Clock rant

One of the things I find annoying is that when my computer’s busy, it stops doing the niceties. So if I want a little reminder of what the date is, I put my mouse over the clock, and… nothing. Dammit. Likewise, while the computer is busy processing something, I go surfing, so I start typing a URL into my browser and hope it autocompletes… and… nothing. I assume some of this stuff only triggers when the CPU isn’t busy, but maybe it needs to be tweaked, if the user is obviously hoping it’ll kick in. If I’m slowly nudging my mouse around over the clock, then dammit, I want to know the date.

On a similar note, how many people double-click the clock when they want to look at a calendar? I certainly do, at least if Outlook isn’t in the foreground. Alas, on locked-down machines (eg servers, which probably don’t even have Outlook), this gives you an error about not having permissions to change the clock. Dude, I don’t want to change the clock, I just want to look at the calendar.

Oh yeah. Servers. Outlook/Office. Unlikely. But they all come with Outlook Express installed by default. It’s a flippin’ server, why would I want Outlook Express on it?! Like I’m going to go sit in the server room freezing my arse off, reading Usenet and sending mail?!

3 thoughts on “Clock rant

  1. Josh

    KDE – click on the clock, get a calendar. Which then takes 20 seconds to figure out how to make it go away (click on the clock again – not the calendar). I’ve been exclusively using Linux for a month at work, and I’m yet to be particularly freaked out by anything it does. PS: I am not a crank.

  2. vaughan

    To my extreme irritation, work have downgraded our computer from Win 2k to XP. One of the most annoying features of said downgrade is that when I double click down in the corner, which I’m in the habit of doing when I want to see the calender in order to know what date next friday fortnight is (since that’s typically the deadline for the response to the letter i’m typing at the time), it comes up with that smug little message that i’m not authorised to buggerise the system time.

    I’m not yet in the habit of using lotus notes calender for this purpose.

    Oh, and any typos in this post are due to the RHS panel thingy with the links overlapping with the copmments field, so what I type goes behind the panel and I can’t see it. So there.

  3. Daniel

    That’s not actually an XP thing, that’s a security thing. The same privilege can be revoked in Win2K. Damn it’s irritating, isn’t it.

    Oh, and you need to get a bigger screen/switch to a higher resolution. And yeah, I need to fix the navigation panel.

Comments are closed.