Good morning Rob, Outlook here. Guess what? I still suck.

This has been around for a little while, but I just stumbled across it. Very funny, if you use the crusty old vi editor in unix (as I do) and hate Microsoft (as I do).

How the vi editor would look if made by Microsoft

Outlook Sucks. The reason for its suckiness is unknown. (Right click and select “View Image” in the image below to read the full error message.) It’s sad when it takes such a large dialog box to say “our software is garbage and we don’t even know what’s wrong with it.”

A little while ago I lamented the fact that my office had switched to Outlook, and I announced to the global community at large who reads my website (approximately four people) that Outlook Sucks. It still does. Along the way, I have groused about it to my colleagues here in the office, and now that one of my co-workers has fled Boulder to work at our San Fransisco office, we continue to rail against the sloppy, bloated, non-functional pile of email code excrement via instant messenger. But it’s not enough folks, it’s not enough. Now, every time something pisses me off about Outlook, it’s going on here.

And, begin:

Today I received a duplicate copy of an email forward from a co-worker, that was originally sent two days ago. This struck me as odd. Did he re-send it and forget he’d already forwarded it? He mentioned that he had problems sending it (big surprise, he was using Outlook to send it, after all) and had asked if I had received two copies the other day. I hadn’t. So I assumed this new copy was the second copy that never went through the other day. I wanted to look at the message headers to see what was up.

In my Thunderbird days, all I had to do was click the little plus sign next to the “simple header”—which only shows sender, recipient and date—to expand the header, in place, to the full email header, showing me the entire path that the email took from sender to recipient. It’s a useful diagnostic tool from time to time, and that’s why good email programs give you easy access to it.

But now I’m living in the dark days of Outlook, so here are the steps now:

1. Look all around the interface for a show headers option. Don’t find anything.
2. Pull down every menu, force-clicking on the stupid short menus that Microsoft thinks is doing you a favor by clipping, so you can see all the menu items. Don’t find anything.
3. Open up “help”, type in “headers”, and wait for shitty, slow-ass, web-based help search to come back at ya with some results.
4. Delight that four down on the list is a “showing email headers” help item.
5. Wonder what is mentally wrong with the Microsoft “Help” file editors who thought it made more sense to tuck the actual “how to show them” part of the entry yet another hyperlink away, and fill the main page with endless babble about email headers. Poor Joe Average Outlook User has no idea what the fuck an email header is, and I think most people who land on this page are looking for the how, not the what.
6. Click the damned extra hyperlink and read that you need to go to View… Options to get started.
7. Go to View menu, to find there is no Options entry.
8. Think to yourself how shitty Outlook is.
9. Return to the “Help” page, and read the note about how “if you do not see an Options entry, to make sure you are reading an email message in a separate window, rather than in the preview pane”.
10. Think to yourself how this is something you rarely do, since it’s simply a step that makes no sense in your day-to-day use of email—if the message can be read in the preview pane, why double click the message to open the same shit in another window, to be closed later?
11. Mark #10 as a key to understanding the Microsoft programmer psyche, the people responsible for making a word processor that requires gigabytes of disk space.
12. Open the fucking email in a separate window, while watching a small piece of your soul dissolve and fade away.
13. Go back to the View menu and then realize that now there’s ANOTHER View menu, in the individual message window.
14. Open the second View menu to discover the long-sought-after Options menu item.
15. Select options, giddy with excitement knowing your menial little task—previously a one mouse-click operation now riddled with complexities on the scale of the Normandy Invasion—is almost over.
16. Finally look at the message headers—crammed into a short, narrow window with a scrollbar that is wholly unsatisfying and difficult to look at, especially after the process required to get there.
17. Squint at tiny type and try to follow header lines that cannot be read all in one shot without scrolling, which is like trying to read the ticker board at the New York Stock Exchange as if it were a sentence.
18. Discover no clues in the headers that would explain the latent delivery of the email.
19. Write this post.

Good job, Microsoft; you suck.

Well, shit. That took longer than I thought. Delayed by a holiday party video project and thwarted by my webhost’s computer being downed by the horrid weather and resultant power outages in Seattle last weekend, I am now moved in to a new home at dreamhost.com, and my email is slowly trickling over to the new home on a more regular basis. In the meantime, I went to a roller derby contest (no shit), made a movie (no shit), read a book (well, I started it, anyhow) and prepared for the upcoming Christmas holiday (as best as one can). All worthy of talking about here, and in earlier times I would have talked about all these events in realtime. All I can say is that it feels good to have finally gotten my website moved to a new home and out of my friend’s hair, I’m looking forward to the holidays, and I’m fully planning on tweaking my site and—most importantly, posting more often—in the new year.

Microsoft Outlook SUCKS!

I have resisted this stinky pile of shit for years and years, and was delighted to see they used Thunderbird here at my new job when I came out here a year and a half ago. I snickered and then sighed a long resigned sigh when both of my last two employers haplessly “upgraded” to Outlook when I left those companies and they were forced to hire general IT consultants, who of course mindlessly toed the Microsloth party line.

But, alas, it’s finally happened. My present employer, wanting some groupware features such as shared email folders and calendaring, has finally made the jump. The back end is not Exchange, so at least this thing runs fairly quickly, but the client application is Outlook, and I was one of the last people in the company to get upgraded (I stayed under the radar as long as I could), and this week has just been one annoying discovery after another.

The fact that this bloated, nonsensical, dismal excuse for an email application is the single most popular email client in the world is about as sensible as the fact that this country re-elected our current dismal excuse for a President.

There is more shit in here that I don’t need, tons of hoops to jump through to get the program to leave your email alone and format it according to time-tested internet protocols, and apparently NO way to format replies in such a way that avoiding top-posting is not a cut-and-paste extravaganza.

Good job, Microsoft. Your stuff sucks.

In what amounts to a complete one-eighty move, Apple has decided to endorse the installation of Windows XP on the new Intel Macs. Wow.

It was only a couple weeks ago that a hacker scored $13,000 for being the first to solve the puzzle of booting Windows on the Mac, and now Apple has one-upped him by releasing Boot Camp, a (beta) installer that achieves the holy grail: the ability to run Windows on your mac for those times when you just need it. For me, that’s only to run AutoCAD and Flight Simulator, but that still happens enough that I’m still running my old Athlon desktop system at home for those times.

Boot Camp looks nice, and it even re-partitions your hard drive non-destructively so installation is about as easy as it can be. This just might be worth going out and getting a copy of XP…

Web guru Jeffrey Zeldman had a fiasco installing OSX 10.2 this weekend. Glad I read the article. Apparently if you don’t have OS9.2 installed, when classic runs everything goes to hell, possibly leaving you with a trashed OSX partition as well. Not good.

I don’t remember the last time I loaded Classic, but I need to remember that this is a problem until I get the chance to sort this out. Not exactly sure how the hell I’m going to get me a 9.2 install disk either.

Zeldman complained about the Jaguar installer; he has a legitimate beef. When I installed the Jaguar upgrade, I has a less devestating snafu, but there was a snafu. I had Yellow Dog Linux installed on my G4, along with OS9 and OSX. YDL comes with a bootloader that allows easy triple-booting of all three OSs. The Jaguar installer failed to notice this, because it never asked me about it and blindly attempted to update the OS, and failed. It simply said the disk could not be updated. When I rebooted, I got the grey OSX.2 startup screen (uh oh), but then the install worked a treat. So, apparently OSX.2 is very closed-minded about things, assuming that there couldn’t possibly be any other OS or boot loaders on your computer. I wasn’t using YDL anymore, so it was a minor snafu for me. But if I was, that would have really, really sucked.

So, I have a happy installation of Jaguar, but a hidden partition that I’d like to get back someday, but I’m not messing with anything until after the Radiance Workshop this weekend.