yuck Totally non technology related, I'm here tonight simply to rant about the condo complex in which I live. It turns out that my building has some extremely strict rules. For example: I got ONE noise complaint once... On a Saturday night... Over Halloween weekend. It was the first complaint of any kind I'd had, and the instant I got the complaint, we shut the entire party down and went out on the town instead. Totally reasonable, I would think... But I got a call the very next day letting me know that they would let it slide this once, however, if I got another complaint, they would start with some fairly steep fines, followed by eviction. I'm not running a meth lab... I threw a Halloween party, and responded immediately to the complaint that rolled in. Sheesh. Someone in the control tower needs a nap. Moving on to the topic of tonight's rant, every once in a while I have friends over. Every once in a while, that friend may want to have a cigarette on the balcony. I quit long ago enough now that I might even join them. However, my building has announced that there is to be no smoking outside. Not on your balcony, not in any public area or walkway, not next to the fence, not near the fountain... Nowhere. If you want to smoke in your condo, you need to close all doors and windows. I get it... It smells like crap to a non-smoker, and the smoke does blow right in to other units. Hell... It happens to me, and it does suck. So, I'm planning to petition the HOA here to eliminate any and all fish grilling or cooking... Unless you do it inside with the windows shut. When I got home tonight, the whole stinking condo (literally) smelled like half-rotten fish. Or maybe it smelled delicious, if you like half-rotten fish. Either way, it is a smell that I find even less appealing than someone blowing cigarette smoke directly in my face. Yes, really. Beware, HOA... I'm comin' for you. AND your grilled salmon!
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I wouldn't go this far, but I kind of wanted to! In the same vein as one of the funniest book covers I've ever seen in my life, "F U, Penguin", I'd like to hereby officially express the same sentiment to Lenovo, except I really mean only the F U part... None of the subtext or kidding around about how cute and cuddly Lenovo might truly be. Trust me... I tried... Lenovo and I are NOT on speaking terms, and there might be a restraining order in the works... I cannot comment one way or the other on that one. For the masses of you following my blog with the feverish excitement of a Bruce Dickinson who just can't get enough cowbell, I know you've been dying to know what happened since my earlier post about purchasing that Windows 8 toting, flexibility wielding, touch-screen sporting Ideapad Yoga from the idea squashers over at Lenovo. The perceptive reader may already be able to deduce what my eventual conclusion was after working with the thing for a few weeks based on what I've already said, but I realize that I'm being quite subtle, and not in the least bit over-dramatic, so... Here we go. The first, and one of the very biggest problems in my experience was the hard drive, a 128 GB SSD. Sure, it's not especially huge, but I was planning on using this as a secondary computer, not a primary. It was to be a super-portable tablet (with the bonus of being able to flip over into a laptop) that I would use for some very light development work on the go, but mostly for attending meetings, conferences, and doing a presentation or two. I did not need a huge hard drive, but I was blown away by what Lenovo did to that poor little SSD. When all was said and done, I wound up with approximately 40 GB of space left for me, as the end user. But... I'm a geek, so I figure this is all just a bunch of bloatware and trials and some other crud that I will just clear out, wipe the drive and start from scratch, freeing up a whole bunch of drive space. Right? Right. WRONG! Ok, I'm a geek, but I'm not a Windows OS expert, and I should not HAVE to have a certification in the OS to do something as simple as wiping a drive clean and re-installing an operating system. First of all, Lenovo provides no recovery media. Everything is integrated into the drive itself, so there are two partitions, and then there are some other undisclosed number of hidden partitions. You don't know what any of them really do, because they have somewhat cryptic names which provide hints as to their functionality in some cases, and no clues whatsoever in others. Worse than that, since Lenovo provides no windows installation disc, you are stuck with installing all the junk they gave you to begin with, hogging up all the space on your drive. How does the average user go find a Windows 8 install disc? I have no idea. I found this article here, which provides some trickery to help you download it from Microsoft in a quasi-legitimate way, but holy-windows-guacamole, if there's no way to go download the OS, the computer should come with an install disc of some sort, not just a partition with the Lenovo-bloated version on a small SSD. Whining aside, you get no Windows install disc, and you don't even know your license key. I'm under the impression it is somehow stored in the machine's BIOS, but I'm not a BIOS Ninja by any stretch of the imagination, and I have no idea how to dig it out of there, and I have no idea if I will blow it away if I start mucking around with a bunch of the partitions Lenovo threw in there. That there is the biggest problem. I was getting pop-ups from Lenovo's various trial-ware they had pre-installed. At one point, I got prompted to buy a PDF reader. Seriously? You're going to prompt your end users to buy something readily available for free and in a dozen different flavors for any OS you want?? No thanks. And this is why, Lenovo, you earned yourself the headline of this blog post. I'm not at all kidding: F U, Lenovo. I might be typing this from your IdeaPad right now if you hadn't loused up that hard drive so badly, and force all that junk on there that no one wants except for the companies giving you a few bucks for making sure that all of your customers have to deal with it. The second problem, I am sad to say, was really Windows 8 itself. After using it for a few weeks as much as I could force myself to do so, I longed for a "classic" mode, where I could have the stupid 'Start' button on the normal desktop mode. Instead of a quick click on that Start button to launch any number of apps, I have to make several awkward clicks and/or gestures in order to get to my applications. It just makes navigating around more, not less cumbersome than it's ever been before, and it was already more cumbersome in previous versions of Windows compared to the experience I feel like you get in the Mac OS. This is purely opinion, however, I think you'll be hard-pressed to find a collection of reasonable individuals who are not on Microsoft's payroll who believe that the navigation is easier/faster in Windows 8 compared to Windows 7 and prior. In a quick search, I did find this guy who would vehemently disagree with me... But he cites a plethora of sources that disagree with him. I'll just rest my case. Mostly. On the bright side, it's not ALL bad news... The IdeaPad felt like pretty solid hardware, and the machine worked well overall. There is a lot of coolness with all of the touch-screen gestures you use in Windows 8... However, it didn't feel well enough ironed out yet. Too often I had to make gestures multiple times in order to have the machine interpret them correctly. If you are more comfortable than myself with hard drive wiping, partition-joining, and have the know-how to make sure it's done without losing the embedded Windows license key, and without killing the machine in some other way with all of this hard drive manipulation and hopefully an OS re-install at the end of it all (provided you can find an installation disc/iso to use)... pant, pant, pant... With all that, maybe it would be no big deal, and you'd be up and running in short order with a more reasonable amount of drive space to work with. I had been paying very close attention to my 30 day return policy, and ultimately brought it back to the store and handed it back over to them, and was delighted with my refund. I had no interest in keeping the blasted thing. I'd much rather forego all of the touch-screen fun for a nice little MacBook Air that would fit my personal tastes in computing far better. It's not a tablet, but the OS is easy to work with and easy to reinstall. For tablets, I'm sorry, but my fave still has to be the iPad! Well, it has been an absolutely wild ride for the past 2+ years over at Mitchell International. When I began working there in October of 2010, I had never worked with WPF. I had never even heard of the MVVM design pattern. I had barely scratched the surface of what it was to work with Entity Framework, and I'd not yet explored using POCOs. Aspect oriented programming? Huh?? I'd never (knowingly) worked with that either. A prism was just a device to refract light. I had no clue what people meant when they threw around scary sounding phrases like 'dependency injection' and 'inversion of control'. For the latter, I assumed I was supposed to code upside-down, strapped into my chair with one of those massive roller-coaster style harnesses. I put in an order for said harness, and I was still waiting for its delivery all the way up to my exit interview earlier this afternoon.
Dear Disney-World: You can keep that harness I ordered... Turns out inversion of control has very little to do with writing code from an inverted position. My bad. I learned how to use and at least somewhat understand all of those technologies, techniques, approaches and patterns with my teammates at Mitchell. I drank form the fire hose of .NET goodness, and while the learning curve was steep and required a million extra hours of personal time researching, studying and practicing, in the end it was absolutely worth while. I'm still not a ninja, but I believe that I leveled up a few times as a developer at Mitchell. I will miss my teammates dearly... They are a wonderful and talented group, and I very much hope that my professional life will cross with at least some of theirs in the future! I am filled with bittersweet emotions this evening, and completely unable to focus on the JavaScript I should be studying at this very moment. Previously, my journey into JavaScript was just for the fun of it... Now it has become a very important skill I need to get my head wrapped around for the next chapter in my development career. The title of this chapter, should you be curious, is called, "Web Developer at Bridgepoint Education". When I met a portion of both managers and developers/architects a few weeks back for my technical interview, they raked me over the coals big time. I was insanely humbled, and I am truly honored to be joining their ranks! Not only am I excited about the development practices they employ, I'm also a huge fan of what they are developing as well: I'll be helping to work on their web version of a platform for digital text books. This is the kind of thing I would have loved to have had when I was in school, and I still tend to massively prefer digital to physical books of any type. I like being able to carry a huge amount of books with me with taking up a ton of space, and without being ridiculously heavy to try to transport. I like being able to search my books using an actual algorithm, rather than hoping the index and/or table of contents will give me the hooky-hook on finding exactly what I'm looking for. The product is called Thuze, and for the insatiably curious, you can check it out here! To infinity... And beyooooond!! |
AuthorJon Bachelor: This geek goes all the way to 11. Archives
March 2019
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