Right now, my current project at work involves taking some incredibly crappy code and refactoring it so it’s only partially crappy.  Step two will be making it even less crappy.  So right now I am dealing with completely ridiculous code that looks like that line above.  Actually that line is one I encountered today.  This stuff is so bad it actually makes me laugh, just before I fight back the tears that come with the realization that I have to fix it.

I suppose the worst part is this crappy code is deployed in a production system now considered business critical with a few thousand active users.  It really is miraculous that it runs at all.  Quite scary.

Along comes Star Wars: Clone Wars, a feature-length animated film that resembles the animation style used in those Clone Wars shorts on Cartoon Network.  You know, the ones that weren’t half bad?  Well, let’s add to that formula.  Do these sound like good starting points: a Hutt-let (Jaba’s son), Jaba’s gay uncle (no, really), and a 12-year-old female padawan that whines more than Anakin?  Most people would read that list and either assume it was a joke, or react violently in protest.  Somehow, these ideas actually made it into the movie.

Terrible.  Horrible.  Painful.  The movie was wretched.  Clone Wars was easily one of the worst movies I have ever watched, and I have seen more movies than most.  And what’s worse is it’s based in one of my favorite “franchise universes.”  I’ve never been one of those elitest fans that hates the new trilogy just because it’s not the original.  They had their ups and downs, but all in all they were enjoyable movies.  But this…  This is inexcusable.  In fact, if I was in charge, I would punish the people responsible.  They should be banned from Hollywood and movie-making forever.

Maybe they should even be imprisoned.  Let’s face it, what they did was wrong.  Please, if you have not watched Clone Wars save yourself the agony and torture.  Trust me, you’ll watch the first 10 minutes and start to wonder if the movie will get any better.  I can tell you: it doesn’t.

So after three tries (three!) I successfully installed XP and the Dell specific drivers.  Then, I started the process of running Windows Update.  That was yesterday.  I’m now a few hours into today, and I’m not even close to finished.  And I’ve only rebooted a dozen times…

Remind me again why anyone wouled actually choose to run Windows?  Seriously…  Please, please, please, for the love of all that is holy and good, check out Ubuntu!

To make things worse one branch of a store might carry three brands of a product, while another branch 3 miles away carries a completely different set of brands.  My feeble human brain cannot comprehend this.  If I can buy, say, Ole brand tortillas at one store, why can I not get that same brand at another store.

I’ve even begun to consider keeping a personal database of items and brands listed by available locations.  This way I could easily manage my list of common items.  A quick script could optimize my shopping, not only telling me the store, but placing the items in the proper order on the list so I don’t have to walk back and forth around the over-crowded, under-stocked maze of doom and despair once a week.

Yes, grocery stores must be part of some evil plot to control the human race.  They just have to be.  Nothing that purely evil, sinister, and unholy could come about on its own.