Alpha Mind Blog

A couple of hours ago I tweeted thus:

Tempted to start blogging every piece of hard/software that doesn’t work. Could be a full-time job. Why do we put up w. so much rubbish?

Well, I’ve decided to go ahead and start doing it.

In no order whatsoever, here are just a very few of the broken, incomplete, badly designed, badly supported, just-plain-sucky things I’ve had to deal with in the past couple of weeks:

1. Blogger. I don’t think Google has made a single improvement to this mess since they bought it. It’s a rudimentary, feature-deficient, ugly, lousy blog platform.Today I blogged a post by a Blogger blogger (oy, that clause is a mess), and of course I couldn’t send a trackback, because Blogger doesn’t believe in trackbacks. But they’ve got this possibly-spiffy feature called “create a link,” which I hoped would be a simple interface for manually creating a trackback. Such a feature would have been a baby step out of the dark ages. But no, it’s a process by which, despite my already owning too many blogs, Blogger tries to compel me to create one using Blogger, so I can write a single post that links to the post I want to track back to. After I’ve already written my post that links.Later, of course, I learned that my link will show up automatically, after Google Blog Search finds it. But I learn this after I waste a good deal of time trying to understand a feature that should have been, but wasn’t, designed to follow existing standardsI remember an old joke:

   Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light build? A: None. Bill has declared darkness a standard.

   Maybe it’s time to dust that one off and make a couple of substitutions on the names?

2. Windows Live Writer, about which I said something quite positive just a few days back. Here’s a post I put on one of my other blogs yesterday:

   And here’s what Windows Live Writer wanted me to deal with to get that post written:

   

   ‘Nuff said, I think.

More non-functioning junk coming in next few posts, including but not limited to:

• my Giant bicycle: four months after purchase, it’s at death’s door, but trying to kill me first…
• BlogTalkRadio: lots of time wasted with support people who provide absolutely no support…
• a GE can opener that sprays the whole kitchen with can juice.
• OpenOffice Writer: doesn’t permit Windows Vista to index contents of document files…
• Skype, whose SkypeOut service is absolutely unsuitable for business use…
• the city of Berkeley, which I love but is the most incompetently managed municipality I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen way too many municipalities)

And we might just get around to exploring the burning question:

With everything sucking this much, how long can the Kool-Aid last?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Business Innovation, Innovation, Life Itself, Social Media Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Comments Feed . Both comments and pings are currently closed.