fine whine

I feel like a colossal boob. This morning I needed to call the help desk for (gasp!) an Outlook problem. A folder that I stored messages needing a response had somehow disappeared. Baffled, I made a cursory glance over all of the other folders and things (for lack of a better word like "features") in Outlook's left pane, and then, wearily, dialed the help desk. I spent more time on hold, listening to "Play" by Jennifer Lopez for almost its entire run length, and then somebody "logged on" to my PC (i.e. they took control, but I guess to call it such is too sinister) and within seconds had found my wayward folder in the deleted items of my archives. I was at once shamed and befuddled. I hadn't moved it there, had I? How does one go about deleting a folder? For not checking in there I felt like a total jackass, but really I can't beat myself up too much because there is no reason for the deleted items folder to exist, let alone for mine to have appeared there.

Something else that I noticed this morning is that the local ATM asks for users to "Please insert or swipe card", though it only has a receptacle to insert one. Would it kill somebody to determine just that and leave the other off of the screen? I understand the desire for generic universality, but still that just smacks of slapdash laziness. Contrast that with this mini PC that knows with way is up (the guy made two different cases, one for Linux and one for Windows) and boots the appropriate OS automatically. Can't we make an ATM that smart, with all of the professionals and designers behind it? Don't the people who build the machines communicate with the people who make the software that runs on them? I doubt it, and this saddens me, me with my engineering degree.

On an unrelated note, it is with great reservation that I am reserving (oops, used same word stem twice in the same sentence) Paul Davidson's Consumer Joe on boingboing's recommendation. I'd run across the title a number of weeks ago but I have been burned in the past by similar books of crank letters. The standard to which I hold all of them is the Lazlo Toth canon, written by former SNL funnyman Don Novello, and few so far have stood up to those letters. Others left such a slight impact on me as to have made me forget their titles and authors, though I remember one had a brown cover and another had an introduction by Jerry Seinfeld. Know this: I usually do not forget books. Maybe I am just reading too many. I admire Scott's resolve to read all of his books before buying or borrowing any new ones, but I can't logistically do that since many of my books are a two hour drive away. And when I had tried such a system with my CDs and DVDs it failed miserably. I still haven't caught myself up on the DVDs, and I haven't bought one in months, but that's what a well-stocked library system does to me.

And holy shit, Blogshares is gone. *Poof* and I am free of that monkey(x) on my back. I had a decent run, became a virtual hundred millionaire, was twelfth best player one month and even managed to break the rules and have both accounts open at once. I only wish I had kept my portfolio somewhere so that I could finally get around to visiting the hundred or so sites in which I was part "owner". Or complete owner, as in jwz's journal, a coup that netted me nine million virtual bucks for a cool hundred thousand. Oh well, I never paid them anything so I cannot complain that they picked up shop and went away.