Category: Rant

Putting the Democratic Party on notice

I’m with orc, in his post Crossing the line.

I’m putting the Democratic Party as a whole, and candidates individually, on notice: If you don’t come out strongly and clearly against this torture bill and any other attempt to legalize illegal detention and torture practiced by this administration, you will not receive one penny from me. You say that will leave the House and Senate in the hands of the Republicans? So what? If you’re not against torture, then you have demonstrated that you wouldn’t be any better than them on the most important issue facing this country.

The future of America is at stake. Take a stand, or fade into oblivion.

If MMORPG gamers acted the way in real life that they do in-game

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.

They’ve finally done it!

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.

And why are you making this my problem?

I had to go into work today (Sunday) to investigate a couple of bugs. Couldn’t reproduce either of them, unfortunately, But that’s not the point of this rant.

The building I work in is ancient and poorly maintained. It’s also an industrial/manufacturing building at heart, with offices sort of grafted on as an afterthought. Really, it’s horrible. Between the annoying desk-shaking thumps I’ve mentioned before, the chemical smells, and the notices posted all over the place warning about asbestos, I feel like Great Big Sea’s “Chemical Workers Song” – “every day you work here you’re two days nearer death”.

It was also very rainy this week, so Thurday and Friday marked the appearance of several new buckets catching water from drips in the ceiling. One of those buckets was in the main hallway, where water was coming through acoustic ceiling tiles. The tiles were bulging and discouloured. Today, the inevitable happened – they didn’t fix it, and so one of the tiles had disintegrated and collapsed into the hallway. Plus the drips are in different places than where the buckets were, so while they were lucky that the tile collapsed didn’t knock over the bucket there was dirty water all over the floor. Since I had the only car in the parking lot, I thought I’d do the right thing and report it so that somebody can come out and clean it up before somebody trips over it.

I called security, because I doubted maintenance would be around on a Sunday. Over the next couple of hours, I got called back by two different people, both of whom called and left messages when I was out of reach, and then called me again when I was – Evidently security had called people, but given them my phone number as a contact. First guy to call me was an on-call pipe fitter – I told him I didn’t think it was a pipe, I thought it was a roof leak. Then another guy from maintenance called and wanted to know all about the details, and whether I thought they could wait till tomorrow or not. How the fuck should I know? Why don’t they send out a maintenance guy to look at it and have him decide?

All I know is that if it was happening in my house I’d want somebody to come out and deal with it right now. And if it had been reported to me by somebody working in my home, I would have come home to have a look at it rather than grilling them about the details.