Nice move Microsoft...

Clippy. Never forget

To whoever stole my Microsoft Office license I will find and kill you!

You have my Word

My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

"Software is like sex: it's better when it's free." - Linus Torvalds
"If free software is like Libre Office, I would rather pay for Microsoft Office. "

Being the only one in school holding a presentation without PowerPoint

I use websites 🙃

I hate Munich. Instead of using Windows, the city administration had built their own Linux distro called LiMux for all of the ~30000 city's computers. They invested years into developing it, because, hey, it's open source! Now they used it for four years, and just as Microsoft opens an office in town, they throw it all overboard and go back to Windows. Why? Because, umm, they can't even use MS Word, what all the others use and such.
This is such a bullshit. You had a good thing going here, in times of NSA surveillance and monopolies. Munich is such a capitalistic town. I'm happy to have moved out of it for good.

Worst experience with higher ups:

The Office team at Microsoft suddenly woke up to the possibility of innovation from the grounds up. We were asked to come up with ideas. The best ideas were to be shortlisted by management.

That's what i had a problem with. People are generally bad at dertermining what will work. So instead of managenst shortlisting, everyone should have run cheap experiments with their ideas and we could then double down on the ones that showed promise. That's what is done at all internet companies. But the Office team's culture hadn't changed from the boxed software days.

I was asked to have faith in the judgement of management.

Well, Ballamer didn't let Office develop mobile apps for Android and Apple. When Nadella took over, he fixed that mistake. But because competitors had already gotten ahead, the Office team had to work on Saturdays for almost a year to ship it quickly. Meaning employees having to unnecessarily sacrifice their family time because of a strategic blunder by the highest management.

So excuse me if I don't have faith in the judgement of management.

Just got the new office update and damn the new icons are hideous

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

Microsoft's Design Guideline

To whoever stole my copy of Microsoft Office, I will find you. You have my Word!

My love towards Microsoft:

When install Windows 10, world's most advanced operating system, I agree to use express installation to make sure I am sharing all the information with Microsoft.

Right after installation, I chose Microsoft Edge as my default browser. Can't live without it really. I also make sure my search engine is set to Bing!

Then I continue to setup Cortana and share all my personal information with her. I install office 365 to to work with my documents and use skype to chat with my friends.

Then I install Visual studio and set all my projects to Windows Application only. I mean who uses any OS other than Windows?

It doesn't finish there. Groove Player is my first choice for listening to music, Film and TV for my videos and etc.

I also always use Microsoft Maps to find my way to work!

<3 Microsoft

LaTeX for life.

Had an interesting time these past few days. Had a customer who, when I left for vacay, was complaining that he couldn't get access to our private package registry. Get back, this issue is still active.

We'd granted access to his github enterprise, and for some reason he wasn't getting the activation email. We spent about 22 hours of customer support time on his failing to help himself before he finally escalated to the standard 40 person IT enterprise tantrum/come to jesus meeting.

Long story short, he had somehow ignored repeated attempts (35 email replies to the ticket chain, 4 phone calls) to get him to check his spam folder. In which, as it was revealed to all the hollywood squares in attendance, there were no less than 35 activation emails from github granting him access. Of course, none of this was his fault. And while screensharing his big brain to god and everyone he decides the problem is now actually Microsoft because their office 365 spam email filtered his emails incorrectly. We of course agreed with his big brain, smoothed over his bruised ego and went about our day.

I mean, fair enough, it's kind of dumb that Microsoft ever spam lists github, but still. I was just a fly on the wall, and he burned all his paid support tickets on the issue, so hopefully we won't be dealing with him again this year.

Also, this is an edge case with our new product line, most of our customers are painless.

Fuck XBOX
Fuck surface
Fuck cortana
Fuck office 365

Fuck Windows

FUCK MICROSOFT

The best part of being an university student?

- Microsoft Imagine
- Office 365 for free
- GitHub Student Developer Pack
- JetBrains Product Pack for Students
- Spotify for only €4.99/month (instead of €9.99)
- Discounts for tech products

And if you're lucky also Adobe CC and AutoCAD.

The worst part?

- The university

Buckle up kids, this one gets saucy.

At work, we have a stress test machine that trests tensile, puncture and breaking strength for different materials used (wood construction). It had a controller software update that was supposed to be installed. I was called into the office because the folks there were unable to install it, they told me the executable just crashed, and wanted me to take a look as I am the most tech-savvy person there.

I go to the computer and open up the firmware download folder. I see a couple folders, some random VBScript file, and Installation.txt. I open the TXT, and find the first round of bullshit.

"Do not run the installer executable directly as it will not work. Run install.vbs instead."

Now, excuse me for a moment, but what kind of dick-cheese-sniffing cockmonger has end users run VBScript files to install something in 2018?! Shame I didn't think of opening it up and examining it for myself to find out what that piece of boiled dogshit did.

I suspend my cringe and run it, and lo and behold, it installs. I open the program and am faced with entering a license key. I'm given the key by the folks at the office, but quickly conclude no ways of entering it work. I reboot the program and there is an autofilled key I didn't notice previously. Whatever, I think, and hit OK.

The program starts fine, and I try with the login they had previously used. Now it doesn't work for some reason. I try it several times to no avail. Then I check the network inspector and notice that when I hit login, no network activity happens in the program, so I conclude the check must be local against some database.

I browse to the program installation directory for clues. Then I see a folder called "Databases".

"This can't be this easy", I think to myself, expecting to find some kind of JSON or something inside that I can crawl for clues. I open the folder and find something much worse. Oh, so much worse.

I find <SOFTWARE NAME>.accdb in the folder. At this point cold sweat is already running down my back at the sheer thought of using Microsoft Access for any program, but curiosity takes over and I open it anyway.

I find the database for the entire program inside. I also notice at this point that I have read/write access to the database, another thing that sent my alarm bells ringing like St. Pauls cathedral. Then I notice a table called "tUser" in the left panel.

Fearing the worst, I click over and find... And you knew it was coming...

Usernames and passwords in plain text.

Not only that, they're all in the format "admin - admin", "user - user", "tester - tester".

I suspend my will to die, login to the program and re-add the account they used previously. I leave the office and inform the peeps that the program works as intended again.

I wish I was making this shit up, but I really am not. What is the fucking point of having a login system at all when your users can just open the database with a program that nowadays comes bundled with every Windows install and easily read the logins? It's not even like the data structure is confusing like minified JSON or something, it's literally a spreadsheet in a program that a trained monkey could read.

God bless them and Satan condemn the developers of this fuckawful program.

I HATE working with MS Office products. Yes, Access, I'm looking at you, you backwards, whanabe database reject! You're invalid as a serious SQL database and retarded as an data application suite.

VBA, make up your MIND with your damn function calls! Either require me to use parenthesis or don't! I'm sick of this conditional parenthesis sh*t!

While we're talking about not making up your mind... screw 'sub', you half wit language! Either use functions like a real language or go the f&$k home and make room for a language that knows what it's doing!

Oh!!! WHY... WHY! do you have null AND... NOTHING?! Who... Who... WHO invented "nothing"?! And what sick joke are you playing at with isnull() and empty()??? How many damn ways so you need to test for "no value"?!?!

Access... That's right, I'm not done with you yet... How is it you've survived this damn long in the business world with all of the databases you corrupt? Sure, you suck as a real database, but at least have some freaking pride that people even USE you! How DARE your corrupt yourself with the regularity you seem to have! I wish my bowel movements were as regular as your database corruptions, for the love of humanity.

F$@k you, VBA! F@&k you, Access! F$#k you, MS Office! And Fuuuuuu$k YOU Microsoft for shoving these half assed reject tools down my throat!

I hope your cloud uses Access as a back end and gets some injection virus.

*Takes deep breath* need to say that.

TLDR: In defense of Powershell - the rant:

I don’t get the Powershell hate.

You don’t hate a screwdriver for not being able to turn a nut, you just *don’t use a screwdriver to turn a nut*

Once you recognize what the tool is good for and you don’t try to use it like Bash, it’s wildly powerful, and satisfying to use in a way Cmd.exe never was.

Cygwin or a Linux Subsystem can only go so far on a Windows computer. You’re dealing with two fundamentally different OS architectures. It makes sense you’d need different tools.

And like it or not, Microsoft owns the non-tech-user desktop , corners the non-tech server business market, and Active Directory is THE tool for managing Windows desktops on a large scale - So Wanblows is not going away anytime soon.

Automation without some weird ass sysVol batch login script is finally possible. Anyone who knows .Net classes can leverage their methods from directly within Powershell. Remote management of headless Windows servers is now a reality. If you have an Office 365 Exchange server you can literally Powershell remote to it for management, just like your favorite cloud hosted Linux distribution.

No one said Windows is a better OS, but an object based shell on an object based OS *makes sense*. It’s useful for its environment. Let it be.

Just wanted to say that I miss you buddy

There's this one Windows PC, hiding in the darkest corner of the office, just running a network service all day. Suddenly the service is not available any longer... Opening explorer.exe to see what's up with the machine, while wiping a thick layer of dust from the screen: Zero bytes free memory on C:\ ...

Assuming that some log files have caused all the occupied space. NOPE! Instead, Windows update just installed a shitton of updates. They all failed, of course... After not being able to simply remove them, deciding to uninstall some programs and kill Windows update. Finally 800MB of free space!

Suddenly stumbling over a Visual Studio 2008 installation. Who the hell installed this on the PC? Absolute bullshit. Nevermind. Uninstall this shite.

The uninstaller takes ages to do anything, then aborts the uninstallation showing the popup "there is not enough space to uninstall". Looking into the memory indicator: 0 bytes left. DAAAAFUUUQ Microsoft??? WTFFFFFFF?!? 800MB to UNINSTALL Visual Studio? Are you for real???

Ended up force-deleting the directory: 3 Gigs free now...

Background: I'm proficient at PowerShell, I was told that I got hired to my previous job (as DevOps engineer) mainly because of that skill.

Few months after I started I wrote a script to automate some processes. My boss saw the script and told me that it was too complicated, and that I should make it more simple.
Now I'm all into clean code, meaningful names, small functions.
So the code was readable and maintainable.
I asked him in what way is it complicated. He didn't know exactly. (Later I figured that he didn't know of some of the (built-in) cmdlets and functions I used.)
He raised his hand high and made a gesture and explained that I'm "that high (skill? enthusiasm?)", then lowered his hand to a lower position to mark the bottom line, then raised it up half way up and said that he wants me here - in the middle.
After that he added: "This is not Microsoft! and we don't own the 3 other buildings that can be seen from our office window" and pointed at the window.

I was surprised by his comment, I didn't know how to respond.
I've got more stories to share about that workplace.
I can't believe I stayed at that place for 1 year and 2 months.

Doesn't it look like Bixby(New virtual assistant from Samsung) logo got inspired a bit from Clippy(Microsoft office assistant)?

Or is it only me?

Working on a project where the coordinator is insisting on using OneDrive. Lost the link he sent out in an email so decided to:

- Google "OneDrive": Eventually brought me to "office.live.com/...." with a view of my settings and apps ... no OneDrive.

- Spent a while using a bit of logic to click around and find it, forgot logic doesn't work well with MS products and ended up on Outlook instead.

- Spent a while searching for the original email with the link, found it, brings me to "...sharepoint.com/....".

- Inside sharepoint (OneDrive?) the banner says "Office 365".

- But the browser tab says OneDrive.

Are Microsoft just afraid of consistency at this point? I mean seriously, pick a name and use it everywhere. Why is that so hard? why is that so complicated?

Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.

Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.

You know.

"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.

In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?

I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?

The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.

What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.

Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.

But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.

Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.

Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!

Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?

Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?

So my in-laws got a new computer 😑
Yup you know where this is going. Ok so after I transferred all of their data set them all up etc.
They wanted to use "word" and could I set it up for free for them. I said no Microsoft office is not free you lost your license and disk and your old computer is trashed so the better choice would be Google services . So I explained the value of using Google drive, docs,sheets etc.. today and told them how much better it is everything would be on their Google drive so if I got hit by a bus they could get a new computer again and still have access to their data etc... So they said great and so I did.

Two weeks later... Can you set up word for us on our computer. Me annoyed at this point " sure no problem"

I made a shortcut on their desktop to Google docs. Them: oh boy this is great see John all you have to do is click on google docs to go to word! Thanks so much!

🤫🤓

Best of all sides

User gives me a Mac to work on, States that it “only needs Microsoft office Mac installed”

Okay.

Boot up the laptop....

**Mac OS X utilities**

Hmmm, odd. Reboot.

**Mac OS X utilities**

You’ve got to be shitting me. Call user —
Her - “NO! It was working when I gave it to you, you fix it. I’m not paying to get my laptop returned broken. It was working when I gave it to you!”

Me - “I’m sorry, but it wasn’t. I literally turned it on and this is what it stated * read her the message*

Her - “I don’t believe you, you did something to my computer.”

YOU FUCK! THE FUCK I DID! YOU LITERALLY JUST HANDED ME THE GOD DAMN THING! Can I PLEASE curb stomp this bitch, please....

We have a ver crappy Internet connection at my office (I believe it's 100Mb/s for 50 people to share), so when somebody starts downloading a big file they pretty much hijack all the available bandwidth and fuck up everybody else.

Now, we have ONE, just ONE SINGLE FUCKING COMPUTER RUNNING FUCKING WINDOWS 10 AND EVERY WEEK IT FUCKS UP THE ENTIRE OFFICE'S INTERNET CONNECTION WITH ITS STUPID FUCKING UNCANCELLABLE MANDATORY UPDATES.
FUCK YOU MICROSOFT.

Requirements: IT degree
Excellent knowledge of Microsoft Office

Honestly I don't bother anymore

This one's for all the SysAdmins out there.

About 4 years ago I was asked to take over a dental offices systems administration (~20 machines) after their previous guy had allowed their servers RAID 1 to fail and hadn't done any updates or general maintenance. (please take note this office is my parents dental office).

I since have been recovering from his poor configuration and setup by instating an active directory environment and installing up to date software as well as updating machines on the domain to Windows 10 since windows 7 is no longer supported. I have also been properly licensing everything.

My bosses (my parents) are annoyed with this because "it's more expensive" and "it's too complicated we don't know how to manage it" and I don't know how to explain to them that they aren't fucking systems admins. They asked why they could do it before and I tried to explain that now it's secure and things need to be rolled out on the network level. They had every user running full local admin on every workstation plus the server.

Some people don't fucking understand that just because it's simple doesn't make it a good fucking idea. And because it's cheap doesn't mean it will always be (just wait till Microsoft audits you).

Oh and they also don't understand fucking CAL licensing and refuse to pay for gsuite for all their staff who use it. Instead they just have two gsuite accounts and give everyone the fucking password.

I'm going to have an aneurysm

People were posting their programming companions. This one kept me amused through my early days with a computer. Who else remembers?

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server.

There is no technology on Earth that speaks worse of Microsoft than is this crap. Nothing they ever made (not even Comic Sans) is as bad as Sharepoint.

No proper editor. Everything is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. To run it you need a state-of-the-art server. There is no way to make the UI modern, as Sharepoint itself is built upon 1995 era HTML. Tables in tables in tables in tables in tables. And even if you do a web part that's readable, it will be wrapped in shit and presented to the client anyway.
It's so easy to break too. Most of the time I was just watching why the fuck it didn't work. Huge problem with caching as well. Deploying any change requires 10 minutes of manual labor.

I get why companies want to use it. Out of the box it's got quite a few very nice features, and aside from the problems setting it up, and hardware requirements, it works decently well.

But I won't come near it unless I'm paid 100$ per hour or starving to death.

So Microsoft have not only decided to make it so you can't install indvidual parts of Office, but you also have no choice as to where it gets installed... Straight into "C:\Program Files".

These days when more and more people are using multiple hard drives, what possible benefit can removing installation options have??

They want me to be a speaker at this event , I wrote them this

Regarding this statement on the speaker form “Presentation rooms are set up theatre style with a lectern, lectern mic, screen, laptop with Windows XP Office

2007/Vista XP and a projector.” – is it just an old form?

I do have one question what does this mean exactly?  Are you actually using windows xp? it’s not supported by Microsoft anymore, so it’s quite dangerous to have unless it’s not attached to the internet what so ever and never has been. Vista… is not much better. Windows 7 is 2008 you should at least be using that I would of thought? I mainly ask because if I am going to speak about technology and computers I can’t exactly say I’m an expert when I’m using tech as old as that. I mean I’m 20 I was 7 when xp came out, I know how to use it but it’s ancient, in computer terms It’s as old as Aztec times and I’d rather not be sacrificed to a sun god (seriously if anyone who knows tech at all sees me I’ll be embarrassed and taken the piss out of majorly).

Could I just use my laptop? If needs be?

Sorry to be a pain

I forged a katana once, under the supervision of a swordsmith. Nothing super special like damascus patterning or anything, but the cutting edge was pretty sharp.

Ugh sorry, lame word jokes.

In terms of software...

Microsoft Office Ribbon (cutting edge at the time, lol). Only as a maintenance drone on a bunch of manual search-and-replace work and merge conflict resolving.

Ariane 6 family of rockets (Welding X-rays and other DICOM quality assurance).

Software for continuous flow chemistry, developing microfluidic PCBs to perform Elisa immunology assays during the Mexican flu outbreak. Idea was to eliminate the need for microplates, expensive robots, microwell washers, etc — just have blood plasma, enzymecoated nanoparticles, antigen, conjugated detection reagents and substrates flowing programmatically through a PCB with a spectrophotometer built in.

Thanks to Microsoft and Windows for making my work day one hour shorter. FUCK OFF WITH THIS FORCED UPDATE/RESTART SHIT!!!! Who the fuck in Microsoft thought that this was a smart idea? Fucking assholes. And yes, I did tell it to only update outside office hours. Doesn't work apparently.
Luckily it's easy to explain to my boss why I had one hour of not being productive.

Long time ago, back in a day of Microsoft Office 95 and 97, I was contracted to integrate a simple API for a payment service provider.

They've sent me the spec, I read it, it was simple enough: 1. payment OK, 2. payment FAILED. Few hours later the test environment was up and happy crediting and debiting fake accounts. Then came the push to prod.

I worked with two other guys, we shut down the servers, made a backup, connected new provider. All looked perfectly fine. First customers were paying, first shops were sending their products... Until two days later it turned out the money isn't coming through even though all we are getting from the API is "1" after "1"! I shut it off. We had 7 conference calls, 2 meetings, 3 days of trying and failing. Finally, by a mere luck, I found out what's what.

You see, Microsoft, when you invent your own file format, it's really nice to make it consistent between versions... So that the punctuation made in Microsoft Word 97 that was supposed to start from "0" didn't start from "1" when you open the file in Microsoft Word 95.

Also, if you're a moron who edits documentation in Microsoft Word, at least export it to a fucking PDF before sending out. Please.

The whole Microsoft office suite is being rewritten in React.js

This. Is. Not. A. Joke.

This also includes Skype, Ms teams, all office programs on all platforms, AND, VS Code....

Guys, we have trully peaked... gg....

Return to office, return of the haikus:

Returned to office.
Time for the daily standup
On Microsoft Teams. 😒

For all the hate going around about microsoft i just wanted to list things microsoft has done a great job at (imo of course):

windows 10
powershell
microsoft office
minecraft
xbox
microsoft edge
probably more so don't hate for the hell of it.

Computer science doesn't just mean teach me how to use Microsoft office over and over... MS Access is not useful!!!

Microsoft: Here's are simple to use Office suite which works offline and online with powerful features.

Google: Our suite is FREE. FREE. FREE. It's shitty, broken, and works only online.
If you want to use it offline, you can go fuck yourself. But hey! It's free.

Monday morning and Microsoft goes down across the board

No office
No teams
No SharePoint
No azure
Not any fucking thing.

Well done ass hats, not like I had anything to do today 😓

Today I'm ranting about Windows. No, it's not "WiNdOwS sUcKs!", it's more like "But why!?"

See, I'm an IT guy for the year, and in my office they use Windows. Now once upon a time, they had Active Directory and all that (well, actually, they still do) but then they got some new computers running Windows 10, and for some reason they just couldn't join them to the domain!

Why can't they, you ask? Well, Microsoft only allows Win 10 Pro and up to join a Domain, and since these computers came with Win 10 Home, that wasn't possible.

Long story short, I now have some 30 computers that need to be upgraded (possibly from 7) to Win 10 Pro, and joined to the Domain.

Thing is, I would like to do that all in one go, so I look into how to automatically setup Windows.

"Ah! Got it, provisioning packages!"

Lest you think they work let me spare you now: they don't. Just like real computers where everything is different, provisioning packages failed to work twice, and after wasting about a week trying to make it work, I gave up.

So now I realized that I need to try a different method, a custom windows image. Issue is, I've got no clue how to make one. See, microsoft decided to go all in on the provisioning packages thing (they do have advantages in certain use cases), and seemed to decide that making custom images was no longer necessary, so they documentation was nearly impossible to find.

But after a lot of searching, I figured out how to do it:

1. Install Windows in a VM.
2. Put it in audit mode.
3. Install your stuff.
4. Create an unattend.xml file with certain customizations.
5. Put the unattend in Windows\System32\Sysprep
6. Generalize the image.
7. Boot WinPE.
8. Open the console.
9. Capture the image.
10. Wait an hour or two.
11. Done!

I'm over simplifying, it was a huge PITA, and yet there were still issues.

Maybe another time I'll talk about those.

- Back in October 2019 -

- Me: Hey, these two servers are having weird problems. Several services we use stop functioning every 7-10 days. I can temporarily fix them by taking them off the domain and putting them back on, but I don’t know why they’re happening or what further damage this workaround causes.
- Boss: Thats not good. Well. Keep doing the fix when it’s needed.
- Me: We should really reach out to someone at Microsoft through our support plan. I have no idea how to fix any of this and it’s making our Hyper-V environment very unstable.
- Boss: K. Let’s not worry about that now, let’s just keep working around it.

- In January 2020 -

- Me: Hey boss. More and more errors are generating from these servers. I’ve created a log of everything Ive found to hand off to a support agent. We really need to.
- Boss: Okay. Let’s talk to our internal team that uses Hyper-V and see what they did since they don’t have any problems.
- Me: Its not Hyper-V specific. It’s stemming from AD and authentication. It causes problems even without Hyper-V installed, so I don’t think it will help.
- Boss: K. Let’s just do what we can with what we got.

- Today, May 2020 -

- Me: Hey. The servers no longer work at all, and the workaround has no effect anymore. I’m completely stalled on my project now and have nothing to do.
- Boss: What?? What happened to them?
- Me: *Sends 17 page PDF file documenting all found issues, errors, warnings, and weird anomalies in both servers, as well as troubleshooting steps I’ve already performed*
- Boss: None of this makes any sense. I need you to start troubleshooting right away.
- Me: But... I can’t... *Sends screenshots of errors having no search results on the web, screenshots of Microsoft Support Techs on forums telling me we need to open tickets with Microsoft directly, other reasons why I’m completely blocked*
- Boss: Keep trying to figure it out. We need this resolved as soon as possible and we can’t let it happen again in the future.

Now I’m completely alone in our office, bitterly staring at the servers, trying to force an epiphany on how to fix these dumb boxes.

One thing every junior web developer learns is how to implement a login system.
They may not make it the most secure, but it works.
It boggles my mind how Microsoft still don't know how to make a login that works consistently.
Every Microsoft login page requires like 30 redirections to work.
The Teams app on my PC fails to login at least once a week, just because another Microsoft app is logged in using the same account (usually office), but Windows is not.
Microsoft needs to take it's head out of it's ass and BEG Google to teach them how to make a decent login system.

Just found out the opposite of Microsoft Office is Macrohard Onfire.

Ladies and gentleman, I've done it.
Remove your hacker game trophies from your wall.
That nasty bug you fixed a couple of nights ago? Meh.
Your top devRant post? You'll delete it after reading this.
Every awesome accomplishment you can think of: it all means shit now.

>> I have SUCCESSFULLY changed my business Microsoft account password into something I can remember AND Microsoft accepted it in under an hour of trying!!!!! <<

I want to say a big FUCK YOU to MICROSOFT for WASTING MY BLOODY TIME.

FUCK YOU for giving me a max of 16 characters. DASB&(*(&G*HH*& for telling me every time my password is 100% strength and then after every submit tell me I have to change it AGAIN because it should be harder to guess. WUT?! It was 16 characters including a (capital) letter, number and multiple special characters, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! UNICODE EMOJI'S???!!! ALLOW ME TO USE MORE CHARACTERS SO I WILL MAKE IT HARDER TO GUESS IT, IT'S 2018 FFS.
I don't even understand why my new password is accepted compared to the other one, but fuck it I can access my account again.
Now I might have to find a new job before the company password policy kicks in again.

/me drops everything and walks out of the office to get wasted (not sure if celebrating or just really pissed off)

Every damn time I turn on my laptop I spend 15 mins just closing auto update shit from windows 10 and office
Dear Microsoft I have a 2Mbit line not 100000GB fiber optics, auto update cripples my internet 😒

hugging Microsoft with their clucking buggy software!

>> generate an xls with Apache POI
>> colour some particular cells in green, others - in red.
>> export as xls

>> open with LibreOffice Calc -- looks pretty
>> upload to Slack, open slack's generated xls preview -- looks pretty
>> open with GDocs -- looks pretty
>> open with sheet.zoho.com -- looks pretty
>> open with onlinedocumentviewer.com -- looks pretty
>> open with aspose.app -- looks pretty

>> open the xls with MS Office Excel -- more than half of the cells are unformatted, uncoloured

🔥🗑🔥

For about 3x years now, we have had 3x generic work email addresses that are used as microsoft accounts for office 2016 licenses.
(The company is dragging its heels on getting office 365 so MS like to make our lives hell.)

Suddenly we can’t get office updates... and when we sign in to see why, it says that because we are apparently only 3 years old we need our parents permission to use the account or we’ll lose access by September.
Never were we forced to enter a DOB when setting the accounts up!!! So it used the account setup date instead.

It turns out that we can’t change our DOB ourselves, as we are a ‘child’ and need a parents permission.
Fine.
I access my personal account and follow the instructions to add the 3x email addresses as my children so i can change the DOB.

‘Ha ha’ i hear microsoft saying, ‘it doesn’t work that way!!’

No, In order for the parent to verify their child’s identity, they are charged 0.50c per child!
Wtf!!
Doesn’t cost a lot but come on Microsoft!!

It’s that, or submit ID, which obviously wont work for a generic support@ email address like we have.
So annoying and we don’t know what to do.
Wonder how much MS are making out of this...

During the majority of my career, I've been the stereotypical pissed off guy with earphones in mashing away at his keyboard.

During lunch hours, I absolutely love listening to other pissed off devs. Their tales of buggy Microsoft products, oblivious project managers, dangerously unqualified directors, and severely disabled bosses are often the only thing that put a smile on my face in a workday, and here in Tokyo a workday is often your whole day. I don't feel there's anything wrong with it - the targets of their abuse often really are leeching tons of money while contributing little to nothing, so I feel like they deserve the abuse.

However, I don't like it when devs trash-talk other devs. I sympathize with those guys, even if they wrote bad code. I know writing good code is really, really hard, and I know that they were trying to do it under extremely difficult circumstances (in an office). If they're junior I sympathize even more because they're often better than I was when I had the same amount of experience.

So in conclusion, don't hate your fellow dev. Don't let hatred control you and poison your well-being. Direct your hatred where it belongs, at project managers.

When your boss isn't a developer (knows how to use Microsoft Office and browse on the line, and thats about the extent of knowledge)and you get that 'lost in another universe' stare when you try to explain something clever you just coded. *Face Palm*

For some reason, I started using Office 365 30 day trial a month ago, obviously, and yesterday, a month passed, but the product registered automatically and says it is a product officially signed with a product key.
Thanks Microsoft!
I <3 you!

(don't report this to nsa)

Why is it that software has gotten so hardware heavy these days?

I get that some things require more ram, larger screen resolutions and games.

But even calculator apps are now in the hundreds of MB when the entire Microsoft office suite used to come on a couple of floppies.

Is it laziness and relying on ever higher level languages or is there some reason that stuff gets unnecessarily large now.

Microsoft got my hopes really high. Such heartbreak.

*Goes and renews office subscription*

So Microsoft doesn't ship the ODBC drivers for Access on their new distros of office because they run in an isolated environment... THEN WHAT GOOD IS YOUR FUCKING EXPORT TO ODBC OPTION IS. YOU'RE MAKING MY JOB SO MUCH HARDER THAN IT NEEDS TO BE.

I hate Microsoft for not making Office run on Linux. It's the only reason I have to use a fucking MacBook instead of a Linux laptop. No Microsoft, I'm not going to run windows on my laptop. The system ist too much different to my production systems.
I hate Microsoft for not thinking about the consequences of not providing a Linux version. I have to use the fucking Apple Finder in my daily job. I have to buy a thousand dongles to connect anything to my laptop.

How do you guys/girls explain to potential new customers that you can perfectly work in a structured business environment and follow the rules, but also that you're assertive enough to oppose desicions being made based on bias, misunderstanding, fanboyism, or grave stupidity.

I just got informed from a freelance position that they would have hired me if it were not for my 'rebellious nature towards customers'

I don't oppose customers, i oppose stupidity unfounded.
Example from experience
> me working in a helodesk support position, all windows computer.
> new mgr comes into office, is a douche and complete mac fanboy
> wants all computers that are FINALLY working decent for some time in the entire department replaced with mac's... Back at 2010.
> whole team, even disliking microsoft themselves, are telling mgr that's a bad, dangerously dumb idea, expensive too, different OS, different software mgmt making, back then integration microsoft and apple was beyond diarhea... Several other issues the senior devs and admins pointed out

>mgr: 'but aple is soh much better, like a billion times better, hurrduurrrrr'
His decision passed somehow to the board..
> All stations from our customers get changed...we don't get a single machine to try out problems because overspending
> we are most of the time unable to help out customers because we still have pc's...
> mgr asks team why performance drops after 1 month
> we compared performance graph with his starting date of mgr, see clear drop after mgr's plan implemented...
> board stilll stands by mgr, gets praise for 'bold changes in the company', but appears to be some associate's son
> two main seniors leave after 15 years of employment, in three months, 80% of staff leaves.
> we canr fix the problems, we are not dev's , we get shit from all sides, i was still a junior in the industry so i worked as a slave inside that job.
> eventually get fired due to 'bad performance'
> mgr loses entire team... 'Hey why don't we outsource this dept to south africa, it's a lot cheaper! '

now that company is an it hellhouse where everyone get clinically depressed from sitting atbtheir station...
This is what i wish to oppose!

How to make that clear!

Just reinstalled Windows to an SSD, so I'm reinstalling​ MS office. Office 365 is helpfully provided by my university. I also use Visio a good bit, and again my University helpfully provides Visio 2016.

Install Office 365.
Download 2.2GB Visio iso.
Mount Visio iso, run setup.exe.
Get this message.

🖕

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

Microsoft Office fidget spinner 😂😂

I'm a Linux user. I've been a Linux user for the last 14 years...

Having said that: Microsoft Office is much better than LibreOffice.

There, I said it.

When I began my sandwich course in a big French company, I was dreaming about cutting edge stack, rocket computer and stuff...

I was disappointed when I came to my office with an old Windows 7 computer, coding via LANDesk to an old server with Windows Server 2008 on it, with Eclipse ... INDIGO...
I have to use Java 1.7 ...
Tomcat 7.
PRTG for monitoring...
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ...
One screen...
Coding on a codebase where, indubitably, MVC pattern was just a weird thing in books.
No UT.
Lasagna code.

Well it really disappointed me.

Luckily, the Information Service was very open minded and gave me a laptop with Fedora, 3 screens, updated the servers, and let me update the stack, with Java 10, Angular for the front, they are okay for using Docker.

So ... even if it seems to be fucked up, there’s still hope !!

what's worse? having very few/no endorsements on any of your skills, or having craptons of endorsements on "Microsoft Office"

Why the fuck does Microsoft Office have a background process that opens a cmd window every hour?

This is some real shady shit...
I was trying to set my office 365 account we got from school to gmail in my phone and this is what it wants to be able to do. In summary (Dutch screenshots):
- It can disable important safety features,
- Lock me out of my phone at any moment,
- Encrypt all data,
- Or just erase all of it
- And watch me while they do it

Nice.

wait, what?

I was typing a mail there Microsoft,you signed out yourself :/

Another oldie - apologies if it has been done before.
So there were these two developers in a light aircraft looking to land, but they were completely fog bound and had no clue where they were (I said it was an oldie - no GPS).
So they flew around for a while, getting lower and lower hoping to see a landmark, when they flew past this office building.
As they went by, they saw a single light on in one of the windows, so they flew around again and attracted the guy's attention.
On the next loop around, the pilot shouted "WHERE ARE WE?"
Then on the next loop around, the guy in the office shouted back "YOU'RE IN AN AIRPLANE".
They looped around again, and the pilot shouted "THANKS!" and set course south west for 15 miles and made a perfect touchdown at Seattle airport.
Hi passenger looked at him and said "How did you do that??"
He said "Quite simple really. I asked that guy a perfectly reasonable question, and got an answer that was 100% correct, but totally useless, so I deduced that must be Microsoft, and I knew that the airport is 15 miles to the south west"

While studying business information technology (useless btw), we had to take these exams with Microsoft Office programs.

When it was time for Excel exam, we were given this sheet of instructions on what to do, and it even listed the exact functions you had to use.

The fun started when I realized that my Windows installation was in English, so my Excel installation was also in English. The instruction sheet and the functions listed in it were in my native language.

Because Excel is probably the shittiest thing ever made, this is the part where you know you are fucked. The functions listed in the instructions don't even exist in the English version (same goes vice versa btw), so what can you do?

You implement the fucking functions. Never used VB before that day, and never will again.

But I got a perfect score.

Microsoft seems to get progressively worse every year. My work transitioned from google products (email, drive, chat) to Microsoft & it was a humungous step backwards. Everything crashes & doesn't save. Edge sucks. Windows 10 sucks. IE always sucked. Office 365 sucks. One drive sucks. MS Teams sucks. 😑

With all M$ buying GitHub thing i really hope some good things will come out of it like:

- Better version control inside Visual Studio.
- Microsoft making its projects more open source, since it now has an official platform for itself.
- Faster and better service from GitHub since there is now a much bigger budget for servers and other things.

But there are some things that i think are worth thinking about:

- Will this be another one of Microsoft's paid services?
- Will there be "intergration" into the Office apps along Skype, Word and others?
- Will the privacy policy change?

Most likely, none of the bad things happen but me being paranoid as i am, I'd prepare. I always try to be optimistic and just ignore it for now until Microsoft start doing things.

Found at work. Not Y2K compliant, otherwise in pristine condition.

Don’t teach with LOGO, but instead start with Scratch, then something more advanced like Python and after that maybe C# or Java.
Teach different operating systems and software, not only Windows and Microsoft Office. There should be class with Linux (Mint for instance) with LibreOffice and another with macOS and iWork.
Teach basic troubleshooting steps.
Less theory, more practice.
STOP BEING SUCH MICROSOFT ORIENTED.
Ability to use own laptop (I would be really happy to use my own one).
Teach basic commands for Windows and Unix based systems.
Teach how to install Windows and Linux.

Whoever wrote apache poi does not seem to like Microsoft Office formats very much.

Why is it, that every time Microsoft updates their Office, it gets worse?

You want your “ribbon simplified?” You’ve got it, we removed all the buttons that you usually need.

You want a clearer view of items? You’ve got it, we doubled the font size and added 10cm empty spaces between emails in the list.

Wanna see how the weather in Washington? You’ve got it. We added the forecast info there automatically. We know that it’s like 20 000km away from you!

What else could we do in future to fuck up your setup more?

When searching for "microsoft" in Ubuntu apps, it results in all libreoffice apps. And similarly, a search for "microsoft word", shows "libreoffice writer" as a result and same thing happens with other microsoft office products.

A very simple thing but pretty neat if you ask me.

Not really a rant and not very random. More like a very short story.

So I didn't write any rant regarding the whole Microsoft GitHub topic. I don't like to judge stuff quickly. I participated in few threads though.

Another thing is I also don't use GitHub very much apart from giving 🌟 to repos as a bookmark. Have one hobby project there. That's all. So I don't worry that much. I'm that selfish and self concerned. :3

I was first introduced to version control system by learning how to use tortoisesvn around 2008. We had a group project and one of the guys was an experienced and amazing programmer unlike the rest of us. He was doing commercial projects while we were at our 1st and 2nd year. Uni had svn repo server. He taught us about tortoisesvn. He also had Basecamp and taught us how to use it as well. So that's how I learned the benefits of using versioning tools and project management tools. On side note, our uni didn't teach any of those in detail :3

After that project, I was hooked to use versioning tools. So until school kicked me out, I was able to use their svn server. When I was on my own, I had to ask Google for help. I found a new world. There are still free svn services that I can use with certain limited functions. That's not the new world; I found people saying how git is better than svn in various ways. It was around 2010,2011.

At first I was a bit reluctant to touch git because of all the commands in terminal approach. But then I found that there is tortoisegit. I still thank tortoisesvn creator for that. I'm a sucker for GUI tools. So then I also have to pick which git servers to use. Hell yeah, self hosted gitlab is the way to go man. Well that's what the internet said. So I listened. I got it up and running after numerous trial and error. I used it briefly. Then I came back to my country on 2012-2013; the land of kilobytes per minute (yes not second, minute).

My country's internet was improved only after 2016. So from 2013 to 2016, I did my best not to rely on internet. I wasn't able to afford a server at my less than 10 people, 12ft*50ft office. So I had to find alternative to gitlab which preferably run on windows. Found bonobo and it was alright. It worked. Well had crazy moments here and there when the PC running Bonobo got virus and stuff. But we managed. We survived. Then finally multi national Telecom corporates came to our country.

We got cheaper and faster mobile data, broadband and fiber plans. Finally I can visit pornhub ... sorry github. Github is good. I like it. But that doesn't mean I should share my ugly mutated projects to the rest of the world. I could keep using Bonobo but it has risks. So I had to think for an alternative. I remembered that gitlab didn't have cloud hosting service when I checked them out in the past. So I just looked into Bitbucket and happy with their free plans of 5 users and unlimited private repos. I am very very cheap and broke.

That's why I said I don't really care that much about the whole M$GitHub topic at the beginning. However due to that topic, I have visited GitLab website again and found out they have cloud hosting now and their free plan is unlimited users and unlimited repos. So hell yeah. Sorry BB. I am gonna move to cheaper and wider land.

TL;DR : I am gonna move to GitLab because of their free plan.

A member of infra team:
"Hey, we are migrating to a Microsoft office tools and we migrated your google drive data to One drive"
I go and check the new One Drive account and it's empty. So I point that out and the reply was:
"You should export your files to a zip and then import them to One Drive"
I didn't want to waste my time showing him that he is just contradicting himself in less than 5 mn and in two nearly consecutive messages.
I need more patience.

Why the heck is Office so incompatible with everything??? They have their own proprietary standards for Word, Powerpoint and Excel and then implement them WRONG. WTF?

And don't get me started on Outlook: MSG files are the worst horsecrap ever, why can't you use EML like a normal mail application? Not to mention the complete incompatibility with CSS in mails. Nooooo you have to design everything with tables and images like we are still in the 90s. WHAT YEAR IS IT? Everytime i have to work with this boolshit i can feel sweaty Steve Ballmer scream "DEVELOPERS!!!" right in my fuckin' face.

The real cherry on top is their permanent advertisement being shoved up your ass. The stuff is all over the place! When you register a new mail account via IMAP they open Edge and prompt you to give them your phone number so they can send you a download link to their stupid Outlook app. I could understand that if the Office suite would be free... but it isn't! I effectively pay a shitton of money to see ads.

Why is everyone still using these applications?

Thanks to Microsoft Office 365 I never worry about getting junk in my inbox because all emails including ones sent from within Microsoft Office 365 go to junk.

Can you imagine if one day Microsoft acquired WeWork and named it Microsoft Office?

A dev life in Queen songs:

„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim

Holy fucking shit are email clients bullshit.
I don't know what happened there but if you thought the chrome-firefox-ie-egde gaps back in the days were sick - let me tell you.. email clients are made by the devil himself. All of them. All of them? Yup. Because he made some of them being owned by apple, working beatuiful and no weird stuff.
But on the same end he made some of them owned by microsoft and their office Studios. They use the word engine to render html emails. Read this again. Read it without starting to cry in agony.
But thats not enough. Let's make some of them use an ie-engine and the mac os variants going to use some webkit based renderer. This way there will be no valid ruleset to make it look good on all of them, isn't this great??
Now this might be hell already. But lets pour more salt into these wide opened wounds.
Let there be Germany and United Internet, owning trash like Web.de and GMX, whose android clients going to work completely different across Android and app-versions!
Once you've mastered these, let me introduce you to gmail. Lets take only the body node of your email and do some fuck up with it, so you have to display a non-responsive variant on mobile.
Now you might be thinking "but there are web-based clients, they'll do good ain't they?" Long story short: fuck you.
Not enough.
Let's go back to ms.
Hey dude lets make it possible to scale up your whole system. So old people can read shit better. And now the funny part: let's make it so that the word rendering engine, rendering emails goes completely mayhem on your mail, so it looks like a completely different thing! (:

If you ever receive a newsletter in your inbox and that shit looks like it's planned to look like.. appreciate that shit. Sacrifice a virgin as thanksgiving for it.

TL;DR:
E-Mail needs to die. I'm doing this for over 2 years now and this shit needs to stop asap.

microsoft office on a mac:

update the updater, so you can update your office

Awhile ago I was working with an National Instruments RFID analyzer scope.. the item cost $100,000. And the vendor that sold it my company had the boldness to have Windows 7 run all the licensed software equipment on the device.

The product however did work quite well. One day I came into the office and IT "UPGRADED" TO Windows 10 OVERNIGHT.
Effectively turning the equipment into the world's most expensive brick. Luckily for me, it was my last day in that position.. got a salaried position in engineering.

A couple months later an intern was assigned to fix it.. the licenses were messed up.. he eventually got it working again. Microsoft almost cost my company $100K without a second glance.

It all worked out in the end. :)

That moment when someone asks you, if they can get a Microsoft Office license for free from you.

Admit it! We have all tried it.

Back in the days when I knew only Windows, I used to be a Microsoft fan. I wanted to use only Microsoft products. I had a Hotmail email account that Microsoft acquired. I used a version of Windows and Microsoft Office (even though I didn't know at the time that it was pirated). I wanted to be a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) and promote Microsoft everywhere.

Fast forward to now (or maybe to the time after I got introduced to GNU/Linux), I started hating Microsoft solely for the reason that they had a price-tag on everything. Later on, when I got to open-source software, I hated Microsoft for making all of their software closed-source. When I decided to move out of the Microsoft environment, my next favorite was of course, Big Brother (Google, if you haven't gotten it) - Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive. My personal information was the price to pay for the services even though I wasn't OK with that fact.

Then again, I realized that you could actually have your own stuff if you had the know-how. Compile / host your own software on your own systems. Oh, then I went on a compile spree. That's when I realized I didn't need any of these corporations to own my data. Today, I try my best to keep my data in my control and not some corporations who gives me free stuff for the price of my data and personal information, no thanks.

So, at the very day I've been expelled, the university cancelled my MSDNAA account as if they thought they would punish me. (They got Office, Windows and everything Microsoft for students for free there)

It's sad but half of the students have no idea what MSDNAA is and how to use it. Then there is the other half who would still feel like they've been stolen from even if they got a MS product for free.

And then there is me. Because of math which is significantly impossible, I've been expelled. Fuck.

I'm starting to think that LibreOffice is easier to use than Microsoft Office 😐

To whoever stole my copy of Microsoft Office, I will find you. You have my Word!

"F*ck Microsoft!" **posts online using Windows**

Well thanks to them, I was able to finish my f*cking project in college using Microsoft Office.

How is it possible that Microsoft Office and Open Office have less portability issues then Microsoft Office on Windows vs. Microsoft Office on Mac? It's supposed to be the same f*king programm developed by the same company! <.<

*use windows, ms office, vsc, skype probably code in ts, ... *
*rant about microsoft buying github*
I'm not a microsoft fan either, but thats the sad truth.

I was given two lists of values in an excel spreadsheet and I needed to compare/find duplicates. I wrote some JavaScript to handle it. I don't know how to use fucking Excel.

University switched to Office 365. Just realized they implemented "Focused" inbox mode that auto filters messages microsoft deems less important. It filtered 3 important emails from last week. Just give us back the ability to make our own rules and filters again!!

Board-o-Word, it is even better than on Windows!

Well fuck you then

I hated lotusnotes until we upgraded to Outlook, pretty sure there was an office-wide case of Stockholm syndrome for at least a week...

Also Microsoft Communicator, flashbacks to MSN messenger and the most infuriating shortcuts. *shudder*

Teaching advanced IT topics like programming or system management has become much harder in only about five years, because many 20 year olds do not know how to effectively work with the file system. I don't blame them: the Microsoft Office applications nudge you strongly towards storing everything in the Cloud (saving files locally requires extra clicks), and on Windows, the folders C:\Users and C:\ are almost hidden in he respective dialogs (open file, save file). Same on macOS. Students also keep loosing files. This used to be an excuse for not doing the work; nowadays, you're able to find the files on their systems by using appropriate tools (e.g. `find`, installed with Git Bash on Windows). And don't get me started on touch-typing... hell, those kids were fast ten years ago with a proper keyboard! Now they're fast with their smartphone, but painstakingly slow on an actual keyboard.

WFH vs Office, what will be your preference in a post covid world?

I'm sure after the covid saga ends, there will be a plethora of remote and WFH opportunities since businesses are now ready for it. Most big companies in our place (Like Microsoft, Google, Amazon) have extended WFH till June/July, and Microsoft even said it's gonna be way more flexible in letting ppl WFH

The only really influential product Microsoft ever created is Verdana. Yes, the typeface.

It was the first typeface designed to be displayed on a screen rather than in print. Before that, there only were monospaced typefaces like we saw in terminal, or digitized typefaces like Helvetica Neue.

More than that, its looks were partly generated by an algorithm, hence the odd, alien looks. But because of it, Verdana works amazingly good in small labels. The 8pt Verdana is more readable than 10pt Helvetica.

I still use Verdana in all of my projects, religiously.

All the other Microsoft products: Windows, Xbox, Surface, Office, Azure, all that stuff — is mere garbage compared to the influence Verdana made on how our interfaces look now.

!rant from a support guy

I was tasked to migrate an Exchange 2003 server (yes, those are still used) for an upcoming Office 365 deployment. There are no direct upgrade path from one another, as far as we know

My task was to export PSTs from mailboxes. Great, a native tool exist for that in 2003 (exmerge). But only for less than 2 GB mailboxes because ANSI/Unicode! Half of our mailbox busts that limit. Oh, it seems Exchange 2007 has a PowerShell command for exporting to PST as well! But pre-SP3, that command relies on a local installation of Outlook on the server (DAFUQ), and has been superseded by another "standalone" powershell command. So I install a bogus Windows 2012 server only for that purpose, with Exchange Management Tools (which, by the way, is bundled with the Exchange installation setup and REQUIRES to have IIS installed on the target machine. Also, if you install ONLY the Exchange 2007 Management Tools and wish to uninstall them afterwards, you can't because the uninstaller wants me to select an Exchange Role to remove, which are all unchecked in my tools-only setup). Never worked, and Google-fu says that the newer Exchange 2007 New-MailboxExportRequest command seems to have removed Exchange 2003 support.

So i'm back to installing a pre-SP3 Exchange 2007. Then the older Export-Mailbox powershell command whines about 64bits and 32bit incompatiblity-- actually I ***HAVE*** to have the whole OS/software stack 32bit ONLY. Don't ask me why!

Some article I found says I could fire up an XP virtual machine for that, I go for Win 7 x86. "Sorry, Microsoft Exchange won't be installed on a workstation environment because reasons." All right then, let's go for an old Windows Server 2003 x86. Have you tried to boot this up in an Hyper-V environment where mouse and keyboard support for Windows Server 2003 are apparently optional? No keyboard AND mouse events sent to the guest machine at all.

* Sigh *, let's use a Windows Server 2008, but WATCH OUT! Microsoft has discontinued x86 support on their W2008 R2 release, so non-R2 for me. Even then, mouse event wasn't sent until I installed guest additions.

After all, export-mailbox ended up working, but that costed me two days of banging my head against the wall. (Oh, and I take internal calls inbetween as well...)

And that's why I aspire to be a programmer. Thank you for nothing, Microsoft!

Another day in the office to fix windows updates.

Love when a multi-national company is not even able to do a proper update system... Thank you Microsoft! Because of your incompetence i have a lot of work!

Some background to get us started...
Just took over the position as IT Specialist for our local county commission back in December after the previous employee left.

Before leaving she deleted all of her emails for the past 9 years.

Included in her emails were the details for certain program licensing the county had purchased not the least of which was 200 Office 2010 professional keys.

Getting into the office this morning my boss says "Hey got a problem for you, we've exceeded the license count for Microsoft office, and the vendor we purchased from is no longer in business."

My first response was Ok, lets go with open, or libre office. Problem solved. (I'm piece by piece upgrading our infrastructure to a more dependable OS you know, Linux.) I knew the open office suggestion wasn't going to fly so I promptly got on the phone with our friends @ Microsoft.

They were as helpful as you can expect when provided with only our MAK # and sent me back to try digging around for details 9 years old with our purchasing department. Who happens to be too damn busy to concern themselves with what the IT department needs this morning.

That will be remembered the next time the internet "Quits" working as they so often like to claim when then cant get an item to add to a cart in amazon.

Sure people just because your chosen shit browser (Edge) doesnt like to play well with js all the time the internet must be broken...

Setting up a laptop for the next employee. Office 365 has taken over two hours to install in what it states as "just a moment."

OpenOffice for life.

Why is every one of these marked critical!? Every month or two they have an update that is critical and they are usually just security improvements. Is their security really that bad to always mark as a 'critical' update.

Microsoft Teams 👎

Luckily most of our company uses Zoom, which is great UX-wise. But MS Teams... What a joke!

I've even been on a call with MS engineers for some Office integration support. Of course, they scheduled a Teams meeting. It was embarrassing how bad the quality and connections were. But likely they simply don't know any better...

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

Firstly, my main wish is to work in the office. I don't like remote stuff and all that. I would like to have a job where you have to go every day except weekend at a certain time and be there for example 7 hours. I would love to have a good who will tell me what to do, I like to listen to people. I would also want to have a secretary, Im not organized. I would like to do either .NET development, Web Development or 3D modeling. If im working .NET, I would like to work in Microsoft. If Im working Web, I would like to work anywhere, with an office, of course. I don't know, I just love the feeling offices give me and the atmosphere in them. And if im working 3D modeling, I would like to work in Bethesda. Oblivion played a big role in my childhood. I don't care for salary, it doesn't have to be anything big, just enough for bills and my children (which I hope ill have).
There, dream of a 15 yo

Me: *Wants to install Office trial to use a key to activate it*
Microshit: You're almost ready to use office. But we we need you to provide payment information to use the trial.
Me: This is one more reason to why a metric fuckton of ppl despise you, Microsoft!

Update the method books and lectures, first and foremost. Nothing better than studying outdated versions of languages just because university's technical base can't accommodate anything newer.

Upgrade the universities' hardware and software (I studied CS subjects on 1998 hardware with Windows XP and Lubuntu on board).

For the love of anything holy, stop making students program on paper.

Make professors available via e-mail. A surprising number of my professors weren't teach savvy enough to use it.

Introduce programming in highschool. Use a language that is easier to grasp than Delphi or Pascal. We had informatics as a class, and it never covered anything aside from Microsoft Office.

I just think about it ...
Running docker on windows is shit
Running nginix on windows is boofff
Running apache on windows is boofff
Running WWS on windows is hugly

Install linux
All server software run like king
Don't have access to any adobe product for design and micro$hit office for client sanity because ODF is to special, i want my docx i said ... Like what do you want from me ... Shit the dev setup is a fucking mess because some enterprises don't want to wet itself in the futur...

Microsoft love linux BULLSHIT

How the fuck is visio the worst fucking tool ever. For some obtuse reason, I can't move a text box. At least tell me why your being an uncooperative asshole, instead of showing the new position, and then not moving the damn thing! Its like trying to get a cat to play fetch.

Been working in market research for the past year and a half while doing a part time masters in business.

I officially quit in a week and will be a full time student and reviving my dormant programming skills.

Gone are the days of colleagues asking why their pirated Microsoft office crashes on then 8 year old laptop. No longer will I be subjected to attending client meetings where my sole purpose is to ensure the projector is working as I am "good with that sorta thing".

Friday evening, I am free!!

Hello, today was my First day, internship at Microsoft innovation center BE, a great day with amazing people, my project is called tech Office, we need to process data from sensors in the office, create and use Microsoft AI to optimize and help the office become smarter and more efficient. Make the life better and the environment more productive. I don't really know where to start but I'm happy to be given such an opportunity and will do everything to make this work !

Going from Nautilus to Windows Explorer feels like going back to Stone age .. why does Microsoft's modern OS feel so clunky . Btw I love the feel of the new Microsoft office ..

Finally done with school. It were three years of ups and downs.

The downs were plenty and mostly in the way school material was organized.

We've spend years learning web development where the course should have been more broad (application development)

So by the time my first internship period of half a year approached I searched for a company outside of web development and ended up at a company which did serious games using unity C#. Those were the best months of my 3 years. I managed to push the company into a direction for a future even though it was reletively small.

After that I took up .net and got the MTA C# Fundamentals certificate from microsoft itself. (School offered the exam).

Then there was the 2nd internship.
Worked for a company who sold intranets to other enterprises and I developed a mobile app which connected a user's phone to their account on their intranet. Allowing to seperate work and their private life.

That project was fun but the company itself was terrible. 4 people at the office and the owner treated us as objects rather than people. The company was too small for such an environment and most of them were irritated 9 times out of 10. Glad to be rid of them.

Now I'm in the process of looking for a job and have a meeting with a recruiter tomorrow

Wish me luck.

Aligning things in Microsoft Word is officially more difficult than aligning them in CSS.
Change my mind.

So, I decided over the weekend that I would move my entire dev environment to Linux. No Windows on the laptop and only as a backup boot system for my home PC. I wanted to wean myself off of Linux as only being a VM and move to the full blown desktop.

I can only describe my experience to that of having your first kid: lot's of crying and joy at the same time.

Things I've learned:
1. The install is amazingly painless. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth work straight out of the box no configuring needed.
2. OH MY GOD THE CUSTOMIZATION. Rocking Arc Dark theme on Gnome3 = EVERYTHING IS
ALWAYS DARK MICROSOFT WHY IS THIS NOT A THING.
3. Getting Java servlets to work has been hell. I gave up trying to get them to work in eclipse and moved over to IntelliJ. More trial and error before I can figure out why tomcat won't fucking work in eclipse but it's fine in IntelliJ.
4. The UI and overall work flow has been improved after getting past the learning curve. Gnome3 is way better from when I tried it out 4 years ago.
5. Vim has a steep learning curve but I am starting to understand the net benefits of it. It'll probably be a solid month before I get good with it.
6. Loosing Microsoft Office has been a little bit of a challenge but their suite is online so....meh. I do miss Visual Studio though, and am still looking for an adequate replacement for C++ and C# development.

Overall it's been a challenge but I think it's been a net gain. Now if only I could get the whole sys-admin team to use it. ;)

Why Microsoft, WHY???
Why the hell did you DISABLE remote archives in outlook 2016??? It worked in 2013, and you just killed it ?!?!

Microsoft Office for iOS

My brother-in-law's mother's face when she was telling me that she was forced to use 2FA Microsoft Office for work..
"They think we're all IT ppl or what"

Just realise how complex the "simple" 2FA activation step is for someone without the slightest IT curiosity. Not super-democratic either.. (eg. For someone who uses a library PC and has no phone)

Just fired up my Windows 10 VM and it goes ham... there is nothing installed but office.

Why!?

Seriously. If someone can explain to me why this is necessary, I'd greatly appreciate it!

It's 15 minutes past when I've resumed the VM from suspension now and it's still going on like that and it's slow as fuck.

I don't want this to escalate to an OS war. Tastes are different.

As I was writing this: apparently Office is updating itself by default consuming a shitload of system resources while doing so. This is fucked up...

So yes, Microsoft is scanning my emails for keywords. I tried to send an email using the word PFA and did not attach any file. It gives a pop up to attach one.

Spend last two hours trying to get a language pack for Microsoft Office. Two fuckin' hours with just an error saying "Please check your internet connection and see if you have space on disk"

Yes motherfucker, I fuckin have internet connection and I have 1 fuckin terabyte free on my fucking disk.

The only fuckin solution on Office's forum is to uninstall and reinstall the whole office software. Just to add one fuckin language pack.

I'm going crazy... Everyday I hate Microsoft products more and more and fuckin more.

Microsoft Windows
Microsoft office

And the worst of all: Adobe reader

Which browser did/do Microsoft employees use before/after Edge at the office ?

-Be Friday morning
-Be me sleeping, I have my vacation.
-Got SMS from secretary that her office (MS office 2013 pro) not working Word, Excel, Outlook.
-Ignored, still sleeping
-After hour received call from her. Answered say I will be after half a hour.
Got shower, breakfast and went there.
-an old error appeared again. Can't open any of programs, same error, can't remember error codes. But it's update or something breaks it, tried reinstalling, but it will shows up again. Quicker fix is repair.
-turned off updates cuz I don't want to deal with this everyday.

Anyway. Fuck Microsoft monkeys for not testing their shit before releasing

I hate windows, I hate office, but for some reason I keep using it.

Have been thinking of a new job opportunity so started looking and applying a few places. I have mostly been interested in senior software eng positions so had a few calls with companies directly and some recruiters. Seems to be mostly going well and normal.
However received a tech test from one place and one of the questions in the test was "Name 5 microsoft office products and give examples of each with benefits of its use". I am not even paraphrasing it, rhat was exactly how they worded it with 5 bullet points below to provide answer. I am just baffled as to understand if that was a joke or someone had no idea how to test someone for senior position.
I felt bit cocky so answered with "office 365 (or go linux and use freeware or open source)" and left it at that.
Let's see what (if any) feedback I get. 😂😂😂

Homework for Informatics: Create a Powerpoint about yourself...
Me: That’s no homework, please let us create an app, site or something creative that’s something I prefer.
School life... development is so much nicer

The magic Apple Support:

A few days ago, I suddenly couldn't login to iCloud on my mac. I thought it was something that would be gone if I would try turning it back off and on again. Didn't work. Used the mac without bothering about it. I was too lazy to call the Apple Support and it didn't annoy me that much.
A day later, suddenly Spark (my email client) didnt work either, it asked me all the time to re-login into one of the accounts but "an authentication error occured". At that point I thought it was a problem with the keychain. Because i don't use email that often and the last time I should pay 30€ if I wanted to call Support (out of warranty), I just started using email on my phone.
Yesterday, MS Office (yes I use it and I like this Microsoft Product and I'm an Apple fanboy) wouldn't login either. I didn't call them.
Today, I had finally time to call them. They didn't want to charge me since I selected an Apple-Id Problem (and I think the Support Hotlines are free to call idk). The call from Ireland came 2 times and the connection didn't work (thanks iPhone). The third time, the moment the Support guy said Hello iCloud worked. A few second later Office and Spark worked again too. I don't know how these coincidences happen. Anyway, I am just happy my stuff works again and I don't have to use Google Docs and write my mails on my phone.

Ok so I had to make a revision on a PDF with JS that was being tested to fix some bugs, I hadn't touched it or Acrobat Reader for more than a month I think but I could work on it well back then.
I had to see the problem first so when I go and open it with Adobe Reader, it crashes. Weird. I can't get it to work.
Well I'm reinstalling it then.
After downloading the (now correct, I tried to use an old one I had and lost some time) installer, I tried to install it and it asked me to close Outlook and Excel. Weirder.
I do, and after finishing it said "you have a newer version, open it?". Super weird. Of course when I accepted it didn't work.
I uninstall my current installation and while uninstalling it asks me to close Chrome. Ok now I'm not ok with this shit.
Adobe wtf?
I needed to fix it in some minutes and it ended up taking hours.

!rant
anyone got any experience with Samsung Dex? I still keep Windows as dual boot on my laptop since I sometimes need MS Office with full functionality and not only the limited online/mobile version. I heard that one could install full MS Office on the Dex since at some screen size Microsoft requires that or something...? No idea. Any experiences?
Since if it is possible I'd get that instead of the dual boot.

Microsoft f*cked up...

Microsoft, please stop the incomprehensible work vs. school account stuff and if you want to mail me a login code, then please actually do send an email. What's wrong with Microsoft Teams and office always giving its users headaches already when trying to log in?

A customer sent me a "FindTime" link, something like Calendso / Calendly, but "powered" by Microsoft Office. Seems that their power is off again, like ever so often. Microsoft: "can't access your account: You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school account instead."

Okay, go to bing, and search your error message. Try to use bing page to log in to my account: Microsoft: "We emailed a code." (No you didn't. At least I never received anything. And, yes, I did check my spam folder!) Microsoft: "Other ways to sign in: use Microsoft Authenticator".

me: "dear customer, please feel free to pick any time and date that matches your preference, as the FindTime link has been impossible to use".

How can Microsoft make me feel so dumb again, after more than 20 years as a developer? Have they ever heard about usability?

I use Microsoft Word like once a month. Every time I open Word there is an update to all of the Office Apps. And the update take like half an hour to complete.

I usually like updates and install them, because I hope that the new version maybe patches a bug or makes the software more efficient, but unspecified updates that often is frustrating.

Microsoft Office Communicator (2007) is complete junk.
It can't even save a conversation session overnight

Are any of you "cursed" with a particular set of software tools/programs?
Take me for example, I cannot use Adobe shit or it crashes. The same thing can be said for Microsoft Office. Anything in there, it does not matter. It always crashes on me. I continuously get the "Not responding" status. Regardless of operating system.

This has made me absolutely *despise* anything that is Microsoft Office or from Adobe. Now, I am sure you can all guess how and during what circumstances I would have to touch Microsoft stuff, work and the like.

But Adobe, mainly photoshop because it is what my designer uses for mockups and the sort. Dude has been constantly baffled when I show him me trying to open something only for it to crash. And we have made the experiment, in which two of my other employees would use MY COMPUTER to open something in Adobe and it would not crash on them. But the fucking moment I attempt to open anything in these two pieces of shit, guess what? it crashes.

I fkn hate Office and Adobe products

Am I the only one getting PTSD from Word? I fell like every time I get a new computer It somehow gets even slower.

I find still very funny that Desktop outlook (So Microsoft) doesn't support MFA from Office 365.

I'm kind of tired to tell user go and geerate "app specific" pass which bypasses MFA.

Specially when even default Windows 10/11 mail client supports MFA just fine and fucking faster than outlook.

This is the part of my job I hate : Administrating users, search how to make thier PC/MAC work (Btw Mac client does suppoort MFA ironicly).

Can I just get back to Infrastructure, redis caches, step in Q# ? .

Okay, I've been thinking on this all week.

Microsoft Office (All of it)
itunes
Adobe Creative Cloud (Only The Management Software / Installer)
Apple Mail

Trying to help my friend fix his Microsoft Office over the phone.
Friend: 'I seem to be having some trouble installing Office'
Me: 'What version are you trying to install?'
Friend: 'Windows 10'

(Note: I got a bit carried away while writing this, so the end result is a lot longer than I expected. Apologies for the long post!)

The beginning of my programming journey started with a book.

This was back in 7th grade. I had some basic exposure to BASIC (pun maybe intended?) from our school curriculum, but it was nothing too interesting as our teachers never really treated it as anything important. They would stress a lot on those Microsoft Office chapters (yes, we actually studied Microsoft Office as part of our computer science course at school) and mostly ignore the programming chapters because I dare say many of them struggled with it themselves. So although I had been exposed to *some* programming, it was mostly memorizing the syntax without actually understanding what was going on.

Then one day there was this book fair thing going on at this local Carrefour (for those of you who've no idea, it's a pretty famous hypermarket chain) in this mall, and for some reason my mother and I were in that mall on that day. Now the interesting thing is that this usually never happens -- I usually visit malls with my dad or my friends, this is the only instance I remember where I had actually visited one with just my mom. This turned out to be fortuitous. My father is the kind of person who's generally not amenable to any kind of extraneous shopping requests. My mother, on the other hand, was and remains pliable.

So I basically saw this book -- Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours -- being sold at half price. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that JavaScript is a good introductory programming language (and it helped that this was the time when I was getting into a Google-craze -- I basically saw some photos of Google Zurich and went all HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHERE I NEED TO WORK WHEN I GROW UP (for those of you who haven't seen it, I recommend googling it. That office is the bomb) -- and I'd also read that you need programming skills to join Google). So I begged and begged my mum to buy that book, and thankfully she did.

Back home I returned with my new prize under my arm. Dad took one look at it and scoffed that I'll never actually use it. Pretty much entirely out of spite (to prove him wrong), I attacked the book with a zeal. I still remember how I felt when I wrote my very first JavaScript program (printing the current system date in an h1 tag) and marveling at the output. I guess that was when something struck -- the realization that this was probably what I wanted to do in life.

Fast forward to today, and I've never looked back and wondered what it would be like to have done something else.

PS: for all you beginners out there, JavaScript is a horrible language. Please start with something like Python. Also there are better resources than Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours available, that I just didn't know of back then. I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript any day.

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.

OneNote is just a big pile of shit.
I‘ve been trying for three hours now to share a Notebook (OneNote Desktop to OneNote Desktop).
It just does not work. It used to work. Microsoft broke sharing.

If the other person invites me via Mail or even MS-Account I neither get Notificiations nor an E-Mail with a link nor am I able to select the Notebook somewhere. It‘s. Just. Useless.
OneDrive also sucks.

Microsoft tries to offer solutions for everything and nothing is finished and fully functional. It sucks. People using OneDrive suck. I just want to do my work.

I started writing basic in 1980 on my stepfather's Apple ][+. I was about ten. Then I got a Commodore 64 and got this awesome program called Gary's Game Kitchen. It had a Sprite editor and you programmed it by writing pseudo code. From there I learned C, then got jobs in Visual Basic and vb for Microsoft office (yuck!). Then I discovered Linux and became a web developer. *Hugs vim*

I love you sooo much Microsoft! Your goddamn Office download page won't stop re-loading. For fucks sake, get your shit together.

Someone messed with something they shouldn't, but I have no idea what it could be.
And no, I'll not try open it on IE.

Windows ffs stop shoving your fucking updates into my ass. It was prompting me to restart computer for 6 fucking hours and it never gave a fucking option to postpone the update beyond one fucking hour. So I literally kept postponing it every fucking hour and went for a shower. By the time I returned it was updating it. I had more than 25 tabs opened on incognito window of chrome and atleast 8 Microsoft office files open and editing atleast 4 of them. It fucking ruined my work flow and I don't even remember the locations of the files I was referring. Who is going to open all those tabs and files. Ffs what is wrong with you WINDOWS. I AM SO PISSED OFF AT WINDOWS AND MY UNI THAT DOESN'T FUCKING ACCEPT ASSIGNMENTS IF THEY ARE NOT IN DOCX, PPT AND OTHER MICROSHIT'S CRAPPY PRODUCTS. I AM NOT IN A MOOD TO DO THE ASSIGNMENT NOW. FUCK WINDOWS. I SWER BY THE Old GODS AND THE NEW THAT I WILL CONTRIBUTE TO WINE IN THE NEXT 5 TO 6 MONTHS SO THAT I DON'T HAVE TO USE WINDOWS AGAIN.

So I had to install office on a computer and you cant avoid not installing SKYPE. MICROSOFT WHY?!

OH GOODY, FUCK MICROSOFT. This last update, killed off my head bud sound, nothing, no fucking sound. Why?????????? I am NOT uninstalling and reinstalling software, fuck that, been there, done that. No, I spend a montly fee for my subscription to office, and I expect this to work, every damn time I am using it. Period. This is bullshit. I think I am going back to mac, I have had enough of this. Enough. Why do they do this??? Why???

I was in the first grade and my dad worked at the government as a budget officer. We didn't have a computer at that time, though. So, my Dad let me use his PC at his office. My first interaction with computers, started with just one program, Microsoft Word, which Dad used most of his documents.

What I did to immerse myself with computers for the first time as a first-grader was by typing my name in Times New Roman and printed it with my dad's printer. I was very impressed of how a computer can do at that time.

And that sole program was my starting point of my fascination with computers and how it motivated me to learn more about computers.

“Please don't use Google docs in the [redacted] env--it is not allowed at all and we will get dinged. You should all have MS Office so please save important artifacts in an approved format.” —Said someone being bribed by Microsoft

I cannot stand that companies still use Office365 and other microsoft products to run their business.

I constantly meet with clients and frequently they're always using office for their email. I've seen or experienced rather many of these clients having major problems with their emails, sending things by share point and having issues and so much more.

Plus when you get to the point of dealing with the IT teams, there is typically a lot of people on IT that move very slowly to resolve what seem to be simple issues.

Our company has been using Google for over 8 years now and has been an absolute dream. Sharing documents and spreads easily and easy access to login to my accounts. I feel like with microsoft, i'm always 2FA'ing into everything and it honestly just makes my life harder just to communicate and exchange information with my clients.

Out of interest does anyone else have a Microsoft keyboard, and does it just die (requiring it to be plugged out and in again) every now and again? I honestly thought VS and Outlook were bad until I got this piece of crap

Microsoft encouraging SharePoint 2010 designer to not play nice with Office 2013 - to incentivize upgrading to SP 2013. I agree with the upgrade but not the incentivization.

Microsoft office and I have a love & hate relationship with Xcode 8 these days.

Why is it that when I mistype something in spotlight, it must mean I want Microsoft Word?