Great Moments in Computer Programming

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I did open up a request with Discover's help. They said oh noooo there is no way to disable this or stop it from doing that. Oh ho ho ho no (even though it didn't exist seven days ago).

This is Brianna in the Ohio center. Thank you for messaging in, I hope you are having a great day so far! I see you are inquiring about the security feature. We do not have a way of turning off the security for logging into your account. If the system wants to verify further we are not able to turn that off, this is to keep the account secure. Was this information helpful?

I am very sorry to hear that you will no longer be using your Discover card. The 2 factor authentication is strictly for security measures to protect your account.

Because it's not the gal's fault, and because it could be an AI agent I just said ok, I'll just use a different card from a different company. Which I will. They made their choice, I made mine. How fucking companies let this same stupid decision ruin people using their products, I will never, ever know.

[Flack]

Great Moments in Computer Programming:

Walgreens, where my wife and I pick up our prescriptions, has my wife's last name on record with the apostrophe, and mine without. It could be the other way around. We always forget which of our accounts has the apostrophe and which does not.

Every time we go through the drive-thru to pick up a prescription and they ask for the name, we have to explain to them "it may have the apostrophe and it may not." When both of us have a prescription to pick up, we have to explain that the names will be in the system differently. this always leads to them looking us up by date of birth which is fine, but it's never the first step.

We've already asked. Nobody who uses the system has the ability to update it.

Oh, and while this is a Walgreens policy complaint more than a computer programming complaint, when both of us have a prescription to pick up they make each one of us verify our address. It's the same address. And we're both there, side by side.

[Casual Observer]

Great Moments in Computer Programming:

Walgreens, where my wife and I pick up our prescriptions, has my wife's last name on record with the apostrophe, and mine without. It could be the other way around. We always forget which of our accounts has the apostrophe and which does not.

Every time we go through the drive-thru to pick up a prescription and they ask for the name, we have to explain to them "it may have the apostrophe and it may not." When both of us have a prescription to pick up, we have to explain that the names will be in the system differently. this always leads to them looking us up by date of birth which is fine, but it's never the first step.

We've already asked. Nobody who uses the system has the ability to update it.

Oh, and while this is a Walgreens policy complaint more than a computer programming complaint, when both of us have a prescription to pick up they make each one of us verify our address. It's the same address. And we're both there, side by side.

Sadder example: Total Wine and More is completely unable to remove my old rewards account attached to a phone I had long ago. Apparently I would have to write a letter.

[Da King]

I check my Discover balance every day, I check all my financial balances every day.

Wow.

I thought I was anal by actually looking at my statements every month. I know a TON of people who dont. I think I annoy my wife when I ask "What you did buy at <insertstorehere>?".

I cant imagine looking at them all every day. Well played.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I can't not look at them all. I don't know why. It's become a habit, I guess. But I also pretty much buy everything on credit cards to get points and to not give stores and websites access to my debit account. I then pay the credit cards off each day so I don't accumulate a balance, and then when there are enough points, I get something fun for myself.

I admit that I am a problem (but not remembering the computer when you click a box to remember a computer is also a problem).

[AArdvark]

Checking the balances daily is a good habit, trust me

[pinback]

I will definitely get started on that one of these decades.

[Da King]

I then pay the credit cards off each day so I don't accumulate a balance

Wait WUT!? You pay them off DAILY??

You know you can still pay them off monthly and not accumulate any interest right?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yes, but!!

I sort of like it coming out of the bank account at regular intervals. It lets me know "how I am doing" for the two week period before I get paid again. As I have and use a Mastercard, Visa, American Express and Discover card, I would not want to hold the aggregate total in my head when I can just pay them off each day or days. Sometimes they don't let you pay it off every day, I have found.

[Roody_Yogurt]

This reminds me of how I sometimes choose Amazon's slowest shipping method when they offer to throw some digital credits which I eventually use for buying or renting videos. The frustrating thing is that they don't charge my card until the item is shipped and it occasionally messes up how much I think I have at my disposal later in the week. It's like, I don't care when you actually ship it, but just charge me right away so it doesn't fuck me up later. (because, yes, I'm using a debit card)

[Da King]

Yes, but!!

I sort of like it coming out of the bank account at regular intervals. It lets me know "how I am doing" for the two week period before I get paid again. As I have and use a Mastercard, Visa, American Express and Discover card, I would not want to hold the aggregate total in my head when I can just pay them off each day or days. Sometimes they don't let you pay it off every day, I have found.

Good on you. Thats a ton of discipline right there.

[Casual Observer]

This reminds me of how I sometimes choose Amazon's slowest shipping method when they offer to throw some digital credits which I eventually use for buying or renting videos. The frustrating thing is that they don't charge my card until the item is shipped and it occasionally messes up how much I think I have at my disposal later in the week. It's like, I don't care when you actually ship it, but just charge me right away so it doesn't fuck me up later. (because, yes, I'm using a debit card)

ICJ - I think he does this because he wants us to order more and wants to eat the processing less: just leave your payment card locked until Amazon complains, open your card, log in and update payment method for the order.

I also make sure to never choose the just one delivery garbage, if I didn't have a box of pens I'd love to make him send a whole truck to me for this:
Items:$0.89
Shipping & handling:$0.00
Estimated tax to be collected:$0.09
Order total:$0.98

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Years ago, Google Drive changed how it worked for spreadsheets. If you copy a value from a website, like your credit card, and pasted it, it made "Paste with Formatting" default. Of course that was stupid. It should never have been default. It could be a user setting! If they had implemented that for Google Drive. But none of these people use their own shit, so that was never done.

I realized just how fucking frustrating it is for me, someone balancing his bills every day. This is a daily frustration. You gotta manage your own happiness in 2025.

Is there a program that anyone can recommend that is an offline spreadsheet? I'm the jerk who isn't going to pay for it. I just want to be able to have a bunch of tabs of a template with rudimentary math for every pay period and ***not have it paste with formatting by default.***

This seems like a good thing to ask chatGPT about.

[Casual Observer]

Years ago, Google Drive changed how it worked for spreadsheets. If you copy a value from a website, like your credit card, and pasted it, it made "Paste with Formatting" default. Of course that was stupid. It should never have been default. It could be a user setting! If they had implemented that for Google Drive. But none of these people use their own shit, so that was never done.

I realized just how fucking frustrating it is for me, someone balancing his bills every day. This is a daily frustration. You gotta manage your own happiness in 2025.

Is there a program that anyone can recommend that is an offline spreadsheet? I'm the jerk who isn't going to pay for it. I just want to be able to have a bunch of tabs of a template with rudimentary math for every pay period and ***not have it paste with formatting by default.***

This seems like a good thing to ask chatGPT about.

This is a bit right? I can mail you my pirated Office 95 disk if you need one. Would like to know why "fill" is the default and not "copy" even there though.

[Tdarcos]

I thought I was anal by actually looking at my statements every month. I know a TON of people who dont. I think I annoy my wife when I ask "What you did buy at <insertstorehere>?".

I cant imagine looking at them all every day. Well played.

When I first became seriously disabled, i.e. unable to walk, I started auditing my sister's credit cards, making sure she wasn't being incorrectly charged for anything. I mean, I don't care, she can buy anything she wants, it's her money, I'm just making sure she - or me or my brother, when she has asked us to buy something - is the one spending it. That's all, just making sure she has no fraudulent charges.

She said the fact I'm querying her about the stuff she buys made her hesitant to spend money!

I had a history of doing this. Back in California circa 1983-87, I worked as a bookkeeper, programmer, and data entry clerk for Mrs. Rice, who was a real estate broker, tax preparer, and enrolled agent for the IRS. (An enrolled agent is a non-lawyer authorized to represent people in appearances before the IRS or in tax court.) That was one of many jobs I did, reconciling all her bank statements and credit cards, including auditing bills of management companies who handled properties of hers in other states. (I have a story about spending $20 of her money to find 1c; I'll tell that elsewhere.)

[AArdvark]

Was Mrs. Rice once married to Uncle Ben?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I started having crashes, so I had Windows 10 run a memory scan the next time it restarts. Si ce MS doesn't let me fucking choose that, my machine restarted last night.

I woke to see that MS thinks I have bad memory.

I replaced two sticks and I am running the scan. I have 48 GB of RAM.

Mocrosoft's idea for this is to run it before the OS comes up. Okay. And also nothing on the screen indicating how long it will take.

I dunno man. I think they could figure out how to display an elapsed time and approximate time remaining.

[AArdvark]

Microsoft engineers hate all of us and they think their bytes don't stink!

[Da King]

I woke to see that MS thinks I have bad memory.

How do you remember?

[Flack]

I started editing a new video on Wednesday with Vegas and it crashed. This isn't uncommon as Vegas is the biggest piece of shit software ever made. It makes Windows look like a porn star covered in baby oil. It's so terrible and they only offer a couple of upgrades for each version before you have to pay to get the next version, and they always promise that the next one will fix the bugs from the previous version... and sometimes it does, but it always adds new ones. Always.

After Vegas crashed I closed and reopened it and it crashed again. Then I rebooted, tried it again, and it crashed again. And again. And again. It got to the point where I could edit for 60-90 minutes before it would crash Explorer and blow everything up. Imagine working with a word processor where you have to hit Alt-F, S to safe after every sentence. These videos take me 6-8 hours to edit so crashing every 60-90seconds is a real PITA.

I turned to Google and all you can really find is a thousand other people complaining about how terrible this program is. And your options are paying for an Adobe subscription or switching to DaVinci Resole, which is a whole other thing. Resole is open source and doesn'pt do what other editors do and that's people's go to response anytime anyone complains about any video editing software. It's like the old Linux zealots. "Man, my computer is--" "Install Linux." "Yeah but the problem is--" "Doesn't matter, install Linux." "But it won't ru--" "Install Linux." It's like that.

Next I spent several hours tracking down drivers for everything single thing attached to my laptop and either updating or reinstalling them. NVIDIA drivers, updated. Thunderbolt dock, updated. DisplayLink, updated. Laptop BIOS and firmware, updated. Of course in the back of my mind I'm wondering if some recent Microsoft update didn't fubar the whole system and that I might be fighting an uphill if not unwinnable battle here. After every update I have to reboot and try it again. Crash. Crash crash crash.

I then went down the YouTube rabbit hole and found a thousand suggestions. Ruling out throwing money at the problem like replacing my SSD or adding RAM, people offer at least 500 options you can tweak which of course none of them do anything. It's just like the people who really think chkdisk fixes anything. So I fiddled with the memory settings and the cache settings and this and that and none of it fixed anything.

I'll FF to the end because nobody really gives a fuck about any of this. During one of the reboots I went over to watch my laptop's screen (which is like 6' away from my workstation proper) and noticed that the laptop screen was closed. Usually it's open, but I guess over time gravity won. It doesn't really matter because I use external monitors for everything. I checked Windows display settings and all of my monitors and refresh rates are the same except for the one built into my laptop. Now, normally the laptop is open and the monitor is disabled. But for some reason when you close the lid, it becomes enabled. I did not type that wrong. When the laptop is open the screen is disabled and when it's physically closed, it's enabled.

I opened the laptop lid, the screen disabled itself, and the crashes stopped. Apparently having a monitor with a different resolution and/or refresh rate caused Vegas to lose its mind. It also caused me to lose MY mind.

I used to be good at computers.