3/12/2009 - Bill Gates/mosquitoes @ TED

It's allergy season and I see my friends and co-workers fall victim to it one after the other. I find myself fortunate enough to only have a couple of allergies. The first being a certain type of berry (which one in particular, I don't know... it was a mixed berry pie). And the second allergy I have is of mosquito bites. The bite area will swell up like a balloon and turn purple the next day. Yeah, it's not very pretty. And they itch like hell, too. One time I had three mosquito bites on one hand. It looked like a baby's hand the next day... a purple baby's hand. If I didn't keep it elevated above my heart, it would have probably exploded.

Ever since, I have developed a fear of mosquitoes. When one flies into my house, I drop anything I'm doing and go on the hunt until it is dead. So when I saw this video, it confirmed to me that Bill Gates is an evil man:

9/26/2008 - Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates (2 videos)

I'm not sure if anybody reading this was able to see it, but Microsoft ran a couple of advertisements for Windows featuring the former TV star Jerry Seinfeld. The ads were soon replaced by the new "I'm a PC" ads which try to counter the PC/Mac commercials Apple is famous for. Why did they recall the initial commercials so quickly? Was it because they made false claims? Were they suddenly outdated? Did they offend some group? Actually, the answer to that last one may be yes. The truth is, the commercials were nonsensical. Now, Jerry Seinfeld may be famous for making the obscure and inane seem funny, but these commercials were neither funny or informative. I have to ask how exactly were they trying to lure people into buying Windows PCs with these ads? These are kind of like all those Superbowl commercials which try to draw attention by being funny or innovative. Sadly, these commercials are neither:

7/12/2007 - Windows 98 Blue screen of death

It's hard to remember just how bad Windows 95/98/Me was. It's a wonder that so many people put up with it only because it was the most widely used operating system at the time. Booting was slow, installing drivers for peripherals was a pain, the graphical user interface would freeze for no reason, and I'm sure we've all experienced the wonderful Blue screen of death. It's cryptic messages still haunt me today.

In fact, the BSoD was so pervasive, it even made its way onto a demonstration during a keynote address by none other than Bill Gates. You would think that everything would have been rehearsed over and over again so that there would be no surprises in an important presentation. It just goes to show that nothing can prepare for the suckage that is Windows 98:



You just know that guy was in the unemployment line the very next day.