Category: This Sucks Page 1 of 2

This Post Is a Meta Post About the Post I’m Too Tired To Work On Which Is a Post About Being Burned Out

On August 22, 2022

In Apple, Link Dump, This Sucks, Vegan, Work Horrible Work

I started writing this overly wordy post about how burned out I’ve been feeling lately. This is not news to anyone since I’d wager most people who didn’t have their work lives wildly disrupted during the pandemic are equally fried and as ready for the scrap heap as I am.

I had a few free hours this weekend and tried to just concentrate on writing that smaller thing that seemed less intense than the much, much longer thing I’m also puttering away on. I was completely wrong about that. The end result was an intense wave of brain fog and fatigue that knocked me entirely out of commission at 10 PM on a Friday night. This is not at all normal for me.

After I concluded that absolutely nothing worth sharing with any one was going to be accomplished that night, I just poked around on the interwebz for a length of time likely equalivalent to what I’d spend writing something that wasn’t a link dump with a lengthy explanation.

As a side note, I’m giving Ulysses a trial run as an editor for things longer than 1000 words. I have not yet decided whether it is for me yet but it does give me some separation from a web browser which is a nice break if nothing else. I recently acquired one of the M1 Pro Max (it just flows off the tongue like a song) MacBook Pro’s and decided that I should stop doing everything in the damned browser if I was going have a machine that substantial. I still have very mixed feelings about Apple but this generation of machines is pretty damned good at least until the new version of the OS comes out and makes me regret my earlier words. The weird part is that I actually enjoy this keyboard which is significant because I often go to ridiculous lengths to avoid ever typing on the keyboards built into laptops. So, yeah, real tools like a goddamned grown up. Totally weird, right?

Unfortunately, this wasn’t prompted entirely by a fervent need to complicate my workflow. Draft is performing strangely for me over the past few weeks and the ‘Oh boy’ moment was watching my cursor, unmanned by me, mow backwards over something I’d just finished up and losing 650 words or so. Nope, haven’t reported as a bug or anything yet but until I have some free time that actually feels free I’m going to stick to editors that save text locally. There are too many unstable layers to that stack although I’m guessing Chrome is the guilty party. I’ll come back to that extraordinarily handy tool when I’m less terrified of it potentially eating a bunch of words while I watch in horror.

Things I saw recently:

This hardware-centric examination of a 1996 photo of animators working on Final Fantasy 7 is one of the those things that I started reading out of general interest in all things FFVII but ended up being far most interesting. The idea that an SGI machine had the capacity for 8 GB of RAM in the 1990s when hard drives were generally measured in megabytes is mind blowing. SGI and IRIX were always fascinating to me but, mostly because I work with excruciatingly boring commodity hardware even on the server side of the house, I’ve never had to opportunity to do much with that family of machines other than stare slack jawed at it. I made the mistake of looking at ‘vintage’ SGI hardware (specifically the Onyx line mentioned in the article) and I am now reassured with complete certainty that I will never own any piece of hardware from Silicon Graphics.

Holy shit! A Next Level Burger opened in Denver! I will soon venture out on another leg of my ultimate quest to become the most overweight and unhealthy vegan ever. I’m not happy about the potential impact this will have on our local heroes Meta Burger but I suppose this was somewhat inevitable.

I would have never guessed that DMCA takedowns were an escalating issue on Reddit. Maybe it’s because my use is largely limited to geeky/work/funny areas. If you follow the link, the actual number is startling.

Unsurprisingly, dictionaries are too risky for Florida schools now. I wish I had adequate words to describe the sounds that came out of my mouth when I originally read this. It’s also saddening that I now have a Google Alert set up for book banning in the United States. That’s really where we are folks. Maybe the uncertified veterans being welcomed into classrooms as teachers will just start shooting books deemed offensive?

My Burning Need for Standards for Graphics in Lists

By goneaway

On December 18, 2020

In This Sucks

I have a super important national standard to propose: Let’s standardize whether large images come before or after items in a list. I cannot be the only person occasionally baffled after reading several paragraphs of a story below a particularly enticing image only to realize that it has absolutely nothing to do with the picture. I guess there’s an element of mystique that comes along with it when you’re trying to divine what this stock photo of Winston Churchill has to do with XML but I could honestly live without that most of the time.

Maybe I just need to spend more of time reading things on my phone screen and less looking at them on 36″ monitors?

My Good Intentions Are Worth Less Than The Website They’re Printed On

By goneaway

On December 16, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, Oh God, Politics, This Sucks

I’m starting to think that the perceived ending of the pandemic might actually be effecting my overall mental health more even more than the apocalyptic uncertainty at the beginning of it all. My motivation to do anything even as strenuous as starting a new series on a streaming service has completely fallen off. I’m sure there will be ton of academic work done on the impact of Covid-19 on our collective sanity but it’s hitting me harder than at any point that I remember so far.

The feeling of a continual and torturous walk on a malfunctioning hotel treadmill is the only approximation I can come up with. Maybe that burn is striking in conjunction with our national post-election malaise where something that should have been resolved in a few days keeps dragging on and on until we’re completely burned off all of the outrage built up over the past year. Maybe we’re just tired of better being slightly over the horizon and tantalizingly out of reach. Oh yeah, and then there was the whole series of police murdering people of color to add to the misery as well in addition to the number of people who can’t feed their families because a catastrophic number of businesses have either gone under or struggle to stay open in a time period where a lot of foot traffic is a truly terrible idea. I guess the things I’ve written about above are things I need to think a lot more frequently and seriously about since comparatively I’m only suffering existentially and the Black Lives Matter sign on our lawn doesn’t actually do much of anything.

Sunday Was Thankfully Dull

By goneaway

On November 23, 2020

In Apple, This Sucks

There wasn’t a whole lot of excitement at our house this weekend as both kids were at their respective other parent’s houses and, really, there isn’t a whole lot worth noting in tech news unless you’d like to read another unexciting rundown of all of the pre-Black Friday deals in hopes of getting you to click through an affiliate link. Blah blah blah.

There were a couple things that did spring to mind when I thought about making a whiskey fueled Sunday night post though. The major one is my experience with the newest macOS (I feel like an idiot each and every time I type that) release. Right now I’m typing this up on a 13″ MacBook Pro running Big Sur and despite being on a less than stellar hardware version (quad core i7 with 16G of RAM) it feels pretty snappy but that’s also because it isn’t doing very much of anything other than running Chrome with way too many open tabs and Mars Edit which is the application I’m writing this entry in right now. I’m also in bed with just the laptop on my lap (this is not typical computer usage for me) and all is well.

On my other MacBook Pro with an i9 processor and 32G of RAM everything is a complete shit show. I also run two large monitors on my desk (36″ and 32″), a mechanical keyboard, and always always a Logitech MX Ergo trackball mouse that keeps my shoulder from attempting to kill me. I also do crazy things like take advantage of my gigabit internet by using a wired connection. This crazy, wild collection of hardware that none of my Linux machines has the slightest bit of trouble running harmoniously is giving the other machine continous breakdowns. I’ve switched out both the USB-C hubs and even switched over to a wired mouse without a trackball to try to isolate what the fuck is causing $2.5K of vastly overpriced hardware to completely lose its marbles. What I’ve found is that it’s entirely due to the fact that I expect my mouse to track quickly over two spacious monitors. My mouse stutters, freezes, and sometimes just locks up until I move it with the trackpad and others leave it paralyzed until I log out and back in again or reboot. It’s frustrating to a point where I don’t even want to use that machine at all anymore. Apparently this is somehow related to polling frequency of the mouse being too high with the fanboys recommending switching to a ~~win modem~~ Magic Mouse which doesn’t in any way work for me since I’m not 23 years old and need to preserve what little connective tissue is left in my wrists and shoulder. I’m feeling pretty over the whole free beta tester role and have just set aside the recent MBP and am running the commodity Dell laptop running Arch which handles everything magnificently. It’s frustrating and I wish it were easier to downgrade the OS version without having a Time Machine backup to lean on. Guess my brief resurgence in Apple stuff is over. Not a huge surprise.

The Same Idiots Who Loved Calling You ‘Snowflake’ Now Fleeing The Repressive Notion of Being Held Accountable For Their Stupid, Stupid Words

By goneaway

On November 12, 2020

In Oh God, Politics, Sad Spam Poetry, This Sucks

Now that things seem less hospitable for racist Trumpists terrified of factual evidence backed by observation in the real, actual world that we all inhabit they’re being encouraged to ditch the toxic wasteland of Twitter for its right wing discount equivalent Parler.

I’m not an avid Twitter user by any means but I do enjoy a quick stumble down into Lack of Reading Comprehension-Land when major news events happen just to see how LOL-worthy the public reaction is. Well, that and baseball. I do not consider Twitter a news source (excepting baseball trade rumors) so I don’t treat content there with any more seriousness than I do the unread copy pasta that fills up Facebook timelines. I do enjoy the idea of my flow of baseball gossip being less frequently interrupted with inflammatory word salad from sources even more questionable than social media sites. That exodus of folks who habitually misuse their caps lock key doesn’t sound awful to me. I suppose I can find other rich veins of unintentional comedy to mine in other places.

Hilariously, the wide open spaces dedicated to the unfettered venting of spleen don’t seem to magnetically attract the sharpest knives in the drawer. This is all fine and good for the folks making a few bucks swindling the rubes by repackaging worthless opinions from our own stupid shores but I worry, only a little, that the level of internet discourse will somehow get even more poisonous and concentrated by purposeful isolation from other ideas. I suppose that’s an idiotic thing to trouble me in this of all years. You can read all about Josiah Motley’s experiences on the platform here. It sounds pretty horrific and not something I can’t convince myself is a good idea to try myself. It just seems like more trash than I can cope with.

Is The ‘M’ For Meh?

By goneaway

On November 11, 2020

In Apple, This Sucks

Despite the fact that I’m now working on Apple hardware at the new gig, I haven’t been a huge fan for a while. I have one of the 13″ MBPs as my company machine and I’ve been pretty disappointed with the overall OS instability, frustration with the sheer number of dongles and hubs that I need to use non-fruity accessories, and shitty thermal management of this machine. If I had paid for it myself I would return it. I’m fully aware that the 16″ MBP is a better machine for all of the above but that doesn’t mean that the other pricey machine should be trash because a better model is available.

It should be no surprise then that I’m not all that excited about the new models announced today. I’m skeptical of the exaggerated battery life since that assumes that the software you’re using isn’t running atop an emulation layer or something. I’m also more than a little underwhelmed at the maximum 16G of RAM on both the new Air and MBP. Oh, and two ports seems a bit optimistic as well. Maybe I’m reading this completely wrong and there is some mystical layer of magic as an intermediary? This is also the first generation which means the usual guarantee of a few terrible iterations. I just shrugged for the most part and then moved on. Oh, no external GPUs either. I guess that’s innovative?

Kicking Some Things Down The Road Because It’s Saturday

By goneaway

On October 18, 2020

In Apple, Link Dump, Linux, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses, This Sucks

Some quick things since my son is with me this weekend and there are some very important shows to watch and video games to be played:

1. Mozilla is completely fucked. No one, including the barely plural employees who remain, can decide what the fuck Firefox is actually about. I’ve been mostly absent from this concern but a bunch of folks who I respect have vocally advocated for FF for years. This is the proverbial chickens coming home to roost. Given the performance of the browser over the last half decade, this hasn’t been a question or issue for me for a very long time.

2. Hey! Guess what? Apple even hates its own hardware now. How long do you need to get everything completely wrong before smart people start jumping ship. Apple is lucky since they’ve been actively opposing your rights as a user for long enough that the Ouroboros manuever isn’t altogether surprising.

3. You can actually buy the Google Coral board now. Well, you can pre-order it.

4. An article about gaming on FreeBSD seems absurd enough for a weekend link dump. You can play games on FreeBSD but most of them are ancient. Linux is doing slightly better on this front in case you were wondering.

Life Is Still Terrible

By goneaway

On October 12, 2020

In This Sucks

It probably wasn’t obvious (and again I’m telling this to an assumed audience when I am actually talking to myself a few robots) from my earlier and more sunny post about my wife. She had surgery on Thursday of last week. Right now she is still breathing through a tube and hasn’t been responsive to attempts to wake her up. She also suffered a couple of small strokes either during the surgery or afterwards. We (meaning me and the handful of doctors that I speak to on a daily basis) have no way to access what debilitating effects those strokes may have had on her without her regaining consciousness. It has been a very long four days that feel like they are never going to end.

I’ll likely do a fair amount of posting here about the usual technology related things because it’s a kind of mental break from thinking about what is going on in real life and the panicky attempts that I make at planning whenever I have moments when I’m not otherwise occupied. Until she wakes up, I’m going to keep myself occupied.

One Not Really Weird Trick To Avoid IT Wrath – Microsoft Hates This

By goneaway

On October 8, 2020

In I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Microsoft, This Sucks

About once every ~~10 minutes~~ every couple of weeks I warn someone about what a terrible fucking idea storing important data in Excel really is. Seriously, don’t do dumb things like that. There are are as many good alternatives to Excel as there are pieces of software that are not named Excel. I’d sooner try to recover lost data from scraps of paper kept in a hat than I would some monstrous spreadsheet filled with fuckery that sorta works most of the time. Try a fucking database that is actually designed to efficiently store, manage, and retrieve data. Seriously.

That makes disasters like the loss of 16K Covid-19 tests in England so painful. If you’d used not even the right tool but any tool actually designed for the task at hand. I know people are lazy and stupid but you can be lazier and stupider with better tools and not, you know, have to change the naming convention for genes:

Errors from the spreadsheet software have even changed the very foundations of human genetics. The names of 27 genes have been changed over the past year by the Human Gene Nomenclature Committee, after Microsoft’s program continually misformatted them. The genes SEPT1 and MARCH1, for instance, have been changed to SEPTIN1 and MARCHF1 after they were repeatedly turned into dates, while symbols that were common words have been altered so that grammar tools didn’t autocorrect them: WARS is now WARS1, for instance.

There are very good reasons why your IT folks get so pissed at you after you build some business critical business process that runs entirely in Excel and is brittle and prone to losing or altering the data it mismanages. Don’t do it.

This House Feels Strange

By goneaway

On October 7, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, This Sucks

It’s been a while and I’ve decided that I will no longer make excuses for my absences from writing here because I’m an
old grown-ass man and I don’t have any more pretensions about writing to an imagined audience; this is for myself and the robots. Unfortunately, I’ve been away for different reasons and this mostly has been due to my wife’s health. We found out this weekend that she is going to need another round of open heart surgery which is jarring enough by itself. She survived an aortic dissection a couple of years ago which required emergency open heart surgery but this went from an urgent care visit to scheduling surgery in a matter of 36 hours.

Needless to say, it’s been jarring for me and all I have to do is keep the household running in her absence. Despite my natural inclination for solitude when it’s available to me, which is very rare in Covid times, I feel less inclined to do anything and spend more time working the increasingly ragged seam of free form anxiety. Although when I was younger I was often teased about being a living embodiment of entropy I have become increasingly drawn to the quiet comfort of routine. She is the core of that routine and it sucks not to be able to mumble something to her across the room.