It's only right and natural.

[reddragdiva]

• American Airlines are fatally incompetent. Spread this link.

• The death of the DSLR. Rather, its marginalisation: crappy convenience beats inconvenient quality every time.

• NotN: Google Maps shows nonexistent city "Perth".

Today I got (a) Notes 7 to work in Ubuntu (b) my boss to heartily approve me using Ubuntu officially and that he will back me up in telling IT that it's a business necessity for me to have a Unix main box, so they need to type in the office WPA key kthx and not bitch. The only thing I need now is remote access to work, and that can wait.

(The bees that power are apparently considering dumping Notes for ... Outlook. That said, Notes is actually more horrible than Outlook. Which is worse: Notes on Linux or Outlook on Windows? Outside candidate: Gmail for business. I have a visceral aversion to outsourcing such a core communications channel, but I must admit it'd suck way less than either.)

This evening we went to see the local fireworks. Freda was delighted. I got pretty good videos. And an LED butterfly with a sound chip that makes the most fucking grating "music" imaginable. I'd like to see early industrial noise enthusiasts put up with this shit. Living in the future: all this technology is for making cheap toys.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Google Maps shows nonexistent city "Perth".

And I thought it was on another planet...

[jld]

The bees that power

For obvious reasons I may need to, er, borrow this expression.

[reddragdiva]

It's a SubGenius phrase, meant far more positively than I use it here. That said, mine is the only use Google can see.

mail abominations

[spz]

I assume the Powers that Bee mean they want Exchange.
The latter has an IMAP interface, and if the IT department does not feel inclusive, thunderbird and evolution-exchange don't work worse than Outbreak does.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

NotN: Google Maps shows nonexistent city "Perth".

It's funny because it's true.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Don't get me going about American Airlines. Its headquarters is literally a 20-minute drive from my house, and it's been a workfare program for SMU business and marketing majors for years. (Its house magazine, American Way, is the employer of last resort for SMU's journalism department when its graduates can't get jobs due to failed drug tests or sexual harassment charges, but that's a completely different rant.) The reason why Mr. X got fired wasn't just that he cared: it's that he made some horsefaced MBA feel even more insecure about the eight years he wasted on keggers and date rape than usual. And if there's one thing I've learned the hard way in this town, it's that while these people are so stupid that they trip on the carpet pattern when they arrive at work, they'd also rather let the whole company burn than admit that they fucked up.

Sorry. I worked for Southwest Airlines back in 2001, and while I was less than thrilled with the way I was treated (I and all of our other over-thirty tech writers were literal placeholders for the cheery new college grads that the company hired because our supervisor wanted a harem), I have nothing but respect for the rest of the company. When I fly, I exclusively take Southwest these days, and if I had no choice but to take American, I'd walk.

[reddragdiva]

bsd is not unix. unless it's mac os x. so get me a macbook, d00d.

alternately i could try opensolaris. what could possibly go wrong.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

For a couple hundreds people that need calendaring (just email? Postfix and dovecot will do), Exchange is an inexpensive choice. Notes really wants a huge investment, big installation and a large user base to shine.

[reddragdiva]

This place is several hundred, maybe over a thousand total. I'm really not sure Notes is appropriate technology.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

If the number's near that bigger one, it's getting there. My experience isn't in scaling for Notes installations, but the vibe I get from looking at the doco and what kinds of companies show up in the customer testimonials, 1000 users is kind of minimal, a toss up, and 2500 with a couple of dedicated staff on running the Notes infrastructure is the real sweet spot. There's VPS Domino vendors out there to help smaller organizations by offloading the server work, meaning that a couple of dedicated to mail can instead be put to work on the mail templates and automating stuff around the mail engine: directory support, forms and applications, all that kind of crap that actually takes advantage of that it's all built on real and robust databases.

Oh yeah, you remember who my employer is, right? Yeah, I'm probably a little biased.

[reddragdiva]

The server may be robust, but the client is complete shit. AND IT DOESN'T NEED TO BE.

[jo-hoetmer.livejournal.com]

we're just moving to 8.5.1 version of notes and we're just going be using the inotes (web client) functionality. Apparently it's the bees knees and all :-)

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Version 8 of the client is nicer, aside from being a tremendous memory hog. And I admit I haven't spent any time in the mail template outside of the one being used internally, so there may be things I'm assuming just work that don't even exist in the stock issue.

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

Which is worse: Notes on Linux or Outlook on Windows?

Yes.

'Perth'

[evilpaul.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, makes me think 'Perth' might be an ARG version of Grant Morrison's metafictional city of Orqwith, from his run on Doom Patrol.

Actually, didn't 'Perth' make an appearance in Neil Gaiman's Sandman?

Re: 'Perth'

[reddragdiva]

Perth is where Satan goes to relax.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I've never used Notes under Linux but I remember using it under Windows and getting hugely frustrated with it.

We use Thunderbird at work.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Noo! The NotN article falls in to the classic trap of assuming that nothing existed on the Internet before Google. The mythical city of Perth was in fact a joke that started on alt.fan.warlord in the early 90s, and went viral across Usenet with the memetic triumph of an ASCII-art rendition of an incontinent puking rabbit.

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, that picture does notably lack a large asterisk hanging in the sky above it. I might redo it.

[heliumbreath.livejournal.com]

I've actually visited Perth (well, ok, I was just driving through) and as this photographic evidence (http://www.leftmind.net/random/perth.jpeg) shows, the asterisk was close to ground level that evening.

[reddragdiva]

Check current version!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Hooray. Old-geeky in-jokes FTW!

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I flew American Airlines in 1990 (Toronto-LaGuardia-Raleigh/Durham. Return).

It was such a dreadful experience I've never repeated it.

And that was in the days when my reference point was internal Air Canada flights! (AC really, really sucked in those days).

[reddragdiva]

I think the essential point is true: convenient but crappy beats high-quality but inconvenient in the marketplace, every time. Compacts eat SLRs from the bottom, phones eat compacts from the bottom.

The same pattern holds all over. Cassettes were the shittiest music medium ever, but they were waaaaay the most convenient. MP3s suck, but they're so convenient over CDs. Or even FLACs. Blu-Ray is really cool, but it's a niche product - the future of video appears in practice to be crappy Flash players: YouTube and iPlayer.

I use gmail instead of a client under my complete control ... because it's the best email client I've ever used.

arkady just got a new phone specifically for the camera - it's more convenient than even an Ixus. OTOH, she is getting a DSLR soon, for the quality.

I think Micro-4/3 will demolish DSLR utterly. But it will itself hold on for the niche that demands that quality.