Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

« ? Blogging Brians # »

Book Plug:

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money. I think.
BSD Mall

10/6/2003 -  10/8/2003
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4/28/2003 -   5/4/2003
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3/31/2003 -   4/6/2003
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1/27/2003 -   2/2/2003
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12/30/2002 -   1/5/2003
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11/25/2002 -  12/1/2002
11/18/2002 - 11/24/2002
11/11/2002 - 11/17/2002
11/4/2002 - 11/10/2002
10/28/2002 -  11/3/2002
10/21/2002 - 10/27/2002
10/14/2002 - 10/20/2002
10/7/2002 - 10/13/2002
9/30/2002 -  10/6/2002
9/23/2002 -  9/29/2002
9/16/2002 -  9/22/2002
  9/9/2002 -  9/15/2002
  9/2/2002 -   9/8/2002
8/26/2002 -   9/1/2002
8/19/2002 -  8/25/2002
8/12/2002 -  8/18/2002
  8/5/2002 -  8/11/2002
7/29/2002 -   8/4/2002
7/22/2002 -  7/28/2002
7/15/2002 -  7/21/2002
  7/8/2002 -  7/14/2002
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6/24/2002 -  6/30/2002
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5/20/2002 -  5/26/2002
5/13/2002 -  5/19/2002
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4/29/2002 -   5/5/2002
4/22/2002 -  4/28/2002
4/15/2002 -  4/21/2002
  4/8/2002 -  4/14/2002
  4/1/2002 -   4/7/2002
3/25/2002 -  3/31/2002
3/18/2002 -  3/24/2002
3/11/2002 -  3/17/2002
  3/4/2002 -  3/10/2002
2/25/2002 -   3/3/2002
2/18/2002 -  2/24/2002
2/11/2002 -  2/17/2002
  2/4/2002 -  2/10/2002
1/28/2002 -   2/3/2002
1/21/2002 -  1/27/2002
1/14/2002 -  1/20/2002
  1/7/2002 -  1/13/2002
12/31/2001 -   1/6/2002
12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Friday, November 1, 2002
15:31 - W1ND0VVS 1Z TEH ST4ND4RD!!!!11``!`	(top)
There I was, down to the wire today, finishing up the last piece of testing before beta-qualification was approved today: a suite of printing tests from part of the Web interface for our product, using IE. On Windows, naturally, because that's what we support. I'm regressing something backward through the last few versions of our product. Print in the current version: click, dialog, whirr, go get the page from the printer. Print in the previous version: click, dialog, whirr, go get the page from the printer. Print in the version before that: click.... Uh, click.... Right-click? Oh look, there's the dialog. I wait another few minutes. (Yes, minutes.) Finally, the little printer icon shows up in the systray. Huh. That's odd; the printer icon usually takes all of three seconds to show up. And I wait. And I wait. The printer comes to life, but no paper spews forth. I try right-clicking on the little printer icon, to try to bring up the printing monitor window. "1 document(s) pending for briant," it tells me confidently. Good, I'm so glad Microsoft took the time to handle singular and plural so elegantly. Eventually the print queue comes up. It's empty. It remains empty for a good three minutes; finally (after going through "Connecting" and "Initializing" phases), my document appears in the queue. "24 bytes/120.4M," it says. I watch as the 120.4M number continues to climb... slowly, sloooowly. Not the "24 bytes" part, mind you, no-- the total size. Yeah, that really fills me with warm fuzzies. (The fact that I'm printing out a simple one-screen Web page, and that it thinks that amounts to 120 megabytes, doesn't do my heart good either.) Right-clicking works, though. So I hit "Cancel", and it deletes the document from the queue. Well, that was pointless, I think. So just to be safe, and to see if it might help, I decide to log out and log back in. "Start->Log off briant". Uh... huh. Windows stares back at me with the expression of a cow chewing its cud in the middle of the most placid set of train tracks in Kansas. Okay... "Start->Shut down". Nothing. Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Aha! There's the six-button menu thingy. "Log off!" I tell it. And it does! Fancy that. I log back in; everything seems peachy. I connect again to the site and print. Annnnd... the same thing happens again. I'm in one of those backwards-talking slow-motion dreams where everything's in reversed grayscale. Nothing I do makes a difference. I click on one thing, and a menu pops up somewhere else on the screen. ToolTips on the icons in the systray pop up behind the taskbar. (How helpful.) And no printout is forthcoming, even after a patient ten minutes of waiting. Okay, okay... I know where this wind is blowing. Time for.... a reboot-to-the-head. Ctrl+Alt+Delete (the "Shut Down" in the Start menu still doesn't work), and hit the Shut Down button. I select Restart. It goes black, whirrs, and beeps. $%^#%. %^$&^ $%#)_%^&()* &^&^^& ^&$%$. <deep breath> *^&)&&( $%^$ $%W#$%@# ^&%& ^**(&^ (())+_%&%!!!! Why in the donkey-humping fuck** is this the unquestioned standard operating system in business today? This is, if you recall, the same machine whose upgrade-to-Win2K procedure, which ended up costing me an entire week's worth of productivity, caused me to harangue the company into springing for a new iMac back in February. Since that time, I've been blissfully free of these kinds of nightmares of technology gone horribly wrong, except for those times when I'm obliged to test the functionality of something under Windows. Then I approach the machine with a chair in one hand and a whip in the other, and getthejobdoneasquicklyaspossible so I can leap back to safety without getting unduly injured or slimed. Well, today it looks like its revenge is complete. But it couldn't stop me from finishing the test suite. With the help of others' Windows machines, I was able to sign off, and the release was certified; my computer appears to have been the only casualty thus far. I made it back to the ledge without getting dragged under. Here's my desk today. I think this says it all: One of these boxes is not like the other; one of these boxes just doesn't belong... Hint: it's not the one that's working.