The IT Dept: We should be on the same side!

Ways the IT Department in my company mess with me:

• Disable tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer on Terminal Services for 5 days, and then inexplicably, allow it again.
• Disable saving and applying certain views to all folders in Explorer and Window View in Terminal Services for 2 days, and then, when I think I'm going mad because my system logs are showing as icons no matter how many times I apply the details view to my explorer folders, set it to what it was previously.
• Make all VPN traffic: Internet Browsing, Email, Database connections, etc run through Terminal Services only, Effectively making my copy of SQL Server management useless and forcing my to log onto a production server to carry out simple system health check scripts, and without notifying a soul that the changes have been made.
• Disabling all email through Wifi so I can look at Facebook on my iPhone and Twitter, but I can't check my gmail account..... hmmmm
• Disabling all Java in all Terminal servers except one. Then keeping the name of that server a closely guarded secret.

I dont get it? We should be on the same side! I know what it's like being in IT support, I know Users != a Clue.

In fact I know

    Select * from Users where a.clue > 0

0 rows returned.

 

I know all of them.

 

Why am I still one of them?

I dont want much.... I'd never bother you if I could do my job properly without fighting your control tactics every month.

 

Simulation Games: Plan it Green

I started playing a Demo of this game made by National Geographic a fortnight ago. Its a surprisingly simple game where the object of the game is to transform "Greenville" from Smog Central to a plush energy efficient green town. It goes through some town planning and infrastructure upgrading campaigns where you're liaising with consultants and pouring money into research. There's also the need to raise funds for building materials and the cost of building and upgrading old and new buildings. To do this you can try and get tax funds up or sell renewable energy credits.

 

In campaign mode there are 45 levels, each has a time limit of a certain number of days before you lose your "Star ratings", but no such limit where you have to restart the level, and each level has 4 or 5 tasks which include building and upgrading new structures, getting the happiness level to a certain percentage, getting taxes to a certain level per day and raising environmental health to a certain percentage as well. Those 45 levels can go for 5 to 10 minutes or an hour depending on how hard and how many goals there are. I got about 6 hours of game play out of campaign mode, I started playing on Sunday morning and finished on Wednesday night the same week, I was playing for about an hour to three hours each day.

 

Once you've finished campaign mode you can go into free play mode, where you have no goals or rules and you can if you like, start levels from scratch. However this is really boring as the levels give you 1,000,000 in cash and about 500,000 in building materials to start with and it takes a lot of building to chew through that. I'm still currently playing this though as it is really a free for all I am really just building up each area with Eco -Apartments and Zero energy houses and piling on upgrades until I run out of money and materials. While this might be hard if you're a 10 year old or slightly mentally impaired for me, and my giant brain it poses no challenge whatsoever and causes me to lose interest within 15 minutes and go back to watching television and using face book.

 

Lastly there's the price, depending on where you buy this game you can pay anything from 14.99 US or 26.95AU and whilst its been a while since I actually bought a game, the last time I did, I kind of expected to get more than 5 days enjoyment from it. Fine if you're a kid, you might play it on and off in campaign mode for a month depending on how much TV you're allowed to watch and how much homework you have. I suppose if it keeps you off the internet and out of reach of paedophiles that's probably a good thing. But I'm living in the land of adult, and while I have housework, work, and social life to juggle I don't have homework and I have mastered the art of watching TV whilst playing computer games and I am great at procrastination as well, so the housework can wait til the weekend. Sure I can play it over and over and over again, but chances are that I probably wont, there's only so many ways a level with 10 vacant lots can be modelled before it all becomes samey samey and all a bit of a yawn. I suppose I could think of it as a donation to National Geographic's gaming development, but I'm not sure the tax man will agree with me when I put it on my tax return.

BLOGSPOT FAIL!

Do you notice? You can follow your own blog..... WTF?

 

BLOGSPOT FAIL

 

This surely was raised in beta testing?

 

If not, what sort of cabbages did they recruit?

 

iPhone OS 3.0 released and Battle of the Twitter clients

Well Wednesday was the big day for the long awaited iPhone OS 3.0 release, Twitter was, all a twitter all day long with the technological equivalents of "Are we there yet?", This was the release to solve everything, including the MMS and the copy and paste function. For the most part it seems to have delivered in every way as well as adding a voice recognition app and the ability to read SMS's and Emails in Landscape form and changing the SMS icon to a speech bubble.

 

On the downside it has made Twitterific Shit. I know I posted a few weeks ago saying that Twitter in general is shit and I don't get it, and to be honest, I still don't get it really but I signed up to a few more tweet streams and am starting to get addicted to these short messages that seem to overload my phone every time I open up the twitter client and I have found myself tweeting mundane messages of Shit occasionally too. Its very fucking sad and I hope to stop the whole sorry cycle very soon, as soon as something else bright and shiny starts to occupy my attention. In the meantime I am annoyed that a necessary iPhone upgrade has made the keyboard in Twitterific terribly slow and clunky and the 'I' key seems to be perpetually pressed down and changing itself to the uppercase letter. Furthermore to annoy me, one light press of the delete key to get rid of previously noted bad spelling means that the key takes it upon itself to actually delete the entire message until you either press the spacebar key or some other key and try typing again. What should have taken 1 minute maximum takes 5 and you get annoyed and give up at the 3 minute mark. Having said that I like the format, I can look at the public timeline and look at information for each tweet stream, I've tried Tweet deck, which looked similar in interface but crashed every time I opened it up and I'm currently giving tweetfon a go, but neither platform lets you look up individuals. Really, twitterific makers Indigo software should just fix the problem, quickly. So what are the twitter streams I am following that make this stupid phenomenon addictive? Stephen Fry and Vic Police.... yep, if any crime gets committed in Melbourne you can bet your boots I'm not going to be out of the loop, and its all happening here too. Robberies, missing children, shootings, drug busts and live chats with police chief Simon Overland not to mention dead people being discovered left right  and centre. Its honestly a wonder anyone leaves their house around here. Stephen Fry on the other hand has an incredibly exciting life consisting of Gala Dinners, trips to the ballet, long walks and longer baths, he also writes columns for the Guardian and develops Apps for the iPhone. The modern day Oscar Wilde, you can't help but admire him. Were I a man, I would throw myself at him in a second.

 

Anyway, celebrity stalking and voyeurism aside, Twitter is still shit. by the way if you want to follow me its rascuache but I'll have to approve your stalking request first.

 

 

 

 

10 Internet Phenomena I wish would go away

1. Twitter
        I use it but I still don’t understand why it’s there, why people are so interested in it? No one has been able to explain to me either. It just seems like legalised stalking.

2. Digg
        I have never used it, I don’t even pretend to be cool enough to understand it, it just seems like another popularity contest.

3. Second Life
        For people who have no 1st life.
4. World of Warcraft
        I became a WoW Widow for an entire year whilst my partner played about 12 hours a day. I HATE this game
5. Facebook
        What you get when you cross a Computer Virus with a High-School reunion. I use it but I'm still sceptical of it.

6. Every other Social Networking site.
        I'm a member of about 5, Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, Where in the World are you, Windows Live. Same shit different smell.

7. Pay for Porn Sites….
        You Porn and Red Tube for the win.
8. Trolls.
        Get a fucking life. Nuff Said.
9. People who insist on using SMS Speak when they have a perfectly good keyboard in front of them.
        YOU HAVE A KEYBOARD, YOU ARE NOT LIMITED ON CHARACTERS!
10. Chk ChK Boom Girl
        Die Now Please.
 

To Jail Break or not to Jail Break

Funny how as soon as you get a new gadget like the iphone one of the first things you get asked is 'Have you hacked it yet?'

I'm not totally sold on jailbreaking my iphone yet as I'm aware there are some downsides to it, like....loss of warranty, which of course you can negate with refreshing the whole phone.

However, the idea of getting a whole bunch of applications for free is indeed appealing. At the moment especially because living on one wage is getting really tight especially with the new addition of a Car living up to its name of being a massive money pit and the addition of other things around the house breaking and needing to be fixed (The zipper on my favourite Boots, the Espresso machine, the pockets in my vintage jackets and several glasses).

So one of my colleagues sent me the link to the Jailbreaking site. It looks fairly simple (but then again the Original Xbox mod looked simple and I know several people who managed to break their xbox by making a hash of it) at least there's no soldering involved. I'm just waiting for a reason to try it. So far I havent had that many problems with the iphone in the state its in (Except for my email account not checking for new emails ever and the battery going flat a bit quickly.)

It would be good if someone out there (and I know this isnt a really widely read blog) had done it and could tell me how it went and if the iPhones either better or worse.

Jumping on the bandwagon

I finally jumped on the iPhone wagon.... yes yes I know only took a year. I'm such a luddite.... I dont know if I can retain the Geek label anymore. I think if there was a Scrooge Mc Geek though that would be me, because then I could combine my love of not spending any money at all and my love of computers into one glorious thrifty whole.

Anyway, I now have a wonderful love of the App Store and have been busily filling up my phone with Music and Apps and bloody hell its wonderful. There's an app for the Melbourne Metro system so I can see when a Tram, Train or Bus is coming to one of my most used stops.... this App used to be pay for but now its free. Then there's Urban spoon which, tells you all the restuarants and eating establishments in your vicinty and lets you shake the phone to pick one.... there are hundreds, and wonderfully, there's a good amount of free ones. One I have bought was Spend, its a bit like Xpense it, but it apparently has a simpler interface and crashes less often, I've been using it for a week and its only crashed once, whilst transfering money from one budget to another.

The transition from one platform to another was not bump free however. It took 4 days for Optus to transfer my number across, so far I can only check my email at home when my phone is plugged into my Mac.... setting up the old numbers from my other phone in Contacts is long and time consuming and means getting my shit together basically, at the moment there are about a hundred duplicates and parts with first names and last names all mixed up because my old Nokia liked to have the name in the last name part of the VCard. Weird... Also, I cant seem to sync my Google calendar with both my work calendar and my iCal Calendar.... its either one or the other... which i dont understand, why can't I have both? I'm hoping these are just teething problems though and will be all worked out in the mix.

So Far my favourite Apps from the App Shop are
1. MetMelb
2. Facebook
3. St George ATM Finder
4. Spend
5. Twitterific

I also like the fact that my phone and iPod are now one. this was a problem previously as listening to one cancelled out the other, so the iPod always won out in the end, ending up in a lot of missed phone calls. Thats ok, the phones for my benefit, not for others to call me on.

Another piece of technology I've bought is a car..... oooh only 100 years late there 'eh. Funnily enough the moment I bought it and drove it home it reminded me why I didnt own one as the speedo stopped working and a crack showed in the windscreen. Wonderful.

Buying software legitimately

My work situation has improved and I've sorted out the virtualisation riddle. Parrallels is the key Version 4 is quite excellent as it uses a new technology called coherence, so you can run windows applications whilst feeling like you're still in your Mac interface.

However, you have to pay for it... and yes I can claim it, I still have to fork out for it now, this comes as a shock after using open source software where ever possible. And sadly, the australian dollar value is shitful at the moment. I have put it off for a month already and thanks to the elecricity bill coming in I will put it off for another month and hope earnestly that i dont receive any support calls at 2am in the morning because the system has gone down.