The Computer Gods Hate Me

by Bryan

16 comments

1 ellroon { 01.16.12 at 12:59 am }

Thank goodness my sons were about. I absolutely snarfed my download of Windows 7.. (not at all like XP, is it?) I wanted to do it by myself, but found it was waaaaayyyy beyond what I could handle or even understand.

I’m so sorry you are having connection problems. There’s nothing more infuriating than the internetal tubes that won’t deliver…. (besides a computer that won’t work.)

2 oldwhitelady { 01.16.12 at 1:14 am }

Good Gravy! Totally Annoying when that happens! Hope it straightens out!

3 Steve Bates { 01.16.12 at 3:30 pm }

Good luck, Bryan!

I don’t know if your local installation of WordPress has this feature, but WordPress.com has a mechanism for emailing in a post, and I’ve used it several times from my cell phone when no other connection was working (usually because the power was out, or because I was stranded beside a freeway with a trashed wheel and no tow).

Such posts are not much to look at, and they have the date-and-time as a subject, but they at least give you some way of giving notice to your readers. (Obviously you found a way to do that…)

4 Bryan { 01.16.12 at 9:14 pm }

I’m back after 36 hours. For this I pay $100/month down here, most of which is supposedly for the telephone line that I neither need nor want, but they require to get DSL. Magically, the cable company also charges $100/month. Amazing how that happened with the ‘competition’ for my money. [/snark]

I thank you for your condolences, but it is more of an aggravation than anything serious.

Yes, Steve, you can do it with any WordPress system, but I don’t bother when I can take the laptop to a WiFi hotspot for a brief post without trying to use the telephone key pad.

Yeah, Ellroon, XP and 7 are only vaguely related when it comes to using them. Nothing is where it should be and ‘the names were changed to protect’ book sales and training classes.

5 Steve Bates { 01.16.12 at 9:39 pm }

“Amazing how that happened with the ‘competition’ for my money. [/snark]”

Ain’t capitalism grand? What’s that? You say we’ll never know because we never see it in operation? Fancy that! I believe you’re right!

I am reaching an age at which cell phone keypads are too small for my neuropathy-afflicted fingertips. I don’t know if I need to re-equip myself with a laptop (mine’s been dead for three years), or try something like an iPad (I tried it once, and didn’t like it, but first impressions are not always good indicators), or continue as I do now, using a ballpoint pen as a stylus on the cell phone keys. Forty years I was in the technology biz, and in all that time they still haven’t come up with a satisfactory portable device.

6 Bryan { 01.16.12 at 10:09 pm }

For under $300 this Toshiba is a great machine for what I do. It isn’t the lightest thing in the world, but it has a large screen and a full-sized keyboard. I added another two gigs of RAM and wireless mouse, so it does everything I need to do.

I looked at netbooks but they cost almost the same or more, with fewer capabilities and under-sized keyboards.

7 Badtux { 01.17.12 at 12:35 am }

Yah, I used a netbook for a couple of trips on my motorcycle, where it was the only thing that’d really fit into my motorcycle luggage, but the screen and keyboard were just too friggin’ tiny for me even then. Nowadays I lug around an old 13.3″ Core 2 Duo laptop where I don’t want to risk my expensive Macbook Pro’s, I have one fitted with a 128GB SSD and 4GB of RAM (taken out of one of my MBP’s when I upgraded it to 8GB) that works well enough and doesn’t care about the vibration from bouncing around in the Jeep.

Regarding Windows 7, basically Microsoft re-wrote their kernel for Vista/Win2K8 to build in security as well as having to re-write a number of the ancillary parts of the OS to work well with the new kernel, and the wonder is that Windows 7 has any resemblance to Windows XP at all. They still managed to make it pretty much backward compatible from an API point of view with Windows XP (i.e., they added new API’s, they didn’t remove old ones) other than for drivers, which is one reason why it’s such a mess API-wise, but (shrug). They didn’t have a choice. The only reason anybody buys and runs Microsoft’s OS is because any software you want to run, it exists on Windows. They couldn’t break existing software because then nobody would have any reason to buy Microsoft’s OS.

8 hipparchia { 01.17.12 at 8:44 pm }

i love my slightly-smaller, netbook-size keyboard.

9 Bryan { 01.17.12 at 10:20 pm }

Yes, Badtux, they have to be backwards compatible to at least their last version, or people will look else where for a solution, and the pre-packaged versions of Linux are looking very good right now in the normal office environment.

I can see hard up governments switching to save money if things don’t turn around.

Hipparchia, I have always told people that they should spend their time looking at keyboards, mice, and screens, because that’s how they interact with the computer. If those elements suck, it doesn’t make any difference how fast the processor is, how much RAM they have, or how large the drives are, the computer sucks.

My finger tips are too large for the netbook keyboards. I tried out several different makers in hopes of finding a fit, but the keys were just too small. If you have smaller hands, I can see why you would appreciate the close spacing and small size.

10 Badtux { 01.18.12 at 7:08 pm }

Bryan, from a desktop point of view Microsoft’s OS’s are so cheap on a site licensing basis that you’d save more money if you discontinued buying bottled water for the water cooler. They make their money on quantity — when just about every seat in the world has a Windows OS in front of it and you’re getting per-year seat licensing fees, that’s a buncha dough even though you’re only getting $20/seat. And yes, they are *quite* aware of the possibility of someone taking Linux and turning it into a real desktop OS competitor to them in much the same way that Apple took BSD and turned it into a real desktop OS competitor (albeit one with the world’s largest and most expensive hardware dongle), I think the Windows Phone fiasco has made an impression there — they decided to do a clean sheet rebuild of their phone OS, and the result is that they went from having around 35% of the smartphone market to having basically no smartphone market share.

Where Microsoft’s real money comes from is Office and servers. By tying Outlook so tightly with Exchange they’ve basically created the one and only reason to have a Windows server now that Samba does ActiveDirectory. Microsoft was sweating when Sun bought StarOffice, but the resulting OpenOffice has never replicated the most important part of the whole office suite as far as the typical pointy haired boss is concerned — the email client with all its bells and whistles that let him see and schedule appointments and create and view contact lists and get them across his entire environment, whether via ActiveSync to his iPhone or iPad or via his travel laptop on the road. Just another example of geeks not “getting it” when it comes to the needs of non-geeks…

Regarding keyboard and mouse, I obsess about those because I’m interacting with them all day long. The keyboard and trackpad on my Macbook are pretty much perfect — the keyboard is nicely spaced and not “flexy”, the trackpad is *huge* and the whole thing is a button so I don’t have to go searching for a button. On my Windows and Linux boxen, I have a specific Logitech keyboard and mouse that is required to be attached via their Unity transmitter (i.e. they’re both wireless). My monitor has to be 1080p and must be large enough that I can see everything well, but not so large that I must turn my head if I’m close enough to see details (practically speaking, this translates to about a 23″-25″ monitor). And if I can get a “non-glare” screen I do — the “glossy” screens supposedly have better color reproduction, but I don’t give a flip, I don’t want to look at my ugly mug in my computer screen all day.

11 Bryan { 01.18.12 at 11:05 pm }

LibreOffice solves my needs and provides both compatibility with WinOf and cross-platform commonality.

I have worked for a variety of clients, and other than the lawyers [who I avoid like the plague] the real functionality of Outlook wasn’t really important to them, so I didn’t get into it. Individual industries seem to have very individual ways of working. The cost of the licenses and the importance of that cost also varies a lot. Some didn’t care because everything was put on a project ticket as an expense, others watched every penny.

I used WinOf for years and just got tired of the interface changes every time I upgraded. In a small office the upgrade costs are significant.

I compare the screens and keyboards to speakers in a sound system – if you have $25 speakers, no matter what you spent on the rest, it sounds like $25 speakers. If you have problems with the keyboard, mouse, or screen, you will never be happy with the system.

I have always preferred Logitech mice, and have come to like some of their keyboards, so I will get a new wireless system for the big box.

I will have to look at some screens before making any decision on what to buy, but it will probably be smaller than your preferred size.

12 Badtux { 01.19.12 at 10:04 am }

The nice thing about a bigger screen is you can place it farther from you and still see it. This can avert the need to buy a specific pair of computer glasses for those of us who are old enough for presbyopia. But of course that requires having a workspace where this is possible, the practical limit on my computer desk is a 24″ monitor because that’s all that’ll fit.

The alternate notion is a small very high resolution screen and use the reading glasses part of your bifocals to read it. This requires the screen to be *low* otherwise you end up with a pain in the neck. Practically speaking, the only way I’ve ever had this work is with a laptop that’s actually sitting on my lap.

Ah, to have 25 year old eyes again… the rest of aging I’m not particularly annoyed by, since my chosen profession is an intellectual one rather than a physical one, but the ability to focus on things not at a distance is one of those abilities vastly underrated…

13 Badtux { 01.19.12 at 10:14 am }

BTW, on the keyboard/mouse front, I’m using a Logitech K750 solar keyboard and a Logitech Anywhere MX Darkfield mouse. The keyboard is flat and well-spaced and reminds me much of the Apple keyboards and never needs batteries (even the relatively dim light of my computer room keeps it charged), while the mouse is somewhat small-ish but still large enough to have a good grasp on it, and of course it has Logitech’s patented wobble click wheel on it for left-right scrolling and *quick* whizzing up and down in windows if you click it to freewheel mode rather than click-at-a-time mode. Both are connected via Logitech’s Unity receiver (one receiver for both mouse and keyboard). On Windows I have the side buttons set up to trigger Logitech’s re-implementation of Apple’s Expose’ functionality and the middle button set up to trigger third button for my Linux virtual machines. On the monitor front I have no specific make model or brand, just that it needs to fit into the available space (doh!).

14 Bryan { 01.20.12 at 12:18 am }

The screen is based on the optimal distance for my eyes through my normal lenses and available desk space that has to include the ‘cat walk’ around the monitor.

The thing about Logitech is that you can choose from several different keyboards and mice, without having to plug in cables if you decide to change.

The little mouse I use with the laptop is a good fit for my left hand. If I use the mouse with my right, after about a week the arm starts hurting. It just seems to be a bad position no matter what I try, so I have adapted.

The larger wired Logitech isn’t as convenient to use because of the wire, which also attracts the attention of Excise if he wanders through.

Like I said, these things are personal preference, and should be. There is no one-size-fits-all if you sit at a keyboard for hours.

15 Badtux { 01.20.12 at 1:46 am }

Logitech is definitely the Apple of keyboards and mice. I paid $80 for my mouse and $90 for my keyboard, when there’s mice and keyboards at Fry’s for $9.95 apiece that are perfectly serviceable — if you aren’t spending 60 hours a week in front of a keyboard and mouse. But it’s the same reason I got my Macbook. I spend too much time with my computer to deal with bad gear that annoys me. I can afford to get the gear that I want, that does what I do, that doesn’t annoy me all day long, so I do.

16 Bryan { 01.20.12 at 11:36 am }

If you buy good tools you get a good product. They aren’t inexpensive, but they last and work the way you want them to. People who use the manufacturer supplied garbage are setting themselves up for problems down the line, and they paid top dollar for crap.

In the long run, the Logitech products are cheaper.