[geeks] my head just went explodey

[velociraptor]

On Apr 1, 2005 5:32 PM, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
>
> I really hate this trend.  The industry has successfully deeducated
> everyone.

Think of the "popular" television shows, the reading level of USA Today,
etc. and you'll see where it's all going.
 
> The worst thing about this and similar situations is that eventually it
> forces everyone to do things the broken way, or face isolation.

On one of my mailing lists with my college buddies, I finally broke
down and kill-filed two guys that can't even figure out how to quote
properly in their damned non-standard-compliant HTML only email
clients.  The list constantly errupts into arguments about what is/is
not a standard, etc. ad naseum because a handful of bozos think
because the *can* everybody *must*.
 
> I already have a hard time getting and maintaining a job unless I do
> blindly stupid things like use Word.

Ach! The SA's I work with, while capable when it comes to the OS,
etc., just don't understand why I balk everytime they say "the 
documentation is a Word file in our public folder".  They are frikking 
UNIX SA's for chrissakes!  OK, assuage manglement by tossing
a plain text document in there--but put up a web repository or 
*something* on a UNIX server so you don't have to worry about it
when the friggin' Exchange servers go belly up.  

Or, why, when the documentation says, "start up jnbSA", I say, "we
need to document the CLI steps for this".  Just the other night was 
a prime example--I had to do a WebSphere deployment for the dev-
elopers, and ended up having to switch window managers on my 
desktop box b/c the stupid admin GUI wouldn't work under the one
I was running.* WTF?  At least with WebLogic you don't have to 
handhold the damned middleware by exploding it's .war files for it,
and can't point a browser at at admin port.  What a concept!

Feh.  The only way I can see staying in IT going forward is getting 
into the hardcore side of security where they pay you the big bucks 
and expect the bad news as part of the deal.  The attitude of mgmt
and the lusers steals the joy right out of being a geek for pay.

=Nadine=

[*] I switched from fluxbox to fvwm2 and it worked.  I broke down and
installed Cygwin on the PC as my "stop gap" for doing this kinda of 
crap in the future.