Why Do People Refuse To Help Themselves?

I have a real problem with people coming to me for help, but haven't done the least little bit of reasearch. One of my fellow bloggers (I am unknown to him I'm sure) has the same problem, but he's way nicer about it.

Don't be helpless: You can find information, too, if you try

I also direct you to my previous post

How To Stay Out of The Forums You N00bs!

I just encountered this in-person last week. A co-worker was terribly struggling with ASP.NET, and was asking me to basically build this whole page for him, because he did not understand how to use View State.

The very sad part was, he had a perfectly-good book on ASP.NET sitting on his fucking desk, apparently unread!

Rather than do the work for him, I spent some time acquainting him with his book, directing him to the relevant chapter. I also recommended additional reading, since he was going to be doing this quite a bit here at this job.

Needless to say, I asked to borrow the book over the weekend; I am still picking up good bits from it, as I am not an expert, but I know how to become one; do your fucking research...

Where You Work...

...is an extension of where you live! I used to have a saying:

"Treat your work as well as you treat your home."

For the people that drink the coffee but never make it, you are a bunch of fucking Free-Riders, and your mommy is not here to keep you serviced with coffee, so take the fucking 30 seconds to make some and keep us from mother-fucking you behind your back, because we are!

For the people that leave their dirty shit in the sink even though there's a dishwasher 2 feet away, and generally fail to keep common areas clean, I am revising my saying:

Treat this place way fucking better than you treat your own home

because your spouse is not here to clean up after your lazy ass! And you better believe the people who are bitching about you behind your back about the coffee situation are getting you on this one too!

If you're down with this, you will probably like my "Walk Like You Drive" theory...

Windows is a Slow-Booting Piece of Shit

Yes we all know that one. Don't start spamming me with links about how to make it faster, I'm a dumb-fuck, Switch to Linux, Switch to Mac, etc. That was just to get your attention, and I'm not looking for suggestions. This is a Rant.

Ok, We Are Listening...

It's time for a change in philosophy for Operating Systems. The Hardware is not the most important thing for the OS, it's me the fucking user you stupid fucks!!!

To enable this Nirvana, we must take a radically different approach to how the OS decides what is important to load first. Forget about all these background services and crap; no offense, I don't need those until I do something. And I mean systematically apply this; not just the services you think are necessary.

With this in mind, the OS should be booting up in this order:

1. Kernel,
2. Graphics Subsystem,
3. User Agent (Shell),
4. Nothing Else You Stupid Fucks!!!!

Profanity aside, the point is Appearance Is Everything, and the sooner I can see my customized desktop, the happier I am; I feel like I can interact, and I can, because the OS won't be frantically loading and starting services and thrashing my hard drive while I try to open the Start Menu.

Once I am logged in, all disk thrashing should cease. This would be because there are no frantically loading services.

I've read lots of the Optimize Windows links, so we know it is certainly possible. I should be able to get logged in with only the absolute minimum number of services and drivers running.

Let's spin it another way. We should be trying to limit the attack surface at all times, and that means not even loading shit that the user isn't calling for.

We've all looked at the Windows Services list and we've looked at Task Manager. Why is there all that shit in there? I just logged in and started my browser, and i already have 60 processes running! What the fuck? I am not naive here; I am an experienced software developer, so believe me when I say that seems excessive. I have not started any other applications. I have 7 items in my task tray, and Virus Scanning.

I'm sure someone from Microsoft would argue the other way and say that is totally reasonable, and more and more "system" tasks get more and more cores to dump useless processing on and rob your applications of cycles.

Freaky Friday

Trying to keep up the pace of posts even with last year; I am really hoping to equal-or-better last year's production of 30 posts. Friday The 13th seems like as good an excuse as any.

Well your luck with traffic can't get any worse...

Some minor configuration tweaks here at the blog, courtesy of Blogger.com, in the gutter so-to-speak.

Finally A Member

Yesterday, my cell phone finally updated its "Carrier" text to "AT&T". It was stubbornly reading "Cingular" up until then.

We all know it's been AT&T for a long time, and my wife's phone had switched over months ago.

Why was my phone holding out? I don't know, but it made me feel like a rebel Dottie...