Diary of a Wolfeman

I seem to be running into this topic alot lately, so I’ll ramble a bit here.

Like many small-town hippies, my folks were never big on religion in general, despite at least one fairly devout Christian grandma. The subject really just never came up. Sure, there was a Bible on the bookshelf, but I don’t think that copy had ever been openned more than twice in my lifetime, and once was when I looked up a particular quote.

(An anecdote from a magazine described how college kids had taken to putting taglines on the front of their pants, and one smartass had put “Mathew 7:7”. Look it up.)

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Yes folks, it’s pretty boring around here indeed, because I’m writing about a new router here at Chez Wolfie. We upped to a Linksys WRT54G, instead of the combination ancient D-Link+Sony WiFi AP.

So, now we are up in the 802.11g range for wireless, with a much stronger signal here in the garage. I also took advantage of the shuffle to redo some of the wiring behind my desk, which cleared some tangles out. The true test comes this weekend though, when BtheFormerRoomie becomes BtheNeighbor – if he can link his WiFi kit to mine, he’ll just pitch in rather than transferring his current provider. Should it work, I’ll more than likely be bumping my service up a notch to compensate.

One of the other benefits is that the new router enables proper port forwarding, so I can let external connections in to our game servers when they are active.

Hey Impact – you need to pick up a copy of Mechwarrior Mercenaries! :)

McAfee Antivirus has been looking at Symantec’s Norton product for a while now, and they have gotten tired of being the No.2 AV product on the market. What did they do to solve this? The same thing Microsoft did with Windows: they went to the manufacturers.

New computers are mow shipping with McAfee from the factory. AOL’s AV product is from McAfee. Even Asus motherboards are coming with the software bundled into the driver disc.

All well and good, you might think, except for one small problem: in my humble opinion, it sucks. I recently ran across a new Compaq computer with the whole shebang of McAfee products installed, and they thought they were safe. I removed it and installed AVG. What did I find lurking on the hard drive of this supposedly well-protected machine? Five different Trojans.

Instead of pushing their developers to write a better product, McAfee spent heaps of cash to get the vendors to drop the venerable (and top-notch) Norton Antivirus in favor of Mcafee.

Consider yourself warned.

This post over at Greyduck’s got me thinking for a few minutes.

Scary, huh?

Anyway, my thoughts revolved around how annoying the current crop of “helper apps” is becoming. You know, all that shit that lives down in the Windows system tray, waiting in the background for you to do something with their product. HP printer utilities, MSN messenger, digital camera software, etc., etc., ad infinitem. It drives me batty to watch a modern computer chew on the ‘Welcome’ screen for a full 2 minutes waiting for it to load all that into memory when a clean XP install can boot in 45 seconds. Then it does some more chewing when you actually log in. Is it really too difficult to double-click a frelling icon?

Even worse, these programs no longer leave traces in the Startup folder of the Start list. The only way to prevent them running at startup is to dig through 5 pages of configuration options and uncheck the “run at boot” option.

Then it hit me: the software vendors are walking the same path as the TV execs – you know, the one where they pitch every show they have at the average 12-year-old. They’re pandering to the lowest common denominator…

The AOL users.

It makes sense if you look at it in a certain light – AOL has been the biggest ISP for internet eons, largely due to their marketting campaign. They have been flooding user’s screens with useless, unwanted crap for years now, and their subscribers have simply dealt with it, since they have never known there was another way. Obviously, software developers for the mass market have decided to follow AOL’s playbook, writing software that monitors your system all the time, lying in wait for you to plug in that camera or watch a streaming video. Those little things that you maybe do twice a month – but still it waits, like a circling shark…

This has led us to an unfortunate impasse, one where the average computer user, instead of getting smarter and more savvy as they continue to use this most able tool, is getting dumber and letting other people make their choices for them. This is giving us a country full of people who just basically click on everything that comes across their screen.

A world ripe for spyware pushers.

I have this to say to the software vendors of the world: Yea, though your user base may have sheepish traits, it is possible for them to learn. Write software that requires a decision to use, not something that sits there like a bandit, waiting to ambush me should I even think of hovering my mouse near the taskbar. Make them learn to use their computer, one tiny step at a time. They can do it. Really.

I’m in a strange situation at work. I’m running the East shop and reporting directly to the owner as East Tech. Meanwhile, the guy running the West shop is nominally my manager. This means that those things I need approval on have to go through one or the other. Unfortunately, neither one of them is exactly Johnny on the spot about it – but for different reasons.

The owner is usually running around the world doing site surveys and bids for new work, and therefore rarely someplace I can throw paperwork at him. The manager, however, is usually in the shop – he just can’t organize his time effectively. Case in point: Friday I asked him, while he was sitting at a computer, to take a couple minutes to proof $2000 worth of bids so I could fax them out in a timely manner. I asked him to do this at 10am, and it never got done. I’ll grant him that his shop is busier than mine, but still…it’s getting bad. Part of the problem is that we’ve been on a training schedule for over a month now, with people that can’t handle the workload long enough to get good at it. They keep leaving, one reason or another.

What this all boils down to is that I still get calls from the West shop for me to abandon my post and come help him out. So I’m billing time for his shop and not billing anything for mine. That alone is bound to irritate me, but the way he tells me rather than asking me really gets my goat some days. This guy is not a good manager, and I don’t want to be working for him.

I think it’s time I talked to him about it.