this site is not designed for minors. With that in mind we have created this really crappy test for you. If you can input a date of birth that means you are over a certain age then we will permit you entrance to our web site, otherwise please leave.
Problem number 1, anyone over the age of 18 (or, shock horror for drinks sites 21) gets sick of these things coming up so often. I mean come on people, just a button saying ‘i agree, I’m over the required age’ is a much better mechanism, because invariably the implementors of the web site in question have used some gorram flash animation that doesn’t take key input, and can’t deal with nerds typing dates.
The only time I got a kick out of something that insisted I was over a certain age asked me questions that were unlikely to be known by an under 18. The game was Leisure Suit Larry and it had a good collection of questions. I’m not certain, but I think they were age related, so if you claimed you were of a certain age then a different set of questions were sourced. you had to get three questions correct, and could fail two, after which it kicked you out.
Integrated updates
I saw a recent complaint from someone that Apple should open up their system update interface to other developers. I agree, this should be done. It would be a boon for consumers.
However, it should also be done for Windows as well. Currently only Microsoft products (and a few drivers) are integrated into Windows Update, which is a real shame.
What hurts on your typical PC is the sheer number of update mechanisms that are installed on a machine in order to ensure that software is kept ‘up to date’. Typically each of them installs their own scheduler that performs all the update checking tasks. Liveupdate, jusched, realsched. There’s probably a scheduler for you anti-virus software as well. The complaint is that on Windows 2000 and newer there is a perfectly good task scheduler on the machine (there was one earlier as well, but that’s not the issue, really). It can do everything that you need for scheduling – one offs, once a week, once a day, once an hour, every third Thursday of the month. Why can’t developers use it?
Warning! This show has graphic scenes
It’s 11pm and you still tell us that the show has graphic scenes (CSI:Miami), come on, this is well beyond the watershed.
Apparent laydeez in the area
My filter keeps missing them – bloody bayseian filtering; maybe I should go back to keywords.
Annoying, and generally incorrect. If you’re trying to sell me worthless, internet pseudo-intercourse then you could at least target it better.
It would be really easy to get work done
Well it seems to be a problem for me – I’d love to get more work done on Pocketcity, but these bloody episodes of CSI on UK Living (I used to work there) are distracting me horribly until really late at night.
Energy Drain
I have a problem with emotional situations – they tend to drain my energy completely. On Tuesday morning, my sister-in-law’s father passed away. I was directing traffic around the house last night, and got home sometime after 11pm. I was, to say the least, shattered, even though I was doing nothing more than waving a torch and walking people from their parking place to the house (to protect them from oncoming traffic).
Every funeral occasion in the last year has left me drained; even if they were only slightly connected to me.
Aww, Pat Morita has died
Quite a few people died this week, not the least of which was Arthur (Artie) MacGrath, George Best and Pat Morita.
Bad Motorola, no cookie for you
My old, unreliable mobile phone died a couple of days ago, and I needed to buy a replacement. I’m not able to upgrade my phone for another 2 months so I decided to buy a pay-as-you-go phone and just slip my SIM into it (same network, no issues with locking). People who know me, will understand that I have a liking for flip-phones, so I went for the Motorola V3 (Razr). Aargh! christ, but the phonebook is the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever come across. I understand this misbegotten need to have the phone book maintain some compatibility with the SIM, but for christ’s sake, they need to get their act together on this. Practically every contact in my phone book has two entries, in fact most have 3. On the motorola phone book every contact is a separate entry on the person list. This means I have to wade through 2+ entries per person to scroll from one person to the next. Factor in that I store people’s full names on the phone, in surname order, wading through the 9 Shanahan’s in the book takes a long time. It always integrates the SIM contacts onto the phone book. There is no visible option to disable this ‘feature’ (my SIM contacts always were a backup of my phone entries), so I end up with loads of duplicates (or purge my SIM). I can’t send my entire contact details to someone, I have to send it piece by piece. It shows the email addresses interspersed with the phone numbers which is pointless most of the time.
The next complaint is really a bit of a click-fascist thing. You know what I mean by this – it just seems to take an extra click or two to perform some tasks. Just enough to annoy perceptibly.
Then there’s the syncing software. Following the really annoying splash screen – slow, irritating and serving no purpose, we are presented with a rendering of my phone on the bottom right corner of the screen, a bunch of icons and no idea what does what without mousing over one of the icons and seeing what it does, based on the tooltip! Come on people, tooltips cannot replace text! Apparently I can dial numbers from the number pad (never would have guessed at that). The only way to pop up the menu is to hit a box that’s about 20 pixels square, replicating the menu button on the phone itself. Too small to hit easily, and there is no keyboard navigation, unless you can guess at the magic hotkeys. Most of the hard work is farmed off to other applications, none of which share details of the current state of the phone (contacts, calendar), each sub-application launch causes the data to be re-read, which takes ~30 seconds each. None of these sub-applications are keyboard navigable (bugbear of mine). Quitting the application requires either clicking on the really small off switch, or doing the acme Alt+F4 close the window trick. Practically everything visual about this application could do with a rewrite.
On the plus side, it does synchronize, which is it’s primary role, but I just wish it wasn’t so annoying about it.
Badly implemented phonebook aside, practically everything else about the phone is good. It’s small, neat and call quality is great. I’ve not tested the bluetooth functionality very much so I can’t say either way on it. Over all, I’d consider it a good replacement phone, but unless something good happens with the phone book, I’m not planning on buying another Motorola phone in the forseeable future after this one.
Now if only I could make my own phone book. I wonder if it’s even possible on these kinds of phone. Maybe I should check this out.
iTunes, explorer, context menus and stalled music
Ooh! this one really annoys me. I’m using iTunes for syncing with my iPod. But when I’m playing music on the desktop if I right-click on anything in the explorer and don’t select something really fast iTunes stops playing the music. What a piece of junk.
Java webstart – absence of errors, absence of forms
This one is beautiful. If you get an unhandled run-time exception in the public void main(String args[]) method then your application simply won’t launch. You should make sure to intercept all exceptions in the main class and then throw up a simple error dialog.
Of course this doesn’t work if you are missing a class in the distribution, the exception happens before you get to the main method.
Quick tip: enable and show the java console (JavaCPL on linux, java control panel under windows) it’s under Java console in the Advanced tab.
[Listening to: Funny Break – Orbital – Orbital (4:56)]