Bermuda lacks a Starbucks

Yes, there are Starbucks coffee shops in Africa, former Soviet bloc countries and other third world areas.

Bermuda does NOT have a Starbucks (or for that matter any other coffee shop chain).

You see, this is why they REALLY had the Boston Tea Party where they threw all the tea into Boston Harbor. The citizens were fed up with drinking tea and wanted coffee.

Bermuda, being on the side of the tea drinking sore losers of the Revolutionary War lacks decent coffee anyway.

Sigh.

Microsoft BizSpark Support SUCKS!

I had an Avanade MSDN subscription (expired) and a BizSpark MSDN subscription.

In a moment of not paying attention, I deleted the unusable Avanade MSDN subscription.

Unfortunately it was the "default' MSDN account.

Now without a "default" MSDN account, I was locked out of my BizSpark MSDN subscription.

So, I called Microsoft support which is based in India and spoke at (not with as that would imply some modicrum of communication) a representative regarding what had happened.

His response was that since I could no longer access my BizSpark MSDN account that I must no longer be in the program, although my BizSpark membership doesn't expire until August 2012!!

Today I went to see if anything had been done, and sure enough the IDIOT in India had totally removed my BizSpark account!

So now I am truly screwed over once again by the incompetents at Microsoft.

(Microsoft fixed this, but I am still kind of pissed off about it.)

JetBlue flight attendants

Bleh! I was on the red eye from Sacramento to JFK, and I found it difficult to sleep.

So, seeing that there was an empty exit row, I moved there, stretched out and went to sleep.

About 2 hours later, 2 flight attendants woke me up and told me that because the exit rows have more room there's a $25 upgrade fee to sit there. They wanted me to either pay them $25 (you can bet there would be NO receipt) or move.

Then they walked away. So, while risking being sent to Gitmo, I stayed in my seat (OK, I had the whole row) and they didn't return and ask for money or threaten me so I suppose it all worked out. They also hustled a woman who was sitting there with her infant, and she moved back to her original seat.

However, they never made any announcements about "upgrading" to that row and frankly they had sold 2 of the rows to a couple of less than 100 pound ballerinas. The emergency exit doors weigh 33 pounds so try to imagine one of those young girls attempting to lift one third of her body weight.

Anyway that incident soured the flight for me.

The Engineering Gap

The Economist in their January 30th, 2010 issue, published a report on Aspiring Minds, a company in India who tested thousands of IT workers who had graduated from schools in India.

Their results:

4.2% of India's engineers are fit to work in a software product firm and just 17.8% are employable by an IT services company, regardless of how much training and education they have had.