Little things that annoy the hell out of you

[trap15]

[Edmond Dantes]

Another thing I was just reminded of.

People who are stupid with computers

For example, not long ago I had a friend who said he wanted to rip a DVD to an AVI file. I'm like "that's easy, download Handbrake"... but then he says he doesn't want to download anything, he wants to do it using only software he already has on his machine -__-

And then there's anytime people tell me that their computers are running slow or getting slogged. Nine times out of ten, they think its either viruses or just how old their machine is, but when I investigate I find out its simply because they have a lot of crapware installed that is running in the background and eating their resources. And this is very easy to fix--just download and run CCleaner to scrub unnecessary files, uninstall unwanted apps and limit what items start on bootup, and then probably run Avira and Malwarebytes (and Spybot S&D) for good measure...

But once again, "Oh no I don't trust these download programs that's too complicated and I might need some of these programs" or some other bullshit excuse.

Some people just shouldn't be allowed to own a computer, seriously.

It's like, imagine if someone said "I have a terrible migraine headache! What? Take aspirin? NO FUCKING WAY!" People who have a problem but then refuse all solutions deserve to have problems. Frankly, I'm happy that these people suffer.

[Formless God]

MBAM and Spybot are really nice. To hell with Avira, though. In one of the updates it had me run the installer again. I made sure to uncheck all the 3rd party shit. After the installation, my Document and Settings was flooded with Ask.com trash and the program picked up a suspicious .dll in its own folder. Couldn't scrub that fucker off my machine quick enough.

[Ed Oscuro]

Haha, I remember once I agreed to look at somebody's slow laptop.

It was incredibly, painfully slow (and slow by the standards of my Core i7 laptop, which feels really slow by the standards of SSDs, 16GB, and running new Firefox revisions), and had a lot of stuff simply locked out, including the task manager - always a flashing red light to YOUR COMPUTAR HAS BEEN INFESTED WITH THE BADNESS.

Tons of BHOs related to online games. I pointed out that these things were probably Very Bad and the kid was like "well, but I like those..." and wouldn't even agree to try to get anything removed. Yeah, okay, enjoy having a paperweight for a laptop then that you can't get any work done on and which is probably stealing all your personal information Hopefully he wisened up later and just reinstalled the OS.

[Specineff]

People who have a problem but then refuse all solutions deserve to have problems.

I'm so making that signature on another forum. Thank you for saying that.

[Pyongyang]

When you wake up and it's, say, 6:53am but you won't get up until 6:55am because it's just plain wrong to get up on an odd number.

[null1024]

Tons of BHOs related to online games. I pointed out that these things were probably Very Bad and the kid was like "well, but I like those..." and wouldn't even agree to try to get anything removed. Yeah, okay, enjoy having a paperweight for a laptop then that you can't get any work done on and which is probably stealing all your personal information Hopefully he wisened up later and just reinstalled the OS.

Oh lord, I'm actually glad that the people I know actually defer to those with experience on this point and let me just clean out all the shit and tell them to go play something that isn't Bad for your Machine(TM).

I've installed Ubuntu on machines for people that are not merely confused on using a computer but are actually clueless of what they were running. Much less likely to get infected, and they can still browse the web [which is all they used the machine for anyway].

[Specineff]

People who don't use proper hyphenation in sentences. Examples:

"The truck carried a load bearing a sticker identifying the country of origin." This tells me that the load on the truck has been labeled to indicate where it came from.

"The truck carried a load-bearing steel beam of enormous dimensions." This tells me the steel beam is intended to support a weight itself upon installation.

It's a minor pet peeve, but darn it. English is one heck of a practical language, even if it was cobbled up from parts of German, Latin and others. Might as well make full use of that flexibility.

[null1024]

Tiny text in games made at 480p or lower. Even if you display it on a big TV, it's blurry and unreadable.
see: Xenoblade [especially bad, it's like they were making it for a 720p screen], Wipeout 3 [Special Edition fixes it, but that's PAL only], etc.

People who don't use proper hyphenation in sentences. Examples:

"The truck carried a load bearing a sticker identifying the country of origin." This tells me that the load on the truck has been labeled to indicate where it came from.

"The truck carried a load-bearing steel beam of enormous dimensions." This tells me the steel beam is intended to support a weight itself upon installation.

It's a minor pet peeve, but darn it. English is one heck of a practical language, even if it was cobbled up from parts of German, Latin and others. Might as well make full use of that flexibility.

It's a little bothersome, except that sometimes you just don't even know which word pairs to hyphenate. I'm not even sure if I should hyphenate "word pairs" or not... and it's also an issue that no automated spell checker will catch.

[Ed Oscuro]

Hyphens are added and dropped over time as the language changes. I probably use some hyphenated pairs that are already a bit archaic.

I think the story here is one of punctuation. These examples show the importance of good ol' commas or additional words as well.

In the examples above, I think context is enough to show you what is meant. For example, if you saw this sentence:

"The truck carried a load-bearing a sticker-identifying the country of origin" it would actually be paced more naturally as dashes (the grammar would work better as a parenthetical) reflecting a speaker's voice. Adding spaces around each of the hyphens would change their function of course. Another variation of the example:
"The truck carried a load bearing a sticker identifying the country of origin" doesn't really strike me as being too ambiguous. It just contrasts with the previous example by appearing "out of breath," but we aren't going to interpret that to mean something is load-bearing (besides the truck, that is).

"The trucks have started to move load bearing stickers" could be sorted out by adding either a hyphen or an "a" and get different meanings.
"The trucks have started to move a load bearing stickers" - the load has stickers on it
"The trucks have started to move load-bearing stickers" - the stickers bear the weight of the load.
"The trucks have started to move a load, bearing stickers" - probably means the trucks bear stickers and are moving a load, although I would prefer "Trucks bearing stickers" or "Trucks, bearing stickers, have started..."

[MOSQUITO FIGHTER]

Trying to reattach the rear view mirror to the windshield is a total pain. The adhesive Permatex stuff never works. Even if you do manage to get it to stick, as soon as the weather starts to get hot outside it just melts it off. I'm seriously considering taking it to the dealership. I wonder what they use at the factory?

[RGC]

.

[null1024]

"Unexplained error when running the game" errors in GM. If I run the game in debug, often I can hit pause and then play to get the game working again, and occasionally it'll crash again with the real error [in this case, I wasn't doing proper near-camera Z clipping, so when the player zoomed back onto the screen after moving the camera, weird side-effects happened, and it wasn't entirely consistent...], "Invalid floating point operation" [although that's completely unhelpful because damn near every number in GM is a double].

I was about to kick a puppy, I had gotten a nice RayForce-like 3D object system going on, lots of scaled sprites, and it had come together enough for me to begin implementing bosses and the like. And then it just decided to throw up spurious errors at me, bleh.

I have no idea what voodoo set of values caused the error, I had originally thought something was being screwed up with the camera positioning code, because it only crashed when I was messing with the camera [and this error happened after a bunch of changes, the manual camera adjustment worked just fine without crashing before, and after I was looking at another glitch [visual, non-crashing], this one came up, and they were unrelated [I never found exactly what the display glitch was, something to do with explosions, so I just diked out enough code to remove the effect it seemed to be associated with [when bullets get cancelled upon death, they'd make an explosion object and disappear]]].

/vent

Back to coding.


...also, apparently the GM Wiki got all dicked up, because supposedly there was a helpful page on possible causes of the "Unexplained error when running the game" message, and it [along with a bunch of pages] got deleted. Mightn't have been supremely helpful [I'm still using GM5.3a, GM6 doesn't like Vista/7/8, and GM7/8/Studio are YoYoGames stuff and they can go fuck themselves, even if I have GM8 installed still].

[BulletMagnet]

Prospective employers who promise to let you know whether or not they've decided to hire you and not leave you hanging indefinitely once they've made their decision. Presumably I don't have to finish.

[trap15]

null1024: Sounds like a division by zero

[null1024]

null1024: Sounds like a division by zero

There actually was one that I found later related to the camera zoom code, but GM usually reports those properly.

[Edmond Dantes]

That eBay only accepts Paypal, and Paypal now requires you to send in faxes or scans of various documents to use their service.

If not for that, I'd probably own a couple of games I've been wanting for some time now.

(Hey, if anyone here has Turrican II for MS-DOS, or a great-condition Wing Commander: the Kilrathi Saga, we might discuss a trade...)

[O. Van Bruce]

Prospective employers who promise to let you know whether or not they've decided to hire you and not leave you hanging indefinitely once they've made their decision. Presumably I don't have to finish.

Oh God, that... They play with my feelings.

[drauch]

Prospective employers who promise to let you know whether or not they've decided to hire you and not leave you hanging indefinitely once they've made their decision. Presumably I don't have to finish.

Oh God, that... They play with my feelings.

Ugh... going through that right now. Absolutely the worst. Need to be searching for jobs, but really can't mess up a prospective opportunity. I'll probably get railed in the end.

[powersoul]

After a short chat with my doctor, I realized that I get really annoyed with people of management level easily, because of the way they perform for a job that requires professionalism. Like how the HR replied to a co-worker's question of "My head and manager couldn't solve my problem, can you help me" with "Seek a higher authority" when the so-called higher authority is HR itself.

[jonny5]

That eBay only accepts Paypal, and Paypal now requires you to send in faxes or scans of various documents to use their service.

Ya, ran into this recently when my g/f tried to make a paypal account. We said fuck that, as some of the documents they are asking for are not things we are willing to provide. She can just use mine instead.

[MX7]

People who go completely shit the bed crazy just because it's a sunny day. On the way home from work I saw five potentially fatal car crashes, the last one ended up with the participants kicking each others cars before beating the shit out of each other. Probably the same all over London.

In fact, why is private transport even still a thing? It's dirty, dangerous, and completely unnecessary, especially in metropolitan areas.

[moh]

the last one ended up with the participants kicking each others cars before beating the shit out of each other.

woah, pretty aggressive.

[MX7]

the last one ended up with the participants kicking each others cars before beating the shit out of each other.

woah, pretty aggressive.

It was pretty crazy. Then from one of the cars emerged an elderly bloke (presumably a father) wearing a cowboy hat and it just got embarrassing. Seriously, some people should just count to ten and go home.

[Edmond Dantes]

That eBay only accepts Paypal, and Paypal now requires you to send in faxes or scans of various documents to use their service.

Ya, ran into this recently when my g/f tried to make a paypal account. We said fuck that, as some of the documents they are asking for are not things we are willing to provide. She can just use mine instead.

The sad thing is, eBay seems to be the only place I can find some of the games I'm looking for--for a decent price, in any case.

Like Turrican II... eBay is the only place I've seen selling the game (and then its the Amiga one, not the DOS one). Every time I Google it, I get abandonware pages -__- I don't want to pirate it, I want to buy it!

[ptoing]

Both the Publisher and the Developer of Turrican II, which is 22 years old, are defunct. I doubt anyone would give a fuck if you pirated it. It's not like anyone who originally made it will see any of your money anyway.

Dos Turrican II on German ebay:
http://www.ebay.de/itm/PC-DOS-Turrican- ... 53e1d57921

[Ed Oscuro]

>watching episode of Cadfael
>Derek Jacobi disarming drunk knights with elbow strikes = YEAH
>download VLC 2.0.6
> Cadfael stutters and crashes within seconds


(replacing more morose looking image on account of hotlink backfire)

eh well time to turn on that verbose logging

[Edmond Dantes]

Both the Publisher and the Developer of Turrican II, which is 22 years old, are defunct. I doubt anyone would give a fuck if you pirated it. It's not like anyone who originally made it will see any of your money anyway.

Actually, in this case I already know I love Turrican, and that's why I want to own real copies. If I love a game, I want to own it in real form. It's like collecting a memento.

[KAI]

HDD malfunctions.

[Friendly]

HDD malfunctions.

Those aren't little things.