The Photographic Truth

This is the tree that knows its picture is being taken:




This is the tree three seconds later when it lets out the breath it has been holding:




And this is the William-Shatner-post-corset-removal tree:




I think that pretty much covers it...

Consume More!

There's a commercial that's currently playing on Hulu that epitomizes pretty much everything that is wrong with the world today. It's a cell phone ad that brags about how long the battery life is by showing two boys in a tent with their dad, watching videos on the phone. Isn't it great? They can sit inside the tent in the woods and watch a four inch screen all day and the battery will last that long!

It makes me want to throw things.

Ironically, I work for the company that funds that ad. Even worse, I am now getting that exact phone because they've come up with some idiotic rule that says everyone needs to have carry a company phone at all times and that company phone number needs to be listed in the email directory that every employee has access to.

That seems a little bit like... oh, say, being on-call 24-7. And we've already established that I'm not an on-call sort of person. I don't work in support. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to have my phone number aside from my boss and friends and family. I don't answer my phone unless I recognize the number, and I sure as heck don't carry my phone with me all the time. And guess what? The world doesn't end when I walk the dogs without my phone. I don't need to be able to look up things online when I'm not in front of a computer. I'd rather just be in the place where I am at the moment.

So basically some poor kid in China is being abused so that more of the earth's resources can be used to create a phone that I don't need, don't want, and don't intend to do anything with other than turn off and put it in a locked drawer somewhere so that it doesn't get stolen.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Idiots.

Suspicious Subject

So last week was the users' conference, during which a whole bunch of people got together in a hotel in some other state and did demos and training of a whole bunch of projects, including the one I work on. I had a great time, mostly because I didn't go, but also because a whole lot of people were at the conference and thus unavailable to bug me.

Even better, of the three remaining developers who were theoretically at work with me, one was sick and going on vacation, one was merely sick, and the third is so quiet I honestly had to stand up and look to see if he was even there. (He was.) Taken all together, that led to some fairly productive time, and I finally found the source of a problem in our product that has been plaguing me for months.

Naturally I sent Rvan email at about 9pm with the subject "The users should go away more often..." and then followed it with information about the bug and what was triggering it. I wasn't even thinking about the fact that Rvan would be projecting the contents of his laptop screen during his presentations the next day.

Luckily (or maybe unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), Rvan thinks about these sorts of things, and replied saying he was glad that I found it, but that he was going to delete that email so he didn't have that subject line presented to a few hundred of our users. The thing is, he didn't change the subject of the email when he replied, so when I got in the next morning and replied to his email telling him he was a spoilsport, I came really close to sending mail with the exact same subject. And that might have been a problem because Microsoft Outlook (ptui!) has a feature where it pops up a small window with the subject of newly-receive email.

I did happen to notice the subject before I sent it, and changed it to "RE: Great job Rvan!". Because, you know, sometimes I try to be nice.

Sadly, he had disabled the notification popup during his talks, so I wasn't able to use all of the rest of the subject lines I spent the rest of the afternoon coming up with.

Maybe next time...

Neighborhood Watch (Me Not Do Anything)

Here's the problem with my neighborhood: my neighbors work too hard on the weekend. Sure, the fact that they keep up their yards and don't park their cars on the lawn are good things that keep the housing prices up (sort of) and keep the riffraff out. (Yes, I might be one of the riffraff...)

On the other hand, it's hard to really enjoy being slothful on the weekends when you can hear people working hard on the other side of the fence. While I'm lying on the futon out on the cat porch with the big dog snoring on the ground next to me, contemplating eventually getting a broom and knocking down the cobwebs that I've been staring at for the last two hours (or maybe just leaving them there for another week -- no rush), I can hear one neighbor using his leaf blower, and the other neighbor raking. It makes me feel, I don't know, lazy or something.

I don't think my neighbors realize how much they're hurting my feelings by making me feel this way.

Oh well. Whatever.

Just a Drive By

At some point soon I'll need to get a new car. Decision-making not really being my thing, this has been dragging on for quite a while.

The biggest problem is that I can't decide what I care about. Buying a house was relatively easy -- I had (X) dollars and my only real requirement was that it not have a pool. My realtor then showed me a bunch of houses that cost (X + $30,000) because that's what realtors do, and I bought one of them. (I occasionally, like last weekend, regret that pool requirement, but then I think about the likelihood that my pool would either be drained or full of green slimy water when I wanted to use it and realize that I made the right decision.)

The car requirements, though, change depending on my mood. Here is the list of number one requirements going back a few months:

• Low cost
• Good stereo with a way to connect my iPod
• Little road noise
• Great highway gas mileage
• Not white
• Four doors
• Okay, at least three doors
• Not a wagon
• Fun to drive (high-torque, baby!)
• Cheap

Unfortunately, depending on how you select from that list either no cars apply or a whole bunch of cars apply. It really didn't help things when Rvan told my the BMW 335d was "too much car" for me this week. Okay, sure, I'd probably end up in a ditch in less than a week, but still.

Anyhow, what will likely happen is that I'll just keep driving my Civic until it suffers from some catastrophic break down, at which point I'll walk to the nearest car dealership and buy the first thing I see.

Honestly I think that system is about as good as anything else...

Poor Imposture

I realized this week that the main thing wrong with the world is that it matters more whether you can get the job than whether you can actually do the job. It's such a pain to hire or fire someone, that as long as a person isn't waving a gun around and threatening to shoot someone, it's easier just to say "Eh, maybe he'll get better, and the next one could be worse" than it is to find someone else. (If a person actually is waving a gun around, that's probably not the right time to fire him either...)

Anyhow, I spent a large portion of the last week revising documentation for the product I've been working on for the past two years. Apparently we paid some vendor to write user guides less than a year ago, but things have been changed in the past six months. Since we've been pretty bad at documenting what changed, I'm pretty much the only person who really can update the user guide.

We've already established that I like to make fun of other people's spelling and grammar, but I went into this whole thing thinking "hey, it was written by a professional -- all I'll need to do is change the sections where we've changed the product."

Then I read the existing guide.

Here's a condensed version of what the hundreds of pages of professionally-produced user guides look like:

Table of Contents

Scope

Flow of Control

Task 1

Task 2

Task 3

Task 4

End

Scope

This user guide is meant to be used by the users.

Flow of Control

(Diagram that was superseded two years ago here.)

Task 1

The first task is done by the RF Engineer when they enter a Date and then click on the Submit button. Then you're done until you get to Task 2.

Task 2

After the first task, Task 2 should be done by the Regulatory user. They need to click on the approve button.

And on it goes. Seriously, if you write technical documentation for a living, shouldn't it just be second nature to format everything the same way? If you're going to capitalize and underline the button names, then capitalize and underline all of the button names. And we aren't speaking German, so random nouns shouldn't be capitalized, no matter how important you think they are. And I know there isn't a good gender-neutral pronoun, but one RF engineer is not a "they". That's just wrong. Also, if I'm the one who has to go through and figure out how to fix all of the MS Word styles in the document so the table of contents doesn't look like it was done by a schizophrenic, something is wrong.

Sometimes you just want to demand your money back.

Taxpayer #2 Strikes Again

I've got this tax thing down now -- it took me less than two hours to incorrectly fill out my federal and state taxes online this year. After I submitted the federal forms I even got the standard "Dear Free File Taxpayer #2" email.

Then I got the rejection notice about five minutes later.

Automatic rejection is apparently my new superpower. I'm never playing the lottery online.

Anyhow, I went back and clicked the radio button that I forgot to click the first time.

Then I got the second rejection email.

And I went back and clicked the same radio button again and submitted it again.

The third time was the charm for the whimsical binary gods, which is good since I don't think Rvan has any pull with the IRS.

I'm trying to figure out how to turn my new superpower into something useful or even lucrative, but I'm really having a hard time here...