Indeed. Had this been Garfield Park, Englewood, or Fuller Park, this might have been cause for concern, but dicking around out by the West Loop/Logan Square area isn't cause for concern. For the most part, you're pretty spot on. Cool, the MobileMe service worked, but it's not nearly as dramatic as people are making it out to be. I don't get the submission myself, but then again, I'm just another jaagov slumming around in the Kedzie industrial corridor who can keep his phone in his pocket when he's had a beer or three.

echo "set et ts=4 sw=4" >> ~/.vimrc

You'll thank me in the morning.

I'm still a diehard C coder at heart, but I'll admit that braces as a syntactic measure are just plain bad (unless you're in a Lisp-variant, where a paren _is_ the whitespace, ffs). It's why reference-counting is insufficient for being a singular GC mechanism, and why, if compilers were built like garbage collectors, work efficiency would plummet.

Seriously, a decent editor that can swap out tab commands for a N-length block of spaces will alleviate your indentation worries. If you're worried about bytecode and compile-time efficiency (aka, the mythical "zomg whitespace==compile inefficiency!" fallacy), you wouldn't be using an interpreted language in the first, and you'd also know that Python+Psyco won't ever get you the same hardware optimizations as a true compiled language.

At that point, you're indenting for readability and maintainability anyway. Braces add nothing to syntax and actually add in avenues for compile-time error. I usually see this sort of issue as being with someone who isn't using Emacs of Vi properly [I'm a Vim user, but I hear tell that (setq default-tab-width) achieves the same thing in your emacs conf]. If you aren't using a capable editor, that's a fault of your editor, not of the language design principle.

It's been ages since I took compilers or checked out a copy of the G++ source, but IIRC, preamble whitespace is insignificant if you use a line terminator (aka, ";" for most C-lang expressions). Once the tokenizer kicks in, that whitespace becomes irrelevant to the expression because you know where expression and block delineations are. However, if you're typing that way in your CVS check-ins for maintenance sake anyway, why not lose the terminators and make the whitespace relevant? It all compiles the same and makes it easier for jyumang beans to read.

"Treating them however you wish" is highly subjective. Product support is a contractual agreement: if an organization provides inept, impotent support, then it shouldn't be surprised if it or its employees incur hostility via said support channels.

It's sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.

I've done time in the trenches, and frankly, it's appalling. People are hired by quantity, not quality, and were it not for scripts, 90% of the people in the call center wouldn't know assholes from elbows. The problem is that they don't continue their own job training upon hiring; if you crutch on the drone script, don't be surprised if you get called on the carpet or treated like shit.

I tend to be respectful of support techs, but if you've already got my money, I expect a certain quality of service as was agreed upon when I entered into the agreement. If the organization can't provide that, and instead provides bargain-basement CS reps, then I'm going to be rightly irate. Is it fair to directly express my irritation with said rep? Well, his/her wages are on my dollar, so yes, I think so, especially if it's obvious he/she has done nothing but the bare minimum of job training.

GNU/Turd?