Wow, start actually blogging again, and you discover all these new things about your blogging software. WordPress, the software that has “powered” this blog for the last several years, is up to version 2.8.5 and a lot has changed for the better. Software updates are automated and work seamlessly, even for users running WP on other hosting sites (like me). Themes and plugins have similar auto install/update functionality.

Apparently there’s also a change to the database from latin1 to utf8 character sets, which is wreaking havoc on a few of my posts that have “smart quote” characters in them. Lots of solutions exist, but the “right” one seems to be a slightly involved conversion of my MySQL database and I’m not in the mood. I think I’ll manually change all the characters that need changing.

The upshot of all of this is that I’ve been spending the better part of the morning reading the WordPress Codex site and looking at new themes and plugins for my site. I guess I’m motivated again.

awright, I got my iPhone talking to my new user account. All I did was tell the “Applications” tab to sync with my iPhone, and it copied the apps to my new iTunes install. Then I did the “wipe”, letting iTunes blow out my iPhone’s music library. At this point, my contacts and iPhone apps are synchronous with the iTunes install on my new laptop’s new user account. I spent an hour or so copying the music from my old user account to my new one, and after all that things aren’t perfect, but they are good. My old files from my old user account are on my new laptop, and after a little terminal action I changed the permissions on those files so I can move them freely about to my new user account’s directory structure. This I will do over the next three years.

Meanwhile, Hooper’s right rear leg is a little gimpy, half my music is not showing up in my iTunes library even tho it’s taking up space in the iTunes directory, and the Outside Magazine article about Lance Armstrong is the biggest piece crap I’ve ever seen. Folks, Lance is a doper, was a doper, and is dressed like the asshole in Napoleon Dynamite at the prom for his photo shoot in this article. And the hack writer for the Outside article just completely missed the point about all of pro cycling and especially the importance of American pro cycling. For now I don’t want to get into it, but for now also, Christopher Keyes (author of this crappy Outsice Magazine article) is a fucking asshole, and a moron to boot. He seems to think that American pro cycling started and ended with Lance Armstrong, and nothing could be further from the truth. God Dammit! I was so ready to renew my subscription to this rag, too…

Let’s talk later.

I fucking hate this shit. New computer, started setting up, got my iTunes all dialed in, then realized my goddamned motherfucking iPhone is really not interested in syncing with my new setup. Apparently, I was supposed to use the Apple Migration Assistant. That utility is fairly impressive, but now my Mail.app is busted, and I have a crapload of duplicated bytes in the form of redundant applications and all kinds of extra shit. The whole point of the new computer was to start fresh, and now I have one halfway setup user account on the new computer (that does not want to speak to my iPhone), and all the binary turdlets from my old computer copied over, with a broke-ass malfunctioning Mail.app. It’s bittersweet, because while I’m sure I can fix the Mail.app thing eventually, there just seems to be a lot of other weirdness and I can clearly see that loads of files I never need again have migrated over. I’d really like to just keep getting my new user account set up on this new MacBook, and get my iPhone to divorce itself from my old laptop. Now that everything from my old computer is now copied to my new one, I guess I can just tell the phone to start fresh; the applications should all be on the copy of the data from my old machine, right? Most of my applications have been re-installed on the new computer already, and like I said I basically have a copy of my entire old computer on here for now, so I should be able to pull over all the missing bits I need. I should do it, right? Start fresh with the iPhone?

Good lord, why is it so hard to start fresh every once in a while?

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…