One Aging Geek

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Bitrot and wasted time

My work provides me with various computers. One of them is a decent recent vintage laptop. The corporate IS geeks are always a few years behind in what they'll support so until last Friday the laptop was running Windows 2000 Professional. But it was suffering from a serious case of bitrot. One particular thing was that the Microsoft XML parser was busted. This left me unable to do a number of things I needed to do. Like file expenses for one. And being an aging geek I never would remember that I couldn't do these things until I did them and got weird failures. Then I'd remember, say a few unprintable words, and move over to a different computer to do them.

So the annoyance level of that stuff finally overcame the dread of starting from scratch. After a multiple hour long transfer of the 40-some gigabytes of "My Documents" off to another system I sent the laptop off to IS for a wipe and re-image. Forty minutes later it's back. No big deal, right. [snort] Right.

Now I'm several business days on down the road and I'm still tripping over things that needed customizing, applications I had to reinstall, and fixes to be applied.

It's an enormous and annoying waste of my time!

One strike away from the World Series...

At the top of the ninth inning, the home team Astros were ahead 3 to 2. Two outs already taken care of, two strikes against the batter, David Eckstein, and Brad Lidge, the best closer in all of baseball this year, can't get that last strike. It would have clinched the Astros first ever trip to the World Series and done it on the day the team was founded 45 years ago.

Instead Eckstein gets on base, Lidge walks Edmonds and then gives Albert Pujols a fat pitch down the middle. If the roof had been open the ball would have been a couple of blocks away.

So now the team is in the same boat as this time last year. Up 3 games to 2 but headed for St. Louis where they have very few wins.

The optimism is gone from the fans. Everybody felt good about the team's chances last night. Winning it at an away game just doesn't seem as likely. We'll know in a few days.