Now, in at least one school district there, no book is allowed if it has any LGBTQ characters at all. They are not allowed to exist.

I’ve been in the software game for 30 years now. I’ve seen some things.

One of the things I’ve seen is the gradual degradation of technical capability in IT departments. When I joined this world, there was little divide between people who built software and people who ran information systems; they had many of the same skills, and careers would often move through both spheres.

That’s not really the case anymore. Software people just build software, and remain (generally speaking) technically proficient and often quite bright. However, the other side of the house is in disarray. IT departments are now often overrun with people who have never done anything hands on at all, or who have very very minimal technical ability. This is trouble, and leads to meetings with a WHOLE BUNCH of people who are deadweight while two or three people who can actually engage with the material have a conversation.

(That said conversation is frequently interrupted by the know-nothings with worthless contributions should be taken as read.)

But wait! It gets worse!

I have a customer now who has taken this a step even farther by outsourcing the not-knowing to a third party. I suppose this makes sense, because you can get external people to not know things for far less money than hiring internal people to not know these things.

We must engage these third party people to ensure there’s a proper headcount of know-nothings in any given meeting; often, we must reschedule to ensure that precisely the correct parties are included — we may have someone on the call who does not understand Active Directory, sure, but we ALSO need a resource who does not understand SQL Server, and they’re offshore, so we have to reschedule.

Obviously, too, the lack of knowing generally allows the rampant metastasis of Policy, which always thrives in environments short on knowledge. Such policies are often at odds with reality, and so we must carefully explain why one cannot, for example, do the IT equivalent of declaring mathematical truths by legislative fiat.

(Yes, that link describes an event from 1897, but don’t get cocky; legislative bodies the world over continually try to impose back doors on cryptographic systems that would somehow only ever be usable by “good” people, which makes no more sense than setting π = 3.2.)

The Windows world has long since adopted a “we know best” approach on app behavior. A great example of this is apps that, when you quit them, inform you that “Hey, we see you’re quitting, so we’re going to close the window but not really quit because we think we should stay around for $some_bullshit_reason. To completely quit, check the System Tray, and good luck finding that if you’re not a nerd!”

That’s incredibly obnoxious, and violates user expectations. It runs completely counter to something called the Principle of Least Astonishment in UI and system design.

[T]he principle means that a component of a system should behave in a way that users expect it to behave; that is, users should not be astonished by its behavior.

Closing a program should stop the program’s activity. Staying behind, in deliberate contravention of the user’s stated intention, so that you can INTERRUPT THE USER with a notification, is an egregious violation of this idea.

Heretofore, though, as I said, this was more or less exclusively the province of Windows apps.

Unfortunately, Apple’s gotten in the game for no good reason. Here’s how.

One strength of Mac + iOS world is that Apple, realizing text fees from carriers were just bullshit rent-seeking behavior, quietly over the last several years began replacing texts with an internal, more secure messaging system over the Internet. You know it as “iMessage”, and it’s why your texts to other iPhone folks are blue, while true SMS messages (e.g., to folks with Android devices, or “feature” phones) are green. Only the green ones are truly texts for which carrier can nickel and dime you; the rest are just data, and work over wifi, even if you’re overseas with no local cell connectivity.

This is neat.

The other part of this that’s neat is that, because iMessage is just data associated with your AppleID, you can also use iMessage on your computer or iPad, even though you probably think of those messages as “texts”.

At some point, though, some “I know better” weasel at Apple decided that, even if a user doesn’t have Messages open on their Mac, they should still get notifications for incoming messages there.

This is bad, first, because of the Least Astonishment principle I noted above. This is bad in practice because it may surprise you when giving a presentation. This didn’t actually happen to me, but it could have; I just happened to notice that I was still getting notifications after a reboot and before I’d reopened everything.

That, to be quite clear, is some serious bullshit, and reeks of some mushy-headed “designer” who thinks every paradigm needs rejiggering.

The only way to stifle this is to engage the Mac’s Do Not Disturb feature, which is an additional step you should not have to do if you’ve already quit the damn program in question.

I’d really love to know what the fuck they were thinking.

There is apparently a trend among halfwit, muzzy-headed interior decorators to encourage clients to shelve books backward because “more consistently neutral color” matters more than “being able to find a book.”

It’s probably time to bring back tarring and feathering.

Because we’re all goddamn hysterical idiots, we let fear of meth drive good cold meds off the shelves, replaced by something many of us — including Chief Heathen — saw as effectively inert. Turns out, we were right:

When the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 passed, pharmacies moved all cold-medicine with the actually-works ingredient pseudoephedrine, only available on request and with a copy of your ID. In its place, the pharmacy shelves were restocked with phenylephrine, which was alleged to work just as well. It doesn’t work at all.

Some people are so amazingly dumb it’s astonishing they don’t drown in the bathtub.

Apparently, this includes both this absurd QVC host and designer Isaac Mizrahi. Jesus.

I’m all for classic and throwback style, but this is fucking ridiculous.

Some hipster company is selling a canvas, center-pole tent. You know, the kind that needs a dozen or more stakes and probably external support to stay up (or stay what passes for up), and that will fall down at the slightest insult. It’s the kind of tent that has a HOLE IN THE ROOF for its support pole, and therefore allows an inappropriately intimate relationship with any rain.

It’s the kind of tent that lurked in the very back of our troop gear closet when I was a Scout, that the only the doubly unlucky kids got stuck with because (a) they didn’t have their own tent and (b) they didn’t get to the campout quickly enough to snag one of the modern ones. BECAUSE EVEN IN 1981 YOU COULD BY A NYLON TENT FOR ALMOST NOTHING, so there was no need to deal with overtly shitty leftovers from the Boer War.

These godless fashion-victim goatfuckers are charging one thousand dollars for this abomination.

I remind you all that we live in the year of our Lord two thousand and goddamn FOURTEEN, and that you can get a completely awesome tent at REI for about a hundred bucks. You could probably go cheaper at Academy or CampMor or Sierra. These modern tents will keep you dry and out of the elements, and will withstand clumsy campmates, wind, rain, and will not require you to carry a fucking hammer to nail it down. Oh, and they’ll weigh substantially less, and can be pitched all by yourself.

Jesus, Mary, and Batman, these people are absurd.

Snake handling pastor bitten by snake during service. He then refused medical attention, and was thereby promoted to the choir invisible.

All good Heathen, of course, know this Robert Heinlein quote, from Time Enough for Love.

Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.

RAH was wrong about many, many things, but this is not one of those times.

Fortunately (?), we still have Anil Dash to remind us of the unremitting fucktardery typifying that era.

ShareFile.

Think of them as sort of a corporate Dropbox, kinda; we use it for all the kinds of file exchange we need to do with customers, including distribution of software as well as the exchange of log files or databases for troubleshooting. It’s secure, and has features that allow us to set up folders with limited permissions to segregate clients & etc.

What’s bone stupid is their support, and especially their reporting.

First, there is no way to get a total of your disk usage in real time. This is vexing, because they charge for storage overages. Cleanup operations are necessarily multi-day affairs, because the report showing disk space is only updated overnight.

Yeah, I know. It gets more impressive, though.

Second, what reporting they provide astonishingly bad. Every one — storage, bandwidth, charges, etc. — lacks a total. I’m serious. Who runs a report without wanting a total? Even the “summary” reports lack totals — thereby calling into question just exactly what they’re summarizing.

“But Chief Heathen,” you ask, “can’t you just download the data and get the totals yourself?” Well, yeah, sort of. But you don’t escape the halfwittery that way; turns out, the “Excel” format bandwidth report (for example) has the bandwidth column explicitly formatted as text, so you can’t get a total without manually recasting the column first.

That’s an extra step on top of additional extra steps that shouldn’t be required. This service isn’t cheap. I should be able to log into the administrative back end and quickly see bandwidth usage by month, charges applied by type, etc., but ShareFile doesn’t seem to think that’s important. Since their self-service plan sucks so badly, their phone reps ought to be able to give me this data — but they can’t do that, either.

Heathen Central recommends you shop elsewhere.

“Hang on while I check the pressure…”

Click on through to read more about why domain knowledge matters in design.

MS State House Rep. Steve Holland has filed HB150, which would, in summary, rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” for all “official purposes” in Mississippi.

Folks, I left as soon as I was able.

Update: Turns out it was a joke/stunt. From FFF’s new comment:

Turns out it is a joke. Steve is generally a smarter guy than that. I was saddened to learn of this legislation without more. The problem is, he needs serious messaging help to get his point across. This is what he told the Mississippi Business Journal about why he filed the bill, according to its staff writer, Clay Chandler:

“It’s right in line with all the other bullsh** going on now in the Legislature,” Holland said. “And you can quote me on that in capital letters if you want to. Cutting education, cutting healthcare, going after immigrants, all the things the Rebublican majority seems interested in, that don’t do anything to enhance the quality of life and the economic foundation of the average Mississippian. It’s a spamelot bill. I thought it made about as much sense as some of the other stuff coming through here. We’ll see what happens.”

Sweet mother of GOD this may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Idiot parents are apparently deliberately infecting their children with chicken pox instead of vaccinating them because the former results in “natural immunity.”

There’s more at MeFi, but the real fun starts with the SciBlog response.

A friend just sent me the mail the Red Cross’s Charley Shimanski is circulating to drum up donations in light of the East Coast’s hurricane panic. Here’s the lede:

Hurricane Irene, potentially the worst U.S. storm in 70 years, is now heading toward the East Coast, and thousands of Americans in its path are preparing for the worst.

Dear Red Cross: Give me a fucking break. Heathen HQ is on the Gulf Coast, buddy boy, we know a little about hurricanes, and your little embellishment is ridiculous. Don’t believe me? Let me introduce you, Charley Shimanski, to a few folks who’ve come to visit me and mine:

• Camille
• Frederic
• Andrew
• Ike
• Rita

and a bitch called Katrina that erased the Mississippi Gulf Coast and damn near killed New Orleans.

Maybe you’ve heard about one or two of these, Charley. Maybe if you’d been thinking, you wouldn’t have resorted to this kind of hyperbole. Sure, the good folks of the East Coast need to take appropriate precautions. People in flood-prone or low-lying areas in danger of the surge should evacuate. Further inland, people in permanent buildings just need to hunker down and wait it out.

Irene is a category TWO, people. Jesus.

I’ve joked for years about how the early-90s color names in J. Crew were almost hilariously devoid of any information about the position of the shade in question on the visible spectrum, but it appears now that house paint companies are embracing the whole idea of obscure, meaning-free names:

“For a long time we had to connect the color name with the general color reference,” said Sue Kim, the color trend and forecast specialist for the Valspar paint company. “But now,” Ms. Kim added, “we’re exploring color names that are a representation of your lifestyle.”

Someone please smack this person in the mouth.

A helmet-free motorcyclist riding in a civil disobedience style, helmet-free ride in New York wrecked, hit his head, and died on Saturday.

Authorities say he most likely would have survived had he been wearing a helmet.

The vaccination rate is low enough in some place to produce whooping cough epidemics.

A statewide whooping cough epidemic has not changed how Danielle Lawson of San Anselmo feels about vaccinating her 5-1/2-month-old daughter.

Lawson has declined almost all of the standard vaccines recommended for infants, including DTaP, which protects against whooping cough.

“I haven’t categorically ruled them out,” she said. “But I just think at this point she’s too young, and her immune system is still developing. Nothing goes into my baby right now, except for breast milk, so I don’t feel comfortable injecting her with strange chemicals.”

[…]

Unfortunately, public health advocates say, the consequences of rejecting vaccination are not strictly personal. Widespread vaccinations not only make disease outbreaks less likely, but they also help protect vulnerable populations like newborns who are too young to get shots.

“Anything that leaves people unimmunized and unprotected, thereby reducing the overall rate of protection in the community, would be a contributing factor when you have an outbreak,” said Dr. Fred Schwartz, Marin County’s public health officer.

Parents who do have their children vaccinated are troubled by others opting out, fearing outbreaks of disease.

“This is the first one to hit us, but how long until we have a chicken pox outbreak, or mumps or polio?” said Sara Sonnet of San Rafael, a mother of two young girls who are both fully immunized. “We take it for granted.”

The article concludes with this winner: “Others remain unconvinced. Lawson now avoids taking her daughter to the pediatrician, taking her to see a chiropractor instead.”

I had a little free time tonight, so I thought I’d (finally) download the expansion to Fallout 3 (which, by the way, isn’t available any other way). Turns out, I don’t have enough Microsoft magic script to do so, I I tried to buy more, both on the XBox itself and on the XBox Live web site.

Cryptic error messages ensued, followed by a frustrating call with idiot tech support people with a tenuous at best grasp of English. The links are true. It’s some goofball, poorly implemented halfwit “fraud prevention” thing. What’s absurd, btw, is that you can only get this information from Google; the web site gave no error message at all (“try again later”), and the XBox itself gave only a bit more data: “Can’t retrieve information from Xbox LIVE. Please try again later. Status code: 80169d94.”

That opaque message is the money shot. Apparently, my account is locked now because the info on my XBox live account itself — entered long ago on a free trial — did not match the information provided on my credit card (which was accurate and complete). That’s all well and good (though, I note, they had no difficulty automatically renewing my membership back in October); calling them ought to make this right.

Oh no. No, no, no.

As the Google search told me, they’re not actually able to fix this on the phone. They have a “process” and require “escalation.” Someone will call me within 72 hours, and after that it’ll take 5 to 10 business days to process the unlock.

Whatever, boneheads. I think I’ll watch something on my AppleTV instead. 100% FAIL.

If you’re not vaccinating your kids, you’re a fucking idiot — and, worse, you’re not just endangering an innocent for whom you are completely responsible (i.e., your own kid), you’re also creating a public health problem and potentially endangering other people’s kids through your wrongheaded, goofball, crystal-gazing, Jenny-McCarthy-listening crackpot beliefs.

Period. Full stop.

It’s crap like this that points out two things really damning about America today:

1. Journalism is dead. If there were any still real journalists working, we’d see widespread coverage of just how fundamentally stupid the idea of eschewing vaccinations is, and just how monumentally wrong claims of an autism link are.

2. People would rather believe some kind of muzzy-headed bullshit than actual science. This isn’t surprising — there’s an astrology column in every major newspaper — but it’s tremendously disappointing.

There’s a real undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in this country that leads people to rely on their own imperfect impressions of complex ideas and concepts that require years of study to actually grasp. Doctors know more than you do. Physicists know more than you do. Your gut feeling that homeopathy probably works is worth precisely squat compared to more than a century of actual science-based, double-blind-tested medicine. From the article:

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincare said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” […]

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

Before smallpox was eradicated with a vaccine, it killed an estimated 500 million people. And just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans every year, while rubella caused birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns. Measles infected 4 million children, killing 3,000 annually, and a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b caused Hib meningitis in more than 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage. Infant mortality and abbreviated life spans — now regarded as a third world problem — were a first world reality.

How’d we fix that? VACCINATION.

You think the LCROSS experiment, wherein scientists will propel a spacecraft into the moon to provoke an explosion which they can examine for evidence of water, is a bad idea because of astrology.

Seriously. Screenwriter Amy Ephron — Nora’s sister — had this to say in the HuffPo:

It’s a big explosion. Suffice it to say that any amateur astronomer west of the Mississippi with a home telescope will be able to view it from their backyard.

I could say something scientifically lame and ask, “What if it gets thrown off its axis?” or something funny and suggest something (that I actually sort of believe), like, “What if it somehow throws off the astrology?” Or that we’re not risking — as we have the earth with continued experiments of this kind — sending the solar system out of balance.

Did you not even GO to a science class, Amy? Apparently not, if you “sort of” believe in astrology. 1.5 tons of TNT isn’t all that much in the scope of explosions, and certainly isn’t enough to alter the moon’s orbit. (The moon’s mass is on the order of 7.35 x 10^22 kilograms Dear Luna has enjoyed countless impacts larger and smaller than this in her current orbit.

Sadly, Amy’s little fit here (and resultant Twitter group, I shit you not) is decidedly scientific compared to this reaction to a similar experiment back in June:

In many traditions, including astrology, the moon represents the feminine. It is the yin, the intuitive, the emotions. Women are connected to the moon by their menstrual cycles while they are fertile, and all beings, including the earth herself, are affected by the pull of the tides.

Purposefully crashing something into the moon just to watch what happens is akin to a schoolboy cutting up a live frog to see what makes it jump. It is an example of the domination of the left-brained rational scientific approach over the intuitive.

Did these scientists talk to the moon? Tell her what they were doing? Ask her permission? Show her respect?

American education: FAIL.

Apparently, only 10% of respondents can answer these twelve questions correctly. They are not hard questions.

(Via Stina.)

Last week, I ordered a book from Amazon with my One-click settings. It arrived three times this week, since UPS refused to leave the slim, obviously-printed-matter package on our doorstep without a signature despite having done exactly that literally hundreds of time previously. UPS could not explain the sudden change in behavior, but the bonehead CSR did try several ideas on for size in an attempt, sadly unsuccessful, to explain the sudden change in behavior.

Two weeks ago, I ordered $5,000 worth of fancy laptops for two of my co-workers, which had to be delivered to my house for anti-fraud reasons (i.e., the billing address of the card in question; I’ll have to ship them myself to the employees in question). This time, UPS helpfully left both very portable boxes on our doorstep without a signature at 1:30 this afternoon, where they sat for more than 2 hours before I discovered delivery had been made and arranged for a neighbor to rescue them.

Sigh.

That British researcher who supposedly linked the MMR vaccine with autism? Big fat liar who faked his data.

You’re in line at Sun and Ski, and the rail-thin Carrie-Bradshaw-in-Houston wannabes are discussing their skiing plans:

“Oh, I never go off the green slopes. I might mess up my hair.”

It shouldn’t really surprise me that letters to the editor in (in particular red state, small town) newspapers are filled with the stupid, since really they’re just a manual version of modern comment-on-story features at newspaper web sites — and the only thing dumber than those chuckleheads are YouTube commenters.

Still, when you run across something like this, it does sort of make you think we’re all fucking doomed.

You work for the TSA, and you’re actually proud of confiscating things that nobody thinks are dangerous.

Turns out, if you’re a journalist, and you repeatedly report on how bone stupid and ineffectual the TSA is, you’ll end up on a watch list and have trouble flying. Nice.

I’m traveling this week. Stupid abounds.

• Starwood seems to be in a race to the bottom of customer service with, well, itself. The Westin Peachtree is charging for in-room internet, which is par for the course with so-called “full service” hotels (despite the fact that, in general, one’s customer service experience is far better at a business-focused hotel like a Homewood Suites). However, they’re doing it with real fuck-you aplomb here: it’s part of a $15 per day “unlimited phone and Internet” plan. The kicker? The “unlimited” phone refers only to local and toll-free calls; long-distance calls are charged at an exorbitant rate, of course, and never mind what someone might think “unlimited” means. The gotcha is only apparent if you’re cynical enough to ask (like me), or lawyerly enough to read the fine print. It’s tricks like this that make it clear what Starwood really thinks of their guests.

• Starwood gets a twofer here: the Omni at CNN center is utterly devoid of service as well, but in new and interesting ways. They’re now charging $7 every 15 minutes to use their business center, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a guest or not. Once again, the biz-class chains are all over the so-called full-service joints on these points, leading me to once again declare the big lodges utter ripoffs hell-bent on nickel-and-dime policies that are completely customer hostile.

• The security checkpoints in the building housing the Client this week are inconsistent with themselves. In the morning, at the front door, I was told not to worry about x-raying my wallet; after lunch, at the back door, much was made of the requirement to do exactly that. “Why?” your intrepid correspondent asked. “Well, because someone might have a razorblade or a handcuff key in there!” Fair enough. They x-rayed my wallet. They didn’t find the spare razorblade I keep in there. Nice job, guys.

• WAIT THERE’S MORE: the Westin room-service menu is, by default, delivered on the TV only like some bizarre 70s-era vision of what the 21st century might be like. Ordering, however, must still be handled with the telephone. Fortunately, a print menu is available by request. I did, and I didn’t tip the bellman, and I’m not sorry, because this whole thing is just stupid.

You set educational policy in Louisiana, where matters of personal conscience, not scientific consensus, determine whether or not creationism is taught in the classroom — under the guise of “academic freedom.”

The term “academic freedom” has historically been used to refer to the ability of tenured research faculty to work on whatever it is that interested them within their field (and that can be supported on its merits with publication). It ought not be used as a smokescreen for a bunch of non-publishing, non-researching halfwit redneck “educators” hell-bent on keeping wicked Darwin at bay.

You set USB cable prices for OfficeMaxDepot. Actually, this may be an “asshole” and not an “idiot,” but either way they’re worthy of contempt.

I went over at lunch to get an extension cable to facilitate more comfortable Rock Band play in the Steel Heathen Lounge, and discovered all they had was a Belkin six-foot for twenty clams.

“Gee, that seems a little high, and plus I’d like a longer cable. What does Amazon have?” Enter the glorious iPhone, and I discovered they stock the same Belkin cable for less than six bucks. The local price is 333% of the Amazon price (and we have Prime, so there’s no shipping cost).

I expect a local premium in pricing to account for brick-and-mortar convenience, but I expect it to be ten or twenty percent. 233% more is “we see you coming, and we’re gonna fuck you” territory, and that’s the sort of thing people don’t like.

Information is easy to get. People don’t like being taken advantage of. Do the math.

You work for TSA.

From: (forged)
Subject: Get your watch now
Date: June 26, 2008 5:54:24 PM CDT
To: Chief Heathen

Did you watch the last 007 flick, Casino Royale? If you did, you probably noticed that all throughout the movie, James Bond wears an spectacularly beautiful Omega watch… and he even brags about it! How would you like to be wearing that same exact model watch?

What, you mean like this?

The designers are clearly on crack, but the staff isn’t.

The bad news, then, is that I have to put pants on. But the good news is that my pants-wearing is so the hotel staff can bring me another TV, and a piece of furniture to put it on, so that the hotel room works like every other hotel room in America.

Wacky.

You work for Marriott, and you design a hotel room layout where the television isn’t clearly viewable from the bed.

Front Desk: “It’s designed to be viewed from the couch.”

Heathen: “Do the people who design your hotels ever stay in hotels?”

Front Desk: “I don’t know, sir, but I’m getting this a lot, so I’m starting to think no.”

Time to cross the Courtyards off the list, methinks.

In the bad idea department: Agitator sends us over to Penny Arcade, where Gabe calls our attention to a truly terrible idea for a child’s snack product: Lego Fun Snacks. That’s right; fruity candies for children shaped like Legos.

I would love to know what sick bastard at Kellogs came up with this genius idea. I just spent the first three years of my sons life trying to get him not to eat blocks, and now you’re telling him they taste like fucking strawberries. Thanks a lot assholes. Seriously, how in the hell did this ever get past their legal department. You can’t tell me that this isn’t a lawsuit just waiting to happen. I can only assume that their next product is fruit flavored thumbtacks.

You work for the AP, and are trying to convince the world that Fair Use doesn’t exist.

Some geniuses at the Associated Press has started promulgating the policy that bloggers and web sites must pay them to link to and quote AP stories — just like we just did, below, with the story on Big Bird. The AP thinks that Heathen should PAY them because we quoted an excerpt of the story, and never mind that people interested will click through and read the whole thing, thereby adding value to the AP’s content and the AP’s paid distribution channels (like Yahoo News, to whom we link below). Usage such as this is typically seen as Fair Use, and requires no license or permission. That’s how references work. It’s how research works. And it’s how the web works — and, as noted, how the web drives traffic to interesting sites and stories, a dynamic that you’d think the AP would be embracing.

This move is a stupendously bad idea, and impossible to defend legally besides, and the AP deserves to be heartily embarrassed as a consequence. And it gets worse: read the link above (to the analysts at Techdirt) to learn more about how the AP seems to think they can prohibit you from quoting them if you say bad things about the AP, for example. This isn’t idle policy; they’re actually acting on it.

Remember the Denon cable? There’s a satirical Amazon review:

A caution to people buying these: if you do not follow the “directional markings” on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that before mentioning it in your reviews.

I was disappointed. I consider myself an audiophile – I regularly spend over $1000 on cables to get the ultimate sound. I keep my music-listening room in a Faraday cage to prevent any interference that could alter my music-listening experience. Sending any signal down ordinary copper can degrade the signal considerably. While ordinary listeners might not notice, to somebody with even a rudimentary knowledge of sound, the artifacts are glaring. Denon should have used silver wiring (hermetically sealed inside the rubber sheath to prevent any tarnishing, of course), which has a significantly higher conductivity than copper. Furthermore, Denon needs to treat the wires they use in the cable with a polarity inductor to ensure minimal phase variance.

Needless to say, I returned the cable and wrote an angry letter to the so-called engineers at Denon.

Wonder how long that’ll last?

You paid FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS to Denon for a network cable.

You buy or sell books explicitly as home decor without regard to what’s inside.

Our Danish printed, European imported books are sold specifically with interior design in mind.

Many people feel that it’s silly to purchase books for pure decorative value. While we certainly understand this, we also savor the opportunity to change the mind of such individuals! Our books are so beautiful on the outside that their interior ceases to be important.

Jesus wept.