Obervations in the time of COVID-19, Part 2

-
Observations Part 2 are a collection of selected email and text messages from the last couple of days. (I've done minor editing for clarity and anonymity.)

Regarding climate disruption:

We [the US] can't get our act together about shit that's killing people now, why would we ever get it together for shit that's going to kill people later (soon).
 The economy:
People our age sometimes discuss retirement in various contexts, like how's the 401k doing and stuff like that. I've been saying for a while now that I don't worry too much about retirement savings because I think there's around a 30% chance money will be irrelevant to the sorts of problems we'll be having at retirement age. I would have put money on climate disruption before virus, but whatever.
Broken legs and blown knees:
What got me most was force-realizing how much mobility -- and I don't mean doing moderately impressive for my age athletic feats on skis, I mean like just being able to move about with some measure of grace -- was core to my sense of self. Wild.
I've been hammering my docs for permission to go hiking with crutches outfitted with trekking pole tips.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Acrobat "design", part 1

-
Image
 Adobe's "design" of Acrobat is even worse than Microsoft's Word!  The above is clip of the error you get when trying to run OCR on a signed document. One would think that Acrobat could tell you the specific problem (a signature) rather than some generic warning of "not permitted".  It's also completely unclear why low memory/disk space would cause an operation to be "not permitted". Not possible, maybe, but not "not permitted". Also of particular note is that checking the box to "Ignore future errors" does *not* work. Meaning, if you try to run OCR on a large signed document, you'll be clicking on the OK button from the error message for *each page in the document.* Force close it is. SaaS is a bad joke.
Read more

Microsoft "design", part 1

-
Image
There are many things I don't understand about Microsoft's Windows design/implementation. One is security. Why does Windows warn me that a scan is due, rather than ... just performing the scan?  As built, a user needs to A. notice the small triangle exclamation point in the notification area, B. click on the notification to open "Security at a glance", C. note what the actual error is (here, "Quick scan due"), D. click on <Scan now>, E. finally, click the <Quick scan> button.   This flow is nonsense. The only good thing that arose from this blog post was buried deep in the flow, where I noticed:   Same thing. What the hell, Microsoft? I'm connected to the internet. Update the protection definitions already, in the background, without user input. Then do the quick scan, without user input. This isn't hard.   Update 1 : I ran the quick scan. Interesting. Windows claimed the scan would take around 15 seconds. The timer clicked down to about...
Read more

OneDrive isn't good

-
Image
I'm going to start posting about tech junk, and I'll start with this observation. Microsoft's OneDrive is pretty terrible. I tried to move a large number of files to the cloud (I have 1TB OneDrive storage), and it has proven basically impossible to accomplish. The OneDrive app crashes my network, and it's not even clear what it's doing in the background because the UI is garbage. It's constantly reporting different file numbers and total file size to be synced to the cloud, but the two numbers don't seem to work in concert with what's actually on my physical SSD.  Also, you can't upload files from an external drive, that doesn't work. So if you have a 500GB SSD in your ultrabook, it's essentially impossible to use your full 1TB on the cloud. Yes, technically you can probably move a block of files from the external drive to your local drive, sync those up to the cloud, set the files to stream on demand rather than be stored locally, delete the...
Read more