One of my cow orkers has the domain control-escape.com, and he recently implemented a redesign of the site. As part of the redesign, he created a new logo out of his domain's eponymous unicode symbols. I, however, maintain that the Unicode standards body got the symbol for "Escape" wrong--the arrow should be pointed down to the left. Can anyone guess why?

I work for a Radio company, and my latest project has been to pair up the things we play on air with output on our websites. One of the things you'd find on the website would be a potential link to current tours. I was discussing this with one of my cow orkers, and I used the following example:

So like, you'd see "Jeff Buckley" and next to it "Tour Dates" would be generated right next to it if he were currently on tour.

Um, yeah, not a great example.

One of my co-workers just walked in to the cave with a problem. He had been working with a document in Microsoft Office some time ago, and very distinctly remembers saving the file under a different name. He wasn't able, however, to find the document under the "Recent Documents" listing, nor was he able to find it in "My Documents."

This sounded very familiar, so I asked him if he had opened up the file from his own hard drive or whether it was opened from the web or e-mail.

See, a few months ago, I was faced with a Pinky who was brought to the point of tears when she couldn't find a Powerpoint presentation that she'd worked hours on. I only managed to find it when I followed the steps that she herself went through to open the document--open mail, click on attachment, work on powerpoint, save.

It turns out that Microsoft Outlook, when opening attachments, saves them to a randomly-named directory under whatever is designated temporary storage for Windows, and then opens the appropriate program. When saving the opened-via-Outlook document, then, it will save any changes to that same randomly-named directory, unless told otherwise.

Now I know the power users reading this will say, "Well, duh--you should always check to see where you're saving things." Indeed, some of the programmers in the audience might say "Why should I go through the trouble of checking where someone's saving something so they don't shoot themselves in the foot?" Well, if you're a Microsoft Outlook/Office programmer, I respond, "Because that's your fucking job."

To begin with, Outlook should probably query the user on whether or not they wish to save/execute an attachment, given the prevalence of viruses and worms. And when any related application attempts a user-initiated save to temporary storage, it should probably ask "You know you're going to save this into temp storage, are you sure you don't really want to save to My Documents?" Hell, it's bad enough with all the stupid tooltips coming from the system tray and that fucking paperclip--where's the harm in adding one or two more actually-useful messages?

My officemates and I have just spent the last ten minutes or so making the radios we have on my desk display PC LOAD LETTER WTF IS PC LOAD LETTER?. Hopefully no one in the near vicinity has an RDS-capable radio tuned to the frequency of our low-powered transmission.

The problem with being tasked to monitor a geographically remote radio station is that when they play songs like "Carry on Wayward Son," "Sister Christian," and "More Than A Feeling," I can't listen to it. Fucker.

ETA: Aggh! They're playing "Brown-Eyed Girl." *grumble*

I just took the first step on the path to quitting my job.

You know what's worse than spending six hours in a meeting with slow-on-the-uptake people who just reiterate the same thing someone else said minutes ago?

Having to spend your birthday in said meeting.


The day got better (despite an hour-long stint in some of the worst Atlanta traffic I've seen since moving here), however, because aside from my No Idea order coming in the mail, the gang got together and picked up the Tekken 5 Arcade Stick combo. I'm way too into Guitar Hero at the moment, but as soon as I'm done with "Bark at the Moon" on Expert, the beatings will resume.

The latest computers capable of running our application for the client have built-in 802.11b antennae. The users have had a lot of trouble getting the Wifi working (they're the typical user--intimidated and clueless), so as a part of my job, I ran around town today testing with two of the machines.

After eating first at our clients location (free lunch), I hit Lenox Mall to test at the Apple Store, Panera Bread, and the Food Court. I then drove down Peachtree and hit the Panera Bread next to the Imperial Fez, and then continued down to Whole Foods and Dunkin Donuts.

Finally, I hit Aprés Diem where I could connect to their network, as well as the networks for The Independent and The Highlander.

In the immortal words of my former roommate, Je vais vomir.

I spent Monday and Tuesday down in Ft. Lauderdale for work.

( Travel Hell )


Happy Birthday to El Guapo. If you lived in Atlanta, then you could see the many stuffed piñatas for your birthday celebration.

If this week were to move any slower, it'd be yesterday.

Ugh.

From some blogger:
Sometime in recent memory, Jack Davenport and some Sandman fangirl got it on at somepoint.

Sad, really, that I only know Mariella Frostrup's name from those few episodes of the show.


ETA: Why Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates blow goats, Reason #1138:
I am in the process of trying to access a file that's on a PocketPC. The file is named "rsyncd.conf," it's located in the "\unix\etc" directory, and its contents are essential to what I am trying to do with the device. The only way that the OS has of natively viewing the file is to open the file up in PocketWord, the Microsoft Word analogue for Windows CE. The version of PocketWord that exists on PocketPC 2003 can only access two types of files--PocketWord files and Text files, and only within the My Documents directory. Even if I copy the file into the My Documents directory, I still cannot see it because Microsoft determines what kind of files to show by the three-letter extension.

I should, of course, be able to just rename the thing "rsyncd.txt" or something like that, right? Of course not, because the File Explorer acts just like Windows XP, obscuring the file extension from the user, except with no discernable way of changing that setting.

Why do they insist on making everything as dumb as the potential user that might use it?

this is me giving the world a finger.

My co-workers and I have been hearing this strange sound today, which just started about 40 minutes ago.

One of them took a smoke break and said that the sound, which resembles that of an electric saw or some other power tool biting its way through wood, is echoing throughout all around our office building. Having stepped outside, I have noticed it's much louder in our particular room than it is outside. This wouldn't really bug me that much except for one thing: The noise appears to be coming the wall we share with our next door neighbor. What's located in that space?

Dentist's Office.

It sounds like there's someone getting their molars drilled out with the high-speed saw that they use to cut casts of broken limbs.

For some reason, I am feeling particularly cranky today.

If you haven't already done so, vote on what movies you think I should keep in my Netflix queue.
Current Mood: bitchy

Out of all the possible things I could dream about at night, I'd like to request that you stop giving me dreams of my client asking for me to work on asinine projects.

Thank you for your consideration,
That Yellow Bastard.

P.S. Oh, and more Lauren Graham, if it's not too much to ask.

Going through some papers tonight, I found some stuff from my old job--my reaction to said papers?

My old boss is a fucktard.

These pipes... are Clean!

Stick a fork in me.

Since my client has moved me from the office that I was working in, I've moved to a desk where I'm working in the corner of a desk that wasn't meant to have someone work in it's corner (there's not really enough space to fit anywhere else). Today, my elbows are killing me, from resting non-ergonomically, directly on a hard table surface.

Back when I was at my old job, they had these "Surfboards," large, black, somewhat-kidney-shaped metal boards with a large rubber-ended lip which you could fit into the 90-degree corner of a desk and effectively have a good keyboard and mousing space. I talked to the Coffee Achiever (who still works somewhere organizationally similar to the old job), and someone at her workplace said they got theirs at Staples. Having scoured the Staples.com site for "Surfboard," "Above-desk drawers," "Under-desk drawers," and "Desk Accessories." Does anyone have a lead on this item?

ETA: Found it. Unfortunately, it's $170.

IHTFP

"You know that movie Lost in Translation that was up for all the awards? Horrible! It was so slow, I fell asleep halfway through."
"Who's in it?"
"Bill Murray"
"Is that the one where he has an affair with someone?"
"I don't know. I never got to that part. It's the one where he's in Hong Kong..."

"Please note that people who can’t handle really slow movies are stupid and worthy of neither friendship nor food."
--Patrick Hughes, Bad News Reviews

If your cell phone rings, and you're not going to answer it, hit the cancel/send-to-voicemail button.

If you want to answer it, but you want to conduct your conversation somewhere more discreet, answer the phone, "Hi, this is <your name>. Can you hold on for a moment?" And then walk somewhere more discreet and talk away.

Do not let your phone ring until it goes to voice mail. Do not let your phone ring loudly throughout a sea of cubicles until you've reached a location which you think is not disturbing to your office mates. If you do that, you've already disturbed your office mates.

Especially if you've got your phone set to that annoying default Nokia ringtone.

Thank you,
The Mgmt.

Overheard at the office:

"Are you talking about Cirque du Sol?" [sic]
"No, not that one..."
"Because it's not worth it...I mean there was some neat things, but $245.00..."

I'm suddenly reminded of the two rubes (and I'm being quite generous there...) who sat next to us when we saw Alegria a few weeks ago. The woman actually screamed, "You suck!" to the clown who was mocking our section.

Really, other than a suggestion to buy cheaper tickets, I'm speechless.


A very happy birthday to the Coffee Achiever. Since you're already torn about where to go for her birthday dinner (based primarily on the dessert options), make sure you follow this link after your celebration...

Microsoft Windows might be good for something after all...

Some days I hate being stuck in an office. It's breezy and sunny outside, looking like prime weather for climbing or biking or something which doesn't involve me being in the cubicle farm.

Today, Slashdot had a story about Google's expansion of their web index to over six billion items, titled "Google's Bigger Index." Most people would say, "Wow, that's pretty impressive--six billion is a lotta pages." Some people might opine "sheesh, what a fuckin' waste of time."

Me? I'm thinking, "Well, shit. They've just made searching for high quality information that. much. harder." But I might just be overreacting because I just got home from work.

I. Just got home from work.

I. Just got home. From Work.

I may weep openly.
Current Mood: tired

"British bookmakers are apparently giving Tony Blair poor odds of getting out of the week... They're going to need to put out want ads--'NEW SYCOPHANT WANTED.' "

My supervisor and boss in conversation:
S: "Did you read that article that says juggling increases your grey matter?"
B: "So? So do tumors..."

Well, despite the chance that I might lose my job, because our client reduced our hours this week, I'm taking a half day today and tomorrow...

I'm going to go have some Bún, grab some Sung buns, and then go home and watch the second season of Coupling.

Woohoo!

Today, when describing the choices for a given project to our client, I stated that should they choose a particular one, it would be "a grievous error."

Of course, they chose that option.

Sadly, I can understand why they chose it, too (time constraints). *sigh*

End of Line.

One of the more tedious aspects of working in application development is finding a bug with no discernable cause. We've worked on several such bugs before. This latest one involved my turning my laptop's touchpad-enabled screen so that it faced directly up, and using the stylus to randomly hit links in the site we're debugging, hoping desperately to generate an error.

We've been going at this for about three hours, and I had been using a mouse and actively watching the screen, until I got bored and flipped things over. I figured I could read MegaTokyo and my Friends list as I randomly clicked on links with my left hand piloting the stylus.

I finally generated the error. Thank Goodness.

( The Geek Holy War: cut for the non-geeky )

I think, if Boston Market hadn't expanded to too many stores in too short a time and went all chapter 11, I wouldn't have a food coma right now. Since there's only one BM that I know of in Atlanta and it's not readily accessible, when I do go there, I tend to get a lot of stuff.

Because I went to get the oil changed for the car, I passed by BM on the way back from Jiffy Lube. And here I am thinking, "Bonus! I was just gonna grab something fast and not-entirely appetizing on the way back to work..."

So I got the meatloaf with a sweet potatoes (complete with marshmallows and brown sugar), stuffing, and a cornbread muffin ("aint nothing wrong with dat!"). As rich and filling as the sweet potatoes were, I still had to finish the meatloaf and cornbread, because I don't get a lot of Boston Market. And now I just want to curl up under my desk and sleeeeeeeeep.

It occured to me earlier that I've been working at this job for exactly one year. Woohoo!
Current Mood: food coma

Someday, I'd like to meet an end-user who knows the good balance point between planning and spontaneous suggestions...

Here's this week's Friday Five...
( Read more... )

I've got little cuts everywhere. The obvious one is the small cut on my bottom lip, from the excessive dryness, as well as a small paper-cut-like slice on the side of the middle finger of my right hand, where I tried to dig some more hair gel from a near-empty bottle. There's a small cut on the first knuckle of the same finger, though, and I can't fathom where it came from.

At the moment, I'm torn between working on this entry, working on porting the Bronze Archives to Livejournal, and reading Bringing Down the House. Pondering that just now, I just remembered that I also bought some more comic books today.

Hopefully tomorrow will go better than today did. I had an ass of a time trying to debug the system that we're working on, especially because of a previous request that our client made. He had wanted a particular menu item in our product to behave differently depending on the context in which it was called. While that might make sense for some applications, this was an Invoice Review screen. I had to wade through a library of code to ultimately realize that there was some vestigial calls which were screwing up the system.

I'm going to read some comics now.
Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Good Eats "Squid Pro Quo"

As you know, I've been working on an email-to-LJ gateway where I can send in entries via email. Hopefully I can set things up so that I can compose messages offline and have them queued into the system accordingly.

Yesterday was a pretty cool day. The weather was really nice, and I had rousted tiiguy to get up and fix my car. So when he was all done, he picked me up from work, and we ate some scrumptious Indian food at Udipi.

The car's running far better than it was before...it seems positively spritely (if you can ever use such an adjective for an SUV) compared to the way it drove before. Taking a cue from Airplane, "sluggish...like a wet sponge" seems the best way to describe my Pathfinder prior to yesterday. Jason mentioned that my fuel filter was probably the dirtiest one he had ever seen. Jason, given that it should have been changed about 13K miles ago, do you think the exhaust manifold leak had something to do with that?

The previous version (yes, the one we just released) of our code is currently having issues, so I've got to get it working.
Current Mood: geeky

You know, at first glance, Boolean logic is extremely simple, but I think every programmer eventually makes a ridiculous mistake. I just now discovered the mistake that I made some four months ago, which luckily wasnt released until this week.

Sigh.

This has been quite a week. Like I said before, I went to go see Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on Tuesday night, following our pool league match.

Our match went quite well--We took 4 out of 5 to secure first place in the division. The four wins over the then-second place team allowed us to give Rob's team a bump up to second place. We have to play a wildcard round two weeks from now, and then figure in the session finals.

The movie was pretty good. I'm not sure about some of the plot changes, but since I don't recall the book itself well enough to delineate the exact differences, I'm going to wait to say anything else, other than to reiterate: Not enough Ents.

The birthday celebration was quite enjoyable. I ended up in quite a stupor towards the end of the night, demanding my cake and trying desperately to find a fork and knife with which to eat it.

I honestly can't say enough about how much I appreciate the gift, too. tiiguy suggested to batnandu that they get a signed copy of the recently out-of-print Super/System, by Doyle Brunson a two-time (maybe more?) winner of the World Series of Poker. It's what just about everyone in the professional poker world would refer to as the "Poker Bible."

And now I have one.

The work week is winding down, too. Unfortunately, the project that I'm currently working requires me to constantly reload a WindowsCE device with old versions of our software product, and upgrade. These upgrades take about 15 minutes each time to reinitialize the entire system, and then I have to check if the changes that I made worked or not.

So now you know where I found the time to learn how to juggle.

Ugh. The unit I was working with basically just choked out, and because, I suspect, of the continual re-loads will now require flashing the harddrive and a total rebuild from the ground up.

Luckily I have a spare...

Sigh.
Current Mood: busy
Current Music: "Here" - VAST

I've been working on a new version of our product for about three weeks now, lately I feel like I need some serious Ritalin. My attention span has just been at near zero for the past few days. I suppose it could have something to do with lack of sleep, but I am getting some work done (unlike my last few months at Cox Interactive).

I don't know if anyone realizes how happy I am, however, to get back into programming--management was just such a bitch. I've told this to quite a few people, but when you're managing three junior and one senior technical developers, there's just not a lot that you can volunteer your own skills for. Any little projects you give to the junior techs so they can glean some amount of experience, and any big projects you give to the senior tech, so he doesn't get bored and/or resentful (like his boss did...).

So it's no wonder they laid me off--I hadn't really been at all productive since becoming a manager (plus the fact that I tended to confront my boss's decisions in e-mail amongst the circle of my fellow managers--what? He was a dick).

Either way, I'm glad to be coding again.
Current Mood: listless
Current Music: ...yet another VNV nation song...

Python, while being a stupid, stupid non-programming language, is my bitch.
Current Mood: triumphant
Current Music: Alegria

Work can be pretty tough when you're fighting off sickyness and a splitting headache--especially when you've reinstalled Windows 98 and Windows 2000 on two separate boxes while hypothesizing why rsync doesn't work right on the Transmeta Crusoe. Apparently it's not the Crusoe, but some weird installation issue with our client's setup.
Fuck Windows; fuck Bill Gates; Fuck Ballmer and his crazy epileptic monkey self.

Chris is now playing I am the World Trade Center. Not too bad. His laptop's speakers sound better than the $30 pair that I got with my first computer in 1993 or so. Big shock.

Oh, by the way, dixiebelle, after considering the amount of time I would have to devote writing my own journal system, I decided, "fuck it," and asked xopherg to give me a code. So he gave me the one that he gave to nandu. You snooze, you lose.

Word of the minute: moist
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Ladysmith Black Mambazo