Listen, Western Europe…North America has a great deal to thank you for. You are, of course, our big brother…and we’re really glad that you led the way. However, we’re a little ahead of you on certain things, and we need to get something straight: older doesn’t necessarily mean better. And when it comes to character sets for languages, you’re really starting to show your age. Much like the show Hoarders, I know that you have a hard time letting go of your “treasures”…but, really, it’s for the best. Now, I’m not suggesting that certain garbage characters be dropped entirely; I’m sure that your ministers of culture are already seething at the mere mention of it. Of course, you can use them without reservation in your daily lives for useless fun. (Like calligraphy!) For the sake of computing, however, it’d be better for all software developers (and everyone in general) if you just converted all electronic text to ASCII…and I’m willing to bet some of my Western Europe counterparts would agree with me.

Imagine a world where we wouldn’t have to ask “Is this character in encoding Windows-1252 but not in encoding ISO-8859-1?” That place could be real! Just think about that for a moment…it would be beautiful, wouldn’t it? Together, we can make that happen. So, let’s take that initial step of purging your electronic banks of filthy, superfluous text. Much like Hoarders, we need to step through each “treasure” and mull over its inherent worthlessness…I mean, “value”…to your respective languages:

Ligatures – Come on…we both know that they’re stupid. Æ and Œ were created by drunk Trappist monks, when they were sloppily copying books with cramped hands. Afterwards, when someone pointed out their mistakes, they said “Uh, no, I meant to do that. Those are real letters.” And thus ligatures were born. Even more and more of your populations have stopped using it, and they split them into “AE” and “OE”. You know that it’s dying. Drop them.

Umlauts – We’re not even going to address diacritics for now and how everyone should just use normal tittles. I said tittles! Stop laughing! In any case, we’ll address that diacritic bullshit some other day…First, I have most encodings on my side: they don’t distinguish between umlauts and diaeresi. (Even Unicode is like “I don’t give a shit.”) Second, each country has its own version of them! You formed the EU for a reason…start standardizing that shit! Three, I understand the purpose of umlauts: to help a nascent reader with the pronouncing of vowels that are next to each other…but in North America, we eventually get it after some direction and practice. We don’t need diagrams and pie charts in order to learn how to pronounce “cooperate” properly. Trust me…you can, too.

Cedilla – Even though I’m against diaeresi, I understand that they’re useful, especially to novice readers. But a cedilla? You can’t just replace “ç” with a “sc”, “ts”, or even a “z”? Because it’s so special, of course. Did an ancient Spanish or French monarch allow their child to doodle while writing…and then it was decreed that the doodle was official henceforth? (Personally, since I love the movie Aliens, I’ve always liked to doodle little snapping jaws shooting out of everything. If it hadn’t been invented in the Middle Ages, I probably would have invented the cedilla…but if would have looked different.) It doesn’t matter. We all know how useless monarchs are…that, and how they generally look better without heads. (That’s a tip of the hat to you, Frenchies.) In any case, like monarchs, the cedilla is a complete waste. Into the trashcan.

You see how easy that was, my brethren in Western Europe? We got rid of three different types of characters…in one shot! That’s at least dozens (if not hundreds) of characters that we can free from our collective banks of data! By using just ASCII, we can use half of the data needed, which means almost half of the processing power. Think about how many baby seals that could save…and you don’t to kill baby seals, do you? I’m sure that John Lennon would have written an extra verse about this very subject in “Imagine”, if he had just lived long enough. It might take some time, but eventually, we can live free of an Encoding Hell. Leave Unicode to the rest of the world and its craziness…and join hands with us, so we can finally blow that bridge together. ASCII and freedom for all! You just have to believe, Western Europe. Just believe.

1.) Erlich Challenges James Gosling and Richard Stallman to a Beard-Off

2.) Gilfoyle & Dinesh Go to In-N-Out Burger (and Party “Animal Style”)

3.) The NSA’s Ultimatum to Richard: A Backdoor to His Compression Algorithm…or His Backdoor

4.) Dinesh Becomes a Hooli Spy by Impersonating Deepak Chopra and Mentoring Gavin

5.) Big Head and Mochachino Collaborate on a New App Called “Chubber” (Which Finds a Strip Club that Matches Your Perfect Stripper Measurements)

6.) Jared Meets with an Outsourcing Firm in the Ukraine, Gets Mistakenly Kidnapped by Russians, and Ends Up Naked in a Banja with Snowden

7.) The Dark Lord Tells Gilfoyle that He Must Kill Brian Krebs, but It Turns Out that Brian Krebs Is the Dark Lord

8.) Peter Gregory Forms ’DropoutsCannot-Code.Org’ Just to Spite His Nemesis Mark Zuckerberg

9.) Erlich Meets His Good Friend John McAfee in Oregon, where They Get Chased by Criminals while Seeking Pirate Treasure

10.) Monica Introduces Richard to Jeff Bezos, Who Will Invest in Pied Piper if Richard Can Beat Him in a Shirts Vs. Skins Segway Streetball Game

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.

Web Method
data.postData

Description
Post some data to another piece of data (i.e., “data data”), which will be related to some other data. You know…the other data. You’re not confused with all this ambiguity, are you?
Notes: In order to be less confusing, we will now refer to the other data as “Smegma Lite”. If you are posting data related to Smegma Lite, please notice that there are other related parameters which are not mentioned here. Learn more in the “Smegma Lite: Why Do I Need to Read a Fucking Manual About This Mundane Concept” guide.

Request URL
http[s]://ima.weiner.com/carlosdanger/data.postData

Parameters

—–

…and if you think that any documentation resembling this format passes as adequate, you should be deemed a pariah and removed from society by being banished to the new edition of the show Naked and Afraid, which will take place in a nearby asteroid belt.

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.

1.) Candy Crusher – A NFC-enabled mobile app which, when used near a person playing Candy Crush, takes remote control of the target’s phone and annoyingly broadcasts to all in the target’s contacts list:
“I would read right now if I weren’t an illiterate, stupid fuck that hasn’t figured out how to use headphones. Please knuckle my loins when you next see me.”

2.) AutoStalker – An Internet bot that can be set to different modes, surreptitiously dissuading your friends from posting to social networks. Frustrated with friends who inundate Facebook with pictures of their children? Simply set AutoStalker to “PedoBear” mode, and after compromising your target’s account and those of its friends, it will generate random creepy comments about kids’ buttocks and post them to your target’s wall. Sayonara, kid pics!

3.) DroneZapper – A thirty foot Tesla Coil that will extinguish the life of any snooping drone or quadrocopter. With every purchase comes:
a.) Metallic mail suits for all family and pets (since death is guaranteed by not wearing one)
b.) A lifetime supply of hair gel in order to combat the neverending battle between static charges and style

4.) RingDumbs – A mobile phone app which will listen for certain ringtones and immediately respond to them. For example, in the case of the whistling ringtone of Samsung, the phone will supply a small charge to an embedded portion of the phone, which in turn will ignite a small packet of C4 and kill everyone within a few meters, including the offender. (You might die in the process, but you’ll have the honor of blowing the bridge.)

Employee Name: Edward Snowden
Department: NSA Operations Center
Immediate Supervisor: Yuri Nater
Date of Review: April 1st, 2013

O – Outstanding
L – Like a gangsta mofo
S – Surpasses expectations
E – Exceeds expectations
M – Meets expectations
N – Needs improvement
T – Tends toward crapola
U – Unsatisfactory
Y – Yeasty

Technical Support for Monitoring Operations = S
———-
Attendance and Punctuality = T
———-
Expertise in IT Security Practices = O
———-
Eager to Help Fellow Employees with Password Issues = L
———-
Communicates with Peers Regularly = E
———-
Refrains from Having Journalist Friends = N
———-

General Comments: Ed performs his role with enthusiasm. As a standup employee, he volunteers his time with staff by offering to backup their personal drives on a regular basis, without incurring overtime or other costs to the agency. He is well known and loved by others for his quirky sense of humor and his generosity. For example, his candy jar of free keychain flash drives keeps everyone productive and in good spirits. He even provided some homebrew “palware” (how creative!) on each flash drive, in order to help us with our daily tasks! Ed is an asset, and we should consider getting some people under him as quickly as possible.

Room for Improvement: Ed does need to spend less time talking on the phone, especially with his domestic partner Glenn about planning vacations. (Hong Kong might be a fun town, but if you’re planning a party for weeks, there better be some real dragons dancing around.)

Employee Comments: I will divulge your Orwellian monitoring to the world at large, and any confidence held by people regarding your principled position will be shaken to its core. You will pay for your treachery through the loss of wealth and international trust, and even though you will likely not learn your lesson (and I am likely just blowing the bridge), I will have the satisfaction of knowing that it was due to me and that you were unable to stop me.

Supervisor Comments: That Ed! Such a kidder! Man, his stuff is totally priceless.

1.) Your deployment environment is nothing but Windows servers, your entire framework depends on .NET, and your entire programming team only knows C#…but he doesn’t understand why you fight him when it comes to replacing all of your desktops with Mac Pros.

2.) You inform him that your team has donated personal hours of work in order to complete an ancillary project that will save the company millions of dollars…and in response, he nods approvingly and then asks “Who are you again?” Then he digs out his cellphone, laughs, and shows you a picture of his dog wearing sunglasses and a tutu.

3.) When you’re in a meeting with him and stakeholders in your project, he reacts to any of the stakeholders’ complaints/issues by shaking his head, rolling his eyes, and covertly pointing at you…especially if you’ve blown the bridge.

4.) When he speaks to your projects’ stakeholders, he overestimates his ability to connect with them. For example, if they happen to be black, he will punctuate his comments with “…girlfriend!” and horizontally oscillate his head like an upset guest on the Jerry Springer show.

5.) When he asks you to help tune his slow PC, you find that his desktop’s Recycle folder contains nothing but files with suspicious names like “shesquirts.stuxnetworm.mpeg.exe”.

6.) When talking with him about how a certain piece of software resembles Lotus, he responds with a look of confusion…though he is eager to admit how Lotus was his favorite nightclub back in the day.

7.) When you report that your network latency has increased tenfold, he optimistically asks if that is good news.

8.) He has eight screens on his desktop which supposedly show realtime information from eight different subsystems…but when you scrutinize the setup from a distance, you realize that it’s just an enlarged game of Tetris.

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.