Anyways, I was a developer at a smaller web development company that was run more through fear and unreasonable expectations than through proper management savvy. This place also had a habit of paying its female employees lower than the males, despite experience and obvious credentials. I don’t want to draw any correlation here, but I’m sure your mind can work something out on its own.

Before we get into the story, I should point out that in work environments, I tend to be fairly outspoken, and chatty. This doesn’t seem to hinder my work or the work of those around me. This is just how i work; I am a surprisingly social creature at my workplace. People tend to know what I think about what I’m working on, situations at work, and most topics that get discussed around me. Its a good working model for me. Sadly this model didn’t work so well with management at my old job.

The Story

So it was annual review time. A week prior to our expected meetings with our manager I, like everyone else, was given a sheet for a self-analysis review. We were to outline our strengths, weaknesses, goals etc. It was all very open-ended. Well, I thought it was, apparently there was a correct way to fill it out, and I had just missed something. There was a section at the end for goals I wanted to achieve; personally, professionally, etc. I had no real problem coming up with some answers for the professional section, but I was reluctant to list any personal goals. I came up with some answers, submitted my paperwork, and continued on working.

A week later my meeting with management arrives. I step into his uniform, unadorned, clinically sterile office. This was a man about efficiency; he didn’t take bullshit, he felt he didn’t deal in it (this is suspect) and was generally quite boring; well boring except for the fact he could dead lift 300 pounds. Seriously, he worked out like Arnold. He was, however as anal as the boss from The Incredibles. That whole scene with him lining up the pencils on his desk calendar?

That’s a real thing.

He sits me down and we stare at each other in silence for roughly a minute; him with a frown, me with what was probably a bored look on my face. I couldn’t help it; this was not something i wanted to be doing considering the timelines they liked to throw at me. Frankly I had more important things to do with my time than what I considered a formality. Had I known what was to come, I’d have been a bit more on my A game.

He opened with the easy compliments, and then went after my behavior (and his distaste for it), and then said “but the real problem i have today is with your goals.”

“My goals?” I responded. “what about my goals?”

“Well Corey, when i set a goal, i give myself a clear timeframe in which to achieve it by. Say I wanted to read a book, I’d set a goal that I will read that book by March 21, 2007. Your goals,” he says as he motions to my self-analysis paper, “are too vague. You’ll never really achieve them with goals like that. You didn’t even write that many down. You can’t tell me you don’t have goals.”

I tried to hide a smile. My reasoning for vague goals is that I had absolutely no intention of sharing any of my legitimate goals, work, personal, or other to them. I didn’t like working there, and i didn’t like how it was run, and to be honest i didn’t really like them. So yes, my goals were vague and not really defined, which was by design. Apparently my manager took notice of this, and than took the completely wrong impression from it.

Now, not noticing my smirk or utterly unfazed by it, he went on: “we really want you to get some more focus Corey, so here’s what were going to do: we’re going to split your raise for now. You’ll get half now, and we’ll have another chat in a little while and see about that second half.”

Yes, apparently the best way to motivate me into having better goals was to punish my financially.

“Uh, okay.” I responded, not because I was offended (though I should have been), but because their tactic honestly confused me. Did they honestly think this was going to make me more motivated? Apparently so, but they wanted to give me that extra push: ”Something else i want you to do Corey… There’s a movie id like you to watch. Its all about setting goals and keeping focused, despite what comes your way. That’s something else you need to work on: focus.”

As an aside, let it be known that by this point my projects where the only ones that managed to hit any sort of timelines, and I had worked 50 hour work days to make sure i hit those deadlines. Lack of focus my left gingery testicle.

At this point I was honestly trying not to laugh. A movie. Seriously? You’ve just robbed me of half my wage increase, and now you want me to go watch a movie?

“It’s called Rudy. Its a fantastic film, I really think you’ll get a lot out of it. Have you seen it before?” he said, smiling at me in what I assume was his best fatherly smile.

“Nope” said I, still totally blind-sided by the situation, “can’t say that I have.”

“You go home and watch it tonight, then come talk to me tomorrow. I really think you’ll learn a lot.”

“Y..yeah, sure” I muttered. I sat there for a moment longer, before the awkwardness of the moment hit the ’14 year old male doing a presentation in front of his class for sex ed.’ level of uncomfortableness.

I went back to my desk and sat down, and explained to my neighbor (one of the female employees who had similar opinions to my own about the company) and explained what had just gone down in our managers office.. She laughed when I mentioned the video, but refused to tell me what I was in for.

I know why now, and my revenge on her will be devastating.

Before we get to the review…

I am sure a great many number of people love Rudy. It really is a soul-stirrer. Underprivileged guy makes his way into school despite all odds, studies hard, makes it onto the team, and in the end he finally get to achieve his life-long dream of playing for … Whatever the hell football team he adored. I obviously paid close attention.

My problem was probably the fact that I went in watching this movie, I was cynical due to the context in which I was told to watch it; that is, I only got half my raise because of vague goals and an apparent lack of focus. You are going to have to forgive me a bit for my inability to appreciate what may very well be a decent movie. I don’t think any suggested movie can really be appreciated in a similar situation.

Anyways, lets see what I took from Rudy, given the context.

My curt, somewhat biased review of the movie ‘Rudy’

A slow, small, un-athletic teenager from a lower middle class family has a dream of playing for a college football team. He makes sure everyone knows about this dream, and refuses to listen to their pointing out the obvious; namely that he is slow, short, and poor. He starts working at the steel mill with his father, where he continues to tell everyone about his goal in life. Everyone laughs. Rudy is resentful and becomes more determined to prove them wrong.

Rudy heads off to the college and weasels his way into campus life by begging a preacher to sponsor him and then living off of the charity of the groundskeeper. I will give him credit: he is resourceful. He basically lives in the shed in the football stadium.

Fast forward through a montage of Rudy studying hard, applying for the main school and getting rejected every semesters’ end until we have Rudy’s first big (and obvious) break: he gets into the big school. He does, of course continue to study hard, because hell, why not.

So now that Rudy has made it to college, he starts begging to get onto the team. He is obviously denied. It takes more than grades to get onto the team. You need things like skill, strength, and to be roughly 7 inches taller. No matter, obvious job requirements matter not to Rudy. He keeps pestering until he gets onto the maintenance crew for the team and starts befriending the team members. After months of this, he manages to get onto the reserve team. Once again this is due the charity of those in better positions.

Game season starts, and of course he is begging to get onto the team. He’s got moxy! Once again the coach points out that he is too small, slow, and unskilled to ever make it onto the team. Moxy or not, he’s just not a decent fit into a line-up of skilled players. He is almost literally the short, fat kid in the red rover line.

Que another montage. This one involves loads of training, more befriending, and i think there is some sort of half-baked romance in there too. I’m pretty sure his training revolves around a tackle or some such thing. My memory in this is mercifully vague.

About 40 minutes of sappy, endearing crap happens now. It’s just one long ‘everyone against Rudy’s dream’ train, and you are stuck watching it crash and burn. I think he gets to kiss a girl, and there was probably a bar fight. I know that at some point in here, he ends up being super-friends with the main football lineup.

Game day; literally the climax of the film.

It’s the last game of the season.

Rudy hasn’t managed to get onto the main team yet. He is crushed. Luckily, all of the guys on the team love Rudy so damned much by this point in the film, that they threaten to turn in their jerseys to the coach if he doesn’t put Rudy on the team. Once again the coach says no, calling their bluff because Rudy is too small, slow, and unskilled to be an effective team member. Never mind that he montaged his way to probably successful tackle or whatever.

The team follows through, and start to hand over their jerseys until the coach caves and puts Rudy on the team. Success for our poor little beta male! Note that this is the third major example of depending on others to get him where he needs to be. Other than being lovable and studying like a med student on meth, Rudy hasn’t really done that much.

Rudy has made it onto the field, but the coach hasn’t played him; nothing but bench for poor, small Rudy. That is until the team starts chanting “Rudy” or something, and the crowd picks up on this and runs with it. This is supposed to be the emotional build-up that make grown men suddenly have something in their eye. The sap-o-metre is dialed up to 11 for the end of this movie.

There are 4 seconds (I could be wrong here, but I am pretty sure there were less than 10 seconds left) left on the clock. The final play. Team Rudy is up 7-24 (once again this is a guess but there was at lest a 2 down difference). The coach cracks under the pressure of the crowd and puts Rudy in. The coach is a bit of a bitch for peer pressure.

The whistle blows, and rudy performs his singular tackle, enabling him to fulfill his life-long dream at the age of 23 or so, and be carried off the field by his team mates. Fade to black. or Sepia… or… something.

What I learned from being forced to watch ‘Rudy’

By the end of the movie, I was angry. I was also bored, but mostly I was angry. Here’s what I took away from that movie was this:

• It doesn’t matter whether you can or can’t do the job; work hard and suck up and you can make it on the kindness of others.
• Your life-long goal is actually very short0sighted, and after you achieve it, you wont have anything to look forward to. You peaked at 23. Also, your life goal is kind of weak.
• Nothing you contribute to the team actually matters, nor will it actually make a difference or change the outcome of anything you are involved in.
• You are stupid.

So what my manager was telling me (in my eyes) was that I was stupid, got by on the sympathies and kindnesses of others, that nothing I do actually matters, nor do I contribute anything to the team other than some sort of mascot status. Oh, and my goals are shallow and unimportant. I don’t even know if focus was really brought up in the film.

I made sure to tell my manager this the next day. I did make sure to outline that i knew what he expected me to take from it, but I wanted him to know that he should be very careful about what he suggests people to watch. He didn’t seem too pleased with the fact that I basically shat all over his most favouritist movie. I did however manage to leave him utterly speechless.

What happened after this second chat really is a testament to a lack of employee understanding, and what happens when you use 1950s management styles in the new world. That is, a style of management that induces a fear of losing your job if you don’t work harder, as opposed to a method where support your employees.

The day I told my manager my about my take on Rudy was also the day I had signed the jobs death certificate in my head. I stopped talking to people, I stopped being a social person, and worst of all I stopped caring. My work became sloppier and I just didn’t care. Why should I? They already explained that I wasn’t that important, held back half of my raise, and didn’t like how I worked anyways. Oh, and apparently lacked focus, despite evidence to the contrary.

They saw my new, depressingly altered work style and actually attributed it to me focusing more on my work. It was actually quite the opposite; I didn’t care, but they couldn’t tell because they never actually bothered to talk to me about anything.

The end result

Watching Rudy (and the attitude shift that happened after) did drive me to make a rather specific goal: I applied to college for Graphic Design. Right in the height of my “fuck this place I am leaving and I don’t care” phase, they gave me the rest of my raise because I seemed to have a lot more focus. That night, I went home and applied for graphic design school.

That gave me a rather solid deadline in which to achieve a couple more specific goals; pay off my new car, save up as much as possible for school (made easier by the rest of my raise), and quit the job that had robbed me in more ways than my raise.

I guess they were right about the focus, but wrong about the subject.

The lesson?

There are many lessons to take away from here: Don’t make people watch Rudy, don’t withhold raises for terrible reasons; don’t make your life goal to play for a college football team; don’t be afraid to quit your horrible, horrible job; the list goes on and on.

The most important one is actually for the manager: don’t run your shop through fear and doublespeak. Instead of punishing someone for not fitting into your mould, see what they are contributing, and find a way to augment that to the benefit of the company.

Also, don’t be a dick.

P.S. If you’re wondering why this is called Rudy 2, I can field that one. There was at one point a one line blog post on this website that stated ‘Rudy, rudy, rudy, rudaayyyy.’ That’s it. The reason was that I was still working at my former job and feared they’d find my actual thoughts on the subject and sodomize me. It was also a hat tip to the then popular song ‘Ruby’ by the Kaiser Chiefs. Some time down’ the road, I deleted this post due to its utter irrelevance.

The irony in that statement will become apparent as you continue to read. It blows my mind how much effort and extra money all of this cost me.

Also it should be mentioned that the span of all of the following events took place over a week and a bit, because I was only at my home for about two days over the entire time-line.

Alright so where to begin? I’ve always sort of wanted an XBox 360, which would come to a shock to a younger version of me. I was always a huge fan of the PlayStation. Sadly since the PS3 has nothing on it that interests me, my loyalties have changed. That and I don’t think Blu-ray is doing very well, so I don’t need a player for them at the moment.

The issue with wanting one and owning one were two-fold. First there was the issue of my T.V. being almost comically small. I’ve had it since I was 13, and bought it with my very own paper route money. It’s colour, mono sound, has no AV jack ports, and I lost the remote so long ago that it’s nothing but a myth. The second issue is that in order to get a decent XBox, I’d be looking to drop anywhere from 350-500 dollars.

As I have a shortage of funds, these two points were a little more daunting than I would like to admit. I told myself that when I could afford a nice T.V. and an XBox, it would be one of those “for me” purchases and left it at that. Then my parents decided to buy a fancy new T.V., and I was given the older one from the family room. Now it’s nothing amazing, but it has two AV jack ports, stereo sound, and a remote (mind you, the 3 doesn’t work well on it). So I now had a T.V. that would service my needs. The XBox costing too much still put me off the purchase though.

So then Boxing Day comes around, and lo and behold I can get an XBox 360 with four games – Kung-fu Panda, LEGO Indiana  Jones, Halo 3, and Stranglehold -, and a 60 gig hard drive for 260 dollars. that’s roughly 130 dollars cheaper then usual, not even factoring the cost of the free games which average around 45 dollars each. Put it together and I could save 310~ dollars. This is not something I could pass up.

This is where things start to slowly go down-hill.

Day 1 (Friday)

So the flier says that Future Shop opens at 6 a.m. I make the decision to line up at 3 a.m. because they only had 20 or so of these deals. This may sound insane, but trust me when I say that there were people who were lined up there as of 12:30 that morning. The kicker is that due to some insane bylaw in Brantford, Future Shop could only open at 9 a.m.. For those unwilling to do the math, that’s an extra three hours of standing in the cold, hating myself. Thankfully I had a chair and my sleeping bag, so I was alright for the most part. Waiting around for 6 hours was… less fun.

In the end I got my XBox 360, brought it home, and only then did I realize that it is the only NextGen console that does not have built in wireless. Why? I have no actual idea, though “cash gouging” comes to mind. “No worries,” I thought, “I’ll just pick one up while we’re out! How expensive can they be?”

Day 4 (Monday)

100 dollars, as it turns out. Which is, of course, insane. “There must be a way around this!” I proclaimed. I went to the all-knowing Google and started looking around.

There is apparently a way to rig up your XBox 360 into your computer using Internet Connection Sharing. After following 3 of these tutorials, failing, and nearly killing my computer and network to boot, I decided to try a different approach.Well not totally true, I fished out my old laptop, and tried doing the same through that, but it was even less successful; something I didn’t even think was possible.

This whole thing took roughly four hours of my life away.

Day 7 (Thursday)

“I should be able to use a router as an access point, hook into the wireless network that already exists, and then connect the XBox to the router via Ethernet!” This is possible, as it turns out, only if you have the correct routers. D-Link, which was up until this experience my router of choice, does not actually allow this quite the way I want.

What I want:

• Router A is connected to the modem, and broadcasts the wireless network.
• Router B acts as a repeater; that is to say that it connects to the Wireless network from Router A wireless-ly (this is an important distinction) and acts as an additional hub, and/or repeats the signal from Router A.
• Things can then connect to Router B and they will attach themselves to the network, which makes my XBox go live.
• Alternately, allow my XBox to use Router B as an antennae, allowing it to connect to the Wireless signal broadcast by Router A.

What my D-Links can actually do:

• Router A is connected to the modem, and broadcasts the wireless network.
• Router B can connect to Router A with an Ethernet cable, and then act as a broadcast anchor.
• Things can then connect to Router B, and it directs the traffic back to Router A.

Since I cannot run a cable through my house, this effectively screwed me. Of course I only found this out after buying the router, trying, failing, and then finding the manual online (doesn’t come with one!). This took another couple hours of my life away. The router is of course non-refundable. The upswing to this is that when I move out, I have a router. Fantastic. For now though, it sits in my closet, mocking me.

“I know I’ve seen this done though! My friend has this exact setup!” I screamed, bordering upon hysterics at this point. It turns out that the only router that can do this the way I want is a Linksys router, which of course is what he has. This will teach me to leap before I look.

Day 10 (Sunday)

11:45 A.M.

At this point I snap. “Fine! Fuck all of this, I’ll just spend the 100 dollars and get the stupid adapter for the stupid XBox so I can finally get online!”

Totally defeated, I got into my car and drove down to the closest EB Games to pick up an outrageously over-priced Wireless Adapter. I decided against going to the Brantford Future Shop, which is about the same distance as EB Games (in the opposite direction, basically), because they specialize in video games and so the funding should go their way.

12:10 P.M.

EB Games is closed. Not a “back in 5 minutes” closed. This was a “Shutters are down” sort of closed. a Closed closed. No hours of operation in sight.

“Fuck you EB Games, I’ll just go to Wal-Mart” I proclaim as I dive back into my car.

12:18 P.M.

Wal-Mart carries every other XBox accessory, including Viva Pinata face plates, but no Wireless Adapter. It’s literally the only thing they don’t carry. There isn’t even a peg for it. Asking the mouthbreather working the electronics section says “if it’s not there, we don’t have it… I guess.” I hate Wal-Mart.

“Alright, fine. I’ll go to Microplay! They are a trustworthy store that can fulfill my request” I say, my knuckles going white from gripping my cars steering wheel too tightly.

12:29 P.M.

I enter the Microplay and wait until my general anger and distaste for the universe decidedly stops their conversation, and they graciously ask me if there’s something I am looking for. I scan the wall and do not see any wireless adapters. I figure they probably have some in the back, and so I ask.

Both employees look at the wall, then above their heads at the additional storage area and mutter to one another like some sort of synchronized pantomime of ignorance. My forced smile fades as I already know the response: “We’re sold out, I guess” says the less clean of the two. I’m already starting to move towards the door by the time they say this. I thank them and exit, my rage slowly starting to get the better of me.

“Fine. I will go to the Future Shop. The Future Shop I could have gone to in the first place.” This was then followed by a collection of curses, the details of which escape me. Suffice it to say, it was both colourful and creative.

12:45 P.M.

I arrive at Future Shop, park, and stride in. The greeter shies away from me, probably tasting the rage that pre and proceeds me. I walk into the XBox 360 section, and find three wireless adapters left. With 10 dollars off, no less. Lucky me, I guess. I spent about that much money in gas, so it basically evened out.

As I go to pay for the adapter, the check-out girl wishes me a good day with a smile, and I restrain myself from putting a hole in the wall. Thankfully my rage is slowly, slowly ebbing away.

1:05 P.M.

I plug in the Wireless Adapter, turn the XBox on, test the connection, and I’m up and running. The connection is horrid due to my dressers apparent lead physiology. This forces me to re-arrange my entire shelf to allow the XBox to reside on the top with the T.V.

1:20 P.M.

Connect to XBox live, download the OS update, and spend a good 10 minutes online trying to come up with a Gamertag that actually isn’t taken. This is harder than it seems. XBox Live asks me if I want to be a Gold member. To have this privilege (which expires every year) will cost me an additional 60 dollars a year. “Fine, fuck it, whatever,” I mutter as I attempt to explode someones head at the XBox headquarters via transferred telekinesis. I sign my life away and eventually the system is up.

1:40 P.M.

I decide to download Castle Crashers, a game that I love dearly, only to find that I must add Microsoft Points in order to purchase it. 30 dollars for 2000 points (that’s roughly 1.5 cents per point. Not a good exchange rate) later, I drop 1200 to own the game.

In the end…

So lets see: almost two weeks to get the Xbox live, and it cost me 240 dollars to get to that point. How? well 90 for the wireless adapter, 50 for the useless router, 60 for the online membership, 30 more for the points, and 10 for gas.

Good thing I got 130 off the Xbox eh? I would have been totally screwed there!

In the end, I’m glad it is up and running, but the shitstorm that I went through to get to this point almost made me murder someone.

Oh and in case anyone wants to friend me on XBox Live, my gamertag is “Jack Dutson”

Don’t ask, it’s a sort of inside joke with Theresa. She appreciated it.

Some people had to reset the time on their computer. Some had to un-check the starting options (Remember me, Remember Password, and Auto Sign-In) and then do it manually. Others had to go and delete things from their registry, and some even had to repair Messenger and its Sign-In Assistant. Then you had people like me for some reason or another Microsoft decided to totally cut off from their whole service. I mean a total cut off. I couldn’t access their service, I’d get a 404 when I tried to access web messenger. Even their Live Messenger Support website was cut off from me, so I couldn’t even get professional help. It kept telling my my proxy settings were screwed up, when in reality I don’t even use a proxy at all.

I took it upon myself to try and uninstall/reinstall the product and I got half way there at least. I couldn’t reinstall the program, because in order to install it the installer has to download the contents from their server. Since I was cut off from their servers I couldn’t do anything. Thankfully I recently brought my old laptop out of commission, and Messenger worked just fine there. I finally got it working over a day later when my Microsoft-induced ban was lifted.

The point to this rant?

Don’t screw your customers.

I can understand that what they were doing could have been really super, duper important. I get that they had to cut a good section of people off from the service in order to fix whatever it was. Hell a server could have gone up in flames, and we wouldn’t know the different and that’s part of the problem. They didn’t say anything, but instead let a good section of people go without a means of common communication.

This is bad practice.

If you’re going to cut off a good section of people from something that many of them pretty much cannot live without, you need to say something. The only information I found on the subject was what Google told me when I was trying to fix my problem. All it told me was that there were a bunch of others in the same boat with no idea how to fix it.

I’m aware they have a spotless image to try and maintain (whoever they think they’re fooling I have no idea), but when you screw over that many people by not saying anything, you cause more damage to your image than if you just came clean. Sometimes being honest will cause you less grief in the end.

Had they returned a new error number or had a post somewhere on the Internet that said what the hell was going on, I wouldn’t have bothered writing this post.

Anyways, todays little post is a little bit of a bitch. That is to say that I am bitching about something that to this day manages to blow my mind.

Why the hell can’t people drive in the snow?

Seriously, it’s been around longer than we have. We have developed wheel-drives, tires, break-styles, wiper-blades, anti-freezing, self-heating, Pi-calculating cars. So despite our advances against the frozen flecks of water still manage to turn everyone into drooling, knuckle-dragging morons whos only response to having to drive in the stuff is to go under twenty km at any given time. For those out there still using the imperial system, that’s roughly 12.4 miles per hour.

Todays example will revolve around the recent swing in temperature changes: It was cold and rainy, but alright. Then the sun went down, things got cold, and thanks to nature, the roads started to freeze. Shortly after that it started snowing, which blanketed things in a layer of snow. I admit, these are not road conditions wherein driving excessively is a smart idea. I would even go so far as to say that to err on the side of caution would indeed be the better choice. Caution doesn’t need to be 10 km (6.2 Mph).

Yeah so you can’t drive as fast, I get that, but going so slow I can out-walk your car just so that you can ‘safely’ ride the bumper of the car in front of you as you would at regular speeds is, at best, retarded. You can drive faster, if you actually allow yourself the time to stop. What this generally means is that you back the fuck off, and leave room between you and the car you’re trying to ride in front of you. This is generally good practice in optimal driving conditions as well, if only to help avoid accidents by giving your dumb-ass time to react.

Additionally, you can actually drive on the snow instead of the lanes that other cars have driven in. When you are facing the possibility of driving on the black ice that every other car preceding has contributed to, you can actually shift your car a bit to the left or right and drive on the snow which has been otherwise left alone. This will allow you to actually gain now-valuable traction, and get you to where you’re going before you die and ripen from old age while whimpering in your car, cursing mother nature as you plow your gas pedal into the floor, wondering why oh why wont your tires find grip?

Maybe these little things are not common sense for some, but for those of us that live in an area that has frequent and shitty winter weather conditions, I would assume that after a while people would be able to adapt and drive in said weather conditions with some modicum of ability. Apparently this knowledge is only reserved for those who live in perpetual snow, or happen to actually drive in it. I’ve driven through conditions that would blow peoples minds, and so maybe that has given me some keen insight into how to drive in the winter. A lot of it, however comes from not being retarded.

One last note, get winter tires. All-seasons will not cut it when push comes to shove, as today clearly proved to me. I know this because last year I drove my little Yaris around in the winter and slid through many a stop sign, because I simply did not have the grip available to me. Lessons have been learned and this year I dropped the coin on it. I’ve not regretted the decision. Maybe you don’t need them, but I can assure you that the difference they make is noticeable, and you will not regret the decision.

Fuck sakes people, I drive a Yaris and I navigate this weather better than the SUVs, Trucks, and about 70% of the other drivers on the road that managed to spin out for no God damned reason. My car is tiny and super-light, and yet somehow here I am driving like an apparent winter veteran. That’s sad people, sad.

As it turns out, customizing a Wiki Library to do anything isn’t just difficult, it’s not even a chore. It’s a goddamn mission of epically frustrating scale. Let’s start off with some over-all items:

1. I needed to create custom columns, some of which looked at lists.
2. I needed to create a content type that was based off of the Wiki content type.
3. I needed to customize the Wiki library to have said content type.
4. I needed to add custom-made web parts to the various views of the Wiki Library (History, Edit, etc)
5. I needed all of this to work through a feature

Where to start? Lets start from the bottom of the list, because as it turns out this was the easiest and where I started.

You want to edit those page layouts eh? Well have fun because as it turns out all of those files are system files, which means they’re on the hard-drive of the server and therefor shared. That means you can’t mess with one without causing a server-wide change. The solution? Copy those layout pages and rename them. Now add them to your feature. I’m not going to explain how to get the feature to deploy, that’s a different story all together.

That’s sweet! Now how do you make anything use those pages? Well in terms of all the little widgets (Versions tool, History Link, Incoming Link) You will have to build your own versions of those controls. Why? Well the URL of the pages that they point to are hard-coded. Simple enough to get around, though annoying as hell. Just to demonstrate, to the left is a screen shot of what SharePoints’ markup looks like just to recreate some of the controls in HTML. Seriously, that’s messed up. In the end each link was surrounded by two more tables. What the hell man?

Okay so you got all of the default pages redirected. What about when you edit an entry or make a new one? Those pages are tailored specifically for Wiki Pages (CreateWebPage.aspx) and so you’ll have to copy that one. As for redirecting it? Well you should be able to do it via an Event Receiver attached to the Feature that Installs the custom content type that this is all based from. please note my use of the word ‘should’ because I’m still stuck there.

Let’s move onto the library for a moment. Now I have not been able to replicate the Wiki library properly, without making my list type use the basetype of ’119′. As it turns out, this comes with a whole bunch of strings attached, like having hidden name columns and a lot of red-tape. I dare you to try and rename the “Name” column to anything with any sort of graceful code. I’ll leave that one there. For those that are wondering, the default Feature for Wiki Libraries is called “WebPageLib” or something of that nature. Try searching the 12 directory for the content type of Wikis. To find that, go looking for the ctypes Feature and look in there.

Creating the feature to house all of this turned out to be the easiest portion of it all, though all of the problems stemmed from it in some shape, way or form. I can’t bitch too much about the feature markup itself, because all it really lacks is some functionality that should… well really should just be there. I’ve had to rig extra code together just to get what I wanted, but read on and I’ll explain.

I managed to create the content type with little issues, though I had to add Remove references to the WikiPage content type (that does exist by the way, it’s just stored in the ‘_Hidden’ group which is why you can’t touch it via the site). Adding the new content type to the list template was fun too, because you have to do it via the feature, since Wiki libraries do not allow you to edit the Content Types of the list at all. Like I said, Wikis are sealed, and don’t like to play with the other kids.

The problems really started when I created the site columns. Just a note to everyone: if you ever feel like creating columns or content types, then using them, and then trying to remove them via a feature, good luck. SharePoint will not remove anything if it’s being used. Just a helpful tip there. This could be fixed via some EventReceiver code, but I won’t get into that.

Anyways, I had a column. It was a lookup column. It wanted to look at a specific list, so I gave it the list id (though to be honest this is a bad way to do it because what happens when you want to deploy this feature somewhere else?). I deployed the column, and it worked! Then I tried to use that column in a sub-site, which ended up failing miserably. Took me forever to find out that you cannot specify a web property in the feature. webid and scopeid, yes, but nothing generic (refer to my listId comment here). The solution to this was to add more custom EventReceiver code that would do this work for me. Which worked great until I moved the feature to another site.

This is where my night went bollocks.

I installed the feature onto another dev-site and activated it (all through stsadm). Worked fine. Then I tried to deactivate said feature, and it would just sit there. I could uninstall it fine, but when I deactivated it the process would just hang there and I’d be forced to end it via Task Manager. It took me 6 ruined dev-sites to realize that I was missing the lists that my lookups were pointing to. Apparently if you tie a lookup column to a list that doesn’t exist via code, it will cripple the server when you try and remove that column from any content types that it was attached to. When I say cripple, I’m not kidding. stsadm.exe ran up 50 Mb of resident memory, and 100% of the CPU. The best part was that no error would be logged, it would just hang there forever. I admit I toyed with the idea of letting it run all night and going home.

I kid you not, I laughed like a madman when I finally figured it out. I cannot explain why, but that’s just how it is. The lesson I learned from this really was that I shouldn’t have expected SharePoint to have any sort of intelligence sitting behind it, and code for stupidity. Anything you think SharePoint should probably just do probably doesn’t actually happen, or it happens with a hope and some duct tape.

Oh and for the record, I’m still stuck on how to change the Edit/New pages properly.