Why can’t people just do their fucking jobs?
[Warning, this post contains a lot more swears]
What with buying a house being one of the biggest and most stressy commitments you can make, it’s REALLY ANNOYING that everyone is so fucking half-assed about how they do their jobs. We’ve been stressing for the last week about how little feedback we’ve been getting from the various solicitors and financial institutions involved as settlement date approaches, and now at the last minute, after us constantly asking whether there’s anything we need to get sorted (to the point where it was clear they thought we were being unnecessarily concerned) we’re finally informed oh there actually is a problem because some fucking paperwork didn’t get transferred.
So after some urgent ringing around there’s going to be a last minute dash to the fucking bank tomorrow to pick up a cheque and drive it to a fucking solicitor 50 fucking km away because for some reason a fucking bank can’t electronically transfer the money we already agreed to several fucking weeks ago. We shouldn’t have to do shit at this point, we’re already legally committed to this mortgage, we even accepted a longer than usual settlement period just so make sure it all went smoothly… but no, now we have to chase this bullshit up for god knows what reason, and if we hadn’t then we wouldn’t get access to OUR HOUSE until after the weekend we’re supposed to be moving.
“Oh and by the way you should organize a pre-settlement inspection a few days before settlement”, they fucking inform us 36 hours before the cheque is supposed to be handed over.
Jesus Christ, so-called professionals, take some fucking pride in your work!
You know who isn’t totally shit at their jobs? Hospital staff and teachers. Everyone else is rubbish.
How big is 16KB?
Memory capacities have been growing so fast for so long it’s easy to lose track of just what the numbers mean. For reference, consider that the following tiny picture of a monkey occupies 16K of RAM (74 pixels square, with three bytes per pixel):
Many computers in the early 80′s had less than this much memory in total.
I was lucky enough to make my start on an Amstrad CPC464 around 1985, which had 64KB of RAM!
Loading data from tape was error prone (and horribly noisy) and took about 90 seconds per monkey. A 30 minute audio tape could hold up to 22 monkeys.
Fast forward 27 years or so, and the computer I’m typing this on has 800 thousand monkeys worth of memory, and 60 million monkeys worth of hard drive space. It can download monkeys from the internet at a rate of more than 90 per second.
41
So I’m 41 years old, as of fairly recently. And I’ve been programming in some form or another for more than 25 years! It’s funny to realize if you divided programmers into old and young I am now well and truly one of the oldies, as I don’t really feel that way.
But then I realize that coders under 30 aren’t really going to relate much to stuff like the following, or even remember what it was like before home internet connections, and I start to feel a teeny bit old.
T minus 3 days…
In theory we are to finalize ‘settlement’ and receive the keys to the new house this Friday, which I am both excited and apprehensive about. I’ve moved house 7 times in as many years and am rather ready to stay in one place for a while. Moving is really one of the most horribly tedious, stressful activities in life, but in this instance I just keep reminding myself: “But this house will be OURS”.
I don’t actually have a lot of stuff to move, but even so I am kind of dreading it and wishing I had a personal assistant who could do it all for me. And of course, because I don’t have a lot of stuff, it’s not worth hiring movers, which means lots of borrowing vehicles and lugging crap myself– trying to avoid roping in friends as helpers at this point as the only thing worse than moving house is helping someone else move house. A small mercy is that the place I’m currently living could be charitably called “run down”, so I don’t have to be quite so anxious about leaving the odd scuff mark and such as the place was already amply blemished when I moved in 2 years ago, so I’m pretty confident I’ll be leaving it in a more habitable state than I found it.
I will miss the seaside shackiness of it though.
How to Join a Conference Call
- Ten minutes before the meeting is a good time to suddenly recall that it’s not being held on Skype like all your other meetings are.
- Search your inbox for the invitation containing the URL for the meeting.
- Click on it, and you should get to a page telling you the meeting is yet to start. You will see a big button that says JOIN, which although currently disabled will obviously become clickable when the meeting is about to start, so you’re all set with minutes to spare!
- Just before the scheduled start time this page will refresh, allowing you to enter your name, email and password before clicking JOIN.
- Oh, you don’t have a password…?
- Frantically scan your email invitation, which will helpfully inform you that you can obtain a password from the meeting organizer.
- Have a go logging in with no password first, just to confirm it won’t work.
- Email the organizer, apologising for the slight delay and ask for the meeting password.
- Once you receive the password, enter it along with your name and email and click JOIN.
- SURPRISE! NOW IS EXACTLY THE MOST APPROPRIATE TIME TO FIND OUT YOU NEED THIS JAVA APPLET INSTALLED!
- Enable Java, then download and install the applet, violating every instinct you have.
- Reload the page.
- Your browser should say something like: “Could not load WebbyChat General Plugin Container”
- Restart browser, revisit the meeting page, reenter your login, and click JOIN.
- You should see the same message as in step 13.
- Google: “Could not load WebbyChat General Plugin Container”
- According to some person on the internet it doesn’t run in Chrome on Mountain Lion (you dummy!) so try Safari instead.
- Launch Safari, go to the meeting page, enter login, click JOIN.
- And you’re in! You should now see a shared desktop waiting for you.
- Say ”hello, hello?” a few times out loud, just until it is clear to you that this is not one of those new fangled web apps that does audio.
- Click on that button with an audio symbol on it to be shown a helpful 7 digit phone number.
- Dial the number to confirm it is definitely not a valid phone number, with or without a country code.
- Look in the WebbyChat window and you might see some text chat going on, where someone might helpfully suggest an actual phone number to call, rather than that meeting code you’ve been trying to dial.
- Dial the phone number.
- Listen to the last half of a recorded welcome message.
- Now listen to the first half. It will instruct you to enter the meeting code.
- Clumsily enter the code, pausing just a fraction too long after the third digit so the recorded voice can now scold you for invalid entry and give you one more chance.
- Enter the code again, this time forgetting to press the “pound sign” in a timely manner, the voice is not impressed at all, and starts telling you about the helpdesk for technical problems.
- Hang up and take a deep breath.
- Redial the number.
- Quickly but carefully enter the meeting code, and press “pound”.
- You should now be able to both hear and apologize profusely to your colleagues who’ve been waiting patiently a couple of minutes now. Congratulations, and welcome to the future!
I made some ice-cream bread
It was indeed bread-like in sturdiness and taste, but was not as delicious as I hoped. A bit of butter and jam goes well with it.
Made from 2 cups ice-cream (vanilla in this case), 1.5 cups self-raising flour, and nothing else. Looks like the idea has been bouncing around for a while, eg here.
Needs More Cloud
Xbox One has been revealed, and according to one slide in the launch it’s “Powered by the Cloud.” So Microsoft is as hip as it ever was.
Just like Sony is apparently doing with the case design of the PS4, Microsoft is getting rid of as many curves as possible, leaving Apple with all the RoundRects. I can’t help wondering if they didn’t try prototyping a sharp edged controller at some point in this redesign.
The most interesting technical point for me was that they’ve abandoned the Kinect’s Structured Light approach to depth-sensing and replaced it with a Time of Flight (ToF) camera, which is in fact a real thing and means that the device actually measures the time it takes for a light pulse to bounce off you and return on a per-pixel basis. Given that light travels amazingly fast, that’s an impressive feat. They don’t give specifications or resolution yet but it’s probably in the range of a centimeter or so.
The presenters strongly emphasised voice control in the presentation, which I’ve realised I will probably never be comfortable with until the software is better than humans at understanding speech (that’s a high bar to clear, but it will eventually happen). I want to mumble and run my words together, and I want to keep my goddamn voice down if I’m talking to my TV. How annoying will it be to have to hear someone in the next room declaiming “Xbox, watch movie!” – At least with Siri you can hold the phone close to keep from disturbing others (but you know you still sound like a twat).
The whole launch felt rather muddled and dull (although I only watched the first 20 minutes or so I am assuming it didn’t get better) and just made me wonder if we’ll see an alternative from Apple this year. Basically an Apple TV with a proper App store will be a far more interesting prospect for developers.
BitTorrent Sync – a really good idea
Sick of bullshit cloud sync services? Why not make your own? (with a few friends)
With this method you could easily keep a folder synced with friends/work/home of whatever size you want. It uses BitTorrent to do the transferring so it should be able to handle large files and delta updates well. For private data you could probably sync encrypted volumes/sparsebundles fairly effectively too.
That time of year again
It looks like I need to do this, once again
COMMITMENT
I hereby commit to not purchasing any products containing tobacco for one year, covering the period from UTC 12PM, 15th May, 2013 to UTC 12PM, 15th May 2014.
PENALTY FOR NON-COMPLIANCE
Should I break the Commitment within the designated time period, I hereby promise to publicly acknowledge this lapse and donate AU$1000 to the Liberal Party of Australia* within 48 hours, after which the Commitment will be terminated or renewed at my discretion.
Also, I finally donated that $500 I promised on successful completion of the first compact, choosing Médecins Sans Frontières as the beneficiary.
As you were.
__________
* In Australia the Liberal Party are the conservative jerkwads who court the reactionary vote and think climate change is something invented by the left to undermine good ol’ fashioned capitalism. They’re not as bat-shit crazy as the GOP in the US but who the hell is? It’s unfortunate in that I would otherwise describe myself as a liberal but it’s not worth it here because you have to explain you mean “small el” rather than “large el”
NBN hardware
In Australia there is this huge rollout of high bandwidth infrastructure known as the “National Broadband Network”. I’m looking forward to it, and really hope it gets to our new house before a conservative government gets voted in and hobbles the plan.
That said, I’m a little squicked out by the excessive hardware required within the home. Here’s an illustration of what will apparently be gracing a wall in a home with NBN (fibre) installed:
Note that this picture doesn’t even include a wifi router; this gear is just to terminate the optical fibre and provide ethernet/WAN and telephone line. I’m pretty sure that giant power supply (box on the left) will be the most expensive component, even though it exists primarily to provide backup power for the phone line should the mains drop out. I can’t help thinking this is a massive waste, since landlines are becoming almost an anachronism– Everyone has mobile phones now, and if the fibre network is still up it’s a reasonable bet that cell towers would be operational too.
