Category: Aggravation

Death by Software: Let’s Review

This morning, I woke up early, so I played Fallout 76 before starting work. It’s buggy. We all know that. In fact, it’s famously buggy on the Playstation, especially. But this is a game, and I have two options: take it, or leave it. So I continue to “take it.”

This morning, I was trying to do a story mission on a second character — a really annoying story mission — buried in the most labyrinthian “dungeon” in the game. A half hour into the very lengthy mission, and almost at the end, I couldn’t click “the thing” to do the next step. It was right in front of me, highlighted with a mission quest marker and everything, but I couldn’t interact with it. The only thing to do was kill the game and start over.

After traveling back to the spot, and loading into the “dungeon,” getting most of the way through the labyrinth, I followed the quest marker — the single marker, after turning off all other markers — through a door. The marker then showed that I needed to go right back through the door that I just came out of, and then I got hit with the infinite load screen bug.

So I traveled all the way back, all the way in, all the way down, found the button again, and was finally able to click it. That was 22 very frustrating minutes.

Then I sat down to work.

My Mac wouldn’t show up on my external monitor. I cycled my monitor a couple times. I unplugged the breakout box that connects to it (along with many other things) from Mac (because it’s easy to reach). I unplugged the TV from the breakout box. I finally REBOOT MY MAC, and it can see the screen.

I NEVER reboot my Mac, so now I’m seeing programs auto start that I don’t want. I can’t kill one of these. So I force quit it, and remove it from the system. Then I notice a whole bunch of startup programs I don’t want — Microsoft, etc. — so I try to kill these. I reboot to see if they’re gone.

First, I can’t connect to my monitor again. Second, once I re-persuade it, I see I have NOT, in fact, removed those startup programs. I go on a hunt, rm -rf‘ing lots of stuff. I reboot. My Mac can’t see my external monitor. I don’t know if those things are gone now, and I don’t want to reboot for the fifth time this morning, and deal with my external monitor again.

While I’m doing all of this, my manager asks me to submit my time. I couldn’t because I was waiting on him to approve a vacation day, which I see he’s just done 26 minutes ago. I still don’t have 40 hours, and I finally notice that I submitted the vacation day for FEBRUARY 27th, not MARCH 27th, which both just happen to land on a Thursday, so it escaped both of us.

We use the infernal Workday for this nonsense, and I see there’s no direct way to get at this. Of course. Why would there be? I finally find the indirect way, and see there’s no option to delete, so I try to set the old day’s vacation hours to 0, and request the correct day. That was about an hour ago. I have no idea what hassles my manager is having to go through to make this work now, and I’m sorry.

Note that, I’m not talking about the hassle of trying to use a Mac “cleaner” application — which wants to charge me $40/year — and still can’t see the startup items I’m trying to remove. Nor am I talking about the popup in Teams on my work computer that wants me to stop what I’m doing and “profile” my voice.

It’s been 2 hours or so since this all started, and I still have crap on my Mac, I’m scared to reboot it again, I don’t know if my timesheet is going to work without further hassle, and I know that Teams is lurking to hassle me over more useless, privacy-invading AI nonsense.

And I’m just starting the day.

Now I need to restart a very long-running process on my work laptop because 1) it wanted to install updates, 2) the service I need to interact with is somehow shut off on the weekends, and 3) we lost power last night. So there were 3 ways I couldn’t keep this process going if I’d have wanted to do. Oh, that’s right. I did, in fact, want to.

UPDATE: I wanted a new image of a brain for this site. I load ChatGPT. “Something has gone wrong.” I reload. I ask, “Can you generate images.” Nothing happens. I hit enter again. Nothing happens. I do something else. I notice that ChatGPT is bugging me asking if there’s anything it can do for me. I retype my question. “Something has gone wrong.”

I really did get up on the wrong side of the bed today.

Please Hang Up and Dial 911

I woke up with a chronic pain about 3.5 years ago, which has never stopped. I’ve now seen about 22 doctors and clinicians, had 4 MRI’s, 3 ultrasounds, a CT scan, 4 different nerve blocks, and 2 surgeries. I don’t say any of this for sympathy, but to setup this half-joke/half-serious idea I just had. As you can imagine, I’ve made a LOT of calls to various doctors’ offices over the past few years. It would be fun to record a voicemail greeting so that when all of these people call me back and leave a message, they have to sit though a couple minutes of their own greatest hits that I have to listen to multiple times a week, like, “please listen closely as our prompts have changed,” and “leaving multiple messages will only delay processing and returning your call,” and my all-time favorite — because EVERYONE has this in their prompt — “if this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911.” I wish I had thought of this sooner.

Windows Startup Buggery

I have a PC. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I have a PC. I bought it for one and only one use: to play Elder Scrolls Online. To that end, I bought a SCUF Envision Pro controller. It does not work unless its Corsair iCUE software is running. The software will not start with Windows. There’s a checkbox in the software to make it do that, but it doesn’t work. I’ve tried toggling it back and forth several times. It just won’t work.

Frustrated with the situation, I decided to finally fix it.

The “startup” thing you can find in the Windows options only has toggles for programs that have registered with it. iCUE is not there. So I search for where the actual startup folder lives now. I have to google that, and find a howto to run “shell:startup” from a Windows Run box. This is stupid, but now I have the old-fashioned startup folder to put a link to the program.

So, now, where’s the program?

I search for the application in the Windows start menu. All this will give me are links to web pages talking about the application. (Launched in Edge, naturally, and I don’t care to see if I can fix that, because I know they’ll just change it back with the next update.)

I have to click another button to get to the actual list of applications installed on my system, and it’s not there either. That’s right: a proper link to a properly installed program simply doesn’t exist on the system.

I have an icon on the taskbar to run it. I thought you could right-click on a taskbar shortcut, and see where the program that it runs actually lives on disk. Nope. So I google again, and find where the taskbar shortcuts live. It’s buried under AppData under Internet Explorer. No, actually, I find where they live on Windows 10. Despite Windows 11 having been released for 3 years now, all my searches still bubble up references to Windows 10.

I finally find the new location. It’s been moved under Roaming, but it’s still related to the folders under Internet Freaking Explorer. I find the shortcut. The properties do not point to the executable, but there’s a right-click link that takes me to the application folder under Programs. This is a regression in usability. On the old shortcuts, you could put flags on the command they would run. But I digress.

I try to link the launcher application in my startup folder. The default action is to MOVE the file, which is about the last thing I want to do, but, hey, I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and this isn’t my first rodeo. I press the modifier keys to find the one that makes a link, but it doesn’t work. I try again. Nothing. I link the actual application. That works.

For my own reference, I linked C:\Program Files\Corsair\Corsair iCUE5 Software\iCUE.exe in C:\Users\david\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup.

After all this, I reboot on the spot to see if this will even work. It does. Whew. Twenty minutes of frustration after frustration to make crap software work the way I want it to on a crap OS. Something that should have worked by default. Something that, failing the previous, should have worked within the software’s options. Something that, failing both of these, I should have been able to figure out in Windows startup options. Something that, failing all 3 of these, I shouldn’t have needed a bunch of googling to figure out.

Why is this still a thing? Why is this “operating system” even still around? How is this the best we can do? This feels like something from 25-30 years ago. It’s utter nonsense, but this is what people have been conditioned to accept.

I moved to Macs about 10 or 11 years ago now, and I just can’t believe that people still put up with this crap. While I’m typing this out, my work laptop has just popped up a useless message about some “feature” in Teams that I will never use. Good grief! The popups now. Everyone in the Windows world is using them now. Open an application or go to a web site? Get 3 or 4 popups with a “tour” of features that — if they had designed the software intuitively and didn’t bury the icons and menus to begin with — you wouldn’t need in the first place. It’s all just so maddening.

I should just uninstall and reinstall the software. That’s the Windows way, right? But I’m afraid I’ll lose my settings. You wouldn’t think so, but, then again, I wouldn’t have thought I needed to do ANY of this.

UPDATE: Trying to figure out why my $200 controller couldn’t map one of the programmable buttons led me to finally discovering Corsair’s help forums. Among other things is a big thread about how the iCue software won’t launch at system start. Someone figured out that this stupid software just doesn’t put a link in the Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run like it should, and pointed out how to do that. Almost mercifully, my last comment about just giving up and reinstalling is moot, because it appears that wouldn’t have worked anyway.

For future historians, the problem with remapping is that the one button I bought the entire controller for — to remap the right index finger button to D-pad left, in order to put the ESO bar swap on a button I don’t have to take my thumb off movement for — doesn’t work, despite a dozen tries to reconfigure it. The G keys are mapped to keystroke combos, and they work fine. I don’t know if that’s because only these kinds of assignments work, and button remappings don’t, and I’m not going to figure that out. Anyway, and again for my own reference, it seems that:

Hooking up the controller with a USB cable gets the button remapping working again.

My Whole Life is Crappy Web Sites

This Nonsense

This is a snapshot of my inbox. I think it tells the story well enough that it doesn’t need explanation. This is my life: battling crappy web sites. All day. Every day. This is all of our lives now. We gloss over this constant, digital friction in our lives, but I remember when it wasn’t like this, and it drives me crazy.

The best part is that all of this nonsense was to figure out that this account has been closed, and the remaining whopping $8 has been moved to another, similar service, where I don’t even know how to get started to get to this point with that service. So there’s another battle looming. I’m not done. I’m never done.

Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds | Ars Technica

Single-vehicle, single-pedestrian crash data for 2016-2021 finds hoods a problem.

When Tyndall controlled the data for vehicle body type, the effect of vehicle hood heights became more clear, actually increasing “the partial effect of front-end vehicle height, suggesting high-front-end designs are specifically culpable for higher pedestrian death rates, and this is not driven by other characteristics that are correlated with front-end height,” he writes. In fact, the study estimates that a 4-inch (100-mm) increase in front end height translates to a 28 percent increase in pedestrian death.

Source: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds | Ars Technica

I’m glad that more people are starting to fuss about this. What I really want to know is how and why it seems that everyone in the automotive industry pivoted in this direction at once. Back when I worked in the market, the tier-1’s worked fairly diligently to disguise and, at least, nominally, not telegraph their design moves, and yet all the US makers have done this, and at basically the same time. It feels conspiratorial, but I can’t imagine a motivation that would account for it.

Same Truck Models, 40 Years Apart

Dell/Windows Display Malfeasance

Apparently, no power in Heaven or Earth can make a Dell Windows “mobile workstation” display 4K@60Hz on an external monitor, using any of its ports, cables, connectors, or adapters, despite every piece in the chain assuring me that it can.

Who do I bill for the last half hour?

Bonus points for Windows losing its patience through the process, and not allowing me to resize the graphics options window after some point.

UPDATE: In desperation, I dug around in all my storage, and found the tiny USB-C-to-USB-A/HDMI adapter that came with the laptop. BEHOLD! That one works. I guess my “certified” Anker converter was not, in fact, up to spec.

Our Lives are Run by Bad Software: Verizon Edition

My son broke his phone, front and back. Instead of fixing it, I went to a local Digital Replay store, and bought a second hand phone. We logged into the phone with his Apple account, which wanted to send a text message to confirm the login. I swapped the SIM card, and it showed up on the new phone, and we were done.

Verizon correctly detected that I replaced his phone, and “helpfully” wanted me to “confirm” it on their service. I get a text on my phone. I log in. It wants to verify me, by sending me another text to the same number that they sent the first one to. If this was supposed to be some sort of security measure, they “dun goofed” already. But this is the experience of all of our lives, at this point, and I play along.

On the web site, I now try to confirm the swap, and it asks me to “confirm” my identity again, with another text message, not 10 seconds after the last time. This time, the web site prompt includes a second code. What’s this code, you ask? I have no freaking clue. I fumble around trying to give it PIN’s and codes that I think it might be looking for, and wind up here:

Verizon Wireless’ Web Site “Experience”

Remember, Verizon, you asked for this. My son’s phone was working just fine, yet you inserted yourself into my texts, and interrupted my work to hassle me to keep your database correct, and then the process was unnavigable, even for someone with 30 years experience as a “full stack” engineer. Well done. You have to work pretty hard to make this process this frustrating.

Corporate IT “Automated Systems”

Today, I was contacted by #CorporateIT as to whether I was still using <expensive software>. I said no, and that I had tried to uninstall it, but it didn’t work. And, by the way, I’ve tried to “surrender” several other applications, so that my department is no longer billed for them, and NONE of them have worked.

So #CorporateIT guy forwards my email to <IT Director>. I’ve worked at Cummins for 10 years, and still can’t figure out the organizational structure. Anyway, he explains that their systems are great, and process 12,000 requests per month without any problems. I thank him for the considerate response, but this doesn’t change the fact that this has never worked for me, not even once.

Then I get dressed, go into the office, and try to “surrender” one VERY expensive piece of software from a machine that needs to be retired, and I get this error message. Now, I understand that these are (probably) not the same systems under the skin, but it’s the same aggravation, and I just wish that the people running these systems lived in the same IT world that the rest of us do.