I’ve been showing this monstrosity to people all day after seeing it on jwz’s LiveJournal this morning and decided to actually link it up here. Life really is this disgusting apparently and I’ve had the creepy crawlies for at least twenty minutes after each viewing. Sorry:
I really, really hate coffee makers that can’t last more than a couple of months under heavy use. Granted, this one was a Woot deal instead of the my electronic brain thinks I need cleaning and I will refuse to make coffee again until you chemically douche me coffee maker pictured that is equally broken at the moment. The coffee press still works thankfully.
I don’t like biting on the obvious ad revenue whoring pieces but this one is so ridiculously reductivist and serves as such a wonderful metaphor for what should be minimal interaction between the concerns of technology and business that I couldn’t really pass it up. The suit (or, alternately, the dockers and dress shirt combo) is so emblematic of why management should stay the hell out of the problems and solutions that revolve around pure technology. Don’t believe me? Have you suffered through consultants in your workplace lately? Suits. Utterly clueless fucking suits and management, in general, tends to buy whatever line they’re selling and pay them outrageous sums of money for what amounts to nil. Applying the who you’d like to party down with at the frat house and have date your younger sister methodology of decision making to technology is stick stupid. I’m currently in the job market so maybe I’m just a little bitter.
That reminds me: I need to actually do backups more often instead of miserably thinking that nearly four years of this crap has been flushed semi-permanently down the bit toilet. It wouldn’t be the end of the world or anything but I hate it when things break for reasons that I don’t understand. I guess that, in a nutshell, is why shared/virtual web hosting is always going to be painful.
Some things that didn’t fit into anything longer:
Google making terrible choices when it comes to word choices for verifications. I laughed but many more will spend hours trying to unsee those words and atoning and all that shit.
Apparently TX law enforcement is trying to make people incredibly uncomfortable by scouting out public drunkenness in bars where people are both surprised and appalled by drunken behavior. We can’t seem to fit any more fish into this barrel…
This otherwise well considered piece about desktop eyecandy, Windows Vista, and what it all means to the end user is hilariously sidetracked when people in the comments assert, without a trace of irony mind you, that eye candy is equitable to usability. Several people even say that they cannot be productive if their desktop isn’t attractive. Insane.
I’m completely ignoring all of the incredulous news stories about the Windows Vista delay. Duh. Has a Windows release ever been on time? Have any of the features that would almost make life bearable ever actually made it into a product? Yup. You get new interface elements that your machine probably won’t be able to handle. Luckily, I don’t have to use that crap. I just have to fix it when it breaks which is like every fucking day of my life. As I am currently applying for jobs in the same painful area I don’t see this ceasing in the near future.
So the above was my impression of ajaxWrite at least as it stands today after being trampled by the usual insipid horde from Digg all proud because they took another site down without reading a single word of it. The only thing that I was really able to figure out while horsing around is that the application deals with file types you’d normally associate with MS Word as its default. It seems far too crashy to hold up under the Friday crowd so I’m going to send myself a piece of mail as a reminder to come back when things are less stupid. Looks pretty good from what I was able to see and actually feels a little lighter/smoother than the limited experience that I’ve had with Writely. I don’t remember whether Writely had PDF conversion capabilities but that is one of the most useful features of ajaxWrite for me — being able to instantly convert things to a PDF format really takes some of the fear out of carrying files around in the ODF format.
I had the unfortunate experience today of witnessing a discussion between a user and one of my fellow desktop support types that reminded me why I need to have some patience enhancing drug prescribed post haste. The topic had to do with automatic/scheduled shutdowns of XP machines in what amounts to a public lab and the idea the user had was so horrible that it was almost funny. It did inspire me, though, to think that maybe for a week or so we should go forward with every dipshit plan that a user comes up. The clean up afterwards would be horrible but nearly worth it when pushy users were forced to deal with the consequences of ideas that they don’t entirely understand in any sense excepting the “But that’s what I want” way. This user wanted a scheduled shutdown and startup that didn’t require any intervention and would simply shut the machines down presumably after a lab tech had issued some kind of verbal warning. The very first time that a user had their work nuked into the ether because the tech forgot to give that warning would be my reward. I could play stupid for a week. I really could.
Major revisions:
The term ‘Web 2.0′ (often camel-cased into Web2.0 or the like) should no longer be used. After its overuse by buzzword aggregating industry magazines to the point where it is being twiddled around by management types in meetings like this year’s Sharper Image castanet arrangement it really doesn’t mean much anymore unless you’re trawling for venture capital. Instead please revert to previous versions of same sentiment such as ‘That’s so money’ or ‘Where’s the beef?’ or the more dynamic solo thumb thrust triumphantly skyward and followed by the gutteral exclamation of “Ayyyyyyyyyyyyy!” for the purpose of board room song and dance routines and/or the half-assed assertion of getting this ‘new thing’ and renewing your commitment to getting it to market whatever the fuck that means.
Oooh. Oooh. Just as I was preparing to write some of my own tests for making sure that MySQL wasn’t bullshitting me I ran across page of testing scripts that the Digg folks use to make sure that MySQL and their storage devices aren’t bullshitting them. The downside is that they are Perl scripts which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world other than the fact that they aren’t made for use by the general public so you’ll probably need to do some editing. Reading and understanding other people’s Perl is something that is less than enjoyable. These are pretty humanely written and well commented but, still, be aware that it’s prolly best if you do some editing. I did.
Unfortunately we had to make a pit stop at Guitar Center after band practice tonight. If you’ve ever been in one them before you generally know what I’m talking about: the utter annoyance of a myriad of I-download-tabs-from-the-internet-then-head-immediately-to-the -guitar-store -to-demonstrate- my-incredible-skills guitar players who string together the most god awful effects imaginable and pair it with a solid state amp with the midrange turned all the way off and the sales people. Jesus, it’s like running a gauntlet of Jehovah’s Witnesses or something. What makes things even worse for me is that I play a pretty strange setup that sales people at all guitar stores would like to talk me out of.
I’m especially strange about strings. I play pretty much the heaviest gauge of jazz strings possible and avoid any of the bright sounding brands. Trying to explain this to the person behind the counter involves either making up elaborate lies to explain my weird yet specific tastes or basically insulting them while directly contradicting everything they were told at sell you expensive shit you don’t really need university. I made the mistake of mentioning that I wanted to scale back a gauge or two tonight. The guy behind the counter immediately wanted to sell me the most expensive set of overly packaged strings they had in stock:
Me: So, these are a little on the light side for me. Are these strings bright?
Sales guy: Yeah, they’re super bright.
Me: OK. So, do you have a little than heavy kind of jazz string that has a wound G string and is not at all bright sounding?
Sales guy: Where on earth have you bought strings that were wound all the way to the G?
Me: Here. (I point to the strings I normally buy).
Sales guy: Oh, those are really low quality strings.
Me: Because they’re not bright sounding?
Sales guy: Yeah, they’re really dull even when they’re new.
Me: OK. Do you have those in the next smallest gauge?
Sales guy: Are you sure because I really recommend the ones I showed you.
Me: Yeah but they’re super tinny/bright sounding and only come in white guy blues gauge. So, if you have a few sets of those low quality strings I’ll take them.
Sales guy: Oh, ok.
I’m also sort of in the market for an equalizer pedal. I don’t really need it to do anything other than halve my volume for certain parts of songs. The rest of the lack of comprehension will be revealed in Act Two where I start to feel like I am taking place in some hidden camera television show Abbot and Costello routine:
Sales guy: So, are you looking for some distortion?
Me: Not really. I’m looking for an inexpensive eq pedal to use as an A-B switch.
Sales guy: Well, we sell those.
Me: My amp only runs one channel at a time.
Sales guy: Have you thought about getting another amp?
Me: (stifling what would turn into hysterical laughter) Uh, no. I have a Sovtek and they’re pretty rare and expensive these days.
Sales guy: Oh, you mean you have Sovtek tubes in your amp…
Me: No. Sovtek made guitar heads for years. Hand wired ones that never seem to break.
Sales guy #3: (after overhearing some of the previous exchange) Wait, I’ll look and see if we stock Sovtek A-B switches.
Me: No, you don’t. They don’t exist. That’s why I need a cheap eq. I don’t care about the how many bands there are etc. I want to halve my volume consistently with a foot switch.
Sales guy #3: You want a volume pedal (starts gesturing towards the display of outrageously expensive volume pedals) like over here.
Me: No. I want an A-B switch but since my head doesn’t switch channels I need something like an eq but I don’t want to spend a hundred dollars on it.
Sales guy #3: Oh, I guess we don’t really have anything that fits that description.
Me: I figured.
I want to start my own guitar store called something like “We Think You Know What You’re Doing” and it will cater exclusively to people who have played their instrument for longer than six months and aren’t easily distracted by shiny things and/or the term ‘extreme.’
I’m puttering away with the zombie game which largely means cleaning up the test scripts that I used to make sure that everything was playing nicely with all of the other components. Much to the dismay of other folks who seem to need to disparage PHP in order to lavish more beta++ praise on the current flavor of the month, I’m actually pretty organized when working with PHP. Yes, I begin with a hojillion files that separate out each stage of form-script-form-etc before compressing them into functions contained in each actual PHP page but everything is tested a half dozen different ways before it becomes a function. Usually this means writing a couple of test functions that are required in order to run the test script. Granted, I’m not using some gigantic IDE or anything so I’m able to skip some of the more tedious steps that many go through when doing initial testing and I’ve been working off and on with this lump of code for over a year (I think) so I need to do a batch of comment reading and running test scripts before I really remember where exactly I left off. The combination of a rigid naming scheme and the strategic placement of comments makes this a whole lot painful than it could be.
It’s weird because I read many of the Ruby versus Python versus Java offspring are infinitely better than PHP rants and other ugly my language can beat up your language arguments started by Tim Bray’s eloquent rant against PHP and had nothing concrete to contribute to the distributed conversation. I’m manually refactoring all of my code and I enjoy the process of working out kinks and refining the clarity of this pile of crap I’m hacking on. Maybe there is some degree of masochism involved in my enjoyment of the power and flexibility of the language. I like the amount of thinking I need to do in order to make my own code better and the idea of an IDE ripping the steering wheel out of my hands is one that alarms more than comforts me.
Speaking of, has anyone seen any web games successfully implemented in either Python or Rails? I’m really curious because my tentative stabs in either direction were disappointing to say the very least. I really like both but haven’t been able to get much done on the web side that didn’t involve a ton of pain and tedium or considering the creation of my own damned framework.