Category: Geekery

Can somebody tell me why…

…the installer for the latest update to Photoshop Elements thinks it has to kill every other application running on your computer? Even bloody Terminal! Don’t they realize that Mac OS X is a modern OS, not Mac Classic or Windows 9x where an inadvertent gnat fart could crash the computer?

Ooooh, pretty

My favourite computer accessory store, FrozenCPU.com, now sells PolyGFX Case Skins to customize your case. Even better, they’ll let you submit your own imagery and they’ll print you up a custom case skin.

I’ve never been all that tempted by some of the “Pimp My Box” stuff like cold cathode tubes or water cooling systems, but I’m sorely tempted by this. My gigantic Linux full tower sits up on my desk to keep it from getting clogged with dust, but it’s sort of overwhelming there.

I’ve been playing around a bit with Photoshop Elements to make a couple of candidate images. Here are a couple of small copies of the huge images I’ve made: Early morning departure and Clouds

The originals are 49 inches by 17 inches at 300 pixels per inch, so they’re pretty damn huge. I’m not going to stress my cable modem by putting links to them here.

Not “Bill Law is dead” sad, but sad none-the-less

In software development, there is nothing sadder than seeing a nice simple and elegant design turn into a mishmash of special cases and exceptions – except maybe having your project relocated to India. And in this case, I’m not close enough to that part of the project to see if it’s just that real life turned out to be a lot more complicated than the design, or if (as I suspect) the guy doing the work is overlooking simple and elegant ways of solving the problems and grafting on complicated band-aids on top of other complicated special case band-aids.

Pulling out the thermo-nuclear trump card

Our QA group works in the basement of this building. I work on the third floor. The only elevator is a freight elevator at the other end of the building, and I think you need your doctor to swear on a stack of bibles that you are legitimately handicapped before you can use it. Consequently, when the QA people need me to come down and look at a problem, I have to haul myself down this steep stairway in one of the danker and more industrial smelling parts of the building. I would like to I avoid it as much as possible. However, one of the QA people, Lisa, always calls me first whenever she has any problem, and she’s not very good at describing what the problem is, so I have to go down the stairs to see her. Unfortunately she’s very nice and pretty good at her job for the most part, so I can’t just tell her to fuck off.
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