Last Updated on: 25th September 2013, 03:37 pm
Ok, I think my lack of sleep has given me a little unexpected venom, which has unfortunately found its mark on three programs that pissed me off today in quick succession.
Lets’ start with that stupid HP Software update thing. It comes up about once a month, but it doesn’t just come up, it comes up singing. This wouldn’t bug me, except it chooses to come up singing between midnight and 2 in the morning. So if I leave my computer on, I get an ugly wake-up call. Then, when I choose to acknowledge it, there’s usually no update! In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever actually gotten an update through that blasted thing. Piss off! If you must start singing in the middle of the night, make it for a good reason.
That’s mild compared to the rage caused by the stupidity of Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall. It’s very good. IT’s so good that sometimes it starts whining in the middle of an install over every detail that the program wants to do. I authorize a program, and then when it does something slightly different, there the firewall is again, screaming screaming screaming! it’s so good that I think I don’t spend the time I should reading the dialogs because I have to approve so many of them. Plus, these pauses don’t sit well with some programs who want to get their stuff done now now now and don’t want to wait for me to aprove them every step of the way! How many MSN and Winamp installs have I buggered up because of Kerio?
And then there’s the stupid web-filtering. Sometimes, I have to knock down the whole firewall just to visit a site that is harmless but it doesn’t like, and try as I might, I can’t convince it to like it. I’m replacing Kerio with something much easier to deal with real soon! Arg!
I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. Some people install it and soon find their computers speechless because it has a battle royale with their screen-reader and the screen-reader doesn’t win.
And the biggest pile of rage goes toJAWS, my screen-reader. Hey folks at Freedom Scientific. Not all of us blinks are dumb as posts and need to be led by the hand. So, when you design an updater, make it give more information than “Please wait while your system is being configured by JAWS.” Click…click…click. How about some percentages? Those clicks mean nothing, as proved when Kerio put a nice stumbling block in front of JAWS, and JAWS kept on clickin’. I could have sat there all day whistling a happy tune if I’d relied on those clicks and gotten exactly nowhere. Seriously guys, everything else in the known universe lets people know how it’s doing as it installs things. Why not join the club. You used to do that.
and, at the end, when it’s time to restart, give me a choice to restart now or later. When I hit escape, the universal cancel command, respect that that is my choice and don’t reboot my computer! Maybe I wanted to save something! Maybe I wanted to turn something off! Maybe, just maybe, I have a clue better than you! Can you read my mind? Nope! Didn’t think so! So stop trying!
Ok, rage over. Until something else pisses me off. Aren’t I pleasant?