Thoughts on Software

So yesterday I was signed in on a computer where I am not a local administrator, and I tried to use what I call the "calendar" in Windows that you can access by double clicking on the taskbar clock. I was confronted with the error message "You do not have sufficient privileges to change the system time." Huh? But I want to look at the calendar!

I thought it was kind of funny because it occurs to me that it really is the "control panel" to change the system time, and I doubt when they programmed it that anyone was thinking of it as "the calendar". But I use it that way all the time. So does one of my coworkers. I mean, if the developers were thinking of it this way, they would make it so you can still use the calendar features but not be able to commit any time changes.

This happens to me CONSTANTLY with software. In fact, now that I've realized there are "actual humans" programming these things, I often send in feature requests when I bump up against something in software that drives me crazy. For example, in Microsoft's FrontPage, you can't use their hyperlink tool from code view. Well, maybe I imagined that or am losing my mind, but I swear you used to not be able to, but I just did it a minute ago when I went to confirm it. Thunderbird doesn't have a "send this message at a certain future time" feature, and as far as I can tell, there's no extension that does it either. I can't find a single calendar app that does what I want it to do (easy to create events from email, multiple to-do lists, email reminders/confirmations, indexed search - I hope Google is listening since they have 3 of the 4 already). In fact, off the shelf products can be so infuriating sometimes, I totally understand the impulse to just come up with your own solution. But I'm not really up for writing a calendaring application, so I'll just sit here whining about it instead.