Tag Archives: computers

Good Science, Bad Science

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Please do not create nuclear reactors in your homes, people! I thought this went without saying, but apparently, it doesn’t.

Is the sun squishy? This is not a question you can answer by going over there and checking.

And finally! Ada Lovelace is credited with being the world’s first programmer, and yes, she was a chick. And for a while, apparently programming was considered women’s work.

So… did the abusive bad husbands of the era tell their wives to get into the office and write them a program (instead of getting into the kitchen to bake them a pie)? Did they keep them barefoot and pregnant in the computer sweatshop instead of the kitchen? I don’t really know, but it’s definitely an odd thought.

Technical Difficulties

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My work computer was sick, and I didn’t even notice.

If it had been a dog, it would have been wheezing, staggering around and not recognizing familiar objects, but as a computer, it had a lot fewer options for demonstrating symptoms. So it just slowed down a lot.

Because I know just enough about hardware and systems infrastructure to get myself into serious trouble, I figured I’d run a virus check to make sure I hadn’t run into some nasty worm or virus that could cause my computer to limp around like it had been hit by the online equivalent of a truck.

The virus check caused the system to go even slower, and I wandered away to edit a photograph for the newspaper. When I came back, the computer was napping. But it wouldn’t wake up when I jiggled the mouse. This should have tipped me off that something was wrong, but I just thought the antivirus software was bogging the system down, so I tried to restart it.

Now if you’ve used a computer before, you probably think you know what happened next: it wouldn’t start, there was a smell of smoke, or the screen flashed blue and hopeless.

What actually happened, though, was that the computer restarted just fine. In fact, the computer decided it was a pro at restarting, and kept restarting, without any intervention from me, over and over again. This was something it could handle. Restart! Restartrestartrestartrestart!

According to my systems administrator, who knows these things, the hard drive is toast. Crispy toast. The kind that’s black not just around the edges, but in the middle, too. The kind you can’t even eat if you scrape the top off.

The good news: It wasn’t my fault. Apparently hard drives just go bad sometimes, like eyes or children in Lifetime movies.

The bad news: Some of the stuff on the hard drive will not be recoverable.

The worse news: I hadn’t finished putting up the audio and video of the Worthington Windsurfing Regatta and Unvarnished Music Festival, and some of that material was on my hard drive.

This year, I was at the Regatta all three days, and had recorded snippets of audio and video of every performer. I had edited and put up about two-thirds of it by the end of the day on Monday. Sadly, the other third of the video and audio, including the performances of the New Primitives, the Strollers and Chuck Suchy, may be gone forever.

Fortunately, there’s still a lot there. If you want to see video, audio, or photo galleries of the Regatta, be sure to visit www.dglobe.com. The galleries were unaffected by technical difficulties, and there are a lot of photos there.

There may still be more video and audio coming, but thanks to the untimely death of my hard drive, you may have content yourself with video and audio of the opening ceremonies, the Galactic Cowboy Orchestra, Boiled in Lead, the drumming workshop, the DitchLilies, and Patchouli.

I’m sorry.

Rest in peace, hard drive. We miss you.

Tech and Tribulations

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Contrary to popular belief, I did not grow up with computers.

I have just as much empathy for frustrated people trying to fix their computers as I do for frustrated techies trying to explain the internet and help upset people without being able to see their screens, via the phone.

People seem to assume that working with tech is easy for me because I’ve always been doing it, but I haven’t. We didn’t get a computer until I was in my last couple of years of high school. There was a UPS strike at the time, so we ended up getting it late, too.

It didn’t work, right from the very beginning, straight from the box, and for some reason, probably because I didn’t have a job and because I had slightly more patience than my dad (very, very slightly), I ended up becoming the tech support phone jockey most of the time. Occasionally I tagged my mom in to take my place, but mostly, I think, it was me.

Knowing what I know now, which can be summed up by "we spent hours and hours getting that &@#% thing to work", I would have demanded the company send us a new one. There was something wrong with it when they shipped it, and all the partitioning and unpartitioning and reinstalling every program and sacrificing a chicken to Moloch in the world wasn’t going to help.

But I was wishy-washier back then, so I sat through the phone trees again and again and again, while the techs patiently explained what a "browser" was and what an "operating system" was, and together we tried to get the computer to work.

Eventually, we got it so that it limped along pretty well, but the computer never really got completely fixed. I remember how frustrating that was.

So when a nice lady calls me on the phone with a question about the Globe’s site and I have to pretty much explain the internet, I’m okay with that. Really.

If you’re having trouble with our website (www.dglobe.com), please email me at klucin@dglobe.com, or call the Globe and ask for Kari Lucin. If I can’t help, I probably know somebody who can. That’s part of what being the online content coordinator means. Heck, I like helping.

And while I can’t promise instant results, I can say this: I will try to help you.

I didn’t grow up with computers.

I still vaguely remember staring balefully at the glassy screen and thinking: "Why can’t you just WORK?" and getting progressively more and more annoyed with the whole phone tech-support process.

I didn’t care why it wasn’t working. Hardly anyone cares why it’s not working. They just want it to work.

I didn’t grow up with computers, and I do remember what it’s like to try to decide whether you’d rather put a fist through the screen or throw the phone across the room with extreme prejudice.

My recommendation? Throw a pencil. It’s a lot cheaper, you can probably erase the mark on your wall and you won’t have as many pieces to pick up afterward. Plus, you won’t have to buy a new phone just so you can call tech support.

Again.