Sunday, December 12, 2010

Gainfully Employed... Again!

First entry in a while, but I'm writing to inform those who might read this and/or care that after being unemployed for some time (or working independently for a dynamic client base if you go by my resume), I finally got a new job!

After a phone interview, a nearly two hour 1st interview and a grueling three hour 2nd interview, I have a new appreciation for the phrase "Welcome Aboard!"...

There is some (2 months) training and certifications I need to get and It's not too much more than a glorified screwdriver monkey position, but that's what I love doing :) I'm actually looking forward to the challenges and learning the changes in how I am used to providing on site service in the past.

The only potential downside could be that what I will be working on will be restricted to printers, but who says I can't stay a computer tech on my own time? Heck, the vice-CEO encouraged me to so long as the job was my first priority!

So, I suspect that this could be a very ideal job for me and from what has been described to me about actual work I'm actually excited about the position!

I'll post some more updates as I get further settled into the groove...

Here's to fun times ahead! Cheers!

Friday, October 29, 2010

So much rage....

Ho-Kay...

With the vote coming shortly and the world economy falling apart and religious crazies are trying to take over the government and the general violence and famine and death and destruction the world over, I am going to take a moment and put out something of some importance that has been bugging me for a few days now.

If you are trying to do anything and I really do mean ANYTHING at a professional level with Open Source Software you learn that it's all SHIT.

I'm not talking your regular shit either I'm talking USELESSLY USELESS SHIT!

Let me lay out some of the background here;

I am most commonly known as a computer technician, however, before that I was a graphics designer.

Hence I often use those talents to apply them to interests and such where they are useful, one such interest is geocaching. I make my own little logs for the caches I hide and to replace others that I come across that are damaged or full.

As per habit, I used to use professional level programs, such as Adobe InDesign or QuarkExpress to make them and as a result, they are really, really nice.

Just the other day, I decided to be altruistic and offer my log designs to the official Geocaching.com site in order for other people to use them also.

A few problems of course, one, most people don't have such professional programs and two, some of them want to be able to change the log in some manner so they are supposed to be submitted to geocaching.com in an editable format such as .doc, .rtf or .txt

I figure I'd support open source software for a change and offer them up in the Open Document Format along with a few others AND while I was as it, recreate some of the simpler ones in OpenOffice.org, this is something that would take 15 minutes TOPS in InDesign or MS Word (gag!).

So, even though I figured that I almost NEVER use "middle of the road" text editors like MS Word or OpenOffice.org, I DO know their capabilities very, VERY well ("MS Office Certified" does actually mean something) and they would be perfectly sufficient for this task, after all I've even used Word to make some of the most basic logs before so OpenOffice.org would be no problem right? RIGHT?!?

Oh, how incredibly wrong I was.

Even after chalking up the learning curve, which was actually pretty flat, I was absolutly frustrated and horrified by the general... general... general... MISBEHAVIOR of the program.

The basic functions worked fine, but when I was getting into the more advanced layouts and using tables to create the lines was when everything fell apart.

Hard.

I have been wrestling with this program for HOURS ON END at this point. Every time I want to restructure the size of the resulting logs is a nightmare of utter destruction on the entire document as elements scatter across 40 pages for no obvious reason and like HELL if I can fix that, bug in the drawing make something look totally different on paper than it does on screen and don't EVEN get me going about the almost terrifyingly inconsistent pasting of text styles... I could paste something 3 times and get 3 totally dissimilar results.

The list goes on and on and on...

This is completely and UTTERLY unacceptable.

I know fully well I could go to MS Office, InDesign, Quark Express, Apples iWork, and even TEXTEDIT on my mac and not have these troubles, so what the hell gives?!

I have dumped many, MANY more hours into fighting with OpenOffice to make it do what I want and I'm STILL NOT DONE!!!

Yet, for the heck of it (and to prevent myself from throwing my computer across the room in frustration) even went into the aforementioned programs and DID ALL OF MY WORK on the log sheets in a total of 20 minutes... for ALL FIVE OF THE PROGRAMS!

This is why I have become disgruntled with OSS lately. I've been using it more and more and have been considering Ubuntu as a replacement from even Mac OS X in the possibly near future.

I just can't yet. OSS is disgustingly unrefined and rough edged to the point where is is actually UNUSABLE in a professional sense.

It's not a learning curve issue, it's not "what I'm familiar with", it's not me not wanting to learn a new "way to work".

It's too buggy and flawed to work RIGHT.

This isn't to say that open source is useless to everyone, heck no! If all you want is the basics, which is all most people DO, then it's great... Just don't expect to do anything too serious with it because it's not there yet.

Is there a real point to this? Not really, I'm just blowing off some steam because something I want to rely on has made so little progress at being something I CAN rely on.

I'm going back to work now.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Oddball Surprise

I was puttering around late one night when I had a brainstorm I wanted to write about but I was tired and I had to walk the Meeka dog before going to bed and I knew I didn't have them time to do both separately so I figured I'd use the voice recorder function of my iPhone 4 while I was walking and just transcribe what I spoke the next morning so I wouldn't forget it.

Luckily, it was late at night (1:42am) and few, if any, people would overhear this crazy person monologuing on to himself.

When I finished walking and talking, I bedded down, got up the next morning and after transferring the resulting audio file to my Mac, I readied my typing fingers and pressed "play".

The resulting quality of the audio playing back through my speakers stunned me so much I totally forgot to start typing as I marveled.

I have never, EVER heard such amazing quality from a tiny little phone microphone! It rivaled and possibly, POSSIBLY, even EXCEEDED the "enthusiast level" dedicated dynamic handheld microphone and line level mixer setup that I have hooked up to my computer!

Absolutely WOW.

Now the microphone in my iPhone 3G wasn't BAD, in fact it was pretty good for a small microphone and, by FAR, considerably better than the ones in my Motorola RAZR or Palm Centro and even my old dedicated voice recorder that I used to use in my college psych classes.

Yet, here is this iPhone 4 with an uncelebrated, un-noted and arguably an insignificant detail of an upgrade giving anything less then a semi-professional setup a run for it's money.

People wonder WHY I love Apple despite my love of open source, my love of the freedom to choose my own hardware, and my love of inexpensive equipment.

I love Apple products because of the engineering, or more accurately, the OVER-engineering, that goes into their hardware. The countless nigglingly tiny and perfectionist details and exhaustive work that goes into making something so beautiful and yet amazingly functional that just looks and works BETTER than everything else.

Apple doesn't make products, gadgets or devices.

Apple makes a user experience that we all take for granted.

I'm convinced that Apple products are 50% engineering, 50% UI and 50% art. No, my math is good, because they always seem to find a way to wedge in that last extra 50% in the other companies just seem to not "get".

Call me a drooling fanboy. Call me a mindless Apple promoter. Call me a aesthetics obsessed dork that favors form over function. You're wrong, but feel free to accuse away.

When a company makes something, I appreciate the extra engineering. I appreciate the extra details. I appreciate a smooth and sculpted interface. I appreciate a design that is clean and beautiful and pleasing AND simple, yet doesn't interfere with the functionality. I appreciate the EXTRA EFFORT placed into ANY product above and beyond just finishing it and dumping it on the market in order to get something out as fast as possible to start making a profit.

When another company gets even HALF WAY to making something that is OVERALL better then one of Apple's products, I'll gladly and without hesitation promote and support them every ounce as much as Apple.

Sorry for the blurb, but I just wanted to note that sometimes it's the UNCELEBRATED and UN-MARKETED upgrades to a product that can make you go "wow!" just as much as the headline grabbers.