Hyper Gumbo » waste

Wasted money

Don — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:48:13 +0000

I’m not a big fan of political strategist companies, who’ve commoditized our democracy so that whomever has the biggest warchest wins, but that’s the way of the world these days, so be it.
So it’s an annoyed amusement, when I get one of those massive postcard fliers for some nameless PAC that doesn’t have any positive agenda to put forward, they just want you to know how much they hate the current guy, and they have a link to website for information about their campaign…and the website is a wordpress site that’s still locked down to admin users only. Truly brilliant. Whomever paid WinPower Strategies for their anti port commissioner campaign seems to have wasted their money. oops.

VMWare EasyInstall is full of fail

Don — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:07:22 +0000

Usually I do all my VM-ing with LabCenter, an ESX cluster, and a local install of Server. Recently for a group learning event at work, we were tasked with pre-building some VMs using Player. One of the two VMs is based on Ubuntu, so the Create VM wizard helpfully auto-selected it for EasyInstall, which is where things go wrong. EasyInstall prompts me for all the info it’s supposed to use during the install process, which it then throws away into the ether I guess, because the Ubuntu installer asked the same questions. Best part is, giving both prompts the exact same initial username and password, I ended up with an install that didn’t recognize the login credentials I had been supplied.

So, I’m deleteing the ‘easyinstall’-ed VM and starting from scratch. When it auto-detects Ubuntu and wants to EasyInstall, I’m saying no and selecting manually install later. Like 5 seconds later, but whatever. Personally, I wish VMWare would allocate their developer resources to fixing bugs, instead of introducing new bugs for functionality that I wouldn’t have found helpful even if it really worked. It replaced 3 prompts with 3 prompts, there’s no savings in effort or time. What a waste.

WoW Flight Path madness

Don — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 21:07:59 +0000

My druid character doesn’t have a hearthstone at the moment. I’m sure whatever I needed that one inventory slot for was totally worth it. It’s not like he can’t teleport to moonglade and take a quick bat to Orgrimmar. Today I go to do that, but notice that instead of the path it used to use, it now wants to send you through 5 different flight points in the new Mount Hyjal area, for a total cost of 5 gold. Or you can manually tell it to fly you via Winterspring to Bilgewater Harbor, for 14 silver, and then a second bat on to Orgimmar from there, for only 6 silver more. I suspect the manual route is significantly shorter too. I’ll have to time it and see.

Waste of Time

Don — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 03:48:48 +0000

We cut the test team in half at work, without changing the schedule.
We are BUSY.
Two of my co-workers decided to spend the last two weeks re-writing tests that already work 100% of the time, in a new framework that isn’t linked into our automation or our reporting systems, instead of the overflowing basket of new tasks related to code that actually changed in this release.

Let’s just say they have cemented my feelings that we let go the wrong people.

Blizzard continues pushing for Battle.net maximum annoyance

Don — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:59:41 +0000

I found the intense pressuring they’ve been doing on World 0f Warcraft, to convert accounts to battle.net, very annoying. Not least because battle.net has traditionally been a black hole of suck. I suspected it was all part of a nefarious scheme on Blizz’s part, and their actions with Starcraft II have only re-inforced that opinion.

In the world Blizz envisions, I guess no one ever has a LAN party that doesn’t have a 1gbit connection to the internet, which is fucking stupid. If you only have dial-up, like literally millions of gamers, you can’t have your friends over to play a game, even though everyone has a fully paid copy. Yeah, that totally sounds like the grassroots growth that made the first Starcraft a success. I sure as hell won’t buy a copy until someone has cracked that stupid part, which is probably before the game itself is even released. Morons.