MicroSoft Sucks.

I have Office 2007 Standard Edition installed on my computer and I have been using it successfully for months. Now, for some reason, when I click on a .doc file, Windows tries to install Office 2003. So I can't even open my files by double clicking on them. Was I supposed to buy to versions of the package or is this a bug?

Thanks for nothing Redmond.

Don't Damn the Poudre

According to this article, they're talking about creating a new damn up by Fort Collins and using Poudre water to feed it. That sucks. Some of the best attributes of Fort Fun are the Poudre river and the proximity to the Poudre Canyon. They're going to mess it up so people can grow rich blue grass lawns in semi-arid climate? The argument was made that water demand is growing so they need to build this thing. I say, then curb the population growth and try xeriscaping, it looks better too imho.

Is GTD a cult?

I read about 60 pages into Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, and I got bored and gave it up. After hearing such strong claims for it, I figured I would have gotten some insight after a while. Oh well, what can you say about productivity anyway? Do your job as best you can, try to fix things if you can, keep your files organized, let your coworkers know something if it's relevant to their job. How much more is there to say? Maybe these types of books just aren't for me.

The Voice.

I listen to NPR and various other podcasts alot. Some of the hosts, reporters, commentators, guests, politicians, shills, have excellent speaking voices and some don't. Got me thinking of people with excellent voices and people with bad voices.

People with excellent voices (in no particular order):
Christopher Lydon
Tom Ashbrook
Ray Suarez
Michael Goldfarb
Dominic West
Clarke Peters

People with bad voices (no order)
Sarah Vowell
Nina Totenberg
Bill Gates
Bobby Knight
Dave Damashek
Jerry Seinfeld
Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr
Senior News Analyst Jack Beatty
Marilyn Monroe

Sarah Vowell has, I guess it's a lisp (I don't know what else to call it), and she speaks in a too high voice and she kind of slurs words. I literally turn off the iPod or switch to a different show when I hear it. The rest of the guys I'll listen to but with some degree of annoyance.

I sort of like Diane Rehm's voice. She has an actual disorder that makes her speech a bit halting. It might have been odd at first, but I don't really have problem listening to her now. Maybe it helps in that she speaks a little slower and more methodically.

Heros Happen Here (Denver edition).

3/20/2008.

I went to the Denver session of MS's 'Hero's Happen Here' Visual Studio 2008 promotional tour on Thursday. It was a very nice day out. (Sunny, 60 degrees, somewhat breezy). I hadn't been Downtown in a while so I took the time to grab some Bruegger's bagels on 17th, and some Anthony's pizza on California. Yum!

I took the light rail in and it was pretty packed. Standing room only from the Southmoor Station to Downtown at 7 something in the morning and just as packed on the way back at 4 something in the afternoon. The light rail seems quite popular.

Random notes:

I'd guess there were about 500 - 2000 people at the convention.

It was at the Colorado Convention Center, where the Democratic National Convention is going to be this August.



When I got home that night I tried to install Visual Studio 2008 on my computer and I got an error. There was a problem setting up the .NET Frameworks 3.0 and 3.5 apparently. I downloaded them separately and tried to run them individually. From the error log:

Windows Communication Foundation: [2] Error: Installation failed for component Windows Communication Foundation. MSI returned error code 1603

Fixed above by uninstalling IIS then reinstalling IIS after setting everything up.

Did a Hello World form in C# on VS 2008 and it worked.

I heard Coldplay on the speakers during an intermission. Yuck. Better than U2 I guess.

Walked by one session and the speaker tried to pump the crowd, 'How many of you are excited today?' and got a halfhearted 'yeah' cheer out of them.

At the business intelligence session I went to, one of the presenters got no rows back on a query that he expected data from and he couldn't figure out what happened. Another time the same guy had to re-boot his computer. He handled it pretty smoothly though.

Went to a session on development with MS Office. You can create add on's to MS Word in VS 2008. Don't know if you could do that before but it's probably easier now. In one of the examples, the speaker created a tab in Word so that a user writing a document can get information from the database. Nice enough I suppose, I don't know how useful this is.

Movie Reviews

Saw Charlie Bartlett and Juno over the last couple of weeks. Both were about teenagers incidentally. Juno was pretty good. One of the criticisms of Juno was that the dialog was a little sit-commy, which was true in places I thought, but that wasn't a huge problem for me. Charlie Bartlett was not so good. I didn't get into it all, thought the main actor had a weird speech pattern, plus I thought it was going to be a comedy and I didn't laugh and it got kind of maudlin in parts.

Interesting Ebert thought Juno was the best movie of last year. I liked the movie, but considering the number of movies I liked last year, Juno probably made the top 10 list (if I had one).

What are you getting at?

We were having a meeting and we were reviewing issues we had been having with the performance of our application for one of our customers. Sometimes these guys used 'air cards' on their laptops which are really slow. (I don't think any of our customers use them anymore.) I mentioned that their network performance might be a problem. One of the senior consultants said, 'No. We know that's never an issue.'

What he meant was, something along the lines of, 'See. I told you! You guys are always saying it's our fault. We can't make their network any better. But you guys want to blame someone and you blame us.'

The problem is that I wasn't on the blaming side. My boss's boss would have been. I didn't say anything and the meeting moved along, but in retrospect I might have said, 'Chill out man. I'm not the one busting your chops about this shit. Also, let's just try to fix the fucking thing without making this another pissing contest.' Actually, I can see why I didn't say anything. Never mind.

Another time, I was eating lunch in the cafeteria and I overheard one of my co-workers talking about MicroSoft. He has been saying negative things about Vista. He doesn't see the 'business case' for it. It strikes him as a sort of rip off by them.

He said, 'One of these days, they're going to make one change too many and then people are just going to give up on them', shaking head left to right as if MicroSoft or Bill Gates needed his advice but weren't taking it. He was apparently upset that the company was doing something he didn't agree with. He was predicting their financial distress for not appreciating his point of view, and he was shaking his head as if upset by their folly. Who was asking for his opinion on that anyway? What the fuck was that about? This is kind of a common motif for this guy. When someone disagrees with him, he shakes his head and smirks knowingly.

Colorado State University Library

That's a mistake right there. CSU rebuilt their library, well expanded it, in the 90's because they needed more space. The design was post modern. I guess they thought it looked cool. It reminds me of the new Denver Art Museum. It looks goofy and pretentious and it's not entirely functional. The 3 story glass wall in the picture faces the West. It gives you a decent view of the foothills, and the parking lot, but when you are reading a book at 5 pm the Sun will be right in your eyes, blinding you. And, if you are on a computer near there, it'll be hard to read cause of all the glare. I think they made some sort of movable window tinting/shade they drop down when needed. Seems like a kluge. Didn't anyone think of this when they bought the plan? Maybe the people making these decisions didn't actually used the library? If that's the case, damn their gall.

Another fuck-up in the design is that now, if you don't want to be near a window, you're shit out of luck. It used to be that the basement didn't have any windows. I used to like studying down there. You wouldn't get distracted by what you saw out the window.

CSU is building a new CS building. Hope they don't fuck it up. I got a letter, from the College of Natural Science I believe, asking me if I wanted to donate to this. Nope.

Things I Hate, Continued.

Lack of specificity. Example, at work somebody asked me for, 'that script'.
'What script?'
'Steve said you would know the one.'
'Sorry, I don't know what he's referring to.'

Steve came by our area later and I still couldn't figure out what he was talking about. Why not name the thing? Check it into source control and then send out an email describing what this script does, would that be too difficult?

Another Thing About Michael Clayton

If the company's product was poisonous, eventually, it'd become obvious to people. It's not like people wouldn't notice that they were dying when they used it. It would have been in the company's financial interest to kill off any murderous herbicide/pesticide.