More software grrrr

Not so much about the Blogger software. I am investigating alternatives. I am also investigating alternatives to the iPhone SE (old version) running on the Telus network. Do I put another battery in it and carry on till I forget to set airplane mode at night and Apple kills the battery? Or do I bite the bullet and get another phone? Seriously contemplating going Android on the speak out network like Linda does. Any phone suggestions? Texting, a little bit of talking, the parking app, some social media, but maybe I can do without that or email on my phone. I absolutely do not care about the phone camera, and that seems to be the big part of the reviews. If I want to take a photo, I'll use a real camera.

But what's really got my goat these days in particular is Excel. It used to be such a nice program, outside of some fetishes about dates and scientific notation, and a few other things. Now it's bloated up and I can barely find the features I want to use because they're hiding behind other stuff that I had never conceived of a reason to use in Excel.

Word has long since gone down that path. I don't willingly use it for anything outside work, and not even much there if I can avoid it. Do not get me started on PowerPoint. That is the work of programmers corrupted by evil and demonstrating their hatred of humanity. I hope to never see another power point presentation in my life.

But even worse is the environment they work in. This Office 365 thingie is terrible. The system has  insisted I restart and reinstall it several times. It's slow as a reluctant cat. Every time I try to save something it tries to put it somewhere different, and I have no idea where that is. It might be on the desktop, though the address looks like a virtual desktop. It might be in a documents folder, and no idea where that is. It might be on some team network drive, and don't get me started on Sharepoint.  All that is before using the VM and doing SQL. I've no idea where the actual query files are.

So far I've been a Luddite and am emailing xl sheets, rather than dropping them into some shared environment where all the other people I share it with will quickly come to hate me. My work generates spreadsheets like there's no tomorrow.

Some days I feel for the people who have to decipher my spreadsheets, as I think about data differently than other people. I think in terms of tables and relationships, of data strung together, and presented neatly  in rows. (There is a special place in hell for the Maximo developers that created the asset spec table.) There are usually filters. What it looks like is not what the front end data looks like, and that confuses people. Because the front end is an assembled fantasy, that's why. I give them naked, raw data, and people aren't used to that.

But that depends on Excel doing it's thing. I badly want a version of xl that doesn't try to be helpful. A version that treats a text string as a string and doesn't try to convert it to a date, or scientific notation, or play stupid games with thinking it's a number, or a number that's treated as text. That last one matters in INDEX MATCH, which is one of my main tools. Pro tip here, if you're still using VLOOKUP, get with the INDEX MATCH program.

Then there are the two different SQL editing tools I have to use, to query two different databases on different servers. Similar, but just a bit different. I was choked when one of them is several versions back and won't let me use WITH or DECODE. Sheesh.

Which is a roundabout way of getting to Lightroom. There are two different versions, very similarly named. One is for the web, and the other is for the old desktop and hard drive paradigm. You can guess which I use. I've never understood this idea of having everything on the cloud. That just means someone else's computer, and then you're at their mercy. Lightroom is getting to the point that the updates are frills that get in the way of actually editing photos.

That's been my sore spot with software for years. They keep updating it, changing it, just for the sake of doing it, I think. The product is almost never improved for the stated purpose of the software. For example, Evernote used to be a slick little program for keeping notes across several platforms. It was fast, easy, intuitive. Then it got complicated. One day I opened it up to a new interface and had no idea how to add a new note. I captured the notes I wanted to keep, and deleted it.

Apple's iTunes has long since reached that point. I rarely play music on the computer from my own music. The last batch was to create some files on a USB so we could play music in the car, which is it's own special version of hell. Don't get me started on Honda's "infotainment" system. I won't buy another Honda till they fix that. Even Apples's photo program has become unusable. Once I got a real camera I essentially stopped taking photos with my phone unless I wanted to email someone a photo of a document, for example. Or something similar. Which is one of the reason's I'm pissed at Instagram. You can't put photos there from your desktop, and any of my photos worth looking at came from that desktop.

All this is to say that the thing I'm most afraid of is software updates. I hate them happening automatically, because then one day you'll be in a rush to do something, while someone is watching you, and the interface will have changed. If you aren't careful, one of your expensive pieces of software will update itself, and then won't run on your computer because it's only 32 BLAHBLAHBLAH. Or the OS will update, and the software on the computer won't run till it's updated.

It's all a giant GRRRRR, and there are some days I wonder if any of it is worth it. Maybe I should try going without a cell phone, and see how that works. Buying a film camera is cheap, but I've no idea how expensive the film or processing is. Although I've read stories of people trying this, and quickly learning why the digital world is not just better, it's worlds better, unless you like the smell of developer chemicals.

Anyways, I feel better now that I've got that barfed out.



Of the Day
Michelle

Curtis, up in the window where he doesn't belong.

Flowers
Our home grown dahlias are blooming, but it's tough to get a nice shot of them.

White Peony

Driftwood