About

Departing the Sensory is a weblog, initially focusing on my long train adventure from New York to New Orleans, and my subsequent stint in the Lower 9th Ward.  I post things of interest, be them what they may. I also post things my father has written -- poems, reflections, and so on.

Popular posts from this blog

Acrobat "design", part 1

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 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.
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OneDrive isn't good

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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
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Microsoft "design", part 1

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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
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