MS$DesignersRCretins
Registered User.
- Local time
- Today, 10:32
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2012
- Messages
- 41
Background: machine language(briefly), ASM, Fortran, BASIC (MS-, Turbo, Quick), PL-I (and ROSCOE and a few other mainframe interfaces), C (weren't TC 2.01 and Turbo Debugger screaming beauts?), and in recent times Excel, Excel, and Excel.
I am here to help and be helped, though because of my name choice I won't be surprised if I sometimes encounter summarily delivered ridicule and abuse. I am actually a good guy, have done years of extensive volunteer work for the disadvantaged, spend hours and hours and hours working on answering others' questions on forums like this, and have been known to spend hours tweaking and tuning code or spreadsheets to wring out every bit I can in performance, robustness, clarity, maintainability, etc. - even just style sometimes. I respect and honor many of the MVP masters and feel I can never repay the vast web contributions many of them have made, and they did so for free. I can never pay ahead, because when you have all the things I've drawn from names like Walkenbach, I can only hope to partially pay back, not pay forward!
I am also a very hard worker (including when I answer forum questions) and as a matter of principle, have a low tolerance for inexcusable laziness, lack of thoroughness, slack effort, and simple ineptness (or ineptitude? I'm a huge tweaker) as is evidently sometimes practised in the major software development community. I do and will continue to be tolerant of other members of the web community with their diverse abilities. I also strive to be particularly tolerant with those with English as a second language who have to work so hard just with that part. However I think a higher standard is appropriate for the richest company in world history, who I believe has a high responsibility to the public, who, for whatever reason, are now effectively hostages to Microsoft's practices.
Thus my name. It's really a matter of self expression, most severely driven by the devastatingly unproductive interface changes made in Office 2007 and later. It is my hope and intent that there is some tipping point, perhaps due to embarrassment over incompetence, where MS will
- return the vastly more productive 2003 menu interface, while still providing other useful improvements and enhancements in newer versions.
- Fix help so it actually works - as it used to, and it wasn't broken. Once upon a time you could highlight a word and hit F1 and you got help on that word. Now that works maybe under 10% of the time for me.
- Show 16 permutations of examples on Help, if 16 are needed to eliminate ambiguity. How about a compromise: make the ONE that they do show actually be a meaningful one.
That would be a start anyway, so maybe we can spend less time fighting bad product redesigns, and more time whether finding a cure for cancer or playing solitaire or you-name-it.
That's more than you might want to know, but a lot of careful thought went into the name choice, and as it's so extraordinary or provocative, I predict that someone might want to know the back story, or part of it. Before you crucify me as a "Microsoft hater" please give my questions a fair shake, just as I will for you.
Bad habits: Spider Solitaire, hours-long addictive Internet Browsing, chronic YouTube addiction. I fear that I may have overshot in my ambitions to hear every legendary jazz or rock performance video on the web, probably because I lock into repeat play on a whole lot of Zappa, Hendrix, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, and a couple million of others.
How's that?!
I am here to help and be helped, though because of my name choice I won't be surprised if I sometimes encounter summarily delivered ridicule and abuse. I am actually a good guy, have done years of extensive volunteer work for the disadvantaged, spend hours and hours and hours working on answering others' questions on forums like this, and have been known to spend hours tweaking and tuning code or spreadsheets to wring out every bit I can in performance, robustness, clarity, maintainability, etc. - even just style sometimes. I respect and honor many of the MVP masters and feel I can never repay the vast web contributions many of them have made, and they did so for free. I can never pay ahead, because when you have all the things I've drawn from names like Walkenbach, I can only hope to partially pay back, not pay forward!
I am also a very hard worker (including when I answer forum questions) and as a matter of principle, have a low tolerance for inexcusable laziness, lack of thoroughness, slack effort, and simple ineptness (or ineptitude? I'm a huge tweaker) as is evidently sometimes practised in the major software development community. I do and will continue to be tolerant of other members of the web community with their diverse abilities. I also strive to be particularly tolerant with those with English as a second language who have to work so hard just with that part. However I think a higher standard is appropriate for the richest company in world history, who I believe has a high responsibility to the public, who, for whatever reason, are now effectively hostages to Microsoft's practices.
Thus my name. It's really a matter of self expression, most severely driven by the devastatingly unproductive interface changes made in Office 2007 and later. It is my hope and intent that there is some tipping point, perhaps due to embarrassment over incompetence, where MS will
- return the vastly more productive 2003 menu interface, while still providing other useful improvements and enhancements in newer versions.
- Fix help so it actually works - as it used to, and it wasn't broken. Once upon a time you could highlight a word and hit F1 and you got help on that word. Now that works maybe under 10% of the time for me.
- Show 16 permutations of examples on Help, if 16 are needed to eliminate ambiguity. How about a compromise: make the ONE that they do show actually be a meaningful one.
That would be a start anyway, so maybe we can spend less time fighting bad product redesigns, and more time whether finding a cure for cancer or playing solitaire or you-name-it.
That's more than you might want to know, but a lot of careful thought went into the name choice, and as it's so extraordinary or provocative, I predict that someone might want to know the back story, or part of it. Before you crucify me as a "Microsoft hater" please give my questions a fair shake, just as I will for you.
Bad habits: Spider Solitaire, hours-long addictive Internet Browsing, chronic YouTube addiction. I fear that I may have overshot in my ambitions to hear every legendary jazz or rock performance video on the web, probably because I lock into repeat play on a whole lot of Zappa, Hendrix, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, and a couple million of others.
How's that?!
