Author: Paul Tomblin

A company of idiots

I work at a company that employes thousands of people. Early this morning, Corporate IT send out a message to everybody at the company with a Lotus Notes (bleargh) account warning them that a couple of servers are going to be upgraded this weekend and Notes might not be available during the upgrade. That was immediately followed by a deluge of idiots using “Reply All With History” to ask why they were getting this mail, followed by a few dozen people saying “Stop using Reply All”, followed by more people saying “You’re doing it too, you idiot”, followed by the original few dozen saying “if I hadn’t done a Reply All, I’d only be talking to people who’d already done it”, followed by several petty flame wars, followed by still more people saying “take me off this list”. It’s the most traffic I’ve seen on Lotus Notes since I came to the company – as a matter of fact, it probably outnumbers all the Lotus Notes I’ve had in total since I came to the company.

Fortunately my Unix mail account is still working.

New keyboard

SafeType keyboardI’ve got the new keyboard and it’s nice. It takes a bit of getting used to, and strictly speaking I need more mobility in my left hand than the cast allows me. But when I get the arms of my chair set up right and the pillow under my cast exactly right, it’s just about full speed for normal text typing. Still very strange trying to find number keys, and very hit and miss to find the various modifier keys. The mirrors are more help with the number keys, especially since the modifiers aren’t labelled in an Apple manner, but also because they’re too far away from the mirrors to see them well.

SafeType keyboardOne of the weirder aspects of this system is that is comes with a PS/2 to USB adaptor, and it’s got two connectors, one for a PS/2 mouse. I don’t have a PS/2 mouse, I have a USB mouse, but when I plug this adaptor in, then the Powerbook thinks it has a mouse plugged in, even if my USB mouse isn’t plugged in. This means that the trackpad doesn’t work (because I turned on that option when I’m typing one-handed because otherwise my hand drags on it and moves the cursor when I don’t want it). This causes problems when I have to unplug the mouse to, say, plug in the Compact Flash reader. I’ve either got to unplug this keyboard and go back to one handed typing, or reconfigure to allow the trackpad when a mouse is plugged in. What I really need is a small USB hub. I wonder if an unpowered one would work with this keyboard or if it draws to much?

Aaaarrrgh!

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate typing with one hand, even with Sticky Keys turned on? I just spent way too fucking long on one of those stupid meme quizes. I wrote several paragraphs each on apple, linux, cross country skiing, flying, odd professors and the like, and was just finishing up 4 paragraphs on why usenet is better than blogging when I accidentally hit a key combination that closed the tab I was writing in – I think I was reaching for splat-x and hit splat-w. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

You know what’s aggravating?

When you order a $314 keyboard specifically so you can do some work while your arm is in a cast to immobilize your wrist (and because you had a bit of rsi already and were already thinking about solutions) and you spend $45 extra for “next day air” shipping, and 24 hours after you ordered it, it still hasn’t shipped.

OI! I SPENT THE RIDICULOUS AMOUNT YOU CHARGE FOR HANDLING TO GET QUICK HANDLING!

It better ship by COB tomorrow or I’m going to be more than pissed.

Weekend Update

Evidently the weekend’s activities weren’t as successful as originally thought. As well as this palm-to-armpit cast thanks to being rammed by a canoe full of idiot girl scouts, I also seem to have totally fucked up the light over the garage. As of yesterday, there is no power at all in the garage, not to the new light, nor to the inside light and plug socket. And the circuit breaker is not tripped. I even tried resetting it just to see if that would help. I swear there is a secret switch in the house for the power to the garage, and we’re switching it without realizing it.