Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/28/microsofts-priority-update-laptop-de-nazification/
Cleaning out the inbox, I find this image to recall: 
Yes, apparently there was a swastika or two found in the reserved areas of a font set that had been converted over from some overseas workers who didn’t know any better. The de-Nazification of my laptop was regarded as a Critical Update for Windows that may have required a system reboot.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/04/28/buncha-random-stuff/
I’m on my third day of my new work shift of 7am-3pm. It is a little rough getting out of bed, sure, but I get the office to myself for two hours, I get lunch early, and at 3pm I have time to enjoy some sunshine and maybe the paper and a magazine or two, down the block at the local coffee shop. Then it is five or six and I still have time to engage in domestic or creative activities. So, today, I have some time to type stuff here. A random smattering of links and observations and whatver.
In cleaning out the mailbox, I have to give props to Matt Johnson for what he titles “YA Mirror” … the contents? A copy of “Curt Tucker is a Liar” for posterity. Google is doing its job just right, at the moment. I’m such a mean, defamatory person, huh?
Yayoi’s Mom visited last week, alla way from Japan’s third-largest city, right between the big big Tokyo in the East, and the nearly as big Osaka in the West. Well, you see the parallel as apparently we’ll have to visit Nagoya next year for their own World’s Fair. Anyway, the whole visitation worked really nicely. The ol’ lady has an awful fondness for food and drink, but today I’ve noted that my belly has shrunk considerably from the massive swelling it exhibited Monday. I also have new pants and a belt and you know what, a little N Scale steam engine for my future model railroad. Japanese-style! Yum!
It was sad for the both of them ladies to part with each other Monday morning. So, when dropping off at the airport I did the smoothest thing I could to park in the far lot and ride the people mover in to give them ample time for goodbyes. Among my newfound afternoon activities I ought to write that lady a thank-you note.
On Saturday I drove us all down to visit Champaign. Weird weird story is that as soon as I arrived at the Illini Union, I received an e-mail from a stranger on my hiptop with the title “Curt Tucker is Still a Liar” purportedly from a current employee who closed with the words “wish I’d seen this web page before I started work there.” I’m no Ralph Nader, but we can all do our small, incendiary part to get the word out when a public entity gets us a notably good or bad experience.
Ah, by the way, I’ve got a GMail account. More out of curiosity than anything. I’m not checking it so often at this time: dannyman@gmail.com. The interface is kind of slick. It groups messages in to “conversation” threads, which is something that Microsoft notably sucks at. It is also good at folding quoted blobs of text out of the way. I’d be impressed if some of their storage came from some algorithm that cleverly identified quoted text and simply cross-referenced the blob appropriately. But then, text isn’t so expensive, right? The big savings would come from being clever with binary attachments. Calm down, Danny!
I’m also on orkut in case you have decided to join that hip wave of friendster technology.
Oh, you need cheap ink for your bubblejet? I’ve done well with 1800ink.com. They sent a little business card with my order, which I taped to the printer for the next time I run out. Stuff came fast, and I paid like $3 for perfectly good cartridges that retail for like $20.
Eh, fuggit. I’m caught up on e-mail to early April now. Progress progress.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/04/16/still-plenty-of-work-to-do/
It has been a busy busy week at work. And just now at noon on Friday it has started to calm down a bit. I figure I can spend some slack time. It is not just that I feel tired, but I do this clever thing of keeping a log of all the stuff I do at work. Based on the size of this week’s log, I have evidence that this has been the busiest week I’ve had at work so far.
Especially because the sun has come out the past few days, warming Chicago up to a pleasing 70 degrees, I start to lament the virtuality of my existance. During the Winter or during the Summer, it is not so bad to be cooped up in a climate-controlled environment, taking it easy, whiling the season away. But you know, doing computers eight hours a day, five days a week … there’s less interest in the virtual work hobby after hours. And especially when the sun comes out … it is just time to take a nice long walk and smell the grass.
Things have been moving around at work, and things will be moving around more. I’m stepping more into the role of “manager” and one of the things I’ve had very little time to work on is a job req for some introductory-level first-tier support representatives. There is a lot of work to be done. It is actually somewhat intimidating, but then that is good because it is nice to have a challenge. Anyway, can’t talk much about that.
Yayoi’s Mom is coming in from Japan for a week, starting Wednesday. I’ll be surrendering my bedroom to our honored guest. Yayoi seems a little cheerier lately. I think she feels more secure in her relationship with me, and the weather it is not winter any more … there’s that feeling of liberation when you can just step on out of your house without wrapping yourself in layers and layers of stuff.
And it is nice when your Mom can appear in the flesh from 10,000 miles away. It is tough to be a stranger in a strange land where none of the words are pronounced as they are spelled.
Though, she does like Chicago. We went out last night with a whole bunch of strangers that she knows through an association with a cooking club she joined online. She likes that we can go out to a fancy sushi restaurant and rap with a gaggle of intelligent young professionals. We shared our table last night with a loud-mouthed young doctor lady, and a quiet British-Canadian from Toronto who is working for a video game company, thanks in no small part to NAFTA. Champaign-Urbana is not the same.
One thing I’ve done lately is move back to FreeBSD. Windows is nice when you don’t feel much urgency about getting work done. But if I want sheer productivity, it is hard to beat a crisp, clean fvwm2 desktop. Where Windows lends me alt+tab, and tends to run out of memory and sit around swapping, fvwm2 with a 3×3 grid of nine virtual desktops lets me jump around from screen to screen. It is actually more visual than windows … it lets me spread out, but the real estate is in part a cerebral one. The rest of the guys at work have twin flat-screen monitors. I’ve appropriated a single, large 20″ CRT … I have nine very large work screens that I can swap through, and my workstation can keep up. I’m such a freak.
Still, it is a bit painful in that it is not easy to work with Word documents, and I have to figure out how to configure Java to work in the web browser, and Flash, as well as the little bits of glue that would let me click on something in the e-mail client, and have it open in the web browser. And then there’s the web sites — and we have a lot of “control panel” stuff at work — that only work in Internet Explorer, so I have to turn and talk to the old laptop waiting at my side.
Well, there’s still plenty of work to do …
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/03/25/innovation-lacking-when-regulators-regulate/
Okay, if you have any interest in Microsoft and/or European anti-trust regulation, check out this New York Times article. It gets good on page two.
The background is that Europe has told Microsoft that they will need to offer a version of Windows that does not include Media Player, so that computer vendors can sell a version of Windows with competing media playing software.
A colleague at Microsoft ranted yesterday that this was a massive imposition, because after removing Media Player, they would have to test Windows, which would take months of time and thousands of employees. This complaint seemed strange to me, as Microsoft is frequently making revisions to its operating system, and distributing these changes via Windows Update, so, it surely has some mechanism for testing Windows? And it is not like this need to change Windows is entirely unanticipated, as they’ve been working towards it for five years.
Anyway, to the first quote:
“Microsoft … said the commission’s ruling would stifle innovation and deprive consumers of choices.”
What charms me about Microsoft is that any threat of government regulation will always deprive them of the ability to innovate. (They don’t really seem to do much “innovation” themselves anyway, they mostly just copy or co-opt the innovations of others.) In this case, they are being compelled to innovate, by changing their software so as to offer consumers more choices.
I wonder if whomever issued their objection stopped to consider whether they needed a more innovative objection? If only there were other consumer software monopolies haunted by the specter of government regulation after which Microsoft could model innovative rebuttals to the specter of government regulation!
Oh, but it gets better. Next quote:
“Once regulators get their bit in their teeth and realize they can regulate, they may not stop with the bad actors,” said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley research firm.
Yes … once regulators figure out that they can regulate, they might start regulating! The implications of this could be spectacularly regulatory!
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/02/26/sullied-outlook/
So, I’m told to send an e-mail to a third party. Microsoft Outlook conveniently highlights the e-mail address, so that I could click on it to end an e-mail. But the e-mail I’m sending is actually based on another e-mail, so I’d rather forward.
So, I right-click. Can I add the e-mail to my contacts list? No. So, I pull up contacts window. I put the guy’s first name in and drag the e-mail hyperlink to the e-mail address field. Close and some annoying dialogue pops up and I click it away without reading it because I don’t care what silly advice Outlook has for me.
So, I can not find the contact in my contacts list. Okay … I keep clicking away trying to make the search work right because I tell it to search all lists but it keeps switching to “search global list” but whatever.
So, instead of searching for the contact I guess I screwed up when I entered merely a first name and e-mail address, I go and drag the little blue e-mail address to the To: field in my message composer. Edit edit edit proof-read double-check contacts hey … why is the To: address prefixed with mailto:? Edit that …
Edit that … I mean … each time I try to edit the To: address it only let’s me select all or none. I can not edit an e-mail address. Can I right-click on it? Yes, but unlike, say, the file browser, there is no “rename” or other “edit the fucking e-mail address option.”
Stuff like this drives me crazy. Why do we put all these features in the software when none of the features are actually useful, and we actually have less ability to do things than we did in the evil bad old days when software was “hard” to use?
So, I delete the mailto: address, highlight the blue blob from the other message, right-click, and paste a well-formed e-mail address into the To: field.
Sigh.
I just have to rant sometimes. I’m usually a very easy-going guy, but over-engineering that interferes with my ability to do simple and obvious things I take for granted, like editing an e-mail address … that stuff makes me really really irritated. Dang.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/02/20/make-adobe-fast/
Thank you, NTK:
More cheap hacks to counter-impress smug MacOS X owners.
Yes, Panther's "Preview" app is a super-fast PDF viewer that's
a lot snappier than Adobe "OMFG! A vector! How do I draw
that??!!" Acrobat. Close the gap of shame (and stop yourself
eating your own fist off waiting for Acrobat to start up) by
running ADOBE READER SPEED-UP, a eensy-weensy Windows
program that deletes a bunch of Adobe plugins that you don't
care about. Voila: spend your spare time reading your doc
rather than watching Adobe go "Loading dumb-ass marketing
rubbish/lousy DRM feature" for a thousand hours.
http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index.php
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/01/29/damn-it-is-cold-again/
It got cold again. I seem to only post when it gets cold. Gives me something to ramble about, I suppose.
Ah, so, my laptop is getting older and older. The mini keyboard I hacked in to replace the old internal keyboard has now failed. Just before that though, I invested in a desk. Yayoi gets her own desk, ya see? Well she liked the first one I picked out so much, so I went and bought another to go with it. Where she had liked the broad, open spaces of now-cluttered desktop, I opted for a compact footprint that reaches for the skies. It’s designed to hold a nice computer system.
Well, so what good is a desk designed to hold a nice computer system without a nice computer system to hold!? I went over to MicroCenter and spent a whole bunch of money on parts. I already had a hard drive, you see, and a sexy video card, and a mouse, keyboard, lotsa stuff. So, I bought a case, a motherboard, a CPU, and half a gigabyte of DDR RAM.
Dennis volunteered a DVD drive and a CD burner, and with all these parts and a fair bit of patience, and a lot of weird random black majic and mojo tweaking to get Windows XP to accept its new environment, I’ve now got a nice workstation in my home.
The system is nice. 2.66Mhz Intel Pentium 4, 800 Mhz bus, to 400Mhz DDR RAM, weighing in at half a gigabyte, which is excessive, unless you’re trying to do something with Windows XP, as I am, in which case, it is just right. ASUS Motherboard has such bells and whistles as on-board RAID, gigabit ethernet, an AGP slot for the graphics card, and a WiFi expansion slot. The case is really nice, with low-decibel fans, and rubber bushings for the hard drive mounts, all to reduce noise. I can not hear the computer, especially with the apartment’s heat, water heater, washer, dryer, or dish washer running, or the space heater, which we have out here because it is so damned cold!
Eh, I lost my train of thought. As if I had one. Let’s play SimCity 4! Now I’ve the first computer I have where this game doesn’t suck through a straw.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/12/09/fearless-failure/
In case you haven’t already received some e-mail from your favorite nerds about it, it is noteworthy that if you visit Google, enter the phrase “miserable failure” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky” you’ll be treated to the official biography of our featured American President.
Well, I felt it my patriotic duty help elevate the status of our Fearless Leader by posting this. Huzzah!
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/12/02/spam-count-mail-config/
Since Monday, October 27:
Total Number Folder
----- ------ ------
746632 233 .IN.tuna/
40458402 2303 .spam/
66014448 8323 /dev/null
1144201 104 /home/djh/Mailbox
24251285 1358 /home/djh/Maildir/
51940 15 IN/tuna
2470117 245 spam
----- ------
135137025 12583
Yup, 8,000 messages delivered directly to the trash upon arrival, and another 2,000 detained as likely spam. 1,400 messages deemed legitimate and routed to my mailbox. A lot of those are boring stuff like cron output and legitimate commercial e-mailings and news notifications and whatnot. I don’t actually have folks writing me 2,000 messages every few weeks.
You can also see a shift from mbox to Maildir. I’ve found that Thunderbird isn’t a bad e-mail client for offline, but Courier IMAP requires Maildir, so Maildir I use.
So, just in case this ends up in someone’s search, I’ll share the Thunderbird-Maildir portion of my .muttrc:
# Courier-imapd compatability # Where does mutt look for subfolders? set folder=$HOME/Maildir/ # Subfolders begin with '.' -- default value excludes these set mask="^." # Where do we store our ingoing / outgoing messages? send-hook . "set record=$HOME/Maildir/.archive-`date +%Y-%m`/" save-hook . =.archive-`date +%Y-%m`/ # This is compatible with Phoenix "Drafts" folder set postponed=$HOME/Maildir/.Drafts # Mailboxes mailboxes ! =.IN.tuna =.spam
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/25/worth-a-chuckle/
From an item in The Register, on Dell’s efforts to off-shore tech-support calls to India:
Customers had complained of “thick foreign accents” and “scripted” exchanges – although this proved to be a winning combination for Arnold Schwarzenegger in his successful bid to become California’s gropenführer last month.
EETS NOT UH HARDAWUH ERA!
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/14/frankensteins-laptop/
I’ve spent a little too much time hacking on my laptop lately. And by hacking, I mean hardware, and by hardware hacking, I mean an iron file, wire cutters, trimming off chunks of plastic, and of course carpet tape, electrical tape and duct tape, all in an effort to install an internal keyboard.
You see a good while back, the keyboad controller in my laptop started flaking out. So, I removed the internal keyboard and have been using external devices. One external device is a compact keyboard that fits very well in the space the old internal keyboard used to occupy, so I’d pack that along with the laptop whenever I wanted to go portable. But now I’d like to roam about the house with wireless, without having to drag a seperate keyboard around.
So, I liberated the mini keyboard from its plastic case and plopped it in the hole in my laptop, which it fits pretty well except it has a little printed circuit board connected to it by a couple of ribbon cables … and I really couldn’t fit that IN the laptop anywhere. Well, it sort of crammed underneath the keyboard fairly well. Also, the plastic from the laptop case chewed into the function keys, so, I trimmed back the laptop case somewhat and filed the plastic edges of the keyboard down a bit, but I still couldn’t get the thing in there with the circuit board tucked underneath. Too springy. Hrmmm.
So I puzzled and pondered and hit on snaking the ribbon cables underneath the LCD hinge and mounting the circuit board on top of the computer. Ugly, sure, but it worked! I wrapped the circuit board in a trimmed plastic baggie, and used electrical tape to mount it on top. Mmmm, not quite — the electrical tape, while black, like the laptop, is just a little too weak to keep the thing on. So, today I upgraded to good old-fashioned silver duct tape, reinforced with carpet tape to fasten the back of the circuit board to the surface. And after much dicking around, I was able to trim the three foot cord down to about four inches, that comes out of the back of the LCD and snakes around the corner and plugs in to the PS/2 port.
Much more portable, so now I can wander off to the living room and sit back in the recliner and type, as I’m doing now.
If only I were doing something useful with my little Frankenstein’s monster CPU buddy.
/d
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/11/contingencies/
Exactly two months of unemployment left.
If I’m still collecting unemployment December 10, I’m going to start chasing the local restaurants around for a job. December may not be best time for restaurants, though I could be wrong, but there should also be some New Years / Holiday turn-over to help me slip in to the sector.
A long, strange trip indeed.
Meanwhile, dev.toldme.com now has a CVS repository, and a feed search interface. So, it is coming along, but still has no recommendations, and lots of things I don’t like and want to change around, and lots of clean-up, and some serious work to do on performance and scalability.
I need to share some pictures here. If you’d like to hasten this at all, nag me via e-mail.
G’nite!
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/06/11/amazoncom-feedback/
Your web site is becoming a useability nightmare, which is discouraging given that this has traditionally one of your core strengths.
I have a gift certificate. I try to buy something with it. I order a used item, I go through all this stuff, and it says NO YOU CAN’T BUY A USED ITEM WITH A GIFT CERTIFICATE. Why not? Hasn’t someone given you $10 to send to a third party?
Okay, so a few days later I want to see your price on color sidekick. You don’t have them. Pity. Ah, but I could afford a heavily-discounted hiptop carrier! Okay, let’s put that in.
And it says “your gift certificate wont cover it” which is interesting because the item is $8 and the GC is $10. How much IS shipping? It won’t tell me HOW MUCH my order costs, just that it needs a credit card, and submitting my credit card is the ONLY navigational option.
Okay … well, let’s do that, and there are items in my cart from WAY BACK, like the used item I tried to purchase the other day. The only option is to confirm my thirty dollar order. Where do I say no? There is what LOOKS LIKE a navigation bar on the top of the screen, but it doesn’t do anything, not even clicking on “Amazon.com” to start over.
So, I go in to my web browser and TYPE Amazon.com to get to the point where I can clear out my shopping cart to just the item I want, proceed to check-out, and you STILL want $3 shipping for a little piece of neoprene. After all this hassle? FORGET IT! I could stuff that thing in a padded envelope and smack an 80 cents stamp on it and send it USPS, but you can’t, because you’re designed to extort money out of your previously-loyal customers.
Please fix your user experience.
Thanks,
-danny
I try to be very laid-back about most things, but I guess I take customer service really personal now, huh? And it is all the more frustrating to be thwarted by Amazon.com because for a long time they distinguished themselves by being pretty clueful and user-friendly.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/06/09/linux-will-dull-the-pain/
I decided to really really really clean out my e-mail inbox, purging anything I can. So I’m running across little ideas for things I should try and right about, and interesting links, and there is this wonderful post archived on Keith’s web site with this beautiful reflection from Anne:
From what I have observed from my male friends, though, this is exactly the climate required to learn Linux. Without a full and happy lovelife or distraction of soft lips and a reason to kiss them, there is enough room to grasp the intricacies and nuances of such a fine operating system.
It has already begun to happen. As I walk down the street I am not thinking of emptiness, kising, nathan or any other previous SO’s, I am thinking of penguins, rm -rf / and lilo.
I am already convinced that linux will dull the pain better than heroin.
I am reminded that in my youth, during times of family strife, it was suggested that one of the reasons I spent so much time playing with my computer was because it helped isolate me from the unpleasantries swirling around me. Being a geek was an anti-social reflex; I’ve always been such a nice boy, but for a long time I vented my Id on computer networks.
Since the layoffs and that wonderful little trip all over the world, I sense that frustration and a lot of the negative emotional energy is just not useful, so I tend to let it go. Every time I find things that upset me, I figure out a way to explain to myself why I shouldn’t be upset. Legitimate grievances with The Way Things Are are left as a big karmic to-do wall against which to I can formulate frustration in to little bits of positive action.
Or something. We’ll see how it goes.
You know, where computers used to be my escape from a troubling family situation, now it serves as a creative outlet for my surplus of time when I have the energy to interact and refine ideas, but I don’t know of an appropriate audience, so I work out in this little room here, and maybe if someone passes by and notices something and can provide feedback, that is all well and wonderful. But, I’m not waiting for them, because talking to the wall here is cathartic enough.
For the time being.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/05/02/all-the-latest-k-rad-3-day-memezz/
Here’s an interesting thought that compares modern bloggers to the warez couriers of the BBS age. Thanks to my feed aggregator, I can 3-day warez this meme to you. I’m not in it for the ratios though.
I have been watching the blog phenomenon from a bit of a distance – I’ve been doing online journalling forever, in Internet years. Now all the kids have these crazy terms like “backtracks” and “blogrolls” and there was even some embedded reporter who started a blog and blog-ified everything to be hip. For example, he was no longer posting humble photos on web pages, he was photoblogging! Wooh! (Gag me!)
So, I’ve purposely avoided overly-bloggifying my humble web log. (A “blog” is a contraction of “web log” which is a term I adopted myself.) You won’t find “backtracks” here, which is where a blog site lists URLs that link to a particular post in some sort of point-whoring contest. You wont find “feedback forums” with floating heads of friends and bored strangers dissecting the minutea of my life, and I try to avoid the sort of post which basically amounts to “Woah, this link is the coolest thing ever I’ve seen in the past five minutes of web browsing!” (“Holy poop my ass is numb someone please come over and beat me until I get off the computer and interact with some real people!”)
But if someone wants to riff off one of my posts, I now have these little bylines to each post’s anchor. Citations are great, in my opinion, if they act as footnotes to original thoughts or otherwise provide a jumping-off point for discussion on a topic. If a reader has something to add, they can drop me a line.
Back to the aforementioned interesting thought which inspired this little rant, I find myself asking what my role in the, ahem, blogsphere is, in the context of the “blogger as courier” metaphor. And I guess what I am is a shareware author tinkering about as a hobbyist, trying to create the occasional interesting bit of software, or in this case, memes, that I can share with the community. Since I’m a low-budget hobbyist who is more interested in creation than self-promotion, I eschew the whole “warez trader” mentality of trying to be the first to post links out.
Of course, I’m not even focusing on memes so much, just trying to flex my muscles, because I enjoy the activity, and I have the vague idea that I could develop the skill into something marketable. I’m just playing, trying to come up with the occasional interesting thought. In the meme-coder realm of the blogsphere, I’m one of the older guys who isn’t into the hip, new scene, but instead puttering away on low-key “demo” releases.
I should try and break into the publishing biz sometime.
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