Let me tell you how I hate technology today

So it’s 2-thousand-freaking-9 right?

So I have to fill out a position description / banding form for the University. As a nice change from the last time I did this a few years back, it’s a “form fillable” PDF file. (or whatever the term is, it’s not like I do much desktop stuff anymore.). Instead of a word doc, thank goodness.

I’m thinking “sweet”. I know at one time, form-fillable PDF’s couldn’t be saved with the text in them from Preview on the Macintosh, but I know they can now. Awesome.

So I crank up Preview, fill my text in, and get to a signature line. Doh! The last thing I want to do is print it out, sign it, scan it, convert back to PDF. Sigh. I can just scan my signature, I need that anyway. Put the scanned image into Preview right?

Wrong.

Well, I own a copy of the CS3 suite, so I have a somewhat backdated version of Acrobat, but I figure “hey, I’ll open that filled in PDF in Acrobat, and just paste my signature in. I bet Acrobat will allow it”

And yes, Acrobat does. Cool.

Only, all… my…. text…. is…. gone. Damnit!

But no it’s not, if I click in the field – it’s there! WHAT?!?

Sigh. So I saved it with the image, opened in preview, text was there, emailed it to my colleague, text wasn’t there. SIGH. I then opened in Preview, “Printed to PDF” to get something that can be sent back over.

In retrospect, I should have just faxed it to myself, signed it, scanned it, and faxed it back to myself. The RIAA’s aversion to digital media and workflow has NOTHING on the enterprise apps from Adobe, et. al.

Absurd.

If I only had a brain…

I could be an App Store moderator too. via John Gruber @ Daring Fireball

You can’t make this stuff up. Apple has rejected the latest version of Tweetie — currently the most popular Twitter client in the App Store — because there’s a swear word in the current list of top Twitter trends. The trends feature isn’t new to this version of Tweetie, nor is Tweetie the only iPhone Twitter client that has the feature. It’s just that there happens to be a dirty word in the trend list now.

I can only figure that this moderator or moderators in the App Store division have some kind of dirt on Steve Jobs. Or maybe they ran Merrill Lynch in a former life.

Absurdity

We live in an absurd society where a company’s plans to ramp up production on machine Y of widget X by 17% is considered far more confidential than all my purchases of widget X and my purchasing information. IT groups bend over backwards to try to address the former and a lot less to address the latter.

Something is seriously wrong with the people running Information Technology in these organizations.

They must have learned how to do IT from Michigan State or they read Michael Krigsman columns in ZDNet.

Building the Spartan Wall

EAST LANSING, MI – Michigan State University officials today announced that they were placing the campus on “lockdown”, and never allowing the faculty, post-docs, graduate students, and select undergraduates to leave the campus again. In a statement released from the office of University President Lou Anna K. Simon, the University said that “We had recently taken the principled position that our faculty were under no circumstances allowed to use modern information sharing tools and collaborate online with their peers and the public. We felt that this position wasn’t strong enough. Our world class faculty and students carry important and critical University Intellectual Property and business records in their minds, and we just can’t let them get out and risk them sharing that property and exposing those records. We attempted pilot projects where each faculty member was given a stack of permission forms for each person they encountered to sign. That pilot was not successful. So we had to take the next logical step.”

“Not successful is an understatement”, said J. Allen Farnsworth, a tenured Classical Biological Anthropology professor, “I got a bloody black eye when I asked the lady at the lawn and garden shop to sign this form after I gave my lecture about the history of all art that includes references to caterpillar segments. The University told me that I had to do this any and each time I shared their Intellectual Property.”

Pressed for more information about such an unprecedented move, a spokesperson for Simon said that “we realize this may cause some consternation. But our IT department created this thing they call a ‘wallfire’ for our computers, and we really liked that wall idea. We absolutely must protect our Intellectual Property, and our Business Records. Especially all those emails from the facilities department about why my request to the move the light switch closer to my desk hasn’t yet been completed. However, we feel that our faculty and students will be well cared for and comfortable here. We have the finest in Spartan accommodations.”

“Spartan is right.”, agreed Professor Farnsworth, “all they gave us was a cheap plastic air mattress, a toothbrush, and some toilet paper. And it’s not even two-ply.”

Asked for additional comment, a spokesperson for David Gift, Vice Provost for Libraries, Computing, and Technology told us that “David couldn’t be more pleased. He’s taken a lot of criticism for being such a classicist on this issue. Forcing everyone to use our crappy custom developed webmail client really has been hard. He’s been having administrative meetings and lunches, and golf outings every day, to try to get the budget increased now that we told everyone they can’t use better products. And that’s hard, you know? If we don’t get more budget, we may never be able to back up our mail server ever again. By locking up all our faculty and students, which of course was the next logical step, it takes some of the pressure of me, er, him. And with Jack [Valenti, late head of the MPAA] gone, it’s been hard to find a sympathetic shoulder to lean on. I’m really doing everything I can for our fine University! I’m trying to protect our Intellectual Property! Oh, excuse me, I have to meet with some RIAA representative to install their monitoring software on our ResNet”

Asked why the Administration wasn’t covered by this policy, a spokesperson for Chris Hanna, Interim Assistant Vice President for Human Resources responded simply “well, we do keep some business records, but we’ve been assured that we are neither intellectual, or have any brains.”

A joint Engineering/Natural Sciences research initiative that would allow the faculty and students to dump the University contents from their brains each night showed some early promise, but some of the key neurological research needed to implement the filters properly, so that the faculty and students didn’t forget the names of their pets and partners was only available from Stanford. And with the new IT policies, MSU wasn’t able to share in that information for risk of exposing their own Intellectual Property.

So, for now, MSU faculty and students stay locked in their offices inventing new Pong games while waiting for the mail servers to be rebooted. Stay tuned for more on this developing story.

Thanks to Kevin Gamble for information contributing to this report

Shame

I have a good friend serving as an Army Chaplain in Afghanistan. I dropped him a note the other day to tell him about my wife and I bringing a second pup home and linking to the story of it.

His “government computer” in the office? It blocks access to Flickr apparently (and maybe rambleon.org, he wasn’t clear on that).

The military blocks Flickr. Absurd.

It might not be a blanket policy in theater. It just might be that office, or that computer. Whatever it is, the IT people that manage that computer should be absolutely ashamed of themselves.

Nice Upgrade

Last night, when I was at the Quicken site looking at possible upgrades to Quicken 2006 for the Macintosh – either Quicken 2007 for Macintosh or Quicken 2008 for Windows (running under VMWare) – the prices were $59.99 (Macintosh) and $39.99 (Windows/Deluxe)

Today they are $69.99 and $59.99.

That might have made the decision for me – I’ll certainly spend more than that in labor time to import/cleanup/re-enter my data into iBank or go to Wesabe.

But ad-hoc discount removal on a moment’s notice? Ridiculous.

([edited] okay, they are well within their rights to do so, it’s business – but why not post some dates and things? and why would the prices change between tuesday night and wednesday? it just seems like it’s completely arbitrary)

Absolutely Astounding

Dear WordPress devs.

I really appreciate the work you do on WordPress. I appreciate your open source philosophy – I appreciate your contributions to the community of a relatively easy-to-use software package that has been a part of a revolution in how people communicate. Long ago, I threw away my own blogging platform, because I was attracted by the community and ecosystem surrounding WordPress (once it got going out of a languishing b2 product).

But I continue to be mystified by your continued obstinate behavior about helping the product’s users actually pick a standard way of syndicating their data. I know that Uncle Earl cares not about what text strings are formatted where and in what way. But as programmers you should actually get the fact that standard ways of consuming and sharing information really do matter – and they are going to matter more and more for Earl and Millie both when they begin to realize the power of mixing, mashing, and aggregating information.

I was so impressed that you enlisted the community help with implementing Atom support – including the publishing protocol. But why on earth did you not write a few lines of code to make it easier to change the default format from the InternetJerrySpringerDrama that is rss2 to atom?

Oh, I see, you “didn’t think this option should be part of the UI, because for almost all people the option is not useful.”

Of course, because my timezone offset and my encoding preference and whether or not I use “wp-hacks” support is stuff that more people care about than using an actual standard way of syndicating our content.

I really, really do in all sincerity appreciate that WordPress is Open Source – because it give me a chance to route around your damage to it.

For the rest of the world – the quick hack – until plugins show up to make this a little more seamless is to (I THINK) replace line 845-846 in wp-includes/functions.php from:


if ( $feed == '' || $feed == 'feed' )
$feed = 'rss2';


to


if ( $feed == '' || $feed == 'feed' )
$feed = 'atom';


That was only a quick, cursory examination on my part, I’m sure others will be coming out with better solutions.

I realize that open source means putting your coding fingers where your mouth is, but some coding choices in life just seem better off in the core – and this is certainly one of them. The WordPress devs apparently disagree, and it’s their software and their prerogative to do so. I respect that – I just don’t have any respect for it.