Please don't let Blogger design nuclear power plants, 'k?

Quote du jour:
Arthur: "What happens if I press this button?"
Ford:"I wouldn't."
Arthur:"Oh!"
Ford:"What happened?"
Arthur: "A sign lit up, saying Please Do Not Press This Button Again."
- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Curse Blogger! They've changed the whole interface, and taken away all the text on the draft page. If you add an image, you can't see it, not even the HTML code. All you see is a bunch of icons. Presumably you're supposed to click each icon until you find out what it does. ("Oh, was that the Delete button? That must be why all my text went away.")

Not that Wordpress gets any awards either, as you might have discovered recently if you tried to leave a comment on a blog and got a message loop telling you to log in.

Luckily, I read another blogger's comments, which mentioned that clicking the cog icon gives you an option to revert to the old UI. Which has text, text being symbols that TELL you what will happen if you click a link BEFORE you click the link. Please don't let Blogger get the idea that it should design nuclear power plants. "Oooh, it's a shiny red button. What would happen if I press it?"

Trend Micro Rant ... or, how not to win friends and repeat customers

[Warning: the following is long. There is ranting. There are no funny animal pictures. It is only a rant.]

Geez. Wasted much of Thursday night helping my mother upgrade her anti-virus software, and got so miffed that I had to blog about it. Probably I wouldn’t be so miffed if I weren’t in this profession doing this for a living for the past 10 years. I’ve easily done thousands of installs and upgrades. There was no need for a simple procedure like this to take over Two Friggin'Hours.

Had to uninstall the existing program before installing the upgrade. Fine. Annoying, but fine. I plodded through the installation wizard until I got to an error message I couldn't decode.

What I got was an error message saying that I'd already installed this program on three computers and I couldn't install it on any more. Since the program had ONLY ever been installed on that one computer, and not re-installed ever, this was a puzzler.

The installation wizard thoughtfully provided a link that would explain what to do if you got this message. The link was broken.

I googled for it, and found the page at another location, and thought I was home and dry. But no. That page didn’t explain the problem; it repeated the words on the error message. (“Why does the installation tell me I have 3 computers already running this software? Because you have installed this software on 3 computers already.”) I truly loathe customer documentation that simply repeats the error message. I call it the “Duh” school of writing.

Turns out what that meant was that even if it were only on one computer, I needed to deactivate the program before re-activating it on the same computer. Not only did the instructions not suggest anything remotely like that, the support page didn't even suggest that as a solution.

Honestly, if they want their error messages to sound like riddles that you're supposed to guess the meaning of, why don't they try for something more Zen and poetical?

The snow falls on the butterfly's wings
While the wolf howls at the moon.

Finally, after jumping through every hoop, leaping every chasm, decoding every cryptic error message and exhausting the batteries in my cordless phone (I was doing this long-distance, talking my mother through all the steps), we came to the final challenge. To activate the program, you had to reboot.

On the surface, this seems like a simple obstacle to overcome. You normally have to reboot when installing a program. Ha! You fool! That's just what they want you to think!

When you reboot, you see nothing. The application's icon in the task bar is grayed out. If you open the application, it says you have to click a button before you can activate the application. If you click the button, the computer restarts. And you see nothing. So you look at the application and it tells you that you have to click the button and restart the computer again. And again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Turns out what that means is that you're supposed to wait for 10 minutes or so while the application starts up. Since by this point I'd already been doing this uninstall and upgrade for over two and a half hours, waiting was not my first impulse.

There wasn't even any evidence that the Trend program, or anything Trend related, was running while all this went on. Usually you can check the processes in Task Manager to see what the computer was doing, but even that didn't help. And how many average computer users would do that?

Besides, I'd already been caught on that waiting thing. Earlier on, the install wizard got to 98% done before it hung. It kept saying it was "almost finished." Turns out what that meant was that I had to stop using the installation wizard and switch over to start configuring the program before the wizard had finished the install. Not that there was any message telling me this. You're supposed to wait around looking at a message saying "almost finished" until Hell freezes over?

The cherry blossoms pine and fade away
The installation cannot proceed until you deactivate the program before re-activating it.

No, wait. I would've understood that message.

Why I am not better than cable

Pet Peeve du Jour: I wouldn't mind people dropping in unexpectedly, if it weren't for the fact that they expect me to drop what I'm doing to entertain them.

Excuse me? You want free entertainment, find a television. You want to know if I'm free to go do something fun, ask me. Don't just suddenly take it into your head to "drop by because I was in the neighborhood" and then expect me to stop what I'm doing when I need to get these things done today. You stop by my house because you're bored, I'm likely to put you to work.

The trouble with friends or relatives who are retired or out of work is that they have a lot of free time and haven't had to do the 9-5 stuff in quite a while. From my own experience, I can vouch that it's easy to forget that other people have deadlines when you do not. All the same, they could try to see the other side of the picture.

Okay. Done now.

What did people do before blogging? This is a great medium for venting about irksome irritations that aren't major enough to write a novel about, but are frustrating enough to poison a perfectly good day.




Exercise du jour: 30 minutes with my rowing machine, whom I've been informed is actually male. The full name is Michael Rhoda-Bhote.*

Done! Finally. Okay, to the more technically-minded this might seem like it was completed on the next day, given that I finished exercising after midnight. But there are times when it pays not to be too technical, and this is one of them. It's done.





*My apologies to anyone who just got a 60's flashback/earworm. P.S. Thanks Gina for christening the rowing machine!

Status check: month 2 of Weight Watchers

Are you really curious about this? Okay then, here are the stats after two months on Weight Watchers.

Weight lost
This week: -.8
So far: -9.6 (9 point friggin 6. All it would've taken would be 4 ounces more for me to be just a leeeetle bit happy.)
Average weight loss per week: 1.2 pounds

I am not pleased. Another woman, who joined the week before me, has lost 20 pounds by this weigh-in. (Yes, okay, she does weigh more and work out less. I don't care. I am Not At Home to Ms. Reasonable right now. Everybody is losing weight but me. I'm pissed.)

Total inches lost
Arms: -1/2 inch
Bust: -1 inch
Waist: -4 inches
Hips: -3 inches

What, you think I should cheer up because I'm fitting into smaller pant sizes? Was that Ms. Reasonable I just heard knocking on my door? Sorry, not answering the door. I sat through that WW meeting absolutely starving. I couldn't stand that everyone was talking about food, food, food!

Look, I know it's silly, I know I'm paying too much attention to numbers. I'm still bummed.

Exercise du jour: Cycling to work and back. For that matter, walking at lunch. I'm not working out hard enough, damn it.

Update du later on: Sorry. I wrote most of that last night right after I got home from the meeting. I was tired and ab-so-lute-ly starving, and that tends to make me wear the cranky pants.

I kept it up there because it was honest. Yes, I do want to lose weight as much as the next person, even if the next person is also losing water and muscle as well as fat. I want the weight to come off quickly and stay off forever. I also want a pony, with a pink glittery bridle.

I'll settle for a healthy body that's progressively moving downward on the scale, albeit at the speed of a slug on prozac.

Running in a Winter Wonderland? Bah humbug.

I know snow is wonderful when it falls on a windless evening, thick white flakes drifting out of the sky to cover the streets and sidewalks with a clean white blanket of soft powder snow.

I don't care. I want it to stop already.

I'm as enthusiastic toward snow as the reindog is toward Christmas.

Must you do this to me every year?

Can running in snowy weather affect asthma? Sure feels like it.


Exercise du jour: Ran 30 minutes. Didn't get a baseline time; too busy peering at the ground trying to find the icy patches.

I'm sweet enough already, thanks

What are all the food producers out there trying to do?

All I wanted to do was buy a loaf of bread. Seemed a simple enough mission to accomplish: I had the money, I was in the bakery section at Safeway, each loaf had the words "healthy" or "whole grains" on the label.



What could possibly be wrong with this picture?


The problem began when I started reading the labels. I rejected loaf after loaf, brand after brand, because each and every one of the dang things had sugar as one of the first ingredients. High-fructose corn syrup, at that. Who the heck puts sugar in their bread? Why would you want to do that?

It's like the frozen pre-made pancakes that I saw in the freezer section. Now I was raised proper, I was. About the only thing my Southern-born daddy taught me how to cook was pancakes, but I learned that good. You do not put sugar into the mix when making pancakes. If you want to add syrup or powdered sugar on top, more power to you. But you don't mess with the pancake itself.

I truly do not understand. I've got a sweet tooth, like everyone else. Doesn't mean that I want everything to be sweet all the time. I like popcorn with salt & butter just as much as caramel popcorn. Even sour foods taste good sometimes. (Pickles, anyone? Argh! No, not sweet pickles!)

Gilroy, California, is famous for their annual Garlic festival. Anyone who's been there has probably tried the garlic beer, or garlic chewing gum, or something similar. But the one food item that the festival is notorious for is the garlic ice cream. Yes, you read that correctly. Not a typo. And people will even admit, reluctantly, that it "isn't all that bad." The problem is not so much the taste as it is the idea of ice cream that's garlic flavored. That's how I feel about high-fructose corn syrup in bread or pancakes.

To me, it's a freedom of taste issue. If I want to go home and put sugar on my toast in the privacy of my own home, well, I'm an adult. It's not against the law (yet). This is not something that should be decided for me by some mindless profit-seeking company trying to corrupt my taste buds, ruin my palate, and restrict my choices all for their own profit. Huh.