Of course my hardware is bad. There is nothing wrong with your code, oh Mighty Engineer!!!!

I was put on a new project at work so I'm working with people that I've not worked with before. The engineer in charge of the team worked with my daughter's dad, back in the 90's and he's never worked with me.

I found a really nasty bug that kept crashing the setup and was preventing me from doing much productive testing. I documented it.  One of the programmers came to see me but didn't see anything obvious at first. Then his boss came around, and had the balls to say "Since you are the only one who seems to have this issue, are you sure your hard disk is good?"

I bit my tongue to not respond "Oh? Is the big boss giving everyone on a new project new hard drives?" 

I went home pissed. The next morning I made a point of reproducing the crash on 2 other setups. I even asked my boss if I should take a brand new drive to install an OS to prove the point. He said not to go crazy!

Yesterday the programmer in charge of debugging came to my machine to debug the problem. After all was said and done, he tells me not to use the features I used to crash the application and that I found a really big issue, one that has been missed the past 6-9 months this application has been tested.

Just because no one else had found the issue does not make my hardware defective. I hope he's learned that his statement about my hardware made him look like a pompous ass!

Severe lack of Women in some professions!

When I went to Concordia in Computer Science back in the 1980's I was in the 5-10% of women in that program.

The sad thing is, things really haven't changed much. Some engineering programs may have from 15-20% women, but that's the most they might have.  There are now more women in computer science especially in black box programming... maybe 40%

And then I read an article that there was a BOYS ONLY robotics program offerered in an Ontario public library. I get that many girls might not be interested but to make it boys only?????  I was so unimpressed.

Well thankfully one little girl and her mom started a petition and now girls can join. BUT WTF? I would have fought to make that program gender free no matter what!!!!

Once an asshole generally always an asshole...

So yesterday I had an engineer at my desk. This is not unusual. The particular engineer was. I've worked with the guy years ago, and he's always been an ass. He's one of those engineers who looks down on anyone who isn't an engineer, and yet, he's one of the more inept engineers I know.

One who  used to ask us to do the stupidest things to prove that the bug wasn't his. He used to play ostrich in a big way and make it sound like the testers were inventing problems to make him look bad, never mind the fact that he couldn't debug a simple problem if it bit him in the ass.

This particular fellow is more socially inept then he is in development, so while waiting for testers to reproduce issues he generally manages to piss them off good and proper with salliant non-work related, none of his business questions that make people boil.

Luckily he's been put on more obscure projects that have rarely interfaced with me or my team in years. But yesterday he seemed to think despite having burnt all his bridges with me years ago, that I'd gladly help him out with his problems. From what I understood he trashed his development system.  While he didnt' manage to get otehrs to re-install for him, now he's trying to get others to setup his development environment, and to that end he came and see me yesterday for my "Newbie wiki".

The good thing is I don't have a newbie wiki. I had to argue the point. He was convinced there was one and I was holding back. The information he wanted to know is in the back of my checklists in the "How to" section. However he's the kind of asshole, who would not benefit from the information but who would take my checklist and tear me a new one, even though it has nothing to do with anything he's doing and though he has worked on display drivers, he would not know how to test one if it hit him in the face. 

So I told him I could not help him. I had to yell it at the end because he became incredibly pushy and would not take no for an answer.

The sad part is, if it had been anyone else in the company including a totally new employee, I would have went out of my way to be helpful. 

Moral of the story - don't be an ass to others, don't burn your bridges. You never know when that stupid Software Quality assurance dumbass can be of help.

What were they thinking?

That's a question I often ask myself when I get new hardware equipment. For instance with LCD's.  Most of the new LCD"s I end up buying for work are displayport.  I've ranted already how the company who fixes our monitors did not have even a displayport card to test out monitors they fixed. They expected the client to send them a board to try out the monitor!

Then there's the guy in our IT department, who's worked there for at least a year, who could not tell the difference between displayport and HDMI. One of my employees went to get a displayport cable and was offered 4 different types of HDMI cables. In the end the IT guy asked my employee if the monitor had other ports, when my employee said yes, he suggested to use another port.  I can see it now a client calling tech support complaining our displayport boards don't work with displayport monitors and we answer "Sir our IT guy suggests you use another port!!!!"

Then there's stupid features that are developed for monitors. This is the 2nd brand of LCD where I spot what I call stupid features.  My Benq periodically tells me "your eyes deserve a well-timed rest". I kid you not.  I'm sure my boss would love it if each time my monitor told me my eyes need a rest, that I would go home. Like WTF? 

I have these new Philips displayport LCD's that I just got last week. They look very nice and sleek. And after you turn it on for about 4 minutes it goes into low power mode. So in an office with neon's, you can't see anything on your display. I had to hunt down the feature that does that. I mean  you're sitting there clicking away and suddenly your monitor goes dark. They call this feature a "power sensor". I'm not sure what it senses but seriously having these features turned on by default for shipping is kinda stupid.  I can figure out it's a feature of the monitor, but I wonder how many neophytes would return the monitor because it goes dark? 

I often wonder what the people who design these things are thinking... or maybe they aren't thinking.  I've met a lot of gifted engineers, but I've also met some who design some of the stupidest and most useless features into products. Things that you have no need for and would never see the need for. Like spamming the user with messages on his LCD that his eyes need a well-timed rest!!!!!! Please!