I spend a miserable morning working with Microsoft Sharepoint. A “smart quote” in a code sample from a KB article really chocolate-flavored my morning. Flavored it so much that I just had to send a profanity laced (virtually every sentence), but informative email to the MSDN keepers.
The funny thing about MS though is that interestingly enough they read and reply to feedback rather quickly. Just watch this: there will be a reply in my comments from Scoble in a day or two. Apple, Google, as well as the company where I work don’t really dedicate many people to answering customer complaints. Especially publicly. Yep, MS is funny that way – they even have real, live people looking at those crash error reports. And I hear that the suggestions and general emails get read and answered quicker than one might expect.
There’s even a link to “Request a Microsoft Executive to speak at events and functions” (notice capitalization), but sadly it does not work in Firefox. Too bad – I was gonna request that Ballmer give me and my co-workers a “Developers! Developers! Developers!” pep talk over lunch tomorrow.
Actually, here’s a little known fact for ya – if you write to One Microsoft Way and ask for Gates’ or Ballmer’s autograph, they’ll send you an Autopen-signed photo. I obtained Gates’ photo like this once, but I used it up as a birthday card for a Microsoft-loathing friend. I wonder if this trick will work on distinguished engineers past and present. I’d totally want Dave Cutler’s autograph.
In the evening I decided to go and replace my phone featured in this quaint still life from my cube’s desk. I mostly use the slide rule for pointing at the screen, poking my co-workers who having agreed to go out to lunch insist on sending one more email and drawing straight lines. I even learned how to do simple multiplication on it.
Being one of those people who insist on getting burned on new technology and then feeling resentful (thank you, Acer for making your first Tablet PC with a 256 meg ram limit and you, Microsoft developers, for using memory-hungry Win XP for the tablet’s OS) I finally decided that maybe it’s a good time to forgive Handspring for the disappointment that was the original Visor Phone. Oh, that stupid thing. It only worked when I didn’t need it and crashed whenever I did. Bulky, ugly, nasty thing. After one more crash/memory loss I sold off my Treo and my Visor phone and started using a different kind of PDA. I just shudder when I remember how Jeff Hawkins arrogantly told everyone that handheld users should mould themselves into using stupid graffiti script instead of giving us good thumb keyboards like smart people at RIM.
Well, I thought I’d get a Treo 650. I need something to type in on the train. The keyboard is not very comfortable compared to Blackberry or Danger (which design I like a lot more). But once again it’s the choice of better design vs an OS which is easier to develop for. Sadly I choose the latter way too frequently.
Also, in New York you can either pick a cellphone company that has better prices, phones and customer service or you can pick one that has good reception. Yes, everything about Verizon sucks. But they have so many damn tower that even though you get shafted on everything else, at least you get a phone that works better than others. You can actually send or receive a call in most places, even in some shallow subway stations.
Unfortunately it turned out that they want $25 extra per month for 10 megs of data, and in conjunction with a 2 year contract and $400 phone this just did not look like a good deal to me, so I passed. I guess I a destined to live with a bricky ol’ phone that is only good for making phone calls. Sadly it looks like to get better PDA features cheaper I’d need to sacrifice Verizon’s good reception.
Then I spent 3 hours this evening cleaning out spyware from a friend’s computer. I failed miserably – Adaware, Microsoft Antispyware Tool and Search & Destroy could not clean out all the crap even on multiple passes. Looks like I’ll have to reinstall.
Er, I tried to include this…
http://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/K&EManuals/manuals.htm
Yes, it’s a vintage 1924 K&E. Unfortunately poking and smacking around cubicle invaders and hallway talkers is something I have to do rather frequently, but I do not get a lot of call for slowly performing mathematical calculations :)
Actually, the Danger devices are a lot easier to develop for than Palm devices, if you don’t mind that you can’t distribute the software you write beyond other developers (unless you write something that the morons at the carriers will take for “Download Fun” or whatever they’re calling it this week).
Yeah, I bet. Almost anything is easier than Palm programming.
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Yeah, well who wouldn’t hire a few nebbishes to answer email on $40 billion a year?
If you switch to a different OS, you can put on the poor mouth and sadly tell your friends that you really don’t know anything about the latest version of Windows.
Right. In any case, most of my friends only call me when they catch Windowitis. I mostly help them out of the goodness of my heart and to get at least some human contact :)
Sprint once offered me a $150 rebate on a new phone, if I upgraded my plan for an extra $10/mo for two years. I did the math, and switched to Verizon. There’s a rumor floating around that Sprint is the Better Business Bureau’s #1 complained-against company. Also, if you read the fine print on your contract, you’ll notice that you’ve agreed never to sue them for anything. I really have an undying hatred towards them now.
Verizon loves to rip you off too, but at least they have decent coverage.
Prod Philo (JOS) about it if you haven’t, he’s respectably responsive and not loathe to fire off an internal missile when needed.
Who’s Philo (JOS) and which one of my numerous grievances can he fire off an internal missile about?
I don’t seem to be getting most of your references thes days :)
Philo is a Microsoft Corporate Consultant and Evangelist for Sharepoint, he hangs out at Joel on Software and happens to be one of the moderators at the Off Topic Forum, as I used to be (long tedious story).
Ah, Joel’s forum, right. I don’t like the “unthreadiness” of it, so I don’t read it much. Interestingly enough, there seem to be a couple of hits coming into my blog from it, but every time I can’t find the thread.
Wait. You have a beautiful old K&E (as far as I can tell by the little I see of it; is it perhaps some old soviet-made rule?) slide rule, and you just use it to poke people? And you taught yourself how to multiply, but nothing else?
Sacrilege!
Here, at least peruse this:
There! Good deed done. I will now reward myself with peppermint tea.
Ahh!