What induces nerd rage in you?

The Balrog has wings.

OK, didn’t mean to go there. Just kidding ;-)

You left out all the Wow stuff that gives you nerdrage!

I kind of like Facebook. It allows me to keep up with people I know but don’t actually want to talk to. It’s basically a gossip site. Thanks to Facebook I know that somebody I haven’t seen in three years just had a kid, and I even re-connected with a couple people I haven’t talked to in months. Of course, I also know that about five different people hate Mondays, and what Superhero/D&D Alignment/whatever they all are, but you can block that to some extent.

Its main advantage over email is that it can be passive. You don’t need to send a “what’s up” email to anyone, you can just check it and see. And then comment, if the urge strikes you. And conversely, you don’t need to send the same email to all your friends telling them you got a new cat or wrecked your car, you can just post it and they’ll see. Basically, it’s like XBox live–the quality of the service is determined by the quality of your friendlist.

Anyway, my current nerd rage is corporate spam. I get so much crap in my inbox about Executive All-Hands teleconferences and Quarterly Results, not to mention people from other offices sending a city-wide spam to tell everyone that the fax machine is out of order, it’s maddening. And then you get people replying-to-all to tell them to cut down on spam. Gah!

What? Why? I have a domain but I don’t use it for email because I haven’t seen the need.

When a professor assigns a reading that’s half french in a history class full of students that don’t know fucking french. Seriously, how does that help us, any? It doesn’t, asshole. Who cares if you wrote a book on ending the french revolution, we’re talking about all of Europe, not just France, dick.

Linux zealots.

Nitpicking Nerds!

Ooh, but what about broadcasters who think 4:3 480p video stretched to fit a 16:9 display = HD?

What about the people that refer to the whole tower as “The CPU”?

I see people all the time refer to the monitor as the computer too. Bleh

Oh, the best is when someone hits “Reply to All” to say “Take me off this distribution list” or “Please stop hitting Reply To All”

People who play FPSes with gamepads! :P

Nous ne pas avons besoin de quelqu’un qui ne peux pas parler francais.

You’ve been watching History Channel, haven’t you?

Top posting!

Work-related: Calling all large-format printers “plotters”.

  1. When my parents, not-very-savvy co-workers or anyone else uses Google instead of the address bar to get to web sites. They don’t appear to know the difference. They would have been dead meat before Google and other search engines came along.

  2. My much-smarter-than-me partner, who is looking over my shoulder right now, adds this: people who believe Google is synonymous with “the Internet.” I know people (my parents included) who believe the Web is “the Internet” and that e-mail exists, I dunno, outside it, I guess.

  3. I get really pissed when someone wants to send me a PDF of a document they’re working on, and instead of using the PDF printer that’s probably installed in their system, they print the fucker out and then scan it into Adobe. It’s especially annoying when Large Federal Housing Agencies do it, because it creates a document that’s not even remotely accessible to blind people.

  4. People who think that they are web designers simply because they can operate Microsoft Front Page (or its current incarnation, Expression Web).

  5. “Designers” of online college courses who spend no time on the Internet (or the WWW, or Google - whatever you want to call it) and thus do not understand the conventions, like navigation. (Contributed by my above-referenced partner)

That’s all for now. We’re ashamed that we can muster only about one-third of Brian Seiler’s nerd rage.

I get all nerd-rage-y about copyright protection, and why you shouldn’t illegally download movies/games/music/etc.

Naturally, this makes me quite the hit at parties.

Swine flu.

I especially like people who, every time they want to check their email, go to Google and type in Hotmail.