Having used a computer the past 11 years of my life, I've come across a plethora of install programs for various software. The absolute majority of them are a pain in the ass, let's face it. The simplest kinds of software, like Winamp, don't exactly require a lot of configuration options, but even those are a pain to use a lot of the time. Very rarely do I see an install program that caters to the user. The occurence is borderline miracle, in fact.

But worst of all, the operating system category. Any OS I have tried my hands on had a fairly long install procedure and just about everyone of them was painful. To make this more intuitive, I'll try to categorize a little.

1. buggy software
This is an immediate show stopper in many cases. If you can't even get the install program to run, there's little hope for you. I've had many experiences of this kind. Off the top of my head, the Windows XP installer will not run if you have a somewhat custom partition scheme with Linux partitions. It won't give you an error (that would be too convenient after all), so the best thing you can do before starting the install is to wipe your drive and try again. I had a reiserfs partition on mine drive, perhaps that's what did it. Another fond memory was the RedHat installer (think it was 8.x), which wouldn't start anaconda because the hardware detection failed at the pcmcia step. Passing the nodetect flag to the kernel didn't work and trying to omit this step was theoretically possible but required a fair bit of skill and determination to hit that F8 none too early and not too late. Finally I did succeed but it took a good hour to get there.

2. horrible design
This is the most prominent deficiency install programs possess. Around 10 out of 10 times, the dialogs are laid out in such a manner that makes it a pain in the ass to use them. The most glaring error is the notion that thou shalt not be blessed with the privilige of navigating both forward and backward in the install steps. Some installers give you an overview of the steps to be carried out first, guide you through them and then offer you a possibility to review your choice. But these are a minority among installers. In many cases, such as the Sun Solaris install I'm conducting at the time of writing, give no such privilige. If I press the wrong key by mistake and bypass the hardware autodetection, there is no way at any point in the installer to go back and fix it.

3. missing functions
In some installers, certain basic functions are just missing. Most recently, when conducting and install of Fedora Core 2, I selected to install no boot loader at all, awaiting the prompt at some point in the install process that would allow me to generate a boot floppy. But it never showed up, it was gone. And given that making a boot floppy in FC2 is as simple as typing one single command, it probably wouldn't have been too much of a problem to throw it in there or at least not take it out. Meanwhile, getting a FC2 bootdisk was far more involved than one might imagine, so in the end I was forced to run the install again, just because that step was missing.

4. bad interface
For those of us who have installed a few programs in our time, the interface of the installer is a key issue in determining how much time and aggravation goes into installing a certain piece of software. For Windows programs, the blatant lack of keyboard shortcuts is a real pain, although this applies to a wide range of "mouse-driven" installers. Omission of reasonable defaults is another annoyance, forcing you to type in or select a certain setting you use over and over again, which might as well have been made easier to define.

5. inflexibility
A close cousin of #2, this one is just about omnipresent. And for once, you can justify that being so, because installers give you a limited set of options to choose from, no matter how you look at it. You would have to do everything manually to allow any possible configuration. So I will go lightly on this step, because it's a tricky one. However, some installers are truly egregious when it comes to giving the user basic flexibility. Things like offering only ext2/3 for filesystem when the distribution has built-in functionality for reiserfs is annoying but no show stopper. But not allowing a custom location for installation destination certainly is.

Apart from the practical side of facilitating a large volume of installs with a well designed interface, the installer is also the first piece of your software that clients see. Evenso, it often seems to be the most neglected of them all. You would think any software vendor would want their software to be easy to install, if not pleasurable. But if the vendors had conducted any kind of feedback program on the installers, they would very well know (perhaps they do) how bad those installers really are.

It seems that Real Madrid president Florentino Perez (who was just re-elected with 95% of the votes) was on to something. Now Besiktas have adopted this "buy big" mentality. After spending a season on loan at Roma, unwanted by Valencia, he wasn't exactly a Galatico at €3.5m. Nevertheless, he was received like Zidane, a media frenzy at the airport and a mass audience following his every move. He was just officially presented today and he'll be getting a whopping €1.6m/year.

The question is, of course, what did this reasonably talented player, whose repertoire is fairly limited, do to deserve this royal treatment? Well it seems that Besiktas is set on the new "galactic" policy. They wish to sell no less than 150,000 of these shirts, no doubt to cover his wage expenses and then some. But is it going to work?

This whole situation naturally begs the question: what exactly do they expect from Carew? Is he the new Maradona? I conceed I don't know much about Besiktas but Del Bosque must have spoken very warmly about Carew to the fans, in order to make them receive him this way. And hell, he knows how it's done at Real Madrid so why not... apparently Besiktas think they have themselves a new Air Jordan but so far only the shirt numbers match up. That black and white shirt *does* look pretty good on him though..

What is with people dialing the wrong number? I don't understand this phenomenon, how hard is it to dial a number, how hard is it to correctly key an 8 digit sequence? This baffles me because approximately once a month or once in two months, I get a wrong number caller. Once I had a new cellphone, 3 people knew about the number and I got a wrong number call from Denmark. How the hell does that happen? They just dial the wrong prefix by mistake?

What is wrong with these people? I have dialed the wrong number maybe 3 times in my life. And that's a high estimate just to be on the safe side. Meanwhile I get these calls and it's always the same routine, first of all they never introduce themselves. It's always

"Is John there?"

"No, there is no John here."

And damn it, half the time they don't hear that and ask the same question one more time. There is always that element of surprise, like they can't figure out how the universe conspired against them to end up in this situation. You would think that with cellphones, where you have the digits on the display, it shouldn't be too hard for people to check that they have the right number before they start the call. I swear there is no hope.

Even worse are the people who demand to know who they are talking to. Of course, these never introduce themselves either.

"Is Mike there?"

"No, there is no Mike here."

"Then who am I talking to?"

That's right, and when you ask them who they are, they won't tell you, they simply reiterate their demand. Well I'll tell you one thing, you call me and refuse to tell me who you are, I'm returning the favor.

I was at the supermarket the other day and I noticed they started selling medications right at the check out counter now. Which is funny, because that's also where the tobacco is being held. See, you can't buy tobacco products if you're underage, so they keep them in a shelf right above where the sales clerk sits when you check out. And the new thing is that they made room on the far side of the shelves for some pharmaceutical products. Aspirine, paracet, vitamins. And call me crazy but I think I saw cough medicine in that rack as well. Now this state of events could lead you to a number of conclusions...

1. These medications are now also sold exclusively to people of age. So if you got a headache and you go to the store but you don't have your id handy, no can do.

2. Someone decided it's time to heal the smokers. Well smoking has too many negative side effects, among others you have that nasty cough. Some Einstein decided it would be a good idea to get the smokers back on their feet quicker so they could come by the store to get more cigarettes. See how it goes full circle? First you get the poison, you consume that, then you come back for the medicine. And while you're there, why not just load up on the poison as well? So handy when it's all in one place!

And it's probably the tobacco companies that did it, they are now pushing tobacco remedies along with their tobacco. And this should make life all the more convenient for these low scale suicide bombers, now they can get the complete makeover all in one place. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the profit from the drugs is higer than it from the tobacco. But if they cut the tobacco, who's gonna buy the medicine?

What is it with bikes that causes endless aggravation? I bought mine new a year ago and no matter if I use it a lot or very little, there's always something wrong with it. For one thing, the gears have never functioned properly in its entire existence. The breaks are great when new but then they get loose after a while and you have to mess with the string to tighten them. But when you go there, you notice that it's quite a challenge to fix it so that the brake pads will stay symmetric, more often than not, one of them is inching closer to the wheel than the other and you get the wonderful automatically breaking effect. Aside from that, you know that sooner or later you will puncture your tire. Do I ever hate fixing that, it's a pain in the ass to take it out, you have to dismount the wheel and break open the tire with a screwdriver. Then you patch the puncture, wait for it to dry (or you can replace it, either way it's still time and effort), then put it back in, again a pain in the ass to seal the tire with the screwdriver. Then put the wheel back on.

And unless you're some kind of bike enthusiast, the maintenance is just a pain in the ass.