Amused gamer constructs “musical” of bugs found in game. Contains hits such as “Where’s my f-ing car?” “My car door’s freaking out,” and “What is this place?”
Archive for December, 2006
On average, spam accounted for 87% of e-mail traffic this year.
Gadgets seen as best way to tell white lies.
Taxis not available to take drunks home.
Wired posts their 2006 Vapor Award Winners.
Steve Yegge writes about unanticipated situations in programming.
I have some awesome spam subject lines today:
- Swarms of SUVs hunt for parking spots.
I like the imagery of this. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a typical pump & drop. Boring. - ringworm frenzy
This email wins the award for “email with subject line most likely to turn me off of ever clicking it.” Seriously, the only way to turn me off more would be to throw a “rectal” in there somewhere. It appears to have the same origin as the first email, so apparently you either love or hate the subject lines. - Passover Hotline
Another pump & drop, although from a different source this time. This one made me wonder: What would a Passover Hotline do? Walk people through putting lamb blood on their doors, perhaps?
My relationship with Microsoft Word for the Mac has always been a love/hate one. I can’t really describe why I love it - there’s just something about the way the main document window behaves that fills me with word processing joy, as stupid as that sounds (once the keyboard shortcuts have been de-Microsoft-ized, at least). However, the rest of the product seriously sucks.
We have multiple testing checklists that need to be followed, and items checked off, every build we’re seriously testing. I could go into a whole rant about these lists, but I think everyone who’s seen them (and especially had to use them) would agree with me on it. At the moment it has to be done, and that’s it.
Microsoft Word for Windows handles these with ease. It’s only when they’re brought over to my PowerBook that they start to cause problems.
The spinning wait cursor abound as I try to work with this document. A lot of it is caused by the documents being in Page Layout mode. Switching to Normal mode fixes this, but I hate Normal mode. It confuses me why I’d have to use it, considering how responsive Word for Windows is, even in Page Layout mode. Still, I can put up with this.
More significant, though: I fill this form out by repeating the formatting change that checks an item on the list. Sometimes I apply it to the wrong line, and then it’s time to Undo. Undo has about a 70% chance of crashing Word. Not every use of Undo, but just undoing this particular formatting change.
Seriously.
How did this ship? And how did Microsoft manage to release roughly ten minor updates to Microsoft Word without ever fixing this? Does the Mac team at Microsoft use Word on Windows for all their large documents? Are the Mac team at Microsoft perfect people who never use Undo? That’s a trick question. If they were perfect, Undo wouldn’t crash. (Not that I expect perfection. I can’t attain that myself, after all.)
This seriously, seriously sucks. It’s cost me serious amounts of time. What good is software that crashes all the time? Why do people - including me - keep paying for products like this?
“Programs that crash have been proven to be less useful than those that don’t.” — Apple Technote #117