Category Archives: Technology

My dumbest computer user ever

August 20, 2011 jkkblog 2 Comments

You’ve all heard the computer-idiot stories about the executive who complained that his computer’s coffee cupholder no longer retracted, right? I have a true-to-life one.

Before I was an editor, before I was a writer, before I was a computer shaman, before I was an assistant MIT at an investment company that managed ten-figure sums, I was a computer salesman about five miles from the Micro$oft campus. I worked for a very wise entrepreneur from Taiwan, Mr. TeLung Chang. Mr. Chang (who had literally been an American longer than I had) gave me opportunity, guidance and consideration. I returned his kindness by being contrary, troublesome and having the highest profit margins in the company, so I was a mixed blessing for him. He passed on in 2008, and the world was the poorer for it.

This was from 1988-1990, and the main computer sold was the AT (80286) clone in some form or other, gradually giving way to 80386-based machines. IBM was trying to make the world want MicroChannel PS/2 machines. The world was laughing at IBM’s doddering distance from reality. A woman named Nancy bought an Acer 900 from me, a great big can of an AT clone. She ordered it with the standard 1.2MB 5.25″ floppy, a standard 40MB hard drive, and the usual 640K of RAM. It was for her plastics company in south Seattle. She had bought it over the phone, and picked it up while I was at lunch, so I never met her in person.

That afternoon, I get a call. It’s Nancy. “Jonathan, Jonathan! My computer’s no good!”

“It doesn’t work?”

“No, it doesn’t. The disk is broken.”

“Your hard drive won’t start up at all?”

“No, I don’t have the hard disk, the little one. I have the big kind, the floppy kind.”

I then had to explain to her the the hard disk was inside the case, and that the 3.5″ disk was actually a floppy, just with a firmer case, so yes, she did in fact have a hard disk. Then: “So what exactly is the problem?”

“Well, my disk is broken.”

Clearly we weren’t communicating. “You must mean that the floppy drive is broken, then?”

“Yeah. It’s stuck.”

I brightened. “Oh. So there’s a floppy stuck in the drive and it’s not working?”

“Yes.”

“Just out of curiosity, Nancy, what’s on this floppy? Is it important data?”

“No, it’s my dose disk.” At this point, I admit, I put the conversation on speaker so my colleagues could hear the rest of it. Mr. Chang would most definitely not have approved, so I’m glad he didn’t come upstairs right about then.

“It should boot up to a C: prompt. How come you put a DOS disk in?”

“Well,” she snipped, as if explaining the obvious to an imbecile, “I opened the manual that came with it and it said to insert your MS-dose diskette in drive A. So I did.”

I then had to explain to Nancy that we had actually loaded DOS on her hard drive when we assembled the machine, and that while we included the DOS manuals and floppies because she’d paid for them by buying DOS, she did not need to do anything with them but hang onto them. Might be useful to look up some DOS commands, if need be. Then back to the problem-solving: “So this is your DOS floppy and it’s stuck in the drive. Is the arm broken?”

“There is no arm!”

“Then there must be a little spindle where it used to be. Perhaps somehow it came off. That could explain this. Is there?”

“No, there’s just a slot. There’s no arm and no spindle.” The 5.25″ floppies of the day always came with a closure arm that engaged the drive and locked the floppy in place. It could be removed, or could slip off or break, but never without a trace. What she was saying was absolutely impossible. Unless…no, surely not…

“Nancy, where exactly is this slot? On the right side of the case are three rectangular bays, one with a floppy drive and two covered with faceplates, all the same size. Is it over there?”

“Yes.” Oh, no…

“Let’s narrow this down very precisely. Where exactly is the ‘slot’ in that area? How high up is it, and how much room does it have?”

Her frustration with my stupidity or obtuseness grew worse. “It’s right about a third of the way from the top! It’s the width and height of a disk!”

She had. She had actually managed to stick a floppy into the small, 1/8″ high space between drive bays, failing to notice the authentic floppy drive immediately above it. I had a sudden burst of hilarity, which I had to strangle. The effort broke my voice. “So, what you are saying is that you stuck your DOS disk in the small space between the faceplates, and therefore, you think your computer’s broken?” I am lucky my colleagues didn’t have worse control; I was beginning to tear up with suppressed laughter.

“Yes! This is a design flaw! This shouldn’t be possible!” Now she was angry. And I was about ready not to care.

“Well, Nancy,” I croaked, “most people do not traditionally do this.”

“Well, I want it fixed!” Raising her voice. I didn’t care. I summoned my composure.

“No problem. I can give you two options. The warranty is not on-site, so for $75 an hour I’ll send a tech out. He will fish the floppy out of there, then put scotch tape over those gaps so that this ‘design flaw’ will be remedied. Or, if you feel technically competent to do so, you may open the machine and push it out, then apply the tape yourself. If none of that is satisfactory to you, you can bring it here, and I’ll fish it out and put the tape on it for you for free. How’s that?”

“Fine!” she snapped. “I’ll be there in about an hour!” I’m not sure now if she hung up on me, but the conversation was at an end. As soon as I buttoned the phone off, my fellow sharks howled with laughter. At least someone could benefit from this. But it wasn’t quite over. About fifteen minutes later, Nancy called back.

“What’s up, Nancy?”

She sounded miffed. “I don’t need to bring it in. The disk slid out while I was loading it in my trunk.”

“Great! All’s well that ends well, then?”

“Yes,” she growled, her tone making clear that it hadn’t ended well, that she was very dissatisfied with my equipment and me. Thank the gods. I hoped she never called us again, or if she did, that she got another salesperson. It was the last I heard from her. But here’s to Nancy, who brightened a few days by giving me a funny story to tell.

Editing/writing life, Technology

Check out the paneling

July 20, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

So last night I get word from the SpoCon folks about what panels I’m on. Good to know in advance (another month would have been better, but still, three weeks is ample time to prep). Nervous, I admit it, but looking forward. I’m on:

Research for Search Engines on Sat, 08/13/2011 – 10:00am. This should be pretty comfortable for me because it’s right in the wheelhouse of what I do.

Create a Zine, Blog or Podcast! on Sat, 08/13/2011 – 1:00pm. Well, the zine I can probably talk about, having published my own long ago. Blog, no problem. Podcast? I’m helpless. Irony: I’m on a panel with the author who enjoined me to start this blog.

Steampunk Throughout History on Sat, 08/13/2011 – 2:30pm. My inclination is that it tends to begin with Jules Verne and such, but this will take a lot of reading to get up to speed on. At least I’ll be in costume for it.

Thinking Machines in Alternate History on Sun, 08/14/2011 – 10:00am. Hmm. Well, we can certainly start with mechanical computers…

I’d have preferred panels on the craft of writing and editing, but we get what we get.

One of the most important things will be to remember my fellow panelists’ names. Imagine wanting to make reference to ‘what the other panelist said’ (the cards face forward) and forgetting her name. So awkward. Cannot let it occur. This is a good time for a lot of listening, not too much talking, just be the quiet one who keeps his trap shut unless he has something pretty intelligent to say (and very briefly).

Technology

software updates

June 13, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

Have you noticed, folks, that when you just automatically go ahead and update a piece of software to a newer version:

They moved everything around, apparently for no logical reason other than it looked cuter?
They added maybe one thing you cared about, and twenty you didn’t care about?
The things you liked most about it before, now no longer work the same?
It’s slower and clunkier?

The problem is endemic to software and has been with us for a long time. I think it must have its roots in the way software designers think, because it is very consistent. Most ‘upgrades’ are in fact downgrades. And these days, it seems, that most of them lean toward letting more and more companies poke around on your machine, with nothing preventing them from phoning home with information that is none of their business.

It gets worse if you depend on software to enable you to work. What if it introduces complications in the middle of a huge editing project? “Dear Ms. Client. Sorry I am going to be late. I upgraded my software and now my life sucks.” Yeah, they’re real understanding about that.

There are a few updates that nearly always make sense, namely those to do with security. If your Windows wants to download a security update, you should. If your virus scanner wants to update itself, by all means. If you use a spyware/malware package, definitely keep it current. But anything else? Faaaaaa. Just don’t update it until they force you at bayonet point, or give you some compelling reason in terms of features.

Ignore the constant pleas and pressure. You’ll be happier.

Social comment, Technology

The decline of message boards

May 9, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

While I do not think they will just go away, I think they are fading overall. It came to me today while reading a post I thought was fairly misguided, though not offensive. For whatever reason, I posted that the poster was missing the point. He of course challenged me to prove my point. I thought about it, and then I thought: Why would I care? I don’t care to make him agree or see it my way, and I don’t care what he thinks especially to begin with, and I don’t care if anyone else on the board looks down on me because I didn’t engage him. I simply do not care. So I just told him it wasn’t worth my time, and left it at that.

It’s not that he was stupid, or that it wasn’t a debatable point. It was that the whole message board environment simply has worn down my ability to care what he or anyone else says there. And I am wondering if others sort of passed through a message board phase and lost general interest in them, as I have. In many ways, Facepalm walls and posts and comment threads seem to have taken over, and often with even greater idiocy, though at least some greater need for circumspection how one points it out. One never wants to hear from a liked friend, “Uh, that’s my brother-in-law, and while I agree he’s a fairly dim bulb, I’m not having fun reading you sending his BP into triple digits over triple digits.” Or worse: “I’m sorry about my brother-in-law. He wasn’t always this way. He got caught in an IED blast and has never recovered. Before that, though, he won the Silver Star, and was the best Little League coach ever.”

I admit that editing-related message boards seem to be a little better overall, but only by degrees. They’re still places where I say little of what I really think.

Anyway. Am I the only one out there who nowadays only bothers with message boards when he has a specific question for a specific group/subject, asks it, thanks them for the answer and then vanishes for two years?

Homeownership, Married life, Technology

TV shopping

April 30, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

Our TV just lays there twitching like a sarin casualty. We need a new one. Thank you, Samsung, for a product that only lasted six years of relatively light usage. Of course, I wouldn’t do anything so cold as to post that fact on the Internet or anything.

We kind of have a choice between going to Worst Buy (always feel sort of sullied afterward, like having taken a dip in the Great Salt Lake, or picked up after the dog in the yard) or the local Old School Appliance/Electronics Store. Normally that would be my top preference, but we live in the Tri-Cities, and experience has taught me that many old time local businesses really don’t earn their keeps here. Like most of local government, they are more habits than going concerns. This is one of the downsides of not living in a Seattle or Portland: because consumers have fewer options, businesses can get by with greater mediocrity. I keep telling myself that it’s better than living in constant worry of petty property crime, which is comparatively rare here.

Not sure what brand we’ll get, other than that if AT&T makes one, that’s out, and Samsung’s outside consideration.

Technology

The golden secrets of diagnosing computing problems

March 27, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

Since that’s what I’m doing this morning–specifically, trying to figure out why Firefox is messing up Castle Age for me, and not for the rest of the world–a good subject seemed to be the things many people don’t grasp about trying to correct, or at least track down, most computer problems.

Long before I turned freelance writer than freelance editor, I was a computer shaman. I hate doing my own diagnostics, and I was never a great tech, but I learned the basics of how to solve problems. Most people are doing it wrong. So, here:

No result is diagnostic unless you can reproduce it. In order to make the problem go away, you have to know how to make it happen. In this case, I can reliably say that with all my Firefox paranoia add-ins enabled, both Castle Age (a Facebook game) and Facebook chat are partly broken. I have had them occasionally work correctly, but in general, it’s about 99% reproducible. This is good. It’s the intermittent failures that’ll send you around the bend.

No result is diagnostic unless confirmed from a fresh start. This is especially true of instabilities. Once you see your first instability or oddity, there is the chance that further instabilities and oddities are consequent from the first one. The true test is if you get the same reproducible result from a fresh start. When I was a computer shaman, I can’t tell you the number of people who reported ‘dozens of errors’ without restarting Windows and trying again. It was hard to get them to understand that only the first error told us anything, and then only after a fresh start.

Change one thing at one time. If you alter more than one thing at once, and the result changes, you cannot know which change on your part made a difference. Never, never, never go into your Options or Settings and change five things at once–you won’t know what solved it, and you might mess up something else. In any case, you will muddy the waters and probably forget what all you changed, thus making it impractical to put it back the way it was. One change at a time, then test.

Therefore, the basic concept–and why computer nerds seem to be able to solve things that mystify you–is not as mystical and shamanic and otherworldly as it may seem. What they’re doing is just good science–and this is also why all the DSL tech support people first make you reboot everything, in case you wondered. Restart whatever it is. Try again immediately, in a deliberate effort to reproduce the problem. Once you can reliably reproduce your problem, you can begin trying one thing at a time to address it. If the change doesn’t address it, put what you changed back where you had it, and try something else. Knowing this will save you headaches and money.

In my case, I strongly suspect that one of my add-ins is preventing CA and FB from doing things. Thus, the process is tedious but will yield useful information: disable something, shut down Firefox, restart it, reproduce the problem. If I can still reproduce the problem, my change didn’t fix it, so I should re-enable what I disabled, disable something else, restart Firefox and test again. If suddenly I can no longer reliably reproduce the problem, then I have a very good idea which add-in is the culprit. I then have to decide if it’s one I can live without.

Social comment, Technology

Microsoft = IBM

March 4, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

Today John Dvorak wrote a pretty good article on why Microsoft’s stock is, in his words, dead money. Yeah, I know it’s on Murdoch’s news service, but Dvorak’s old school and knows his stuff.

It is so odd how things cycle. When I was hustling machines about five miles from the Redmond campus, I hated the IBM reps. Every one of them. They were not merely arrogant (though nothing like the Apple reps, the very snottiest of all), they were stupid (which the Apple reps were not). We were making 5% margin on IBM machines. We made 20% on others. Also, no one wanted IBM. Why should we sell it? Well, because it’s IBM. In reality, we were selling them at cost to keep our dealership. We couldn’t get to a profitable discount level with IBM unless we sold more. However, when we had a line on a big account and were willing to go out at cost just to advance our business with IBM, IBM would go direct and undercut us (and we were to understand and accept this, that ‘business was business’).

Their attitude was that everyone should want IBM and we should push everyone to IBM, even when a retarded goblin could see that IBM was the very worst deal going. Even when they came out with a good product, people didn’t want IBM’s MCA (‘MicroChannel’) architecture. They had a great portable and I had a client interested in two. He asked about the architecture, and I said ‘MCA’. His words, quoted exactly as I recall: “Not that f***ing MicroChannel.”

Microsoft, by contrast, was swift and slick and witty and inventive. It was eating Lotus’s lunch, WordPerfect’s lunch and just about everyone else’s. It was the smartest kids in the room. Some of its stuff was dumb (remember ‘Bob’?) but a lot of it took hold. Even IBM used Microsoft’s DOS (which M$ didn’t actually invent, but bought in desperation early on). And when IBM tried to make everyone buy OS/2, the market said ‘meh.’ You could tell the Microserfs when they came into the store. They looked like hippies gone full geek, total slobs. You didn’t make judgments. They were often FYIFV (‘f*** you, I’m fully vested’) tycoons and they might well write you a check for two brand new laser printers.

Now M$ is the dinosaur rather than the juggernaut. It invents nothing. It follows and tries to appropriate the market, and the market increasingly sneers. In the process of its rise, its ruthlessness made it many, many enemies who yearned for the day M$ would become irrelevant. I was one, as I labored on supporting M$ products in the workplace as an IT jock, basically forced to deal with them as the world was once forced to deal with IBM whether it liked IBM or not.

Dvorak’s right. MSFT is a lousy buy, even though its price has been flat for years while the market has risen. They’re not going to invent anything. If they weren’t sitting on so much cash, and if they didn’t have so much inertia due to the past with regard to installed base, they’d collapse. They are in much the same situation as IBM once was. They can say what they want, but people no longer care.

Addendum: As an editor, I find it fun to look back in hindsight at my past commentary, especially where it missed something. This is how we learn. My views held up for two years on this one, and then MSFT began a climb. Writing in 2020, it’s up over 200–about a 9x gain in seven years. What I learn from this is why I no longer buy separate issue stocks at all.

The Editorial Maverick