Category: Geekery

I guess I’m going to have to marry my girlfriend. Sure, I don’t know anything about her, but I’ve completed all the girlfriend quests and I need to level up.

I keep encountering players who just run from quest to quest, ignoring any of the detail along the way. It’s like the game is something to be gotten through as quickly as possible. I tried to praise the art and mood of the game on the forums, and got jumped all over by people complaining about the frame rate or how low resolution the beta graphics are, and how so many of the animations suck. It’s as if all the art and beauty that the designers slaved over is inconsequential because it doesn’t help them level up.

I’ve always said that no user interface could possibly be worse than that of Lotus Notes. Well, our company recently announced that you could access your Notes through a web interface on the intranet. Hooray, I thought, I could get rid of Cross Over Office and the bletchery of running a Windows emulator on my Linux computer.

Then I tried it.

First problem – every 5 or 10 minutes, it pops up a window to tell me that my session has expired, which requires me to click on it, then enter the first character of my user id in the pop-up authentication window, then tab to accept the Firefox fill-in of the user id and password, and click again on the login button. Then retry whatever I was doing. Ugh.

Second problem – every time I accept a meeting invitation, it disappears into the ether, and I get some warning about it being outside my available time. So I looked, and evidently I’m only available from 10pm to 3:30am. I tried to change that to something more sane, and my meetings didn’t come back. I guess they’re gone for good.

Third problem – after leaving the application running for three straight days, I start getting a Firefox popup saying that the script is unresponsive and do I want to end it. If I say “Continue” the operation I’m doing will complete, but I’ll get the same popup a few minutes later. If I say “End script”, the operation I’m doing won’t complete, and I’ll get the same damn popup when I *do* want to do the operation. Shift-reload won’t fix the problem. Even closing the tab the Notes client is running on and re-opening it won’t fix the problem. I suspect I’m going to have to exit Firefox, and that’s just ridiculous.

So I’m back to running Notes under CrossOver Office. Sigh.

Last night I got home at 9:30, and decided to blow off steam by playing a bit of the MMORPG that must not be named.

While I was playing, the graphic screen went away and was replaced by the Windows desktop with a popup on it saying that updates have been installed and I need to reboot. I clicked the “reboot later” button and went back to the game. I figured that would be the end of it, but about 4 more times in the course of playing the game, it did the same damn thing. This would be an annoyance in a single player game, but when you’re playing with other people it’s infuriating to you and everybody else around you.

Why isn’t there a “REBOOT LATER, I REALLY MEAN IT AND STOP ASKING ME FOR FUCKS SAKE!” button?

Meanwhile my Powerbook was sitting there, needing to reboot after installing the new version of iTunes and Quicktime, and all it was doing to annoy me was the Software Update program icon was hopping up and down in the dock. I’ve never seen it change the video mode or do anything more obtrusive than that, even when I was playing DVDs.

I’ve been using Linux since 1992 or so. I don’t remember the date, but the distro was SLS 1.03 and the kernel was 0.99.14. Linux has grown by leaps and bounds in terms of usability since then, but it still has a LONG way to go. Mac OS X has gone from 0 to way, way better than Linux in the course of 3 or 4 years. It’s amazing.

Some Linux developer considered this a decent error dialog. Can I get a “Sheesh” from the crowd?