This is driving me insane.  About three years ago I wrote a perl script to manage my music collection.  Then, after updating Mandrake (as it was back then) it broke.  Try as I might to fix the perl installation, grabbing all the modules that made it work, still resulted in a non functioning script.

It’s beginning to piss me off now.  I’m even tempted to port the whole thing to another language in order to get it working again.  Or changing the distro of the box it used to run on.  Neither of which have any guarantee of success.

What’s more annoying than not having access to the dirty little hack I put together, is not having the skills to get it working again. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth…

I’ve got a need (rather than a whim) for some 3D modelling in the near future, and seeing as I’m not about to splash out on any expensive CAD software it looks like it’s going to be Blender. Again. Only it appears I’ve forgotten pretty much everything I learnt.

The first time I used Blender, I couldn’t get it to do anything. The user interface is so utterly incomprehensible to the novice user that it was a struggle just to shut it down again. Over quite a time I built a usable level of competency, if not flair. Hopefully the learning curve won’t be quite as steep this time… Now, where did I put that 20″ monitor?

Well not any more…  Having discovered a spare keyboard I thought I’d take the opportunity to improve my touch typing skills by using some solvent to remove the letters on the keys.  Not having anything that seemed to make any impression on the paint, the Dremel was brought into play. Half an hour later, job done…

I’ve got to the point where I know where all the keys are by touch alone (even if I don’t hit the one I mean to all the time…) but I can’t help looking at the board for a little hint quite often.  So now I’ve removed all the temptation, no point looking now, nothing there to see!  The only downside is that I now can’t type anything without putting my hands in the correct position… Not so good if you only want to tap a key or two…

Still, it’s not quite as extreme as this one.

Having seen the ad on the telly for ‘Diary of the Dead‘, I was quite eager to add it to my list of DVDs that Blockbuster send me. Typing the title into the search box didn’t yield any results, although I freely admit I might have typed ‘Dairy of the Dead’ by accident. This lead me to Blockbusters Search by Director tool, and the insanity that lurks within…

It’s a Romero film, so that’ll be filed under ‘R’ then. Halfway thru the nine pages of results I realised my error. These results aren’t alphabetised according to surname, oh no, that would be too simple. They are organised by the first character of their names, so you can find Romero filed under ‘G’ because he’s a George… Right next to George f***ing Lucas…

How this is possible in the current era is totally incredible, what kind of insane imbeciles would a) request a feature like this, b) code it up and think it was acceptable and c) sign off on it? Then I remembered, that’ll be the same imbeciles that I pay a monthly fee to for my movie rentals…

Who’s the fool now then?