Oh my \u2013 another quality post. I\u2019m afraid I\u2019m starting a trend for myself, but I have a story to share.<\/p>\n
As all gainfully employed workers in the tech field will tell you, we all have side jobs as tech support for all members of our immediate and extended families. This weekend, my mother-in-law opened a support ticket with me regarding her laptop \u2013 it was crashing randomly (that\u2019s all the details you get when your m-i-l opens a support ticket).<\/p>\n
So \u2013 I turned on her laptop, let it boot, then dealt with message after message from applications starting up and telling me stuff I didn\u2019t care about. A backup program telling me that it needed a product key, an external hard drive utility telling me the drive wasn\u2019t connected (duh), and an OEM replacement for windows wireless config launching to tell me I\u2019m connected to a wireless network. The experience<\/em> was annoying. But there\u2019s a bigger problem. As I was looking at the 3 different web browsers installed and the few dozen or so other random programs and utilities installed, my first thought was \u201cno wonder she\u2019s having computer problems \u2013 she\u2019s installed every app under the sun\u201d. I always try to keep my main work machines somewhat \u201cclean\u201d \u2013 only installing applications I consider tried and true for worry that they\u2019ll mess something up. Then I realized that\u2019s wrong \u2013 I should be able to install whatever the hell I want without fear of losing overall quality (who knows \u2013 maybe I can and it\u2019s all a mental problem on my end). The point is, that we (computer users) don\u2019t seem to expect software to work. We\u2019re not as surprised, alarmed, or pissed off as we should be when software doesn\u2019t work correctly. Honestly \u2013 I\u2019ve belittled people in the past for calling things bugs when they\u2019re 99.99% user error, but I was wrong \u2013 user error or not, that .01% matters.<\/p>\n Ok, so software sucks. It really doesn\u2019t matter \u2013 it\u2019s still a profitable industry. That\u2019s true, but I wonder how long it will be true. I wonder if something horrible (even worse than Windows ME** :}) has to happen before the world demands higher quality software. My hope is that we can start making better software long before something like that happens.<\/p>\n Oh \u2013 as far as my mother-in-laws computer goes, there was a crash dump on the machine. I attached a debugger and poked around a crash in the wireless driver. I put a later rev of the driver on the machine and so far, so good. I hope it stays that way\u2026for at least a little while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oh my \u2013 another quality post. I\u2019m afraid I\u2019m starting a trend for myself, but I have a story to share. As all gainfully employed workers in the tech field will tell you, we all have side jobs as tech support for all members of our immediate and extended families. This weekend, my mother-in-law opened…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}