Return to the office sucks

I can't get over how much I don't actually like going into the office. The things that I like doing before was hanging out, going for coffee, eating lunch together, etc. All the things that I don't feel comfortable with doing. And when I go, there is very few people there that are supposed to be because everyone is sick all the time.

Did I mention how much nicer I like working from home? How much more work I get done?

Can you imagine going to your employer and telling them that you're going to be working in the local coffee shop. You're not really going to see anyone you work with probably. Maybe someone that you worked not closely with before. You demand that your employer pay for your time at the coffee shop because the wifi isn't free. Of course you'll have to call into meetings since not everyone is going to be at your coffee shop with you. Oh, it'll also be terrible for productivity since it's loud, very little privacy, and you're probably going to get sick because of the unmasked people about. I don't think that your employer would think this is a good idea. But this is what I see the office as.

Would it be better if everyone was in the office full time? Not really since I work with people in various different places and departments.

I'm not happy about the whole thing. It depresses me the day before I go in. It depresses me the whole time I'm there.

I've been going back 2 days a week, health permitting since September I think. I can count two different conversations I've had with people about actual work. And those could just as easily have been done virtually.

I hate it and there is no logical argument that I can make that will change it since the decision is political and along the lines of Because I Said So.

The time it takes

I'm a little frustrated. Originally I had thought that 1:40 was a long time to pick up the kids. Currently that's closer to a best time for me. I'm often closer to 2 hours to do pickup. It was much faster with picking up Isaac on the bike, going home, putting things away, hoping into the car and picking up Alice. It took me 20 minutes to drive down Murray street tonight. That's not typical, but somewhere on the route their is always a surprise congestion for no visible reason. The other day is was Kent street.

At this point it just seems like the cost in time I have to pay, but it's frustrating. It shouldn't be that bad.

Even on the days where I'm not doing pickup but just taking the bus it's horrible. It used to be I could take just about any bus going by. Waiting 10 minutes was the most I've waited and it's usually because I was choosing to wait for a bus that had more room. So that was 10 minutes of walking + 10 minutes of bus. Currently it's 25-30 minutes on the bus, plus 2 minutes of walking plus a wait of 10 to 45 minutes for a bus. That doesn't count the time I go "I'm going home now. Uhh, a bus doesn't come for 20 minutes. I guess I'll stay at my desk longer...". Google maps says that it's about 1:18 minute walk. *sigh*

I can't wait until the weather is better and I can bike (or ride my new scooter!) again. *sigh*

Distracting text makes a poor drm / fingerprinting

I'm reading some of the works as part of the Hugo voter packet and some of them have what at first appears to be poor editing. Something that looks like an artifact of badly done OCR. Mostly missing spaces between words or a missing hyphen. But these are digital works, presumably straight from the publisher. Not something that should have any errors like this.

It got me thinking that this must be some form of text based watermarking to uniquely identify me, or perhaps any works that are pirated from the voter packet. I know that they've done similar things to digital music / videos, but usually in places where people wouldn't notice. I think in theaters they are disguised as those old dust spots that you might see on a frame of film, but since there are no frames of film from the digital projector, it couldn't be those. It's something that people are used to, so their brains probably just skip right over it.

It's distracting. It's like someone lightly slapping you every once and a while. It wrecks the flow of the work and makes the work feel like a poorer quality than I think that it really is. Along those lines, it's disappointing.

I hate drm. I hate this type of fingerprinting. And I hate being made to feel like a criminal when I enter into a agreement in good faith. It's that kind of shit that turns customers into pirates.

I need to get more sleep

Don't misunderstand me, Laura is getting less than I am. I've got very little reason to complain. I'm just a bit tired and need to remove the bad habit of staying up too late. I had to laugh when I read The Onion story about a man who thought he really was going to go to bed early. Funny.

The part that jarred me was when they said there was "four different shows he needs to catch up on". Catch up on? We used to do that when we had a pvr that had limited space. We felt like we were obligated to watch tv, to keep up with the Joneses. I feel that if you're "behind" in your "entertainment", you're doing it wrong. It's supposed to be there to fill in the extra time you have. You should not ever displace sleep to get "caught up" on something like that.

I figure that there will be enough time later in life when I may have limited mobility to consume all the media that I'd like. With the plethora of written, spoken and video (and possibly something like holographic in the future) choices, it's possible to be picky. And you can be picky right now. Want a good book? You don't have to look at the things published in the last 2 years. There is entertainment that goes back thousands of years. Certainly more of a backlog than I will ever be able to get through. Mix it up with your other favourite author. But with either, feel free to drop it and move on to something else worthy of your time. There is no need to get caught up with entertainment.

Catching up is for friends and family. Spend the time there.

No spell check

I'm going to write this post without spell check. Why you ask? So that people can see just how badly I spell. So far I think that it's pretty good, but most words are in the range of 5 to 6.

Let's tell some stories.

As a kid I was always frustrated with spelling. Teachers response when you asked them to spell something was simply "look it up in the dictionary" or "sound it out". Since English isn't phonetic sounding it out doesn't work too well. Being able to look something up in a dictionary implies (to me) that you you already know how to spell it. It's like asking "how do I drive to Steve's house?" and being told "Just ask Steve. He's at his house.". Useless.

Aside: I think that I'm doing well so far.

I have a memory when I was in grade 3 (?) I had to ask my friend how to spell "car" because I had no idea. I could spell it yesterday. I'd be able to spell it tomorrow. It's just when I needed to spell it then, I couldn't. He laughed. He mocked. I was embarrased, but what can you do? My brain just was not cooperating with me right then.

Today at work I was having a conversation with a co-worker and talking about her kids having to learn spelling. She more or less said that if I have trouble with it, I just have to work a bit harder at it and then I'll figure it out. wtf. Does she not think that I've been working "a bit harder" at it for 30+ years? I write and write and write to practice my communication skills. It still feels like pushing water up hill. I think that I'm slowly making progress. The conversation felt like if you told someone that struggled with their weight all their life to just "stop being fat and you'll feel better".

How do I deal with it? I avoid problem words. Words like unfortunally and inconvience. I use google as a spell checker by putting my word into a sentence since (thank the FSM) it can figure out context. I ask my wife. I make jokes about it. I install spell check plugins before they are part of core systems. I have my tricks and work arounds. But that's what they are.

I just can't see spelling errors. For other people they stick out like a sore thumb. My brain glides over them. People who don't struggle can't fathom what it's like to struggle with an issue. Oh, they might have tons of other things they struggle with, but for some reason the brain doesn't understand that everyone has issues. Or maybe it's their heart that doesn't understand.

*sigh*

Just... follow... the... instructions.

At work we're moving from Win XP to Win 7. Finally. The testing and paperwork involved was stupid and drove me nuts. However, for testing cots I'm always more surprised when it works on XP rather than 7.

Anyways, there are carefully documented steps on the wiki on how to set things up. But people like to go off the rails sometimes. I have no idea why, I figure that it's all a big conspiracy with the weather to give me a headache. Anyways, about ten times today I have conversations like this:
Co-worker: "Uh, I did what you told me (12 times) and it doesn't work. You have to come and fix my machine."
Me: "Did you follow the instructions?"
Co-worker: "No, I decided to do something else. And now it doesn't work. You have to come fix it."
Me: "Please follow the instructions."
Co-worker: "Just tell me how to fix it"
Me: "Go back and follow the instructions. You seem to have missed step 1." (I said "one", "two" and "the first part" to 3 different people)
Co-worker: "Okay"
Pause for 5 minutes
Co-worker: "Hey, that got things working. Thanks!"
Me: "No problem"

Normally I get crap like this. It's not too bad because it trickles in. But this week it's 1/2 the group switching to Win 7 and the other half is the next week. The part that pisses me off is that these people are supposed to be technical people. I warned them several times to follow things closely and just make sure they do the steps. It's not from lack of understanding or clarity of the instructions. They read them and then decided "hey, I know better. I'll do it this way instead". For the few people that can dig themselves out of a hole that's fine. But when you don't understand what the instructions are explaining, why are you trying do your own thing. Stop. Wasting. My. Time.

*deep breath*

The week is almost over. Almost there... just 4 more days until the weekend...

First world problems

I don't get people. I really don't. Only where people don't ever see the causes of diseases do they refuse vaccines that are freely available. It drives me nuts.

Someone that I work with posted something to facebook where it drew a direct line between number of vaccines given and number of autistic cases reported per x population. Never mind that the issue could be more complex than that. Never mind that what is considered "autistic" has changed over the last 30 years. Never mind that it's possible that awareness and identification techniques might have improved. Never mind that there has been no proven link between the two, time and time again. No, it's a simple A causes B. I was mad, but I didn't trust myself to actually write anything, so I simply posted a link to the anti-vaccine body count page. If people from her post are interested, they can go there. She thanked me for the link and said that they had chosen not to vaccinate their kids (10 and 8?) but she's always interested in information on the subject.

Have I suddenly changed her mind? Opened up a new avenue of discussion? No, I doubt it.

Have I actually met someone with polio, measles, mumps, rubella or any of the other things vaccines fight against in order to feel I should take the vaccine? No. Do I have to? No. I also don't need to meet someone that's flow through the windshield of their car to know that seat belts are a good thing.

Angry.

Stupid waste of time - code comment formatting

I'm pretty pissed off. I was ranted at today over something that I find stupid and a waste of my time - the formatting of code comments. We use eclipse and use the code formatter and "save actions" so people don't have to waste their time doing something that the IDE can do for them automatically. The behaviour in question is that the person would spend (apparently) a lot of time formatting their comment with indents and when the save actions would kick in they would lose all of this formatting.

I typically use the // style of comments, even for multiline comments. Why? Because it's easy with ctrl-shift-c. Boom, it's done. The other person insists that they use the /* */ style comments. Why? Because that's what they've done for 15 years. And they told me that there was nothing that I can say to change their mind. I, and the other 40 developers, had to change how we do things. Quoting years of doing something a given way as a reason for continuing to do it is a really shitty reason. It's a wonder how we as a species ever moved out of the trees or caves.

Now, I was pretty ticked at this point. Why? A number of reasons, but # 1 being that they didn't even want to discuss things. It was black and white in their head. End of story. Full stop. (I don't think that they actually said this, but that's what it felt like.) Aside: if someone says "end of story, full stop" it usually means that they are 1) a jackass and 2) wrong.

The best part about the whole thing? Perhaps the only good thing actually: I learned something new about java today. I learned that if you do slash star dash like: /*- NOTICE THE DASH! */ it will keep the indents. Who knew you were supposed to write java code like that? Apparently Sun / Oracle.

So, here I am probably like 10 hours later still pissed off. Still wasting my time thinking about it. Which pisses me off. Loop.

I love helping people, but gods people help yourselves first. It's fine to come to with a problem. Ideally come with proposed solutions. Come to rant, but not to rant at me. But don't come to me with a closed mind. I can't fix that.

Exceptionally stupid

This is a rant post. About tech stuff. Angry. You've been warned.

One of the things that people don't seem to understand in programming is exceptions. Some you need to deal with. Some you need to fail as soon as you can and let the issue bubble up the stack until some over all wrapper code deals with it.

For example, if you're testing input from a user to make sure that it's a number, you might try to convert it to the number and if it doesn't work, you can assume that what they entered isn't a proper number. Simple.

Other things like the disk being gone, the db down (for a db driven app), or, you know, your language not understanding utf-8: Fail early. Fail fast. I flagged something in a code review today and it turned into a 15 minute discussion / argument for something that was the least of the problems with the code.

The code in question was along the following lines by doing some processing on a string:

try {
byte[] utf8Bytes = myString.getBytes("UTF8");
}
catch (Exception e) {
// just return the original
return myString;
}

Now, one the code was littered with "catch exception" everywhere, which just drives me batty, but that is a different rant. My issue was that if java you are using doesn't understand utf-8, then perhaps that would be an exceptional case. Rather than trying to deal with that issue or letting UnsupportedEncodingException bubble up, just wrap the exception in a RuntimeException and be done with it.

When an exceptional case happens, let the exception happen.

People writing code to protect against a future case and things that might happen one day drive me insane. And not the good insane either. Oh no.

*sigh* I think that there might be a reason why they put us in small rooms with padded walls at work.

The Story of the Craftsman

There once was a construction company that build homes and other buildings. They hired skilled craftsmen (and women, but we're calling them all craftsmen) to do the work. These people had been told that they'd be building homes built on the latest designs, using the best materials, in order to build peoples dream homes for a reasonable price.

The craftsmen were told that the company would provide all the tools in order to ensure a consistent quality. The workers requested pneumatic nail guns since that allow them to go as quickly as possible. The request went to the hardware store were the clerk insisted most of their sales were for tac hammers. Clearly tac hammers are all that are required, so those were purchased. The craftsmen protested - this would take them 10x as long and would cause much frustration. Craftsmen, like all skilled labour, like to feel that they are working at the best of their ability with the appropriate tools. A tac hammer is clearly not a valid replacement for an air hammer.

Ah, but the management of the company said that the tac hammers make perfect sense. If their paid more money for the faster tools, it would be out of the company budget. This would save time, and therefore money, but only what was billed to the customers. So it wasn't in the companies best interest to ensure the craftsmen have the proper tools.

The craftsmen promised that they would pay for their own tools if they were allowed to bring them into work. Alas the company's management stated that would be against policy. I mean, if the craftsmen brought in their own tools, how would that look? People would start to think that the company wasn't able to provide the proper resources to do the job.

I want poor quality too!

I don't get apps like instagram and the filters that you can apply. I really don't get it. Taking cutting edge camera technology and using it to capture the best possible image doesn't make people happy until they can apply film grain and colour distortion from 40 year old badly processed pictures. Oh, ideally wrap it in a generic square boarder to make it look like you're a hipster who only shoots slide film from a defunct company... on their cell phone. If I really wanted to see such shitty pictures I'd just turn off the colour green on my monitor.

I bet that if you went back to the 1960's and spoke to the people were taking photos on film like that, they'd LOVE to be able to cheaply capture images as well as we can today. Oh, in something that you could print a wall poster of. And see it before you took it. And could take tens of thousands of pictures. And the cost per picture was virtually (haha) zero. And the camera was tiny and had access to the world's information and allowed you to contact anyone on the earth, from almost anywhere. But instead you get people taking shitty pictures, cropping it to a square and messing up the colour so bad it looks like they took the picture from inside a girly drink. In some pictures I swear that you can see part of the drink umbrella.

It's like taking a new car, putting horse cartwheels and sitting on the roof so that you can steer it. You know, like your ancestors used to in the good old days. Screw that. When your kids (grandkids, whatever) want to see what you were like waaay back in the early 2010's, they probably don't want to deal with whatever shitty filter you were playing with at the time. Would they correct it? Maybe. Maybe their cyborg assistant will. Who knows. But why make more work. Just take nice pictures. Stop being so... artistic... and hip. Be boring like me.

Half of everything

I once watched a show where they were talking about these "suites" in Las Vegas where you could stay "free" as long as you promised to bet some ridiculous amount at the casino. The suite was huge, lets say 3000 square feet, and came with a dedicated butler. The thing that I took away from that program was when they interviewed the butler and he talked about his training. You were supposed to speak an octave lower, half as fast, and move at half the speed. I think that the idea is that the staff are background and calming. I feel that this is brilliant.

This is how I try to interact with kids. I don't know if it's something that I picked up from my family or if that one interview from that show took deep root in my brain. Kids (not my own) are usually excited to talk to me (being the amazing uncle / parents friend that I am). Rather than feed this "wind up", I use the "half of everything" trick. No use the kid being so excited that they can't communicate. It almost feels zen in a way. Calm, slow, thoughtful.

I'd be lying if I told you that I don't get caught up in the excitement and mess up. But it just feels like the right way to act. It's probably the right way to act with everyone, not just kids, but that's another story.

It confuses me to see adults trying to excite a calm child. Maybe I just grew up in a family with too many excited kids. Maybe the other adults have never been attacked by half a dozen children hopped up on sugar armed with rope and a vague sense of purpose. I don't know what it is. But if you come across my calm child, don't wind them up and I won't shit under your bed. Both actions create a stink and a mess that will have to be dealt with sometime in the night.

FYI: rope burn all over your body isn't fun.

Don't change the url

One of my recent pet peeves is sites that are using different url based on the user agent (UA). It just seems lazy, and when you share a link, someone is just looking at the wrong site.

When in doubt, give me the "desktop" or full version. But if you detect a mobile UA, give me different css / layout. Don't redirect me to a different domain like m.example.com or add in crap like /touch/ into the url. Of course allow me to switch back to the desktop version if you've hidden something.

With each new tech we go through a shitty period where people provide different solutions that don't work well until, slowly, everyone converges to the best one. I just hope that this shitty period is shorter than others have been. :-/

Hate on for DRM

Up to now I've tried to stick to my guns about DRM. If something had DRM, I'd either return it or not buy it in the first place. I've not been perfect - I've bought things like DVD's and bluerays which are at least region locked. I never bought anything from itunes when they had drm, but I've purchased a metric crapload since.

I'd like to get some non-dead-tree magazine subscriptions (Analog and Asimov), but they are all drm'ed when you buy from amazon, sony, barnes and noble. At this point my only option is to buy higher priced individual issues from fictionwise which is owned by b&n - which could mean that it gets killed off in favour their own competing store. I even emailed the publisher and they told me they "do not have any plans for DRM free subscriptions in the future". *sigh*

Why do I hate drm so much? To me it removes who owns the purchased item. At any time the company can decide not to support the device or (if it calls home) servers that the drm uses. You're locked into the devices which the company decides you can use.

Don't get me wrong, I've got no problem paying for content or using docs that are clearly linked to me like they generate at the pragmatic bookshelf. I know when I download a pdf from them, I can view it on my computer, my iphone, or any device I get in the future.

I know that I can strip off the drm. I could just ignore the law. That's not the point. I don't like being a "good customer" and being treated like a criminal. I'll do the only thing that I can do - vote with my wallet and go somewhere else while letting them know why I won't be a customer of theirs.

Fire and forget

One of my goals at work for any of the "infrastructure" that I maintain is that I'd like it to run without interaction for 6 months. I want the other developers to not have to know how much disk space there is, what resources other projects are using, what crappy files some of of our tools use, etc. I want everything to be fire and forget. Unfortunately I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it.

Do as I say, not as I do!

With the recent hubbub over wikileaks releasing documents, I can't believe what some politicians and political advisors are saying, including ones from Canada - "I think Assange should be assassinated, actually". Sure, sure, if you say later "hey, I didn't really mean it!" does it still count?

It just boggles my mind that if the "other" countries were to go through this, any calls for assassination would be condemned by the west. What the hell is wrong with people?? Things like kidnapping people, taking them to a different country, tortured for several months and then released at night on a desolate road in Albania. Why is it okay not to use the law if you think that you have a terrorist on your hands? Disgusting. I won't even get into the campaign of terror that the American government seems to have against their own citizens - a campaign whose purpose seems to be to strip rights and freedoms from not just their own citizens, but the citizens of the rest of the world as well.

If people are breaking the law, put them through due process. If people are doing things that you think that they shouldn't - pass a law that says they shouldn't.

Telling the world that you're the shining example of freedom while not following your own laws is hypocritical at best.

Good Job at being a douchebag!

Sometimes things are not all happy happy joy joy biking to work. Sometimes the drivers do things that seem to have the sole purpose of just trying to piss me off. I don't swear at them, I don't bang on their cars.

I thank them and give a thumbs up. They just don't realize that it's because I think that they are douchebags.

Today a pickup was stopped beside a parked box truck. Traffic wasn't moving, but what I consider to be a biking lane beside the parked vehicles and the left lane was free and clear. As I was approaching this stopped truck in the left lane, the guy cranks the wheel and moves to the right. Not forward, just more to the right. So much so that I couldn't actually get by while riding, I had to stop and maneuver around his side mirror. I don't take up much room, so this was really close to the box truck. So I thanked the guy loudly, moved around his truck and turned back and made sure that I gave him a big thumbs up with an added "good job!" for good measure.

He won the Douchebag of the Day award, but I'm just not sure he knew it. He seems to be pretty dumb, so I'm not going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he would understand. Maybe I need stickers that I can slap onto the vehicle as I go by...

Starving to death at a buffet

One thing that really pisses me off is when people don't take responsibility for their own learning. Yes, some places actually allocate money and time for you to bring up your skills - but I think that in no way makes this the employers responsibility. A training budget is a perk, not a scape goat.

For some jobs it is beyond an individuals ability to self-fund their own training - e.g. an astronaut or deep sea diver. For someone in IT, for the most part it just means having access to the internet or going to the library and borrowing a book (if you're too cheap to buy one). To buy one job specific book a year and read it is well within most people's budget.

When I hear someone say "I have not been sent on training so I don't know how to do that (on something that's happened over the last 10 years)" I just want to call bullshit. I picture that person going to a buffet where the restaurant staff are busting their asses to make sure that the actual buffet has a ton of food on it, the person sitting down at a table and then letting themselves starve to death because no one has brought them food. Life is a buffet, so get off your ass and help yourself. For IT professionals (or amateurs), the internet is the biggest smorgasbord of information and training that you can possibly come across, you just have to help yourself.

Next time you hear someone whining about their lack of knowledge because someone else has not sent them for training, just imagine how well that would go for other professions. Would you accept that as an excuse from your health care professional? Your accountant? Your lawyer?

If people are self sufficient enough to take care of themselves (wash, bath, dress, eat, ...), they should be able to do some reading on their own. Take responsibility for your life.

Banned words

There are a couple of words that, when used, usually piss me off because of the tone that seems to come with them. I call this class of words the "jerk words" because they seem dismissive and arrogant. Words like "obviously" and "clearly". It's clichÈ, but what's obvious to one person is not to another. I don't believe that it's from lack of intelligence (in all cases), but more often from the different backgrounds and experiences that people have had in their lives. Obviously people like to use big words, but clearly it makes them sound like an ass.

The funniest thing: if it was actually clear to everyone involved, why the hell is anyone explaining it? The very act of explaining things using the jerk words means that the issue was not obvious.

*deep breath out*

Brilliant deduction Captain Obvious!

A lot of the time people will say something so obvious that I just want to mock them the moment it's out of their mouth. But I'm either not quick enough, or too nice, or a combo of the 2 to actually slam them.

The first thing out of someone's mouth when I show up wearing a bike helmet and shorts, holding panniers is "Did you bike here?". Like every freaking time. I very much want to answer in a deadpan voice and expression "No, I just took the bus." I don't know if it's a social reflex or what, but it's annoying.

One lady a couple of months ago was trying to get into our 7th floor work area. She was looking for some boardroom 10-something. She asked us if we knew where it was, and the first thing that popped out of my mouth was "no, but I'd try the 10th floor". I'm just glad that it was polite. I guess that some people aren't used to numbering conventions...

*sigh*