Jagged Pills

I like to think I'm a pretty patient person. Patient and compassionate, you know, I don't really hate people, I don't invoke huge amounts of unnecessary chaos, and I want to make sure my kids grow up into being good people.

But there are seriously some things in this world that I hate.

I understand when there is a need for something, sometimes R&D gets thrown to the side while production is ramped up. If you just need some form of capturing data, but all the power is out, you grab a pen and paper and start writing shit down. It's cool, if the need is that great, MacGuyver a solution, and keep moving. But when the power comes back on, revert that paper information back into the system.

When you need a communications device to send images of paper to other people in other places, I get it, you needed to do it RIGHT THEN, and a fax machine was all that was available. It's alright, it was 1985, fax machines were hot shit.

But you know, it's 2011. We have better stuff now. Hell, whole companies are running paperless. Get rid of fax machines. The options available to you only start at email, ftp, and something like dropbox. There are countless options for conveying data from one machine to another. You're using one option now.

Get rid of fax machines. They're dirty, use paper, use electricity, are loud, take up a phone line, take too long to communicate, and are from a time when some guy just needed to send this paper to someone across the country without using the pony express.

I hate fax machines.

Continuing in this direction, I hate printers, too. We have lots of ways of looking at information. You can view it on a monitor. You can dredge it through a front-end to make it all pretty and then display it on a scoreboard for a sports team. You can throw it up on a wall using a projector. You can even use your phone to look at it.

Printers are loud, dirty, wasteful little inventions. I get it, you needed to get information out of the computer that you typed everything into. You couldn't read punch-tape, so you needed the computer to convert information into letters and numbers that were recognizable. It's cool. It was 1985, printers were necessary for business.

But... it's 2011. Paperless companies... Think green...

I hate Blackberries. More specifically, I hate the Blackberry Enterprise Server software package.

Smartphones are a great thing; I can do a significant portion of the things I can do on a desktop workstation computer on my phone. It isn't easy, but I can struggle along. I can view email, I can watch video, I can even open files and edit them, then send them off somewhere.

But the evil beast that created BES decided that they really hated anyone that administered a company full of BBs. There are a ton of restrictions, extra components that have to be installed to a server, and all these weird licensing regulations. If Google had the same requirements to use their services, to access the stuff you need... they'd be out of business.

There are other things I hate, or at least dislike, but these take the top of the list.