Rife With Incompetence
There are times when I fully understand why I moved to a Mac and why people hate IT personnel.
This morning I’ve come into the University to sit out the most enjoyable hour of the week. This basically consists of sitting in an empty room, drinking coffee, and listening to music. Sweet, sweet, consultation. Consultation has been so good to me, that I haven’t seen a student all semester. It’s not that I’m an amazing tutor or anything, it’s just that I’m in a position where I’m not that involved in the subject that my feedback would be that helpful. Better that the students go directly to the source, i.e., the lecturer.
So how does this have anything to do with the Mac and hating people? Well, today’s tasks, aside from the aforementioned sitting around with coffee, were to print out next weeks questions for the students and print out the solutions for me - both tasks involving a University supplied and administered computer. So what’s involved? Well basically, download the materials from my Gmail account onto my Flash Disk, open the files (PDF and MS-Word) in their respective programs, and print them off. Easy enough eh?
For the most part things go well. Word is nice. It loads. It prints. I copy. Adobe, on the other hand, has a different story. It loads - swell. But it doesn’t want to print. Complains about something to do with a printer not being installed. Great, now I’ve got to install a printer. So, I hit the preferences, navigate to the print menu and make sure the correct printer is showing up. Yep, Level 5 Black and White. Sweet. Try again. No print. Printer not installed. But I just insta…
Die Windows! Die Adobe! Die IT personnel administering this piece of junk!
And don’t get me started on the Firefox proxy debacle!
Mildly Disturbing
There is something profoundly disturbing when you log into your brother-in-law’s laptop (or sister’s … you take your pick) and the host name (computer name for you non-nerds) is the root password on the laptop you own. Now for those of you not in the know, a “root” password is the password you use on certain computers to be able to do anything you want. Things like removing important system files (which normal people shouldn’t be able to do), reading important files, and pretty well much anything else your little heart desires. Think about it as the “root” password gives you super-human powers to do anything you want on a computer.
While the fact that his computer’s name and my password are equivalent, what freaks me out more is just how someone could think that someones password should be used as name for your computer. Sure, someone looks at your computer’s name and thinks, “… weird”, and leaves it at that, but I’m sure 9/10 people would ask, “Dude, why on earth did you name your computer that?”
Lets see you get out of answering that without mentioning something about a password …
