(12:20 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Tuesday Hatred: Computer Complaints

• When I type into the Firefox search bar too quickly after clicking on it, sometimes it will "select" the first two letters I type, meaning that they get overwritten as I continue to type. I hate that.
  
• I hate every single minor change they made in Gmail last week. One of the top ones: they got rid of the purely chat-free mode. Now I have the stupid chat box showing me signed off (I use another software client for Gchat), and every e-mail conversation including other Gmail users shows their chat status as "unavailable," every single time. Why did they make such a stupid fucking change?
  
• I hate it when my mp3s skip, and more generally when I lose my connection to the wireless router. I especially hate it when this happens and then it says that I'm reconnected, but nothing will load -- and so I click to "repair" the connection, but that just sits on "Disabling wireless adapter" forever and ever. And then when I try to reboot, it hangs on "Windows is shutting down," so I have to manually turn it on and off. This happens every two days. I hate my computer.
  
• I hate it when Windows shuts Firefox down and it asks me if I want to restart the previous session. I also hate that some Firefox skin that I don't even use apparently upgrades every week and asks if I want to update it.
  
• I hate Apple Software Update. I also hate that I've accidentally hit okay to update my "somehow obtained" copy of Adobe Acrobat. I hate how collossally slow the full Acrobat is -- and I hate that Reader is almost as bad, for reasons that are not at all clear. Everyone should be using Foxit Reader rather than the official Abode viewer! Everyone! Download it immediately! It makes PDF files usable! (The only thing it doesn't have is the "full search" feature that gives you little clips of where a string appears -- a really great tool if you happen to be making an index.)
  
• I hate when I paste from a website and MS applications keep the formatting -- including links, stupid font sizes, etc. I figured out a workaround on Word, but I don't want to re-figure it out for Excel. (I know that you can select from the little drop-down menu, but I hate that it takes multiple steps to get a paste function that actually makes sense -- you should at least be able to change which paste mode is the default, then select "idiotic paste" from the drop-down menu in the one in a million chance that you want it.) Relatedly, I hate how fucking slow Excel is on my computer and I hate that I can't listen to mp3s and use Excel at the same time without experiencing heart attack-inducing slowness.
  
• I hate the HTML code generated by Microsoft Word. I'm forced to either manually reenter the formatting or else manually edit out nonsensical tags that aren't picked up as tags by any browser I've ever used. Is it really so hard to parse out that the whole document is in plain text, except that there is italic beginning here and ending here? Why do we have to have a million redundant "span" tags that randomly begin and end the normal formatting? And why this trend toward using "span" tags for italic and bold anyway? I mean, my God!
  
• I hate that the computers at CTS are set up so that literally every time you log on, it's like it's the first time you've ever used the computer -- so it asks you, every fucking time, if you want to save passwords, if it's okay to view non-secure items, etc., etc., etc. It even asks if you want to delete unused desktop icons -- even though student accounts don't actually have the security level required to delete them! I mean, what the fuck? I have complained about this a couple times every year, and they never change it -- even though the fucking thing boots off the network, so you'd only have to change one thing! (I also hate that I didn't get the tech support job at CTS because of my lack of "experience." Where was nepotism when I needed it? Everyone says that the person they actually hired sucks ass!)
  
• I hate using Gmail on Internet Explorer -- I always have to hit refresh three times to get it to finally redirect to my inbox. Where is the U of C tech department on this? A great university should use Firefox (despite my complaints above).
  
• I hate how angry I get at computer malfunctions.

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