Posts Tagged ‘Rants’

Escape Hatch

By Chief Oddball on February 24th, 2009 at 8:30 pm

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It’s been a long time since my last update, folks, which means there’s a lot of verbal spew that’s accumulated in my mind and needs to be released. This post comes with the usual warning labels attached about excessive length, and possibly excessive bitching. Ergo, read at your own peril.

Yesterday was my 29th birthday. I wanted to post something, but wasn’t able to craft more than two or three sentences before I either became disgusted with where it was all going, or was interrupted by some other task. In the end, my actual “birth day” ended up being rather nondescript and mostly depressing, with a bunch of busywork and meetings bookending my complete inability to accomplish anything satisfying. It was fortunate that we actually celebrated my birthday on Sunday, with a great dinner and ice cream cake, so as a result I don’t feel bad about yesterday clocking the schabbs. (Wow, that was actually an id Software reference from 1992. I’m completely regressing.)

A couple of highlights from yesterday included enjoying the evening air with Apple (during which we watered the plants, one of our daily chores), seeing the very cool blog my mom posted about my birthday, and talking to my grandmother on the phone after my work meeting. All day yesterday I was in the mood to write; I’ve been working on a new story that combines an old-favorite subject with a more mature plot. I was sort of in a funk yesterday evening, though — having had my mood ruined by the mainstream media for the umpteenth time; more on that later — and it was late in the evening before I worked up the energy to resume my tale. I was just getting into it when one of my bosses sidelined me for an hour as he went on with childlike giddiness about how he’s discovered Linux and how I should try it. I’d love to, actually — I always was fascinated by Linux — but until all of the Adobe Creative Suite apps work either natively or through Wine, I just plain can’t. By the time he was done talking, it was time for my ops meeting. Bye-bye story.

After the meeting I talked to my grandmother to thank her for the birthday gift she sent me (I still need to call my parents and do likewise, but it had been weeks since I spoke to my grandma so I gave her precedence). Afterwards I thought about writing some more, but got caught up in troubleshooting our Internet connection. Our DSL has been going out repeatedly in the last four days, and in fact it was down all last night until 10:00 a.m. this morning. Naturally, it went out while I was in my meeting last night over a VoIP line, so that was great fun. I was beat from having gotten a lousy sleep on Sunday night, so I forgot about the story and just went to bed.

If I thought Sunday night’s sleep was lousy, I clearly hadn’t expected Monday night to be worse. I tend to like to get up late — say, 9:00 or 9:30 — and work into the evening, reserving the late evening / nighttime hours for my own personal pursuits, since that’s when my creativity is at its daily peak. While I’m in Thailand, this “half-offset” schedule also has me online for a couple hours when our U.S. office gets to work, in case they need me for some emergency. Unfortunately, it doesn’t jive too well with the other occupants of this house — my brother-in-law and his wife and baby daughter — who collectively rise somewhere around 6 a.m. and leave for work at 7:30-ish. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except for the fact that somebody has a habit of slamming the bedroom door every time they go through it in the morning, which is repeatedly and often. The door-slamming escapades this morning helped ensure that both Apple and I were listless, exhausted — and in her case, suffering from a sleep deprivation headache — all day.

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The Roof Gods Are ANGRY

By Chief Oddball on July 15th, 2008 at 9:15 pm

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Yesterday, we finally received our “government stimulus check” in the mail — a cool $1,200. In retrospect, I should have realized then that something bad was about to happen. It always does, you see, whenever we come into some large sum of money.

So today, naturally, we got our dose of karma-balancing payback. I should preface this by saying that it’s been raining here for the last week straight, and in the last four days especially, it’s done nothing but pour down this unrelenting, drenching rain. It was at precisely the same moment this morning when Apple and I both looked up at the ceiling in our bedroom and blurted out, “What is that spot up there?”

There was a weird discolored spot on the ceiling right above the bed. I felt it. It was cold and wet. Not coincidentally, there was also cold, wet stuff raining out of the sky outside. That’s a great big whopping dose of Not Good. So I get a huge ladder, crawl up into the attic access over our bedroom and start poking around with a flashlight. And then I see it: Water dripping off the pointed end of a crossbeam. About one drop every two seconds.

There’s just a small portion of wood that looks wet, right where the beam comes to an end, and for the life of me I can’t find any other wet spots anywhere in the attic. But it’s been dripping long enough that it’s soaked into the insulation in this one very precise spot, and has now made a corresponding spot on our bedroom ceiling. Actually, there are four spots, all right near each other, one bigger than the other three. I have no idea why there are four. There is only one drip point.

Anyway, I called a local roofing company that does free estimates, so they’re coming out at 9 in the morning on Friday. For the meantime, I’ve stuffed a folded towel up in the attic, right beneath where the water had been dripping. Since the attic does not have a floor, I can’t put a bucket up there for fear the weight would…well, cause an even larger problem. It’s since stopped raining, thank God, but we’re likely to get some more off-and-on between now and Friday.

Based on the downward angle of the dripping beam, the water is probably entering at an elbow-like corner of the roof, where two planes intersect. A typical leak location. Hopefully it will not cost a fortune to fix. I really don’t have a fortune right now.

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Windows is Just a Ridiculous Operating System

By Chief Oddball on June 11th, 2008 at 1:52 pm

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Over the last week, during which I have been extremely busy working with Windows night and day, I have repeatedly had the feeling that certain portions of this OS were designed by a bunch of toads.

I just did a search for some work-related files I haven’t used in a long time, because I need them again now. First of all, unless you open up Vista’s “Advanced Search” panel, you will only be searching in “Indexed Locations.” Query: Why does the concept of “indexed locations” even exist? If I want to search for something, that means I don’t know where it is. Either index the whole fucking hard drive by default, or just search everything by default. Why does the search system default to “indexed locations only” if Windows only indexes a tiny fraction of your data unless instructed otherwise? Why do I even have to waste time setting indexing up in the first place?

Okay, forget indexing. Let’s say you actually get some search results. You browse to a folder within those results, decide this isn’t the right folder, and then hit “Back.” You’d expect to be taken back to your search results so you can continue browsing, but oh no, Windows is too stupid for that. It can’t do anything intelligent like, you know, cache the results of your last search as long as the window is open. No, it has to repeat the stupid search all over again. Real efficient.

The process for making a copy of a file in the same folder where it already lives has gotten less convenient for me since Windows Vista. In XP, when you did that, the copy of the file would be renamed to “Copy of [original filename]” so that it did not conflict with the original file. Now, in Vista, the file gets named “[original filename] – Copy”. That in itself isn’t so bad, but here’s the worst part. Now, Vista alphabetically resorts the file list automatically, as soon as you perform any file operations like copying or renaming.

This makes it really hard to just do stuff quickly. Like, make copies of 10 files within a folder containing hundreds or even thousands. In XP, those 10 files would have appeared at the end of the file list in a nice group so you could rename them or mess with them in a contiguous unit. In Vista, as you start renaming them, they start zooming to whatever place in alphabetical order they belong, and the view scrolls with them, so you have to keep going back to where the rest of the copies are. And don’t even get me started about unzipping a file into a folder where other files already live. The zipfile contents, which formerly would also appear in a nice group at the end of the list, now get sprinkled alphabetically all throughout the list. RAGE!

But my absolute favorite Windows stupidity crisis is the one where the OS will conveniently forget the view settings you wanted for a particular folder. Yes, this is STILL HAPPENING in Vista, and it’s been happening since Windows 2000 if I remember right. You know how this goes: You expect all of your folders to display in “List” view, and then one day you go into a folder that you go into a hundred times a day, and suddenly it’s in “Tiles” view for no reason. Because Windows has ostensibly “run out of memory” to store all the folder customizations. Except that I didn’t customize any of these folders, I just changed all folders globally to display in “List” view until I set otherwise. Are you telling me that this sets a customization on every folder in existence? And is it so hard to dynamically adjust the allotted memory space for these customizations so that it, you know, never runs out? It’s not like I don’t have dozens or even hundreds of spare gigabytes on my hard drive. Why can’t Microsoft just fix this shit?

Gah. Sorry, had to get that out.

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Tactless

By Chief Oddball on December 10th, 2007 at 3:17 pm

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The Internet is enabling the proliferation of a culture entirely bereft of tact.

Think of it. Online, you can be completely anonymous and almost entirely unaccountable for your actions. This kind of anonymity can be a great thing. It can encourage debate and discussion where censorship (or even persecution) would otherwise result. But it also removes the perceived necessity to act with candor when dealing with other people. In and of itself, this results in little more than a couple of anonymous Internet-goers getting each others’ panties in a bunch. But I think it’s trickling down into actual human civilization now, particularly here in the United States.

I’ve been “online” since the early 1990s. Back then, it was a different experience. Most people who had Internet access were either computer science students or professionals, which naturally contributed a sort of intellectual quality and ethical standard to a majority of dealings online. Nowadays, I rarely post on message boards or other open forums of discussion, because so many people get so easily rubbed the wrong way, and have such a hard time being civil about their disagreements. Usually I read forums, absorb information, and contribute only when I have something meaningful to say. On one board where I’ve been a member for six years, my post count is just under 2,300. It takes others just weeks to accumulate the same number, although most of what they have to say is dreck.

People start flamewars over the most ludicrous shit. In addition to the age-old PC vs. Mac wars that are still going on, you’ll have people insulting each others’ integrity over something as inane as which is the best online DVD rental service, or whether American cars are engineered by a bunch of peanut-eating chimpanzees. And then there are the people who believe their opinion is so important it deserves to be injected, in the most hostile manner possible, into every conversation imaginable. For example, the poster on our local newspaper website, who felt it necessary to refer to U.S. soldiers as “war criminals” and compare the U.S. military to the Wehrmacht — on a story about the tragic death of a U.S. soldier in a car accident on our local roads.

I can’t help but draw a parallel between the increasingly boorish online behavior of most Americans, and their increasingly boorish behavior in real-life social situations. Obviously, the existence of the Internet is not at fault, but it provides a handy medium for those who desire to shed their ethical restraints to do just that, after which they become accustomed to the practice.

Sir Isaac Newton purportedly said, “Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.” It is an art that is sadly lost on most of modern American society.

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The Stupid Cable Box

By Chief Oddball on November 24th, 2007 at 4:33 pm

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When Apple and I spent October with my family in Michigan, I was introduced to my dad’s new high-def A/V setup, the centerpiece of which is a Sony Bravia II 46″ LCD television. They get digital cable service from Bright House Networks, and my dad gave me a tour of the HD DVR he’d just ordered. It does its job adequately, but since both my parents, Apple and I are big-time TiVo fans, there was plenty to complain about — and my dad took me on a tour of those complaints.

Coming from a TiVo, there’s a lot of hair-pulling when you “downgrade” to the cable company’s Motorola-based DVR. But inwardly, I found myself chuckling a bit — because the user interface issues with Motorola boxes are nothing compared to the litany of bad design decisions at the core of our Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 DVRs down here in Florida.

Our area is one of the roughly 10% of Comcast’s national infrastructure that is built on Scientific Atlanta equipment, rather than Motorola equipment. While the hardware itself is much more powerful and versatile than most of Motorola’s offerings, you’d never know it — because the horrible SARA operating system we’re stuck with makes the act of watching and recording TV so detestable that sometimes you’d rather just go read a book. Comcast boasts that they’ve got such a better product than TiVo, but really, the only thing better is the fact that you can get a free replacement box if it ever breaks down (since you’re only leasing the equipment).

This past week, our DVR screwed us big time. Our favorite — and only — sit-com we watch, The Big Bang Theory, had been accumulating for a couple of weeks, so for our Thanksgiving dinner, we decided to watch them. During the first episode, the screen inexplicably went black about two minutes in and never recovered. DVR’s fault? Who knows. The second episode, from this past Monday, did not record. I looked at the box’s “Scheduled Recordings” list, and Monday’s episode was still on the list, even though it was now Thursday. Does it make sense that a program that already aired would ever be on a list of upcoming recordings?

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