Expressive Habits

One of the other reasons I prefer telecommuting: I feel much more comfortable audibly cursing at the systems I'm working with.

When I'm working with computers and they're being "difficult", I tend to become "expressive." I curse. I make rude gestures. I smack my terminal. I'm sure it's all very comical. perhaps it's a touch disturbing to some. Dunno. All I know is that, it's probably best, for all concerned, if I'm alone to when being "expressive" towards technology.

Not a Monday, But It Feels Like One

Ugh... Gotta love a day that starts with a laptop's video drivers deciding to crap out.

Each morning when I get up - particularly work mornings - I make a beeline for my computer to see what email has come in while I slept.

This morning was no exception. This morning, when I clicked over into Thunderbird, I noticed that I was getting "cannot connect to mail server" errors as I read each of the locally cached message copies.

As this oddity oozed its way through my sleep-fuzzed brain, I noticed, "hmm... the networking tooltray icon doesn't look right". So, I started troubleshooting. Eventually, it became evident that there was something wrong with the NIC driver, so, I rebooted in hopes of it sorting itself out.

Unfortunately, after the reboot, my computer was being very herky-jerky. Eventually, it started popping errors complaining about the NVIDIA display service crashing and being restarted. Fuck. So, I go Googling around (between lockups and display restarts) to see what might be going on. Eventually, it became apparent that a recent Windows automatic update had pissed off already flakey NVIDIA display software. I went to my laptop vendor's website and downloaded the driver (while contending with the freezes and restarts of the display). After about an hour of all this, I was able to get my computer working as it had been the night before.

Suboptimal way to start the day.

Double-Tap

There are contexts or places where double-tap is fine, nice or, at the very least, just a "damned fine idea". Such a context is in the dispatching of zombies. However, when it comes to my laptop's touchpad? Not so much. I hate accidentally changing apps, clicking a link, etc. just because the OS decided that my finger stuttered enough on a slide to interpret it as "Oh! He wanted to click that!". Fmeh. What next: reduction/elimination of touch-pad buttons?

I Hate Moving (Especially to New Workspaces/Computers)

I needed a new laptop but I hate moving into a new computer. So much to do to recreate your prior environment and get functional:

• HP-specific Drivers: installed
• Windows Updates: installed
• A/V: Installed
• Chrome: Installed (but, not my extensions)
• PuTTY: Installed
• ThunderBird: TBD
• Cygwin/X: In progress
• Trillian: Trying the 5beta
• Office: Installed
• Gimp: TBD
• Others: (As I Notice They're Missing)

And, of course, it's exacerbated by having to move from one OS (Windows Vista) to a new one (Windows 7), having to deal with a new keyboard layout (this laptop has a US101 full) and feel, new display characteristics, etc. Bleah. THEN I need to copy over documents from my old system (before I flatten it and re-OS it with Linux).

This is where virtualization is helpful (though, eventually, you still gotta do OS upgrades).

Joy.

Oh well, at least I'm moving from a single core 2GHz system to a quad 2.67GHZ system. Still gotta sort out the memory as 4GB appears to be "missing". At least I've got three years of onsite hardware support, if needed.