What a morning of stupidity.

Don't get me wrong, I like my job.  I don't know that I love it, I'd love to be doing something that involves making surround sound music dvds much better, but I could do worse as far as jobs go.  And, although I hate getting up in the morning, and always grumble as I make my way to the alarm clock, which is strategically on the other side of my room, even if I did work a normal shift, waking up 1 or 2 hours later would be just as annoying.  So, having my hours of 7 - 4, and waking up at 6:15 in the morning, all in all works out good.  I like having at least an hour of time that I can actually get assignments done before the helpdesk starts going nuts, and I like being able to bolt for the parking lot at 4.

But, there are some mornings that the few people that also get an early start decide to make sure that you get nothing done in the calmness of the early hours of the shift.

Now, mind you, usually what I want to do when I get in is, calmly settle down at my desk, power on my stuff, get some coffee, work on setting up some new workstations, and perhaps check out cracked.com while waiting on something to complete.  So, usually my mornings are pretty relaxing, as they should be, to ease into the work day.  So, when someone walks into my area before 8:00, I just get that feeling of "oh god, what the fuck now, go away"  I'm perfectly willing to help people out, but that doesn't mean I have to like the fact that I'm being interrupted before I can even finish my first cup of coffee of the day.  Also, 9 times out of 10, these things are the most stupid things ever.

So, this morning, I had 2 of the dumbest interruptions I have ever had the misfortune of having.  Someone walks over, and is all like, my computer isn't working, it was stuck on a screen, so I turned it off and turned it back on, and now I have nothing.  I walked over there, and there was a turned off computer.  To be fair, she was right about a few things.  She was correct in that she had turned it off.  She was also correct in her assessment of the current situation of having nothing on her screen.  What she was incorrect about was TURNING THE DAMN THING BACK ON!

Seriously?  You can't figure out how to:
A. Properly turn back on an electronic device
B. Determine if a device is on or off, which has a power button that lights up when it is on for your convenience.

So, I pushed the power button, watched it power up, watched the login screen come up, held my comments at what an idiot this person is to myself, and said "here you go, all fixed", and made my way back to my desk to actually get something done.  I have a pile of computers just waiting to be sent out, once they're all set up.

So then, as I'm getting settled back down, and take another sip from my already cooling first cup of coffee, I hear the sounds of someone else walking into my department.

OH GOD, NOT ANOTHER ONE!

It was someone I've not seen in quite a while, so I had a little, hey, how's it going moment.  Nice to see you again.  Apparently he had been out for some months.  Which of course means that he no longer knows his password.

Now then, in the past few weeks, we had a little change to our password policy, due to our new owners having a different password policy on their network than ours.  It used to be we had a policy of the password having to be at least 6 characters, and different from your last 5.  Now the password must meet the following requirements
A. At least 8 characters
B. Not the same as one of the last 5 passwords
C. Must meet 3 of these 4 requirements
     1. Contain at least one upper case letters
     2. Contain at least one lower case letters
     3. Contain at least one number
     4. Contain at least one non-alpha numeric character

Now then, the easiest way to deal with this policy for someone that has a history of a password change involving a 3 minute phone conversation is to give specific instructions, and not even think about characters that aren't letters or numbers.  So I set a default password that was rather simple that he would be required to change, and explained to him, your new password has to be at least 8 characters, and MUST contain upper case letters, lower case letters, and numbers.

"8 letters"

"at least 8.  And upper case, lower case, and numbers"

"upper case number?"

"No, no such thing."

"Oh, ok.  It used to be 6"

"Yeah, now it's different.  8 characters, and it has to contain upper case letters, lower case letters, and numbers"
"ok"

So I go to dump out my 3/4 cup of now cold coffee and refill my official Amateur Hour coffee mug (complete with url that is no longer valid), and come back to a red light blinking on my phone.

Dear god, what now.

Before I have a chance to listen to the message, he's already back at my desk, telling me it didn't work.

Sure enough, he's locked out, he has entered the default password, of Password1, incorrectly at least 5 times.

Mind you, I wrote this down on a post it for him, and said at least 3 times that the P is capital, and that there is no such thing as a capital 1.

I unlocked it, reminded him that the P is capital, and he went on his way to try it again.

As I'm about to take a nice hot sip of coffee, the phone rings again.  And it's him.

Oh for the love of........


I pick up the phone

"It doesn't work"
"What doesn't work"
"The password, I can't get in"
"Ok, why didn't it work"
"It no work"
"ok, but I need to know what it told you, can you not get past the first part to get to the screen to change your password, or does it tell you that the two new passwords don't match, or does it tell you that the password isn't complex enough?"
"hold on"


The next 15 minutes consisted of him not entering Password1 correctly, or him getting past that and having the two entries of his new password not match, or having the old password be incorrect since you have to fill that in again if you don't get it right on the first time, or being told his new password doesn't meet the requirements.

At this point, my direct supervisor has come in, and can see I am visually about ready to hurl the damn phone across the room, as I try to hide my anger that is hinting in the tone of my voice.

So, after several times of this, and after twice getting the error that the password doesn't meet the requirement, among several instances of the other errors, I ask him what password he is trying to pick.

He gives me a string of 8 letters.

Ok, which letters are upper case.

All lower case.



At this point, my supervisor sees all kinds of silent gestures happening at my desk as I pause to compose myself to be able to speak again without speaking a string of words that would get me fired instantly.

Not only did I explain the password requirement several times when he was at my desk, but on this 15 minute phone conversation, I had said at least 10 times:

Your new password must be at least 8 characters, contain upper case letters, lower case letters, and numbers.

At this point, my supervisor was lecturing me on how to do my job, that at this point I need to walk over there.

First of all....I didn't think a password change should require me walking over to their computer.  Second, I absolutely hate it when this person tries to tell me how I should do my job and gets all up in my business.

So, ok, I calmly hang up the phone, I vent a little bit, I count to 10, I shake it off, and walk over there.

I basically walked up to the computer, took the password he was trying to set it to, made my modifications to it to make it meet the requirements, typed it all in for him, wrote the new password for him, and told him "this is what you will use to log in tomorrow"


$20 says I get a call from him tomorrow morning when he tries to log in.

And now, if you excuse me, I have a full cup of cold coffee I need to dump out to refill my mug and try again.

Half-assed modern technology

Modern technology allows us to do such great things.  And yet, somehow, despite the amount of technology we have, mankind seems to be unable to actually build the perfect device.  My experiences with the Oppo BDP-93 bluray/dvd/sacd/dvd-a player is a perfect example of this.

So, for a long time I've been half-assing my audio system.  For quite a while, I didn't even own a dvd-audio player, and was just settling for dts or dolby digital playback of dvd-a discs.  This was quite ironic given my status in the converting world for creating quality dvd-a home conversions, for backup purposes.  I went through 3 half-assed methods of dvd-a playback before I finally did it right.  First was trying to setup a computer to playback dvd-a, which is doable, but problematic at best.  Then I picked up a panasonic bluray player, which never worked right with my 4.0 setup.  Dvd-a is a fickle format that doesn't like it if you dare try to have a system that doesn't have a center speaker, downmixing to create a phantom center is problematic.  Then I picked up a samsung sacd/dvd-a player.  It downmixes properly, and will playback dvd/sacd/dvd-a, which is great, but....it doesn't actually play dvd-a and sacd properly consistently.  It will do things like randomly skip to the next track before the first track is finished, or stop the disc partway into the first track or other annoying random things like that, piece of garbage.

So, doing dvd-a on the cheap was turning into an impossible nightmare.

So, ok then, maybe it's time to pick up a new player.  And, when it comes to dvd-a, the best bang for your buck is the Oppo BPD-93.  It does dvd-a and sacd, and does it through hdmi, and is a decent bluray player as well.  Great, what doesn't this player do?  Plus, I found out, it will playback .iso images of discs, including dvd-a discs, from external hard drives.  Wow, that's an awesome feature.

However, the man is trying to keep us down, and doesn't like us being free to do what we want to do with our personal property at all.  So, Oppo has been forced to phase out the .iso playback feature.  Boo!  So I ran out and purchased the player while I could still get it with this feature, and for that reason a firmware update will never be applied to this player.

So, ok, $499 later, I am happy with a kickass player that will play just about any disc you can throw at it, and will also let me play backed up images of dvd-a discs.  So, of course, I had to take advantage of this feature, and I ripped my entire dvd-a collection to an external hard drive.  And I found out, wow, this is awesome, I sit back, relax, and have all my dvd-a discs available to me without having to get up and stand in front of the rack, and pick what disc I want to listen to.  I can easily go to a disc, listen to a few tracks, go to another, if I just want to kinda pick through and listen to a few songs.  This is modern convenience.  How could this get better?

Well...that's nice, but that's only dvd-a.  Which is a minority of my music collection.  So, I decided, ok, lets try ripping an .iso image of a CD, and do that.

*BUZZZZZ*

No go.  The player won't playback .iso images of CDs.  Or .bin images either.  Which gets me to another confusing thing.....some CDs will rip to .iso, and some it forces me to do to .bin, and no one can explain why.  This makes no sense to me.  But, neither of them work with the Oppo, so that doesn't really matter.

Well, that's ok, because there is a great universal format out there called free lossless audio codec, flac.  It's great, and will do multichannel, and various bitrates and samplerates, it does just about everything.  So, using flac, I can easily get a bit for bit backup of my CD collection.  And, the oppo player will playback flac from hard drive.

So, I get a nice, big, 2 TB hard drive, and I get all my dvd-a images onto it, and start ripping my CD collection to it.  Finally, I have a backup of a large chunk of my music collection.  So, I hook up my hard drive, sit down, thumb through my collection I spent much time ripping, and think....well, I should verify that this is gapless.  I mean, it's got to be, certainly no developer in their right mind would make a device to playback flac files that isn't gapless.  Who would waste our time with that?

Well, turns out the fine developers at Oppo are just those people that would waste our time with that.  I cue up Abbey Road, start the medley on side 2, and sure enough, gaps.

Now, one at first might think, ok, rip DSOTM and Abbey Road to large flac files, and you're set.

And then you realize, wait a minute, what about live albums?

And then there's Todd Rundgren - A Wizard, A True Star.

And then theres........

You never really realize just how important gapless playback is until some dipshit develops a device that doesn't have it.

So, in discussions with this, someone pointed out that they have their computer setup as a media server, to play their music collection via networking, and that he thinks that might be gapless.  But isn't sure.  So, I decide, ok, lets see if I can get something via networking that is gapless.  I'm not against getting techy and doing networking stuff for playback, but I figured if I can keep it simple and just connect a hard drive directly to the player, why not?  But, hey, if this works, great.

My experiments found that, no, no gapless playback via networking either.  I wasn't sure if this was still the fault of the player, the software, or both.  So I decided, ok, lets check with Oppo, and Oppo confirmed that no, there is absolutely no way to get gapless flac playback at all with their players.

FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Apparently, the chip that they use for sacd/dvd-a/and all that disc playback just doesn't support it.  So, there you go, the buck gets passed to the chip developer.

Now then, there are boxes that will do gapless flac playback.  People have been recommending squeezebox to me.  But, after spending $499 on one player, I don't fancy having to buy a 2nd box to do what you would think someone could build into the one box I already spent nearly 500 on.  Plus, the squeezebox is a bit pricy.

So, ok, lets look at the roku.  I have a friend that has been nagging me, suggesting I should've bought a roku instead of the Oppo.  I had to force him to attempt to rip an SACD to demonstrate to him just why a roku box could never take the place of an Oppo.  But, roku boxes are pretty cost efficient, maybe that can do it.

Well, right off the bat, you can't play flac at all directly from a hard drive to a roku box.

NEXT!

So, basically, yes, I got exactly what I paid for with the Oppo, the features I wanted from the Oppo all work as I want, so really I shouldn't complain.  But, when I delve into the possibilities of what else it can do, it fell flat, and so now I'm left wanting to expand my capabilities further.  And, I'm a bit frustrated that I can't find a 1 box solution to do all that you would think someone should be able to build 1 box to do.  We can put a man on the moon, but we can't build 1 box that will playback bluray/dvd/dvd-a/sacd and do gapless flac playback?  Seriously?

Why is it that, despite the great technology that exists, mankind can never really see and use it to the full potential?  I just don't get it.