with their database being leaked.

If password strength is more important on the tech side and not on the user side, why don't we all just assign random numbers and letters and keep a post-it on our computer with the codes? Apparently real-world safety isn't the motivation here anyway.

why don't we all just assign random numbers and letters and keep a post-it on our computer with the codes

When your web browser asks if you want to save your password for that website, THERE'S YOUR POST-IT.

People keep microwaving leftover fish in the break room here.

Great, until you need access from a different computer, or a certain site doesn't work with a certain browser so you have to change from Safari to Firefox. Or your computer crashes and things get re-set. Or it's not a browser but a proprietary system that doesn't allow you to save anything.

Nerds are already all about this. Basically you run a password manager program, it has web browser plugins, and it syncs that crap between computers. If you can't remember your password for something, you can retrieve it from the software. Then you only have to have one strong password you remember, and in the worst case, you can keep your synced-up file on a usb drive on your (physical) keychain next to yr car keys.

fwiw all this crap will end up baked into systems in the next few years, I'd guess.

I always e-mail myself the password so I can look it up if I need to at home.

the key to the password problem is just to use a date like January1! and then when you have to change it you just add one to the number so it's January2! very easy to remember. or start with your birthday.

I would be more interested in this password manager program idea if a) I were allowed to install ANYTHING on my work machine without sysadmin, and b) if I weren't pretty sure that I'd get in some kind of trouble for using anything to store or organize passwords and then taking it out of the building (like a USB stick). I mean, I'm sure it's not allowed in some way or another. Corporate life/rules are years away from catching up with the tech.

harbl: at least one of our systems won't let you use a similar word to your last 3 picks. Impossible to stick with one word and change the number. Unfortunately.

so February2, then uh.. MMMMarch2

qwerty1
wertyu2
ertyui3...

Keep going Ledge. No reason. Do you online bank? Use the same username everywhere? Good good...

my password is the last 6 digits of my SS# everywhere, if I can use it. otherwise it's my first dog and the last 4 digits of my first phone number.

xp fyi this is just for work pc, my online passwords are reasonably secure. feel free to pop over to my desk and hack in tho...

I have a mental system for cycling between passwords within a certain theme and with corresponding numerals, it just strikes me as a lot of fuss over some emails etc.

- when you mention the first star wars film and some spod disingenuously does this whole 'you mean "the phantom menace"? no? oh then you mean "a new hope" which is actually number four!! you should say what you mean'

all star wars films are shit anyway so

SB