Another manifestation of the irony of life:

I have a few intricate questions on StackOverflow, with a couple of upvotes. I fewer answers, also with a couple of upvotes.

But once, I posted a question due to pure sloppiness: I had forgotten to set up exception options in Visual Studio. That's my most upvoted SO question.

Famous last words:
-"This change was so small, so there's no need for tests. I'll just deploy right away."

Is there anything uglier than XML documentation comments? The signal to noise ratio is appalling, like an exercise in redundancy for the sake of redundancy.

/// <summary>
/// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="CipherInfo"/> class.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="keySize">Size of the key.</param>
/// <param name="cipher">The cipher.</param>
public CipherInfo(int keySize, Func<byte[], byte[], Cipher> cipher)
{ ... }

Compare that to the equivalent markdown documentation comments:
/// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="CipherInfo"/> class.
/// ##Parameters
/// - `keySize` - Size of the key.
/// - `cipher` - The cipher.
public CipherInfo(int keySize, Func<byte[], byte[], Cipher> cipher)
{ ... }

The old method of how to deal with semi close friends needing support still works:
1) Redirect their call to voice mail.
2) If the mention computer problems, ignore them for now.
3) Call back in at least 4 hours. By then, they've probably solved it using Google.

(Why "semi close friends"? Because if they're close, I take their calls and if they're not close, I'm not their free support service. And if they're close and want a lot of free labour, they'll soon find themselves distant.)

Dear whoever decides how websites of various medium-big sized corps work:

I came to your goddamn website to find information. Not to fill out a stupid survey. And, if you had taken the trouble to track me with nasty little cookies, you would have seen that I've never visited your site before, so how the heck could I have any feedback whatsoever to give you?

If I wanted to take surveys, I would have registered an account with Yougov and spend the whole bloody day telling them how many tooth paste ads I've read in the last decade.

Pleb: "What's your job?"
Me: "I'm a programmer."
Pleb: "Great, because I have a problem with my pri..."
Me: "STOP! Last person who thought I was a printer support serf got strangled with the printer cable."
Pleb: "But it's a wireless printer."
Me: "Right, where's the power cord?"

I wonder whether this is a bug in Chrome, or if it's just Google drawing the conclusion from my northern geo-position, that we still haven't left the stage of building longships, raiding England and Scotland, burning monasteries and writing awesome poetry and literature in weird characters sets.

Well, I'm not Ragnarr f*cking Loðbrók or Egill Skallagrímsson, so I can't read electronic component data sheets the way those guys did.

I'll go grab my chisel, so I can carve a bug report into a suitably flat stone and shove it down the TCP/IP series of tubes leading to Google.

Every time someone posts yet another sudo joke, with all the originality of those BSOD jokes nobody's ever heard before, some god kills a kitten.

Thank you so effing much for telling me "Insufficient permissions in the host operating system", VMWare.

Care to be more specific about what permissions are missing? Apparently not...

Helping a friend who's a brilliant at mechanics and has his own patents, and got this question when downloading on his 10Mbit line:
"This was supposed to be a fast computer, so why is it taking so long to download?"

To explain the reason was surprisingly hard, considering that this is a guy who's been invited to give a lecture about innovation at a top tech university.

I actually clicked past this, as per habit, before I reacted. Best EULA I've ever seen!

(In case anyone doesn't know: "Lorem ipsum" is a nonsense place holder text mostly used to try out layouts.)

I've had my current laptop for 3 years now. Whatever "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry" needs to find out by reading my HDD at a rate of 8 MB/s for minutes after every startup, it should have found years ago.

Rant against useless metrics:

No, your bootup time is not from when you hit the power button, until the moment the login screen shows up.

It's from when you hit the power button, until the moment when you can actually use your computer, e.g. the web browser or IDE is running and responding to input.

I'm having a cold and going through Kleenexes faster than a porn addict with Duracell stamina.

So, the question is what therapy exercise to engage in, that fits a brain that's semi dysfunctional due to fever. Last time, I made a Sudoku solver. This turned out to be very useful, because every time someone says "You should try Sudoku!", I can just end the persuasion attempt by replying "I've already solved the general case".

Might do a Rubik's cube solver this time.

Ouch - got my first Windows blue screen in years! (Lacking a picture of it, I stole this one from the interwebs)

Cause: The LITE-ON SSD cache drive. So, can't blame MS for this one, but BSODs are great flamebait regardless of cause.

The SSD was 3 years old, which seems a very short life span for an SSD, unless it's an OCZ.

Peeve of the week: Youtube videos with robot voices (text-to-speech).

Youtube needs detection and a filter option to let users remove those vids from search results.

The problem with LibreOffice is that is some respects, you get what you pay for. Like number formats that just get dropped every time you reload a spreadsheet.

Still, it's worth more than the price. Unlike GIMP, where even free is too expensive (used it for a few days, but I admit that spending time on it was my own fault).

Right, you pesky type initialization bug, I'm gonna find you. Hiding by throwing your exception in an external library won't help you. I'll download the sources, library by library, and look for you there too.

I *will* track you down, bastard, and exterminate you locally. Then, I'll make a pull request and kick your sorry ass off GitHub, off the internet and off the bloody surface of the earth. Oh, you have no idea how dead you're going to be when I'm done here!

Web development in assembler.

Me, before November 2014:
"The chances of MS open sourcing .NET are slightly lower than the chance of seeing a pig flying over a frozen hell."

Sometimes, it's great to be wrong.

There's a special place in hell for those who don't provide keyboard shortcuts for commonly used commands.

It's shared with those who don't display the shortcut keys in the menus, so you can learn them.

1) An increasing number of beards can be observed on the streets.
2) According to Netmarketshare, desktop Linux usage is at an all time high 2.18%.

Coincidence? I think not!

How the heck can Twitter's algorithms for selecting "Who to follow" and "Trends" suggestions? I tweet exclusively (but rarely) about tech, but Twitter seems to think that loudmouthed SJWs would be the perfect people for a tech tweeter to follow.

FFS, intersectional gender studies from a class struggle perspective are not of the slightest interest to a techie.

Maybe Twitter just selects the most frequent tweeters in you area, regardless of content.

ESET Antivirus is a strange animal. On one hand, it seems reasonably well written, because unlike Norton or F-Secure, it doesn't subject your computer to death by constant disk access and 100% CPU load for 10 minutes when you start it.

On the other hand, when I clicked the link in the mail about renewing licenses and filled out the form, I was not redirected to a page where I could enter credit cart details.

Instead, I got message that some representative would get back to me in 1-2 work days. Eh, what? It's a digital product for f***'s sake. Now, I suppose they'll send me a hand written letter (written using a quill, no doubt), delivered by a bloke riding a horse and wearing a tricorn.

Well, at least ESET virus definition updates are pushed on the internet, and not sent out on 5.25" diskettes.

All this talk about "mansplaining" is actually quite useful when you get boring, non-developer related please-work-for-free questions,
- Can you tell me how to get this printer working?
- Sorry, but no. That would be mansplaining.

Microsoft server licensing - so complex that it's probably easier to add Postgres support to my app and run the database server on Linux instead, than to try to make sense of MS license rules.

The name of today is Murphy.

So, the LAN at location A can't reach the one at location B. Turns out that something yet unknown is blowing fuses at location A, but after disconnecting a ton of unknowns, the router and a radio link station are up again. Yay Internet, but still no VPN connection to location B.

Needing the passwords for the OpenVPN servers, I notice that encfs4win refuses to mount the drive where the password manager files reside. Of course, any problem must have the company of other problems. Eventually, the encfs drive mounts on another computer.

So, I can access the OpenVPN computer running the client side and check the logs, which tell me that network B is unreachable.

Both networks and an encfs setup all die at the same time? Right, Murphy, what are you going to come up with next? No, don't tell me because I just got read errors from a hard drive.

!rant
The first computer I used for serious programming. Z80 CPU, 32kB ROM and 32kB RAM, 5.25" 320kB floppies, and the year was 1982.

Blast from the past: when desktop publishing started to take off back in 1987: https://books.google.se/books/...

That was in the days when paper still was the usual destination for written information.

Darn xml config file for a dll wouldn't load.

1) Searching Stackoverflow which says that only configs for exe files are loaded. Problem found and time to send bug report? Nah, better check source code first.

2) Downloading and reading the source for the dll. Nope, dll should explicitly load config file and read settings. Time to send problem report to author? Nah, better to test in greater isolation first.

3) Setting up isolated test. About to copy the LibName.dll.config.xml and WHAT? Note to self: You half witted twat, the file contents is XML, the bloody file extension isn't!

Now apply this sort of typo error to program code, and you will see why I use statically typed languages.