The Aerie

A Plague of Stupids

Apparently I need to let someone's people go, because I am being plagued like a Pharoah. First it was a rain of financial woes, which are at least on their way to sorting themselves out. Today it's a plague of stupids.

One stupid:while perusing our checking account my spouse notices the not-very-surprising-at-this-point: we've got bounced checks. In this case, an automatic withdrawal has come in while we are waiting for my consulting check to arrive today. This is just Murphy's Law, of course: the day the check shows up, we bounce a check. Thanks, thanks a lot.

That's not Teh Stupid however. Teh Stupid was discovered when she examined the detail of the loan to determine why its auto-withdrawal date was a surprise. Buried in the loan detail was a fee, $140/month for life insurance.

WTF?

A few calls later we determined that, indeed, we had never signed up for such a thing - nonetheless we've paid about $1260 over the past year. They have offered to cancel the fee and refund the money into our loan balance. The gall! The freakin' gall! How about I steal $140 from the bank every month - I'm sure when they catch me they would be perfectly content if I simply gave all the money back...

Grrr...

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A little "fun stupid." My client uses Lotus Notes for enterprise-wide e-mail.

Why? Why would anyone use this piece of crap?

An example? I have a shortcut on my desktop that points at a folder for one of my projects. So I get an e-mail attachment in Notes, and I want to save that attachment in the project folder. I click "Save" and then when it asks where, I click on the shortcut.

"There is already a file named 'shortcut.lnk' in this directory, do you wish to replace it?"

So Lotus Notes thinks that when I click on the shortcut link, that I want to re-name my attachment to "shortcut.lnk" and overwrite the link file with my attachment?

This is a bug that should have been caught in the first fifteen minutes of software alpha-testing. And this is in a major corporate e-mail system.

The mind boggles.

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I continue having trouble with my "extra" firewall. Yesterday I discovered that the updated firewall firmware left me unable to access any kind of streaming media site, such as Youtube. Indeed, visiting such a site was causing my web pages to hang. So I decided to disable the firewall again (it's an extra firewall) in order to allow such things to work, and sure enough as soon as I turned off the firewall they worked again.

This morning I awaken - no e-mail. Now, my overnight e-mail is all spam anyway, but nonetheless. So I look at the firewall - turning off the firewall also turned off my port-forwarding that allowed my e-mail to work.

Wha?

And in searching for ways to re-enable my port forwarding, I discover that there are not one, not two, but THREE means of enabling port forwarding on my firewall, each subtly different and apparently incompatible with each other.

Fortunately I got up early this morning, so despite taking half an hour to rebuild my port forwarding table, I still got to work on time. And yes, I would simply "get rid of" this firewall, except I can't - it's a necessary part of my connection to the Internet. It's the optional firewall in back of this one - the one I could remove if I desired - which has been protecting my network from disaster for the past week...

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Yes, the Plague of Stupids just keep coming, and it's not even lunchtime!

Posted by Albatross at March 21, 2007 10:46 AM | TrackBack