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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  1646 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 25, 2019

Just realized I'm turning 51 next week.

Working from home all week because my dog's Vestibular Disease has returned, and she can't stand up to go outside and pee without falling over, and she doesn't want to eat because the dizziness makes her queasy.

Well, technically working from a coffee shop for about 2-3 hours in the morning while my dog is asleep, and then I bunk off the rest of the day and focus on the dog. I keep the laptop open and Outlook and Slack refreshing, so I know if anyone needs me.

Right now my job is mostly documenting processes. So nobody cares where I work from... just that I get the work done.

Lost all my armor to a crash in Fallout 76. Have since rebuilt everything - armor, weapons, CAMP, etc. - and am enjoying the heck out of the game again. (See: "bunking off" above.)

I have Tennis Elbow from all the heavy work I have been doing (motorcycle repair, garden, writing, construction project for the neighbor), and need to get Physical Therapy. But... can't get a call back from the physical therapy center near me. So... I'm mostly ignoring it. Like ya do.

Impeachment has begun, for good reason. (Note: Anyone who says it's "just one call" is parroting Republican talking points and doesn't know shit about what they are talking about. There were multiple calls and an explicit "promise" made that caused the original whistleblower to speak up. The Republicans are doing the same thing they did with the Muller Report, by constructing a strawman - "no obstruction" vs "one phone transcript" - that they can debunk in the media.)

The weather in Seattle is beautiful.

The Seattle Seawolves schedule came out, and it looks like I might be traveling to away games in Washington DC and Atlanta, this year.

I'm volunteering for a Seattle Slam wheelchair rugby event this weekend. No, I have no idea how you play rugby in a wheelchair, and I have purposefully not researched it. I want to see it in person, first.

I had a realization: Most people only use 5% of the capabilities of any piece of software. I am surprised every day at the utterly simple and basic functions in generic software - MS Outlook, Word, Excel, Chrome, Slack, email - that people have NO CLUE about. And inevitably I find out about their lack of knowledge by watching them do something horribly convoluted and ... I ask ... what the heck are you doing?!? Click the thingie there. See? Their eyes open wide... the angels sing, the clouds part... and they think I'm some kind of software guru. I mean... it's a button on the screen you use every single day!?!?

OK. Brain is empty. Now I get to go write a training for salespeople, training them on the basics of how to follow up after an initial call with a customer, and what questions you need to ask when you talk to them. It's like ... how does a salesperson not know this already, instinctively?!? Who are we hiring?!?





kleinbl00  ·  1646 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Most people only use 5% of the capabilities of any piece of software. I am surprised every day at the utterly simple and basic functions in generic software - MS Outlook, Word, Excel, Chrome, Slack, email - that people have NO CLUE about.

Most software melts into a puddle if you use 10% of the capabilities. Theoretically, Logic Pro can be used to mix surround audio for film. Practically, you have to do it in 7 minute chunks, it's got quarter-frame accuracy, and it handles its automation on 16 channels of MIDI and 128 levels of control so really, you can automate about five parameters a time across your entire timeline before the thing dumps.

I've broken Excel before. I've broken Word. I've broken Pro Tools. Many features are little-known because they were added as afterthoughts, are poorly documented and break the shit out of things when you use them.

But yeah, the Excel flight simulator was hilarious.

elizabeth  ·  1645 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Urgh this is giving me terrible flashbacks to the time I had to write/format a 25 page book (with timeline graphics, bunch of icons and text) on goddamn powerpoint because the company didn't have a decent software like InDesign or anything. You better know I learned all the ways to layer, group and center every asset. It worked... but damn it SUCKED and took waaay longer than needed. Because once you decide you want that timeline 3 pixels to the left, you gotta go change it on every page and re-align every little detail.

But at least now I have a good answer if someone ever asks me for a weakness in an interview.

kleinbl00  ·  1644 days ago  ·  link  ·  

"why don't you just do it in Gimp/Audacity?"

"Because I don't hate myself. Why do you hate yourself? Why do you hate me? Why do you think i should spend twelve times as long as it should normally take just so you can support 'free' software? Why don't you understand that professionals are willing to pay for professional tools and that if anyone other than Youtubers showing you how you can spend fifteen hours doing a fifteen minute job used this shit, you wouldn't have to bring it up in conversation we'd already be doing it?"

goobster  ·  1645 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Sure, there are those of us who can wring the unholy shit out of software and processors, and make anything break.

But even rudimentary things - like basic list formatting a Word doc (one of the few things it does well) - is beyond many users. They just poke and prod at it, and finally just hit the spacebar nine times in a row to indent... and then don't get why it prints out like shit.

Derf. So done.

kleinbl00  ·  1645 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah no. We have this fight every year or so and you're still very wrong. Word SUCKS ASS at formatting a basic list. Word wants your basic list to be a very-not-basic list, and it's going to try and guess what the fuck your list should look like, and it will take your first input to that list not as what you want to do, but as some secret gnostic keyboard macro of some list that an engineer back in 1985 wanted to do, and getting the list that you want is never going to fucking happen because Microsoft definitely knows lists better than you do so fucking suck it up, buttercup, because this is your list and if it doesn't match your expectations it's because you don't know lists and Microsoft does.

Clippy happened because Microsoft sucks so hard at understanding customer input that they fucking auto-launched a wizard to create text documents. And that wizard has no more clue what you're trying to do, has no more interest in determining your desires, has no more utility at aiding you in your quest for a fucking list than the dropdown menu does, which by the way is now three different menus two of which are context-sensitive.

I use TD Ameritrade. Know what TD Ameritrade does? It launches a goddamn plaintext AI to get you where you want to go. They recognize that what they're doing is byzantine, ridiculous and subject to categorization that makes sense to financial professionals but is goddamn Sumerian to the average retail investor so they created "Ted" to sit there and parse your angry confusion into useful instruction. But TD Ameritrade is trying to help me self-build a Coverdell for my kid, not format a fucking list.

You know why people hit the spacebar nine times? Because IT LOOKS RIGHT. You know what a decent coder would do? ASK IF NINE SPACES IS WHAT YOUR LIST WANTS TO LOOK LIKE. Microsoft? Microsoft adds bullets, adjusts the tabs for the rest of your document, discards your Undo history so you can't revert and alters your format styles such that your report has now become a grocery list because fuck you, that's why. Google Docs is abject crippleware in many, many ways. It spies on every character you type. But people use Google Docs instead of Word because when you make a list in Google Docs, you end up with a mutherfucking LIST.

Your argument, simply put, is that software can do a whole lot more if you're willing to sink your life into learning how to squint your eyes, hold it with three fingers and hit it sideways in order to drive the nail without recognizing that most people just want a goddamn hammer. And you act as if no one has ever picked up a goddamn hammer before. Ghastly fucking UI is not something to scorn people for failing to overcome, it's something that needs to be pilloried and expunged with vehemence and hatred. Ghastly fucking UI is not a side effect of fast design, it's the core issue preventing the usage of most software. And because it prevents the usage, it prevents the testing, and in turn leads to software that melts into a puddle if you use ten percent of it.

Logic Pro Audio (in Emagic parlance, Logic Platinum 6) was the last version of Logic to ship with a written manual. In the "surround" section of the manual, the Apple engineers had written "although Logic has the facilities to create surround mixes, we recommend that you leave this task to professionals."

In something with "Pro Audio" in the goddamn name of the software.

That's Apple, admitting that they weren't interested in supporting what they bought. Mostly they wanted to gut it to bring you GarageBand.

Imagine what music production would look like if they were willing to make their shit usable.