Okay, here's a complaint, and then a challenge:

Complaint: All day long, my coworkers pester me with questions about problems they're having. Some of the time, the questions are of the form "What were you thinking when you wrote this code?" I don't mind those questions, and I'm happy to answer them. But most of the time, the questions really boil down to "hey, you're good at solving problems. Come here and help me solve mine."

What I've noticed is that most people, even software professionals, just suck at debugging. You'd think it would (a) be a core competency of almost all technical jobs, and (b) be easy to learn because the skills are so generic. But no.

Challenge: I feel so sure that debugging skills are generic that I'd like to call for a "How to Solve Problems" instruction manual. Send me any snippets you can, either generic patterns in trouble-shooting, or else tricks that are specific to a language or domain that you work in.

I'll make an effort to distill and post some kind of general howto. Maybe together we can make the world a better place. (And everyone will leave me alone so I can work! :)

I like to have a playful relationship with my coworkers, and this includes this one girl who likes to trade insults with me 8th-grade style. We have fun, but it can be weird sometimes because her English is not fanstastic.

For example, today our AC at work died today for a couple of hours, so in one meeting we were in together it was getting quite stifling. I said something like "Wow, it's way too warm in here." To which she replied "<giggle> well it's your fault!" To give her a good taunt I replied with "Because I'm so hot?" She giggled again and said, "No! It's because you're burning in Hell!!!"

I have no idea what she was trying to say; maybe it would be less disturbing in Chinese.

There is nothing on Earth that is more deaf to the frustration it causes you than software.

If you listen to Terry Gross's miserable show Fresh Air, you know that whenever someone that she has interviewed dies, they interrupt the schedule to replay the dead person's interview.

When I started listening to the show in 1996 this happened a few times a year, but now it's pretty much weekly. And the other day, they actually had two people die too close together to change the schedule in time, thereby creating a Commemorative Dead Guy Episode Backlog.

And if you think about it, everybody that she interviews is going to die at some point, so the ratio of new interviews to Commemorative Dead Guy Interview Replays can only get worse and worse.

I only see two ways out of this situation:

• If Terry herself dies, breaking the awful cycle in the most final way possible
  
• If the interviews they record end up so far behind the backlog that there isn't time to play them before the guest dies, thus obviating the need to play the interview twice (or indeed at all.)

I dimly remember a friend of mine telling me that Microsoft was going to start trying to do a color-aware anti-aliased font render, where it tried to account for the positions of the red, green, and blue elements of your display device.

It turns out that they really did try to do it, and the results look like complete shit. Another Billy special.

I told you, I'm not crazy. We now have a highly sophisticated napkin dispensing contraption in our kitchen. I have not yet figured out how to use it, but there it is.

One of my favorite things about Microsoft Office Documents is how the plans for the fucking NASA Space Shuttle could be embedded inside of your letter to Grandma, and there's no way to tell until you try to open the doc on someone else's machine and get an error like this:

Now, keep in mind that my MOTHER sent me the document that contains this error. There is no way that she understands what SQL is, or even Mail Merge (the likely functional area of Word that is producing this error). God only knows what she accidentally copied and pasted that caused Word to decide that it needed an ODBC link to some database on someone's "F" drive. Jesus, Bill.