The Supreme Court has ruled that the EPA can regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Since one of the most common greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide — emitted every time you breathe — the EPA now has control over your exhaling. It is important you understand that your breathing doesn’t just affect you; it affects all living creatures, especially those most vulnerable to climate change. Thus, you should be aware of these new breathing regulations:
It feels good sometimes to say that at work but I wish they just did shit right so I didn’t have to. Long story short, we have a new product that I worked on the beta team for. I (among others) noted a very important issue that would be a problem. The product was not supposed to generate any phone calls by design. But with this issue it is pretty much guaranteed to do so. Sure enough, we get a phone call. I can’t find the answer. It took me over two hours, which is precisely how long I said this would take if/when it happened.
First sale and install of this new product and it goes exactly how I predicted it would go, including the amount of time tech support would have to spend on it. I told you so. But no one listens to me.
I am still alive, I promise. I have been busy as hell lately. So much so that I’ve been stressed to all hell and back. Things are calming down and I am getting a little more LD time lately. I can’t remember the last time I had time to go to a movie in theaters or even when I watched my last Netflix other than this afternoon. The first time in like 6 weeks.
I took my LSAT and it felt ok. I’ll know in about 3 weeks. I have to get in my applications and such to schools.
Work sucks, as usual. It’s not just me anymore. Everyone is completely stretched thin and stressed out because of it. It’s not a happy atmosphere. I wish it were better for a lot of reasons. I wish it were better for me, so I wasn’t so stressed. I also wish the company wasn’t so fucking stupid and that things were better for them. I had a meeting with my boss and let him know everyone was stressed and he asked me if I had any solutions. I honestly don’t. Everything I’ve had I have suggested and it’s been shot down. I don’t give a shit anymore.
That’s a bad situation for a company to put itself in, yet that’s what they constantly seem to do. For the life of me I can’t understand it. What we do customers pay for. We generate the highest return of any division in the company. Customers pay for our service and it’s something like 40% of total company income. Yet we can’t hire an extra person. We earn 40% of company income with 8 people, 10 if you include management. Ten people out of around 400. And we are the reason sales people can get 40% of their income. We all really do feel under-appreciated.
Worse yet, we just lost a guy to another position. It’s one I interviewed for and wish I would have gotten. I think he’ll do good. But the bitch of it is he got a sweet raise AND quarterly bonuses. We get no bonuses. Hell, we don’t even get shift differential or overtime when we work 12 days in a row, the last 7 of which are graveyard 10-12 hour shifts. It’s hard to feel valued with that kind of situation.
Worse yet, when asked to contribute to new product releases and such our opinion doesn’t just go ignored, it gets beat the fuck down by upper level management. Why should I bother when I know the outcome? I gave up on my last product release. Not one bit of feedback I gave was taken into consideration. Yet I got yelled at for not bringing it to my VP. Fuck that. If I get told to basically shut up by a VP then I’m not going to fight because what’s the point? I won’t continue to fight for things that I know will never change.
That’s why I havee made the decision to leave the company. There are things inherent to the company that I think are wrong. They won’t change. I can’t stand them. I’m out.
Today I broght my iBook in to work (yes, I had to work on a Sunday for 12 hours). I took it so I could watch DVDs. I’m a slacker.
Anyway, I noticed something today that I never noticed before. I own Quicktime Pro. To change video sizes is as follows:
That seems pretty logical. It progresses with F being a logical choice for fullscreen. That’s what I am used to because I use Quicktime much more than DVD Player.
Apparently Apple engineers don’t talk to one another unfortunately. Here is how DVD Player works:
Command+0? What the hell, where did that come from? That’s almost the opposite of Quicktime. Why didn’t they follow the same logic? Why not Command+F for full screen? Why is is worded entirely different as well? Why change the terminology from app to app for the same thing?
I expect that kind of sloppiness in Windows. I expect more from Apple.
I have been at this company for about 8 months. Next month we have performance reviews and raises. About 2 months ago my boss promised that if I didn’t get the position I applied for back then (which I did not) that he would try to make me a Senior and get me a pay raise in May. He couldn’t exactly promise the position. After all, if they don’t give him the ability to create the position then there isn’t much he can do. He did promise me the raise though.
To be honest, I think I should get a minimum 10% raise. I do about 50% of the work. That’s for nine people. That means probably 50-60% is done by 8 people while I do all the rest. The shitty thing is they pro-rate raises. So let’s say I do get 10%. Since I will only have been there about 9 months I will only get 75% of that, or 7.5%. Apparently they think raises are for past work. I tend to think raises are based on past performance but for future work. Call me kooky.
My prediction is I don’t get the promotion, my raise is less than 5%, then pro-rated to less than 4%. Meaning, I will barely get cost of living. Whoopty freaking do.
I decided to do some spring cleaning on my iBook tonight. I’ve had it for a little over a year. It’s my first Mac. I’ve tried a lot of apps on it. It was time.
I recently purchased AppZapper, a great utility that removes apps and their support files (for the most part). It’s the cleanest way I could find to remove most apps. Sure, technically you can just drag an icon to the trash, but it’s not as clean and leaves some mess behind. AppZapper is so great, I got in on the macZOT freebie deal and still paid for a copy. It’s worth supporting good apps.
That brings me to my complaint. Holy crap is a default install of OS X bloated as hell. It’s really just obscene! Long ago I discovered Monolingual. It removed something like 1.8GB of worthless files. I don’t speeak Swahili or whatever other languages they have. Can’t Apple make it an option on initial boot of a new system to only install chosen languages? I mean, come on, 1.8GB?
I only have a 30GB hard drive in this little monster. Techinically that’s 27.82GB. By my math, unnecessary language files account for roughly 6% of the used space on my system. Gone!
Tonight, as I said, I started using AppZapper and going through apps I never have used or maybe installed to try but don’t use anymore. There were a number of small apps that I installed, but they accounted for minimal amounts of space. What was taking up the largest amount of space? Garageband and World Book Encyclopedia.
I don’t edit audio on this machine, or any machine for that matter, so why do I need Garageband? If I just drag the app I save around 62MB I think. What about the 2GB of samples I never wanted? AppZapper doesn’t delete those so I removed them manually. Why, your Steveness, do you think I need or want 2+GB of audio samples on my small hard drive? That’s another 7% of space.
World Book. I honestly didn’t even know this stupid thing existed on my system until tonight. Why would I want a static encyclopedia when I have “the Internets”? I have more information than an encyclopedia could possibly provide anyway. That was something like 1.6GB of space. Gone! Another wasted ~6% of space.
Tonight alone I saved 3.84GB of space, 13.8%. That’s quite substantial. Combine that with the worthless languages that saved me about 1.8GB and I have saved about 20% or a FULL ONE FIFTH of the space on my hard drive!
What a waste of space. People who think Windows has bloat haven’t seen anything. If I get rid of printer drivers I don’t need that’s another 1.3GB for a total of about 25% wasted space, around 7GB. Can I just delete all the printer drivers? This is just an out of the box install. It’s ridiculous. An average user should never have to go through what I have above just to use their hard drive.
What I really need to do is wipe this sucker out and put on a fresh install of Tiger, choosing only what I want. Again, this is not an option for an average user. Apple, you know I love you, but you are getting fat and I don’t like fat chicks.
Consortiuminfo.org - Bill Introduced in Minnesota to Require Use of “Open Data Formats”
Basically it would make law the use of open document standards, likely something like ODF. This means something like OpenOffice.org as Microsoft doesn’t support an open document format currently. Microsoft wants to introduce their own “open” format in the next Office, but why? Why would they want something seperate from a standard? The only explanation is that it helps maintain their monopolistic kung-fu grip on the market.
An open standard is good for everyone. It open information to the world and not just Microsoft. It allows competition which makes for better products. ODF has also gained some important support in Australia. They are specifically using OpenOffice.org 2.0 as their ODF suite of choice. There are others that support ODF, none of which are Microsoft. It’s a growing standard and I think it’s important we move in the direction of open stadards. Products shouldn’t win because they use an engrained but proprietary standard. Products should succeed because they are the best product, the standard is irrelevant.
Linux is a good example. There are commercial Linux distributions that do quite well. Why? The source is free, anyone with the know-how can make their own Linux. There are plenty of free Linux distros. They succeed not because of the underlying open standards and in their case open source, but because they provide value-add in the form of services, support, and stability. That’s the defining factor, not some proprietary de facto standard like MS Office formats have become. They don’t succeed necessarily because they are the best, but only because people feel forced to use that format.
It seems the folks at AOL-owned Engadget and Weblogs, Inc. may be up to some dirty tricks. The founder of Weblogs, Inc. goes on to patronize and talk down to readers with his explanation:
When you do thousands a post a month based on hundreds of thousands of tips you can make mistakes–it can happen on the best blogs including Engadget. It was certainly not done maliciously.
Huh, a “mistake” involving the intentional editing out of the source URL watermark on the pic they swiped. Yeah, I can see how that can be accidental…
I don’t know if Weblogs, Inc has always been so shady, I suspect the have. I don’t think the AOL purchase has made them any better. All I’ve noticed is more ads to be honest. I have had my differences particularly with TUAW in the past and this is just more evidence for the pile.