uphill battle
Yesterday I was at work for another 12 hours (over 13 if you count commuting time). I literally spent about 8 of those hours fighting it out with assorted M\$ products. Everytime I don't use windoze for a while, and then am forced to use it again, I'm given a wonderful reminder of why I hated it. I spent close to 5 hours just setting up a debuger, amusingly named windbg (get it, windbag?) only for the engineers to determine that windoze was locking up so badly that the debug output wasn't getting reecorded at exactly when it was needed. Catch22 if i've ever seen it. Also amusing, apparently an updated anti-virus signature apparently was corrupted or bad, or something (i have no clue, i tend to ignore that sort of nonsense in the land of Linux/Unix), and basically caused every winXP desktop in the company to go south. Basically what happened was as long as you didn't log out of windoze you were fine, but if you did, you'd never be able to log back in again. Now that's Quality software for ya. It was mildly amusing late in the day when the IT folks were wandering around checking on the people who were still in the office to see if their windoze boxes were ok. I never even noticed a problem because my windoze box is resigned to be a glorified space heater as I use my FC3 box for just about everything and it never knew the different about some silly windoze anti-virus glitch. At any rate, the real frustration was fighting with windoze for so much of the day. One of the things that really pissed me off was that the person whom I was covering for told me a few times the day before that it shouldn't be too bad, and that she'll make sure all of her bugs are up to date. Of course neither turned out to be true, and I got stuck with a ton of her poorly documented, unupdated crap. I seem to have garnered alot of sympathy from both the most senior member of my group and the linux customers' program manager, as they both agreed that it was a waste of my time to be dealing with windoze issues. Hell, i'm the only person in the dept whose job title has Linux explicitly in it, so why am i assigned to cover windoze issues for 6 days? I'm not opposed to learning this crap (and it is utter crap), but when its basically thrust upon me for 6 days in such a way that I don't have any time to devote to working on the Linux/Solaris issues of which I'm the only person in the group who has sufficient expertise to handle them, something is not right. Before I give an impression that I'm not liking my job just 3 weeks into it, i want to make it clear that's not the case. I like the company, the atmosphere, the culture, and my primary job responsibilities. I just hate windoze, with a passion.
Tonight I watched Gunner Palace. It was an excellent documentary. I can't say that anything was terribly surprising, and should not have been for anyone who hasn't been utterly blinded by the propaganda coming from the White House for the past 3.5 years. In many ways, I think it was far better than Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, although admittedly, this really covered a different timespan and perspective.