yonmei

05:47 pm: WAITED IN OFFICE ALL DAY LONG DELL ENGINEER DID NOT SHOW
...NOW I want to kill someone.

Grrr'rrgh.

Just to add annoyance to what: I have had a beeping smoke alarm in my flat for AAAAAAAAAAAAGES, and the fire brigade was booked (they offered! I'd have happily just got a new damn battery or whatever) to re-fit me a new one on 23rd December. And for obvious reasons, like four inches of snow all over Edinburgh, they didn't show up. Non-emergency appointment, big weather disaster, no problem.

So I emailed to say "Any day BUT the 30th, I can be in, just let me know..." and they showed up TODAY, the 30th, to remove it, which would have been great, except I was waiting in the office for a Dell engineer who DID NOT SHOW. They rang me to ask why I wasn't in the house, and I said "Because I told your office any day BUT the 30th, tomorrow would be great!!" and they said sorry, mix-up in communications, and I hoped they would show tomorrow, except...

BLOODY DELL. Who did not get in touch to say they weren't going to show up today, nor to say they would show up tomorrow. So now I have to wonder: is it better to stay in for a fire support call that will get rid of an annoying beepy smoke alarm, or trot down to the office again for a theoretical support call that could happen any time between 9 and 5:30, because obviously if you book a support call for the 30th, it's EXACTLY THE SAME for the engineer to show up on the 31st.

And what this all leads to, really, is that I am once again and even more strongly going to suggest that we quit ordering expensive computers from Dell and instead order cheaper computers with better support from a local company that will build you a desktop computer to order. Because they would have given me a time slot - and if they failed to show up, there would have been a number I could ring to find out why they hadn't, which would have got me an answer in short order. Dell loses.




Tags: hardware problems, home repairs, wanting to fire people for being stupid, work

08:06 pm: Tired tired tired
I got something less than two hours sleep this morning, between when I fell into bed just after six am (having been at the office since 2pm the previous day, having been awake since 7am Wednesday. Today is Thursday. Tomorrow I'm going to see Waiting for Godot. With Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. Yes, this does mean I am willing to go see them even if it means just sitting watching them do nothing for a couple of hours.

But. I have got the report that has been hanging over me since February done. And done well, moreover - I'm really very pleased with my three case studies, for example. And afterwards TS#1 and I went out and had afternoon tea with champagne.

So. I am going to have a hot bath with a thing from whatsisname, Lush. I am going to soak in the bath for a long time. I am going to go to bed afterwards. I am going to sleep. I am not going to wake up till Friday.

Unlike TS#1, I do not have to get up at godawfuloclock to fly to Dublin, though his reasons for doing so are very cool.

Oh, and I got some rather spiffy news about my work: an email I sent a month ago bore fruit, and how!

Good night.

Tags: bloody job, fruity smells, sometimes i love my job, wanting to fire people for being stupid

12:14 pm: work
I have cause to celebrate. I can't tell you exactly why. Later.

I have cause to be angry. I can't tell you exactly why. Later.

And I have more than cause to be really bloody furious, but I'm almost too tired and too bored with the cause of that, so. Maybe later.

Sometimes I just take refuge in dragons.



Tags: bloody job, dragon eggs need clicky, wanting to fire people for being stupid

12:27 pm: At the moment, I'm pretty much massively resenting
Everything, from the sublime to the ridiculous...

1. Dell. Because the big laptop I got from them for work has a LAN connection that is completely disturbed: I normally don't use it to go online at home at all, because it switches back and forth between "now connected" and "a network cable is unplugged" several times a minute.

2. Hewlett-Packard. Because the neat laptop I got from them 18 months ago is in the shop being repaired for a power-connector problem, which is why I have to use my Dell POS instead.

3. Beanscene. Because if they would actually provide WiFi that, you know, worked reliably, instead of a WiFi that just hovers around the "we swear we've got it" level, I could sit in their big empty-ish cafe on Victoria Quay and work, quite happily. And buy their expensive coffee as the price of doing so. I have written to them pointing this out: they do not respond.

4. The British judicial system, which comes up with a measured response like this to a man who raped his daughters:

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was given 25 life sentences yesterday. He will serve a minimum of 19 years and six months in prison.

He fathered nine children with his daughters, two of whom died at birth. The other 10 pregnancies were miscarried or terminated.

The British man pleaded guilty last month to 25 counts of rape, dating from the early 1980s and continuing until this year when the terrified women finally sought help. The Guardian

In what universe does raping your daughters for three decades and getting 25 life imprisonment sentences add up to a minimum of 19 years six months? In principle I believe in rehabilitation and I do not believe in the death penalty, but I also believe you can say that there are people who are too dangerous to ever be let out of jail - and someone who spent 30 years torturing his daughters, only letting up when he made them pregnant and only for the duration of their pregnancies, is such a person.

5. Childline.

The court heard that in 1988 suspicions were raised at the victims' school due to their injuries but these were blamed on bullying. One of the women was asked by a doctor if her father was the father of her children, but she denied it. The girls called Childline, the court was told, and asked for a guarantee that their children would not be taken away, but hung up when this assurance could not be given.

Tags: laptop, not drinking coffee, wanting to fire people for being stupid, wow i am self-obsessed

11:30 am: I Officially Hate Adobe
Also, people who make use of Flash when they don't have to. Which, if you ask me, they never do.

I've given up on trying not to have Flash installed on my computer, because so many websites use it for every little damn thing. Even the site stats Wordpress provides come with pretty graphs in Flash.

Well. New install of Firefox needed for my work computer, okay: done. New install of Flash needed for my work computer *sigh* Okay, will do...

...can't. Every time I try to install Flash, it comes up with an error message saying "No, you need Firefox". There is no means of telling it that I have Firefox, that the exe install file that is telling me smugly "no, you need Firefox" was downloaded using Firefox: it simply says "You need Firefox before I can install" and sits there, doing nowt. You can't report the error anywhere: you can't alter the install program: you just have to delete it and do without Flash.

There's nothing helpful about this on the Adobe site. Obviously, they don't have a support e-mail to contact: you can register and ask on the discussion boards from other users, but frankly I hate those: also, since I have Firefox, the problem must be that Adobe Flash is looking for a specific directory name, and it's probably still looking for Firefox v2 and I have v3, so the only solution is to wait until someone at Adobe realises, behind their wall of non-communication, that in the outside world people using Firefox v3 cannot install Flash.

Tags: computer disasters, just my life really, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, venting, wanting to fire people for being stupid