If you hadn’t heard already through Digg, Slashdot, or any one of a number of places that have probably been spewing the news for a while, CodeWeavers has put their money where their mouth was, and is giving away license codes for CrossOver since the President “met” their Lame Duck Challenge.

This offer is only good today, October 28th, 2008, so get it while the gettin’s good.

(CodeWeavers’ site is getting hammered right now and has been replaced with a bare-bones-bandwidth-saving page, so if you missed news of the Challenge, Mac|Life has this article that provides some backstory.)

When pure (as in refined to 99.99%+ purity) bismuth is melted, then cooled under controlled conditions, it forms hopper crystals, which look like a “Greek Key” meander was melded with the inside of a hollow ziggurat. Though these crystals look like they must have been shaped by human hands (I personally find them evocative of the Ennis House), they form their shapes entirely on their own.

Pretty cool, if you ask me.

Management at the IT department here is on this big jag about “customer satisfaction”. To that end, they’ve implemented a satisfaction survey that gets sent out to users when a trouble ticket is closed. Said users then get the opportunity to fill out a simple Likert-scaled survey to which up to 4000 characters’ worth of additional comments may be entered.

I hadn’t really given it any thought until I got one of these surveys. One of my august colleagues was messing around with ticket workflows and put my name in for a test user. It seemed obvious that I could not pass up this opportunity to open a frank channel of communication with management, so I set every score to “Strongly Disagree” and provided the following comments (against the advice of some of my more timorous colleagues whom I will refrain from identifying here):

I don’t know who you’re hiring over there, but they are TERRIBLE. I would rather slide nude down a mile of sandpaper into a salt pit than deal with your horrible staff again, especially the one called Chuck. He was rude, ignorant, and not only did he insult my intelligence, gender, and ethnicity, the night after I called, he broke into my house, ate all the pickles I was saving for this weekend’s barbecue, and set my dog on fire. All I wanted was to order a pizza with extra anchovies and he acted as if it wasn’t even his job!!! Ridiculous!

I can assure you people that you’ll be hearing from my attorney. Or possibly my dentist, if the first guy isn’t available, but either way they are both respected in their fields and hold fancy degrees from important schools and wear expensive neckties, so YOU HAD BETTER WATCH OUT.

I am reliably informed that this message actually caused some mild bewilderment in certain managerial quarters before its authorship was realized.

Here is my declaration to project managers and developers everywhere: not every call for change is a “feature request”. “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” may be a venerated chestnut in the software world, but sometimes people hear it so much, they seem to start to believe it.

Yes, it may be that the application or function you wrote is working properly, that your code is faithful to the design intentions. Normally, suggestions to change that functionality fall under the rubric of unsolicited “feature requests”, which are often sent to the back burner while more pressing code changes, such as bug fixes, take priority.

However, there are times when a “feature request” is not a feature request; sometimes it is, in fact, a bug report. It doesn’t matter squat that your application, or some part of it, is functioning exactly as you intended, if it causes mass consternation, frustration, and/or panic for your end users. I’m not talking about one or two grumbling or inept users; I’m talking about a steady parade of confused and angry people. Tickets written about the issue are not feature requests in the sense that they can be addressed at leisure. No matter what your design was, it turned out to be bad, and it needs to change.

(And before you ask, yes, I did have some particular people in mind when I wrote this.)

Ladies, gentlemen, and other assorted folks and denizens of the web: today it is my humble duty to present you with a terrifying glimpse of a possible future.

Vote wisely, citizens.

Despite the risk of reducing this blog to a simple link spew, I feel compelled to share the decidedly lowbrow but nonetheless hilarious Comics In My Pants, a simple but ingenious jape based entirely on replacing key bits of comic strip dialog with the words “in my pants”. Enjoy.