Todd Stadler's blog

who debugs the bug-tracking?

Another annoying thing about work is the new bug-tracking interface I have to use. It's actually the same bug-tracking program I've been using for a few projects now, but they change things like background color for each project so you can tell at a glance what you're working on. That's fine.

What's not so good is that the person they unleashed to design the look and feel of this project's bug-tracking system is a fifteen-year old AOL user, or so it would seem. I have never seen a more unprofessional webpage at work.

It has a stupid faux marble image background instead of the usual solid color. It has animated gifs for headlines in which the words get progressively smaller, meaning you can only read them half the time. It has wildly varying font sizes. It has swaths of text that are blue and underlined but are not links, presumably because someday there will be working links there. But for now, you have to put your mouse over them to figure out that they don't do anything when you click. And the designer (who looks rather old for a fifteen year-old, put his own picture at the bottom of the page, making the "peace" sign, for heaven's sake. Next to that is a small picture of a mailbox and an exhortation to e-mail him with suggestions. If I can find which part of the blue underlined text actually leads to a mailto link, I will be using that very soon.

But the two most incomprehensible features of this webpage are as follows:

1. It has a banner-sized animated gif at the top that looks for all the world like an advertisement, which naturally makes me want to ignore it. And what exactly does it say? It trumpets the bug tracking system as "the ultimate database tracking solution", reminding me for no apparent reason that "precision does matter". And these words are surrounded by daisies. Much as I am apparently surrounded by doofuses at work. And yet, that is not the weirdest thing about this page. That would be that...
2. This page has bloody background music. A midi file of blues music. There are not words to describe how flabbergasted I am at this. Hello? This is Intel! Why am I hearing blues music every time I go to file a bug?