Life is riddled with a procession of minor impediments

[I, Cosh]

My mum is now sufficiently experienced that she is able to provide first level support to my auntie. Which is a blessing as I'd end up killing her.

[TordelBack]

Yeah, after many years of complaining about giving my mother a computer being like giving a chimp a machine gun (sorry mum) punctuated by endless baffling phonecalls and dispiriting weekend-long anti-virus sessions, she now troubleshoots her own skype conversations, books obscure holdiay deals online and disapprovingly tracks her entire brood's doings on Facebook.  I'm so proud!

My Dad, on the other hand, still needs me to find the 'print' button...

[Mikey]

My father in law was doing a course at the local tech thingie and had an assignment - and was able to type it up on his laptop ok, but disaster struck! His printer was out of ink and the assignment was due that afternoon! What to do? "Email it to me da and I'll print it off", quoth Mrs Mikey, thinking she'd have to go through a step by step guide to email. But the first thing he said was "Would it get there in time?" Oh, how we chuckled at how his perception of 'mail' was so antiquated!

So, when does it happen to us? For a while there I couldn't work out how to record things from the telly. it starts...

M.

[TordelBack]

So, when does it happen to us? For a while there I couldn't work out how to record things from the telly. it starts...

For me, it already started: smart phones, 'apps' and all ipadish things.  No clue, ladies and gentlemen, no clue at all.  Touch screens, brrrr.

More seriously, I've been doing a series of GIS courses recently, in conjunction with updating my surveying and draughting skills and shifting all my computer use over to opensource freeware.  I was sitting in a darkened room doing unspeakable javascript and PHP things to customise a web-GIS interface and the thought struck me:  "if I miss one sentence of this class, one single sentence, I'm completely and utterly lost".  There were so many things I simply didn't understand, I was literally hanging on by my fingernails, and yet this was something I actually did (in its then form) for my BA dissertation 20 years ago.  It was a scary feeling of there being just too much new since then for me to come to terms with. 

I fear this was the beginning of the feeling of bewilderment that will dog my remaining years...

[vzzbux]

Most compu speak is white noise to me. I fear I got left behind long ago. I kind of blag it in my job and learn stuff from customers when it comes to sorting out internet connection problems. We don't get put on courses.
For our TIVO induction it was half a day in a room watching slides and videos, Half hour to play one one then its every man for himself.
Installing is a nightmare. For a standard DIGI to V+ upgrade you are talking 15 mins. A V+ to TIVO upgrade you are talking 1 hr plus change. NO EXTRA PAY.





V

[Mikey]

GIS fuckin rules. From simple mapping onward, there's so many cool, er, I mean useful  things you can do with it. Not that I'm an expert or anything, but I can confess that creating a 3d fly through of a landform map with orthophotography and my crazy assed results layered on made me feel like I was a Mind. Fuck you, Pong!

And you can look at your house. From above!

M.

[TordelBack]

GIS fuckin rules.

While it has used up every weekend for most of the past two months, which has been hard on the family, and the codier stuff has been more than a bit overwhelming, each day of the course did have a "seriously, you can do that?" moment which made it all worthwhile.  The funniest bit was tea-break on the first morning, when I realised we'd done in 2 hours what had taken young me an entire academic year in the days before GUIs and WYSIWIG digitising.

Of course what's made this possible is the development of really slick open source, such as the QGIS frontend for GRASS - the cost of getting and maintaining ArcGIS and other overpriced Esri stuff has made it impossible to stick your toe in the water commercially.  Now I have the opportunity to get back into the game even though I'm out of work - if only my brain hadn't ossified!

[Trout]

I was feeling all smug that I could follow this conversation until I totally lost track of it several posts ago.

Bastards.

[Dandontdare]

I made the formal decison on my last birthday (44) that henceforth I just can't be arsed learning any more new shit. I can do PCs and not-so smart mobiles, that'll do for me.

[Mikey]

I've only really used Arc and other ESRI loaded GPS (fuckin sub metre accuracy before post processing!:-o) as an end user- but i've never had to pay for or programme it,which makes a difference.

But yeah Dan, there's only so much you need to keep up with-a lot of it's balls at the end of the day.

M

[The Legendary Shark]

I was feeling all smug that I could follow this conversation until I totally lost track of it several posts ago.

Bastards.

^ this ^


An old duffer I know once turned up on my doorstep with his very first (and very second hand) pc under his arm and desperation in his voice. His explanation went something like: "When I switched it on it used to stick. I tried to fix it, bit now it won't start up at all! The novel I'm writing! My accounts! Aaaargh!" and so forth and on.

So, I plugged his pc into my monitor and such and... nothing. Not even a boot screen. "This is a hardware problem," I mused aloud, to which came the worrying answer "I know."

Off came the back of the computer and the problem was revealed - he'd ever so carefully taken each card out one by one (motherboard, processor, graphics card, RAM - everything), sprayed each one with WD40 and then replaced them all. Against all reason, wiping the thing clean actually worked - then came the usual campaign to banish 60 million unnecessary things all competing for processor time.

[Mardroid]

Grr. After looking forward to a day off tomorrow the boss has only just sent me a text message asking me to come in. I know most people work full time anyway, (and I've done that myself... even put in hours of overtime a couple of weeks back clocking up 13 hours at one point) and I'll obviously get paid for it, it's just finding this a few minutes ago when I'm all set to relax for tomorrow. Again. Grrr. And this is after term as well, when everything has quietened down these last two weeks. He has an assignment for us apparently. I doubt it's that urgent it couldn't wait, but...

[The Legendary Shark]

"I conditionally accept your invitation on proof of claim that this is an urgent and important project. Please understand that I will be billing you an extra £15 per hour for all work done on non-essential projects. If I don't hear back from you within one hour, I will assume that the invitation is revoked."

Wait 1 hour.

Get hammered.

Enjoy your day off.

[Mardroid]

Apologies, my above post was rather petulant considering a couple of our lads have just lost their jobs, and I'm complaining about being asked to work tomorrow!

All the best guys, I've been there too.  I am certainly thankful of my job now after a long time unemployed. I was just venting a bit as it was a bit out of the blue and I'm feeling tired. When I actually go in tomorrow it wont be a big deal.

EDIT- Thanks Shark, that made me chuckle.

[vzzbux]

Grr. After looking forward to a day off tomorrow the boss has only just sent me a text message asking me to come in. I know most people work full time anyway, (and I've done that myself... even put in hours of overtime a couple of weeks back clocking up 13 hours at one point) and I'll obviously get paid for it, it's just finding this a few minutes ago when I'm all set to relax for tomorrow. Again. Grrr. And this is after term as well, when everything has quietened down these last two weeks. He has an assignment for us apparently. I doubt it's that urgent it couldn't wait, but...

My work tried that with me this morning.

I have the week of work and this morning I get a phone call asking me where I am.
I just replied "I booked it months ago through three different people just to make sure so I will see you Monday".
The reply was "OH sorry, OK then".

Fucking idiots.

Be firm with them.



V