Firehed’s Blog

Aperture + 50 10MB RAW files + Parallels + 1GB RAM + slow HDD + Thinkpad running OSx86 = painfully slow.

Just FYI. If you try it, expect your dirty hack of a laptop to run 1993-slow. Although it’s somewhat ironic that it’s still only warm to the touch, while my MBP would be hot to the point of melting skin. Oh well.

Wow, I thought FME sucked. Two papers, stats, and accounting homework tonight (after other FME work, of course). Then a Friday Morning exam (for FME, naturally). Okay, FME still sucks. But the other shitload of useless work for equally worthless classes really isn’t improving my mood. As my AIM away message states right now, I’d probably enjoy sticking my 1950’s tripod up my ass fully extended and backwards more than writing this essay (which, by the way, has a topic WAY too broad to come up with a thesis for; though, as the professor could rightly point out, that might be because I haven’t read either of the books).

So… today’s agenda:
[x] classes
[x] FME website
[skipped] guest speaker
[_] four-page essay on an un-thesis-able topic
[_] stats
[_] accounting
[x] complete loss of sanity
[x] bitch about it on el blog
[_] chat session to study for FME exam
[/] deafen myself blasting some tunes
[_] hunt down a new cat5 cable (clippy bit is broken so I’m disconnecting every fifteen seconds)
[_] cry myself to sleep

I swear (and I’m sure I’ve said it before), if I hadn’t already paid, I’d drop out of this place. It’s a complete and utter waste of my time, and at least as far as money goes, my time isn’t especially valuable. Whatever… spring break isn’t far off (where I’ll spend a week doing nothing, as going down to FL and watching drunken sluts really doesn’t appeal that much to me; there’s a whole internet of sober sluts, thanks), then only another couple months of hell. Oh goodie.

And, of course, in class. As the professor is discussing knocking people’s participation for dicking around on the laptop in class. If you can read this, it worked. And my participation grade dropped a couple points.

“I needed to meet my quota and I was drunk.”
Well, that’s just how we roll in Buzz2o.

As always! I’d preordered Wii Play, hadn’t heard anything from a while. Didn’t think a whole lot of it since it’s been popular, but I went to check the preorder status and it said ‘closed’. Huh? Gave them a quick call to see what the deal was. They explained (in perfect English, no outsourcing there, thank God) that they’ve been having trouble keeping it in stock so the preorder was effectively cancelled. I wasn’t quite sure what to do, but a couple hours later, I got an email saying that my rush order was being processed. It’s already out the door, and my history with Newegg would tell me that they might have personally driven down to the Nintendo HQ and bought a copy to get shipped out to me.

Glad I called. I’m even more glad that I can now use Newegg through Bit-tech and get the same great service that I’m used to and support my favorite Brits in the process. w00t!

Gotta love the random crap that comes up on Digg.  The PS3 was being outsold by the SNES, at something like eleventh and twelfth place.  They’ve really bombed since the screenshot was taken.  The PS3 is sitting at 47th (as of posting) in Video Games.  Currently outranked by about half a dozen different Zelda games, the Wii, SNES, and N64, Xbox 360 Premium, classic Xbox, the Game Boy player for GCN, the SNES and N64 controllers (along with the Wiimote, nunchuck, and classic), Final Fantasy VII (which recently enjoyed its tenth birthday from the original Japan release; the North America release will turn ten about three weeks before I turn twenty later this year [oh, damn...], and is selling for more now than when it ever retailed for), and another couple dozen other miscellaneous games and accessories.

In fairness, it seems sold out at Amazon so it’s only sold through people stupid enough to try to gouge for it right now, so it’s certainly not helping its sales rank.  But the last time I was in any electronics store, it was readily available.  Sad enough for what was supposed to be the most powerfully awesome console evar!!!11, but being beaten in sales rank for a controller for a console that predates it by a decade and a half?  Ouch.

Can’t blame people for wanting to play the SNES again.  I paid my eight bucks for Zelda: LTTP on Virtual Console, and it brings back some damn fine memories.  Almost beaten it again, though I’ve completely forgotten where the hell one of those useless canes is.  Turns out that I found an old CD that contains a LTTP website I was building back in 1998 or so; I’m sure it’ll remind me both where the thing is and how to never, ever build a website again.

Meh. I’ve got a terabyte of storage, and I just can’t use it properly. I knew it would be a problem, but it’s worse than I thought. It’s this whole thing with using your laptop as a desktop replacement… desktops don’t move; laptops do. I suppose I really should just finally cough up for that Mac Mini (but I’m still praying for an iMac-equivalent minus screen - price aside, I just don’t have room for another display) so I could offload my ever-increasing Aperture library to my fileserver like I should have been doing from day one.

Honestly, Apple could do a better job of doing it. With the MBP, it’s certainly designed for pro-type use, hence the name. Pros have nice cameras - I’m far from pro, but I do have a nice camera, and shooting in 10.1MP RAW with burst-fire mode tends to burn space at a mind-boggling rate. The flaw with flash, I suppose - no limit like there is with film. It’s not uncommon for me to offload a hundred files at a time (about a gig of photos), and I can take that many in an afternoon. That adds up. So, what’s the deal with not being able to easily split or move your Aperture library? I want to save it to a network share, but not have things flip out when I’m away from my fileserver and want to get some shots off the card. You know - download now, transfer later, automatically? Maybe in Leopard - I hope.

But seriously, 80GB drive for a machine designed to run Final Cut and Aperture, both of which rip through drive space like… uhh… well, I suck at metaphors, but you get the idea. And 5400RPM? Come on. Near full drive -> beachballing all the time. Grr.

Yeah, as a standard user, I’d be asking a bit much. But as someone using products marketed towards the prosumer/professional level, I don’t think it’s really that out of reach. I simply don’t have the spare cash right now to buy a Mini (especially as I’d really like to just pull the drives from my fileserver and drop them in a little NAS box, and even empty NAS boxes are quite expensive for what you’re getting - hardly any price difference than a cheap box with network shares set up and a large loss in functionality), but storing my Aperture library (and iTunes as well, preferably) on a network share is just logistically impossible on a notebook that doesn’t always stay in one place.

Damn. The real pain here is that even though a Mac Mini is only $600, I’d still be looking at spending another $300 on a 2GB kit of RAM and a 7200RPM drive. For $200 more at that point, I could just get an iMac, although it would only have a gig of RAM (but a 160GB 7.2k RPM drive). See, that’s the problem again. No space.

Fuck it, I’ll just drop $2k on an entry-level Mac Pro (with quad cores, I think 2GHz is fine
so I can save over $250), put my existing SATA drives in there, make everything happy and maybe toss on OSX Server too for kicks. At least it would consolidate things a bit. But, shit, that’s now $1,400 more than I was looking at to begin with!

If only OSx86 would just work properly on FrozenFire, I’d be all set. I already have a mighty fine desktop system that can hold quite a bit of storage, but, alas, Windows. :cry: G’damn capitalism and not having a job and being a student at a severely overpriced school and all that crap. Maybe I’ll just sell a bunch of crap on eBay and be done with it.

Well, it just won’t make sense out of context. But while it was intended as a joke, I really wouldn’t put it past them. Yes, “them” means my first-block class professors.

Since teachers here don’t understand the concept of “blog”, I figured I might as well infringe my own copyright and repost it to an actual blog (ie, one can be read by more than three people). If you’re in Buzz2O, you know how I feel. If you’re not - congrats to me, I have visitors!

It looks like I hadn’t been clear enough in my expectations with the team before. Always a translation I tend to forget about, although the general technical ineptitude of most of the team doesn’t help. Once I stated exactly what I needed in the clearest way I could, I actually managed to get the information I was looking for. Notably, job priorities and EXACTLY what people are looking for in the custom systems. Discussing some things privately with other employees show that their overall concerns are largely the same as mine - communication is still okay at best (due almost entirely to Sharepoint; for the love of all things sacred, stop defending that abomination - it sucks in every way possible, and everyone who I’ve discussed it with agrees), and that our marketing efforts aren’t as good as they should be. I was very disappointed with what we had to show at the FME fair on Weds - the presentation looked very unprofessional; and I’ve heard around that many people thought our sales team was excessively pushy. Likewise, our other marketing seems very week - I’ve only noticed a single ad for our business, and it looked to be very ineffective. I still hate the sales quota system we have in place, but it sounds like changes mostly for the better are in the works.

As far as my own job goes, rather than the business as a whole, it’s getting marginally better, but it still feels mostly like a waste of my time (then again, going to classes does as well) - I’m getting no return for my time investment (a custom-designed system like what I’ve created for free could easily net me four figures), and the stress of trying to build three or four fairly large projects in a few days time doesn’t help. But that’s at least partially attributed to the abysmal social offerings of this school.

It seems that most people aren’t really expressing how they feel about the business at the meetings, which is a bit concerning. It’s hard to say exactly why - probably not trying to offend people - but it does nothing to help correct the issues. Whenever I’m privately discussing the business outside of a meeting, I’d say the rating of the business as compared to how we’d consider it at a meeting (esp. the VP meetings) drops by two or three points. The real issue is that nobody seems to get the message across to the person who really needs to hear it, although it frankly depends on how bitchy of a mood we’re in at the same time (at least with me, the amount held back varies inversely with how pissed I am at the time)

Honestly, we’ve all heard it before. “Those who can’t do teach,” or something to that general effect. It sure holds true at this hellhole. Well, let’s quote an email after I make a post stating that I broke SharePoint (anyone who’s actually competent in IT would know that it was a translation to what everyone else can understand, rather than talking about bandwidth quotas to the technically inept).

“Hi Folks:

In a recent post, Eric has implied that SharePoint cannot handle large files and that his having posted a large file has somehow “broken” SharePoint. That’s not the case. The problem is that Babson has limited the size of files that we can post so that we don’t overtax our server resources (both storage and down-load bandwidth). I’m sure that we can have these limits increased if it’s absolutely necessary. However, let’s try to be good citizens and remember that we are using a resource provided to us at no extra cost. You can certainly pay to host these large files offsite, and many companies provide a great deal of storage for a relatively low fee. If this does become an issue, I’d be happy to go to bat for you to increase the size limit for Buzz2o here at Babson.

Prof. Gordon

BTW, the ability of administrators to limit file sizes is considered a positive “feature” of SharePoint, and I would tend to agree that it is.”

Well, I would tend to agree that you’re a fucking retard. I don’t know how much further out of your way you can go to defend the miserable excuse for a steaming pile that is SharePoint, but I know you’re quite far down the path. I don’t think I’ve EVER seen a site with a worse UI in my life, and I’ve seen some pretty fucking bad UIs in my time. A storage quota of under 100MB for a thirty-person group seems just a tad low, especially considering that the totally free Google Apps for your Domain (google.com/a) gives a full Gmail account (>2.5GB) per user.

Don’t get me wrong - user quotas are quite understandable, and being able to put such limitations in place is indeed a feature. But touting it as if it’s one of those Microsoft innovations? Honestly… shut the fuck up. It’s about two lines of code in PHP, and every web app I’ve seen that lets you upload files also allows admins to set size limits. But apparently when such an implementation raises my tuition by an extra few hundred bucks, it’s some stunning new code that nobody could have thought up before.

But, honestly, I can deal with stupidly low quotas. What I can’t deal with are completely inept professors who claim to know what they’re talking about and try to force their “knowledge” upon dozens of unknowing business students paying $45,000 a year for a shitty education. Maybe if the guy could at least back up his claims once, but I’ve yet to see it happen. In-class (well, out-of-class, technically, since we had to go to the damn thing on a day off) activity - split into groups, process some fake orders, come up with an IT solution to help you do it. Predictably, I’m on IT. So, dump the all-but-useless Excel crap into a database and bang together a few lines of code to pull the relevant data, right? Oh, no. “You paid for Excel, use that!” “This [MAMP] is free, and is actually the right tool for the job…” “….*typical “don’t know how to deal with IT-savvy students look* just use Excel”. Returns about twenty minutes later after someone else presumably knocked some sense into him, told me I could use my old approach. Had to start fresh, since I’d deleted the old stuff as he’s never caved in before and assumed it would just be a waste of disk space. Well, thanks for putting us in last place.

So, seriously, if you’re going to be an IT professor, learn IT. Paid doesn’t translate to good, Microsoft doesn’t translate to ‘always the right tool for the job’. If you want to profess otherwise, for the love of God, don’t do it when classes cost me a hundred bucks an hour.

Short version: Babson sucks. If you’re planning to go there, save yourself a ton of headache and money and look elsewhere. And if you manage to fall for the marketing like I did, at least don’t get the same idiot of a professor I did.