I think the storm may have passed. At least it will be in remission for a while.
Since it has been a while, lemme offer a recap.
Being down a tester is a bad thing. Being down two is a freakin’ tragedy. How big a tragedy? I spent four hours walking around 10 buildings on campus today, posting flyers for people, helping to advertise my group – awareness of a team can be useful when trying to staff a team. That’s how big a tragedy it is. And I shouldn’t even say “down two testers” – we didn’t lose people. We just had scheduled a workload for a team of 6 and we’re currently a team of 4. And what’s more, people have been on vacation or stricken with whatever is going around our office – we were really down to 3, for the last month.
I’m not really complaining about it – I’m more explaining why there was lapse in posts. After being in the office for 8 to 14 hours at a time – the 12 hour day is the worst: 8 hours of meetings for Lead work and 4 hours of regular Testing after everyone else goes home – the most amount of talking I want to do is over Xbox LIVE. Or in some cases, no talking while playing Bully or WSOP:2008.
Add to that my own bout of illnesses. For anyone out there that’s had a staph infection, you have my sympathy. Have two on your neck that have swollen to the point of pain? You have my empathy. Not this is something I would usually write about in-blog, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to miss one of the busiest weeks that’s I’ve had in the last year for what I originally assumed was acne. Meh. I haven’t shaved in so long that I had to trim my goatee down to blend into an impromptu bread. It’s well on the road to recovery but even so… what a fsckin’ mess.
Not too much news in the way of Xbox that hasn’t already been circulated. Halo 3 maps coming, Bully came out, I still haven’t gotten SSBB, and [CENSORED] in time for the Holidays.
I noticed the Safari notification from Apple’s Upgrader app. I don’t mind the advertisement that is being done under the guise of Upgrading, but I do have to say that Apple has committed the same crime that so many other Windows apps have: Service overload. For people that are relatively new to PC’s – read Windows NT or higher – you don’t remember what a TSR program is… Terminal-and-Stay-Resident programs were applications in the days of Windows 3.1 and DOS that would, well, say they ended yet still hang around in memory and using your CPU. Never heard of them? You have, but just as that name… Services in the 2000/XP/Vista world can be thought of as sanctioned TSR’s that never claim to terminate. Same thing is true of applications that are auto-run from the Registry and live next to your clock. Sometimes they are useful, sometimes they aren’t; what really pisses me off is when they are redundant.
What really pisses me off about Apple’s latest round of QuickTime and iTunes is the fact the sheer volume of crap that they have been including lately. It started innocently enough: QuickTime would included an app that lived in the SysTray. No idea what it did; whenever I installed QT, I would pull it out of the auto-run list of commands and it still ran fine. Then iTunes added a Service that was used for detecting iPod’s. OK, I can see that, but why run that all the time, especially as a default? Then they added iTunesHelper, in the Registry. Then a scheduler for Apple Updater. Then the Apple Mobile Device Service. What the hell? Again, where’s the choice in all of this? Every . release of iTunes, I have to fix shortcuts, clean out the registry, reset a bunch of Services… on top of that why can’t third party applications simply use the scheduler that is already active in Windows instead of writing their own?!
*sigh*
The A&E version of The Matrix actually substitutes Neo’s “Jesus Christ!” exclamation, after seeing a metallic robotic bug come out of his navel, with “Jeepers Creepers!”
I’m sitting for Jury Duty in a couple of months. Phear.
I’m going to see a Mariner’s game in a couple of months. Yay!
In closing, I’ll leave you with one random comment from the bar this weekend. I wasn’t helping out this week because the work week knocked me out, but somehow, the lone comment rang out across the bar: “I got peed on, this week.” And based off the conversation that followed, this person did not work in an industry that involved medical situations and the person is not into water sports.
Comical, if hectic, week.
I never recall wanting IE7, though it was pushed on me too.
I think this post sums it up nicely:
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/web_services_browser/apple_software_update_is_ripe_not_rotten.html
And I quote my own post: “I don’t mind the advertisement that is being done under the guise of Upgrading”.
But in all honesty, you had a version of IE already on the box, so IE7 would be an upgrade. I’ve never installed Safari so there’s no “upgrade”. Either way, though, I don’t care – I like having the option of downloading the app. What I’m annoyed about is the collection of scheduled task services that are duplicated and the sheer number of services that a media player needs these days.
When the OS you’re on gets sync services, unified notification apis, and an update mechanism for 3rd parties, lemme know.
And if that happened, what an outcry there would be that there’s an unfair advantage. Need I remind you that not all OS’s are held to the same rules? You get iChat in Korea and iTunes in the EU, after all…
Thats because Mac users are too stupid to find and install chat and music managing programs on their own. I say let apple roll out their broken browser. When it hits the real world where there are spyware and virus running amok, people will realize its not up to snuff.
Actually, im hearing EU is going to look into iTunes inclusion in the OS soon.
But, regardless, just uncheck the option to install it. Big whoop. The whole reason behind it being there is about search ad $.
Actually, I sorta want to install it and see if it has improved… we’ll see :)