Oh, how I love software documentation. As if most commercial documentation isn’t sucktacular enough (no offense to my technical writing homies, but I’ve had more bad luck in this regard than good), it seems like every open-source installation manual I’ve ever used was thrown together in ten minutes by someone filled with contempt for linear thinking. Usually I just close whatever online wiki or other half-assed collection of nouns and verbs they’ve provided and look through the code itself to see if I can figure out why I’m getting random, oblique errors and troubleshoot my way to success. Usually I get lucky. Tonight, with Drupal, I am up against the worst set of installation instructions I’ve encountered yet, and a pass through the assorted install files reveals settings I might change, if there was someplace that actually documented what they did.
I’m too tired to do the change-refresh-change-refresh dance tonight, so I will hang this one up and wave my middle finger high in the air.
Update: On a semi-related note (TURN THE SPEAKERS DOWN, KIDS):
This made me laugh out loud. Thanks, Onion.
This Flickr set from Noisy Decent Graphics is what I’ve been trying to do this year, only much, much better.
Completely unrelated photo of my daughter
During a business meeting this morning, the smell of bacon, smoky, rich, and alluring, began wafting into our conference room, making my stomach growl almost as loud as my voice. In my haste to leave this morning, I missed breakfast and had to settle for the one emergency pop-tart in my desk drawer, which held me over for about ten minutes. I decided to soothe the bacon jones by trying out the deli directly below our building, a Baltimore landmark called Werner’s, to see if they could satisfy my need for breakfast food.
I ordered a bacon, egg, and cheese on a toasted bagel with a side of hashbrowns. What I got was a drippy egg and cheese with burnt bacon on a cold cinnamon-raisin bagel. The hashbrowns were delivered as a styrofoam tub of soggy potato circles which had once been waved over a grill and then placed under a heat lamp.
Anyone who knows me understands the seething contempt I have for raisins hidden in baked goods, but because I’d paid for this grand feast, I had to eat it, so I did. And now I feel as though I consumed a plate of toxic waste braised in week-old cooking oil.
DesignAday: “a daily thought about Design every weekday.” Worth linking to.
This morning NPR was talking about the current state of the stimulus package working its way through the Senate, and how the various factions are arguing over the best way to spend/stimulate. Somebody mentioned there was an amendment to help homeowners refinance their mortgages with federally-underwritten loans at somewhere around 4.5%, which sounded like an excellent idea to me. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest our household could be saving about $250/mo. if we qualified, which we could be putting to excellent use for important things like childcare (keeping someone else employed) or paying down debt (making our risk of foreclosure that much less).
I personally would much rather spend the money we all don’t have on shoring up the inheritors of all this debt instead of flushing it down the toilet that is the current banking system; hearing that Wells Fargo suddenly canceled a million-dollar bacchanal for its “top employees” because of the public furor just reinforces the perception that these fucknuts just don’t get it. I think it might have been more fun to let them all gather in Vegas for their frat party, and then interrupt the whole thing by busing in a couple hundred thousand laid-off Americans to crash the events. That would be some news coverage I’d love to see.
I was also happy to hear the President place limits on corporate pay for any bank who received bailout money; this obviously should have been part of the first legislation passed, but wasn’t.
Whatever the case, it’s nice to hear that this administration, in some part, actually gives a fuck about the rest of us.
