New Computer

Getting a new computer is exciting.

Because as great as computers are, the age about as well as people do. The older they get, the more weird noises and tics they develop. They're also magnets for dust, snack crumbs, and in my case, a spider which got evicted.

But getting the new computer set up . . .

You have to log back in to your accounts. You have to figure out why the speakers that were working fine with the old computer don't work with the new one. You have to clean up all that dust and crumbs and spiders and you end up cleaning up a lot because you've neglected surfaces while you were working on your computer.

I'm glad I have my passwords saved electronically and also in print but even deciphering all that is a pain.

Also, you tell yourself that your old computer isn't all that old, until you're disconnecting cables and the connectors on one end of one of them disintegrate in your hands.

The Laptop Saga Continues

Since thusfar my efforts to find a replacement U key for my son's laptop has proved fruitless, I turned yesterday to HP, the computer's manufacturer.

First, of course, that meant being able to identify the computer. Designers are too crass to label things correctly now; I'm staring at my HP Pavilion desktop right now (which recently came back from the dead). Try to find the name of my son's computer, and it can't be done.

Printed in tiny, smudgeable print on the bottom of the laptop are a series of numbers, which I ditufully entered into HP's website so they could identify the computer. That helped me conjure up the product number for it.

So, progress.

But then, sticker shock. Apparently, HP isn't sitting on a bunch of spare parts that they could either use to fix minor things like this, or send out to happy fiddlers like me willing to learn. No, they said they'd repair the laptop for $300. About 2/3 of what we paid for it. For a broken U key.

So that's a no-go.

Next on the list: Haunting local thrift stores in an attempt to find a discarded laptop that might have keys that'll work with his computer.

Such a pain in the butt. And more evidence that Big Tech is absolutely nuts.

There may be people willing to sell invidual parts, but I've been burned once, so I'm wary.

My Computer is Sick. And, Also, Will Never Love Me.

So my computer is sick.

It's been sick for quite a while, if I'm honest. A few years back, it got a few Windows updates stuck in its craw As far as I could tell, some updates made it through, but it kept going back to these other updates like old friends, always asking, but never succeeding in getting them done.

I did what any other run-of-the-mill slob would do in such situations: I would occasionally and half-heartedly try to fix things, going to the Internet to see what could be done to make things better. I tried several things, from the idiot (trying and trying again to get the updates to install, neglecting to remember that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is a sign of insanity. I also tried recovery points, reinstalling Windows completely, etc. But nothing worked.

So now my computer's in the hands of a friend who has promised to try his best. I hope he can figure out what's going on, because I'd like my computer back. It's taken me a week to finally get this post done via my laptop, because I had to sort through all of my kids' Google accounts in order to get signed in.

I did manage to get everything saved on my desktop to an external hard drive, in case the nuclear option has to be taken. Hoping to her from him soon.

Metadata . . . Metadata . . . Morne Plaine.

I’m sick of the metadata, or XML data, or whatever the hell it is, showing up when I do a copy/paste from a Word document to a web WYSWYG editor. Because it’s really turned that into a What You Don’t Want Is What You Get, Bub, editor, and that’s not nearly as helpful.

I despair having to spend minutes cleaning the metadata out of the way, only to have it screw up the presentation on the screen because I left something in or took too much out.

Yes, there is a way around it in Word 2010, as explained here.

But why does Word need to pick up the metadata when a copy command is executed? Can anyone explain that to me? All I want is the words. The words, that’s important. I can fuss with the presentation, or whatever it is that data is meant to provide.

I have tried this with this document (typed first in Word, then copied over) to see if it works. Will let y’all know so you can ease off on the tenterhooks. (One thing I’m discovering right now: Editing the document adds more XML data, as does the act of SAVING THE FREAKING DOCUMENT. So we’ll see if I can make all that go away.

Well, it's not all gone, but it's a heck of a lot better.

Wikipedia laughably tells me XML is meant to emphasize “simplicity, generality, and usability over the internet” as it helps to make documents human-readable and machine-readable.

I call that hogwash. Because when the XML data shows up in my HTML view, or suddenly inserts extra spaces between my paragraphs (some of which I can remove, others which I can’t) when I paste my words into my Blogger WYSWYG, it’s not making it simple or usable, and it sure as hell isn’t making it human-readable.

So I like that Word offers an option to strip the data from my document. But shouldn’t that be a default when a copy/paste is requested? I can do so in Word 2010 if I copy/paste in Word 2010; I get the option to keep the source formatting, merge formatting, or just take the text over. Not so in any other Word to web application I’ve ever tried. The XML data is there in all its ugly glory.

Popping that Paradigm Clutch

I do not use Adobe’s Creative Suite software – but my wife does. Heavily, At least InDesign, with a desire there in the future to possibly dabble in Photoshop. We have, I think, CS5, and it seems to work well (again, I don’t know; I don’t use the thing).

So it remains to be seen if Adobe’s announcement that they’re going from software as product to software as service by making future iterations of their programs available only through their cloud service will have a profound effect on us. But the seemingly unstoppable move to cloud computing services requiring always-on internet connections is going to have an effect on us whether we like it or not.

That popping sound you hear is a bunch of paradigms shifting without a clutch.

I’m not sure this is all bad. I suppose as long as the service works as advertised – and the always on connection is already a reality at our house, so no problems there – and as long as the cost point isn’t prohibitive (it appears they’ll let owners of CS 3 through 6 use the cloud service for $10 a month for the first year) this could be a good thing, a thing perhaps taken for granted in another five or ten years.

There could be distinct advantages. If they can figure out how to run the applications on their servers rather than our home computers, maybe we won’t have lag time. Or, well, possible lag time of a different sort, I suppose, as computer processing speeds are replaced as the bottleneck by internet speeds and bandwidth use.

It seems like something you’d want to fight against. But I remember fighting against the ungodly trend of PCs without floppy drives. Now, I have to wonder, why were floppy drives so great? A memory stick is a heck of a lot easier, and capable of storing a heck of a lot more information.

Then there’s this position: We don’t see paradigms shifting a whole heck of a lot from software iteration to iteration. The software doesn’t change much, version to version. There are tweaks, but no enormous kabooms. Unless you talk operating systems. Our current Adobe products won’t work with Windows 8, for some unfathomable reason. So my wife is holding off upgrading her two Windows 7 computers for that very reason. No great loss, because Windows 8 is not a paradigm shift either. But when the hardware wears out, we have to make the shift. Though I confess our XP-only internet router doesn’t seem to notice that it’s running on a Windows 7 machine. So maybe things aren’t all that bad.

Microsoft, Nice Mapping.

It’s ironic that I should start reading Donald A. Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things” in the week I once again take up the struggle to install a video card in my computer. 


I thought at first, way back in January when the video card adventure started, that I had a bum card. In describing my symptoms to the card’s manufacturer, they agreed with my diagnosis. I sent the card back in for a refund.

Then, circumstances being what they are, I waited. Last night, about two months after my first failed attempt, I tried again with another, more powerful card. It met the specs of my computer – which with a 500-watt power supply and the necessary slot for the card – has what it needs to power the card.

Or not. 

Plugged the card in and nothing. Or, rather, the same symptoms as last time: No booting at all, just a blank screen. 

This time, the card came with instructions. Weenie, one-size-fits-almost-all instructions, yes, but instructions nonetheless. I followed them. And nothing. 

So to the Googleplex I went, not hoping for much. 

Until I found this – It is, as I suspected in January, a Windows 8 thing, but not an incompatibility, but a change in the computer’s fundamental firmware architecture that adds a completely invisible step to the process of installing a video card.* Part of the program the computer uses to invisibly regulate hardware has to be altered in order to let an aftermarket hardware – interior to the machine – be added. 

Frustration beyond belief.

Here’s where Norman comes in.

A bit of machinery, properly designed, should have visible means of communicating with its user. Buttons should have one function. Services should not have to be activated through the application of a complex bit of number-punching or button-pushing. And what visible signals the machine gives should make it evident what went wrong, or what isn’t working. 

As it is, the only indication I will have that tonight’s trick to install this video card actually works is if I can get dual monitors set up. Otherwise, I’m stuck at the black screen which tells me, yeah, something’s wrong, but darned if I know what it is.

Fixing this is simple – even to a non-computer guy like me. If the computer detects something out of the ordinary with its secure boot system, perhaps flashing a message to the user would be a good thing – and in the event it has to do with video cards, the message could be delayed until the user invariably restores the device to its original configuration and starts the computer up normally. The message could be: Oh, you tried to install something, and it didn’t work. Here’s what you need to do.

Or, it could be simpler: Just recognize the new damn hardware. 

That happened with my printers. I have a wireless printer which, when I turned on the new computer in December, connected flawlessly. Even the outdated scanner I have, after a driver update, connected just fine. I knew what to do in both cases because I’d done it before and got the expected result, as Norman outlines in his book. 

Trick is, I’ve also installed interior hardware, without a problem, with the positive feedback from the devices. I was expecting that with the new computer and the new video card. Not getting the expected result led me to several conclusions:  

• Power supply, even the 400-watter replacing the 300-watter in the machine (which the video card specs said was okay) did not work. So I spent more money on a 500-watt supply and kept the 400-watter, simply because to return it would mean losing half its cost in shipping.
• I’d done something “wrong” installing the card, so I reinstalled it several times, to no avail.
• By reinstalling the card so many times, I had ruined it or the PCIE port in my computer. So off to the store goes the “broken” card, and I wait a few months to try again, only to fail again. 

Nowhere in this mess, until last night, did I even see this Windows 8 Secure Boot system mentioned. Oh, I had many people tell me to “change my BIOS,” which might have fixed the problem. But they assumed I knew how to do that. And nobody seemed to know how to do it on a Windows 8 machine. 

Fortunately, folks more persistent than I whittled away at the problem between January and now. Their action prompted HP – my computer’s manufacturer – to set up a (hopefully) helpful page to offer instructions to would-be card installers on how to do it properly. We’ll see how that works. The fix is getting more visible, but, indeed, is not visible if you’re there, on your own, twiddling your thumbs and contemplating sending yet another “faulty” card back to the store. 

*Note: I am writing this before I actually try the fix I’m about to describe, so maybe my attitudes will change. But I’m confident this will work.

I Miss My Desktop

As regular readers of this blog know, we moved recently. And by recently, I mean in mid-February, so about a month and a half ago. That meant that prior to the move, my desktop computer was boxed up. I think it spent a total of about four weeks in boxes until we finally were able to move in and begin settling in our things.

Inevitably, there were roadblocks.

First, our Internet didn't work. Then it worked but I had to get wireless antannae for my computer and the kids' computer. Then everything worked and it was bliss. For about two weeks. Then the furnace guys came and, of course, my desk was in their way. So the computer and desk got moved and I am, once again, sans desktop.

Not the end of the world, obviously. I'm on the kids' computer right now, slouching painfully to get down on their little desk. My computer is still out of commission, doing little more than acting as a print server right now. Maybe in another week -- once the furnace guys are done and I've done the drywall necessary in the basement to hide their handiwork -- I'll get my desktop back.

In the meantime, I'm mobile.

We're a mobile family. That seems odd, considering the screeds I've written here about my disdain for tablet computers. But as my wife has an iPad 2, as I have a Kindle Fire, as we both have iPod Touches, it was inevitable that I'd be turned around on the subject.

But not completely.

Text entry on even the largish iPad is a pain, even with the wireless keyboard my wife got for her device. It's not a full keyboard and is missing some keys in strategic places, making it cumbersome for touch typists such as ourselves. Given the limitations of keyboard entry on tablets, I'm worried that a generation is going to pass wherein they do not learn to touch type, which would be a shame if they weren't so damn fast at texting. I suppose that's the touch typing for a new generation -- except you can't text type on a tablet -- it's too big. There, you have to hunt and peck.

I recall, in junior high school, being fairly fast at hunt and peck. But after taking a typing class in high school -- yes, a full-blown typing course, on electronic typewriters no less -- I learned that hunting and pecking has its limitations when speed is needed. I know it's fun once and a while to wow the people out at work with how fast I can type -- and compared to the best touch-typists, I'm painfully slow. (I can manage about 70 wpm, which is anemic at best.)

But it's not just the typing that makes me miss my desktop.

Screen size, that's another thing. I love this big screen, even though it's still relatively tiny. It's about four times as big as the screen on my Kindle Fire, so I don't have to squint with my now 40-year-old eyes. (Yeah, I'm a fossil. Will dissolve into oil any day now.) And as handy as pinching and spreading is for magnifying and demagnifying my tablet screen text, I still cherish being able to see everything at once.

Getting on of those laser keyboards for my Kindle, now that would be interesting. Then I'd have to get a stand. Maybe a mouse, because who wants to keep poking at the screen when I'm typing? Oh. I have a setup like that. At least I will, when the furnace guys finish.

More Email

One of the unanticipated events of switching contractors where I work: I now have a completely new email address I have to check on a regular basis.

Part of this is pretty nifty – I get a professional email address to use on my resume and in official correspondence; much more professional than the current Yahoo! email address I have on my resume at the moment.

But that now makes a total of six email accounts I have to keep track of on a regular basis. Trying to remember the passwords alone will kill me.

I’ve tried making checking my email as easy as possible. At least it’s not another frickin’ gmail account. I have two of those, and I hate checking both of them. First of all, Google wants everything in my life to be with them, and since I have blogs that I use under a different email address, they get all snippy with me every time I log into gmail. Second of all, their current app for the iPod Touch (I’m still out of it and don’t have a tablet) is absolutely horrible to use. They ought to be embarrassed by it – it takes forever to open up, asks for my password every time though I’ve told it my password each and every time I use it and ask it, nay, beg it to save it so I don’t have to put it in again. Yeah, it’s a security risk. Tough noogies. I’m going for ease of use here.

This new email address does present one additional bonus: I’ve now got another email address I can use that isn’t bombarded with spam.

Lying Computers and the Lies You Tell Them

Earlier today, as I was helping our oldest son wrap up the final requirements for him to earn his Arrow of Light Cub Scout award, we talked about the importance of telling the truth. When you lie, I told him, you have to remember your lies, and if you forget even one of them, your whole false tale is unraveled. Better to tell the truth, I said, and never have to worry about forgetting the details.

I so wish the same thing applied to computers.

I wrote earlier this week about having to reconfigure parts of our home computer network because things had gone wrong. Part of the reconfiguration involved having to reset our router because, for some reason, the computer we had our network set up on suddenly decided our network wasn't set at all, and thus had forgotten the security encryption key to get into the router. Resetting the router put it back to its factory settings.

That solved the connection problems, but brought up other problems: We lost our connection regularly, sometimes mid-work session, meaning we had to unplug the router to reset things and to get the connection back. After three days of that nonsense -- and we knew it was on our end because we never lost our connection to the ISP, because sometimes the connection would drop on my computer and not Michelle's, and sometimes vice versa.

Then I remembered something: Sometime in the past, I'd updated the router's firmware. Perhaps the reset made that update disappear. So I updated the firmware again, and voila, the connection hasn't dropped once since. And the little indicator light on the router, which was orange from the factory, is now a nice blue-gray. Don't know what that means, but I do know I'm happier having the connection working again.

But this is what I hate about resetting, restoring, erasing, reconfiguring and doing anything else with computers: You have to remember all the lies you told it in the past to keep it working. If, in the restoration of all things, an update or something is missed, things just don't work as well as they should.

This doesn't hold true for everything, however. The annoying programs -- Spybot Search and Destroy comes to mind -- tenaciously hang onto their spots in your computers' memory without wanting to leave, while things that are essential and useful -- a constant internet connection, for one -- are the things that are affected most adversely. So I may begin keeping a log of the lies I tell my computer so, if in the future (and I should say when, not if) things go wrong, I have a trail to get things set aright again.

Home Network Killers Don't Care How Sweetly You Sing

I'd like to know why it is there are never any single-point failures when it comes to home networking.

Our latest fiasco came to a point Friday night when as my wife and daughter left the house for a girls' night out with a scrabooking friend, I agreed to figure out how to make my wife's iPod Touch and iPod Nano talk to her computer using only one iTunes account. We'd had it set up with individual music and video libraries, but the system seemed to be breaking down and unable to put the files where we wanted them to go.

So after I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes twice, I had that problem fixed. Of course, I had to restore her iPod Touch due to a glitch, and could only do that through my computer. Things seem to be working fine now. Until today when she tried to go to the App Store from her iPod Touch and couldn't, because I'd forgotten to reestablish her wifi connection. I tried to do that simply by getting our encryption key from our network -- but the software said, uh, what network? We'd been running for who know how long with an unsecured network. I quickly fixed that, got her iPod Touch working again, and then thought:

Uh-oh. I'll bet she's lost her connection to our networked printer now. Sure enough, it was gone. I'm not sure I want to wrestle with that right now. I may wait until next weekend.

Honestly, though, I ran into several points this weekend when I considered taking our network apart connection by connection and cable by cable and then starting over again. That seems to solve about 95 percent of the software problems I encounter, and I'm sure the problems we're running into are software related. Comes from trying to get two Windows XP systems, a Windows Vista system and a Windows 7 system to communicate with each other while at the same time communicating with the router, two shared printers, four Apple devices and one Sony mp3 player. In this argument of OSs, I have to congratulate Sony in devising a way to make its device communicate without fussing what kind of OS is attached; it's all run like a USB drive in that I can connect it, dump into it what I want, then extract what I want later. It doesn't seem to care how sweetly (or sourly) everything else is singing together.

This is one of the reasons (one of the many reasons) I'd like to get a better education than I've got in computers, networking and such. I'd like to know how to do this properly, rather than in the accidental, haphazard way I've done it up through now -- and likely will continue doing until I figure out how or where to go to fix the knowledge I've got.

Making an appeal to the Internet for help seems particularly useless, as help comes typically in two forms:

1) The forum. Whenever Google brings up the suggestion that I go into a forum for help, I want to scream. The very help I need may be indeed buried somewhere within its depths, but finding it requires a lot of reading and a lot more patience than I'm likely willing to pony up.

2) The how-two article. These are typically oversimplistic and make me want to scream even more loudly than when I'm recommended a forum.

I'd talk with the IT guys at work, but they're terribly busy. Maybe the glitches I encountered this weekend explain why.

Do I Want to Be A Perpetual Student?

I think it’s safe to say I’m probably going crazy.

Why? I seriously spent some time today thinking that maybe rather than pursue a doctorate in technical communication, maybe I should get a bachelors in web design and development.

The latter is tempting for several reasons. First, there’d be no teaching involved, no moving to Logan, no trying to raise a family on the paltry pay of a grad school teacher. Second, just about every job I see these days for technical writers wants writers who are also familiar with CSS, HTML, XHTML and other web-related phenomena.

Of course, bringing this to fruition will depend on a number of factors, mostly related to time but also money.

The money thing first. Michelle currently is in masters classes at Utah State. We can afford one student in the family, not two.

Then there’s the time thing. I can’t be a full-time student; I’d have to tackle the courses two at a time either online or via night courses – something I’m not sure BYU-Idaho would offer – and they would be the only option if physical presence in the classroom were required; there’s no way I’m doing this out of Pocatello.

Good news is I doubt I’d have to take any foundation courses – I hope they’d look at my other degrees and say, well, no, he doesn’t need to take those. And there’s the possibility that I could audit three courses – one in communication, one in English and the other in computer science – because of my current degrees and work experience. Still, that would have a mere 46 credits to tackle – thirteen more than I had to have for my masters, so about another two semesters; three and a half years versus two and a half, if I did two courses a semester. That means I’d be in my low 40s by the time I’m done. Would that make me more competitive in the workplace, given that there are whippersnappers about half my age willing to work for less? I don’t know. Maybe I ought to stick with the novel writing.

So, What Do You Do With A Junk Computer?

It's coming up on a year since my last computer died. Don't really know what happened to it -- it just suddenly decided it only wanted to turn off or turn on on occasion, and would occasionally do some kind of funky maneuvers while it was running, so I opted for a new computer.

Not that I minded -- it was old and my wife had a better one and I was jealous, so, well, a new computer came.

But I kept the old one because, well, you never know.

A week ago, to fix another old computer, I took a CD drive out of my defunct one and popped it in the other. That required a half hour of moving boxes and cussing stuff out of the way to get the old computer out from under the stairs.

I don't want to have to do that again. So tonight I cussed that box back out and dismantled the old computer, putting the best of the old parts into a very compact little box for future use. The rest is going to go away.

What I kept:

Hard drive
Floppy drive
Memory (a whopping 756 MB)
Modem/ethernet card

I thought about saving fans and power supply, but they were all rather dirt-encrusted, so I've decided to chuck them. I wonder, however, is there more stuff I should be saving? What do you save from your old computers? (By old, I mean 5+ years. This is why the motherboard and the power supply went/will soon go to the trash.) And yes, I'll recycle what I can. But where I live, recycling means driving a 60-mile round trip because there are no local recyclers. Green karma is a little hard to come by here.

Ghost in the Machine

Though I crow over the fact that we have not had regular broadcast, cable, or satellite TV in our house since we got married in 1997, we're not totally disconnected from the world.

We now have three computers set up, networked, and attached to the Internet. Our latest acquisition -- christened the "kids' computer" came to us from Grandpa, who was getting rid of a box and wondered if we wanted it. We did. It came with a glitch, however: The CD drive, though it worked, popped open at inopportune times. No matter. the DVD drive worked well, so the continual -- and I mean continual -- popping out of the drawer of the other was of minor consequence.

Or so I thought.

It kept popping open. And popping open. You'd be sitting there in the darkness, typing away, or watching a YouTube clip, and, over in the corner of the study, prrrrrrpt, the drive would pop open. It startled me a few times, especially when I was watching clips like "FOR REAL GHOST!" I began feeling like Newman does at the post office.

But, heeding my wife's advice, and the advice of my brother-in-law Carl, I'd begun squirreling away old and defunct computers so, when the need arose, I could cannibalize parts for fix currently-used computers. So today I dug my parts box out from under the stairs and swapped out CD drives. Now the computer sits complacent in its corner, rid of the haunts that made the drawer pop open unbidden. I may sleep nights better knowing the problem is now fixed.

And of course the old CD drive didn't get thrown away; one that pops open at random is better than one that doesn't work at all.

I'm turning into my Dad, that's what it means. But unlike Dad, I'm collecting bits of computer hardware, not buckets full of nails and bolts and other such stuff, though I do have a drawerful of such stuff out in the shed right now, begging to be sorted. It's useful, too. And I add to it constantly, tossing in the parts left over from other projects because who wants to go back to the hardware store to return three unused bolts? Nobody, that's who.

The kids were fascinated by the operation, however. They liked seeing the innards of two computers. That is except for Liam, who refused to come when I explained what I was doing and only wandered in afterward, wanting to see. I told him he'd have to wait until the next breakdown.

Taming that Octopus, Part II

Oh how little we know.

Stayed up until 1:30 last night trying to get Michelle's computer -- any computer, in fact -- to recognize the new printer we got more than a month ago. It wasn't until today that I triumphed in getting the printer recognized. It's obvious I need to learn a bit more about home networking. It's also obvious I know more about home networking than I did 24 hours ago. So, progress was made.

Taming the Computer Octopus

Those of you familiar with computers will understand where I'm going here.

Michelle's mouse has been acting up. I cleaned it a few weeks ago, but that didn't do much for it. I think the switches in the guts of the mouse are worn out. So we went to Wal-Mart today to buy her a new mouse. We could get a cheapo mouse for $11, or a wireless one for $18. The wireless one caught Michelle's fancy, because her computer setup means her mouse is on a short lead. But it's easier said than done. Both the wired and wireless mice required a USB port. Given that she has an external hard drive and two printers connected to her computer, she doesn't have a USB port to spare. Well, she does, but then she couldn't connect her iPod Nano or iPod Touch to the computer.

So we got the wireless mouse. I told her I'd take one printer and move it to the kids' computer, thus freeing up a USB port on her computer.

Of course it's a lot more complicated than that. Moving the external hard drive cable from the front to the back (one of my goals in this recombobulation). Unfortunately, I also unplugged the second printer. Ordinarily that wouldn't be all that bad, but it's an old parallel-interface printer we have connected to the computer through a parallel-to-USB cable, and it's a bear to get reconnected and recognized by the computer. The software is a bit odd -- you have to run it twice in order for it to take. That took an hour.

Now I'm busy installing the four-in-one printer on the kids' computer. I'd rather retire the thing, but given that it's still got a good scanner on it, we can't yet. Hopefully it'll work on the kids' computer just fine. Then I have to figure out why the printer we've got connected to our router can't be seen on Michelle's computer. Always complications.

All this because the switches in Michelle's mouse pooped out.

Update 1: Also caved in and connected the kids' computer to our home network. They're at the age when they'd be interested in using the Internet anyway, and besides, we wanted virus protection on the computer as well. It's obviously been a while since this computer was connected to the net, since I'm now busy churning through 77 Windows updates. Yikes.

Update 2: Got the kids' computer to recognize our new printer. Now have to go do the same thing on Michelle's computer.

Prof. Hinkle, I Need Your Help

 Word processors are naughty, naughty, naughty

I have a serious bone to pick with the jokers out there writing word processing software and packaging new computers.

Let's take the latter part first. I bought a new computer at Christmastime because my old HP bit the dust. I got a new HP, Windows 7, the works. I love it. Except for the works. Microsoft Works, that is. Oh, the program works fine until I want to cut something from a web page and then paste it into a document. Then the program hems and haws and then has an error and has to shut down. This is unacceptable. If Word Pad can accept a paste, Microsoft Works ought to be able to do so as well.

I'm spoiled, I suppose. My last HP came packaged with WordPerfect, which I love to pieces. Never, ever had a problem with that software, and I really put it through its paces. Not so Microsoft Works. Yes, I could shell out the whatever to buy a word processor; I get enough enticements from Microsoft Office to do so already. But is it too much to ask that a computer come pre-packaged with an acceptable word processor? Evidently, it is.

On to my next beef:

Because I don't care for Microsoft Works, I've downloaded the best alternative, being OpenOffice. Urgh.It does accept a paste from a web page, but if I have the temerity to cut something from an OpenOffice document and then paste it into a WYSWYG test editor on the web -- which I do so often, being a blogger and writer at Uncharted.net -- things go kerflooie. I get all this nifty little metadata that shows up like a sore thumb on the pages. Looks very ugly and unprofessional. If I try to edit it out, I have to have lightning-quick reflexes, like a buttered bald monkey, to highlight and then cut the offending text in the WYSWYG before it poof! disappears and then reappears like the aforementioned bruised digit when it's on the web page.

So get with it, folks. Meanwhile, I'll be pricing WordPerfect.

Update: Hah. Did a quickie Internet search on "cut and paste makes Microsoft Works crash" and found many, many others having this problem. Come on, Microsoft. FIX THIS PROBLEM. yeah, yeah, I get the point: These kinds of things are hard to fix because there are so many variables. Horse hockey. There may be a lot of variables, but something as simple as a cut and paste ought to be handled elegantly, with dignity. Not crashes and cussing.

Second Update: $199 for Word Perfect? On sale? Urgh. Maybe I can buy some papyrus . . .

I Spit at You, New-Bright!

Ah haaah! Chalk up one victory for a guy who's not really computer savvy but is getting better through trial (lots of that) and error (even more than lots of that).

The victory in question is this: I got our legacy printer, an old HP LaserJet 4L, to work on a computer with no parallel ports. And I'm talking the old 25-pin parallels, not those nifty Centronics jobbies. Read more about my earlier agonies here.

I could blame my trouble on the fact that I bought a Chinese-made parallel to USB cable, with its accompanying insanely-translated manual of operation. But I could also blame my trouble on the fact that, the first time around, I didn't even bother following the entire instruction sequence, badly translated as it is. Wrestled with the beast last night, to no avail. Wrestled today. Then I fell back on that old Windows standard: If at first you don't succeed, uninstall all of the drivers and start over again, this time following the instructions. I did so. And the first test page I printed out was a glorious, normal test page, not the 30-page encoded monstrosity I got an hour and a half ago.

So I feel pretty good about my mad computer skillz with a Z. That means that two of the three problems encountered with the new computer I got for Christmas are solved. They are, in no particular order:

1) Getting the parallel-supported printer to talk to either my Windows 7 machine or Michelle's XP machine (I took the wimp's way out and used the XP).
2) Getting my computer to speak to the world, i.e., through powered speakers.
3) Getting SimCity 4 Rush Hour to play properly on my new computer.

The first two are solved, and Electronic Arts, in its arcane and serpentine way of doing things, is "working on a solution," though I'm not optimistic they'll pan through. So if any of you out there in SimCity 4 Land can tell me why I don't have the avenue Y intersection or the building blocks for overpasses, railroads, et cetera, I'd appreciate a ding-a-ling here. Thank you.

I'm just chuffed about the printer. That had been weighing heavily on my mind.

{Cursing}

One of the best things about this time of year is new movies.

One of the worst things about this time of year is getting new movies transformed into movies that'll work on an iPod.

Sure, there's lots of "free" software out there. But it's not until you've downloaded this totally free software that you find out either your movies will have a watermark, or you'll get only the first three minutes of your movie, unless you shell out for the full version. Isn't this the Internet? Aren't y'all supposed to be giving this stuff away, just like you want the music and movie people to let you do with your DVD ripping software? Sure, the license agreements may say you agree not to distribute the "output" to your friends, but they may as well put a big "WINK WINK" in there because they know what's gonna happen, and that little clause is put in the license to absolve them of any wrongdoing should you do just what they expect you'll do.

Not that I'd do it. I'm stingy. And I'm also not willing to expose myself to a lawsuit.

So I'm falling back on the old standbys, DVD Ripper and Videora iPod Converter, and it's scattershot whether they'll work or not. Yeah, I could spring for the software, but a big part of me really, really doesn't want to spend that kind of money to make my movies work on the iPod.

I don't mind that they want to make money. They ought to have the right to the fruits of their labors, just like the music folks. No double standards. I just wish they'd tell me about the three minute thing or the watermark thing up front, before I download the software, install it, get all excited and then dump the whole thing into the poubelle after I find the restrictions. And enticing me with multiple windows with which I could change my mind and purchase said software doesn't work. It makes me madder. I have a list of the offenders. I won't visit their sites again, and even if I find myself in the market for such a product, they're off the list because of that initial, superior deception, as Dudley Do-Right would say, but why anyone would listen to a person with a hyphenated last name is beyond me.

The Real Snow Crash

Could Snow Crash lead to a plane crash?

That was the principal thought on my mind this morning as I read this piece at Slate.com about Northwest Flight 188, which overshot its destination airport by a hundred miles or so earlier this year because both pilot and co-pilot were absorbed in their laptop, teaching and learning about the airline's online employee scheduling system.

We've all done it -- driven deistracted. My weakness is the iPod and my insistence that I have to manually shuffle through the good songs on my way home from the bus. A handful of times I've caught myself so engrossed in trying to find TMBG's "Dr. Worm" that I'm not paying attention to the road, which is scrolling right along under my tires at 55 miles per hour. So I put the iPod away.

William Saletan, in his Slate piece, however, brings up an interesting point:

In his interview with investigators, the captain profusely apologized. He said he had "let another force come from the outside and distract me." But that isn't what happened on Flight 188. The force didn't come from outside. It came from inside. It enveloped the pilots' minds and shut down their senses. They lost touch with everything outside: their displays, the world beyond their windshield, the passengers behind the cockpit door.

We're all doing the same thing, zoning out at home, at work, on the road. Maybe all these nifty little devices are great for connecting us to the Internet, but we shouldn't let them disconnect us from the world.

So enters Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I read this book a few years ago and recommend it for its philosophical implications, not necessarily for the story. Do we want virtual realities so real they take us away from the true reality? Are we so dedicated to the universes squeezed between our ears that we forget about the universe we can see through our eyes and hear through our ears? I hope not. But it's a tempting trap. I'm in front of the computer for about ten hours straight each work day. Then i go home, watch television during dinner most nights, then after the kids are to bed (and most of the time I'm too tired or distracted to read to them) I'm sitting in front of my laptop. Something's gotta stop, folks. Maybe rolling blackouts aren't such a bad idea after all.

ISP Mystery Thickens

A while back, I was here complaining about my internet service provider.

As is the case with most Weird Tales of customer service, what appears on the surface isn't really the reality. So here's what happened. And I must give credit where credit is due, we found all this out after Michelle called them and asked the questions; she's much more aggressive about finding out this kind of stuff than I am.

First, a little background. Our ISP suddenly goosed our internet service up $10 a month. We got some shrugs from one guy, a "your promotion expired" response from another guy, but no real explanation of what really happened until Michelle called them yesterday, out of frustration because I didn't want to.

And frankly, the guy she talked with isn't quite sure how it happened, but this is what did happen: We were on a promotional program that was meant to give us service for $25 a month for the first six months, then step us up to the $30 a month we were suddenly charged starting two months ago. A glitch in the system, however, caused our price to step down by $5 a month to $20, a price which we enjoyed for a year. Now, when the bills came, we never paid much attention  to them utnil, of course, the price went up to $30 a month. Nobody seems to know why this happened.

So we got a slightly better promotional rate of $29 a month -- not much of a discount from the $30 they were charging, but we get three months free on a two-year contract. Just an odd little situation. I'm hoping by the time we renew that prices will have gone down. But I'm not holding my breath.