Undone
Those progress bars are a menace.
I sat at my computer last night installing some updates and I was presented with one that showed 0% progress for nearly ten minutes before briefly flashing at 100% and disappearing. I find it hard to see the point of this since the bar was designed to help us impatient humans.
Without something saying ‘It’s cool, I’m doing stuff’ followed by something else saying, ‘I’m still doing stuff, and no crash has occurred since the last message’, the human brain freaks out which causes us to press all sorts of unnecessary buttons.
That’s why the loading screen was developed. Especially if the loading takes forever as in the tape era, a blank screen is a symbol for a crash and people would just reset and try again, rather than wait.
But perhaps the progress bar is more accurate and more human than it lets on.
It’s easy to assume a computer knows how long something is going to take for it to do. It’s just maths, right? Or maybe the computer doesn’t know, it’s just guessing, using the information it knows… maybe in my case it had no idea at all how long the update was going to take and rather than make an inaccurate guess it went for the ‘it’ll be done when it’s done’ approach.
An approach that’s left me with several ‘ongoing’ projects…
…For example, my sister bought me some lovely coffee plants for christmas. I’ve worked that they will be ready to harvest for beans in a minimum of six years, possibly, and even then I’ll only be able to make enough for a few cups (minus the two for myself and my sister). It’ll be the most exclusive coffee available, hand grown and harvested by an artist with something better to be doing with his time… ongoing.
And I’m not the only one… Leonardo da Vinci had his famous bronze horses for Francesco I Sforza… and 3DRealms has their Duke Nukem Forever.
But it’s not quite true, ‘it’ll be done when it’s done’… there is a time limit.
I think I’m going to swap the phrase ‘It’ll be done when it’s done’ for:
It’ll be done before I am… or else it won’t
justine on 
This comic reminded me of all the times my computer has made me cry. For something that I love so much, I really do hate it. I think I only really love it because I dread the thought of writing out essays and labs by hand.
Also, I just made the realization that if I line my mouse up on the exact edge of the comment box, the line of the curser turns teal. It’s the most fun I’ve had all day, thats for sure.
Tealboxing!
“For something that I love so much, I really do hate it”
Valentines day cards for computers.
Oh it does turn teal! I used to have all sorts of fun when I was supposed to be doing important things hovering the text-field mouse pointer over certain spots to make it invert the colors. I like to hover it over the blinking text-input cursor the best.
I like to say “Coming eventually”, or variations on that. Continuing the theme, many things I’ve said that about have triumphantly failed to come at all. Many of them were comics, my Star Trek comic was “coming eventually” for well over a year (possibly two, but I don’t know when I started working on it) before I recently admitted to myself that it would probably never happen. It would be less embarrassing if I hadn’t already got the page up for it and had people stumble across it, thus accidentally virally marketing it.
Did you play the game where you try to move the curser all the way down the line with out losing the teal-ness? So far that’s my favourite game. I’ve gotten to the next level and started trying to do the whole box.
I stink at that game. Yet another thing to add to the long, long list of things I’m not good at.
My computer is named Farinelli for a reason. XD
You cut its what off?
I didn’t cut anything off him–he just up and decided he was a castrato one day. It isn’t as though an object’s personal gender matters very much. No, I named him Farinelli because he’s rather a queen bitch.
My personal favorite is the estimate that starts by saying seven hours and then rapidly declines during the two minutes it takes to complete finally only being correct when it reads two seconds to completion.
that always makes me happy too
My computer does the exact opposite.
It starts out at a few seconds and pans out to days later.
The Aus Army has a saying, “Hurry up and wait”.
That’s the saying we use in American Theatre! XD
Yeah, it is a good one.
I loathe it when it is an accurate description of my day.
My computer starts installing, so I get up,
make some tea, make the bed, then upon returning
I have message pop-ups asking whether I should allow
this or that, and everything is stopped awaiting my input.
I allow, and it starts installing again. A five minute
installation takes 30 minutes, but I have tea to drink.
I do that when my comp is lagging. I go off and faff about in the kitchen for a while.
The worst is when all you have is a loading bar, no percentage given, and you watch and wait as it slowly fills up… oh the anticipation as it gets close to the end of the box… then when it finally reaches the end it just rolls over to the beginning again and starts over.
THAT TELLS ME NOTHING! (except “not done yet”)
If there is one thing a computer can do to push me towards a complete breakdown, it’s what you’ve just described.
It’s one thing to provide a lack of information, but another to provide some that is entirely made up.