Is it just me?

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Or have corporate web sites become more obtuse?

We’ve all heard the message on hold. “Most of your questions can be answered by going to our website www.blahdeblahblahblah.com” 

Some of us fume, (I’m one of the fumers) I hear that message and think, “If I had found what I was looking for on your daffy website, I wouldn’t have dug up your freakin phone number from your website to call you.”

The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy

I’m reminded of the passage in Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy between Arthur Dent and the Foreman of the construction crew ready to destroy Arthur’s house.

“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.” 
― Douglas AdamsThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Indeed websites appear to bury the lead more frequently now than in the past. 


Design and Stylistic Rant

I632hexq l’ve decided that the next website I build I’m going to put all the contact information, frequently asked questions, phone numbers, mailing addresses, and any other useful information behind an image of a disused lavatory door with a sign that says “Beware of the Leopard” (That’s my web design idea, call it copyrighted). Optionally, I may add another layer of annoyance by forcing the intrepid web user to open a filing cabinet then simulate flickering of light to make reading the information (displayed as either yellow on grey or red on grey characters) stored in the filing cabinet, a much more challenging thing to do before your first cup of coffee. 

With all these designers with their media/ design/ art school diplomas in web design, you’d think that at some point some professor would have discussed that a significant portion of the population exhibit some level of red-green or blue-yellow colorblindness and a larger portion of the population are shade blind as well. 

Which means that putting a 10 point HelveticaNarrow font in white on a light grey page, is going to look to a lot of folks like a blank page.

I’m not shade or color blind, and stuff like that is annoying as hell to me. All it takes is an allergy day, a cold, or dry eyes and now my lovelies, your web page is useless to pretty much everyone. 

I shouldn’t have to open your page in an HTML editor to be able to see what’s on it.

Just Sayin…


Anyhow.

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My finger is hovering over a schedule time button on the Apple webpage.

I’ve spent 10 minutes thrashing through pages intended to answer every question and provide every service EXCEPT something that must take place in the physical world.

Why not make it simple? How about putting a button Front and Center that says SCHEDULE a visit with an Apple Genius? How about putting that right at the bottom of the opening page?

<sigh> It’s the age of obfuscation.

I’m finally on the page, I think, that will allow me to complete the task that I thought would be simple and only take a minute.

Hovering over the button, I ask myself why is it that I can ONLY schedule on a single day a week out? Why can’t I schedule an appointment on any of the other days that week? Why can’t I schedule an appointment 2 weeks out?

Why is Apple dictating essentially that I’ll have to make a special trip to their store and not be able to combine that trip with other things I might already have on my agenda?

My finger is still hovering. the first appointment is 2:15 in the afternoon, I’d really like a morning appointment, I don’t like being in Apple stores in the afternoon or evening.

Flightline

Then it hits me;

I DON’T LIKE BEING IN APPLE STORES AT ALL!

But the morning is always preferable to afternoon.

I slowly come to realize that while I like Apple products, I can’t stand the noise, crowding, confusion, and general disarray that every single Apple store has become. I’ve actually been to shooting ranges that were quieter than most Apple Stores.

It’s like being in an ‘80s disco bar.

Everyone is yelling to be heard, there’s continuous BOOMING driving base coming from the PA system and at least half a dozen different sound sources all around the room. People are shoving to get to whatever bright and shiny, they want to play with, and they’re rude about it.

4246303 683742 cocktail a mix of various drinks sometimes alcoholic drinks

At least in a bar, I’d have a drink that would be acting as an anesthetic. 

Alas, Apple stores, for all their other bar-like similarities are lacking the one critical component that would allow me to justify shouting over music which is indistinguishable from being on the flight line of a aircraft carrier during a fighter scramble. 

Whiskey!

The only bar I’ve ever enjoyed with noise as loud as the Apple store, was a place where you could get a drink and a BLOW-JOB at the same time.

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The volume of the music was to hide the grunts, shouts and “Rebel Yells” of various guys blowing their loads down willing throats. In other words, the pain in my ears was offset by alcohol and nasty pleasure.

I’m spending premium dollars in an Apple Store. I don’t need Vivaldi but I would like to conduct business at some decibel level below 200. I’d like to literally be able to hear myself think.

The 2:15 appointment has vanished. 2:45 is available.

My finger still hovers over the button.

Nah… I’ll wait.

That was interesting – But a complete waste of time

DVD

Been meaning to try out a thing in the Mac OS called BootCamp. BootCamp is Apple’s tool that sets up the ability for Windows to run on a Mac.

I’d been meaning to do this for years, but since I’m a VMWare Fusion user, I never really had a reason.

Until last night.


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After doing battle with glaciers on the road in front of the house. (Global Warming… MY ASS!) Two days with a trenching tool, snow shovel, and a pick! Only then was I able to get the 4” of ice cleared from in front of my driveway.

We had a county worker fall on the street and injure herself earlier in the week. She turned her ankle so severely that if she didn’t break it she’ll have gotten off lucky.  Thank God she wasn’t in front of my house when she fell. Our street has a long and colorful history some of which I’ve documented in this blog so I won’t retell it in this post.

To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone had been injured

Ironically, the lady was a county employee, and since the county refuses to take responsibility for the road by maintaining and plowing the road perhaps it’s a bit of Karma. Had the county plowed the road, there wouldn’t have been ice 4” thick for her to fall on.

The ice was caused by snowplayers, driving up a dead end road (mine) so that they could play in the abomination the county calls a flood control project. (Another story!)

When you have vehicle after vehicle slowly crusing up the street, then backing down the street spinning their tires, you get ice. This is especially true when the cars and trucks are coming up before we’ve had a chance to get out to the street with snow blowers.


I digress!

After two days of manual labor, my shoulders and the rest of me was pretty sore. (I’m much better today, thanks for asking.)

So I resolved to plant my ass on the couch and do nothing last night. Then I happened to go into my office and noticed a Windows 7 installation disk peeking out of its storage bin.

HardDrive

Hum, “Oh why the hell not? It should be pretty mindless and I’ll be curious if I don’t…”

At this point my tech friends are all saying to themselves, “Uh OH!

To be fair, BootCamp is really cool. It provides any Mac user with a reasonably powerful machine, (ie Most Macs) the ability to create a disk partition on their Mac, then install and run Windows.

boot-campIt works well and even provides the ability to boot up in the partition you’ve created (Windows in my case) OR Mac OS by default. I’m not sure why you’d spend the money on a Mac then only use Windows or another operating system, but I’m sure there are people that do exactly that.

I could see a diehard Windows fan attempting to transition to Mac OS and failing, then continuing to use the Mac running exclusively Windows. It would be a bit of a waste but at least the person would get some utility out of the Mac

Anyhow, BootCamp works and it works well. Windows installed and worked like a champ. I installed the printer drivers I needed and was planning on giving this partition thing a whirl to see if I wanted to perhaps abandon VMWare. So I tell Windows that I want to install an instance of Office.

… and that’s when it all went to hell.

Grrrrr

Unbeknownst to me, Office 365 has some kind of problem with one or more of the HP printer drivers.  Office will install then get to about 90% complete and HANG. To get around this you have to restart Windows, go to services, disable the print spooler, make sure; In my case, that the firewall and Microsoft’s Antivirus were offline, then restart the Office installation procedure.

It was at this point that things went seriously off the rails. Office claimed it was installed but wouldn’t let me sign in, nor would it reinstall.  As I was fiddling with it I started getting a message that Office couldn’t access the internet, but I was looking at webpages FROM Microsoft’s Office installation help and my accounts page. Then I rebooted Windows again and things went from bad to worse.

After a couple of hours I realized the Windows installation had been damaged in some unique and interesting ways. I threw in the towel.

I have a perfectly functional installation of Windows in VMWare, I don’t NEED a BootCamp partition. I especially don’t need to go through the whole Windows installation process again, then wait for Office, etc, etc, etc.

I learned some things I didn’t know before.

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BootCamp works really well.

Note to self, Install Windows, Install Office, THEN install HP printers.

Probably, not a bad rule of thumb to hold off installation of printers in general until after Office is installed and online. I have the suspicion that HP isn’t the only printer manufacturer that’s got some kind of “blocking” bug with Office. This begs the question if you’re installing Office on an existing installation of Windows, should you maybe remove the installed printers then reinstall them after the installation?

On a Mac with Bootcamp installed, the 2nd (Windows) partition is shown on the desktop.

That’s something I don’t care for. I’d like the ability to have that partition hidden unless I explicitly mount it. I know I can hide all hard drives from the desktop, but I’d prefer to have the ability to have user selectable hidden partitions.

Since the Mac OS is, at its core a UNIX system,  I’m fairly sure that I could hide the partition… maybe fstab? Humm, I wonder…

In any case, I’m sticking with VMWare for my Windows needs. The single major reason is this, I can COPY a VMWare container. That container could be Windows, Linux, or other operating systems. Restoring that container is simple and VMWare doesn’t care.

Effectively, this means that I can corrupt the hell out of a VMWare Windows container and lose only the most recent changes (Or bad installation of something).

VMware is not noticeably slower than running Windows as a stand alone partition. So as the doctors say, the benefits outweigh the deficits.

Sad Mac 400x400

This could easily have been worse. I could have trashed my Mac OS installation in the process. I briefly considered that as a possibility. I discounted the potential danger for 2 reasons. 1) I Have a couple of complete backups of my Mac OS X installation. 2) I suffer from that terrible arrogance that comes from the Mac OS being so robust.

Yes, occasionally something really bad happens, but issues I have with my Mac are generally caused because I’m monkeying around not because the OS itself is bad.

So for all of you who’ve not used BootCamp, you can continue to not use it.

If however, you decide to give it a try, you can do so with a bit more confidence. Depending on your needs, you might still consider VMWare or Parallels as options.

PunishmentIf you’re looking for a way to spend an evening…

 

There are far more interesting things you can do instead of experimenting with a computer. I can tell you even BAD sex is more interesting.

Your milage will no doubt vary.

 

Just learned something interesting

I have two blogging programs that I use regularly.

The one I’m using right now is reliable and a workhorse but sometimes it’s a bit more than I really need and its interface is dated and perhaps a little “busy” when I’m interested in just typing.

The Other Blogging program is simple and features the newer “Open” design that many programs are moving to. The newer programs seem to be leaning toward minimalist icons in the menu, and a generally Spartan appearance. I like the look and feel of the newer interfaces, as a result I gravitate toward programs that are using the Spartan look.

February 10 089

Which leads me to some of the problems that new software can exhibit…

Software that’s a bit buggy, or in this case a lot buggy. The newer program has some issues with its spellcheck. “Issues” is me being polite.

Their implementation of spell check is almost completely wrong. A couple of weeks ago I went to great lengths to document how wrong they were.

Oh I was nice. I’d noticed the problems and when to their website to see if there was an estimated date when they’d have it fixed. On their site I saw many people leaving messages about things not working right but no-one was really specific.

The impression I got from the replies the company was writing, was that they didn’t understand what the users were complaining about.

I’m an OLD ASS SQA guy. 

So I figured I’d define the problem in a way that the programmers would understand.

I opened my copy of their program and started checking and unchecking options in the spellcheck system. Then I was doing screen capture and boiling down my procedure to recreate the problems into five or six steps. I put it all together and sent it off to the person at their company who takes care of these sorts of things.

I got a very nice email back saying, “Thank you, we get it now, and we’re working to fix the problem.”

“Cool,” I think.

Then I set all the settings back to my preferred conditions in their program and went on with my life.

Then, over the past couple of days I’ve been firing up the program to write quick little blogs. The program is highlighting some spelling errors but not others. I didn’t notice the inconsistency until this morning. The other thing the program is doing is this. It’s autocorrecting things as I type and doing that wrong!

I go back re-check the settings and confirm that indeed, the little check marks are having absolutely no effect. Which means another bug report to the company and that when they update the program they may have to have the customers do a complete uninstallation and then reinstall the program. That’s seriously ugly! Somewhere along the line, either using the program or changing the settings, the program has lost control of it’s preferences file.

Uh OH!  This means that Blogs I’ve written over the past few days are probably horribly screwed up!

Sure enough, I go out to the blog site and find that not only did the program not schedule things right, it also did some really bad things to spelling in the blogs posted over the last couple of days. 

So I’m falling back to the reliable old workhorse until the programmers get a handle on the defects in the new program.

Maybe I’ll hit the manufacturer of the new blogging program, up for a job. They could use my assistance!

 

In Elder Times…

We had conversations that were civil, it wan’t uncommon to have friends with heterogeneous opinions and you could have a passionate discussion without it ending in name calling or death threats.

The primary differences were that we were face to face, we’d been taught conflict resolution, we understood that the world didn’t revolve around us or our feelings. We knew that sometimes people will say things that we don’t like, agree with, or believe, BUT that it was other folks right to say those things, just as it was our right to express ourselves freely.

These were to some extent, lessons learned in the sandbox, or when we learned to share, or when we learned that for every bully, there’s someone stronger who may or may NOT be more “Just” than the bully they took out.

Then came the internet.

And people could sit behind their screens and say some of the most horrific things imaginable. For many years those of us who understood the old ways simply did what we’d done before. We ignored people who were trying to be offensive and moved on with our lives.

On IRC (Internet Relay Chat) groups we knew where the loudmouth dunderheads were likely to be mouthing off, and where folks who were interested in conversing were likely to be hanging out.

That’s what adults do.

We make choices, we take responsibility for what we see, read or hear. We remember that there is an off switch on our televisions, radios, and computers. If something offends us, we have the ability, right, and duty to ourselves, to turn it off. One thing that happened in the IRC groups was that someone would start mouthing off in a purposely offensive way and we’d all leave the room. The person could type their offensive stuff ’till their fingers bled but we’d not be reading it. They’d try to follow us and we’d leave again. Eventually, they’d get tired and go away.

Then came ICQ. Yeah, remember that? 1996, it was pretty cool. Unfortunately within 2 to 5 years the service was overrun with spammers. “Hi there, do you like date me?

By 2010 when the service went from AOL to a Russian company I’d not been a user for 5 years or more. Even so, we’d all been able to block users and I’d blocked hundreds of spammers if not thousands. Again, taking responsibility for myself.

Facebook and Twitter had eclipsed the ICQ service long before I’d opened and closed my Facebook account.

With Facebook I got tired of ever-changing terms of service, and oversharing my information every time Facebook updated their service. I didn’t like feeling like I had to watch what was supposed to be a fun leisure program as if it contained banking information. Then Facebook added a financial component and I was gone.

I moved to Twitter.

I like a lot of the features. The following of people while stalker-ish is pretty neat and Twitter’s hash tagging and presentation of folks with similar interests to those people I’ve already followed is convenient.

Twitter and Facebook are both facing issues. The way these two businesses are trying to deal with these problems is via censorship. I think this is the wrong way to go.

Rather that allowing some very immature people to dictate via censorship what I can read because they, not I, are offended. Twitter should instead make the offensive situation a teachable moment.

I agree with the ability for me to block certain persons who are chronically offensive to me. I do not think that Twitter or Facebook should sit in judgment of content.

A prime example of why I feel this way, is the story of a 175 year old pub whose Facebook page was deleted because of the pub’s name and over sensitive arbiters of taste. The pub is called “The Black Cock Inn”. Facebook apparently decided this was racist. Uhh 175 years ago in England the most likely meaning was black cockerel (black male chicken). In all probability at the time the place was named they had a ton of black chickens running around.

“Excuse me good man, where might I find food and lodging for the night?”

“Ahh Sir, not a quarter mile from here is an inn.”

“How will I know it?”

“Sir, The yard be full of black cocks, there be one or two in the cook pot too, I’d wager.”

We really must stop looking at everything through the lens of today’s morality and start looking at things in context using the moral lens in effect at the time of an event. We should then compare and contrast the difference so that we may learn from mistakes. However we needn’t  impose guilt on today for the abuses of yesterday, we need only learn, and vow to not make the same mistake moving forward.

Imagine how we’re going to feel when we find out Whales and Dolphins are in fact as intelligent as we are and that we murdered them for food and accidentally while we were fishing without permission in their ancestral waters.

I can hardly wait to see the SJW crowd throwing themselves off the nearest pier or drowning themselves in their bathtubs wracked with guilt.

Pardon me, that was a private fantasy… I’m back now.

Twitter’s Gulag methodology is so prone to abuse that all it takes is a butt hurt person to rally a very few of their friends and BOOM, you’re blown off Twitter, for the simplest of infractions.

adam-baldwin-mouth-getty-640x480The best recent example was when Adam Baldwin had his Twitter account locked over a recent gamer gate tweet.

Mr. Baldwin used no profanity, didn’t single anyone out, and said simply that his opinion was; (I’m paraphrasing) Gamergate folk were more joyous and attractive than anti-gamergate folks.

For that Twitter suspended his account.

The problem seems to be that the progressive liberal social justice warriors, using these services don’t understand that their opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.

ChildishAt the same time, these people have enough Whine power that they are dragging what should be simply services into politics and forcing these services to choose sides when these services should be completely agnostic about race, religion, politics, and everything else.

SJW ThinkingTwitter says that they’re going to be taking on trolls in the coming year. I suspect that means it will be easier for someone with a conservative bent to have their account locked, and harder for a SJW or ISIS recruiter to get tossed off Twitter for making death threats. (Yep, it’s a common occurrence. Direct death threats, or wishing people would die, or that their families would be shot, raped, killed… you name it.)

Usually this is the end of the conversation where the SJW has been proven wrong, or called on to prove their allegations and they are either unable or unwilling to do so.

FailA.K.A. (also known as) They’ve lost the argument and been humiliated in the process. This happens quite a bit especially when the SJW insinuates themselves into a conversation then starts mouthing off about a subject on which they have little direct knowledge, and are instead parroting “what they’ve heard” from other SJWs.

Oddly, the SJW is not usually called a troll. The people called “trolls” are the folks that demand the SJW back up their assertions with facts. I consider it another example of blaming the victims but that’s another story altogether.

Since I tend to say what I mean on Twitter, I wonder how long it will be until I’m labeled a Twitter Troll and have my account locked out.

I wonder if my old IRC handle is still available…

At least there, I’m the master of my own fate.

While writing another piece…

I got to thinking about the internet and wondering about it’s effects on the world.  The piece in question was about Trump calling for us to cut the internet going into ISIS controlled areas.

1450552308_full.jpegAs I thought about it I wondered if you were to disconnect ISIS, would young internet addicted people from the West continue to join their ranks?

If messages of radicalization weren’t regular, would the radicalism simply flame out?

This line of thinking has caused me to wonder, “Is the internet with it’s ability to instantly show the disparity between cultures and living conditions actually the source of the problem?”

When the third world can see the first world through the window of technology, does that engender social unrest, or even civil war? Desire and greed are natural human emotions.

Taking someone from the poorest slum in Brazil to Rodeo Drive and handing them $50 would by most measures be considered cruel. They could window shop all they wanted but never purchase any of the bright shiny baubles.

Gene Roddenberry explored these questions a bit in StarTrek. The Prime Directive wasn’t about protecting The Federation, it was about protecting less advanced cultures.

I suspect his thought on the matter may have been based in the cargo cults that sprang up during and after World War II.

Essentially you had an extremely disruptive event where native people were confronted with technology that was for all intents magic to them.

Items of great value were given to the locals by visitors descending from the sky. These items held little value to the visitors but took on great value and importance in the lives of the natives.

Then one day the visitors left. Taking with them the source of new gifts and wealth. So the natives built effigies of planes, hoping to entice the visitors into coming back.

It reads like the plot of an Ancient Aliens show but it happened.

Maybe the question is; “Have we technocrats been inadvertently cruel and thoughtless by bringing the internet to all parts of the world? Are we essentially saying ‘See, we have all this and you can’t?’

We talk about the disruptive technologies that appear in our society and their effects. What effect do these disruptive technologies have on third world societies?

As an experiment we could shut down those parts of the internet that service Daesh then see what happens. If their violence ceases to spread then we might be on the right track.

These are questions I think are worth answering.


Fear not!

I’m not becoming a social justice warrior. I’ve already been there, done that, and donated the T-Shirt to the preservation of female unicorns society. They used it to light the bonfire that killed the last male unicorn. Now they’re asking for donations funding recombinant DNA research to preserve the unicorns!