Fixing a parents iPhone, episode 1.

Problem: "Whatsapp is gone off my phone"

Debugging:

Me: *unlocks phone and sees whatsapp*, it's right here.

Mam: no, I no that I can't see my messages.

Me: ok, that is definitely not what "whatsapp is gone off my phone means".

*opens whatsapp*
*inside add contact screen*

App seems ok, your trying to add a contact?

Mam: that's a problem, whenever I open it I only see that page.

Me: *taps cancel button with shocked face*

Mam: omg there's my messages, how did you do that?

Me: ... ... ... I tapped the very easy to see, large cancel button in the top right hand corner.

Mam: but why was it opened there?

Me: *looks at opened message from unknown number*

If I was to hazard a guess, now stay with me on this one as it's a bit complex. I think ... I THINK ... you clicked the "add to contacts" button on the screen in front of you.

I am suspicious of one thing though.

Mam: what's that?

Me: how you managed to click the add contacts button, and when brought to the add contacts screen, you assume the app is broken.

Mam: oh will you **** off you sarcastic little ****. Thank you very much.

Me: no prob, 4 year computer science course put to great use.

Who ever does this crap needs to be named and shamed!

i am BEYOND pissed at google.

as some of you know, i recently got android studio to run on a chromebook (you read that right), but it being a chromebook and google being a protective fucktard of their crappy operating system, i had to boot into bios every time i started it.

when i was with some friends, i started up the chromebook, and left, after telling my friends how to boot the chromebook.

ten seconds and literally one press of the esc button later, he broke the entire thing.

but that's not what that rant was about, i honestly knew it would happen eventually (although, this wasn't the best time).

so now this screen pops up.

"chrome os is damaged or missing, please insert a usb recovery drive" or something like that.

well, i'll create one. simple enough.

no wait, this is google, just your average 750 billion dollar company who cares more about responsive design then a product actually responding.

i started to create the recovery usb. of course, chrome developers thought it would be a good idea to convert the old, working fine, windows executable usb recoverer, and replace with with a fucking chrome extension.

i truly hope someone got fired.

so, after doing everything fine with the instructions, it got to the part where it wrote the os image to the usb. the writing stayed at 0%.

now this was a disk thing, writing os's and shit, so i didn't want to fuck it up. after waiting ten minutes, i pressed 'cancel.'

i tried again many times, looked things up, and frantically googled the error. i even tried the same search queries on bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and ecosia because i had the feeling google secretly had tracked me over the past 7 years and decided to not help me after all the times i said google was a fucker or something similar.

google is a fucker.

after that, i decided to fuck with it, even if it formats my fucking c drive.

i got to the same point where the writing got stuck at 0% and proceeded to fuck. i start spamming random keys, and guess what?

after i press enter, it started.

what the fuck google?
1000s of people read the article on how to make the recovery drive. why not tell them to press the goddamn enter key?

i swear there are hundreds of other people in my same situation. and all they have to do is press one fucking key???

maybe tell those people who tried to fix the shit product you sold them.

fuck you google.

Useless feature I've built?

Too many to mention. Here's #25.

Modified an existing "Are you sure..?" dialog pop-up (Yes/No buttons) to Yes/No/Cancel. Why? Managers claimed users were "accidentally" clicking 'Yes' when they should have clicked 'No' and causing all kinds of chaos, costing the company money, etc. Managers believed giving the user two chances instead of one would make it easier to avoid the problems they caused.

The meeting:
Me: "Users can click 'No', hit the 'Esc' key, or click the close 'X' button on the window, how will an extra button make it more foolproof?"
Mgr1: "It just will. Andy accidentally deleted inventory and when I asked him if an extra button would have saved them a days worth of re-counts, he said yes."
Mgr2: "Barb accidentally credited a customer $1,500. She promised me she clicked 'No', but the system credited the account anyway. An extra button would have saved us thousands of dollars!"
Me: "Um...these sound like training issues, not an extra button issue."
MyMgr: "PaperTrail, how hard is it to add an extra button?"
Dev1: "Oh yea, adding buttons is easy."
Dev2: "I can do it 5 minutes"
Dev3: "We'll save the company thousands and thousands of dollars!"
<lots of head-knodding and smiles>
MyMgr: "That settles it. PaperTrail, add the extra button!"

Users still screwed things up, but at least they couldn't blame it on not having an extra button.

A few years ago I was in high school and used to have a small reputation of hacking things. I could hack, just would never hack any school networks or systems (reputation + notice that there was a breach is a bad combo since everyone would immediately suspect you).

Anyways one day the networks internet connection went down in the school district and I was the only one who used a laptop to take notes. So I quickly opened the terminal and ran Wireshark and said to the person to my right "see that button there? yeah I programmed this last night. anytime I press it I can shut down the network so the teacher can't reach her files (she famously only saved them online). *Long dramatic press* Wireshark started scanning the network so all the numbers and lines were going crazy as it viewed the packet info "Now just wait", soon the whole class knew what I had done through whispers and lo and behold a few minutes later and the teacher couldn't reach her files.

Everyone loved me for the rest of the year for saving them from the homework for the week the wifi network was out since it also ended up having to cancel two tests in the class, and a lot more homework and tests in all their other classes. Solidified my reputation and no one fucked with me from that day on.

I was 1 hour into an 8 hour data warehouse build on my VM, when Windows popped up with a dialogue informing me that it would initiate Shut Down in 10 minutes. No button to Cancel or Delay, just “Okay”.

To Microsoft, I offer a hardy Dickensian “GOOD AFTERNOON, SIR!”

Today I was minding my own coding-committing-pushing business, when all of a sudden, a split second before typing Enter on a command, the obnoxious UPDATE JAVA popup reared it's ugly head.

Normally I just politely recommend it to fuck off and let me manage my Java versions with homebrew on my own time. But I had no time to not press Enter, and so it rapidly started downloading/installing.

Thankfully I had juuust enough time to hit the cancel button. The progress bar it was showing stopped at 81%. Didn't even have time to read what it said. Crisis averted. Them NSA fucks be like, "curses, foiled again!"

This was probably the most intense moment of the year for me. I think my lifespan grew shorter a few months.

Dreaded auto-updates are getting smarter. They nearly got me when I was in a vulnerable state of hitting Enter many times. Stay on your toes!

Got a code for the Adobe suite which made it the same price as the student package so i could use PS for a tiny project and to dick around a little bit: mostly to see what has changed since CS5. Project was done in 2 weeks and I didn't open PS again for months, letting my subscription lapse too. Well if your subscription lapses Adobe deletes all of it's apps from your machine with no fucking notice. Pretty fucked when you are out in the sticks with shit internet and limited bandwidth, not to mention the ethical shitfuckery of it. So I tried to cancel my subscription, but because the deal i got using the discount thingy there is no button to cancel like there normally is and tech support tell you that you can BUY OUT OF YOUR CONTRACT by paying ~60% of the yearly cost upfront. I told them to fuck themselves and 30 mins later had the subscription canceled.
Am I the only one that sees anything wrong with all this??

There is no friggin cancel button (this time with the right image)