Venting thread

[Travis B.]

I'm really sorry.

[malloc]

Same here, that sounds very rough.

[Raphael]

I'm so sorry to hear that, rotting bones. All the best to you. I hope you can somehow manage.

[zompist]

My condolences, rotting. It's hard to lose a parent, and especially a person so important to you.

Hang in there. You're part of this community, at least.

[alice]

My condolences too.

[Ares Land]

My condolences too. I'm really sorry to hear that. Hang in there!

[bradrn]

My condolences also. Be assured that, if nothing else, you are welcome here.

---

And now a vent which is insignificant compared to yours, but very, very frustrating for me: I have to install MOE for a chemistry unit at university, and I am already sick of this crazy crazy software and its crazy crazy installation process despite the fact that I haven’t even gotten to the point of running the thing yet. Let’s consider their download ‘process’, for instance. First I tried downloading it from their website by clicking the ‘Download’ button and filling out the form. I click ‘Submit’, and I get — not an installer, but a message about how soon they will get in contact with me about downloading their software. Yeah, right. The email, when it comes, has of course absolutely no information whatsoever about how to get ahold of it. I eventually find the right place to ask in my university tech support system, and someone eventually comes and informs me about the installer located in a random folder in a random drive of my university network. (Which I have to access over the uni VPN, so thank God I’ve already gotten permission and installed it.) I duly copy the folder over to my local machine — but Windows informs me that it will take an inordinately long time. It reports ‘only’ 55min, but this being Windows this really means it’ll take the whole day. So I go and check on it — and surprise surprise, there’s a 6 GB ‘datafile.dat’ next to the installer. So that’s why it was so slow. Hmm, I wonder, do I really need a data file for an installer? So I copy over just the installer by itself, and see if it works without the data file. Turns out that it does — it still needs it, but can download it from the web instead of requiring me to copy it over the slow connection to the university server. So I run the installer, wait for the datafile to download, and start using the— haha, nope! Who am I kidding? Actually, after waiting an inordinate amount of time, it gives me an error about unpacking the datafile, or something. Coincidentally, this error popped up at exactly the same time I disabled the university VPN. (Because it turns out I can’t access my reference grammars when the VPN is on, and I wanted to check something about Bardi.) So, OK, the installer does need the datafile, all 6 GB of it, and furthermore I obviously can’t trust it to download it from the web. So — hooray, I get to download the humongous datafile over the slow connection to the university server! I start a PowerShell process (because I’ve heard it’s faster than Windows Explorer), go away to do something else while it downloads, come back to see another error and no downloaded datafile, restart the process, making sure to babysit it for like one and a half hours or something to make sure it doesn’t throw a tantrum, watch it end successfully and dance around in joy now that all 6 GB are safely saved on my computer, open up the installer, point it to the datafile location, start the installation process and — oh, what’s this? Another error? Wait a minute, that looks like the same unpacking error I got last time I ran the installer. It would appear, in fact, that there is a bug in the installer: it chokes no matter how I download the datafile, it would seem. Anyway, I give up at this point, just ignore the error, complete the installer process, and hope and pray that nothing’s been corrupted or anything.

But the fun is only beginning! There is still the license file to figure out. MOE appears to subcontract out to another program for license management, a bizarre arrangement I don’t recall seeing anywhere else. At least the university has provided a complimentary license file to students, which thoughtfully has been copied into an email and thence saved as a PDF, stripping out indentation and who knows what else somewhere along the line. There are certainly ‘instructions’ for how to register this license file. I of course use this term in the loosest sense, because generally one has an expectation that instructions work. (And also that they don’t actually contradict themself, though I eventually realised this was because I was using two different sets of instructions which were intended for different versions but not marked as such.) I start to follow the ‘instructions’, and soon am drowning in a sea of executables with names like lmtools and lmgrd with eight tabs to a window. First time around, it can’t find my license file; second time around, it finds the license but refuses to do anything with it. One tab seems to autodetect my Minitab license of all things, though this apparently has no effect on any other tabs; another one shows me a licensing service which I can’t stop, but can’t start either. Eventually I find a log file — in a completely different directory, of course — which informs me it can’t contact the licensing server. This, of course, is a server which presumably exists somewhere on campus, but which I have never heard of and have never seen anyone refer to. It is at this point when I finally gave up and emailed my supervisor asking if she has any idea what the hell’s going on with this software.

I must apologise, by the way, for I am almost certain that I have forgotten to include some episodes in the above recount. I can’t remember them in any detail, though. Presumably I must have scrubbed them from my brain. It’s a wonder I haven’t torn any of my hair out yet. (Mind you, that would probably do me some good. It’s gotten excessively long during this latest lockdown.)

[MacAnDàil]

I am sorry for your loss, Rotting. Perhaps her life can inspire your own to succeed as she did.

[Raphael]

Another example of something pretty trivial compared to what rotting bones is going through:

One of the doors in my apartment has just started creaking in a way that sounds creepily like a human being screaming in horrible agony whenever someone opens or closes it; my landlady and landlord have just gone on their summer vacation; and I'm not at all good at handling that kind of thing myself.

[KathTheDragon]

Have you tried oiling the hinges? Any oil you happen to have would probably work well enough til someone can have a look at them.

[Man in Space]

It hurts to eat. This is a symptom of my chronic health woes, and I do not like it.

[Raphael]

I hope you get better, Man in Space.

Have you tried oiling the hinges? Any oil you happen to have would probably work well enough til someone can have a look at them.

We're thinking about it. Problem is, we only have cooking oil ready at hand at the moment, and I've heard that if you use cooking oil to oil something, after a while, it'll turn bad, and then you'll have to put up with some pretty bad smells for a while.

[zompist]

We're thinking about it. Problem is, we only have cooking oil ready at hand at the moment, and I've heard that if you use cooking oil to oil something, after a while, it'll turn bad, and then you'll have to put up with some pretty bad smells for a while.

Don't use cooking oil. Go to the hardware store and get the smallest can of oil they sell. (In the US you'd get a can of WD40, which you can spray-- especially useful for hinges.)

Hinges are pretty simple devices-- the bit that squeaks is obviously the place where the metal surfaces move against each other. Drip or spray the oil in there, and move the door back and forth a bit to help spread the oil.

[Raphael]

Thank you!

[malloc]

Sorry for distracting from the loss of loved ones, but I made another huge mistake at work today and now they are even angrier than ever. This may well be the straw that breaks the camel's back and gets me fired. Even getting another job will prove difficult as my current employer will simply tell anyone looking at my résumé about my mistakes here. At the very least, it has permanently locked into the bottom rung of employees. It really stings to consider that literally everyone I know detests me at this point.

[Moose-tache]

Very sorry for your loss, rotting bones.

Now for an entirely less important torment: internet misinformation loops.

As you probably know, before electricity most common people had nothing useful to do between sun down and sun up, so during the long hours of darkness, especially in winter, they would sleep in spurts. I mean, if you're laying in bed for fourteen hours you're not going to sleep that long, after all. This is a matter of necessity, since winter nights are long and candles were expensive. Fine. What really grinds my gears is that the internet has interpreted "people had no choice but to sleep in spurts for half the year because they had more dark than they knew what to do with" as "humans are evolved to experience biphasic sleep." To me, this is ridiculous. People slept in spurts because there wasn't much alternative. If biphasic sleep is some kind of evolutionary feature, then what did pre-industrial people do in the summer? Did they all suffer from six months of sleep deprivation and just not talk about it? Did they go to bed in the middle of the day so they could get all their phases in? Obviously biphasic sleep is a behavioral adaptation, not a prescription for "correct" human sleep.

Now about those Dubai "poop trucks" everyone thinks exist...

[Linguoboy]

Well, fuck. Just found out that someone who attended the same party as me last Saturday has tested positive for COVID. It was outside and all the attendees were vaxxed so we were going around unmasked. I got tested today but it'll be a day or two before I have the results. The good news is that I feel fine and everyone else in this guy's household has gotten their tests back and they're negative--except for the one member who I had sex with on Tuesday morning with lots of snogging. He won't know until tomorrow at the earliest. FML.

[alice]

Fingers crossed for you, linguoboy.

[Ares Land]

Likewise. Waiting for test results is awfully stressful. Take care.

[Raphael]

Good luck, Linguoboy!