Gotta love those brain-dead software "designers"...

Nothing is guaranteed to make one's day like having one's browser (yeah, mea culpa, I'm using IE) designed so as to pop a window into the foreground (with focus, of course) telling you that the 54-MB file you started downloading is now being copied from temporary storage to your disk and giving you the opportunity to cancel the whole operation. This, while you are blithely minding your own business, touch-typing in your word processor and you come to the end of a paragraph.

Pressing "Enter" cancels the download... after it is complete. While I am sure there were fine and dandy reasons for such a truly rectocranial design, I cannot help but think the designers were morons, or incredibly arrogant ("No, users shouldn't do anything else while waiting for our program to download files for them! They should, instead, contemplate our god-like skills as software craftsmen and tremble.").

I probably would not have mentioned this, except, that the same kind of idiotic design has made itself apparent three times this past week. This morning, I was editing a document that is part of our POS system when the poor thing suddenly popped up a screen noting that it had just downloaded an urgent update from the Web and was quitting immediately to install it. All my changes were lost, of course.

The other instance escapes my recall, for the moment, but I could not help but notice that it, too, was an example of the computer-be-boss, you-be-insignificant-dirt school of software design.

Scroom.

Cheers...

Depressed...

This turned out to be one of those days when all my thoughts were on the depressing side, undoubtedly brought on by depressing news from the insurance agent, to the effect that getting a bond may not be the no-brainer we imagined it to be. There was no final answer today... we'll have to wait until Monday, so I suppose no news is good news, but I have this tendency - from time to time - to imagine the worst (though in practice, the worst has never happened, or if it has, it really could not have been important since I do not remember it).

I tried to move my office TWiki files from evdokia to onegin, with only partial success. I had been hoping to completely free up evdokia so I could take the machine back to the store, but that's going to have to wait for a while longer.

In other computing news, I serendipitously recalled that a wav-to-mp3 processor called lame (go figure) is installed on bagger, which means that - if I really wanted to - I could replicate the functionality offered by AudioBlog with relatively little trouble and no cost.

The procedure would be as follows: (a) record a .wav file on the Zaurus; (b) email it to, say, onegin, which would use lame to convert the .wav to an .mp3; (c) ftp the resulting file to a server; and (d) generate and post an LJ entry with the appropriate link, and more than likely, text. All of this would, of course, be done inside a Perl script.

However, past doing some kind of proof-of-concept post, I really, really don't anticipate making many posts with audio accompaniment, since (as I've noted before) it takes so bloody long to extract spoken information from sound tracks. Possible exceptions: I happen to run across Someone Notable while holding my microphone-equipped Zaurus, and some kind of LJ-interesting exchange results. Another possibility is a recording of some kind of notable event (I'm thinking here of the Shuttle launch from September 2000, or the Proton transfer while I was in Kazakhstan, but I may be suffering from a slight case of stupidity with such suggestions... or not).

Lots of time was lost today running around - mostly on bond matters. I got another assignment, which makes three due on Monday morning, and there's another day or so of editing work in the pipeline, for early next week.

Is is really almost 11 pm? I guess so...

Cheers...