Dear Microsoft-

I do not want to install Terrible Internet Explorer 8 on my PDF production server. At all. Not even a little bit. I've told you this several times now. But every two weeks, like clockwork, you interrupt my entire production server to ask me if I want to downupgrade to Terrible Internet Explorer 8. No matter how many times I tell you to never ask me again. It's not even a matter of its terrible-ness. The software on that server needs IE6 to function properly.

In conclusion, you are quickly wearing back out any good will that Windows 7 might have bestowed upon you.

-Aden

mood: annoyed

I actually kind of, sort of, maybe. . . like Windows 7.

mood: surprised

Allow me to start with the email I just received.

"can you chng the em thing re vac mes , thanks"

I stared at that for about five minutes or so. Eventually I figured out that he wanted me to turn off his Away Message on his email. I mean, I totally got there. This is what happens, incidentally, when a person begins to think of his billing in terms of usable seconds.

But let me roll the day back a bit more and relate to you a story. We have about seventy "high value" users here who have laptops. Basically, anyone who isn't a secretary. And I understand that, since most of them have to travel fairly often. Today someone asked me for a new power cord for his laptop - and I know that he has at least two. Usually, this request is because the user wants to leave a cord everywhere he ever goes so he doesn't have to bring one with him.

And while I don't inherently mind that - one for the office and one for travel / home - sometimes get users who want a ridiculous number of them. So I'm supposed to try to reasonably limit how many I give out, and bill their department if they start to get excessive with them. The user today admitted that he was replacing the one at home.

You see, he ran over it with his car. The "box" part in the middle. And crushed it. And then, he plugged it in again and tried to use it. This man? He makes $200-300 per hour for using his brain.

mood: flabergasted

So, Firefox 3.5 is pretty bangin'. But it does one thing that thoroughly pisses me off. Ctrl-W'ing the last open tab closes the whole application, as opposed to simply closing the current tab and replacing it with a blank one. Not anymore!

about:config
New > Boolean
browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab
FALSE

mood: jubilant

You know, Joe, I live pretty close to Manhattan, and I'm over there every now and again. And we have a word for people who say that they talk directly with god on a regular basis.

The word is crazy. Of course, it's sometimes harder to spot that sort of crazy when it isn't wearing a knit cap in the middle of August and doesn't smell like four day old piss.

But it's still crazy.

mood: disappointed

Step 1 - Keep about 8 gigs of vacation photos on your work computer.
Step 2 - Complain that it takes so long to move your profile to a new machine.

In a sane and rational world, Step 3 would be, "Get slapped."

mood: annoyed

I've recently been told (over and over) by a variety of wobbling, talking heads that if the government were to offer a public option for health care that it would be inefficient, oppressive and terrible, just about the worst sort of insurance you could imagine. I've also been told (often by the same heads) that government competition would drive the private insurance industry out of business.

Possibility A: At least one, if not both of these assertions is a lie.

Possibility B: HMOs suck so badly that even "shitty" government health care could run them out of business.

mood: sick

Some of you out there may be wondering if you are, in fact, former Congressman and current talk show host / pundit Joe Scarborough. It can be confusing, I know. Being the helpful guy that I am, I've devised a single question self test that should help you figure things out for yourself.

Are You Joe Scarborough?

Which one of the following items is more than you can chew, if bitten off?

A - Vitamins


B - Peanuts


C - Grapes


D - Jon Stewart

If you selected A, B or C, you are almost definitely Joe Scarborough. Please seek psychiatric care immediately, and stop pretending you enjoy whoring for Starbucks. Also, Jim Cramer is really glad he cut back on the java. I'm just saying.

So, it's probably time for me to stop blaming my age.

Trouble being, that was very convenient, and I'm running out of excuses.

mood: drunk

"So, Meghan McCain is twenty-four years old. And John McCain is her father, and he's 72 years old. I just really thought about the logistics of that."

"Eww."

"Yeah."

"I guess maybe Bob Dole was the wrong guy to do all of those Viagra adds?"

"Hmmmm, I don't know about that. I mean, she may be a Space Dragon or something, but I'd still rather hit Cindy McCain than Liddy Dole."

"True."

mood: amused

This is an unedited screenshot from one of our developer's laptops. He asked why it took him five minutes to reboot (which he hasn't done since January). For reals. I'm not even kidding.

mood: shocked

My spell check is not work. Says there is an internal error.

Please contact me.

Thank you.

mood: annoyed

So, all this week I've been out of work because I got to enjoy five straight days of Microsoft Vista training. Which means I'm being trained on an OS that I never intend to allow inside my working environment in the first place. Of course, the class starts an hour earlier than my normal workday, and this week started daylight savings time. So I'm bleary-eyed and broken until lunch, though I guess that's nothing new.

The real complaint I have is that the class is intended for people who are going for their Microsoft Vista certification. I am distinctly NOT attempting to acquire this cert, much for the same reason you don't see a lot of people bragging about being a Windows ME Certified Technician on their resumes.

But the reason I have this complaint is that the class is tragically unrealistic for actual administration and support purposes. And that's not the instructor's fault - in fact he seems very sharp and has been trying to augment our lesson plans with tips on what to do if (read: when) the techniques listed in our workbook fail in a real world situation.

For example, the lesson plans we've been doing for the past day concern how to back up and restore user images and settings using the new Vista tools. Tools which, let's be clear, don't back up any third party application settings or files. So if you have all Vista computers using only Microsoft Office products, this tool will mostly work, except for the long list of times that it won't. At which point, their suggestion is to edit an XML configuration file in order to get the "automated" process to back up extra files and folders. So their process is to copy down a directory structure, edit at least two XML scripts, run a DOS command longer than this paragraph, and then check two logs in order to move (in the case of their example) 16KB worth of files on the C drive.

It's assinine. Even in a large-scale environment, say, one thousand computers, there are simply more efficient, more effective, and more secure ways to perform these tasks. Shit, I could probably do one thousand backups by hand with less hassle than I could by using these Vista tools. The problem with their backup system is the problem with Vista in general. The tool attempts to solve a problem I didn't have, and then assumes that I work in a very inefficient way in order to solve that problem.

What really frightens me, though, is the rest of the class. Not all of it, mind you. But about half of it. There are people in this class that are clearly in management positions, directly as a result of the Dilbert Principle. I imagine that they are here because they are expected to know something about the computers their subordinates work on. But when I hear them making sounds of surprise and delight at the miracle that is the "Run As" command, a tiny part of me compares our theorhetical salaries and gets angry.

But it's more than that. I know they are going to go back to their places of business and suggest that viruses can be adequetely checked, quarantined and eliminated through the use of Windows Defender. Hell, if they actually do work instead of just delegating it, they may try to actually solve problems this way.

The entire lesson plan is geared towards a fantasy world where everything always works the way that Microsoft's plan for a Windows Vista world assumed that it does work. Everyone uses IE and Office (and only IE and Office). Third party apps are unnecessary. And nothing ever errors out. Ever. It's not just unrealistic - it's patently stupid. But they can't very well have a training course where they charge people to learn what to do when their shitty software doesn't work.

I've never before felt so much like I was back in high school, studying for the SATs. A test designed solely to test my ability to take that specific test, with no significant real-world application, use, or measuring capacity. In short, a waste of my fucking time.

mood: irate

I have another section of the Benjamin Bellwick story written up well enough to post. I've changed the way the paged work a bit, so these things are password protected from the very general public. It's not that I want to keep them completely hidden, I just don't want bots and such crawling all over them.

A Few Things About Paranoia

The password for this entry is "IN PUBLIC", all lower case, no space.

mood: accomplished

I'm not a big comic book guy - I was just never really into them growing up, and with the exception of some of the Star Wars EU stuff, they really only held a passing interest for me. That being said, as an objective observer, this guy's rundown on Rob Liefield is both hilarious and mortifying.