Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
My daughter woke me up at what I must admit was actually a very reasonable hour, and told me to come over right away. She lives with her mom. I went, it was good. Sometimes by the grace of God, even broken families can still in some important senses be families. I'm very grateful. Then my daughter and I went to my other sister's house for the largest, tenderest turkey I've ever had the pleasure of getting outside of. Actually, of course, I got outside of rather more of it than was dictated by actual necessity. 'Tis the season to be greedy... Then we gradually subsided to a contented torpor, punctuated by the sounds of kids playing with new toys. Other than pleasant conversation, we won't dwell on any sounds emanating from the grownup contingent. Delicacy forbids. And an exceedingly pleasant time was had by all.
Just before the holiday, my brother-in-law upgraded one of his PCs from an AMD K6II-300 to a 500. The mobo went belly-up, so he replaced it with a generic M599LMR unit from (I think) PC Chips. Built-in video, sound, modem, and ethernet, cost under $90. Well, we played with it for a day at work (and got paid, too--what a country!) but couldn't get it to run reliably over 300 MHz. Some upgrade. I told him to send the CPU back, but he kept fiddling with it until it worked. How did he get it to work, when I, an experienced PC guru, was impotent? Will I ever learn the answer to that question? Will he even be able to tell me what he did that got it working? Yeah, well...
You've probably had the occasional experience, same as I have, of just flailing around madly when something that SHOULD work, because all the settings are PERFECT... doesn't. Sometimes one of the things we do eventually works, or some combination of things, and too often we aren't positive just WHICH thing(s) did the trick. But it works now, so we get the work order signed and hightail it back to Dodge. The worst thing is when all the above happens under the eye of the client, who just wants to look over your shoulder because all this computer stuff is "so interesting." Then when you're done, he (never she) asks "So what did you do to fix it?" This is when all those wasted childhood hours of constructing elaborate fantasies pay off. Just remember, no matter what I say, he isn't going to understand it, any more than I would understand if I asked a similar question of my doctor. Am I starting to sound a bit like the BOFH, sans venom? A thorough-going cynic, and I so young? Sad.
I've been playing with the latest Linux Mandrake release on my work desktop. I just gave it four gigs or so at the end of the drive, and chose the Business Desktop installation option. It came up with a perfectly adequate driver for the old 8-meg Diamond A50 AGP card, and it let me put in my static IP settings, and it found the two network printers I use, an ancient LaserJet 4 and a largish, ink-swilling DeskJet 2500c. Both of them printed pretty test pages, but apparently at only the minimum resolution. Very artsy, but I'll need to tinker with that. I don't think there's an easy way to connect to my Exchange email server, though. If anybody knows differently, I'd enjoy hearing about it.
Mandrake comes with some reasonably good (if minimal) office-type software (K Office or something, plus some assorted miscellany), which I've thus far only browsed through. I'll be interested in seeing the next Star Office. To paraphrase Bob Thompson, when Microsoft finally goes to all-subscription, that'll be the end of my personal use of new Microsoft products. How can anyone live in a world that contains the Microsoft corporate culture, and still doubt the existence of Evil? Though in the interest of even-handedness, I expect that any super-dominant vendor would (and justifiably) draw similar ire from the informed consumer. So while Bill Gates is not the antichrist, or even Darth Vader, he may very well be Zurg, arch-enemy of Buzz Lightyear and right-minded space rangers everywhere. C'mon, penguin!
And another thing -- how come Front Page 2000 has such trouble connecting to my website, when I can ftp up there with seldom a problem? And when FP publishes, how come it's so doggone slow, compared to ftping the same files over the same wire to the same destination? It's like FP was written in interpreted BASIC. Phooey.
OK, I know. Everybody knows the problems; it's solutions that are hard to come by. In other words, it's way easier to be the opposition than the party in power. As penguinistas are beginning to learn, with obstacles such as clueless-newbie-itis and projected ship dates to contend with. Oh well, RTFM time again I suppose. Not that software comes with manuals any more... So it's usually RTF-$50 Book time instead.
Incidentally, all you smart people out there who already know this stuff -- sorry, I was busy. (Please feel free, BTW, to correct me at any time. Life's too short and there's too much new stuff to learn every day to let ego get in the way.) As it happens, at the moment I have a job that often leaves me a decent amount of time to continue exploring things that fall more or less into the category that the PBS radio program Whad'Ya Know likes to call "Things You Should Have Learned in School (had you been paying attention)." Of course, back when I was in school this stuff hadn't been invented yet. But if I were in school right now, I could be paying through both nostrils to watch some bored academic hack regurgitate these nifty things
before my wondering eyes two or three times a week, plus labs. Instead I get to play. And they give me money. Say it with me now, "America! What a country!"
*************************
OK, for the record, I just installed Netscape Navigator 4.08, and it overlays one table on top of another, and ignores the "absolute" specified positions of my GIF files. Let's try Opera.
*************************
OK, installed Opera 5 (non-Java). Very nice, BTW. I think I like the multiple document interface it's always used, because one click minimizes everything. And it renders my Front Page creation reasonably well. It ignores the presumably-nonstandard BORDERCOLOR tag for one table, and it ignores the "absolute" positioning of a one-line paragraph that I use as a caption. I guess if I made another table with absolute positioning, it would display that stuff OK. Better than Netscrape, anyway.
I thought about Zip drives and suchlike, but for under $200, I get 640-ish megs, and if I use CD-R instead of CD-RW, any decent CD-ROM drive will read it. I formatted a single CD-RW just to carry this little web site around on, because I find that in actual practice, I edit it on my PIII-600 at work, and both my AMD K6II-450 and my ancient P75 Stinkpad at home. So CD-RW seemed like a good way to keep from simply filling up CD-Rs with redundant daily backups of the site. Though when I see it written down like that, my professional alert warning begins to flicker on, and I think "Hmmm... That doesn't actually seem like a Bad Thing."
Then this afternoon I'm going to try and help my sister Chocolat figure out how to get her online banking working correctly. Hey man, when it works right, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it for so long.