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.

Your place of encounter

My place of encounter? Great! Do I need my boots of escaping?

It wishes to send a modification?

It must specify return date!

And when it’s done, it rubs the lotion on it’s skin.

[1] I have high respect for anyone who can speak multiple languages. Having lived in multiple places where English was a second language, that respect only grows. But c’mon, we can still have a giggle at the funny things we see, right?

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.

• 97.3% of respondents feel like they receive a large amount of work-related emails
• 55.8% use a BlackBerry while 34.8% use an iPhone
• 90.4% said eProductivity saves them time, and 72.1% of those people said eProductivity saves them 30 minutes or more every day.
• 87.1% said eProductivity makes it easy to get an empty email inbox
• 91.2% can access LinkedIn at work, but only 73.5% can access Twitter
• 90.5% reported being satisfied with Lotus Notes when using eProductivity, but only 31.1% reported being satisfied with Lotus Notes when eProductivity was taken out of the mix

The last fact sums it up: If you must use Notes, you must you eProductivity. It is that simple.

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.

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

You can see this happening everywhere, and the term “second breakfast” is very convenient.  At the old building, there was a very good little Cerveceria in the ground floor, where you could get tostado con tomate, aciete y jamon.

Nowadays, this consists of people cramming into little vending machine vestibule and having a sandwich brought from home.  And when one of the two vending machines is broken, it’s best to avoid this time due to the lines.

The upgrade to version 8 is a huge relief.

My good friend Toby put me onto the book by David Allen, “Getting Things Done”, which is a productivity system that really seems to work.  During my stint with Outlook, I started using the GTD add-in, and loved it so much that the idea of giving it up when I moved back into the Lotus world was a real bummer.

Then I found eProductivity, the GTD solution for Lotus Notes.  It is a replacement of the standard mail template.  I have installed it on my company laptop, without having any special privileges (or permission), and I have had no problems at all with replication or interaction with other corporate applications.  This is a significant statement considering the standard of our IT deparment, and the quality of our internal applications.

Luckily for me, I was an early Beta tester of the 1.x version, and just recently was selected for the 2.x Beta program.

Anyone who is interested should check out the Getting Started Video, and then download the trial template.  They have done a very good job of the trial template – it will copy a sample of your inbox, and guide you through the GTD process of emptying it.

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.

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”.

A jet engine operating at maximum thrust is capable of lifting a 2 foot (0.6 m) boulder, located 35 feet (10m) behind the airplane completely off the ground.

That’s a big boulder!

Other times, they are a collection of photocopied, scanned, hand annotated monsters, with sections numbers from different conventions, and pictures like this:

Airport with sensor locations

This is a map of an airport, and on this map are the location of existing sensors which are to be replaced as part of the RFP.  Take special note of the 22 sensors and 9 RPU cabinets, and from this map, calculate the cost of

• sensor cabling,
• data cabling,
• power cabling,
• trenching,
• obstruction light placement,
• a thousand other things.

Now go and prepare a fixed price quote.  Oye.

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.)

Funny, I had this draft post hanging around for a while, and then I came across this exact router configuration at work.  Turns out it was easier, faster and cheaper to buy 2 routers, flash the new firmware, and set up a point-to-point wireless connection into the staging area than it was to rely on the company’s IT department to do it.

They wanted to charge thousands of euros for a similar solution.  Thousands.   Seriously, the staging area is in the next room.

The IT department is actually outsourced to another company owned by the same parent company.  They offer shit service at a high price, and using them is mandatory.  I can’t say their name, but I say that it rhymes with this:

It has not been a good week for moral.  Let me summarize:

• There are flexible hours.  The start time is between 8:00 and 8:30, and the end time is between 5 and 5:30.
  “The aim is to combine the employee’s right to manage their time freely with respect to their responsibility to a full workday.”
• One hour for lunch, between 1:30 and 3:30.  Feel free to pass out from hunger before then.  The cafeteria will be closed until 1:30.  Vending machines only sell junk food.
• Employee work time is calculated as the time between swiping-in and swiping-out of your building.
• Since you will be considered to be working if you are inside the building, you must be in the building between the times stated above.  That is, you must enter the building between 8:00 and 8:30, and must not leave before 5:00.  Since there is no overtime, you should probably therefore leave before 5:30.
• Any time you do not follow the above rules, an “incident” will be recorded.
• Working in other building in the campus does not constitute “working” unless you have a “good cause”.
• You are allowed 30 minutes a day outside your building.  Any longer is considered an “incident”.
• All “incidents” are logged in “the system”, and employees must attend to each one and provide justification for their absence.

The main driver for this is stated as:

[The new workplace]  represents the social model that [the company] wants for their employees, which enables greater compatibility between work and personal life. …. For [the company], it is important that all the benefits of [the new workplace] have a positive impact on our employees, customers, suppliers,
shareholders and investors.

Or, put another way:

We want you to have a healthy work/life balance.  And even better, we have determined what that balance will be for you, and we are going to make damn sure you get it, whether it works for you or not.

Or, perhaps this:

To make sure that you get balance in your life, we will be tracking and penalizing you if you don’t follow our plan, because we don’t think you can be trusted to make the right decision for yourself in this whole  ”work/life balance” thing.  Actually, we think that because we under-pay you, you would probably slack off and work less.

Doesn’t that sound a bit like “this is going to hurt me more than you”?

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.