Journal of a Sabbatical

June 16, 2000

computers basically suck

Today's Reading: Summer: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Pete Schourek

First some followup on previous entries, then we get to today's insanity.

Regarding that eel in the Skittles bag, a reader writes that wolf eel does live in the North Atlantic despite the first 10 hits on google.com referring to the Pacific. Sure enough, refining my search I find a being known as an Atlantic wolf fish. However, after looking at pictures of wolf eels and ocean pouts up the wazoo, I am sure the thing in the Skittles bag was a pout.

Another reader writes that the lyrics to that song Good-bye, Mister Ball, Good-bye are available on the Life and Times of Hank Greenberg web site. If you like baseball, see this movie.

In a mischievous mood after reading that Ludlow Griscom pamphlet, I listed Great Auk on my plover warden report yesterday.

I finished The Birds of Brewery Creek. The description of baby northern flickers leaving the nest was worth the price of the book (only $12.50 US). If it flits through your local used book store, take a peek at it. It is definitely along the lines of what I want to do with Sewage Outflow and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch.

OK, so now on to today. I told Zsolt I'd come over at 10:00 AM to work on upgrading the laptop and equipping it with everything we'll need for digitizing the Beijing herbarium specimens. I get out of the house at a somewhat reasonable time, but unaccountably the rush hour traffic on Rt. 128 and Rt. 9 is not over with. I crawl toward Framingham. Hmm, that'll be my next book title: Crawling Toward Framingham... True to my new pattern, I arrive a half hour or so late. Not only that, I crash into his front porch. No need to ring the door bell as I've shaken the house. Neither house nor car is damaged. What a way to start the day though.

And it went downhill from there.

Everything we need to install on the laptop requires Windows-98. Everything we need to install on the laptop, including Windows-98, is on CD. The laptop does not have a CD. I get as far as installing one of the PCMCIA (or however you spell it) cards whose software is on a floppy. Then since we are going to buy a CD-RW for the trip, we naively believe we can just go over to CompUSA with the laptop in tow and buy everything on our list. Hah!

The aisle of CD type devices has many bare shelves and only one brand of CD-RW, which appears to be USB only. We ask a guy in a red shirt where the rest of the CD-RWs are. Behind the counter, under glass. We have to ask some other guy in a red shirt for what we want. This is as bad as trying to buy drill bits at the hardware store.

So we ask the guy behind the counter. He refuses to make eye contact. Without looking at either of us he tells us the one we've picked up isn't supposed to be out on the shelf and it is USB only. We show him the laptop with its parallel port and total lack of anyplace to put a USB connection. Oddly, he does look at the laptop, albeit in a sort of sideways glance. He informs us nothing will connect to that.

Silly me, I then ask an unbelievably stupid question about buying a USB to SCSI adapter for the desktop while we're here. You'd have thought I was suggesting that Bill Gates uses a Mac or something. Still without making eye contact he informs us that such adapters are "not recommended".

One more question later and I am sick of this guy and tell Zsolt we are going to Best Buy instead. They at least try to be helpful. Who ever heard of connecting a CD-RW to a laptop that old and through a parallel port? But at least they look at us directly and speak politely and not like we are both idiots. Only one of us is an idiot and at this point I'm not sure which one.

I manage to park in the driveway without hitting the porch this time. Inside, I examine every port on every computer and device. I call the manufacturer of the laptop on the phone and speak to an actual live support person, who tells me there is no way I can add a USB port or much of anything else to the laptop. I search the web far and wide and discover there really is no parallel CD-RW, however, I come up with a parallel CD-ROM, which will at least let us load large popular email provider's software, and all that other stuff, including the stuff for the camera, onto the laptop. I order it using my credit card and have it shipped overnight to Zsolt's address. Overnight turns out to be Monday, but who cares.

The desktop problem is trickier. See, we've got one parallel port and three parallel devices. My idea is to hook the tape drive through the printer. It no work. Much later tonight I discover via the manufacturer's web site that the tape drive has to be connected directly to the parallel port - you can't use the pass-through on the printer. We have a USB to parallel adapter for the printer so plan B is to use the USB port via the adapter for the printer and connect the tape drive to the parallel port directly and connect the scanner through the tape drive's pass through. This would be all fine and sort of good if the printer actually worked with the USB to parallel adapter. Arrrrrggggggh!

Rush hour is almost upon us. After the traffic this morning I am loathe to use Rt. 9 to 128 for the return trip. Whereupon I definitively learn which of us is the idiot. She is me. Instead of braving 128, what do I decide to do? Take the Mass Pike. To Boston. To I-93. On a Friday night. In the summer. When the Red Sox are at home. Idiot doesn't begin to cover it. Certifiably insane maybe covers it.

I reach the Allston-Brighton tollbooth pretty quickly and am feeling smug. Suddenly I see long immobile lines of traffic in front of me. I sit unmoving for longer than I care to think about then inch along from there to the ramp onto 93 where I get to sit some more. Finally I get to where I can admire the new bridge over the River Charles up close and personal. Yessirree that is gonna be one awesome bridge when the Big Dig is done. I have the same feeling about living 'til the Big Dig is finished as I used to have about living 'til the year 2001. I calculate how old I will be when it's done. I calculate how old I will be when I get home...

Some 2 hours and 29 minutes after leaving Framingham, I am home having accomplished nothing except ordering the only parallel CD-ROM in existence.

Masochist that I am, I attempt to solve the static problem on my radio by listening to the ballgame on the Internet. No can do without a newer version of Real Player. Attempt to download same only to find that it requires MacOS 8.1 or higher and I am running 8.0 (how have I lived this long without upgrading). Then I try to at least download a newer version of Netscape in the hopes that it solves the tiny unreadable font problem (abebooks.com displays its results in type so tiny I'd need a microscope to read it - fortunately bibliofind.com and alibris.com do not use this trick). Forty eight minutes later, just as the last byte is loading the modem drops carrier. So now I need DSL or a cable modem. Not only can I not get Zsolt's computers upgraded, I can't even update my poor Mac.

Computers basically suck.