Jiggety-frikkin-jig

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

This poor blog has seen better days… I don’t seem to have much to post lately, largely because of the amount of mental energy going into work right now. It turns out I’m pretty crap at estimating the hours required for various tasks, because I keep forgetting to multiply everything by three. And right now I’m in a pretty foul mood, largely thanks to Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005. Because of its buggy crapulence I’m going to lose at least a day of my weekend just to keep from falling further behind. Until recently all my development was using the relatively stable VS2003, but for various reasons I find myself converting several projects to 2005, and instead of taking the half hour or so that I expected I must have toiled for at least five at this trivial task (staying back until 9PM)— and I’m still not sure the same mystery problems won’t come back because I’m still not sure what caused them (basic symptom is linker errors as it tries to link to non-existent object files, without even trying to compile the damn things first).

So anyway, I think I have to start acually doing something interesting in my spare time again, so at least I have something to write about here. If email correspondence is anything to go by then my primary focus should be on JujuEdit and Drivey. The following is my favourite piece of feedback to this effect (received late last year):

Quit your day job, focus on your craft (Drivey) one time. Before it’s all over, you’ve died, you’ve squandered it, YOU FUCKIN’ ROBOT.

Love,

Scott (and the D)

Thank you Scott (last initial J) — I hope you don’t mind me reposting your message here :) I appreciate your, er, enthusiasm, and the point is well taken, but since I am just barely solvent right now it will be some time before this becomes a realistic possibility. To be honest it’s not time so much as energy that’s required, especially for Drivey. I just need to find some enthusiasm to restart development, which is one reason the MacBook appeals (will be buying one shortly I think, although my recent experience with XCode at work has cooled me a little on doing direct development on OSX— the version I was using didn’t even have syntax hilighting!).

And now, since this has been such a whiny post anyway I’ll finish up with my top 5 Things Which Really Piss Me Off Right Now:

  1. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
  2. Credit card insurance which is made deliberately tedious to opt-out of, so basically they get away with extorting about $50 a year from me.
  3. Rory, for changing his mind again and choosing not to spill his guts and end his career.
  4. Websites which can only be accessed using a www prefix, ie when www.example.com works but example.com returns a 404 error… DUH! Here at intepid.com I actively discourage the use of this redundant nine-syllable prefix— go on, just try prepending a www to the domain name!
  5. People who rely on ad hominem arguments, as well as the people who call them on it but insist on using the term ad hominem when doing so. Too many people don’t know what it means, and there’s got to be a plainer way to say it.
feed

11 Comments

  1. Paul says:

    Great. Now I have the “I’m a Robot” song stuck in my head…

    http://www.uvphactory.com/Portfolio/robot/

  2. Charlotte says:

    http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html

    Very off-pissing. It’s like the whole “we’re at cross purposes” bullshit; “no…I UNDERSTAND what you’re saying, I just think you’re wrong!” Has nothing to do with cross bloody purposes…

  3. dirtymouse says:

    my pet peeve is the ‘www’, especial when reviewers or interviewers ask for your web site URL and then go ahead append the truely dated prefix, wordy, ugly W W W! (?F F F¿)

  4. dirtymouse says:

    i mean, what is that? WWW. are we stuttering? Do you have a stammer?

  5. mark says:

    It’s always nice to know I’m not the only one who gets grumpy about the little things :)

  6. dirtymouse says:

    “I’m as mad as hell - and i’m not gonna take it anymore!”

  7. rossnixon says:

    I prepended the www, but it just loaded intepid.com (Firefox 2). Was I meant to get a cute error message?

  8. mark says:

    no, it just silently removes the www again, which I think is a nice unobtrusive way of encouraging leaving it off. The other (very practical) reason for doing this redirection is that it cleans up google and bot searches a lot, because they don’t see intepid.com and intepid.com as two separate sites.

  9. Ashwin says:

    I’m pleased to hear the news about JujuEdit. It’s a very nice & nifty little editor that I use every day!

  10. mark says:

    * I use the word crapulence incorrectly in this post; it means overindulgence or intemperance, not crappiness.

  11. Rory says:

    You aren’t the only one who’s pissed off about me not telling all about last year.

    I still sit around, debating with myself over whether or not to tell the whole… frikkin… story.

    It’s long. And sordid. And bad.

    Which is precisely why it would be fun to write, and probably even more fun to read.

    I’d have to change a lot of names so as not to get sued, but others I’d leave in because, whether they want to sue me or not, they’re fuckers and deserve to be written up for it.

    But that’s such a small part of the story.

    I’ll tell it.

    Someday.

    I have some other thoughts about this whole thing, but I can’t share them yet.

    (Kind of odd that I’ve hit the point where I’m not even willing to share my metathoughts about the subject, but that alone should tell you something about why I haven’t told the story yet.)

    Thanks for mentioning it, though. I need a little kick in the ass every once in a while about it.

    Here’s a little bone I’ll throw you…

    I’m almost at the point where I could tell the story and survive.

    That’s all.

    Gotta go…

Leave a Comment