From: sabrina downard Date: 18:46 on 07 Mar 2008 Subject: textedit Dear TextEdit: If your job is to edit text, as is implied by your name, why are the only four file formats you offer to let me Save As as follows: - Rich Text (RTF) - HTML - Word Format - Word XML Format Whither plain text? Oh, I see. . . I've got to convert this document first by going to the Format menu and selecting Make Plain Text. *Then* I can Save As text. Oh, and I see I've got to manually force you to default to plain text. Because naturally when I choose an application called TextEdit what I want to do is RichTextEdit. Not like I'd open up Word or Pages or anything. It's a good thing that I've already been exhausted by suck-ass software today and have got no more energy for you, or else I might be forced to remark that it's stupid crap like this that keeps stubborn, elitist unix bastards stubborn, elitist unix bastards. Christ, just give me a terminal. oh well, whatever, never mind. --sabrina.
From: sabrina downard Date: 18:45 on 14 Jan 2008 Subject: In which we learn that not all characters which look similar are, in fact, the same > Dear Valued Customer;/r/nThank you for your inquiry./r/nYou will receive a response from one of our Customer Service Specialists within 24-48 business hours. Monday through Friday./r/nPlease do not respond to this message./r/nSincerely,/r/nwhoever > > This response powered by Brightware. Dear Brightware: ITYM \. HAND. --Valued Customer, whose newlines are newlinier than yours.
From: sabrina downard Date: 14:03 on 04 Dec 2007 Subject: Banking web sites The entire fucking Internet had just better be grateful I'm practical enough to not limit myself to doing business only with people who can design functional web user interfaces, because I'd be shit out of luck finding one. Dear Citibank: You can stuff your criminally obtuse payment-account-addition interface in your ears. And top it off with your ridiculous "feedback can only be 20 lines (of unspecified length, natch)" comments form. I'll tell you what, I'll keep my feedback to 20 lines or less if you make the explanatory text on your dialogues not LIE about required formatting. Dear Chase: And as for you people, you can just take that ridiculous "You're logging on from a new computer! OMG!" authorization code transfer nonsense and shove it where the sun don't shine. I am in fact NOT signing on from a new computer, I'm signing on from one of the two computers I always use, on its same IP it always uses, and your goddamn inability to handle cookies is not my problem. God, imagine the pain if I had multiple machines changing NAT addresses all the time behind my firewall at home. It's amazing it ever works for anyone at all. I want goddamn SecurID tokens for my banks just to eliminate this bullshit. I hear tell other people get them, and I'm bitterly, bitterly jealous. hatefully, --s.
From: sabrina downard Date: 17:30 on 31 May 2007 Subject: What's Up Gold Going beyond the so very many things I find objectionable about having to use a Windows GUI-driven suite to monitor my UNIX systems and utilities, and especially one with such a loathsome name: Every time, every single damned time I find reason to think to myself that maybe, just maybe there's hope that using this package will be bearable, the goddamn software rips the hope right out of my hands and beats me over the head with it until I collapse. GODDAMMIT. Just make sense one time! Once! This is all I am asking of you! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. --s.
From: sabrina downard Date: 14:29 on 22 Sep 2006 Subject: Windows: where everything is harder than it needs to be. And also broken. I've recently changed employers and now I use a Windows workstation at work. Outlook, even. (At least putty's pretty unhateworthy. And it turns out you can configure Outlook to send blissfully ordinary plain text mail, if you try, even if it is a pain in the ass to work around its damn-near enforced top-posting.) It's been tolerable. I mean, I find it irritating and unnecessarily difficult at certain times, but I shut it down at least once a week and run my little software updates and it has been alright enough, I guess, for a kludgey hack of a window manager. Except sometimes you have to work with the kludgey hack of an operating system instead of just the window manager, and that's when the illusion starts to break down. Situation: I have a memory stick. I have some files on my machine at home that I'd like to bring to work. I have used my personal memory stick in the past to transfer files to work this way. This week? No worky. Plug it in to the USB port, nothing. Doesn't mount it. Device Manager insists nothing is wrong. Yet, if I look at my Event Viewer, there it is: "[Removable Storage Manager] could not load media in drive Drive 0 of library Sony Storage Media USB Device." Well, why not? It used to work. It used to work great! Could you at least give me a hint? Okay, well, maybe it's the memory stick. They are awfully small and, although I've never broken one yet, presumably it's possible. I was wearing shoes the other day that apparently really hated our office carpeting so I was shocking everything I touched; maybe I fried it. Good thing I've got another memory stick. (Get home, the memory stick is still perfectly fine as far as Mac OS is concerned. Now that's shocking.) So, take the work memory stick home. Mac OS says "hi! how are you! oh, your name is 'widget,' that's amusing. those are lovely files you've got stored on you. would you like some more?" I blithely copy over most of a gig of files, umount it, and drop it in my bag to take it to work. Work computer: "What is this 'usb memory stick' of which you speak? I know not of these things. Begone with you and your filthy removable media ways." Event viewer: "RSM could not load media in drive Drive 0 of library Sony Storage Media USB Device." Cheers. So, okay. I give up. Device Manager: "This device is working properly." Clearly! "If you are having problems with this device, click Troubleshoot to start the troubleshooter." Okay. Troubleshooter: "Well, is your hardware supported? Yes? Well, have you changed your driver recently? No? Well, have you reinstalled the driver anyways yet? Okay, have you called the manufacturer of your hardware device? Well then, 'this troubleshooter is unable to solve your problem.' IOW, HTH, HAND, FOAD, $user." Seriously. It's a usb memory stick. It's not rocket science. Not only is it not rocket science, it's barely science at all. It's third grade earth science where you think the hamster cage in the classroom is the coolest thing ever. Turns out, though, I got it figured out. It had decided that the USB memory stick wanted to be drive E:, as I discovered when I went into "My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management." Trouble is, I had a network drive already mapped to E:. Rather than, say, generating a warning saying I had two things wanting to be drive E: and I should probably do something about it, it apparently just happily mounted the USB stick as E: under the network drive E:. As soon as I unmapped the network drive, my E: window refreshed, happy and ready to give me my files. Stupid, steaming pile of shit. If you're going to auto-allocate drive letters to removable storage media, maybe you should consider allocating drive letters that aren't already in use? Just a thought. hatefully re-secured in mac-pwns-windows snobbery which I thought I'd grown out of, --s.
From: sabrina downard
Date: 16:11 on 30 Aug 2006
Subject: Die, die, die.
I have a lot of things that I could hate on at the moment, but I think
I'm going to just pick on one particular thing. Which ironically is,
like, the *one* thing that's relatively working. (At least I can fix
it when I'm the problem.)
resizer_reiserfs: the new size value is wrong.
Really? Why is that? What have I done wrong? How could I fix it?
What would an example be of a not-wrong size value? Can I just tell
you how much I appreciate how helpful and specific that error is? I
mean, I was too stupid to figure out that it was "wrong" since IT
DIDN'T WORK and all.
Incidentally, the problem was that I had made a typo: I typed "GB"
instead of merely "G." So, owning up to the PEBKAC, that's still a
fucking stupid error message.
hatefully,
--s.
From: sabrina downard Date: 17:23 on 22 Aug 2006 Subject: You know what I hate more than I hate software? Software installers. Worse, operating systems installers. Especially ones that work just fine with your pointer until the first reboot, then decide they know not of this strange "mouse" of which you speak and force you to use the "obviously no one will ever have to navigate this by keyboard! hah! hah! And if they're trapped without a pointer *certainly* they won't need the 'expert options' dropdown to work!" interface instead. Of course after I rebooted after the install completed, the pointer worked fine again. Hate. --s.
From: sabrina downard Date: 16:29 on 10 Jul 2006 Subject: DRM can bite my ass Dear Apple: As I'm sure you know, I've been a pretty unrepentant Mac fangirl for a while. I like shiny things. I like your laptops. I like your operating system (and I used to like your old one, too). I like my transparent terminal windows. I like not having to run OpenOffice just to read the attachments people insist on sending me. I like Quicktime. I like a lot of things you do. But I've got to tell you, this iPod destructive mind-meld "link" to a specific computer, or whatever the hell it is, is just fucking stupid. So I've got two powerbooks. One's my "real" computer, which has a slowly failing hard disk, and so I've also got a loaner from work. I copied my home directory over to the new one via drag and drop and everything worked very well -- thank you -- such as my shareware apps recognizing my previous registration codes, all my photos and documents and the cruft accumulated over years. Even my Firefox plugins came over (and, it should be noted, that the Firefox on this laptop doesn't exhibit the completely wack-ass behavior that Firefox on my other laptop does -- so that seems to prove well enough that it's not my preferences or plugins or something that's causing it, interestingly enough). Everything was great. ...Until this morning. I had ripped some music over the weekend, onto my external hard disk and added it to the real laptop's iTunes library therefrom. I wanted to listen to it at work today, but my upload speed from home is pretty crummy, so I decided I'd just throw the music on my iPod Shuffle and take that to work and listen to the tracks off of it. I hopped in the car, happily listened to my new MP3s on said faithful iPod on the way in, arrived at work, and plugged in the iPod to my loaner laptop. Whereupon I got a message that said something like "Some songs have not been copied to the iPod 'wee' because this computer is not authorized to play them, including '$song_by_some_other_band_that_was_in_aac_format_but_i_dont_care_about_that_band.'" Okay. Whatever. I have that album on this laptop and I don't know why you're whinging about it anyways, as I didn't ask you to "copy" anything. 'Cos it was already *there* and all. But whatever, I didn't want to listen to that band at the moment (and I can always go type in my stupid iTunes Music Store password if I did). I want to listen to those new MP3s......hey, WHERE THE HELL DID THEY GO? What I'm assuming happened here is that my iPod, named 'wee' (what? it *is*!), had some sort of sympathetic bond with my old laptop, "shiny." It liked shiny. It was evidently involved in a fiercely monogamous relationship with shiny. When I plugged it in to my loaner laptop, "snooty," it decided that, as a part of automatically updating the iPod (why was snooty auto-updating wee if wee is married to shiny?) it would delete the MP3s that were not a part of snooty's music library. Despite the fact that they're not AAC files and had no DRM of any kind. And it's not just that iTunes is not showing them; I downloaded and fired up PodUtil just to check. Then I plugged the iPod directly into my external speakers. Gone, daddy, gone; the love has gone away. Attention Apple: Those were my bloody MP3s. I wanted to play them for myself on my bloody iPod. You morons have just fucked me over because now not only can I not listen to them on my laptop speakers, but you deleted them off the iPod entirely so I can't listen to them in the car or over headphones until I get home tonight. (I would be SO PISSED if this had happened while I was travelling and away from my home computer!) In practical terms, won't someone please explain to me the legal reasons I have *less* right to listen to music I purchased on one set of speakers versus another, to the point where the laptop not only disables the music in question but outright destroys it? You disabled the AAC files that were not authorized. If you wanted to similarly refuse to play back the MP3 files that were not in my currently-connected laptop's music library, why was it necessary to REMOVE them and not simply disable them? I used to carry my old 5G original iPod around with music on it and plugged it in to listen to on other people's computers with some regularity. That was evidently okay behavior back in the halcyon days of, what, 2002? The times they are a-changin'. Suck my dick, Apple. --s. p.s. no anti-IMS anti-DRM advocacy rants need to be sent. I know, I know, I know. I did not deserve what I got in this instance, I don't think, and I'm not ready to pick up a sign and start picketing the Apple Store just yet, but jesus fuck this was a stupid fucking thing for them to do. p.p.s. I'm totally firing up OurTunes and seeing if anyone else on campus has that album so I can pirate it so I can listen to THE MUSIC I FREAKING BOUGHT. You *shits*.
From: sabrina downard Date: 17:16 on 20 Jun 2006 Subject: and on the topic of firefox biting shiny metal asses failing to block pop-unders *that play sounds at me*. at least if they're silent i won't be bothered by them until all my memory's used up and firefox is using 70% of my cpu! freshly off of "where the hell is that *noise* coming from because i'm pretty sure i don't recall there being any 'Beavis and Butt-head' dialogue in this song," --s.
From: sabrina downard Date: 04:40 on 04 Feb 2005 Subject: Mirapoint. Mirapoint. Oh, Mirapoint. I've been cut over to you for beta testing for about an hour now (well, when I started writing this Hate, it was) and-- well. Let's just say I'm not enjoying myself. I'm sure you do well enough for most people, but I actually, you know, sort of know what I'm doing? So, clearly, I'm just fucked. I had a really good time, attempting to replicate my masses of procmail recipes into your little filters so that my inbox isn't a firey pile of burning wreckage with spam complaints and lists and hates and my actual spam and support email and everything else strewn hither and thither. Editing several dozen filters via a webmail interface -- oh, boy! Yeah, THAT was fun. The sort of fun that makes me stare longingly at the office fridge, because I *know* there are two bottles of cold, refreshing, delicious vodka in that freezer. And there's a coffee mug right next to my hand. And exactly how fucking hard is it to put in an option to filter on an arbitrary header? I don't even want to hear "oh, you can open an RFE for new features." What the fuck is that shit? I refuse to believe that after, like, four or five years or whatever of product development on a fucking mail server appliance, I am the first person who ever wanted to filter on a header that wasn't To/Cc, From, Subject, Return-Path, or the message body. I especially love how, since it's a black box instead of a proper computer -- and this may well be the only time you hear me screaming, wanting *another* computer -- i have to give up the perl scripts that I'd written to further simplify some of my mail (I LOVE being on the AOL spam complaint address for our site!). No computer, no perl, no inline editing (and possibly auto-deleting) of email! ARRRGH! The black box will make my life easier! It is, after all, as the trainer told us, the Perfect Messaging Solution! The appliance model means I never have to worry again! APPARENTLY BECAUSE I WON'T BE ABLE TO READ MY FUCKING EMAIL! I am so, so full of hate that I'm not sure I can rant any more without my head exploding. But let's not let that stop me; if my head explodes, at least I'll be free. There was a walk-in trouble call I handled -- "handled" -- yesterday afternoon, wherein our chief network engineer, also on the new system, marked a bunch of messages in his IMAP mailbox read and had Thunderbird freeze up on him for twenty minutes, and I couldn't help him one *bit* because I'm not *able* to look under the hood! Point and drool, baby. Give me a fucking banana. Maybe his client is confused; maybe either the server or the client dropped the connection; maybe the server actually is taking 20 minutes to mark 20 messages read; I'll never know! This is the brave new world that I have to look forward to! Fuck functionality; that was just embarassing. "No, I'm sorry, I actually *can't* tell my ass from a hole in the wall. Wait ten minutes, and if that doesn't work, try killing and restarting your client, maybe it'll magically work then. Ook, ook!" Yeah. I enjoyed that. A lot. Or then there was the other network engineer who approached me this morning asking if there was anything special he had to do to get his procmail recipes working on the new system. I smiled, but I think he caught on to the creeping edge of hysteria in my voice after I began describing the webmail-gui filter process, because he left pretty quickly. Upper-level management walked past me in the hall about an hour ago and asked me how I liked my new toy. I, my friends, possess more control than a thousand dominatrices spend a lifetime dreaming of. Hate. Oh, the hate. --sabrina
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