Redwolf's Journal (continued)

 It can be a bummer being the "IT Guy" to friends (or family) sometimes. I mean, I don't like being responsible for other people and their things, but mostly I'm really frustrated when I can't solve a problem. It feels like I'm letting down someone close on top of the basic annoyance of failure. My friend's computer really has me stumped. She got components for Christmas and put them together, but nothing powered on. I looked at it without much luck. The motherboard has actually been replaced twice now and it still doesn't work, but I cannot fathom what the issue is. Normally, when a computer won't turn on, I first blame the PSU. That seems one of the more failure-prone components in a computer. What happens? When all connected and the PSU switch turned on, there's an RGB light on the motherboard that comes on, but that's it. The computer itself cannot be switched on with the power button, the diagnostic error lights on the motherboard do n...

Monday night, my cable box went "pop" and decided it didn't want to run anymore. Some elements still got power, including a case fan and a couple LED lights visible in the back, but the main display showed nothing, no matter how many times I pushed the power button. Yesterday, I got home and tested. Still dead. So, I took what seemed the next reasonable step and called my cable company. They've got a little automated troubleshooter system before you get to any real person. I can respect the desire to get the simple/obvious fixes out of the way first, but when I reached the part where the recorded voice told me to unplug the box, plug it back in, and wait "up to 5 minutes" for it to reboot, I started to feel like this was all a little silly. When the problem is that it won't boot up, waiting for it to do so it a bit futile, and I could have explained that to a person in a fraction of the time. Then it continued with "this could take another 5 minut...

Sooo pissed with Apple paradigm right now. Previous employee tied a company iPad to his iCloud account. Now I can't do jack shit with it without his login. Even the iTunes "hard" reset that worked with another one to clear a set passcode still requires the account login to reactivate.

Between some various reading and some office talk peripheral to the new company CEO, a particular bias has crystallized in my mind. I find I really don't like the way information, especially "news" is propagating online these days. And it's only going to get worse. Cracked is an entertainment site. Everything there should be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes, however, their flash #-of-whatever articles make some very good points . Now, I've worked at a newspaper for years, and my father did before that. And yet, I've never been a big newspaper reader. Really, I'm not much of a news reader, and I'll admit most of that which I do is now online. But even with the intermediary step of TV, you can see the progression toward "news" that is flashy and fast over news that is researched and corrected. On the internet, it's so much worse. News bits get attention by being provocative, not by being accurate. People pass along angry little sou...

The recent RPG research had me pulling out my d20 Sorcery and Steam book. It certainly didn't have what I was really looking for, but it did have a good section on incorporating steampunk-ish technology into a world. And it brought up a point that, perhaps, hadn't fully clicked in my mind before in the "what's different between magic and technology" debate. Magic (unless deliberately designed otherwise) can exist on its own. Technology, however, requires infrastructure, and that has inherent implications. Oh, a secret inventor/society could create a few prototypes on their own, sure. When you start getting into airships (plural) or mass-produced anything, you need factories. And you need mines. And transport for the parts. And... The making of things en masse almost unavoidably causes a big change in society to support it - something that we have historical evidence of.

I'd seen iPads around the office, and done some work with them before. They seem like perfectly useful devices for a niche that last almost no appeal to me. They aren't heavy, but they are bulky enough that I feel I may as well take a laptop if I'm going to try to get something done - at least laptops have full keyboards, which I'm very partial to. Overall impression: Not for me. A few weeks ago, my new manager showed me his Windows Surface. It was neat, but didn't especially win me over. I was looking at the Windows 8 variant on there and... well, I can't fathom why Microsoft is pushing such a touchscreen-oriented interface toward the PC market as well. Overall impression: Sort of meh. Then he introduced me to his Nexus 7. What struck me immediately was the size - between a smart phone and other tablets I've seen. It's a bit large for anything but a cargo or jacket pocket, but easy enough to carry, and remarkably close to the size of a novel. "...

I started off the day rather depressed. Now I'm getting into the realm of pissed/weary. I don't like restoring computers to factory defaults on the best of days. When it doesn't fucking work that's even "better." I was hoping I could get to a point where I could have all the required programs and take it home to deal with the length installs while able to do something else myself, but it's taking a whole hell of a lot longer getting to that point than I envisioned. Use the OS reinstall disk that came with the machine? Sure, but that doesn't have any drivers. Wait, what... the... fuck? Image Recovery option? Well, that'd be great if there was an image. Make an image off another of the same model - okay, I'll just burn that onto... upwards of 20 DVDs? Uhh... okay, there's a portable hard drive, maybe... it has to be converted to NTFS first? I simply cannot catch a break here. And that doesn't even get into the bizarre screen lighting...

These days, I understand more of the politics and finances involved, but some things just feel worth it, however hard it may be to truly justify. I fell in love with the look and marvel of the SR-71 years ago. Expensive, yes, but that's one incredible piece of machinery. The pictures and some of the tales of one of the pilots here almost make me tear up. That jet was some awesomeness, no doubt.