Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Monday, March 30 2009

Jed and I were at Woodbourne today to put the finishing touches on a nascent domain-based computer lab there. The great thing about Woodbourne is the responsiveness of the deputies. Computer work there is actually a lot less difficult because we can have our gate clearances modified in real time, so there's no need to resort to smuggling.
We ended up being in that prison from 8:30 am to 6:00pm. At around 2pm we were starving for want of lunch, our brains failing to process even simple thoughts (though our hands could still hammer out the administrative password effortlessly). Jed drove us to a "deli" at the bottom of the hill, saying we could either go there or drive a half hour and go to some place worse. I ordered two slices of pizza and an order of fries. Being the squiggly kind with the mealy centers, they were the worst fries I'd had since the freezer-burned Goya-brand frozen fries I'd made the mistake of buying at Hannaford.
By 6pm, we'd done pretty much all we could, and it had been a lot. All my attempts at imaging a hard drive with Norton Ghost (and other programs) had failed and I'd been forced to install Windows XP Pro, Office, and other things on each Windows Home machine individually. Luckily for me, there were only about six Windows Home machines in the lab; all the rest were already loaded with XP Pro. Meanwhile, Jed handled all the secretarial work of entering the accounts onto the server. It was good to have someone there I could show some tedious procedure to and then trust him to repeat it accurately over and over. In this way he was demonstrating a quality one hopes for in robots, though he didn't exactly perform his tedious job without complaint. At one point he railed, "This is the sort of thing you'd think they'd find a way for computers to do!" I agree. Couldn't Microsoft make those stupid modal windows in the users editor more user friendly? How about making those windows non-modal and capable of multiple-select and drag and drop? How about a usable import and/or export functionality for the user editor?


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090330

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