Author Archives: jdtharp

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. The dead zone. Although they swear it’s unintentional, the building where I work is essentially a giant Faraday cage. Outside in the parking lot, five solid bars of 3G coverage. Inside, at my desk, with my phone pressed against the glass, one bar of intermittent EDGE coverage. Sometimes. If all the atmospheric conditions are just right. I don’t want to sit at my desk playing Angry Birds all day, but it would at least be nice to know who called when the “you have a voicemail” alert manages to fight its way through to my phone. Mostly though, you just get to be surprised by the texts, emails, and voice messages that come rolling in whenever you happen to go outside. Maybe I should just set everything to roll over to my Google Voice account and really freak the IT security weenies out.

2. Forgetting the airbags. For the last two weeks, I’ve been mentally preparing myself to get the truck back on Friday. It’s not that the rental car is awful, but well, it’s not my truck and not being able to see anything further than the tail end of the car in front of me lacks a certain charm. I called Monday and everything was still on track for a Friday pickup. When I called to check in this afternoon, apparently there’s been a snag. A very sheepish office manager confessed that they had forgotten to include replacing my deployed airbags in the original repair estimate and had therefor not ordered them. I’m not a fancy big city auto body shop, but I think I would have noticed the big white deflated bits hanging out of the steering wheel and from under the dash. Maybe it’s just me though. The parts are ordered and the truck is allegedly back together now, so as soon as they get there hands on the airbags, we should be all set. As of a few hours ago, Tuesday is the new Friday.

3. Iran. Part of me is stunned and amazed that we’re going to fiddle around and wring our hands and wait just long enough for Iran to make their very own nuke. The other part of me then remembers that it’s a government operation and then all of me ceases to be surprised. Boy if you thought groups like the Taliban were dangerous before, just wait until their friends get the bomb. The world is going to change and while we had a chance to stop it or at least stand aside while someone else stopped it, we sat around fretting about convincing our enemies that stopping the madness was a good idea. A hundred years from now, the world is going to look back at this generation of “leaders” and collectively ask WTF, dude?

The eternal meeting…

Posted on by

We have the same meeting every two weeks. I don’t mean just a regularly occurring staff meeting or anything, but rather a meeting where we all get together and discuss the exact same issue, come to the exact same conclusions, and then part company knowing full well that we’re going to do it again in 14 days just like clockwork. Nobody, myself included, has the intestinal fortitude to recommend that we stop having this meeting so it seems possible that it will continue on indefinitely into the future, just as it has been held for as long as any of the current participants can remember.

As far as I can tell, meetings are the great enemy of government work – probably work in any large organization. I’m not saying if we cancelled this meeting that my productivity would suddenly jump by 200%, but it would free up an hour or two every week to do something, anything that might be even marginally productive. After all, when what you’re currently doing is complete dead time, even a fractional improvement in how you spend your day is a huge improvement in productivity. That’s not even counting the morale bump that would come from permanently cancelling time sucks like this one. Of course the likelihood of any of that coming to pass is somewhere between slim and none, so if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting to go to.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Shut up and take it!

Posted on by

All I want to do is give you $600 odd dollars. Why, oh why won’t you turn on your interwebs and let me fork it over no questions asked. With all the site crashing, “We’ll be back soon”, and freezing apps, I’m starting to wonder if you really want my money. A company that really cared about me wouldn’t be this hesitant to shake every last dime possible out of my pockets. Once again, you’ve deeply disappointed me on pre-order day, Apple. But I just can’t quit you.

EDIT: Managed to sneak an order in at 5:29 PM. Regardless of what Technorati says, this blog is clearly influential in tech circles.

Tax refund and spend…

Posted on by

The problem with tax refunds is they take all year to accru and a grand total of 96 hours to spend. I’ve got to admit that I was a bit overzealous at paying off a few move related bills that had been hanging out there for a while, and added a few new pieces of kit to my electronics and accessories collection, but still, it feels like it should have lasted longer than it did. There’s exactly $500 left over earmarked to bail my truck out of the body shop on Friday, but other than that, we’re back to the regular monthly budget. I seem to vaguely remember when my tax refund was considered “fun” money. Maybe I just imagined that, though.

I think one of the most unpleasant aspects of being an adult that no one bother to warn you about when you were a kid is that the sums of money that seemed mind boggling and unattainable when you got your first job flipping burgers will very quickly become just what it takes to get by and maybe stash a bit aside for the future. My definition or “rich” and “making good money” have certainly changed in the last fifteen years, regardless of what the Governor of Maryland wants me to believe. I know paying the bills is the “right” thing to do, but damn, there just isn’t much fun in it.

Policy Changes, or Be on the Lookout: A Catalog of Stupid People

Posted on by

I’d like to take a moment and thank the #2 male, approximately 50 years of age, with a salt and pepper beard, and blue shirt, driving a recent model Scion XD with Maryland plate 5AB2637, for inspiring me on my way to lunch today. First, I need to clarify why I laid on the horn and then saluted you in passing with the appropriate hand gesture indicating how much I appreciated your driving skills. Just so you know, when turning left across three lanes of traffic, there is a generally accepted way to do things. Normally, you allow the vehicle in front of you to complete his turn before you pull around him and cut across his path in order to make u-turn. I certainly appreciated your shoulder shrug indicating that you had no idea why I was gesticulating wildly in your direction. The inability to make eye contact was a nice touch. Maybe I’d have been slightly less annoyed with you, sir, if you were racing to a hospital or even to work. You, however, decided to be a giant douche bag so you could get to McDonald’s. I know this because I completed my u-turn just after you did and watched you pull into the drive thru line (please see attached photo as Exhibit A).

Believe it or not, I mostly don’t care what goes on around me. As annoyed as I am by most people, I don’t go looking for conflict. Unless you’ve done something truly egregious, I’m usually willing to turn the other cheek just because further interaction isn’t even worth the effort, but you Scion XD driver, have finally changed the equation for me and that’s why, today, I am announcing an immediate change in policy.

Effective this afternoon, whenever possible I will be posting the name, identifying details, and a photograph of people whose stupidity causes them to be a danger to themselves, to others, and to the continued survival of the species as a whole. When featured on these pages, I urge all my readers to be on the lookout for these individuals and avoid them if possible. All readers should consider interaction with these individuals to be highly undesirable and a potential hazard to your mental health.This policy will remain in force until I find a better method of calling out these asshats or until I lose interest, whichever comes first. Ladies and gentlemen of the Baltimore-Towson Metropolitan Statistical Area, you have been warned.

The first twelve minutes…

Posted on by

It’s Monday. I’ve been at my desk for about 12 minutes this morning. And someone just wandered by to ask if I had read the 15 separate issue papers that arrived over the weekend. Of course I’ve read them. Somewhere between finding the coffee pot, hanging up my coat, and waiting seven minutes for my computer to boot up. I know that some people spend the weekend thinking about these things and rush breathlessly into the office on Monday to get in there and “make a difference.” I, on the other hand, am a bit like an old car. I need time in the morning to warm up before jumping into anything requiring a lot of horsepower or fine motor skills.

Even on my best day, the answer to “what have I done in my first 12 minutes in the office” is pretty universally “not much.” Check back in an hour – or 45 minutes if you’re really in a hurry – and there’s a fair chance I’ll have had time to get caffeinated and come up with whatever you need. Believe me when I say that standing there looking at me haplessly like a mammoth stuck in the tar pits isn’t going to help your cause. It’s pretty much just going to annoy me more than usual and slow down the whole process.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Diagnosis…

Posted on by

Tech problems don’t usually sneak up on me. That’s one of the perks of keeping up an, uh, “aggressive” pace on upgrades. For the last three or four months I was completely perplexed by the cause of my laptop slowing to a crawl. I ran diagnostics on diagnostics and kept coming up with the general result that the system was clean. Unfortunately, I overlooked the most basic issue of all. It seems I have been asking my 2008 model laptop to run at 2012 efficiency with a scant 2GB of onboard RAM. Woops. That’s really something I should have caught as soon as things started bogging down on me. Total amateur mistake. Then again, it’s been a good long time since I’d kept a computer for four years that it wasn’t an issue I usually ran into.

The problem is solved and all is again right with the world. I can run Chrome, Word, and iTunes all at the same time without everything grinding to an agonizingly painful halt. There’s a sexy new piece of kit sitting on my desk serving up content to every other device jacked into my home network. It’s a happy thing. It was a purchase I wanted to make anyway, but the sorry state of affairs with my underpowered laptop gave me enough of a nudge to let me justify all out replacement (at least in my own slightly warped mind).

I haven’t quite decided what to do with the laptop yet. Picking up a RAM upgrade would probably run about $50 and would easily buy it another 2-3 years of life as a backup or secondary machine to use when I don’t need to be tethered to the desk. Then again, that’s mostly the role the iPad fills now. I guess the question I’m going to have to ask myself is if I even have a need for a laptop anymore or with almost everything headed for the cloud is it a form factor that has outlived its usefulness?

Staying put…

Posted on by

If you’d have asked me back around June 19th what I’d be doing this Spring, I’d have give you one of two possible answers: 1) Finding a house to rent that didn’t break every third day or 2) Having successfully picked the all six numbers for the PowerBall jackpot, I am withdrawing from public life to a small, sparsely populated island somewhere in the Caribbean Sea. As it turns out, neither one of those two things is going to be on my agenda for Spring 2012.

It’s not so much that I’ve made a conscious decision to stay put as much as I’ve slowly come to terms with house. After nine months it’s getting that lived in look that comes from finally having boxes unpacked. Cutting out the property manager from hell and dealing directly with the owner has gone a long way towards resolving the upkeep and maintenance issues that plagued the first month or two. The truth is, it’s taken the better part of a year, but I’m starting to feel settled. Just the idea of throwing everything back into boxes at this point and doing it all again so soon makes me a bit twitchy. Besides, I’d always hoped that the next move would be back into a house that Bank of America and I owned together and since that’s not going to happen in the next three months, sticking with the enemy I know seems like the next best option.

So yeah, if the first year was about settling in and getting my footing. This year is going to be all about fixing some of the things that have bugged me, but I didn’t want to tackle because I figured I’d be moving on before being there long enough for them to matter much. Now that I’ve made up my mind to stick around, it’s time to start hacking at those annoyances. In a few weeks when the weather finally turns for good that means a concerted effort to bring the yard into a better state than “eh, good enough for a rental.” If I’m going to be here for a while, it’s time to start putting my own stamp on the place – or at least as much of a stamp as one can place without spending much money. Once the outside is up to standard, maybe, just maybe, I’ll finally get around to turning the basement into something other than a place to store canned goods and cast off furniture.

Or I could just go ahead and get that PowerBall win. That would be fine too.

And then there was Three…

Posted on by

Most normal people aren’t particularly attenuated to the comings and goings of fancy new electronic devices. By now you’ve certainly realized that at least in this category, I’m not like most people. What can I say, I’ve got a thing for well-designed bundles of chips, plastic, aluminum, and glass.

I keep telling myself that I’m only taking a look at things for “informational purposes” only. My iPad 2, at a year old, is still pretty much a marvel of modern technology. It runs like a top and has more storage than I can ever reasonably expect to use in a tablet. Really, it’s every bit as good a device today as it was the day I unboxed it last March. Sure, the new one will have a touch more processing power, a higher resolution screen, and a few other bits that make it just a little more polished than the one I have now, but is that enough to justify the inevitable standing in line or waiting around the house all day for the UPS guy to show up? The logical, well-reasoned answer, of course, is no, no it isn’t.

For better or worse, I’ve drunk the Kool Aid. Normal standards of logic, need, or justification really don’t apply. I guess as far as addictions go, things could be worse. At least I only have to go out looking for my fix a couple of times a year. Unfortunately, like any other self-respecting addict, once I’ve gotten a whiff of there being a new and more potent fix on the market, I’m pretty much helpless in the face of my own excitement to get a taste of it. Just like every year around this time I am officially waiting to see the technical specifications before making a decision. In the less affected part of my head I’m even thinking that this might be the year to ride it out and wait to see what iPad 4 has under the hood. If I were a betting man, though, I wouldn’t wager against seeing an iPad 2 posted for sale here on these very pages in the not too distant future.