Then there is the issue of instance transforms. Holy mother of god, these make vanilla installers look as attractive as your first crush. This is the way to kludge together support for upgrade installs of transformed installations that don’t unilaterally overwrite every other transformed installation on the target machine.

So—guess what I’ve been working on all day.

Dev: The value isn’t excessive. Some progress was made but we still need a long timeout.

EA: But if we need to change this value, we don’t have a UI to do that. Besides, isn’t it excessive? I thought we got this down to less than a minute.

CM: That value is a system value and should not be futzed with on a per install basis.

Dev: We still need a longer value. Progress has been made, but we aren’t in a position to support a shorter timeout.

EA: Okay. I’ll schedule a meeting to discuss why we need an interface to manage that value then.

Here is a transcript of our chat:

awesomecoleyxo3@aol.com: hey you

ME: Yo!

awesomecoleyxo3@aol.com: hey i’ve been sitting around sooo bored and figured i’d say hellooo.. hope i didn’t bother u

awesomecoleyxo3@aol.com: there is like no one around to talk to anymore…. 27.f here how bout u??

ME: Oooh. It’s that kind of chat!

awesomecoleyxo3@aol.com: ohh cool so whats up??

ME: Can you post some shady links and implore me to visit them?

ME: Still thinking?

awesomecoleyxo3@aol.com: well ii have an idea if u wanna have sum fun!!! i was gonna get on my cam and “unwind” a lil u should cum join ;-)

awesomecoleyxo3@aol.com: l joined this awesome sitethat is just like fb but w/o the annoying kidz.. wanna check it out???

ME: I see what you did there.

ME: Clever.

awesomecoleyxo3@aol.com: it only takes asecond to signup and it’s 100% free 2!!! http://badUrlHasBeenRemoved.com/ just click the ‘Join Free’ at the top of thepage

awesomecoleyxo3@aol.com: once you signup u’ll be allgood and u can join my private chat and tell me what 2 do ;)

ME: I think I’ll pass. Can we just chat?

awesomecoleyxo3@aol.com: ya you will need a card of sum kind but they wiII not charge u anything!!!!!

ME: What kind of card?

ME: And, really, I just want someone to talk to

awesomecoleyxo3@aol.com: i can not wait this is going to be sooo much fun… wait till u see what i’m wearing right now lol i think u’ll like it;)

ME: Cinnabon? Cuz I’m kind of hungry and didn’t have time to pick up some peanuts from the Kum ‘n’ Go on the way in to work this morning.

awesomecoleyxo3@aol.com: are u in hun??? i’m going to go get some “toys” but ill brb and hopefully u’ll be in when i get back hurry uppp

ME: Oooh…that hurts. Women should never ask “are you in hun?” because, well, that’s just plain demoralizing.

ME: Also, is your ‘P’ key sticky? My kitteh knocked over a glass of koolaid on my favorite keyboard last summer. No matter how many times I cleaned that keyboard some keys just stick. Especially in high humidity.

ME: Hey. Do you like the silent membrane keyboards they make today or are you more of the old school, buckling spring type?

ME: Because I loves me an M Series keyboard.

ME: They’re more resilient. And the tactile feedback lets you know you’re *typing*. Know what I mean? I really really like them.

ME: Hey. Are you there?

ME: Man….just like my ex. All fun up front but no follow through. Meh.

A: Two in front and two in back

Q: What game do four elephants in a Mini play?

A: Squash

Q: How do you get an elephant into the fridge?

A: Open the door, insert the elephant, close the door

Q: How do you get a giraffe into the fridge?

A: Open the door, take out the elephant, insert the giraffe, close the door

Q: The lion decided to have a party. All of the other animals showed up except for one. Which animal did not show up?

A: The giraffe because he was stuck in the fridge

Q: How do you know if there are two elephants in the fridge?

A: The door won’t close

Q: How do you know if there are three elephants in the fridge?

A: There will be one elephant waiting in the Mini

I freakin’ love elephant jokes!

1. I walked in to the men’s room at $LOCAL_GROCER–a 1 and 1 set up. There was a pair of legs visible under the stall wall and the urinal was empty. The odd thing? The stall door was wide open and there was weird grunting coming from the other side of the wall. I did not tarry.
2. The brewing room smells marvy what with a Belgian Wit, Nut Brown, and Gooseberry wine all burbling away.
3. While WIX v3.6 is pretty much awesome when looked at from the perspective of WIX v3.0, it is still Windows Installer we’re dealing with. Which sucks.
4. Being the mayor of places on Foursquare creates more obligations than one might expect. Well losing a mayorship makes one more inclined to visit a place than one might normally be. Why is it important to be mayor of the Bag ‘n’ Save? Especially when I cannot do anything about grunty open stall? I do not know.
5. Rick Santorum headlines are pretty much always unintentionally funny these days.

Problems encountered

1. Very few of the listening posts are currently active
2. Some of the listening posts didn’t load in a timely fashion
3. Godforsaken, stupid, Flash-only interface to whole damn site

But the site is probably bandwidth heavy and currently experiencing the Slashdot Effect.

Callin’ Oates.