What a morning. Seems that as soon as I came into work today everyone was hounding me for something. The sales folks decided to rearrange some computers and desks, and instead of informing me so that I could change the computers on the network and the shared printers, they just moved their stuff and then when their computers were no longer operating as they should they flooded my phone with a number of 'Ed, my computer what no work!'requests.
Had one guy come up with an alarmed look on his face and said 'Ed! My computer crashed!' I went over to look at it and it turns out he had left a floppy in the disk drive when he had rebooted.
Yahoo fired up their new homepage layout. I like it. Nice and clean and the most common links have been turned into fat buttons. Works for me.
I used my lunch break to scoot over to Oviedo for the new hearing aid. It was a pretty good deal, they did not just repair the old one, they give you a whole new one. So it was $230 for a $2,000 hearing aid, along with a 12 month warranty. My old aid had not died at once... it had slowly gotten softer over the course of several months to the point where I realized it was basically useless. Having a brand new one in was quite a shock. The single most annoying thing is the PA system here at my work. It’s not really a PA, its all the phones in the building going into speakerphone mode at once. Before it kicks in it emits a highly obnoxious BEEEP that is as pleasant as a cold ice pick to the forehead. Without the aid I cannot hear it at all. Now every time it goes off (roughly ever 5 to 10 minutes) it makes my flesh crawl.
It rained on me all the way to Ovideo. I like the rain, we needed it and it cooled things off, but that does not mean I like being in it. Plus there are people out there who do not understand the word ‘hydroplane’ and continue zooming on down the east west at 80mph even though its raining so hard I can barely see a hundred yards in front of me.
At work I have been slowly making the transition from VB 6 to VB .net. It turned out to not be as hard as I thought, although there are a lot of annoyances. For instance, in VB6 when I want to get the directory that the program currently resides in, I use:
App.path
However, my trusty old app is gone in .net, and now to get the same results I have to enter:
That’s just way too long. So before I start any program I have been throwing this code into the form:
Dim Apppath As String
Apppath = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ApplicationBase
So that way I have my trusty app.path again. Is this bad programming? Who knows? I am the only programmer in the house, so I guess it does not matter.
The Orlando fringe fest is gearing up again this weekend. I have been browsing the venues to see if there is anything I want to go see. Quite a number of them I can tell right off I do not want to be within a hundred yards of. For example:
From the Producers of last year's 'Incubus' comes a rousing, carousing musical montage. See all your favorite bathhouse stars in this rib-tickling, toe-tapping, ass-slapping all male revue!
Um. No. Actually, that makes me kind of sad. Bath houses were once exclusive gentlemen joints, a place to get a good steam and discuss politics and business transactions without worrying about offending any females nearby. Instead of a place of male power its been reduced to a dank homosexual dungeon filled with the hollow echoes of giggles and slapping flesh in the dark.
Not that I have ever been in one.
Anyways.
Some other venues that look interesting include some dude dressing up like Salvador Dali and doing Dali-like things. Would I pay 5 bucks to see some guy with a crazy moustache put on a one man show? Since the real thing is dead, I guess I would. It’s billed as:
See Dali as he free-associates about Surrealism, fame, phobias, talent, ego, obsessions, marriage, grasshoppers, cooked telephones, mustaches and sex. You know, all the stuff that makes life worth living.
I might see it. However, it’s the ‘free association’ part that gets me worried.
Another interesting one:
World Premiere. James Judd (7 Sins) is unexpectedly reunited with four Utah Mormon aunts at a Floridian fat camp in July. Hurricanes, murder, revenge, bibles and the candy police
Anything having to do with Fat Camp has to be good.
Some people are also putting on a production of ‘Flowers for Algernon’ one of my all time favorite short stories. For the unfamiliar, it’s about a retard that gets an operation that turns him into a genius. He goes form the happy retard to the miserable genius. At the end his brain goes back to normal and he is a happy retard again. A wonderful parable of human nature on many levels.
I would see this simply because I like belly dancers, however after viewing the image for this production I see there is a whole cast of freaks. So I might have to see this one. Because I like watching freaks.
Firing up the time boiler for May 2006, where a floppy disk causes a crash and Yahoo's fat buttons are the day's highlight.
Ah, 2006. A world where a misplaced floppy disk could trigger a computer emergency, and where being the only programmer meant you could justify any weird code with a shrug. Today, Ed, that floppy is just a save icon, and your phone-based PA system's ice-pick BEEP has evolved into notification hell: every app owns a little slice of your skull. Yahoo had a clean homepage with fat buttons; now the internet is a swamp of algorithmic feeds and autoplaying nonsense. Your hearing aid deal — $230 for a $2,000 device — sounds like a lost fairy tale, because now everything is a subscription, including the sound of your own dignity. VB6's App.Path turned into an AppDomain mouthful, and that aged into containers and YAML nobody truly understands. And your fringe festival review? The bathhouse tangent reveals more about you than the shows. You missed exclusive gentlemen's steam rooms while complaining about freaks; 2026 would like a word. At least rain still rains, and drivers still ignore hydroplaning.
“2006 Ed, when your coworker wailed that his computer had crashed over a forgotten floppy, did you ever once consider that future you would be nostalgic for such a simple apocalypse—or does the bathhouse eulogy already tell me everything?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I never gave that floppy incident a second thought except to wonder what kind of guy stores a floppy in the drive anyway. Nostalgic for a simple apocalypse? Hell, I get nostalgic for last Tuesday’s lunch, so maybe. But future me? If he’s got a computer that doesn’t die because a disk got left in, and he can hear the PA clear enough to cringe, he’s probably fine. I don’t dwell on the future, I’ve got enough trouble with rain and VB dot net. As for the bathhouse eulogy, yeah, that was me being sentimental about steam and cigars, not that I’ve ever set foot in one. It just seems like everything decent gets cheapened. You want a real apocalypse, watch the sales guys move their own desks. Take that.
