Currently, I have ticket open that they wont close, or more accurately, don’t realise it is still open.    Every once in a while I will add another comment to the ticket, to see if that will jiggle something loose.  so far it hasn’t and it is six months and counting.

Why do they bother putting a search button in the Recent Contacts view? Have you ever tried it? It never finds anything. Like, never.  In the normal Contacts view, it finds stuff according to some weird quantum mechanics algorithm.  In other words, it returns a random selection of contacts that have no relationship to the search term.

And then, to cap it off, Notes went completely unresponsive for 10 minutes, and pegged the disk at 100%.

On the bright side, it gave me the opportunity to complain about it here.

Really? Remove the battery? Twice?
And what happened to apps which gracefully replace themselves with the latest version?
Every time a remove the battery, my Curve takes 10 minutes to be useable.

Well, no-one uses it, and its really bad.

Yeah, no shit Sherlock.

So I kindly informed him that I had previously reported that the SAP web application had stopped working, and had turned into a paint program.  He said, “By any chance do you have the zoom set to anything other than 100%?”

Stunned silence.

As my brain slowly started processing the idea that a client-side zoom setting had caused the ENTIRE application to hang, I realised that I was trying to apply Reason in the first place.  So I simply did what the IT guy said, and checked.

Oh. My. Fracking. God.

Behold – the IE zoom level of death:

IE zoom of death

I set this back to 100%, and wouldn’t you know it, it started working….

….until… <click>

<click>….wait….<click><click>

…. ah yes – we all knew this wasn’t actually going to solve all the problems.  In fact, it has joyfully created another problem.

The report which I had wasted my ENTIRE DAY on is inaccesable from the web client.  The IT guy on the phone said those dreaded words:

“Huh.  Never seen it do that before.”

I said that if I  have to delete my report, and start ALL OVER AGAIN, I would come through the phone and strangle him.  He laughed, but with that tinge of fear caused by the realisation that I might actually manage it, somehow.

The World According to SAP

Select a country from the list of valid countries.  If you don’t select from one of these countries, you will fail to save your expense report, and hours of frustration will go to waste.

Painting the screen with a hung application

Haven’t done that in a while…

IE froze, and anything in front of it was painted on it.  Good work SAP.

Seriously, what is Explorer doing that it takes a full minute to retreive a directory listing of 16 objects?  And why must it completely take over the whole computer while it’s doing it?

Worse still is if you are browsing a very large directory listing, and try to scroll.  Then it hangs again, and this time, stops painting, so you get a big white square on the screen.  And then the Start menu stops responding.  And then you can’t Alt-Tab to other processes.

“Oh, well it’s retrieving information about all the files in the directory.”

No.  Because when I click on the file, I have to wait another 30 seconds for the context menu to appear.

“It negotiating security priveledges.”

Uh-huh.  We are all in the same domain, and I am several levels deep into the directory structure.

Does anyone know how I can browse file-shares over the WAN in this lifetime?

This one was great.  I had blocked myself out, and couldn’t continue.

Sony blocks video on youtube due to copyright

LAME.

I wanted to see the original clip of “Hitler reacts…” and was … BA BOWN … denied.  Even when there are like 10²⁷⁸⁹ parodies out there.

Tell me that isn’t annoying.

When is NaN.NaN.NaN?

Trying to select the ‹ or › results in the pop-up calender dissapearing, and the curious “Not a Number” date appearing.

Summary: it is not possible to enter a date using the pop-up calender  for other than the current month.

Do you want to proceed?

When logging on to do submit some expenses, I was asked about the Transaction CO Through-postings from F1, and about how they were locked.

You better ask yourself, ”Do you want to proceed?  Well, do ya? Punk?!

Update: Turns out that this means that month has been closed.  It remains to be seen what that means for my expense claim.

This morning, I Googled it, and sure enough, there is such a thing as an IBM AMD.

AKA fan

Usually, an acronym is supposed to save letters, but this time, the saving of letters is only because the  original term was made needless complicated.

Some of these updates were for Office, and naturally, something went wrong.  All of a sudden, Word started hanging when trying to open documents.  Google found some forums, which lead to this article

Documents that have attached templates take a long time to open in Word 2002 and in Word 2003 …

So the solution is unplug from the network, and run a Macro, cutting and pasting into it every directory in which you may have documents with attached templates on non-existent servers.  Oh fun.

Not to mention that I also dislike VB, especially VBA, and trying to research recursive directory search code requires the internet, which is disconnected because testing the VBA macro will hang.  Nice.

Oh, and by the way, the AutoOpen macro? Yeah, it runs after the templates have been loaded, so no good trying to write a macro that fixes this only when you try to open this document.

Dear Lazyweb: write me an app that searches all my computer for Word files, detects an attached template beginning with “\\” and replaces it with “Normal”.

When you use the “Import…” option, you get this dialogue:

Import Document Dialog

Not a good start really. Nothing in the “Files of type” selection that make sense, so stick with the default “Structured Text”.

Then, you get this dialogue, with a selection list in the middle with about 200 entries in it.

Import Dialog - Select Form

Most of these entries have helpful names like:

• R5 Compatibility Form
• Setup MiniView
• Switcher Form for Calender
• Switcher Form for Folders
• Switcher Form for To Do
• To Do

(Ahh! That looks familiar, we must be getting close to real options, oh wait, what’s this….)

• $$View Template for Calender
• $$View Template for Threads
• $$View Template for TodoByCategory

Anyway, you get the idea.  After about 80 mouse clicks, I found an option “Calender Entry” which seems the obvious choice.

Hit OK, and a the screen flickers, and …. nothing.  Ok, check the date that the calender entry was for, and …. nothing.

Oh well, write off the last 5 minutes as a total waste of time, try to not curse this confounded software, and add the entry manually, which deep down, you knew you should have done in the first place, because lets face it, nothing works like it should with Notes.

(Someone pointed out this link (via this one), but it only talks about sending calendering information via email.  It doesn’t help my import an ICS file.)

This link is blocked: http://www.rotronic.co.uk/content/humidity_feuchte/index.php  The resulting page said it was in the “pornography” category.

Out of frustration, I typed in “Dirty Sex Sluts” into Google and selected the first link.  Can you guess what happened? I wasn’t blocked!  Boom! Full-on porn right there, on my screen, in the middle of the cube-farm!

And yet, I’m told that I can’t have the RDP port opened between internal offices on an intranet because of security concerns.  Right.

(The funny scrollbar is because this image is composed of 4 screen captures)

Ok, so which one of these options is to record my timesheet?

Serious GUI fail.

Honestly guys, your GUI is shit.

Right click on the system icon, and you get these options:

Both, by the way, kill the client.

Ryanair Customer Service Complaints Department
PO Box 11451 Swords, Co Dublin
Ireland
Fax +353 1 8121676

Reservation Number: XXXX
From: Dusseldorf (Weeze)(NRN)
To: Sevill (SVQ)
Flight: 8622
Depart: Dec 8, 2009 16:55
Arrive: Dec 8, 2009 19:40

Luggage Tag Number: 00006XXXX
Excess Luggage Reference Number: 0000XXX
Excess Luggage Fee: EUR120

Re: Theft of item in Checked Luggage

To Whom It May Concern: I am writing to report the theft of a personal item that was inside a piece of checked baggage on a recent flight from Weeze to Seville.

The ryanairbaggage.com website does not include an option to report this.

The item in question was a 125mL bottle of Davidoff Cologne, valued at EUR40, and was taken from my shaving kit. It was obvious that the thieves inspected the camera case that was also in the bag, but not finding a camera, took nothing.

Both the camera bag and the shaving kit were left opened. I have attached a photo of the inside of my bag as I found when I opened it after arriving at my hotel.

It is extremely upsetting to have ones bag interfered with, as anything could have been taken or added.  In these days of heightened security concerns, this is a gross violation of personal security.

I demand an apology, replacement of the stolen item, and a reimbursement of my full fare, including the excess baggage charge.  To think that I paid extra for the privilege of having my baggage rifled enrages me to the extreme.  You can be sure that you will never see me on your airline again, and I intend to make this experience known to as many people as I can.

Yours in extreme dissatisfaction,
Jacob Hawkes
December 9, 2009

This photo was taken after arriving in the hotel, and opening the bag for the first time since the flight.  The black shaving kit is opened, as is the blue camera case.  The cologne was taken from the shaving kit.  Both were left open.