Tralfaz

Category: annoyances

  • PC Repair Theatre

    You might recall my bitching a few weeks ago about my work laptop. I foolishly dropped it and it landed on my iphone charger and broke the screen. That was in May. Mid August they figured pout what I needed to do to order a new panel to replace the broken one.

    The local, on site tech got the panel, but then the backlight didn’t work, so he called the HP support team in.

    Oh boy, what a fun story that is.  The original repair took three days, and went through two logic boards, and a second display. But they got it back together, and handed it to me on Aug 30th.

    Immediately I noticed that the USB ports on the left side were dead. Recommendation, install the drivers. I did. No joy.

    Our local tech was gone for a week on vacation, so I lived with bad USB ports. Not too much of a hardship.

    Today, the HP support person came back out. Didn’t believe that I had installed the drivers and tried that first. No joy. Replaced the system board. No joy. Thought it was the 16G ram in the system, replaced that, no joy, tried a new HD, no joy.

    So, tomorrow she will be back with yet another logic board, and we try again. I am back up on a loaner PC, and I had a very non-productive day.

    I hate windows laptops. I especially hate HP hardware (their printers, once the gold standard, now suck donkey balls, and their PC’s are all the bad things that was Compaq).

     

     

  • Must be Monday – 2 bluescreens by 8:00 AM

    Sigh. This is getting tiresome. I have not had such issues with computer crashes since I first went to Windows Vista in 2007. 

    I come in this morning and pop my computer on the docking station. It was sleeping happily, then I pressed the power button to “wake it up”. I get the familiar password screen, then BAM – blue screen.

    Fuck.

    Wait for it to finish the memory dump. Hmmm, IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_0, and a search of the internet tells me not much.

    Power it off and on again. It gets about 1/3 the way through booting, and BAM, another blue screen.

    Fuck.

    Third time is a charm. It is up, and I only took an hour to get to a ready state of working.

    Last week, the service people replaced my screen, several cables, and the logic board. Now I am getting lots of bluescreens. And my left side USB ports are dead. While they supply power, they do not recognize any devices attached.

    I hate this PC.

    Now to recover all the in progress documents.

  • Bad neighbors – Party goes Wild

    A little over a year ago, we moved from our “edge of civilization” house in Tucson to Chandler, a much more standard suburban setting. For the most part it has been a pretty good experience.

    But there has been a soft underbelly. We live next door to a house with a just graduated high school baseball player (presumably he is playing ball in college as well) who seems to love having loud parties. Throughout spring and early summer, the night for these parties was Tuesday, and they were not too bad, but still annoying. However as time went on, they became bigger and rowdier. A couple months ago, we started alerting the police (after midnight, we are not ogres), and that seemed to quench the growth.

    But they learned to have a lookout for the cops, and would quickly quiet up and turn off the lights. The cops would look around, see nothing and move on. 20 minutes later it was in full roar, again. Sigh.

    Last night they had a rager. When my wife took the dogs out to potty at 11PM, the yard was full, the house was full, and even the balcony on the neighbors patio was filled with people. We left it alone, but at 1:00AM it got (hard to believe it) even louder. So, a call to the police. This time, they came out in force, at least 6 cars, one k9 unit, and they processed the people on the neighbor’s lawn. The police even hunted for those inevitable “hiders” who try to become invisible.  That took well over an hour. Perhaps it was all the clear underage drinking.

    One of the annoying things about these parties besides the noise, is the fact that those who attend and smoke seem to think nothing about flicking their butts into our yard (and presumably the other yards adjacent to them). Really annoying to have to clean up after someone else’s party.

    Where are the parents you might say?  Well, I don’t know for certain, but their cars were in the driveway, so I have to assume that they either knew about the party, or helped with its execution. In any case, they can’t possibly deny that they knew what was going on.

    (Update: As I write this, two women walked out of their house, looking pretty trashed, and drove away.)

    This morning, as I was picking up the debris from the party that found its way to our yard, I peeked over the fence. Their yard looks like WWIII. I hope the son has to clean it up with a raging hangover.

    In Tucson, there was an ordinance that if a party was loud enough to require the police to come break it up, they got a lovely red sticker on their window or door, easily visible, that signifies that this house had been a subject of a noise complaint, and that sticker must remain up for 180 days. Sadly, Chandler could use a similar ordinance.

  • Hmm, it’s about time

    My main domain, tralfaz.org was a compromise. When I first registered it in 1999, the tralfaz.com domain wasn’t available, so I grabbed the .org variant.

    I have often kept an eye on the .com domain to see if it expires, but the scummy domain squatter hasn’t budged. I wouldn’t have minded, but over the last 14 years, the owner has done nothing with that domain. It has moved between registrars (because the “coming soon” message changes every couple of years), but never once has there been any “real” content at that site.

    Then today I get three queries that it is going up to auction. It looks like I am going to be able to pay some scuzzball too much money to get the domain I wanted originally.

    Astro(For those that don’t know, Tralfaz was the original name of Astro, the Jetson’s dog before they got him. At the time I had an English Mastiff named Astro, and I wanted a domain that reflected that, so “Tralfaz” it was.)

  • What a wasted day

    The joy that is Windows. Every so often you need to blow it all away and start from scratch. Today was that day.

    Outlook had been a piece of garbage for quite some time. Lots of bandaids, duct tape and baling wire was keeping me up and running. But today it finally gave up the ghost.

    So, back up all my files, and off to IT to reimage, and get me back to a stable state. Alas, a lot of software needs to be installed to get me functional.

    So, I really got 2 hours of work done today, and tonight I need to leave it running to complete the encryption of the disk (paused now).

    Happy, happy, joy, joy, joy

  • One thing I hate about Chandler

    In general, I love living here in Chandler. Great neighborhood, great neighbors, lots of quality restaurants, and good shopping.

    But there is one bad thing. We have biting ants. Not the usual fire ants that you can see and avoid. These little black ants that swarm up your legs and sting like crazy.

    We had a nest in our yard, fortunately the pest control people eradicated it post haste last year. But lately, we have had some rain, and rain brings out the bugs. On the walk with the dogs this morning, I got attacked. hundreds of them swarmed up my legs, and were stinging up my calf.

    Ouch. About 10 minutes of swatting and wiping them off, and I am covered in bites.

    I hate nature sometimes.

  • Quickie: School starts. My commute sucks for a few days

    Ah, the children are back in school this morning. Apart from the fact that it is only July 22nd, and that is a sucky/short summer vacation for the kidlets, it also means chaos on the drive in.

    School buses are learning their new routes (they practiced last week, but it always seems like it has kinks when there are actual pickups). Kids are doing lots of dumb things getting to and waiting for the buses (playing grab ass, and squirting into the street). And the helicopter parents who much drop little johnny off at school are kamikaze dive bombing, running red lights, blocking intersections, and cutting across 3 lanes of traffic to get 3 cars earlier in the queue.

    This means it takes me about twice as long to drive in, and much head shaking behind the wheel (forget about cycling in this week, too dangerous).

    But it will pass.

  • Dear Google, please stop fscking with Gmail

    Two days ago, I gave you props for being smart about the “Reply All” function in Gmail. Today, you wiped out that karma credit you earned with your new changes to gmail.

    Once again Google screws their userbase
    Once again Google screws their userbase

    I have long been a happy, satisfied customer of gmail. Hell, I purchase a small business account for my main domain, because your service is pretty kick ass. I have been on gmail since it was invitation only back in 2003 (I think). Mostly, I access through the web, as I have found the interface to be clean, intuitive, and efficient.

    I understand that your product teams like to have things to work on. Heck, I am in product management, so I know the ship or die mentality.

    You may have done some customer validation, and market research. Heck, you probably have enough back end analytics to get a very granular idea of how people use and interact with Gmail. So, after crunching that data, you put together a feature map, and started coding.

    But, I have become quite satisfied with my email workflow, and even something as innocuous as the tabs to organize email is disruptive to my work. This will drive me to move to using a MUA to process my mail (Apple Mail or Outlook) and to bypass the once excellent, spartan, and usable gmail interface.

    No, I will not give up my gmail address for this, but I would be a lot happier if you gave people the option to stay with what they had. You are getting as bad as Facebook in changing the look and feel of Gmail.

  • Where has all the Flash gone?

    Please, it's for the children
    Please, it’s for the children

    Thinking back to 2007, and the launch of the original iPhone, I remember the outcry over the fact that the iPhone didn’t render Adobe Flash content. Lots of predictions of doom and gloom for the device (although no cellphones at the time really supported it).

    As a Mac person, I have long loathed Flash. The implementation on the Mac was buggy and a huge resource hog.  I would have to run a plugin on my browsers to turn off flash or the CPU would be pegged, and the fans ramp up to “747 takeoff mode”.

    But Apple stuck to their guns. Of course, there were lots of people who had Android, which did support flash and did a lot of hating on Apple’s position. But then they saw that flash would drain the power in your battery in a ridiculously short time.

    Fortunately, the Web designers took note, and flash seems to be on the wane. I don’t come across many sites that use more than a minuscule amount of flash content. The lazy sites that pretty much did all their work in flash have gone the way of the do do. And the world is better.

    This was brought to my attention when after a required reboot on my work PC, I was prompted to update flash. That has become less important than ever for me. It’s a good thing.

  • The idiots have won: Time to remove the “Reply All” option in email

    Microsoft, Apple, Thunderbird (indeed, all MUA’s):

    Time to kill/hide the Reply all option
    Time to kill/hide the Reply all option

    It is time to remove the “reply all” option. I know that there are valid use cases for it, but alas, the general population has failed to grasp the implications of this seemingly innocuous button on their email. Yes, there are times that people really really do want to spam their colleagues like it was a listserv, but this is an edge use case.

    Unfortunately, the idiots who populate the corporate and social world today seem to think that the normal use of email is to reply all. I have even heard them justify this by saying “If all those people were copied originally to the invite to meet for drinks on Friday, then I need to let them all know I am in.”*

    Even educated, scientists who I work with have this affair with the reply all button.

    Back when I was at Cisco in the early ‘oughts, we had these huge mail storms. People used mailing lists, and sent trivial status updates to literally thousands of people (good reason to limit distribution list access), to which many would reply “Please remove me”, of course this lead to a lot of other people replying the same, and suddenly you have an email thread with 500 replies in less than an hour, with absolutely no commercial value.

    Time for the nuclear option:

    1. Remove the button completely – yes, this makes life more difficult for people who have legitimate uses.
    2. Make it available as a menu option – prefer buried a couple layers deep. I know this breaks my mantra of keep it simple and accessible. I am willing to make a tradeoff here.
    3. If neither of these are attractive, then add a dialog box, particularly when there are more than 3 recipients of the original email, that warns people of how rude it is to spam their colleagues needlessly
    4. Put some intelligence into the email application. If the topic is mundane, and there are lots of people in the “to:” list, move them to a BCC: to prevent the dreaded reply all.

    Of course, the reasonable thing would be to expect people to have some common courtesy, and refrain from replying all.

    The one bright light is that Gmail’s online interface, while I find lots of flaws with it, does this well. A user has to take an extra step to reply all to an email, and it does keep it down. Of course, if you download your mail into Outlook, that safety is defeated.

    —

    *Yes, this email happened this week, and really annoyed the hell out of me.