User: - I'm seeing a redcircle with a white dash.
Me: - What is a "redcircle with a white dash".
User: - It's like a stop sign.

I hope I won't meet this user on a one-way street.

Outlook is quite bad. There's no way to enable week numbers in the week view. And once you accidentally decline an occurrence of an recurrent event, there's no way to get it back, without having to trouble the meeting organizer to resend the request, or create the event manually yourself. In addition, Outlook is ugly and I strongly dislike how the calendar and inbox are combined in the same application. To me, e-mail and calendar are two completely different things, and there should be a way to open the calendar separately, without the distraction of any incoming e-mail.

User: - The application throws an errror message.

Me: - The error message is caused by a minor bug that doesn't affect functionality, though. This is an old solution that is in the pipe to be redesigned from scratch. As this function is rarely used, perhaps you can live with this cosmetic bug for a couple more months?

User (one week later): - I haven't got any answer from you. How is this issue proceeding?

If you don't get the joke, the joke's probably on you.

Our project manager is a past-retirement-age consultant who prefers to communicate the old-fashioned way, which is to physically pop in to my office asking questions about stuff that isn't even urgent and could easily be dealt with in jira or by e-mail FFS. Way to go disrupting a dev, break my flow and deprive me of my joy of working! He even says it himself: "May I disturb?" My answer is "No, but now that you already did, spit it out!" He's a nice and funny guy, I give him that. But I don't like this particular behaviour of his. I've complained to him directly and also to my boss, but to no avail. This is where devRant comes in, to let the steam out. Anyway, if I have it my way, we will definitely *not* be hiring the same consultant for our next project.

Outlook irritates the heck out of me with its distracting notification bar that's recently begun popping up almost every time I start the god damn shitty application. What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable this annoying crap. Our support technicians are unable to solve it, so I wrote feedback to Microsoft. I don't think they are ever going to answer, though. They haven't even responded to another problem with Outlook that I reported nine months ago! Microsoft are reallly inconsistent, to say the least. Some of their products, like Visual Studio, VS Code and Microsoft Flight Simulator, are excellent! But, more mainstream software, like MS Office and Outlook, suck. Windows (I'm using Windows 10) is so so. It works alright if you know your ways with the registry editor. The same goes for the support. If you're lucky, you can get hold of a real, flesh-and-blood person who patiently guides you through the cumbersome process of, for example purchasing and installing Minecraft (believe me, it isn't easy, took almost an hour for the support person to solve. Creds to him). Sometimes, like when activating an old Windows license, you get to talk to a bot and that, surprisingly, works very well too. However, if you report any bug or feedback to Microsoft through an application's help section, you 'll never hear from them. They just ignore it.

Roblox seem to believe that you can actually send texts to landline phones. At least the landline is prefix is the only choice for phone verifications when living in the Åland Islands. I've brought this problem to Roblox's attention a year ago and they promised to fix it. Then I've reminded them a couple of times during the past year. Each time, they respond with stupid AI (Artificial Idiocy) generated answers, prompt me to send screenshots and once even screen captured videos. The follow-up answers I get just prove what I've been thinking for a year now, that Roblox don't give a shit about their users. Fuck it, it's a crappy platform anyway and I'm probably better off moving on to Unreal Engine.

Viva Insights is the worst malware from Microsoft so far. Spent a good two hours finding out how to get rid of events called "Tid för fokusering" (time for focus) that kept popping up in the Outlook Calendar, just to find out that you don't configure that shit in Outlook anymore, but in Teams. Go figure.

What's SAP?
Piece of shit if you ask me.
Their Crystal Reports is so user-hostile it makes me want to throw up all over the keyboard.

Surveyor

Adobe Cloud got my computer messed up and it couldn't even be uninstalled! I got so p-o I went to the registry and nuked anything containing the word "adobe" in it. Pheeew, what a relief! Like taking a real good dump! My computer both starts and runs faster now, and without popups requesting me to log in to Adobe Cloud.

Stack Overflow is a great resource for all sorts of programming hints and tips, information and...sadly, desinformation. But if you want to comment on something someone's said you need 50 reputation points. How to achieve that when you need rep points to do anything that could earn you rep points? It's a catch 22 for newcomers that are like totally excluded from any discussions at SO which is more sort of a read-only community to me. This is where devRant shines. Anyone can rant about anything and comment on anyone's rant. Some rants and comments are stupid, and some are great. In the end of the day, freedom of speech is a great thing.

My LG WineSmart just became a very stupid, uselesss piece of shit. Firstly, it decided to upgrade itself - in the middle of a phone call! So, the phone itself considered its crappy upgrade more important than my phone call that was abruptly interrupted by the upgrade! WTF!? LG, seriously? Secondly, ever since the upgrade, the so called "Priority Mode" is totally broken. It's supposed to buzz only on phone calls from favourites, i.e. the mum of children and only her, but now it lets all calls through, so any idiot can call and disturb at any time! This phone doesn't have a silent mode neither, so now it has to be switched off at all times, except when I really need to use it, actually making the phone almost completely useless. LG, what utter stupid crap have you created?! What's your thoughts behind this, if any?

HUZZA!!! The devRant web app is upgraded. I love it! :D

In the old days "hacking" was used for just about any coding, or "computer programming" as it was called back then. There was even a programming magazine called "Hacker", which had nothing to do with the "malevolous programming" that the word "hacker" has become to mean.

F-word with three consecutive U-letters! SQL Management Studio just crashed, just when I had finished a nice script, that I hadn't of course saved yet. I must say SQL Management Studio hardly ever crashes, can't even remember the last time that happened before this. Wonder if it has anything to do with the plugin SQL Complete that I installed just recently? SQL Complete also has the annoying habit of displaying a popup every time SQL Management Studio is started, with a delay just long enough so you have already got started with something when you're interrupted by that popup. No, I'm not going to upgrade a piece of software that behaves maliciously!

Stupid HTML checkboxes! It's always annoyed me that you can't just set checked to true or false, but have to remove the property altogether to uncheck a checkbox. Better still would be if you'd only need to set the value to 1 or 0, and the checked or not would sort out automatically. Yes, there are frameworks to handle it, I know. But if checkboxes had been designed right from start, a framework or any sort of special cases would not be needed. You've got love HTML, but things like this make it ugly.

The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)

I see a pattern with Notepad++. Every time you update it, it becomes more unstable.

Devrant has become so boring. It used to be actual devs who shared their annoyments as well as joyful moments in their professional life.

Now it's one of two things, a) jokes/gems/utter nonsense, or b) students complaining about their classes/teachers/parents.

There seems to be a limit how large a php array can be. There's nothing mentioned about this in any documentation I can find, and binging/googling on the problem doesn't give me any help. I am so frustrated right now! Well, to hell with php anyway. This is definitely my last battle with it.

Don't trust [VIEW_DEFINITION] in [INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[VIEWS]! It gets truncated at 4000 characters. According to Microsoft, it should be NULL when exceeding 4000 chars. Not true!

Drinking beer. Yes, seriously. I especially remember one Friday afternoon in the late 90s when I was still a trainee at a major Swedish telecom company. I had been working on a test application which gave visual output in the shape of dots teeming around on the screen, each one of which represented a network node. Then my colleagues and I had an afterwork at a nearby bar. After a few pints, when the others went home, I returned to the office and, in an inspired mood, made a few modifications to the test app so that you from each client could control one of the dots with the keyboard, basically turning the app into a multiplayer game. Over time I improved it further with some sprites and the possibility to shoot at each other. We had great fun while performing tests :D

"Your connection is not secure". It is too! The certificate is valid to 2019, and in Chrome it's no problem. Stupid Firefox!

Suddenly VisualStudio throws "Attempted TextBuffer edit operation while another edit is in progress." for every keystroke editing a C# source code that I could edit without a problem just a few minutes ago. WTF?!

Excel is a powerful and extremely versatile application, but one thing that really SUCKS about it, is that formulas are language-specific! So if using Outlook in - for example - Swedish you can't write "IF(<expression>,<then>,<else>)" but instead "OM(<expression>;<then>;<else>)". Note the semi-colon instead of comma (because in Swedish comma is used as decimal). AAARGGH! This pisses me off!

Finally! Oderland supports node.js for all accounts. Huzza! If only I had time to give it a try. Well, soon enough. Unlike many other ranters, I have actually nothing against PHP. It's just that with node.js it's *one* language for the server and client alike :) I like a lot the idea of coding even the server side in javascript.

AAAARGHH!!! It happens every now and then that when I open a window in a Windows application, the window opens outside the display area, on a non-existing display to the right of my primary screen. There is no other way to access the newly opened window than to go to "Screen resolution" and swap screens 1 and 2 such that the secondary screen thinks it is to the right of the primary screen (although physically it stays to the left of the primary screen). And then, once I've got hold of the window, I swap the screens back. It's just so incredibly annoying and a complete waste of time. This is staring to really get on my nerves! >:(

You can find almost anything on webshops like Amazon, but you can't buy almost anything. In many cases they don't ship outside the US and if they do it costs a fortune. In Europe the range of products is very limited in comparison to the US. If you do find the same items, they cost more than double the price compared to the US, and then they don't ship to my country anyway. And if they do, most of the times we have to pay VAT twice. It's FUCKING UNFAIR and OUTRAGEOUS that in AD2017 consumers have so different conditions depening on geographic location. It sucks to live in Europe when it comes to shopping, and it sucks even more to live in Åland Islands when it comes to shopping online.

Biggest regret is not what I have done, but what I haven't. A long long time ago, in the early 90s, I had a great idea for a game, but somehow I never made it come true. A few years later, Maxis launched a game very similar to my idea, and it was called The Sims.