ominous portents

system restore...that'll fix my problem(s)! yeah!

oh, wait, the restore failed...that cannot be a good thing.

looks like it's time to dig out the vista disks and reinstall the fucking OS. joy.

dear garmin mapupdater

you suck. you may well be the shittiest piece of software i've had to use in a long, long time. here are a few tips:

1. if i select "download to computer only", then you should continue to function after i've unplugged the fucking GPS from the USB cable. one would think the entire purpose of this option is to allow the download to proceed without the device attached. otherwise, why offer it?
2. did you implement the windows file copy status bar for your download progress? newsflash, IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO GO BACKWARDS
3. is your server actually a decrepit laptop running a pentium 2 chip in some admin's basement in taiwan? seriously, i just ran a network speed test and my current download speed is 21 Mbps. why is my download speed from your server ranging from 24 Kbps to a max of 2 Mbps?
4. related, are you just not telling me the file size because you know i'll be wondering why it is taking more than a few minutes to download?

really, this is awful. i left the fucking thing running all night, and of course it errored out. this is painful and makes me hate those who created it. i had no idea it was possible to complicate a fucking file download this much.

EDIT: okay, so maybe it's not all your fault, map updater. a big fuck you to vista as well. and possibly my network adapters. at least at work i get paid to try and figure this shit out.

work rant

i hate working on code written by consultants. why? because they don't always know what the fuck they are doing. nor does anyone else know what the fuck they did.

the problem i face is the necessary assumption that what i was given as a base was functioning correctly. i fear that assumption is, unfortunately, false.

it doesn't help that the design of these host systems sucks. really, really just sucks. why, for instance, create a spouse segment, and then store the spouse information in the "additional insured" segment? and if you decide to treat a spouse just like a second insured, why not get rid of the obsolete record layouts? fer fuck's sake, why is deleting so god damn difficult? isn't that what versioning tools are for? to retrieve stuff that might have been deleted if you find you still need it?

perhaps i'm anal. perhaps it's because i learned from anal people. but well-structured code is much easier to figure out. consistency. spacing on the lines. neat and tidy. so much easier. and jesus, why is every freaking working storage variable an 01 level? did they just want to make initialization more of a pain?

i hate this. i wish i could have written it from scratch. there are vast swaths of commented out code. why? why? for me to make any sense of what's going on, i have to clean it up. waste of my time, frankly.

ugh, i sound like one of those sticklers for standards. but, frankly, if you aren't going to be the only one working on a module, they help.