This is getting ridiculous

Hyperactive bots:

When the "best" is no good

I just want to print a list of the files in a folder.

I could do it in DOS.

I don't know why they insist on buying HP printers

Ran out of paper the other day, but I didn't notice. I sent the drawing to the printer, and the associated Excel sheet, and went on with other things. After a minute I went to grab the printouts and noticed they weren't there. Figured I had a mental glitch. (It happens.) So, I printed them both out again. But by the time I'd sent the second one, the first one still hadn't started coming out the printer.

That's when I noticed the flashy thing at the bottom of my screen.

The HP6100 sometimes interrupts me with a window that opens to tell me it's out of paper. But sometimes it only shows up on the taskbar and waits for me to notice. That's what happened this time. It was waiting for me to notice.

But I had sent two copies of each page, and I only needed one copy. So I doubleclicked an icon to open up the list of files waiting to be printed. I was gonna delete duplicates. But the HP6100 wouldn't give me the list of files in the queue. It only gave me the window that said I was out of paper.

I've had that happen before.

The old HP printer behaved much better. My Brother printer at home behaves much, much better. I don't know why they insist on buying HP printers at work.

Click Yes

And, yes, the new one is retarded

All I want to know is, what folder is the file in, the file I have open on the screen.

I know what it should be. I just want to be sure.

But I can't find the Properties item on the menu anywhere. On the stupid ribbon. You know. So finally I give up and customize the Quick Access Toolbar. I easily find Properties in the alphabetical list of All Commands and add it to the toolbar's list of buttons and click OK.

But then when I click the Properties button, half my spreadsheet disappears. The properties are now displayed on a big fat ribbon that takes up the full width of the spreadsheet window and about a third the height. It made me twitch with surprise. On the fat ribbon I find six empty boxes. A seventh box with my name in it, in case I need to know that. And one "Location" box showing the path to my file.

But the Location box isn't big enough to show the whole path.

Of course. That's how it is these days.

There is also a whole bunch of empty space on the fat ribbon, room enough for 20 more boxes. Oh, and I also found a "Document Properties" label that turned out to be a menu. When I clicked it, it offered me one option...

Don't you think, if you're gonna have a menu that has one option, you should just put the option there and forget about showing a menu? I mean, it's not really a menu if it only offers one choice.

... it offered me one option: Advanced Properties. So, I clicked it.

You know what popped up? An old, Windows XP-style form, with all the info and all the tabs and everything familiar to me from the time before we got these new computers.

Isn't that nice? The old one is the advanced one.

AutoCAD 2015: Scrollbars by Gaslight

Friggin AutoCAD. I like to have scrollbars in the drawing window. I don't use them all the time, but sometimes. They're handy, and they don't take up much screen space.

But when I turned 'em on I only got the vertical scrollbar. No horizontal. It was like that Outer Limits thing: "We control the horizontal... We control the vertical..."

Dickheads.

I went all through the Options, looking for options. No luck. Finally I gave up and went to the Help:

Screen snip from 7 November 2014

Use the mouse button to pan around the drawing? Fuck you!

Anyway, about a month later when I went to work, suddenly I had both scrollbars, like in the old days.

Screen snip from 3 December 2014

It's almost like they're gaslighting us.

Sometimes Google sucks ass

My old post now turns up an error when you click the Google Books link to The Golden Age of Capitalism:

Don't give me a goddam picture of a broken robot. Stop making changes that break my links.

Oh, and why is my Blogger Preview window suddenly very slow to load?

Don't get me started.