Girlfriends and their computer 'needs'

Comments

# William said on June 23, 2004 3:32 PM:

programmer's girlfriends, computer etiquette, a cluttered desktop, uninstalls not quite cleaning themselves up and busted systems...i think you might have given me inspiration for my next 3 or 4 posts!

although you should see my fiance at the controls...she could have a fucking cray super computer begging for mercy in 5 minutes...of course, she now threatens to start posting to my blog under my name...(can you imagine that?..."cauticPhil goes handbag shopping")

# William said on June 23, 2004 4:18 PM:

<This whole thing was parody and only half serious. I'm freestyling a little here just b/c it's fun. It's not really as egregious as Im making it out to be>

Keep her away from Kim. She'll start with chaning your Normal.dot which she insists won't change anything. Then, after the problem keeps cropping up, she says it shouldn't and doesn't know why it does, maybe it's something wrong with your version of Word.

But NOTHING, I MEAN NOTHING, Gets her excited like a Directory Tree with only 10 or 15 directories, a Desktop with only 3 or four icons and a Color Printer full of paper with a new color ink cartridge. I used Mental Telepathy one day to find out what she was thinking ....

"Ohhhh my God, only four icons on the desktop, if I don't hurry up and install some lame ass shareware from ZDNet on there God might get mad and inflict his wrath on the world. Oh My God, there are only 20 topmost directories on this 80 gig harddrive, If I don't hurry up an dcopy all my shit from work into a new directory, the world will stop spinning. .... I know I just created a new directory but I can't find it, why don't I just create a new one, what happened to that last directory, maybe I can create another one. Oh shit, all this stuff I copied can't be opened because Bill doesn't have WinZip on his Server. Who in the hell does he think he is? Anyway, there's a bunch of space on it, I'll just delete it afterward. And while I'm add it, I better installl every fucking plugin in the world, and CoffEE CUP. And God help that bastard if I catch him not smililing as I tell him how much better CoffeeCup is than Visual Studio. What's this? Flash MX 2004? How in the world does anyone expect me to do anything with Flash MX? Why does he get to be on the Advisory Board and get perks like this. HE doesn't deserve them, Looks like I'm going to park on this computer today. And if he gets on it while I'm in the shower, I know what to do. I"ll wait around and not tell him that I'm waiting for him. When he offers me his laptop, I'll just tell him "That's Ok, I don't really feel like working now" Then I'll wait 20 minutes, right when he's in the middle of helping someone on the newesgroups and I'll throw a fulll fledged "You don't respect me, you don't think my work is important. You are a selfish dickhead for helping people on the newsgroups when you should have read my mind and new that I wanted to use the new server and not the laptop or the other desktop" And wait a second, all of this shit that I used to do in Office 97 - I can feel a glitch in the Matrix - If I don't do it over in Office XP then the world will implode. I MUST USE XP and I must use it on his machine. I must add directories. I must install utilities that make me more productive - he's a dickhead for calling it spyware - he only says that b/c it's my idea and he can't respect a strong woman. I know he's very polite and respectiful to women, but some angry bitch I work with told me thta some immature guy I work with has a problem working for Strong Women (and I guess weak women like herself). So that must mean that Bill doesn't want me adding directories all over his new server or installing shitware on it because ---- He can't stand the thought of a strong woman."

Well, when someone reads this I'm probably going to have a foot so far up my a33 that I won't be able to sit for a while - but it was fun.

# William said on June 23, 2004 4:33 PM:

please... use... paragraphs..

# William said on June 23, 2004 7:38 PM:

CAUSTICPHIL GOES HANDBAG SHOPPING! I love it!

Seriously...this is what I used to do with my (now ex) wife. She gets her own computer. It isn't on the domain. She has no domain account. She has no way to get into my computers or servers. She has no ability to guess the passwords because they are stronger than I even use for my bank account. I treat my current roommate the same way. He doesn't have admin priveleges on his box, and I have the local admin password. I run the network therefore I can be the BOFH.

Then again, maybe if I had made the wife a power user on the domain she wouldn't have divorced me...

# William said on June 23, 2004 11:14 PM:

Mike: Sorry about that, I was actually posting with Mozilla - our stupid Proxy server blocks my blog if I use IE and Mozilla screws up the formatting and rendering of .aspx files.

# William said on June 24, 2004 3:26 AM:

Not a big deal... lost my place a couple of times :)

# William said on June 24, 2004 8:48 AM:

he hehe..now that's a story to connect to..

I've had the same issues earlier in my "career" when i wasn't really earning much and my jobs seemed to be harder on our marriage than on the clients (yes, they too got a bullocking at times)..

What happened with me was this:

i got a contract job (one of my first ones) with a dubious bloke and he provided me with a 2k server and, at that time rather flashy, 1Ghz AMD..my wife had a 233Mhz Gateway laptop which she loved...after a couple of months she still hadn't used my stuff (or rather my bosses stuff) but that changed when the powersupply cooked the motherboard in the laptop..then it was sharing time...suddenly the machines i used for work was "hers" as well...no matter, i gave her access to the desktop but none to the server..she eventually noticed that i did an awful lot of stuff on the server and wanted to play along...i restricted her access via group policies and hell broke loose (same as you lucky man!)...i eventually quit the job, got rid of the two machines and went back onto my 400mhz trusty AMD (which i'm still using today, sad really)...we got her laptop fixed and she used that for a while...then it broke again...and voila...back onto my machine...but now, at this stage i'd been doing .net for a while and my best defence was always that she couldn't touch anything because it might break some of the .net stuff (which of course it couldn't but it sounded plausible at the time when i broke the news to her)..

happily enough, this ended with her accepting a guest account and are now only using it for email, a little surfing and banking)...i've even added a port blocker which has to be disabled before you can dial up..and the dial up can only be run through the administrators account and then shared when logging off...

guess i'm the lucky twat here with a wife who doesn't really want to know what my job entails!

# William said on June 24, 2004 8:58 AM:

Don't forget gaming consoles. Nothing like not being able to finish GTA Vice City because a strong woman has taken over the console to play Crash Bandicoot.

# William said on June 24, 2004 9:25 AM:

[Scott]

again i'm the lucky one...i got my XBox and the mrs doesn't really play games..she actually enjoys watching more than playing...

QualityWife objWife = new QualityWife();

try
{
if (objWife.typeOf() == System.Type.Perfect())
{
base.HusbandGetsLaid == true;
}
}
catch (UnImaginableException ex)
{
// do nuffin'
}

# William said on June 24, 2004 3:22 PM:

Bill -- Ha ha, yep, that was funny. To set the record straight, I figured I'd just describe briefly something I like to call "The Fortress that is Bill's Work Area."

Here's the truth about what Bill actually has set up in his apartment. Brace yourself...It isn't pretty:

1. Bill has a configuration of multiple (at least three that I know of) PCs networked together in such a complicated fashion that I don't think the combined talents of all the students at MIT could figure out.

To switch between his PCs while working, you have to stand on your head, stick out your tongue, and press Ctrl+Alt+F1+Insert with the right toe of your big foot while farting yankee doodle dandy all at the same time.

Not that I would ever try getting on his PC. Noooooo, I wouldn't dream of doing such a thing.

2. Secondly, in some unfortunate round of "I AM A NETWORKING DUDE," Bill set a strong password on his main PC the likes of which not even the pentagon uses. I am not kidding. It's something like this:

jdk01?#239d7hrtewuycbeu34125549o...##%@Qs

Sure, this is normal behavior.... NOT!!!

3. As a result of several evil little experiments with his PCs, the remants of unfortunate computer parts which did not fare so well surround Bill's work area. Add to that a tangled mess of wires, cords, cables, empty Diet Coke cups, and 5 million paper balls, and you get an idea of what it is like to be in Bill's office.

To date, Bill has lost at least three pairs of shoes, four Diet Cokes, a set of keys, a telephone, five notebooks, and a PDA in the tangled mess.

It is also reported that several small children entered his office, never to be seen again.

4. Finally, I'd like to mention a certain incident with a Canteena, of which my cat was reportedly the cause. Bill had obtained some sort of metallic Pringles can which supposidly would allow him to sit downstairs by the pool and still be on the Bill Fortress Network. Supposidly this Canteena was sitting all by itself, not in the middle of all the office mess, when my Cat out of the blue decided to kill it.

This, at least, was what Bill said.

I in fact believe that the something very bad and very evil in fact lives behind Bill's PCs...Somewhere in that mass of wires, a monster must have sprung up and tried to attack my poor cat, which was not doing anything at the time. I'm sure that the Canteena was just a victim in the fray.

And that's all I have to say for now. But if I hear anymore about the truth of me and computers, I will have to devulge a few more secrets about Bill...

HA!!!!!

# William said on June 24, 2004 3:56 PM:

Plain and simple. This is what I tell my wife. Here are the 10 simple rules:
1.) If you are using a pc or laptop behind my firewall on my network you will not run under any profile which allows installs of any kind ever. You will be lucky if I allow you a text editor, a browser, bread and water.
2.) I will set your password, you may not change it, you may not write it down, it will change at random.
3.) You want something different then you build your own d@mn pc's and servers like I did and start your own network. You can do whatever you like with that network, but do not call me or ask me for anykind of support.

Oh you don't want to do #3? Well then you are stuck with what you are given.

4.) If you want something installed then ask because if the machine detects any kind of install under your promission level it will shut down and keep shutting down everytime you log in until I reset the security service. This will suck if I'm at work because you won't be able to use anything until I get home.

5.) If it is freeware or shareware the answer is no anyway.

6.) I don't play games, I can't stand computer games of any kind they are the most horrendus waste of graphics development ever. If you want to play a game go to someone elses house and play. It is an even draw between them and slashdot as to which is a greater waste of life.

7.) There is never any noise on my machines. If you leave the volume on I will chew your ass out like a drill instructor until you cry. I work in silence, don't f#ck with that.

8.) Periodically things in the house may start doing things on their own, do not freak out and hit them. Chances are I'm testing something and I will be very mad if you smack it and ruin my latest experiment.

9.) If I need wires, solder, or components of anykind anything is fair game for salvage. Do not complain I pulled apart your "InsertDeviceHere". If I never pulled anything apart do you think you would have ever gotten your toaster which plays "Winnie The Pooh" when the toast pops up? Don't worry if it was important I'll get you a new one.

10.) If I am in front of my machines or working in my shop do not bother me. I do not know when I'll be done. Go do something domestic and be happy because if you bug me again I'll sic the dog on you.

# William said on June 24, 2004 4:13 PM:

Everyone, please note that both my mother and Girlfriend are notorious for lying about things that comes to me and technology. So let me set the stories straight.

Lie 1: "To switch between PCs..."
--Ok, what she's referring to is called a KVM Switch. They are pretty common in most parts of the world other than backwoods SC. Simple technology like a KVM is very rare up 'thatttawayz' because they spend all of their resources on other high tech goodies like WWJD shoelaces. Anyway, all you need to do it press the "Home" button twice, and then either the Up or Down Arrow. Or you could do it the hard way and hit the 'switch' button on the KVM. I know that all that crap like if God wanted you to use two computers simultaneously he wouldn't give you gay people to wrongly persecute (I'm not sure exactly what their opposition would be to KVM Switches back in Spartanburg, Maybe Harry Potter uses one - but they are against virtually everything but the King James Bible and What Would Jesus Do Bling Bling so i'm sure they're against KVM''s) but you need to have multiple computers in your house.

As far as diet coke and paper balls. I am probably the most obsessive/compulsive ADHD person in the world. Rolling paper balls and drinking diet coke is one of my favorite things to do as I set around at the computer. It's nothing for me to roll about 1000 paper balls a night. It drives everyone nuts but i find it realising it. It's also true that I have a ton of wires, USB Devices, books and stuff like that in my living room - and best of all, NO CAT. I have a Cuckoo Clock in my living room and the cuckoo comes out every hour and tells me things. I also have some stuffed animual cuckooz in my house that often take over my mind and make me do things. "Bill, listen to us, you can not resist. Visit Club Jenna right now. Bill build a Kat a Polt and see if you can fling Kim's kat across the highway. Bill, go buy that new Tablet PC. Bill, Phil Hendrie is now on XM 152, turn him on now. Excercise is for losers, go eat some Lortabs and drink diet cokes. Let's call up Jenna and Janine. It's terrible to have those birds living in my house with me, but what can I do?



Lie 2: "in some unfortunate round of "I am a networking dude".
--I have never been through this phase. Me and handy man stuff just don't mix. If I ever tried to get the A+ certification, all I would do is succeed at causing some serious electrical fires. My networking skills are quite strong, but that's only because they consist of calling my Friend Adam. Yes, there is no networking problem I can't solve, as long as Adam is in the neighborhood. Now, you may be aware of the perennial ego battle between programmers and networking folks. You may also be aware that I have natural talent at talking trash and infuriating people. So I've provided my company's network administration the perfect opportunity to push Group Policy to it's limits - Yes, in our corporate network, I have my very own OU. Actually, it would be better described as a FU b/c that's what it feels like every time I log on. First it welcomes me as "Lil Willie" Then as it's applying my settings, the Audio file of a dude squeezing out a nice hard dump plays. I have a minimum 16 character password that needs changed every 30 days (for a while he made me change it every two days until I grovelled and promised to never disrespect his Domain Controller again). As such, I got really good at creating and whipping up strong passwords. So I actually applied a similar policy at home, just so I could get useed to it at work. My last password (that Kim's referring to was) JkDF99MP**sw0a!!(=+)Uzs . So kim decided she was going to be slick and memorize it by looking over my shoulder, hoping I wouldn't notice. Didn't end up workign that well.

It's organized enough that I can find everythign quickly but i can always pretend that I forgot where I placed something when I need it.. "Gee honey, I don't know where those tickets to the Waiting to Exhale Film Festival are. I really did buy them, I just can't find them. Maybe one of the cuckooz took it."

Lie 4 "Finally, I'd like to mention the cantenna". Ok, here's the deal. She decided that my life woudl somehow be better with her stupid cat in it. It's the worst cat I've ever met. And I'm not alone. Someone (smart) tossed it out at the county dump where it belonged. Some idiot she works with found it and decided that it needed a home. Well, she decided it needed a home with someone else. So just like an Amway salesman, she tried to find some sucker to pawn it off on. In comes Kim. So kim asks me to take care of it for a week. One week turned to three months. Only after I told her stories of the medical experiments I was conducting on it did she decide to take it back. "Yes dear, Kitty is fine. I put her in the microwave for 15 whole minutes and she was fine. Yes dear, I took Kitty 'Bobbing for Mr Hankey" in the commode today, she loved it. Yes dear, did you know you can swing a kat by it's tail and smack it's head into the wall and it will always land on its feet" So she started to get the hint. Well her cat had EVERY Annoying habit a cat could have... and I'm an animal lover. But I hated this cat with every bone in my body. I used to pray for an hour every morning that God would do something really mean to it for eternity b/c I couldn't think of anything mean enough. Then the Cat crossed the line. It Jumped up on my new Cantenna which i just ordered and only had for two days. She broke the Cantenna's mount, the Pigtail and the piece that the tripod went into So I stuffed the cat into the empty cantenna which was touch. I had to snap a few of its limbs but I finally got it in there. Then I sawed the cantenna in pieces 1/8 at a time. Just when it got fun I woke up. Unfortunately the only thing that was dead was my cantenna. (It's worth mentioning that the cat tried to kill my wireless router about 20 times..

So if you know of any good Cat Exterminators, please let me know, I pay top dollar. http://www.cantenna.com are cool and loving beings and should be treated with respect. In general, cats are too. But this stupid Abby, should be ground in a meet grinder alive, one limb at a time and then brought back to life just so more things can be done to her. She never even apologized for hurting my little Cantenna. So please, help me avenge my Cantenna's honor.

# William said on June 24, 2004 4:17 PM:

Kim do you hear this? Andy is a REAL MAN and he's totally cool. And from no one, This is how it's going to be. If you want the rules, read Andy's post.

So there

# William said on June 24, 2004 4:48 PM:

William,
For the cat. Get a water balloon launcher and put the cat in it. They do land on their feet. Unfortunately shortly afterwards their feet follow the rest of their legs out of the their back as they flatten into the pavement.

# William said on June 24, 2004 7:04 PM:

Damnit Andy, what's the deal with your RSS feed?

Oh yeah, and hell yeah about the network rules. Bill man, throw down on Kim. You gotta protect your network bro. I mean...what happens if she somehow stumbles on the .NET for Strippers code repository and starts adding weird methods like ClubPatronBase.RespectsTheLadies()?

;-)

# William said on June 24, 2004 9:38 PM:

Scott,
I'm not sure. So far hurricane portal really sucks for me. It periodically just stops formatting code and links, the RSS dies, etc. I have to call B.C. where the server is and have them reboot it. This usually solves the issue. It has been nothing but problems from day one. But the blog space was free a friend wanted me to move my blog from the Apache server it was on running php and give aspx with the Hurricane portal a try. So far to date I give it an F-. I had zero trouble on the Unix server of his and nothing but problems on the Windows server. I am going to do one of two things when stuff at work calms down. A.) Get hosting and run a full site with blog too on an Apache or IIS server with php on it because I want to put up a web mapping application that only runs with php or B.) Turn my home server into a web server and register a domain and host my blog locally. Frank thought it would be so cool to try out this new hurricane thing. It's been a pain in my ass ever since.

# William said on June 25, 2004 9:05 AM:

Scott:

That's an excellent point. Fortunately, she's convinced Visual Studio .NET is evil and that Coffee Cup is the only Web Editor out there. WEll, she likes Dreaweaver too, and I shouldn't bring this up, but one day she started the biggest fight with me b/c I use Visual Studio .NET to edit my HTML with instaed of Dreamweaver.

# William said on June 25, 2004 10:38 AM:

isn't visual studio .net the only REAL tool out there to use nowadays? i mean, what else is there to use?

Dreamweaver is evil....fundamentally as incorrect, both technically and morally, as frontpage..

i don't know how many times i've had to tell my dear web designer x-colleagues that Dreamweaver is useless..hell, default values for pressing enter while in design mode is a paragraph tag with a non-breaking space in it...and it clearly lacks the intelligence NOT to use font tags either.

on another note, sounds like your homelife is anything but trivial .. he heh ehehe

# William said on June 25, 2004 1:48 PM:

Hi Brian:

Well the Girlfriend is a great girl, this is just one of those issues we fight over when we're bored - the argument is too stupid for there to be any other reason. She's had a bunch of aholes that she's worked with claim to write all of their code in Notepad - and of course none of them have URL's that anyone can see. Either it was a private Intranet (isn't that always a convenient one) or they can't tell the URL because of noncompetes or some stupid unbelievable stuff. Anyway, she got the idea that using VS.NET for HTML editing was like using Word for it - this was a while ago and she has since seen the light - she's even started using WebMatrix.

The thing is that she's damned good at Flash and has natural talent at Graphics. This has always been a roadblock for me b/c I know my way around Action script, but if you don't have some cool graphics, your effects are going to look as lame as the Microsoft Paint that you used to make them. I've been pushing her to ASP.NET for a while and with Web Matrix, it's a start. She'll be using VS.NET before long. She's been told by more than a few Cobol programmers that she couldn't do stuff like ASP because she's not a programmer. I think after a few years of it it wounded her confidence. I've pointed out (since I worked with some of those same clowns) that she can do more with Flash than they can with Assembler or Cobol, and in the end, that means she's a better programmer even if she doesn't work as a programmer.

So I think with a little more work we'll have another ASP.NET developer in this world. If you would, please feel free to mention to her that it's not nearly as hard as some would have you believe (and the people that told her this couldn't write VB code, let alone ASP.NET to save their live). I keep encouraging here b/c she'll be good at it and then maybe she'll even be better than me (which won't take much). Then the Dreamweaver battle can finally go away.

# William said on June 25, 2004 1:49 PM:

Andy:

I've got to get a SlingKing - You always have some great ideas!

# William said on June 25, 2004 4:11 PM:

quote-"none of them have URL's that anyone can see"

This is a huge pet peeve of mine with myself. Anytime I want to show anyone my web stuff they have to come in to work with me on a weekend because it all sits behind a firewall. I don't generally even tell people I do web stuff because it's vapor ware to them unless they are close by to where I work. That is my other reason for wanting to get my own stuff set up, along with my blog problems. So I can show people what I can do with web apps. Until then though I just have to bite my tounge everytime I want to say "hey I know a cool way to do X thing on the web". Raaaah I wish work would slow down so I could get my stuff set up.

# William said on June 25, 2004 5:31 PM:

Andy: that can be a real pain in the butt. You can tell the people I'm referring to b/c the almost always have some big sounding title professionally but can't 'show' you anything. Most of the ones I know have worked with me and have these big stories about what they used to do.

I had some trouble before where I work now b/c I was learning web services and couldn't really deploy the practice stuff on our production servers. Our Sysadmin is pretty cool about stuff but he's got to take stuff seriously b/c there's too much too lose if he doesn't. We've had a few people try to hit us and had an incident with Sendmail that could have been pretty bad. But it's hard to test stuff on your local network b/c you can't really simulate what it's like in the 'real' work and you can't test it outside of work if it's behind the firewall. I set up a brinkset account which was pretty cool and they supported ASP.NET. One of the guys I worked with used Stargate before and we host knowdotnet.com on them - it's like $7.99 a month and we have a SQL Server Database plus ASP.NET support which is pretty cool.

What kind of stuff are you working on? Have you used any third party tools for the web? I've used Spread and Infragistics, both of which are really cool. Figured if you are doing anything it's probably pretty cool so I'd be interested in hearing about it.

# William said on June 25, 2004 9:21 PM:

William,
We have a full on intranet behind our firewalls that rivals the regular internet. You have to remember we own most of the telecom lines world wide so our intranet spans the globe. So testing things isn't really the issue it works on our intranet the same as the regular web. My problem is I can't show it to anyone outside work and that is just lame. I do side work and I'd like to show prospective clients what I can do. Saying "well I've done some cool sh!t but it's behind a firewall" cuts zero weight with a client so I really need to be able to show fully deployed web apps so they can just get on the web and see my work when I send them a link to it.
Most everything I have ever done for the web minus one app has been for mapping and spatial asset managment. A lot of dispatch apps where the dispatcher is talking to someone in the field be it a law enforcement officer or a utility worker and is dispatching them to a location based on earth coordinates. One of the coolest ones I've ever seen I only helped on, I didn't write much of it just the aerial photo stuff. What it does is when doing crime analysis it pulls up the aerial photos as you progress across the face of the map. Like I said though the main logic and such for that somebody else did. I only did the part that rectifies, indexes, and brings up the correct photos for that area. It was for the Suffolk county sherrif's dept (Long Island). GIS mapping apps is what I do primarily and I can show people samples of my rich client apps but I really need to be able to show them the web ones too. The one I'm doing right now maps utility assets like poles, signal direction, power generators, telecom lines, customer locations etc. for 11 counties in North Western Oregon. It has to run on Linux, Unix and Windows and it's a mother but it will be very cool when I'm all done. I have about five months left to go. I already wrote the piece that pulls all the info out of their CAD drawings, reprojects it to a better coordinate system for spatial managment and into a GIS format once a week. They have two apps one rich client that goes into the fields with the techs on their laptops and radio phones that uses the data. I am done with that app too. It's in the field being tested now. I have about two weeks before we sign off on it for production use. The web based side for the dispatchers and customer reps is the last and hardest piece. The whole kit and kaboodle was writen from scratch it relies on zero third party tools. So that is why I'm so busy but as soon as I'm done I'm going to take the web templates for the mapping system and put them up on my web site to be with a bunch of data in it so folks can play with it and get a feel for what I can do.

The only other web stuff besides mapping apps I ever did was a tiny thing that formats a page of links out of a directory of drawing files for companies that have a lot of CAD so they don't have to manually link the drawing files. It can viewed here:
http://www.afralisp.com/lisp/html5.htm

Don't laugh to hard. Yes, I actually can write in Lisp. The application they rn that out of has a built in Lisp interpreture so I wrote it in Lisp so they wouldn't have to buy anything they can just run it when they are done drafting.

# William said on June 27, 2004 2:24 PM:

Andy, that is some seriously cool shit. I guess that stuff Gene Hackman was saying about the phone companies in Enemy of the State was true? I can't even imagine what all is employed in that GIS stuff. The closest I've seen (and it's totally lame compared to what you're working on) is some GiS stuff that they use at the Savannah River Site. If you saw The Sum of All Fears, that's the place the bomb was supposedly originally made. Some of the channels to the savannah river run along the perimeter and even though it looks like the god damned everglades, it's very secure and if they catch you taking pictures, Armed men from Wackenhut come and say hello to you. mind you that this is in the total wilderness but they have hidden cameras watching all the traffic on the river and stuff. Some guys I know where showing me some GIS software (not the actual images from the site but just the software) and how it's used to track stuff , do dispatches and the like. It sounds like the stuff you are working with is that stuff on steriods, all grown up.
That's amazing the whole thing is home grown. Weren't you telling me a while ago that your shop doesn't buy any third party stuff at all, even for other projects? That has to be a pretty serious code base.


This http://terraservice.net/webservices.aspx sounds like something you might be interested in playing with although you probably already are hip to it. I know what you mean about the behind the firewall stuff. It sucks b/c every asshole out there that made one page in Frontpage but is a wannbe programmer is running around claiming web master skills. It's the same shit I originally wrote about. Then when you ask them about their links they say "It's not up anymore, it's for clients only or it's behind a firewall." So I know your situation because even though you're telling the truth, that's a warning sign for most folks when they hear that. Unfortunately it's the same thing with being a 'contractor'. It's true for many people and you can easily provide references but lots of folks that can't keep a job (or get one) use Independent contractor to fill in the gaps in work. I had 6 months as a contractor and one HR person told me to just use the company name directly, like I worked for them and then put (Independent Contractor) b/c many people I guess will chuck out your resume if they even see that.

Anyway, you should be good to go, you probably just need to start putting stuff up. When we were going to do KnowDotNet we talked about it for like 4 months. Then we finally registered the name and it took another 4 months to 'launch' it. Once we did it magically seemed a lot easier to get stuff up b/c you look at the site and you want content on it. You definitely got your act together though and you're stuff will no doubt be totally kick a33. What are you using now to build your web parts with, rather, are you using ASP.NET yet? I've been trying to learn Flash for a while, but my lack of graphics ability is killing me. ActionScript is so much like C#,Java, C++ etc that it's scarry, there's very little learning curve there - it's just that using the visual tools and getting graphics is a bear. I played with ASP before but ASP.NET is probably the coolest stuff web wise I've come across - although Flash, even being a different technology is quite cool too. I'm trying to get accustomed to ASP.NET 2.0 right now (got a class starting next week) but I'm trying to leanr the whole 2.0 framework so that's a lot to do all at once.

You sound like you have the coolest job in the world though - I'm definitely impressed.

# William said on June 28, 2004 5:40 PM:

Limited user accounts are the way to go, period. I use them now on all of the machines I manage except for the few laptops we don't own as a company. I let those users get the wonderful priveledge of having spyware all over their machine or the added bonus of using AOL (which I won't support, ever).

If me and my girlfriend lived together I would give her the same account I have, which is restricted. I've turned on some access mostly so that I can do things from my account. The big stuff that needs admin rights are gained by using a the password, a lot like sudo in unix. I won't operate as admin any more on any windows computer especially since I won't operate as root on any of the linux boxes I support.

You restricting access is not really just for you to be a hard ass. It's for your protection as well as your woman's. I have somewhat of the same mentality where I create a lot of directories and have certain mentality structures in my work. I have tons of duplicate files and use programs to try to weed those down and I've finally gotten to a decent level. I've stopped rethinking things and started using things I have as a base for anything new. Rather than create 15 new directories, I'll go look at old ones to see my mental logic. I'll duplicate or change what's needed so that rather than reinvent the wheel I only change it slightly to suit my needs.

There's one thing to mention about uninstallers. Uninstallers are only as intelligent as the programmers who made it. Most uninstallers ONLY keep track of what they installed. So say your program creates registry entries that your installer HAS NO CLUE ABOUT. Guess what? Your uninstaller won't remove them. The only way it'll get removed is if you create subkeys and your installer knows to remove say Blah\ which will remove Blah\Settings (Settings created by your program). Most programmers are oblivious to the way un/installers work so there's almost ALWAYS stale information in the registry. I hate this with a passion. Plus it's like even if you were to find EVERY SINGLE stale entry your registry is still going to be slow as dirt. It's as if you're fine if you put nothing on, but the second you install and uninstall something you lost 5% of your speed for the life of the OS until you reformat and start over. At least I don't deal with this in linux, even though I do have to find every damn file known to man if you're even lucky enough to have an uninstall.sh.

Good post, just don't be too hard on the lady. It's the way she's worked and it's severely hard to retrain those bad habits. I have many of the same bad habits and I'm trying to develop a decent working style. It's come down to me making a program that'll help me most likely, though I have no free time because I'm spinning my wheels using these bunk habits. It's pathetic but at least I make money, strangely enough.

# William said on June 29, 2004 8:41 AM:

THanks J. I'm not beign too hard, it's just a goof. She runs the show in the house, I just talk tough. Thanks though ;-)

# William said on April 26, 2005 4:57 PM:

HAHAHA... Oh MY GOd... I am crying im laughing so hard.... you got one funny girl there. LOL

# William said on October 21, 2005 12:41 PM:

Thi is true if you could find girlfriend.
Manish Khanna

# William said on October 21, 2005 1:09 PM:

Manish - there's 3 billion women on this planet, there's plenty for everyone.