Re: You would think that coming up with a name is the easiest thing in the world
Hmm... Fuck IT. Might work you know...
9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009
You know why certain American country music radio stations never took off in the United Kingdom?
But it did resonate with recent thoughts I'd had on companies such as Wahanda and a few others whose names escape me, but they were meaningless syllabic strings akin to baby babble offering virtual services such as a comparison of comparison sites, yet-another-restaurant-review site and being able to buy something you don't really want at a price you can't really afford from someone that you don't really like (a bit like Starbucks operating under a shill name).
Anyway, Wahanda has rebranded as Treatwell. Meh. Bonus - no more annoying guitar singing adverts. But so many others are doing this, it makes me wonder what the point of the name was in the first place.
The number of times I've seen manuals that say "right click" when they mean "secondary" or "contextual" click... because you can swap the button functions over for left handers, and you do get people with three button mice etc etc. And people who use trackpads or digitiser tablets.
You mean like where Word has gone? Where a microscopic picture of a pair of binoculars means "Find", and God alone knows what two parallel grey lines over a pair of green right pointing arrows with some feint dotted motif behind it does, or how it differs from the same but with only one green arrow...
We can't get the radio mics to work. Just no signal from them. The signal bar shows just nothing at all.
"Hm," I think, "has someone changed the frequency setting? Batteries dead? Better take a look as that seems odd."
Walk... walk... walk... walk... walk... ... ... ... walk... walk... walk... walk... walk... enter room, no lights on the receivers, the person points to the mixer unit which has power but no signal level bar even with them banging away on the £100+ each microphones. Switch power on at PSU and aerial distribution unit (switch is at the front and very obvious and I've show this person how to use it all before). Lights up like a Christmas tree - radio mics come on. Not a problem at all.
Mouse doesn't work... at an Arts and Design college. Usual cause (until we got the new back to back desks) was that the extra long mouse cables dangled down the back of the desk, where the students would stretch out, catch their foot on the cord, and yank the thing out of the back of the computer.
I wanted to remove the audio track from a video I recorded of a road junction to send to the local highways authority. Took the video on my iPhone... on my iMac, it comes up in Photos. Great. Now right click, reveal in Finder... wait... where's that gone? OK, drag and drop it from Photos into iMovie... nope, that doesn't work... OK, look in the Movies folder in my User folder, that's where video used to end up... Nope, not there. Pictures? Nope. Ah, a big library file. What was that trick to show a package contents? Alt key, click... WTF?! A dozen folders with obscure names? Back to Photos... what the F*** can I do with this? Info... Ah! A Filename... let's spotlight it... and... it found it! In photos. Back to square one. GRRRRR! I can see it on the screen... WHERE THE F*** IS IT ON MY COMPUTER? Ah, export. No export. Share? SHARE? I don't want to share it, I want to edit it before I share it... Oh, I can apparently share it with myself as a file. Resolution to export at? I don't know. The original one I guess. I don't want to waste cycles reducing the resolution. Nope I can't recall the specs of that camera on the phone. I thought it was HD... that's 1080p... Not an option. Can't be it. No idea. Wonder if the original resolution is the default one? 720p anyway, that'll have to do.
So where... Ah! NOW it's a f***ing file. We're getting somewhere. Now, how to get it into iMovie...
Open... Nope. OH FUCK IT ALL TO HELL! Where's my camcorder?
a fridge which could display a live view of the contents of the salad drawer so that the user could tell if their lettuce was fresh without opening the door or even using a web browser at their office. You see, when you asked me for a feed from a webb cam ... well, naturally...
So long as you take home the message that "end user computing" isn't only heading in one direction. I've got a fight on my hands with End User Services managers who are insisting that they create a managed, standard desktop running on managed, standard hardware for all end users because "that's the future", when the "end users" I look after are, in fact, developing scripts and software for their medical & biological research tools and not being allowed to install e.g. Matlab for themselves and spoon-feeding them a bland array of pre-prepared, standardised desktop machines is not exactly preparing them for life outside this university or adding value to their CVs when they leave to head off into the big, wide world.
Almost as bad as NCIS. "The mines are triggered by a needle laser trip wire that communicates by encrypted wifi to detonate mines simultaneously..." because wifi now means radio, right kids? And encrypted means unblockable without Herculean effort that yields the key at one second before detonation.