Technology will make your life easier

I was about to make a flippant remark along the lines of “what’s wrong with a tap?”… until I remembered that the tap in our office has a safety switch and I regularly have to demonstrate how to use it to my otherwise very capable colleagues :see_no_evil:

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I know someone in the University of Cambridge Computing Service who had to devise state diagrams of the “smart” light switches in order for people to be able to manage sophisticated functions like “turn the lights on for more than thirty seconds”.

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I have just watched someone else who was confused by the new Ui. (Previously , if you wanted flavored water tou touched the icon for the flavor you wanted, and water came out as long as you tapped it. Now you can select multiple flavors, and you hold a button labeled pour. I suppose that’s an improvement for the people who mix cucumber and watermelon water. It’s a regression for the rest of us. ).

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Towards the end of my dad’s lecturing career, they built a fancy new chemistry classroom building. His first visit to a lecture hall, he asked “where’s the periodic table?” (Chemistry classrooms always have a periodic table!). Blank looks. They programmed one into the screen/light/projector control. He insisted it be a single press, on the main screen. Internal programming referred to it as the’Bob button’.

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You just need to Look Around You…

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OK so I just got to use “Long live the King” as a commit message (ensuring that everything is set up for future Queen’s Bench cases to be designated as King’s Bench).

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So with Kickstarters and other crowdfunding you get packages whenever… even when you are on vacation. Luckily, there exists such a thing called “Packstation” – an automated facility placed outside of supermarkets and in other strategic locations throughout the cities where you can retrieve your packages with a QR code. I used to use this a lot when I was working in an office… these days I am almost always home so packages only get redirected when by some weird coincidence neither me nor my neighbors are home. I get a QR code in the mail, go to the packstation, scan it and get my package. Nice.

I also use Packstation to send packages (like games I sell).

It works really well.

Until it doesn’t.

This time I manually redirected the packages there because when I got notification that they were arriving during vacation I didn’t want to burden the neighbors with having to hold packages for several days. Except this is different and I didn’t get the QR code in the post that I usually get.

Ah, I though I still got emails and the packages showed up in the app. It’ll be fine. Except it is not. For “active” use of the Packstation I no longer get QR codes, instead (it’s been like this for a year they say) I need to register my device. I have been using the app all the time and never once saw the button to register…

Now for how tech makes my life easier: the registration code comes in paper in 2 to 5 days and there is no alternative way to get the codes I need to retrieve the packages. No backup. I called support. They could not get a code for me.

DHL relies on smartphones alone to provide the codes without any backup system in place whatsoever even when you have no registered device?

And they told you this at the bottom of your notification emails? The ones nobody reads beyond “when will my package arrive” ?!

I told support to please relay to the devs that they need some kind of fallback because fuckups with smartphones happen all the time and people get new devices all the time…

Ah why are software devs such dumb smart people sometimes?

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Prediction: The devs requested time and budget to fix this years ago.

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We had a big team meeting a little while back. Management have this idea that two hours of PowerPoint is going increase enthusiasm/productivity/etc. We’re just happy there’s free coffee and biscuits.

One of the higher-ups told us to stop spending time fixing the old issues we know about and to spend more time trying experimental or novel things.

Fantastic idea. I’m sure they won’t be asking us in a few years time why there are so many bugs and I’m sure we’ll have the time to fix them.

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Sounds like one of our quarterly planning meetings (“Scaled Agile”, everyone). At the beginning a bunch of the senior management explain why we’re doing whatever we’re doing this quarter including some “exciting numbers” AKA a table showing our clients and how much they pay for each product… Thrilling!

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This was pretty much just two hours of Gantt charts/project plans. By the time my boss came to talk about our team’s progress he flashed up our plan for about five seconds, said “that was our plan, any questions?” Much to the amusement of the audience.

The aim of the meeting was for the higher-ups to ensure we were “all aligned in our vision and understood our roles”.

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If we’re all aligned in our vision, does that mean we’re all looking at slightly different things?

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I just tried a thing. It failed, and opened a new window in my text editor to display an error. Cleverly, the window has a black background. The text is also black.

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Too Cool For You, the spiritual successor to TECO.

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No-compromise dark mode!

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This is a really useful image.


It allowed me to stop reading the article at that point and thus save several minutes.

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It’s so long since I’ve seen Star Wars that I don’t remember Darth Vader saying any of those things.

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It was a deleted scene.

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I’ve just spent two days at a software testing conference and I think it has confirmed that I need a career change. I didn’t find any of the technical sessions interesting or challenging (I really can’t bring myself to care about microservices or APIs). The only session that I really got anything out of was a coaching workshop. I’m open to suggestions, the madder the better :laughing:

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Anger management counselor?

You said the madder the better!!!

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