Day: July 9, 2003

This isn’t just a problem with Blogger, but: why offer “details” on an error message when all those details amount to is basically a unhelpful “there was an error; we don’t know why”? I need to know what’s causing the error, not just another reminder that it exists. If I see a “Publish error” in Blogger, I’d like the “details” link next to it to tell me more than “There Were Errors in Publishing.” If you can’t help me resolve the error — and I understand if you can’t, since sometimes these things simply require patience and persistence and don’t necessarily mean something’s actually broken — why offer me a link or window that indicates you can?

This particular case is a minor issue, may not even be on Blogger’s end, and will likely resolve itself momentarily, but I’m generally much happier with technical help that admits it can’t help me up front than with the offer of help that…well, isn’t helpful.

In this post about computerized voting (and the frightening possibility that it might be extremely easy to manipulate), Bob Harris writes:

I do have a degree in electrical engineering… from almost 20 years ago. Punchcard systems were just becoming obsolete, we had rotary phones in the dorms, and a modem was still a gizmo the size of a shoebox into which you squooshed the phone receiver itself. In short, we lived like animals.

The instant obsolesence is why I became a writer. The rate of punctuation in a sentence doesn’t double every 18 friggin’ months, and you never have some 22-year-old looming over your shoulder, shaking his head, saying “dude… you’re still using adverbs…?”

Which I found amusing. The computerized voting software, however… Well, I can’t feign expertise either — unlike Harris, I was a writer first and would, I think, make a lousy engineer — but, if implemented in its current form, it looks like it could be the worst thing to happen to American politics since…well, since our current president was “elected”. As Atrios writes: “Can this stuff possibly be the real software?! It’s not some cheesy demo?”