« merrill markoe | Main | calling a man about a horse »

October 07, 2009

welding school

I was forced to "upgrade" to Windows 7 yesterday, and I've been trying ever since to make my laptop nominally useful. What a spectacular piece of crap. Anything that took me one step before now takes at least three, sometimes a ludicrous 12. Every message and dialog is a goddamned novel in which every sentence is written in the imperative, whether or not you're actually being told to do something. All of the customizations I've performed for years to the Start menu and Quick Launch sections? Not allowed. More than ever, the Windows UI is utterly random, looking like something at which Jackson Pollack's monkey thew its feces. It stuck. And I'm stuck with it.

(Trying in vain to flick undigested corn off my monitor)

User Account Control, everyone's least favorite Vista feature ("Please confirm that you just clicked the button that you just clicked by clicking this button too"), has a friendlier new look and a new inability to be disabled. So there's that.

It was when I was researching how to hack my registry and disable that motherfucking thing that I saw my future unfold before me: my career is over. It's inevitable. We keep making products worse and worse, and the documentation I write cannot possibly (or politically) mitigate that degeneration. Customers increasingly find no hope in the product's docs. Customers are instead increasingly compelled to use third-party discussion groups and wikis in order to make their products function as they should. Just like I'm doing.

Windows 7 is going to kill my career once and for all. If not Windows 7, Windows 8 or Ate or Windows eXcitement or iWindows or Windows Precipicio or whatever they end up calling the next travesty. I tossed and turned all night, thinking about the inevitability of welding school. And then I got up and hacked my registry some more. There's just gotta be a way to make the "Display full path in the title bar" check box actually display the full path in the title bar. There's just gotta.

posted by john at 07:39 AM  •  permalink