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Jan
04

The Incompetence of Specialists

Yesterday evening I was figuratively steaming after a long day at work, where I am a IT Support Engineer.

It all started with the simple search for a crisis recovery disc for one of the laptop models at work, this lead me to the support page of one of the biggest distributors of commercial computers.

I made my request, asking for a crisis disc, and was in return asked if I wanted a recovery disc. On replying that I required the crisis disc for the BIOS, I was informed that this company did not indeed distribute BIOS on disc’s. The complete incompetence of this reply startled me! One thing is for a company’s internal IT support to not know what this is, I’m okay with that… It’s somewhat more technical then what a support member would require. However, for a hardware manufacturer to not know what a crisis disc is, makes me wonder if the person I was chatting with could tell the difference between a computer and a chair.

I am so tired of teaching people who are supposed to support me about computers! Some of these people are brilliant and actually love their jobs, and the technology the work with, but a massive bunch of them are morons who still think the monitor is the computer, and that the CD-rom is a fucking cup holder.

After this, I was working on testing a new computer we might include in our offerings, and therefor I needed to download Skype. Why on earth would Skype require me to log in on my account to download the software? I cannot see the reason for it… And being on a tablet computer, with a weird and long password, this was not a fun exercise to start off with.

Following this, I got home, and being a guitarist, I had to reinstall GuitarPro 6, since I have recently swaped the main drive of my laptop, and this brings me to another subject: Why am I downloading software to download the software I want? What is the point this? It’s just an additional and completely pointless step in the install process…

So after 12 hours at work, and several of these small annoyances, I was so irate with computers for one day, so jammed on my guitar for an hour and went to bed.

Jan
01

Traces of Life

A video made of pictures from an old mental hospital located 15 minutes from Drammen.

The pictures where taken by Trine Lindh Justad, and is set to my music.
This is a peace that was created for this project, and thus goes under the same name as the video.

Jan
01

Happy New Year!

The past year has been quite the experience, and starting a new year is a good a time as any to start writing my blog.

This wonderful blog will contain  small insights to my brilliant brain, and is thusly named Slightly Retarded.

For a long time the Web 2.0 phenomenon has been of great annoyance to me. I do not live in a country where English is the predominant language, but when I go to a .com website, I’m looking for the English version of that page! Google, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and several other websites use technology to check where my IP is located, and show me a localized page for my convenience, disregarding the language settings in my browser.

This is a horrible way of solving this “issue”. I might be able to comprehend to some extent French or German, but there is no way I would understand i.e. Chinese or Arabic!

Though I am sure there are others, YouTube is the only of these pages I can name that displays a pop-up-like notice in case you wish to change the language settings back to English. The other pages has a link hidden somewhere around the page where you can change it back (or indeed log into an account) – but I can’t see why it should be sett to (i.e.) Spanish in the first place. My browser clearly states I want the English website.

Seeing as very few people would have an operating system or browser in a language they do not understand, I cannot for the life of me understand why they would annoy traveling users with this crap.

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