TriumphAnt

Techie talkin’
Talkin’ techie talk…

For the whole damned post this time. Sorry, but treat this like a parable. And if I can save just one soul from being lured onto the rocks by the Siren call of a MicroSoft Help menu, then setting this tale to blog will be time well spent.

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Four lessons I have learned over the past two weeks in the course of doing a computer upgrade as a Do-It-Yourself project (which in our house means rolling my eyes plaintively towards my much more systems-comfortable better half, and uttering that very antithesis-of-guy-dom word, “Help!”), rather than phoning Nerds-On-Site and simply dumpling the whole project into their lap:

1. MicroSoft Help isn’t. (If possible, render this one on paper and scotch tape it to the upper corner of your monitor screen where the MicroSoft “Help” question mark icon can usually be seen.)
2. My better half has more patience than the Mount Sinai Hospital.
2-a. I don’t.
3. Sometimes, it’s not the user’s fault.
4. And sometimes, it’s especially satisfying to think of “RAM” as an installation procedure.

Recently in our house Yours Truly benefited from a shared decision to bring my computer forward somewhat from the year in which it had been living (1998 - 2000 or thereabouts) and install a few new features / upgrades:

- Windows XP (to replace Windows 98);
- augmenting my RAM beyond the 128MB that it was. For most programs coming out now, 128MB-RAM, if it appears at all, is usually intended to cause much hilarity on the part of those who read that minuscule text on the box where it says, “Minimum System Requirements”, or is at best the absolute minimum requirement, and usually is followed immediately with a dire warning that you can expect hideously slow performance if that’s the best your computer memory has to offer;
- finally, the installation of what is, I confess, strictly a toy: a CD burner.

To its credit, Windows XP is a very user-friendly program to install so long as you select every last one of MicroSoft’s helpfully suggested defaults, and avoid any button with the word “Customize” in it like the plague if you don’t have a clue what you’re doing.

After our first Windows XP installation run-through, my computer returned several signals that assured me that all of its new stuff, including the burner (about which more will be said a few words along) was sitting comfortably in my CPU and had all been “successfully installed”.

And that’s when the trouble began.

Again recalling my claim to “guy-dom” above, what I wanted to play with first, of course, was that miracle of modern technology and the bane of musicians’ unions everywhere, the CD burner. After first saving a few similarly-themed tunes to a memory-resident “library”, I hit the “Copy” option and was promptly informed by my computer, “Device Not Found”.

At this juncture, I should point out that one outcome of the world’s explosion in technology is that it takes almost no time at all for a self-perceived rational thinker to start arguing with a piece of machinery. “What do you mean, ‘Device Not Found?’”, I demanded of my monitor. I pointed at the just-filled slot in my CPU where the new CD unit was. “It’s right there.”

No, no, no, persisted my computer when I re-tried the “Copy” command: “Device Not Found”.

At this point, I ran a really nice little diagnostic program my better half found online. It takes about ten seconds to flash through your whole system and return a multi-page document you can print out that lists all your hardware, all your software, and even identifies where there might be problems. (In my case, for example, it also told me that there were about 65 MicroSoft security updates that I really should import if I didn’t want my computer to turn on me and start trying to convert me to Islam or Communism or some other belief that the US military industrial complex, their soon-to-be-newly-beefed-up brigade o’ border guards and probably the National Security Agency’s “What’s the problem with Baby Duck’s computer?” sub-routine would perceive as a threat. But I digress.)

On the diagnostic printout, there, clear as a bell, was the confirmation that the new piece of hardware was installed, and had been happily adopted by the network of cables, cards and chips already living inside my steel computer box.

It might be, by now, that you’ve already guessed where this is going. And if so, good for you because it never really occurred to me until some two days of really, really, REALLY aggravating troubleshooting had been consumed that I clicked to the fact that my computer had been patiently telling me all along that my correctly installed piece of new hardware was precisely what I had been sold -- a CD-ROM, not a CD-R. (That is a critical distinction. “ROM” means “Read-Only-Memory”; “R” means “Recordable”. “R” is a burner. “ROM” isn't.)

I had, in other words, been sold another CD player.

The folks at the computer store were highly amused when I told them this. I understood their thinking – it hadn’t been, after all, two days of _their_ troubleshooting time I had used up, but I didn’t entirely share their sense of amusement over their mistake. So, leaving them lying in pools of their own blood, I returned home with a new CD-R, my wallet lightened by the additional dollars it required to acquire the burner. (Had I been the business owner, I would have eaten the extra few shekels in exchange for my customer’s time and trouble over my mistake. But I’m not, so they didn’t.)

As a corollary to this process, I am now up to speed on the terms “Jumpering”, “Master” and “Slave” when applied to two like hardware devices installed in your computer. Oddly enough, it’s precisely the same thinking that gave us “Love” as the term to mean “Nothing” in tennis scoring. They’re simply terms used to designate two distinct pieces of hardware. To you, the end user, they mean you’ve got two very similar devices here, so you’re going to call one by one term and one by the other. Good lad. Off you go, then.

Whoever first determined the terms could just have easily have used “A” and “B”, or “1” and “2” but no, he or she must have been big-time into S&M because the terms that caught on were “Master” and “Slave”. (We’ll leave “jumpering” alone entirely.) So much so that the six-pin port at the back of each unit has “MAS” and “SLV” (or “SLA”) engraved into the steel above the respective two of the six pins that serve either function. Activating the correct connection requires the placement of a tiny rectangular pin-shielding piece of plastic that is quite literally about half the size of a typical fingernail clipping.

You think this story is over? Hah! Hah! I say again. This is MicroSoft we’re talking about here. Once you’re into MicroSoft software, it’s like trying to resign from the Mafia. You’re never done with them.

Next day, in my naivete, I asked the computer to open up a document in MS Word 2000. Up came the MSWord 2000 box that always comes up when I ask the computer to open up a document. And there it sat. And sat. And sat. And sat… (If you’ve seen “Casablanca”, you may recall the opening narration which describes seekers of Letters of Transit as travel hopefuls who come to Casablanca and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait.) It’s in the spirit of that narrator’s same hopeless tone of voice that the MSWord 2000 welcome box opened up, and promptly locked up my entire computer.

I’ll skip the vast majority of the many details of the subsequent two days of work. Suffice to say that it was a fascinating, maddening, frustrating process that took me – again with my better half’s seemingly limitless reservoir of patience – burrowing down through so many layers of Windows XP that I had to look up to see Bill Gates’ ass.

But there, with the help of some very good point-by-point directions written by online troubleshooters who wrote things like, “If you are looking for ‘Thing-1’, you will need to do this because Windows XP has so many bugs you won’t find ‘Thing-1’ by following their instructions”, we finally managed to find and delete the offending roadblocking application, a little something perversely called “normal.dot”. (This also taught me that MicroSoft seems to share the same sense of humour as the people who work in my computer store because to get MSWord to operate normally, I had to delete a buggy little application called “normal.dot”.)

In the process, I vapourized about two years’ worth of stored e-mail that Windows XP happily expunged when it over-wrote my existing installation of MS Outlook, but strangely I have discovered that it seems I can get along with it. (So sorry, Betty Crocker BisQuick recipe people, but your “Recipe of the Week” messages now go into the ol’ panietta del garbagio.)

And last but not least, if you’re one of those who has been sold on the idea that you can buy software online, import it into your computer and have it work the moment it arrives, let me tell you this little story.

As if all the above accumulated frustrations weren’t enough, I also had my computer tell me – with impeccable timing – that my virus detection was no longer valid because, “Your licence has expired”. The licence expiration alone should not have been a major problem but, again with a snarly finger-point to Mr Gates, MS Word will not allow a new document to be opened until it automatically gives it a virus check. That would seem to make sense, right? Right.

It does indeed (make sense, that is), right up until your virus detection licence expires. Because now your computer has been dropped squarely into the logical conundrum of being told it needs to search for a virus detection program it is not eligible to use before it will release the document to you for writing, editing, printing, whatever.

So you guessed it – having just been released from its damned roadblocking “normal.dot” file, MS Word went right back into a whole new lock-up mode, this time tantalizingly presenting me with the unopened document window, while “Requesting virus scan…” sat forever in the lower left corner, like a waif in front of a candy store. “It’s all just on the other side of the glass – everything you want, BUT YOU CAN’T HAVE IT!!! Nyahhhhh hahahahahaha!”

Now I know that I had purchased – relatively recently – an update to my virus detection program. What I didn’t know, and only found out after yet another wave of prowling around in the catacombs several “Windows” below my onscreen “desktop”, is that this particular virus detection program requires you to activate it.

In the same way as your new credit card, when it arrives, requires that you phone a 1-800 number to activate it before you will be authorized to make purchases with it, this virus detection program requires you to e-mail a specifically designated site in order for your new program to receive the remotely issued order to get the heck busy and start detecting viruses (viri?). The problem is that, having bought the program online and downloaded it the same way, I never came into possession of a helpful little piece of paper that would have said in plain English, “Before this program will begin detecting viruses, you need to activate it. You moron.”

But if you are reading this, please give me a virtual high-five. It means I managed successfully to activate my virus detection software, which in turn unlocked MS Word 2000 so as to allow me to prepare this input for tonight’s scintillating (*yawwwwwwwwn*) blog update.

And I suspect I owe my wife a second dinner to go with the one I already owe her for preparing my income tax return this year. But the Nerds-On-Site savings alone should more than cover both of those.

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And finally, file this under “More esses, damn it... FAST!” Here is the opening sentence in an Ottawa Sun story the morning after the Ottawa Senators were blown out of this year’s hockey playoffs a whole round later than is customary – usually they get knocked out in the first round and this year they lasted all the way until the second, but I digress. There’s a special heaven for sportswriting aficionados. This lede is pure poetry:

“The Senators sat silently, slumped at their bench in a state of shock.”

So close. (Perfection would have been, “slumped in their seats”.)

So long. Farewell. A la prochaine.
Good bye until we meet again.

(And for victory in the bonus round, tell me who used to sign off each week by singing that couplet.)