Author: Jason Doucette

In my world, the day doesn’t end until I go to bed. It’s still Sunday night, and if I say I’ll have a project done Sunday, it’s technically on time even if I hand it in the following Tuesday, providing that I don’t sleep until then.

The case in point is AngelA’s web site. It’s still a work in progress – the main page is lonely, there’s some scripting to be done for the gallery pages, and a whole whack of content (not the least of which is the resume), but it’s working in recent versions of IE and NS for the Mac, it’s passable for NS 4.7 (complete with “please for the love of crap upgrade your browser” message), and I’ll check out the PC stuff, Opera, etc in the morning. The important part is that there are some photos online, including some A/R stuff, and there’s more to come.

Other than that, not much new, I had a dream that I was supposed to tell everyone how much it sucks in jail, but I don’t remember anything else from the dream, so just trust me on this, it sucks in jail. The MP3 player sucks ass in OS X – songs will rarely play to completion, opting instead to fast forward to the end of the song or simply start playing excerpts from other songs at random. I flipped over to Classic and the download went much better. I’m willing to live with it.

Whew, I just wrote “I’m willing to love with it”. How would that even work?

I’m picking up a pattern that seems to emerge whenever I buy something electronic:

1. I get excited.
2. I buy the damned thing.
3. It doesn’t work like it’s supposed to.
4. I read the manual and make sure I’m doing everything correctly.
5. It still doesn’t work.
6. Time passes.
7. Everything starts to work, and I can’t break it even if I try.

I’ve come to call this the “theory of time served”. I might have talked about this before, but there’s no archive, so there’s a refresher for you. Am I just too dense to figure out simple things? Did my electronics training cause me to make things more complicated than they are? Is there some karmic force at work here? I don’t know, but these days when something doesn’t work right out of the box, I give it a few days before I get upset.

Today’s lesson in patience is the Rio One MP3 player. I had a Rio 300 from a long time ago, but it doesn’t work with the Mac and it has this annoying habit of resetting at the slightest bump, which is a bit of an issue if you only use it while running. I’d love to lay down the cash for an iPod, but since music players only last about 6 months before I shred them to semi-or-non working bits, I can’t justify the expense for what for me would end up to be a disposable toy. On the bright side with this purchase is that I have a spare flash card and the shop I got it from has a “straight exchage” extended warranty, which is the only time I’ve seen an extended warranty that I know will save me money. Still, when you see warnings like this, you know it’s going to be a bumpy ride…

The theory of time served is something I’ve learned to live with, but it’s not like I have any time to serve right now. I think I’m supposed to have AngelA’s website done tomorrow, which by my current time estimate means that I’ll have about 1 hour to do all the stylesheets. Good thing I bought that book eh? Most of the coding’s done, but it’s the kind of done that will have to be re-done after examining the performance of the apps… I’ll rant more tomorrow when I launch the thing.

Oh yeah, here’s the Ikea riddle – how does a $4.95 lamp lead to a $143 bill at the checkout? Argh.

Ok, I was so close to getting back to a daily schedule, but, yeah, stuff.

Maybe I’m just anal, but I’m really getting annoyed by the sheer number of dumb mistakes I’m seeing in the world. I know I’m nowhere near perfect, and I can’t write to save my life (although I haven’t tested that theory yet), but I’m not getting paid millions of dollars. In the hopes that I might one day get paid millions of dollars, I’m not going to spell check this posting. Until that day comes, here are a few guidelines that might help you in your mission to not annoy me:

When the CIO of a large multinational organization sends an email to everyone requesting them to fill out an online survey, it’d be nice if the survey actually works. You know, what with being the boss of all things tech and all. Especially if it’s regarding an issue that most cynical people feel is being brought up as a PR move. Ok, I’ve just heard that some people got it working, but they don’t sit near me.

If you’re publishing a systems newsletter in PDF format, and you’re going to distribute it via the intranet, please consider starting your links with “http://”. This is a newsletter by and for the most technical people in the organization, for sweet crap’s sake.

If you’re providing free software to enhance your product, don’t ask me to enter a license key. Furthermore, don’t write the license key on the CD that I need to put in the drive to install the damned software. One more tip: don’t write two different keys on the same CD if only one of them is valid.

Finally, if you’re going to deliver a keynote speech at Comdex, please don’t confuse Star Wars and Star Trek. I could care less, but I don’t need to overhear all the discussions about it from Simpsons comic book guy impersonators. There are other things you should not do in a keynote speech, but I’ll just provide the relevant quote from the promotional brochure and you can make your own list. The speaker is Lib Gibson, President of Bell Globemedia Interactive. They own a bunch of TV stations, ISPs, newspapers, etc.

Question: Your keynote is tentatively titled “Building an Internet Energy Field.” What is an Internet energy field, and what are some key components in creating one?

Answer: In Star Wars, there’s that invisible shimmer. When you come up to it [to exit], you kind of bounce back. We want to maintain our strong brands that have particular appeal and deep loyalty. There’s no need to go outside of the portal, because we’ll provide you with whatever you need, from wherever you entered the site.

You know, that’d make a great mission statement: “There’s no need to go outside the portal”. I think I’ll put it up in my bathroom.

I got some mail at the PO Box the other day. It wasn’t for me, and I was lazy, so I just tossed it into a mailbox on the way home. It was back in my mailbox today. This is becoming a fun game. I thought about throwing it back in to see how many cycles I can manage, but there’s a chance that the post office will remember the increasingly damaged envelope and get pissed at me, and I don’t think it’s in my interests to piss off postal workers (I don’t care if they go crazy, I’m just worried that they’ll lose my mail). I was thinking about changing the address to see if I could send it around the country, but it’s one of those mail agreement deals where the address has to be typed on the envelope or something. My mind wandered a bit more before I managed to remind myself that this was technically mail theft (technically mail borrowing, your honour), so I guess I should properly cancel the letter and return it to the sender. Still it got me thinking about stupid mail tricks – check out this study to see what I mean (I like the bit about the bottled water).

My workplace is surrounded by a bunch of cheap book sales. They’re just tables and tables of books that I guess were overstocked and now are available for my perusal and consumption for discount prices.

I hate these sales. I have no time for reading, and yet I always end up buying more books. Today was no different. What do I need with two more Japanese language guides? I know exactly 2 Japanese phrases – “beer is good” and “where’s the beer”. That’s all anyone should need. Still, collecting language guides is way easier than, I don’t know, actually learning a language… Ah, someday.

It’s also clear that I don’t know English very well. We found one of those birthday astrology books that give the strengths and weaknesses of people born on various dates. I don’t see how that could ever work, but anyway, not only did I have to look up one of my weaknesses (profligate), I even had to look up the word that was in the definition (licentiousness). Once all that was done, I had to figure out how to spell huh. I don’t think I’ve ever considered myself to be wildly extravagant and lacking all sexual restraint, but one of my strengths was that I’m powerful, which sounds cool, so I guess I have to take the good with the bad.

I finally got around to reading the code that our IBM contractor developed. Hmm. Apparently, it’s been a long time since I read proper C++ code (as in “code that goes beyond structures with functions”). I got the hang of things eventually, but I have no doubt that this will spark another round of masochistic development work in a futile attempt to build actual skills. Yep, I’m downloading modules as we speak. Oh crap this is gonna hurt.

Yeah, I suck. Here’s a list of things that’ve been dragging me down and why they’re less of a problem now, and then we’ll go on with the show.

Sammy the new used Mac was doing the spinny beach ball thing like crazy. We’re talking hours. Oddly, it wouldn’t recover from screen saver mode either. I was getting to the point where I was going to go back to OS 9.2, but then I realized the problem – dead hard drive. It would (usually) spin up, but after about 5 minutes it would be pretty much dead. Thankfully, my days of bad PC decisions left me with a few spare parts, and I could rebuild. It’s nowhere near the 20 gigs I bought the damned thing with, but it’s enough to get a second Mac running in Casa Del Thrusto. Now if I could just deal with the fatal exception on the Ethernet card…

CSS hurts me, and I keep coming back. I was working on AngelA’s long awaited web site on the weekend, and nothing was working for me. Same old story: I’d finally get something going on one browser, and then I’d try it on another and swear. When I finally got to the Netscape 4.x phase, I wept and spent the rest of the evening lying on the living room floor, staring at the stucco. Tonight I broke down and bought that book co-written by that guy on Glish, mostly because while flipping through it at the store I saw two separate sections explaining why I shouldn’t be doing what I was trying to do. Someday I might actually know what I’m doing.

Work sucks. Hey, look, no upside to that part. Oh well…

Ok, back to the show.

AngelA graduated on Friday. When you’re surrounded by people who could actually put “highly trained photographer” on their business card, it’s a given that your photos will look like crap, even if they’re never put next to the photos taken by the newly graduated professionals, who didn’t take pictures anyway because they were too busy collecting piles of diplomas and awards. Did I get psyched out? Nope, I just figure me and the camera knew we’d be better off clapping and stuff.

Moving on from clapping, there’s a really long story about a comedy taping that I didn’t get around to writing up, but suffice it to say that I don’t know enough jokes. I’m on a crusade to learn a new joke every day, preferably a clean one. They don’t have to be good ones, but damn, I need to upgrade my material. Any submissions would be greatly appreciated.

Finally, I bought some chips today that had an expiry date on them, yeah, great, but they also had an expiry time. This is the coolest thing ever. I don’t have to look at them and try to figure out if they’re best before the date or best until the date, I just know that if there are still some left on the date itself, I’ve got until 11:48 to finish them off for maximum enjoyment.

Hey, it’s me, still not dead, still kicking around, you know, doing stuff. I’ve been working undercover as a productive employee or something, but actually I’m researching all kinds of fun stuff.

I’m hearing a lot about the shrinking job market for IT workers, especially for contract and outsource work. I don’t think this is because of a lack of money anymore, it’s just because businesses are getting tired of the pure crap that gets developed. The Internet provided a lot of power, but it didn’t make all of the old rules go away. I never know who reads this thing, so I’ll be brief – just because your browser based app is nice and zippy on your desktop, it doesn’t mean that it will work at all on, say, 3000 desktops simultaneously. Also, backwards compatibility still matters when you interface with a third party and you want to change your interface. Those were two simple examples, I won’t bother going further. Greed has really messed things up for the people who actually know what they’re doing. Oh well.

Conversation at work today – “let me get this straight – this new issue will stop our project from going out if we can’t resolve it, but that’s ok, because this new issue will prevent the subsystem we’re relying on from ever going out. Ok, lunch time.” The good news is that one of the two issues have been resolved. The bad news is that it’s not the one for my project.

Even if I’m stagnating at work lately, I had a brief promotion today – at the gym. The biggest guy there asked me to spot for him. He said his arm was a bit sore, and I guess lifting a bar with more weights on it than i could load up in an hour might do that. I’ve no idea why he picked me, as I was just finishing a set with about 10% as much weight on it, but hey, I was chosen. I don’t know if I’ll ever get chosen again, but in all fairness he didn’t die.

Sammy the new used Mac is now fully operational, thanks to the power of FedEx and some nice people somewhere in the States. It was touchy for a bit, but the Thrust homestead now has a whole whack more RAM. I haven’t noticed the speed difference yet, and I’ve only noticed two brief spinny coloured thingies. Life is good. Ok, as I wrote the rest of this I had three really big pauses, so I guess more research is needed…

The RAM wasn’t enough fun for one day – Buffy season two DVD is out, and yeah, I bought one on the way home. I’m not defending my enjoyment of the show, I’m just going to say that I love these “complete season on DVD” collections. For less than the price of two months of cable, I get 22 episodes of commercial free entertainment that I can watch whenever I want. Sweet.

Finally, not to sound cynical, but of all the ads on the Apple page that I found through Shawn’s links, which one do you think that people will look at first?

Yeah, a three day delay in updates just to avoid any more bi-jokes. Uh-huh.

The new used Mac has made it to Casa del Thrusto, but OS X is…a bit sluggish on it. If you like the spinny rainbow thing, I guess that’s ok, but I’m less fond of it. Thankfully, salvation is at hand, thanks to the miracle that is the credit card. The last time I bought RAM I was back when I was in high school, and cost about the same as today’s RAM did, except now there’s 4000 times more of it. Extra bonus – double rationalization happiness! Because RAM is so light, it doesn’t cost any more to get more, and because things cost so much in Canada, I was able to get a whack of RAM for the iMac (so it won’t feel left out) and the whole deal will cost about the same as just the iMac RAM would by itself. Su-weet.

The downside to the new setup is that the iMac doesn’t have the spiffy 19 inch monitor anymore. Everything seems so much…smaller now.

Other things have happened besides work and sleep, I’m just not sure what they are. AngelA just reported a sighting of red mould in the fridge, and she muttered something about turning into her mother. The two statements might be related, or maybe not, but all I know is it’s not my night to cook.

Ahh, I remember daily updates…on someone else’s blog. I’d call myself “bi-daily entertainment”, but that really doesn’t sound like something I’d like to expose to the Googlebot. Crap, too late.

So the new used Mac is on the way. I know this because it’s been shipped via Canada Post’s Expresspost service, where I can track the package’s progress across the country online! Of course, it’s not real time, and it has the caption “please allow one business day for our systems to be updated“. When the whole point of the service is that packages can go from one major city to another in 2 business days, what’s the point of batch-updated tracking systems? Anyway, I can tell that the Mac got shipped Saturday. I’ll probably have been using it for a few days before I’m able to tell that I can use it. Or something.

Here’s a conundrum – the Catholic Church is holding their World Youth Day in Toronto next month. A bazillion teenagers are going to converge on the city, but the riddle is, what are their chances of scoring? Think about it, thousands of hormone-addled teens from around the world, away from home, possibly for the first time, but they’re all theoretically (or perhaps theologically) unavailable for that other kind of “getting to know you” in the biblical sense. Not that I’m curious, um, just making conversation. Yeah.

Lastly, beacuse I’m sleepy and stuff, Rannie told me I should link to this. I’m in the habit of doing whatever people email me to do, which can be a problem when they monitor your surfing habits at work. Quick tip – when reading email from the office, subject lines like “even my dad thinks I’m a slut” probably shouldn’t be opened until you get home.

You know, even if you call it something cool like Magnum, PI, any drink you invent at the end of the night is going to be pretty bad. That’s about all I can say about last night’s party, because it’s pretty much what I remember. Fortunately, AngelA took many photos, and after much effort, I think I can explain most of them. It’s also worth noting that streetcar drivers are more forgiving of things like getting on the car going in the wrong direction if you have a green umbrella in your hair. The sad part about that adventure is that we had a designated commuter. I’d also like it on record that someone thought I was a rock star. It’s too bad that I wasn’t aware of their misconception, because it made for a really weird conversation. So, as is the tradition after a night of drinking, here are the profuse apologies. Actually, I think I’d remember it if any of you were at the party, so here are some corrections and clarifications from previous blog entries so you can feel like part of the fun. You can pretend I was drunk when I wrote the errors, especially if it makes them funnier.

The Simpsons DVD isn’t disappointing. I had lamented that it was a 3 disc set, so I’d be looking at 4 or 5 episodes per disc, which reduces its effectiveness as a “leave it in the player for white noise” DVD. It turns out there are 6 episodes on disc 1 and 2. It’s good.

People like my money. My eBay transaction is finally proceeding, and my new used Mac is on the way. I even have a Canada Post tracking number, so I can spend hours at work seeing that it’s still sitting in a bin across the country.

My Link-o-Rama is just fine as it is. Maybe. Melinda is cryptic, but that’s journalism for you. Hey, if my boss came up to me and said “don’t do any work on that project”, that’d be ok too.

I can walk and hop and run without pain. Psych. I wish…