As I was doing my best to separate faith from reason in Caveman yesterday (I'm getting into the Dark Ages, or the Middle Ages, or whatever you want to call the period when everyone in Europe was sitting around trying to figure out how best to draw the map of themselves), I received a message from the Nostrumite that put everything into perspective (which, by the way, was invented around the time of the Renaissance; before that the world may have not been flat but the paintings certainly were). The lad is in a state of permanent depression over his war with his computer which is now being raged with dueling copies of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
He's the only person I know who can spend all day installing one program.
"I've got my crummy laptop," he writes, "plus I've got Jules's old desktop that he left behind when he went to Moldova." Julie is presently doing his best to bring peace, joy and prosperity to Central Europe, and keeping his head down, just in case. "Both computers have a copy of the 1999 DVD of Encyclopedia Brittanica, the features of which only worked for a while. Eventually you could browse major topics, like agriculture, but if you wanted to look up agriculture in, well, Moldova, the search function wouldn't work. You had to pore over the entire agriculture article, or the entire Moldova article, to find what you were looking for. Which, if you were wondering, is grapes and a long history of supplying plonk to the Russkies."
I'll take his word for that. It could explain why we don't hear all that often from Jules.
"This is a documented problem with the software," he told me. "I like that. The stuff doesn't work, but at least they're aware of it. So stop your whining, I guess, is the message they're trying to deliver. We know you've got a problem, and we don't want to hear about it."
I have to agree with him there. I love documented problems. They're sort of the flip side of irreproducible results. And they are somehow more comforting, although I don't know why.
"So meanwhile I'm on Brittanica's mailing list, having dutifully registered the program when I originally bought it, and keeping it to myself that I was loading it on every computer within a fifty mile radius. Every now and then they would tell me about a cheap upgrade, which I would ignore because how much has happened to agriculture in Moldova since 1999? I could always get the core story from the disk I had, and Google any updates. But, ultimately, I got tired of the search function not working, so a couple of weeks ago I ordered the latest upgrade for fourteen bucks."
Any choruses of, You get what you pay for?
At that point, the Mite loaded the new software on his crummy laptop, and removed the old software. "I now had about 6 bytes of memory left over, even after I deleted all the podcasts I didn't even know were on the hard drive. Since there was hardly any available memory, the new software, which is Encyclopaedia, thank you very much, where the a and the e are attached like Siamese twins, is slower than taking the T to the library and looking it up in the damned books. Plus there were these great error messages telling me that I had to be out of my literal mind, although the term they used was virtual memory."
If he'd just buy a new computer with a bigger hard drive, none of this would happen.
"So after crashing a few times, or suffering through crashing boredom, I went over to Julie's desktop. This thing is running Windows 98, has a ten gigabyte hard drive, three gigs of which are filled, and the damned Encyclopaedia runs like a charm. So I took Encyclopaedia off my crummy laptop and reinstalled the 99 DVD Encyclopedia."
None of which sounds particularly exciting, but this is how Nostrumites spend their free time.
"When all was said and done I had recoved about 3 gigs of space on the laptop, mostly by cleaning out iPod files. I mean, once they're on the iPod, you don't need them on the hard drive anymore. Did you know that if you delete the files from the iTunes library it does not necessarily delete the files from your hard drive? Does Steve Jobs think I'm made of memory?"
My Sunday was, I think, more profitably spent Googling St. Augustine. Once you get past Florida and into City of God, you're home free.
No comments:
Post a Comment