Sunday, July 12, 2009

Life imitates Dune, or Justin really likes mail merge

So there I was, a few weeks back sitting in a friends back yard, reading Frank Herbert's Dune. I put down the book for a bit to be sociable and found out that at that very moment an unthinkable sin was being committed on the second floor of the house. A dear friend of my girlfriend was reading addresses from a spreadsheet printout, and retyping them into MS Word to print out envelopes/.

I started foaming about the mouth of the waste of labor, humanity's duty to subjugate computers, (being they lack person hood, self awareness, rights and the like), to do our work for us, so we can do other work. I calmed myself and ran up the stairs to educate her on how to use mail merge.

She would have none of it. I was persistent, but yielded eventually. My girlfriend kept saying, "sometimes the simplest way is the best," This statement was beyond wrong in this case, but I was not going to argue with illogical statements. I went and played with my godson for a bit, and continued to read my book.

Some may be surprised at how upset I got. Others think I exaggerate. A select sew that have witnessed or heard secondhand of my outbursts against ip printing and lack of domain (or novell, ldap, NIS etc) authentication in places that had the means of doing better. The inefficient use of computers really bothers me. My pointless emotional outbursts on the matter might be the folly of my youth, but I doubt such incidents will ever not cause my blood to boil.

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