In my day job, I have a couple of stock responses to questions from clients or just to my (and their) experiences with computers. One of these stock responses is something which clients almost never like to hear, because it translates, roughly, to This may sound like a “yes,” but if you believe that you’re crazy:
Oh, the [program/database/software tool] I’ve provided you with can be made to do almost anything. Some things aren’t worth paying for, though.
They often don’t hear the other stock response at all, because it comes across as a bit too braggy, smug, self-satisfied; I may be all of those things, but — haha — just don’t want anyone to know it.
But I think it to myself often enough, you bet. Always after a bout with some truculent beast of a technical problem: a program whose interface didn’t let me do X (although I knew damned well that X was among the things it should let me do); an oddball hardware device — a label printer, scanner, digital camera, trackball — which finally allowed itself to be fitted (usually tightly) with the software clothing available; a database query which had always taken thirty minutes to run but suddenly, simply because I poked at it and finally changed just, like, two words, returns its results in seconds. Whatever. Here’s what I think to myself:
The programmer always wins.
From my post earlier this week, you may already know this has been the sort of week with my home computer to make even an ardent technologist long for the days of abacus and quill. The image at the top of today’s post (like the one from mid-week) sort of sums it up. I had to take it with a camera, rather than the system’s built-in screen-capture feature, and as a result it’s sort of wobbly and muddy and Moire-patterned, but it gives you the idea.
Late yesterday afternoon, I took the “after” counterpart:
Big difference, huh?
True, I haven’t yet restored everything. But at that moment, I’ll tell ya: I felt pretty damned full of myself.
(Which brings to mind, now, that other thing I keep forgetting, what is it?, something about… pride? Yeah, that’s it. Pride. Oh, and I think there might be something about a fall involved, too.)
DarcKnyt says
Excellent! Tell us what you did, and have it for posterity and for those of us threatened and intimidated by those weird OSs like Linux. ;)
Glad you’re getting there.
John says
Darc: Well, you asked… (Others may wish to skip!)
Ubuntu is installed on a small partition of my hard drive. Since I could “see” that partition okay from Windows, I copied over to the latter my
homedirectory from the former. (This includes all documents and customized program settings, like Firefox bookmarks, email account info, and so on. Oh, and I also copied it to an external hard drive just in case the Windows copy for some reason wasn’t readable.)And then I did a full install of the new version of Ubuntu (9.10, “Jaunty Jackalope”): not an upgrade, but a completely new installation. I installed it to the same partition previously used by Ubuntu, including a full reformatting of that partition. (The latter was the only part really making me nervous. I alternated probably about 10 times between clicking on Back and Next buttons, reassuring myself that I’d be reformatting ONLY that partition. Which I really wanted to get right, for obvious reasons. :))
The full install failed once, because I’d accepted a default option which didn’t make sense for my own setup. It took on the second try.
Thereafter, it’s been a matter of transferring all the stuff from the
homebackups back to the new location, changing my wallpaper back to “normal,” recreating shortcuts (called “launchers” here), and so on.So far, so good, with one possible exception: I don’t think I backed up my word-processing
Templatesfolder. Which will be annoying to have to recreate, but in the grand scheme of things feels trivial.Really looking forward to writing again, y’know?
Thanks again (to you and others) for your good wishes. They helped fuel my determination to beat this thing.
Froog says
Congratulations! I’m glad you’re back – or very nearly so – to full functionality.
However, given your admitted obsessive tendencies (and I suffer something of the same vice myself in this regard), I wonder if you’re going to be content with having found a way to make the thing work. Will you not now be endlessly enquiring into why the thing didn’t work as it was supposed to?
It sounds as if this should have been something that afflicted everyone attempting this upgrade, or at least a sizable proportion of them.
That is my curse anyway, I’m afraid. I’m never content just to fix a problem (to defeat the ‘gumption test’ as Pirsig called it); I need to understand how the problem came about.
BTW, it’s a classic bar bet kind of thing, but I think you’ll find (probably know already) that pride goeth not (directly) before a fall, but before destruction. It is the (barely distinguishable) sin of an haughty spirit that trips you up.
I hope there’s going to be no falling over or destruction in your life. Give this Ubuntu beast a good thrashing and show it who’s boss.
John says
Froog: Thanks!
You’re right in one respect. On the way into work this morning, I thought to myself how much I hated just having fixed the problem without really, fully understanding the problem in the first place.
I mean, obviously I knew the symptom. But I couldn’t figure out why it had presented itself. The solution thus feels like the easy way out.
(For the record, there seemed to be an extraordinary number of complaints about this upgrade cycle, although the ones who installed the new version from scratch seemed happy enough.)
But you know what? Because I do computers (etc.) on the day job, I’m really not crazy about doing them at home. There, to the extent possible, I want the computer and operating system to be as invisible as possible. I don’t want them to nag me with distractions — I can find plenty of those on my own — and that, in fact, was one of my principal reasons for moving to Linux/Ubuntu in the first place. (Windows has to be one of the most querulous damned operating systems ever developed, constantly demanding attention and requesting permission to correct itself for problems which shouldn’t have existed in the first place.)
So in this case, anyhow, although it bugs me not to know, it doesn’t bug me enough to follow through. (I just thank God I could get to my data.)
I always thought it a lucky thing that Barry McGuire (and P.F. Sloan, who wrote it) probably couldn’t feel proud about “The Eve of Destruction” until after it had been recorded.
Froog says
I saw a very funny TV interview with Linus Torvalds once where he gave the succint judgement on MS-DOS: “Basically, it’s a SHIT operating system.”
Of course, now you’ve sent me scurrying off to Google McGuire and Sloan, you wicked man.