(By saying this here below, I don't mean to make light of micro-aggressions, I am sure somebody will decide that I am belittling the idea of micro-aggressions. But I'll continue with my train of thought anyway.)

There is a big problem with usability and user experience that is a thread, a theme, a running train wreck, that goes through just about every computer/technical interaction I have with just about anything. That is: the nicks and cuts and bumps and scrapes and occasional razor-sharp rooster spurs of less that good user interfaces. This happens in everything pretty much in my experience. It happens in the context of mobile, desktop, web, embedded, consumer, industrial, commercial, medical, yadda etc., and it happens in their OSs, GUIs, and apps. Also in my experience 100% guaranteed in any and all programming languages & environments. Also in my experience 100% guaranteed with any kind of technology enabled/supported workflow like, say, telephone customer support, or, probably, say, voting machines (ha ha).

Anyway, I think when I try to describe the gestalt of these bad UX things as nicks and cuts, or slings and arrows, then it doesn't feel quite as accurately, forcefully descriptive as calling them micro-aggressions in the UI UX world. The point being that a single micro aggression maybe could be ignored or allowed to roll off your back (though that's not great, of course), but every additional one isn't just an additive insult+injury, it is more a multiplicative thing, even becoming exponential as you hit some threshold of pain and frustration.

Your individual "little" bug in your app is actually embedded in, swimming with, multiplying the impact of, all the other "little" bugs in the universe of technology. My nerves have already been rubbed raw by my stupid mobile or desktop environment, and then I also have to smack my face against the what now feels like brickwallminefield that is your bug.

So, yeah.

I find it... interesting, in the worst sense of the word, that all the communication software products cannot get "muting" ui ux right/wrong. Would it really be so hard to have a ui that just shows, "You are muted" or "You are audible"? Instead we have weird annoying evil toggle button switches. Or roundabout things like "Tap to unmute".

On occasion i piece together, or upgrade, desktop pc hardware. It is truly amazing how all the parts are pretty much just horrible through-and-through. Things like: Screws of different specifications; Power cables that go the wrong way (I guess some expect you to run them through the back of the motherboard tray and then come down from the top of the case, to be all cool and tidy, dunno); Power connectors that aren't symmetric (ie all of them) and the keyways are hard to see and don't really work just by feel; Power cables that have wiggly pins (ie molex); AM4 socket back brackets that fall completely off and down into the back side of the case when you are removing the cooler to redo the thermal paste; Mounting for various data drives (hdd, dvd, ssd, laptop hdd, etc.) being a nightmare of incompatibly placed screw holes, and easily lost or broken drive rails/caddies; all the stupid age-old fiddly bits of a zillion different connector types like the bloody front panel pinouts; pc cases that aren't perfectly flat on top because it just looks cooler i guess; etc. ad nauseam. Sure that's why people "just buy a dell" but a lot of these things are just painfully obviously bad physical design stuff that i feel like you'd have to explicitly go out of your way and spend R&D $$$ on to make it as bad as they make it. And this is from name brands in all the parts, not just some random producer nobody has ever heard of before.

For an epic good time in seeing how usability and security can both combine to make a living computer hell on earth for end users, go read up on the Microsoft Windows 10 "windows hello" PIN stuff. Especially things like trying to just not have a pin at all, but hitting the brick wall of the remove button being greyed out. The "solutions" include all sorts of horrible brain surgery on the permissions of hidden system folders and/or actual windows registry editing. Just, hilarious. It is almost as if microsoft has not been making operating systems or user interfaces for multiple decades now. Well, of course, this is microsoft (hey, i worked there, i can complain) so yeah they don't actually ever learn or improve. (If you want more evidence of how they shovel things out the door that are suboptimal, you should have had the pleasure of trying to use the pc xbox app.)

Nothing says, "we, your Government, deeply respect your civil rights, and we strive every day to maintain the highest ethical and moral standards anywhere on Earth" than when they do business with FasTrak.

All I can say is: the "accessibility" high contrast / reverse video mode of macOS is way better than that of Window 10. The latter doesn't seem to realize that the Clear Type hinting would now make my eyes bleed. So that's nice.

It is funny. (By which I mean, of course: It is not funny.) I load up Blogger and see my blog, and I hit "new post" at the top right and it doesn't actually start a new post. Instead it takes me to the blog dashboard and there I have to click "new post" again.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/44928-arthur-dent-what-happens-if-i-press-this-button-ford

Have I mentioned recently how using technology, and 1000x when it comes to anything involving computers, is death by a thousand cuts. For example, I am trying to copy a serial number from a photo over to a web form, and when I tab back to the form the text field has become fully selected so that when I start to type the remained of the serial number (you know how we have 7+/-2 short term memory?), of course that blows out what I already had in there. 

Just utter horrible in your face "i hate you, user" kind of user interface and user experience. Either, "i hate you, user," or the only other possibility is, "I am a freaking idiot who has never made a web browser or user interface before, nor have I ever happened to use my own product enough to hit these evil broken user experiences."

(Firefox, Windows 10)

"Baytrail" style machines with 32bit (U)EFI yet 64bit CPU's are, of course, really bloody annoying. Neither windows 10 nor any linux seems to work very well with such systems. Most variants of linux flat out do not support it. Fedora claimed/s to support it in some places, but then the manual explicitly denies it, and it did not work when I tried it. On my old MacPro I did somehow heaven only knows how get reFind to work and now have it all happy but I literally do not know what I did any more and could probably never get it ever working again there if I had to. On my cursed AIMB-270 i3 330M setup I once - once! - got Debian to install per https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Support_for_mixed-mode_systems:_64-bit_system_with_32-bit_UEFI but then it crapped out and won't boot right and now I can't get the setup to work again either. So overall it appears that getting the installer to even run is heavily non-deterministic. Yay. 

Email me if you want a free AIMB-270 i3 330M motherboard with 8GB RAM. Sheesh.

Linux is funny. Not funny "ha ha" but more along the lines of funny "pukey". To wit, it is amazing to me that, I guess in some very misguided attempt to make it "easy" to install Linux, they make it really hard to find any iso that isn't one of their 2 preferred versions. And if you can find them they are not very clearly earmarked so I am always like WTF and find out later that I have the wrong thing.

It isn't rocket science to make a better UI here, I feel.

Oh well, what can we really expect from the universe of people that brought us things like Apache configuration files, or sendmail configuration, or postfix configuration, or, well, anything related to anything about computers anywhere at all. What a freaking nightmare. I can't wait for us to have First Contact with aliens and either their software is this bad or they are just scared away from us because our software is so bad.

Of late (well, probably for ever and a day, but you know) I have been really pained by this thing that apparently all OS desktops do: I've seen it in macOS, Windows 10, and I am pretty sure in Linuxen as well.

(Oh and another weird thing: whenever I start a new post on Blogger, there's already a single whitespace space at the start, that I have to manually remove. What is up with that?)

Back, to wit: Dialog boxes that are lost. Lost behind other windows. Or lost in utterly other dimensions, like when the Windows 10 User Account Control UI. And by lost I don't just mean that I manually shoved them down into the stack so it is all my fault. No, I mean dialog boxes that never appeared on top of the stack. 

(Of course, there's the other excommunicable offense of having a dialog box show up in my face when I am doing something already and - oh, well, there's several different ways that can go horribly wrong, like when they immediately take focus and thus take whatever keystroke is next in the stream that I was busy typing in some other app; or they prevent me from doing something I was desperately trying to do and no I don't want to have to answer your modal dialog right effing now (iOS, you sod).)

The whole thing is just depressing.

I know this is a downer of a blog, a real buzz kill. Personally I prefer to think that I am doing a service of pointing out the whole "naked emperor"nessitude of this computing hellscape we have created for ourselves! Yes!

Consider something really basic: trying to actually open files in some app. On Windows, just as one example (as in, it is even worse on Linux, and the Mac situation isn't really all that much better than the Windows situation), I have seen the full gamut of utter broken UX every which way possible. Things like: drag'n'drop sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Or it sometimes doesn't do what you'd want it to do. Things like: just the "open file" dialog UI is inconsistent across apps.

It is kind of mind boggling how bad everything really is.

The whole WSL thing where you are supposed to be able to run linux on windows is, every single time I have ever tried it, on every single different machine ever over the last few years, just a complete and utter failure disaster freaking joke poop show.

I cannot fathom why anybody would want to try to use anything non-Windows on Windows. Like, this is just the basic stuff, don't even get me started on the whole Docker on Windows debacle.

It really is - ha ha, I am holding my gut - funny when trying to run "wsl" just hangs like the halting problem with no feedback at all. The S.O. solution is to "super mega HARD reboot (using the power of the SHIFT key)" your machine... so I did that and sure enough it fixed the problem of "wsl" just hanging with no feedback until the heat death of the universe!

Because now what I get is such a vast improvement of user experience! Drum roll:

PS C:\Users\xyzpdq> wsl

Unspecified error

(and yes, there was like a 3 second pause between hitting Enter and getting the "result".)