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I dislike wikis.

It wasn't a bad idea for storing object oriented software info (thanks, Ward!) and I didn't mind maintaining one for a bunch of other nerds ten years ago.

But now they're everywhere, and it's annoying. Reasons I dislike the wiki phenomenon are:

1. Every nerd who saw the idea reimplemented it, so there are 20 different wiki software packages, all different from each other.
   
   
2. It''s yet another example of the user interface that nerds thing is intuitive. It's so easy, and fun, and transparent! If you like learning another markup language, that is.
   
   
3. Wikis are used for everything. As a shared resource for software development it makes a lot of sense. As the knowledge base for a tech support site, or an archive of scripts, or damn near anything else, it's worse than useless. How many times have we seen "Our useful resource thingy is now a wiki! Enjoy, everyone!" and then been asked to create our own answers to a problem?
   
   
4. Wikipedia.
   
   
5. Administering one of these things is a huge pain in the ass. I never know whether I'm changing my own user settings, the entire site, or someone else's user settings. No one using the site has any clue how wiki code works or any desire to learn, and I don't blame them, so I end up doing all the stuff that's supposedly intuitive and simple and beautiful.

ACCENTUATIVE THE POSITIVE I have to say that I love HTML and its successors, hyperlinking, the WWW, and the Internet. I just don't want to play Choose Your Own 404 Adventure or User-Generated Reality all the time!

Today I had to submit a financial form to the office. I work remotely, so I couldn't just fill it out and drop it by the finance person's office. The question was: how to get it there?

The form was an Acrobat PDF. Nowadays, many of these can be filled out as forms onscreen and then printed or emailed or faxed, making them easy to fill out and easy to read. Not this one. So the problem was: how to get it to the office without driving 50 miles in heavy traffic?

As I realized what was necessary, a tear rolled down my cheek.

I printed out the document and filled out both pages in black pen. Then I took them to the scanner/printer device at the other computer. I scanned each one in, which had to be done separately. The first go scanning them in greyscale produced an illegible grey smudge like a 1980s drugstore copy machine. I redid it at 48-bit RGB color and the greyscale document came out right. What the...?

Now I had two scanned-in .PDF documents, each one half of the previous .PDF document. I used Adobe Acrobat Pro to combine these into one document so that I could send it as one fax.

Now it was time to fax. This involved connecting to the other computer and using its modem as a fax printer. It should be simple, but it rarely works the first time. It's never clear how to find the modem/fax/printer in the first place. Decisions about long-distance prefixes and area codes have to made by trial and error. Feedback from the computer sending the fax is almost nonexistent. To make the whole thing perfect, I was doing all of this over a wireless network.

Because of these things, the promise of faxing over the network with ease is a cruel lie. I walked back and forth at a ratio of five times per page trying to see the status of my fax, hear the fax modem dialing, figure out if it had been sent, etc. The first go was a failure because I'd been given the wrong fax number. The second try vanished ambiguously from my computer, but showed as "sent, okay" on the machine actually attached to the fax modem.

I decided that it had been sent, and fired off an email to the recipient, because of course anything can and will go wrong with the fax on the other end: paper jam, paper loss, toner failure, and inexplicable failure to receive a document or notify anyone that a problem has occurred.

Finally I sat down with relief to do some actual work. This was not to be. From the other room, I could hear an insistent beeping. Perhaps the fax modem hadn't hung up? Sometimes they decide to stay on the line and one has to manually kill the connection.

I went into the other room to find the fax modem trying manfully to send the first fax, the one with the wrong number. I called up the dialog window to see fax jobs and deleted it. I went back to my desk. Three minutes later the beeping started. I marched into the other room and once again deleted the job. This time I stayed and watched. The same thing happened three more times.

Looking at other system preferences in desperation, I had to unlock one with my administrator password. A light suddenly shone upon me, and I saw the problem. Administrator privileges were required to remove a fax job. Sure enough, after I'd proved I was entitled, the fax job stayed removed. The system never told me that I wasn't permitted to kill the bad fax without admin privileges: it just cheerfully removed and reinstated the bad fax job, forever.

Now I'm back at my desk, waiting for the email saying the fax was never received.

If anyone has extra peacock plume pens and pots of India ink, I'd be grateful for a loan. I have parchment and papyrus already.

WHY ARE MY PACKETS FROM LOS ANGELES TO ORANGE COUNTY (45 MILES) BEING ROUTED THROUGH NEWARK, NJ?

BEST,

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This mode of travelling, which by Englishmen of the present day would be regarded as insufferably slow, seemed to our ancestors wonderfully and indeed alarmingly rapid. In a work published a few months before the death of Charles the Second, the flying coaches are extolled as far superior to any similar vehicles ever known in the world. Their velocity is the subject of special commendation, and is triumphantly contrasted with the sluggish pace of the continental posts. But with boasts like these was mingled the sound of complaint and invective. The interests of large classes had been unfavourably affected by the establishment of the new diligences; and, as usual, many persons were, from mere stupidity and obstinacy, disposed to clamour against the innovation, simply because it was an innovation. It was vehemently argued that this mode of conveyance would be fatal to the breed of horses and to the noble art of horsemanship; that the Thames, which had long been an important nursery of seamen, would cease to be the chief thoroughfare from London up to Windsor and down to Gravesend; that saddlers and spurriers would be ruined by hundreds; that numerous inns, at which mounted travellers had been in the habit of stopping, would be deserted, and would no longer pay any rent; that the new carriages were too hot in summer and too cold in winter; that the passengers were grievously annoyed by invalids and crying children; that the coach sometimes reached the inn so late that it was impossible to get supper, and sometimes started so early that it was impossible to get breakfast. On these grounds it was gravely recommended that no public coach should be permitted to have more than four horses, to start oftener than once a week, or to go more than thirty miles a day. It was hoped that, if this regulation were adopted, all except the sick and the lame would return to the old mode of travelling. Petitions embodying such opinions as these were presented to the King in council from several companies of the City of London, from several provincial towns, and from the justices of several counties. We Smile at these things. It is not impossible that our descendants, when they read the history of the opposition offered by cupidity and prejudice to the improvements of the nineteenth century, may smile in their turn. — The History of England from the Accession of James II

So, O.C. goatee guy with the shiny truck. You think you're badass because you blow 10 mpg in your lifted 4x4 and occasionally drive on a trail? Maybe because you have a buddy who did the Baja 1000 once? Let us show you an SU fuckin' V:



http://www.icechallenger.co.uk/


This is a modification on the typical vehicle in Iceland, where instead of showing off the locals are concerned with getting around on a mixture of snow, ice, and sharp volcanic rock. Interestingly even though the thing gets shitty mileage it uses a tenth the amount of fuel it would take for an airplane to go the same distance.

via Autoblog and Forbes

Neither the USPS nor anyone else can locate my nearest mail collection box.

How can this be hard? There are official USPS mail drop off boxes in fixed locations. They rarely move. They know where these are because they pick up from them every day. The location of the nearest one should not be lore handed down from generation to generation, it should be a searchable database.

The USPS has all its post offices in a locator, but not the boxes. Google Local has all the private companies from the phone listings that do mail stuff, but not the boxes. But everyone needs to know where the mail boxes are, not least businesses in the area. Every place I've worked there has been some mail every day that someone drops off in a mail box on the way home.

I am confused.

New Launches has a fairly terrifying/neato post about the latest death gadget from real-life Qs: The Phone Gun, via techeblog.



Ow.

There is one achievement of the last century that will stand without a doubt, and that is the 1980s era Toyota minitruck. In this Google video you see this greatness made manifest, as Jeremy Clarkson and crew do their best to destroy a 100,000 mile+ former farm truck with impact, seawater, fire, and other things.

Every broke person I hung out with in the 80s and early 90s drove one of these things. I'd buy one today. pbd had one that later the_silent_one had too. That was a 1980, wasn't it? Greg's was an '88 and he put 100,000 miles of L.A. messenger/courier work on it before he sold it. The Chadian army blew up Libyan tanks with them. They. Will. Not. Die.

Is the Tacoma still that good, I wonder?

Motoringfile has a nice update and analysis on the next gen engine for the Mini.

So earlier I spent four hours fighting invisible network gnomes and buying stuff I didn't need and talking to the ISP and not fixing it, and also hurting my knee. Now I'm out $70 and I walk funny and I didn't even [PUNCHLINE].

I came home around midnight to discover that the network came up on its own at 8 pm. WTF.

But now I have 15%-20% packet loss. So I opened another ticket with the ISP, and I'm not buying a new DSL modem until they tell me what REALLY happened.

I'm a professional and this one has me running in tight little circles. What happens to everyone else? GAAAH!