What what? A Budget?

I'm expecting flying pigs. A budget? Nicely done!

Now get the fuck back to work.

What did you want, a cookie? Or a raise? That's your job, shits. Get back from vacation and get to work; there's still way too much to do.

You're in the most important halls of government of our country and, to some degree, the world. Good job on doing your job. Now there's more to do. Get to it. Millions of people below you, which you walk on, work 18/7 or more. You, honestly, don't deserve a vacation. I expect to see some momentum or you've accomplished nothing.

An open letter to Congress

Yeah. A bit presumptuous of me to write an open letter. But anyway.

Take a hint. No more bogus deadlines. No bullshit 'balanced budget or we do a sequester' acts. Instead of playing chicken with our economy and government any deadline failures, including setting a budget outline for the year and the decade, should immediately and irrevocably result in a ban from holding public office.

Yes, that's right. You screw up or play games or simply make a boo-boo you get kicked out. Forever. Amen. You are Congress. Your job is the money. Dumbasses. Do it right or you can't be trusted for so much as taking notes in a local city council meeting.

I don't care about you, personally or ideologically, and I'm tired of you playing games. Do your job or shut up and get out. The United States of America would be better served by kicking out, permanently, every single member of Congress (yes, both houses; yes, even with all the inevitable upheaval that entails) seated between now and the time the budget is passed.

It's quite simple. If you can't do your job well enough to care for the single most important responsibility you're given then you can't do anything. You're useless and I want to be rid of you.

Do your job or get out. Take a hint.

I hate titles, don't you?

Need to get speech to text integrated with Blogger on Android. Preferably one that works while I'm driving. In short, accuracy against noise which I know is probably asking a lot in the sound analysis department. I swear I had something interesting I wanted to record but it's purely fled my brain. Yes yes, built-in blogger functions and all. But it's dreadfully inaccurate. I suppose I just have to live with it.

While I'm on the topic, I also need a text to speech (AKA speech synthesis, apparently) app that'll read any app I feel like running from my phone. I'd dearly like to be able to listen to PDFs, random eBook readers, and clipped articles out of Evernote. I'd even more dearly like to be able to do this without using a different T2S for each underlying text app or having to jigger with an interface to move on to the next note/article/book/etc since, you know, I'll be driving and thus not playing with my phone.

I know. I ask for a lot.


Edit: It seems that the T2S app I want doesn't exist. Largely because the TTS service has to be enabled by the app providing the text. While it's possible I could use the accessibility option and the browser to get it done that's hardly ideal. Or perhaps there's a browser or RSS reader with builtin TTS support. Still not really ideal, and neither of those provide PDF or multi-format eBook reading. And at that point we've crossed the 'different solution for every possibility' barrier. What a mess. Makes me want to dive into mobile development. Agh, what am I thinking?

Note: T2S is shorthand for Text to Speech. TTS is the Android service supporting T2S functions. Subtleties abound.

Don't go changing people's stuff!

Point to note: When I do an upgrade, I will not change people's stuff.
I just upgraded from Opera 9.[something or other] to 9.52 and my whole theme was trashed. Buttons I had deleted were added back in (like that stupid new page button on the tab bar, isn't that what mouse gestures are for??), even bars I had disabled popped back up, not to mention the entire flipping skin changed to some ugly dark grey tabs and stars and such. Take note, go look back up top, THIS WAS A POINT UPGRADE. Not a major version. I don't even think it was a minor version upgrade, I'm pretty sure I was on 9.5 already, though I don't think I quite understand thier version numbering. Either way, this shouldn't have been ANYWHERE NEAR this traumatic.

Yes, it only took 10 minutes or so to get it mostly straightened out. I think. That's not the point. An app like Opera HAS to pride itself on customization (or why bother ditching IE in the first place? Okay okay, Firefox then) but when every upgrade (they've done this before a couple times) trashes those customizations, which were probably made long enough ago that you've forgotten exactly what you did in the first place, then what's the bloody point? And don't mistake, you CAN'T let your browser goout of date for very long. People keep trying to add crud to the HTML spec so you can't trust that new content will work properly unless you're up to date.

So in short, Opera, Don't Do That. It's BAD (tm). No cookie.

PS, I still think the Opera browser is the absolute best available, it's just thier update procedures that need some work. And a few relatively minor compatibility niggles that I rarely run in to. MUCH better than when I first started using it, BACK IN THE LAST CENTURY when it was still trial-ware and streamed ads to my browser window. So, yeah, not switching to anything else, but damn that's aggravating.