Brian On Software

When Visual Studio updates its MSDN documentation to "reflect your recent changes", it throws a dialog box right in your face asking you to wait (or waste) several minutes.  Now I must say that there are some things in life that I accept without much stress, difficulty, and impatience; such as forgetting my wallet at home when it’s my turn to pay the cashier for my full basket of groceries and there are six other people waiting in line behind me because it’s rush hour, or when I’m accidentally inhaling the nasty cigarette smoke from the guy in front of me in the waiting line for the 105 city bus, or when I’m filling an online registration box for the 1000th time.  I can live with that.  On the other hand, something I can NOT stand is when an application shoves a dialog box IN MY FACE…and that dialog box is modal and buttonless! That’s what happened to me this afternoon. While waiting for Visual Studio to finish up digesting the changes to its own MSDN documentation, I realized that I was wasting 10 minutes of my life for this thing to finish.  

So there I am sitting, waiting and wasting 10 minutes of my life looking at that stupid green progress bar.  Suddenly, my mind is thinking out loud "Hmm…I wonder what occurred in the world during those 10 minutes…".  After doing some "research" on the web, this is what I found what happened in our planet while waiting for that annoying dialog box to disappear:

• The tropical forests lost 1500 acres of life due to human harm
• 1070 people died (various causes)
• 100 children died due to malnutrition
• 7 people died in a car accident
• 2550 babies were born
• 2 person learned how to program with Ruby
• 8 people committed suicide
• 10 people were murdered
• 50 people died because they had contracted AIDS
• 14 people died due to cancer
• 150 people said "Doh!" (I’m one of them)
• 3 couple divorced
• 2 couple married
• A lion killed a zebra to feed her cubs
• 4 people changed careers
• 2,835,281 people got spammed
• 2,000 people said "I love you" to their partners…only half of them replied back with an "I love you"
• 30 people wasted 10 minutes of their lives on YouTube
• 300 people wasted 10 minutes of their lives on FaceBook (I’m one of them)
• 2 developers managed to integrate their projects under Cruise Control
• 4 developers managed to integrate their projects under Team City (Go, JetBrains!)
• 1 person understood the concept of closures
• 2 people were wondering what is more efficient: C# or VB.NET?
• 20 developers were still coding with .NET 1.1
• 2 people subscribed to Jeff Atwood’s feed
• Britney Spears surely did something stupid (correction: I didn’t need to research this for a fact…)

What else happened in the world while I was waiting for that useless dialog box to disappear?

NOTE TO MICROSOFT: Stop wasting my time with useless "features" like this one.  Whoever wrote the user story for this one should get fired.  Give me an "Ignore" button so I can continue working while Visual Studio is updating whatever needs to be updated.  No wonder I have an ulcer…