A Winter's Tale

One of my cow orkers has the domain control-escape.com, and he recently implemented a redesign of the site. As part of the redesign, he created a new logo out of his domain's eponymous unicode symbols. I, however, maintain that the Unicode standards body got the symbol for "Escape" wrong--the arrow should be pointed down to the left. Can anyone guess why?

One of my co-workers just walked in to the cave with a problem. He had been working with a document in Microsoft Office some time ago, and very distinctly remembers saving the file under a different name. He wasn't able, however, to find the document under the "Recent Documents" listing, nor was he able to find it in "My Documents."

This sounded very familiar, so I asked him if he had opened up the file from his own hard drive or whether it was opened from the web or e-mail.

See, a few months ago, I was faced with a Pinky who was brought to the point of tears when she couldn't find a Powerpoint presentation that she'd worked hours on. I only managed to find it when I followed the steps that she herself went through to open the document--open mail, click on attachment, work on powerpoint, save.

It turns out that Microsoft Outlook, when opening attachments, saves them to a randomly-named directory under whatever is designated temporary storage for Windows, and then opens the appropriate program. When saving the opened-via-Outlook document, then, it will save any changes to that same randomly-named directory, unless told otherwise.

Now I know the power users reading this will say, "Well, duh--you should always check to see where you're saving things." Indeed, some of the programmers in the audience might say "Why should I go through the trouble of checking where someone's saving something so they don't shoot themselves in the foot?" Well, if you're a Microsoft Outlook/Office programmer, I respond, "Because that's your fucking job."

To begin with, Outlook should probably query the user on whether or not they wish to save/execute an attachment, given the prevalence of viruses and worms. And when any related application attempts a user-initiated save to temporary storage, it should probably ask "You know you're going to save this into temp storage, are you sure you don't really want to save to My Documents?" Hell, it's bad enough with all the stupid tooltips coming from the system tray and that fucking paperclip--where's the harm in adding one or two more actually-useful messages?

The problem with being tasked to monitor a geographically remote radio station is that when they play songs like "Carry on Wayward Son," "Sister Christian," and "More Than A Feeling," I can't listen to it. Fucker.

ETA: Aggh! They're playing "Brown-Eyed Girl." *grumble*

You know what's worse than spending six hours in a meeting with slow-on-the-uptake people who just reiterate the same thing someone else said minutes ago?

Having to spend your birthday in said meeting.


The day got better (despite an hour-long stint in some of the worst Atlanta traffic I've seen since moving here), however, because aside from my No Idea order coming in the mail, the gang got together and picked up the Tekken 5 Arcade Stick combo. I'm way too into Guitar Hero at the moment, but as soon as I'm done with "Bark at the Moon" on Expert, the beatings will resume.

I spent Monday and Tuesday down in Ft. Lauderdale for work.

( Travel Hell )


Happy Birthday to El Guapo. If you lived in Atlanta, then you could see the many stuffed piñatas for your birthday celebration.

From some blogger:
Sometime in recent memory, Jack Davenport and some Sandman fangirl got it on at somepoint.

Sad, really, that I only know Mariella Frostrup's name from those few episodes of the show.


ETA: Why Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates blow goats, Reason #1138:
I am in the process of trying to access a file that's on a PocketPC. The file is named "rsyncd.conf," it's located in the "\unix\etc" directory, and its contents are essential to what I am trying to do with the device. The only way that the OS has of natively viewing the file is to open the file up in PocketWord, the Microsoft Word analogue for Windows CE. The version of PocketWord that exists on PocketPC 2003 can only access two types of files--PocketWord files and Text files, and only within the My Documents directory. Even if I copy the file into the My Documents directory, I still cannot see it because Microsoft determines what kind of files to show by the three-letter extension.

I should, of course, be able to just rename the thing "rsyncd.txt" or something like that, right? Of course not, because the File Explorer acts just like Windows XP, obscuring the file extension from the user, except with no discernable way of changing that setting.

Why do they insist on making everything as dumb as the potential user that might use it?

My co-workers and I have been hearing this strange sound today, which just started about 40 minutes ago.

One of them took a smoke break and said that the sound, which resembles that of an electric saw or some other power tool biting its way through wood, is echoing throughout all around our office building. Having stepped outside, I have noticed it's much louder in our particular room than it is outside. This wouldn't really bug me that much except for one thing: The noise appears to be coming the wall we share with our next door neighbor. What's located in that space?

Dentist's Office.

It sounds like there's someone getting their molars drilled out with the high-speed saw that they use to cut casts of broken limbs.

Out of all the possible things I could dream about at night, I'd like to request that you stop giving me dreams of my client asking for me to work on asinine projects.

Thank you for your consideration,
That Yellow Bastard.

P.S. Oh, and more Lauren Graham, if it's not too much to ask.

These pipes... are Clean!

Stick a fork in me.

IHTFP