Snapshot

Posting to the blog has been irregular of late because I've been as busy as I've ever been with work, with looking for work, with side work and, last but certainly not least, my family. Oh yeah, and getting some hours at the pre-school co-op as the school photographer which has been an interesting and occasionally aggravating experience.

Amid it all I am trying to get my bike rides in to keep the tenuous grip on what passes for my sanity these days. I can't complain too much though. Weather reports had us ready for a wet and indoors weekend but we didn't get so much as a drop and today ended up being quite nice out. I got a ride in first thing yesterday morning, nothing special, just a couple of loops on the slough paths. But it felt good to get spinning again nonetheless. Today was more of a surprise ride. I came home from a couple of photography appointments, that went very well, to find an empty house. Rather than ask where everyone was, I loaded up my bike into the car and headed up to Santa Cruz. I parked outside my old house in Seabright and enjoyed a slower paced warm up pedal to the base of Delaveaga where the real riding began!

It wasn't a super long ride, maybe ten miles total, but it really felt good to get back on dirt and mud and enjoy some of the nature that's been hiding behind sheets of rain for weeks.

This next week promises to be busy too. Two schools tomorrow, the second going into the early evening. One school or department each day the rest of the week with the photography make up day at the pre-school towards the end of the week. Also in the mix is an evening of computer work at one of my office manager's house and an open house at Grady's new kindergarten school.

One of the few benefits of my semi-employment in the school district is that I can basically choose whatever school I want my son to attend. The school we are assigned to is an under-performing crap hole, to be indelicate. The school he is going to is one of the best performing and most highly regarded schools in the area. The only other school regarded higher is one of the other schools I work at. Yes, I do take some measure of pride in working at two of the best schools in this district.

The downside is that the school is in downtown Watsonville. I don't particularly like this town very much, I don't care for the mentality, the gangs and the general fuck-you-gringo attitude I get alot of places. But to make the best of a pretty crappy situation, this school is it.

I guess I'm rambling now. I'm writing this while running tests and anti-spyware on an XP laptop I've been working on off and of for the last week. It does some stuff no problem and then totally freezes up and crashes with other stuff and not necessarily the same things each time. One thing the recent work I've been doing on Win machines has taught me is how much I hate the XP operating system. It is utter crap, like it was designed by a drunk monkey or something.

Give me my Macs and don't go yapping at me about fan boi shit. My Macs just work and work well. These Win XP machines freeze up, slow down or just plain lag ass all the day long.

Anyway, I need to get this party wrapped up so I can get to bed at a reasonably decent hour so I can hit the ground running tomorrow. So much to do, not enough time. Always.

I think I might try to plan an IP universe update post. I've been writing to several of my other blogs lately and think it might not be a bad idea to toot my own horn, as it were.

For now though, time to feed the dog, get the coffee machine ready and call it a day.

Google Does Its Best Imitation of Microsoft

There's been quite alot of justifiable furor over Google's latest offering, Buzz. It appears that Google stole a page from the Microsoft playbook, the evil playbook. You see, Microsoft has a long and painful history of release and patch software publishing. They'd push an almost done piece of software out with the intention of using early adopters as unpaid and aggravated beta testers.

From a business standpoint this is a solid tactic. Microsoft has grown into the de facto operating system and office suite on the planet largely due to the release and fix philosophy. The only thing is that end users hate being used as non-volunteer guinea pigs. End users just want their shit to work, they don't want to help Microsoft figure out what's wrong and then have them fix it weeks or months later. Its part of the reason I do my best to avoid Microsoft products as much as possible.

And Google has done the same stupid, stupid thing with Buzz, their attempt to destroy Facebook and Twitter. Only they rolled out this new service without bothering to code in end-user controls, important end-user controls like, oh I don't know, privacy, notifications and other pretty basic service requirements. Google has taken information that many people don't necessarily want made public and went ahead and made it public without regard to their customer base's wishes.

And when a company starts acting without the slightest regard to its customers then they are strolling the fine line between good and evil. And Google has publicly stated their philosophy is to not be evil. Well, Google, Buzz is perilously close to being evil in addition to being non-intuitive, oddly slapped into Gmail and in desperate need of some end-user controls. Without some controls on my end, I'm liable to shut if off altogether.

I don't get why Google, ostensibly a very well run "smart" company, would risk pissing off so many users with this half-baked offering. Much like I don't get why Google decided to change how information is displayed on my Google home page where they forced me to put up with a huge space wasting gutter navbar on the left side of the screen. Its only through the use of an extension have I reclaimed that space. Google is well aware of people's hatred of this stupid, unnecessary space waster and yet they do not appear to be planning to do anything to fix it.

How many more missteps will Google make before people really do start think they are just another evil corporation bent on nothing but shareholder profits and maintaining their market shares? Many people already consider Google the next great big evil internet behemoth and its hard to argue against them lately.

Google needs to pull its head out of its ass and realize that end users can be fickle and, when pushed too hard, will just leave Google altogether.

Google needs to fix up its shit before pushing out any more partially finished products like Buzz. Until then, it will flounder and fail.

The Assininity of Microsoft Products

My dislike and distaste in using shitware from Microsoft should be pretty well established by now (I'd provide links to previous rants but I'm unable to read my own blog from behind the firewall because of my potty mouthed rants).

Anyway, we've been having issues with an email server upgrade over the weekend that's broken most Entourage settings and left a large number of administrators having to resort to using the web-based interface. Which was a decent workaround but people don't really like having to learn a new process when the old one was working well for them.

So I've spent a good (or bad, depending on your point of view) portion of this week tracking down and fixing these stupid problems.

In the course of fixing the settings, I've had to install the four or five "critical" updates that Microsoft's annoying Auto-Update decrees must be done. That's fine but we're talking 180 meg plus files and they have to be updated individually which means baby sitting a machine for an hour or more at a time.

Also, when it comes time to select a hard drive to install the update on, it looks for other drives for up to a few minutes. This is a laptop without external drives attached and yet you have to sit there and wait and wait and wait for the stupid program to get its head out of its ass and get moving.

But, in an incredibly stupid move, even for the dumbfucks in Redmond, someone thought it was a good idea to make a pop under warning that stalls the update install. Think about that for a moment. The warning that stops the whole stupid process isn't visible and there's no way to know its there aside from dumb luck or boredom and you start playing around with the windows.

My disgust for the bloated shitware from Microsoft just got kicked up another three or four notches. And it already got pushed up more after moving from Office 2004 to 2008. No improvements to the applications and several processes have had to get adjusted to do what was pretty straightforward in 2004. Updating should be an improvement and not just to Microsoft's (fat) bottom line.